The Value of One Dedicated Reader
An interview with my most dedicated reader, and a discussion of what he means to me.
Welcome back to my Sports Passion Project everybody, but once again, I’m not here to talk about sports today.
Just a few days ago I posted the following Note, thanking all of my subscribers. My Notes are too long and detailed to fully embed, but from the first five lines you can sense the general tone.
If you recall, in my last post about my Substack journey so far, I mentioned that if that post generated any interest in my story, I would tell the story of the time I almost quit, and why I did not. As it turns out, that post turned out to be my biggest post ever (exempting the ones with
boosts), so I realised I had an obligation to follow through on my promise.I did not plan to do so immediately. I was planning to let my story breathe for a while, and come back when the time was right to tell some more of it. However, after posting that Note, I began to wonder whether I ought to put my money where my mouth is, and release something more detailed about what my subscribers mean to me.
That’s when I realised that I was staring at the perfect opportunity. I can knock out two birds with one stone. This is the story of when I almost quit writing on Substack, and how one dedicated reader pulled me out of it.
I’m not going to rehash my whole story. If you’d like to know, you can go back to this post to learn how I stumbled into writing about sports, why I consider myself good at it, and why this Substack page exists. Where we begin as it relates to the story I’m currently telling begins with my post His Day: Damon Huard, which came out on July 6, 2023.
This post is relatively simple, speaking about how the best game any Chiefs QB has ever had was not thrown by Patrick Mahomes, or by Trent Green, or by Len Dawson, but by Damon Huard. It’s a fun little story, but it has no meaning to anything else. It only goes as far as it goes. It’s also rather brief (by my standards). It’s only 3156 words long.
Honestly, this post was a bit of a throwaway to me at the time. Something to put out because I needed something to put out that week, but I distinctly remember it, because it was the first time I recall ever being disappointed that nobody saw something I’d written.
Every article I’d written before that, I feel was part of the process of becoming the writer I would go on to be. Don’t get me wrong. There are some good ones mixed in. Predicting Sam Darnold’s career resurgence on April 1, 2023 feels pretty good today. Stop Blaming Rex Grossman is an underrated gem in my catalogue, but I hadn’t really figured out yet what I wanted to be as a writer, or if I wanted people to see it.
That’s why I remember the Damon Huard post so much, because it’s good. It’s quite good, and it’s the first post I ever wrote that I truly felt confident sharing with the world. However, my change in attitude did not correlate to a change in results. That post has nine views, which is fun to look back on now, but unimpressive to say the least.
I didn’t let it get me down though. That same month I released the fantastic His Year: Jon Kitna 2003. In August came a fantastic article about Michael Vick. My quality was increasing at an increasing rate. I was going to the moon, but then my rocket hit an asteroid.
University is really good at killing personal ambitions.
Right before school started on September 3, 2023 came the very good hot-take Cody Kessler was a Great QB article. I don’t specialise in hot-takes, but I’m proud of that one. It gave me a good feeling to write, but if you look through my post archives you can see from there my outputs slows to a crawl.
The next post comes six weeks later, on October 15, and from there another six weeks pass until I was able to come out with one of my personal favourite things I’ve ever done: The Night Courage Wore Orange. My next post comes on December 26. I posted a little bit more in January for the NFL playoffs, but fell into the malaise again after that.
February also has one post, and at this point I’m going to come out and say what you all likely have been able to figure out. I had made a rule for myself that I had to post at least once every month, because I knew if I couldn’t hold myself to even that level of consistency I was going to fall off the wagon. I was going to say I tried my hand at sports writing, and failed.
It’s the same journey a lot of writers make. Try for a while, write some great stuff that nobody sees, and give up. It was very easy to justify letting this happen to myself, because it happens to so many people. It wouldn’t make me a failure to give up on this little writing venture. That’s what everybody does.
You can tell from the post dates (November 28, December 26, January 29, February 17) that I was clearly squeezing these posts in at the end of these months simply to satisfy an arbitrary once monthly rule that I’d created to stop myself from quitting altogether. To my credit, this rule did stop me from quitting altogether, but only barely, and quite frankly, the passion was waning from my passion project.
I wasn’t even that busy, but full-time school has a way of making it easier to convince yourself that you’re busy, too busy to follow your passions. I had quit sim racing (a field I was once exceptionally talented in). I had quit doing theatre productions, and then something happened that almost convinced me to quit this hobby too.
Every writer’s worst nightmare.
In March of this year, I had recently seen on Twitter (before I disavowed that website) that Mac Jones had signed with my favourite NFL team, the Jacksonville Jaguars, and I wanted to write about him. The subject was obvious. Write a His Year article on his fantastic 2021 season, so that’s what I did.
