A single operated newsletter may be the easiest business ventures to set up:
1) Create an account
2) Import your email list (Paidletter shows you how to grow one)
3) Connect to a payment system (we prefer Stripe) to receive payments.
Readers subscribe monthly or annually, and most publications offer a discount for the annual subscription.
Luke O’Neil charges $6.66 per month (or $69 per year) for his “Welcome to Hell World” newsletter.
After 15 years as a journalist, Luke O’Neil launched his newsletter, “Welcome to Hell World,” in 2018 to share reporting and personal essays on a variety of topics, tied together with the theme of the world’s transformation into, in O’Neil’s words, a “pit of despair.”
Through the newsletter, he wanted to cut through the niceties of traditional news writing and get the opportunity to speak about how upsetting things like “baby jails” are to him, even as he’s reporting on them.
Creating a direct relationship with readers through the newsletter subscription lets him do that in a way he never could when he wrote for publications like Esquire, The Wall Street Journal, and The Guardian.
In addition to revenue from the newsletter — 1,100 paid subscribers out of 7,000 total as of July 2019 — the newsletter garnered O’Neil a book deal. Indie publisher OR Books approached him to turn his essays into a book, and it released “Welcome to Hell World” (the book) in September 2019.
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