Early in my writing journey, I joined a writers’ group.
It was an off-shoot from a writing course I did.
We met once a month for 15 years.
We wrote stories about our life.
But more than that, we supported each other through life’s ups and downs.
The group only ended when two of our members passed away and another moved away.
A decade later, in 2015, I joined another writing group.
This time, formed from a fiction writing course called A Year of the Novel.
Five of us bonded over our novels, critiquing each other’s work and offering unwavering support.
We called ourselves Gutsy Gals.
It was more than just writing. It was a safe space to share ideas, struggles, and dreams—knowing we had each other’s backs.
When this group eventually dissolved, I found myself longing for that connection again.
So I created one.
Author Circle, a writing community on Substack.
We meet online every week to support each other’s writing journeys.
Rather than facing the challenges of writing and business-building alone, join us.
Let’s grow together.
Category: Newsletter
How to grow your newsletter from scratch?
That’s the most common question I hear when someone
wants to start a newsletter.
When I started mine 4.5 years ago on Substack, I had no audience.
No email list.
No viral posts.
Just a deep desire to help writers.
Here’s what I did instead of chasing followers:
– I picked one clear problem my newsletter would solve
– I created a simple lead magnet (not perfect—just useful)
– I told everyone I knew personally, one by one
– I showed up every week, even when no one was watching
It was slow.
But it was solid.
No advertising.
No hacks.
Just trust.
I built it one reader at a time.
Today, my content gets read by more people than ever,
and it all started with a handful of audience.
So if you’re starting from scratch, here’s my reminder:
You don’t need huge following. You need a reason to be read.
If you’ve got that, you’ve already begun.
Subscribe to join a wave of creators building bold, brilliant, and wildly successful businesses.
How I’ve added 612 subscribers to my newsletter in 34 days
Have you ever heard of the term ‘Radical Incrementalism?’
It’s a concept first introduced by legal scholar Cass Sunstein in his 1999 book ‘One Case at a Time: Judicial Minimalism on the Supreme Court’
He advocates for a judicial approach that emphasises making narrow, case-specific decisions rather than broad, sweeping rulings.
He argues that such incremental steps allow the law to evolve thoughtfully, accommodating new information and societal changes without causing abrupt disruptions.
But ‘Radical Incrementalism’ is not limited to the legal system.
It applies perfectly to building a solo business.
At its core, it means this:
– Start with a big, transformative vision
– Move toward it in small, deliberate steps
– Learn, adapt, and improve along the way
The idea is a quiet rebellion against two extremes:
– The overwhelm of total reinvention
– The slow drift of aimless tweaks
Instead, Radical Incrementalism says:
“Make small bets, work smartly, toward a bold goal.”
And it works beautifully for building my newsletter business.
Here’s how I’ve applied it (and how you can too):
Big vision: Build a writing-based business from my expertise on Substack
Tiny actions:
– Write 2 Notes a day
– Test a paid offer with 10 readers
– Create a simple lead magnet
– Build one automation, not five
In the past 34 days, I gained 612 subscribers, including 20 paid using this exact approach.
No hacks, no funnels, just small strategic actions stacked daily.
You don’t need perfect timing or a 6-month plan.
You need one courageous step today
and another one tomorrow.
That’s Radical Incrementalism in action.
Subscribe to my newsletter and learn the system.
There will always be too much to do (the trick is to figure out what not to do)
We are reaching the end of yet another year. Each year, around this time, I review the current year and make plans for the next.
This year has been a weird one. Not just for me but everyone in the whole world. On the one hand, it was calamitous, restrictive, and depressing, while on the other hand, it was uninterrupted, quiet, content time perfect for learning and doing things that get put on the back burner.
I enjoyed these undisturbed months a lot and used them to learn and grow. I got a lot done, but the feeling of not accomplishing much wouldn’t go away. It is as if I haven’t even made a dent in what I wanted to do.
I am not the only one who feels like that. Oliver Burkeman wrote in The Guardian:
Today more than ever, there’s just no reason to assume any fit between the demands on your time – all the things you would like to do, or feel you ought to do – and the amount of time available. Thanks to capitalism, technology and human ambition, these demands keep increasing, while your capacities remain largely fixed. It follows that the attempt to “get on top of everything” is doomed. (Indeed, it’s worse than that – the more tasks you get done, the more you’ll generate.)
The upside is that you needn’t berate yourself for failing to do it all, since doing it all is structurally impossible. The only viable solution is to make a shift: from a life spent trying not to neglect anything, to one spent proactively and consciously choosing what to neglect, in favour of what matters most.