Roughly seven hours of work later, I had a piece that was written, edited, and of very high quality, about a current story, but not speculating about the future. It was right in my wheelhouse, and I was very proud of it, but when I checked my editor the next day to actually publish it, it was gone. I tried everything I possibly could to find where it’d disappeared to, but it was no use. Somehow, my post had deleted itself. All I had left was a version with about three paragraphs written on it.
All that work for nothing.
It’s hard to understand unless you’re a creator yourself, but (especially considering I use no AI assistance) I pour a lot of my self into these pieces. I put a piece of my soul into that Mac Jones article that I was never going to get back. This hurt me. It put me in a bad place mentally. I had always operated under the assumption that even if nobody read my stuff that at least I would always be able to go back and read it.
Now even that wasn’t true.
I put out three articles over the two months of March and April. I told you why turnovers aren’t as bad as you think they are. I invented a new statistic to better gauge which QBs are better at avoiding negative plays, and I graded every NFL QB based purely on statistics.
You may not notice the pattern, but it was very intentional.
All three of these articles are purely statistical.
I didn’t want to tell stories anymore. My heart was broken from losing my Mac Jones piece, and it’d created a mental block for me. I just didn’t want to pour my soul into telling another detailed story about a football figure. I’d become unwilling to make the investment required. While I saw some Substacks on Notes celebrating their one year anniversaries, I spent mine wondering if I would ever write to my fullest capabilities again.
I was just crushed, and every time I tried to get back on my storytelling horse I failed, which made it worse. At that point, I thought I may pivot this entire publication towards interesting statistical nuggets, like I did in March and April, but I just knew that I wouldn’t be able to maintain a desire to operate a publication like that. My passion is telling stories.
When you take a man whose passion is telling football stories, and you make him afraid to tell a football story, what do you get?
Nothing. That’s what you get.
A failed writer.
I went four months without telling a story. I was keeping the publication alive by leaning into my statistical side, but that wasn’t going to happen forever, so in the beginning of May I did decide to confront my fears, and I wrote His Year: Mac Jones 2021.
It didn’t get me anywhere, because it’s worse than the deleted version and I knew that then and I still know it today. I was able to overcome my heartbreak, and sink another seven hours into the same story I’d already sunk seven hours into, but (unlike I hoped) it didn’t make me want to do it again, which is the feeling I used to get all the time after finishing up one of my grandiose tales.
This publication was spiralling the drain. It really was.
I’d been stubbornly fighting off the urge to quit for eight months (September 2023 to May 2024), but this passion project had been sitting on a knife’s edge. It hinged on an entirely arbitrary once per month rule that I inserted into my life, which fortunately I had the self-discipline to keep to, but it was becoming clear to me that one finished post deleting itself before I could publish it was going to be the thing that pushed me off the cliff.
I just didn’t want to do it anymore. I was still doing it, but eventually my determination was going to fail and I was going to miss posting in a month, at which point I knew it would be the end of the line.
Then, on May 31, 2024, this all changes.
I get an email I have absolutely no business receiving:
New free subscriber,
.To say that this is what I desperately needed would be an understatement. Like I said in my last personal post, I never shared anything anywhere. I never reached out to anybody to get them to read my stuff. That wasn’t (and isn’t) what I was in this for. My publication was stagnating and I wasn’t doing anything to stop it. To receive a new subscriber at a time like this was a miracle. No question about it. Look at my subscriber graph:
I always knew it was going to be hard to start a publication from zero, but deep in the midst of five months of total stagnation (in terms of both writing quality and subscriber count), plus a crushing mental block preventing me from writing to my fullest, I just didn’t know if I was going to be able to do this anymore, and then I found my angel, or more accurately, he found me.
Robbie: How did you find this little dying Substack?
Marc: I was looking for some stuff on EPA, specifically I think I was looking for an expected wins model based on EPA. That led me to click on your Beginner’s Guide to EPA. It was a really long article and because I knew a good deal already I skimmed through. I thought there was some pretty good tidbits of info so I decided to look at what else you had written.
Robbie: Were you on Substack looking or was this a Google search or something?
Marc: I found it through Microsoft Edge. I had been on Substack before and was following Unexpected Points (written by Kevin Cole) and Neil Paine, but I didn't really search for anything on Substack.
I had gotten internet search views before, but the number was roughly ten in the whole history of the publication at that time, and I had never converted one, even more of a reason why I used the word miracle before.
That graph may say I had nine subscribers before Marc, but those consist of myself, my dad, my girlfriend, my sister, my grandparents, my friend Connor, and some family friends. In other words, they’re not really ‘real’ subscribers. They are real subscribers in that they are people who genuinely enjoy what I write on here (some of them are reading this right now. Hey guys!), but they would’ve been subscribers regardless of my level of skill, so it never really felt like I earned them.
I did not know Marc Robinson. He did not know me. He was not going to like my stuff because he was supposed to. There would’ve been no twinge of guilt in him if he disliked a post, like there would be for a family member. He would’ve just gone into my archives as one of my final post views, as one final chance to convert a reader into a subscriber that I’d failed.
