🔴 How this creator gets paid without going viral

Welcome to Self-Timer — a monthly series featuring one creator’s greatest hits, hardest lessons, and growth strategies.

This month's guest is Lucy Werner, a PR expert turned newsletterist who helps self-employed creators get seen and get paid. She'd grown her Substack audience to 13,000 subscribers before her entire publication was deleted, forcing her to rebuild her archive from scratch.

In this issue:

— Natalia Pérez-González, Assistant Editor

Sovrn Commerce is the affiliate platform built for creators. 

And we do mean built for you:

If you share products, reviews, setups, or hauls, Sovrn Commerce makes it easy to earn from your content.

Sign up and start earning. 

This is an advertisement.

Lucy Werner is a newsletterist, author of three books, and mother of as many children. After 20+ years in some of London's top creative agencies — including founding her own PR agency — she relocated to rural France and pivoted to helping self-employed folks get seen and get paid through her paid newsletter, retreats, and classes.

After her third maternity leave, she gave up the agency side and bet everything on her newsletter, Hype Yourself — working just two afternoons a week while raising three kids, learning French, and preparing for her son's future open heart surgery.

Then she accidentally deleted her entire Substack. 13,000 subscribers, 200+ articles, gone in one click. She began rebuilding her archive from scratch, but after weeks of putting out fires, she decided to leave Substack for Ghost — determined to never lose her work again.

She's given herself three years to replace her agency income with her newsletter — she has 10 months left.

Subscribe to Lucy’s newsletter, Hype Yourself.
Follow her on Instagram and LinkedIn.

The below answers have been edited for tone and clarity. Bolding and italics our own.

Lucy: Before I turned on paid subscriptions, I grew my newsletter to 5,000 readers by giving away free resources. Most of those 5,000 came from people who'd bought my books and signed up after downloading a book resource. I also created an annual lead magnet — thousands of calendar dates with ideas for how to use them to hype your business.*

When I launched paid, I was honest about why: at some point, one of my children is going to need repeat open heart surgery, and I wanted a different income stream so I could be there for him when that happened.

From there, I reached Substack bestseller status within six weeks by sharing daily on social media. After my first 100 paid subscribers — what I called my "Power 100" — I raised the price, which actually drove another wave of growth as people rushed to lock in the pilot rate.

I've run a reduced price for my business birthday, but I steer clear of too many discounts.

Lucy: Directories and templates always do well — I'm saving people time and helping them make money. Just this week, a paid reader sold a £3,000 coaching package after pitching to a small podcast she found in my directory.

I wish I were better at collating all the testimonials, but here's how I think about it: rather than spending money on ads, you could buy my newsletter as a business expense for a year – and just one opportunity could make you multiples of that subscription cost back.

I love that I get to help independent creators do that.

I like to walk my talk. I don't believe you need to go viral, pay for ads, or run in certain industry circles to grow. I worked really hard to build my newsletter — it wasn't an overnight win. From the outside, it might have looked like I became a Substack bestseller in six weeks, so I wanted to show the truth of the longer journey. My brutal honesty sometimes gets me in trouble, but in a piece about business expertise, it's useful.

My "Borrow My..." series is free content I use to showcase my advice — I tend to do one a quarter. I write them when I feel energetically ready, and they come together quickly. It's literally just emptying my mind on everything I know about a subject. I share them on my socials, but they tend to pick up momentum on their own.

Lucy’s monthly income varies, but as a baseline, her newsletter is her anchor revenue stream. Here’s how it breaks down:

Lucy: I think I’m most famous for having my entire Substack publication deleted. Over 200+ pieces of content, 13,000 audience, 220+ recommendations, and all the engagement from my articles — gone. I thought I was deleting my podcast in the back end (as that was what I had typed into the search bar), but it ended up deleting my whole publication. 

I hadn’t backed up my data, so I lost about 600 free subscribers in the process.

I immediately went into crisis PR mode and emailed my audience, as I was scared they were paying for something that didn’t exist. I only had two afternoons a week to work on this (this was my sole income at that time), and I did my best to rebuild under a new publication name.  

A month later, an engineering team issue triggered emails to any paid subscriber whose subscription had renewed during that window — telling them I'd cancelled their subscription. For a whole week, I thought it was going to happen to everyone, and I was losing everything. It got corrected, but with the minimal time I had to work on my newsletter, I spent the best part of six weeks firefighting, and my positive/hype energy took a hit.

Before the deletion, I was growing about 500 free subscribers a month, but once I started from scratch, I was never able to replicate the old Hype Yourself on Substack success. A combination of both behind-the-scenes communications and public-facing updates with payments and investors led me to decide it was time to leave. 

To make sure I could never lose my work again, I switched platforms to Ghost. I’m only a month in, so it's very early to see how the course correction will go, but I’m hopeful I’m now on my way to hitting my original target of 1,000 paid readers with renewed energy.

My advice: back up your data and make sure you can switch technology partners if needed.

Lucy’s tech stack totals up to ~£2,448 (or $3,260) annually. Roughly 20% of one month’s newsletter income powers her entire tech stack for the year. Here are the tools she turns to: