When I have a slower publishing cadence my blog grows faster

Airborne, Andrew Wyeth, 1995

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When I started writing online, the advice I got was to publish frequently and not overthink any single piece. The logic was this: the outcome for blog posts is a heavy-tailed statistical distribution—most pieces will be read by barely anyone, but a small subset of outliers will do hundreds if not thousands of times better than average. Ben Kuhn has a good post detailing this idea. He writes:

The most important thing to remember when sampling from heavy-tailed distributions is that getting lots of samples improves outcomes a ton.

In a light-tailed context—say, picking fruit at the grocery store—it’s fine to look at two or three apples and pick the best-looking one. It would be completely unreasonable to, for example, look through the entire bin of apples for that one apple that’s just a bit better than anything you’ve seen so far.

In a heavy-tailed context, the reverse is true. [...] Every additional sample you draw increases the chance that you get an outlier.

Kuhn goes on to give the same advice I got from my writer friends:

Often, you’ll have a choice between spending time on optimizing one sample or drawing a second sample—for instance, editing a blog post you’ve already written vs. writing a second post[.] Some amount of optimization is worth it, but in my experience, most people are way over-indexed on optimization and under-indexed on drawing more samples.

I’ve now written 37 blog posts and I no longer think this is true. Each time I’ve given in to my impulse to “optimize” a piece it has performed massively better (in terms of how much it’s been read, how many subscribers it’s generated, and, most importantly, the number of interesting people brought into my world). I also don’t think that optimizing for growth is a healthy way to write; a better metric for me is how much my thinking improves. But I find it interesting that the advice I got to write faster (which is not good for thinking) also leads to less growth. I’ll analyze the numbers in more detail in a little bit, but the general picture is this: if I spend twice as long working on a piece, it does on average four times better. (If I include outliers, the ambitious pieces do eight times better than the normal pieces.) The work I put in has increasing returns—the more time I spend writing, the bigger difference each additional hour does.¹

This conclusion is based on a minuscule sample, so take it with a grain of salt. But doesn’t it make sense that working on blog posts should have increasing returns? The distribution of outcomes for blog posts looks like this, with more successful posts on the left:

When you figure out a way to make a piece better, you move it like this:

If you have the taste and skill necessary to figure out how to improve an already written piece, doing so means you are starting from a place where the rate of change is higher than if you start a new piece. So why waste that and pull a new sample?

There is an element of luck, too. Some pieces just do inexplicably well. Those who argue that you shouldn’t overwork a piece seem to be saying that luck swamps hard work. For me, that is not true. Hard work trumps luck. It is better for me to work hard on a few pieces rather than do more pieces and hope for luck.²

Let’s look at the numbers from my Substack so you can get a sense of what I’m basing my intuition on.

Some statistics from my Substack

I am, I reckon, a slow writer. Looking at the statistics, the vast majority of blog posts take somewhere between 2-7 hours to write (which I wouldn’t call over-optimizing). I need more like 20-70 hours. Sometimes, however, I stare into the mist that rolls in off the ocean and I tell myself to get with the times and write something fast, real fast! and then I hammer out a piece in what feels like a frantic hurry—which, when I look at the time stamps, turns out to be 10-20 hours. Let’s call the pieces that take me ten hours “normal essays” (because they at least approach the normal time range) and the others “effort pieces”.

Here is a box graph showing how many new subscribers³ I get by writing a normal essay compared to an effort piece:

You can read it this way. If I have forty hours to write, I can spend ten hours on four pieces and get on average ~92 subscribers, or I can spend twenty hours each on two pieces and get ~403. (That is if I exclude the outlier, that long black line above the effort piece box—that is “Looking for Alice”—if I include that, shit goes a little crazy.)

Over the last six months, as I've been contemplating this essay, I’ve deliberately shifted how much time I invest into pieces, to test my intuition. I’ve not been surprised so far. When I follow the wisdom that says you should have a high cadence, my subscriber growth falls by half. I can either write ambitious pieces that I’m proud of, or I can approach the normal internet ethos and lose ground. I’m not particularly obsessed with growing the blog, but I’m happy that worldly incentives for me align with being an artisan rather than a content producer. 

My stat skills are rusty, so I’m not sure how robust these results are. The sample is small enough that you’d think it was a social psychology study. But given the big effect size, I guess the results are significant even though the sample is minuscule? The most successful normal essay only beats the three worst-performing effort posts.

Two caveats

My distant internet friend Sasha Chapin likes to write fast. He has a piece encouraging people to “just hit the fucking keyboard,” and he claims he wrote it in 30 minutes, and if he’d done “it a little faster it probably would’ve been a little better.” I like that essay.

My impression is that Sasha feels pretty miserable when he tries to do what I do; he gets blocked and contrived and starts chainsmoking when he works hard on a piece. It seems a lot of people feel that way. And if the reason you write fast is that it is the only way you can write or the only way you can write without censoring yourself—then I think that is a wonderful reason to write fast. If you try to push a piece to a level of excellence that is beyond you, you will not finish any pieces at all. And that is not going anywhere. You need to write a lot to figure out the craft, and you need to finish and publish pieces, too, because there are certain things you only learn that way. So if you feel blocked, by all means, lower the expectations and hit the keyboard with both hands like a bongo. But if you lower your expectations more than you have to, you are missing out. That is all I’m saying. People will be more willing to share your post if you’ve done a meticulous job, and that compounds. Also, there are things you can only learn by going hard. 

So that is a caveat. Don’t optimize pieces so hard that you hate yourself and give up writing.

I should also say something about what I mean by “optimizing” a piece. I’m not talking about fretting over adjectives or whether to move a comma or not. I hit the keyboard almost as fast as Sasha—I do about a thousand words a day and that is on top of working and homeschooling my daughters—it’s just that I cut nearly everything. When I’m writing, I’m looking for weaknesses in my thinking (which I can usually only spot once I’ve my thoughts on the screen). I write a draft. I critique it; I get people more mean than me to critique it; I get people who are experts on strange things to critique it from their strange perspectives. Then I go and research and rewrite my thoughts again and again as my understanding evolves. I’m transforming my thinking. Then I do a light edit for tone. I leave a few misspellings.

When I started, I thought this obsessiveness—spending months on pieces and then throwing half of them away—would sentence me to obscurity as a writer. The reason I wrote like this wasn’t because of the intuition outlined in this essay. I did it because I couldn’t help myself. I like everything around me to be well-crafted and beautiful, and I don’t mind feeling frustrated at times to make that happen.

I guess what I’m trying to say in this essay is: I’m awed and surprised and deeply pleased that this turned out to be a good strategy. You don’t have to be a content farm to find a community of readers; you can just put your heart into making unreasonably thorough stuff.

Acknowledgements

TracingWoodgrains

read an early draft and helped me cut the weakest part.

1. Up until a point, of course. At some point, diminishing returns set in. I guess that happens at the point where the piece is so good that your taste and your skills are having a hard time figuring out what changes would improve it.

2. Besides, success that comes through luck isn’t sustainable. There are plenty of accounts that have one viral YouTube video because of sheer “luck”, but that didn’t change the trajectory of their lives. But a series of highly ambitious essays will do just that; I’ve seen it up close several times.

3. The reason I focus on subscribers rather than page views is that new subscribers is better correlated with the stuff I really care about. The pieces that drive subscriptions tend to introduce me to a lot more interesting people. A few percent of you also help fund the work.