Robbie: What convinced you to stay and become a subscriber?
Marc: I am not certain if I clicked on your QB tiers first or your publication, but regardless, I looked at your articles and my curiosity was piqued. I'm a junkie for historical sports stuff and most of what you had written I didn't know about, since I'm more of basketball nerd than a football one.
I think the first two articles I read all the way through were Gronk's 2011 and the Ravens 2003 defense. I enjoyed that narrative style you used to explain the seasons. It was like I was watching a 30 for 30 or NFL Network's America's Game about the SB winner each season. I have always enjoyed watching those and SPP is essentially those shows except as a publication. What also helped was I started reading just before the Trent Green series began, which of course led to our back and forth exchanges…
I will get back to those back and forth exchanges in the comments section, but now that I had a subscriber, it created two feelings in me. The first is an immense sense of validation. There is actually somebody out there in the universe who truly enjoys what I’m doing.
I always knew my stuff was good, but self-confidence can only carry you so far. Like I’ve spoken about before, maybe I was selling a fantastic product that nobody wanted. The type of thing that’d be a hit on Shark Tank, make everybody smile, but fail to actually garner any investment, because ‘who would buy that?’
It may seem extreme to you to have this big of a swing in mental attitude in reaction to a single subscriber, but as a human whose natural state is to believe I’m good, and to read everything like a compliment it may or may not be, it didn’t take much to get me back onto the right path. One bit of validation was all I needed.
This good feeling operated in conjunction with the second feeling Marc subscribing gave me, which was responsibility. This man had just gone out of his way to subscribe to my publication. At the time, Marc had two Substack reads, so subscribing to publications wasn’t (and still isn’t) something he made a habit of doing. Clearly he quite enjoyed it, and it’d be a shame for him to be my first subscriber, and have me shut the publication down just weeks afterwards.
Weighing these factors, I made the choice to give this writing thing a second chance. I was not going to quit. I was not going to continue to be half in and half out. I was not going to be afraid of writing stories. I was going to jump into this thing with two feet, for Marc and for myself, and see where it took us.
It’s amazing what a change in mental attitude can do, because after coming out with eight posts in the first five months of 2024, I wrote five between the third of June and the third of July. In this stretch I would get my first ever post like (from Marc), and you wouldn’t believe how elated that notification makes you feel when it’s the first one you’ve ever gotten.
In essence, likes are somebody going out of their way (however slightly) to tell you that you’ve done a good job. Nobody had ever gone out of their way to do that for me before, until Marc did. This kept building yet more confidence in myself, and got me to the point where I could release the article that would change the future of my Sports Passion Project forever.
You guys know where I’m going with this.
We Need to Pump Up Trent Green was originally supposed to be one article, with that standalone title. However, digging into the story unveiled something so rich it couldn’t be covered in the maximum length of one Substack post. I had to split it into parts, which is why part two gets to be covered as the inflection point of my Substack career so far.
We Need to Pump Up Trent Green Part Two: Growing Pains remains the least viewed installment of my serial so far, but regardless, I will put my hand on my heart and tell you that it’s the most important article I’ve ever written, and in my mind will always serve as the jumping off point for wherever I will eventually end up in this Substack landscape.
Why?
Not just a comment, but a follow up question. I know the like button is good for business here on Substack, but to me as a writer, knowing that somebody engaged with my article enough to ask a follow up question is the best feeling in the world. I still remember my reaction when I got the notification that Marc had left a comment on the post, which was to smile for three consecutive hours, and have some trouble sleeping that night.
Needless to say, it meant a lot to me, which led to me going a bit overboard in my response. Those who’ve been in my comments section understand that I’m a lot anyway, so imagine what it’s like when I’m self-describing the comment as ‘overboard.’ Needless to say, my stance (which in this particular comment was that building an offence around a TE tends not to work) came off a little strong, which led to my first ever comment thread being a rather spirited debate over whether or not I was underrating Tony Gonzalez.
Robbie: What compelled you to leave that first comment over the Chiefs’ offence being unsuited to its players?
Marc: To be honest, I don't really remember. I've barely commented on anything before. I guess I was really intrigued by your thoughts in addition to sharing how I enjoyed your work.
Robbie: What were you thinking when that comment thread turned into us debating over Tony Gonzalez? Surely it can’t be a good feeling (as a non-writer yourself) to be debating with a writer in their comment section.
Marc: I actually enjoyed it. I have always enjoyed good spirited debates and dialogues. I often have them with my cousins on our podcast. However, there was a little part of me that thought you would get annoyed, but since you were very welcoming to my challenges I wasn't that worried.