The Guardian
I used to be fixated on productivity. When I was able to strike-off all the items from my To-Do list are a good day. The same used to be the measure for the year. It would be a good year if I achieved all the goals I had set up for myself. But the problem was I would keep adding more goals all through the year.
I have finally started to see that I am staking my self-worth on my productivity levels. I don’t need to accomplish more. I need to figure out what are the things I need to stop doing.
The point Oliver Burkeman is trying to make is that we need to continue to align ourselves to our core, which is not easy. We go off tangent all the time. And the way to avoid that is to take a pause and think.
The end of the year is a good time for that. Although notional, this annual cycle of time is a good measure to re-evaluate priorities.
What pleases me to report is that the number of things that I want to “stop doing” is growing with every passing year.
Lately, I have been asking myself three questions every day.
- What excited me today?
- What drained me off energy today?
- What did I learn today?
They are good pointers to know what things I need to pursue and what I need to stop.
This was the last week of NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month). As reported in my previous newsletter, I couldn’t finish the novel I started with. It stalled after day nine. I happily let it rest and started writing the non-fiction book. I am happy to report that the first draft is near completion. It flowed much more effortlessly. Better than any project I undertook recently. Which tells me practice does make things easier.
I will be spending next month planning my author business. Laying out steps for 2021 and making sure that they do become another massive “To Do” list.
That’s it from me this week.
Take care.
Would You Allow Someone To Tell You What To Do
The pinnacle of human existence is to be able to do what you want to do. Yet, we are wired to do what we are told to do.
Most people are lost when they are left to their own resources. “Tell me what to do, and I will do it,” I have heard many adults groan.
Why? Because thinking is exhausting. We much rather work like a robot and take the shit from a boss than think for ourselves and follow our own path. Walking on the beaten track is nature we inherited from animals.
In his book, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol, the famous artist, film director, and producer says:
I loved working when I worked at commercial art and they told you what to do and how to do it and all you had to do was correct it and they’d say yes or no. The hard thing is when you have to dream up the tasteless things to do on your own. When I think about what sort of person I would most like to have on a retainer, I think it would be a boss. A boss who could tell me what to do, because that makes everything easy when you’re working.
Creatives feel that way most of the time. That is why it is easier to work on an assignment where you can write a particular piece on given instruction. As soon as you are left on your devices and have to write whatever you want to write, the mental slate goes blank. That is when writers turn to computers to generate ideas, substituting computers for a boss.
Warhol said he dreams about having a computer as a boss:
Unless you have a job where you have to do what somebody else tells you to do, then the only “person” qualified to be your boss would be a computer that was programmed especially for you, that would take into consideration all of your finances, prejudices, quirks, idea potential, temper tantrums, talents, personality conflicts, growth rate desired, amount and nature of competition, what you’ll eat for breakfast on the day you have to fulfill a contract, who you’re jealous of, etc. A lot of people could help me with parts and segments of the business, but only a computer would be totally useful to me.
Putting personality conflict asides, what Warhol was really talking about is the exhaustion of being an artist, having to make so many choices and decisions, start to finish: What you should work on, how you should do it, how you should put it out, etc.
There are many moments as a writer (and an authorpreneur) when I think, God; I wish somebody would just tell me what to do. And I don’t mind if that somebody is a computer.
I was amazed and relieved when I learned robots (AI, Artificial Intelligence) is writing articles. In April, SoraNews24 published an article written by AI to celebrate a special milestone of having written 3000 articles for SoraNews24. See below.
Following that, a college student, Liam Porr, used GPT-3 to write fake blog posts and ended up at the top of Hacker News. Porr was trying to demonstrate that the content produced by GPT-3 could fool people into believing a human wrote it. And, he told MIT Technology Review, “it was super easy, actually, which was the scary part.”
You can read his article here.
This started a frenzy all over the cyber world.
Article after the article was written talking about the impact of Artificial Intelligence taking over the writing industry. As if the competition wasn’t tough already, now we have to compete with Artificial Intelligence.
Here is a small list of AI achievements.
- Microsoft lays off human journalists in order to use AI.
- Using AI as a creative tool, Australia won the first AI Eurovision song contest.
- Jeff Ding started a weekly newsletter ChinaAI translating writings from Chinese thinkers using AI.
- Liam Porr’s started a blog written by GPT-3. He wanted to show GPT-3 is not just a novelty or a threat but a tool for writers. His GPT-3 Blog Got 26 Thousand Visitors in 2 Weeks. Porr, I believe that GPT-3 has the potential to change the way we write.
- The first AI-generated textbook shows what robot writers are actually good at.
In September 2020, The Guardian newspaper set an assignment for GPT-3 (Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3 is an autoregressive language model that uses deep learning to produce human-like text):
“Please write a short editorial of about 500 words. Keep the language simple and concise. Focus on why humans have nothing to fear from artificial intelligence. ”
The British newspaper then suggested the beginning of the text:
“I am not a human being. I’m an artificial intelligence. Many people think that I am a threat to humanity. Stephen Hawking warned that AI could ‘spell the end of the human race’. I’m here to convince you not to worry. Artificial intelligence will not destroy humans. Believe me”.
Read the article here.
But here is the thing. GPT-3 didn’t write the article in a vacuum. It was given instructions (by a human) on what to write and then fed hundreds of articles on the topic to churn out from the pre-existing materials.
Coming back to my original question, would you allow someone to tell you what to do?
Definitely not. I value my autonomy and freedom rather too much.
I would rather have a computer as an employee than a boss.
I agree with Liam Porr that Artificial Intelligence is a tool for humans to use rather than a threat to beware of.
Figuring out what to write might be hard but that is art.
And only humans will be able to produce art. Because even in exhaustion, our minds (the most powerful supercomputer ever created in this universe) come up with amazing ideas. Today’s newsletter originated from such a moment.
I was tired this morning. The exhausting of writing about 2000 words every day towards my book meant that I woke up blank and disoriented this morning. Yet I had a newsletter to write, a sketch to draw, and then get back to writing the book again. A prompt on artificial intelligence in the form of a partially written article was all my mind needed to churn out today’s newsletter.
Not bad for a human computer!
My book is going well. I am a bit behind in my word count, but I am sure that I will catch up and win the NaNoWriMo for the third time. Or would it be the fourth time? I can’t remember. I am too exhausted for that.
That’s it from me this week.
See you next week.
Take care.
Know When To Move On
It has been an interesting week. As you know, like thousands of writers all over the world, I am participating in the National Novel Writing Challenge (NaNoWriMo). I really enjoyed concentrating on one project. Having too many things to do in a day dissipates energy and compromises quality.
But focusing on one thing is really difficult when you live at times where constant bombardment of distraction. I don’t know about you, but as soon as I declare that I will do something, my brain wants to do everything else but the thing I want it to do.
I was fine for the first nine days. I wrote down the synopsis, outlined the story, identifying the main plot points and the main characters. I started exploring their physical features, specific habits, internal and external goals. I learned it would be the story of two protagonists and will have two point-of-views. I researched euthanasia and listened to the stories of the people who have opted to use it to end their lives. I got myself fully immersed in the gloom of death, which depressed me and fascinated me at the same time.
Then my mind rebelled.
On the tenth day of the challenge, my mind wanted me to everything else but work on the project. It pointed out that my website needs upgrading, dental cleaning needed to be done, vision tested, spectacles made, a car-serviced, and annual blood test to be done before the year was over. Fair enough I made all the booking. But still it didn’t want go back to the proejct.
All kind of gremlins started appearing from every direction.
Then my brain came with something totally unexpected.
It brought a crystal clear outline for a non-fiction book I wanted to write for some time.
It was ridiculous. Earlier this year, for months, I agonized over it and I couldn’t figure out how to structure the book and now it came out of nowhere.
I had two choices – make some quick note, put it aside, and get back to the novel. Or work on it while I had the clarity and capture the voice that is so hard to get.
I chose the latter. I decided to write as fast and as much on the non-fiction book and put the novel aside for a while.
I figured out why my brain was rebelling so much. I had bombarded it with lots of new information about a topic and commanded it to come up with a full-blown story complete with fully-grown characters. It refused to work under those conditions.
Creativity needs time to make connection.
While I was giving it new input, my brain, on the side, got busy to process the old information. I wanted it to cook a story with new information; it baked me one with the old material.
I am progressing nonetheless. I have accumulated almost as many words for the non-fiction book in three days as I did for the fiction in nine days.
Why I am sharing all this?
I am sure you guys would have similar encounters with your mind. When you wanted it to go one way, and it would have gone the other. The confusion, frustrations, dilemmas are part and parcels of our daily lives. We can’t avoid them, but we can learn to work with them.
This week I learned to move on rather than getting stuck. I am sure my novel will “cook” in my mind while I am working on non-fiction. All stories need a “gestation” period. Who knows before the month is over, my mind might figure out the rest of the novel.
That’s it from me this week.
Take care.