In perhaps the most Substack story of all time, we argued it out (anybody who comes into my comments section knows they’re going to have to argue it out), and in the end we decided that Marc was right, and I was wrong, and I began the next Trent Green article with a retraction and correction about Tony Gonzalez. This spurred a relationship between writer and reader. We went back in forth in my comments all the time after that.
It’s perhaps not common in modern society for me to be writing an article in gratitude to a man with whom my relationship started with a fairly spirited disagreement, but this is the kind of spirited writer-reader relationship that I’d been craving for so long. The one that every writer craves.
The reason I say that this the most important article I’ve ever written is once again twofold. The first part is that, even though it was only one, I now had a watchdog keeping me honest and ensuring that I did not print anything incorrect.
This forced me to increase my quality of research, because nobody wants to be proven wrong in front of a crowd right? Whether it’s a crowd of one or a crowd of a million makes no difference. It was not an especially good feeling to have to print a retraction and correction, and I take great pains to never have to do so again. This resulting lack of flippancy has increased my quality of writing exponentially, just over the past few months.
The second reason is that it just felt good to have a reader so dedicated, which helped get me completely over the mental issues I’d been having. By this point it’d only been about six weeks since I was having serious thoughts of quitting, but by the middle of July quitting was the furthest thing from my mind. I only had one reader, but that one was enough to re-light my fire.
Look at the rest of my posts in July. I did invent a new version of the passer rating formula, which was the first thing I did that got any traction on this website, but around that one viral (by my standards) post, look at all the posts with one like. That’s Marc and myself keeping this publication alive together.
Robbie: Was it weird to be the only one liking and commenting on the posts? You probably knew you were the only engaged reader. How did that feel to you?
Marc: It wasn't really weird. I thought of it as me doing my part to support good yet unrecognized work.
Most of you know the story from there. Around the first of August my Trent Green serial got out into the world, and just a few months forward from the stagnation that saw me get to know Marc Robinson so well, my subscriber graph looks like this:
That scale is still in 20s, so it’s not like I’m a big shot or anything, but the meaning of the blue arrow remains the same. That’s when I got nearest to quitting, and that’s when Marc Robinson jumped on board.
For about two months it was just he and I, but you know what? I didn’t care about that. Like I always say. To me, this is not about the numbers. It’s about the humans. I had a dedicated reader, and that’s all I needed. This bulb finally got its chance to open up and became a flower, but without a chance Google search from a basketball fan curious about EPA, I’m not sure if it would’ve ever gotten that far.
Robbie: What did it mean to you to see my stuff start growing a little bit?
Marc: I thought it was cool to see your hard work paying off, and hoped that our conversations would begin to involve other people.
We’re still working on that last bit buddy. Most of my comment sections still remain one thread, or two if I’m very lucky. If we could have multiway football discussions in my comments section I would be the happiest man in the world, but since we can’t yet, I’m grateful for the ones we have together.
This is not an effort to put Marc on a pedestal above any of my other subscribers, but spending two months on a (metaphorical) island with a man will draw you close together. I’m grateful for a lot of things Marc did over that two month span in June and July, but the most of all is that his subscribing to my passion project, and his subsequent likes and comments on the posts, gave me a reason to give myself another chance at being a sports writer, and look at how far we’ve all come from there.
I owe Marc a lot. Considering my Substack journey is still just beginning, I’m not even sure how much I owe him. If you’re a fan of my work, you owe him something as well, because I don’t think without him, and without his fortunate timing, that I would be here today, and then who would tell you stories about football that you absolutely positively can’t live your life without hearing?
I’ve been lauded a lot. I’ve had lots of good things said about me around here over the last few months. Substack is a platform built upon writers saying good things about each other, but right now let’s pour one out for the readers. Let’s talk about how great they are, because without them, where would we all be?
I’d be entirely gone. None of you would’ve ever heard of me. No
promotion. No mention. No restack. Nothing. I would’ve thought my sports writing tenure a total failure, but now I don’t have to feel that way anymore.That’s the value of one dedicated reader.
Thanks so much for reading.
I’d like to give thanks to
for agreeing to be interviewed here! He is not a writer, but he jumped into this cute little idea with both feet and I think he did a great job. Thank you very much buddy. | A guest post by
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Wow! Had no idea the impact my engagement had; I am glad that I was able to do my part. Also, shout out to Robbie for being very professional in approaching me about writing this article and how easy he made it for me to be involved in the article and get my first writing credit.
I really like a lot these personal pieces you've been writing lately, connecting your passion for writing with your passion for football and delving into the writing process itself and the mental aspects of writing. This one here really digs deep into you as a writer and it really adds a whole other layer to your substack.
You know, writing on the "internet" has huge potential for immediate responses, interaction and connecting with a wider readership that print writing pre-internet did not, but it's harder in so many ways, one being if you're writing on a niche there's a lot for people to choose from.
It seems the key in the modern era of writing is to personalize, and you're doing that quite well!