2 years on Substack: what I've learnt

plus wildflowers

Hi! This is Leyla from A Day Well Spent, a newsletter about purposeful living.

What subscribers received recently:

• 'I create poetry no one will ever read' — an interview

• We are completely responsible for our own lives

• 9 books that literally changed my life

You can subscribe with your email to ensure you never miss my posts:

HI - thought I’d share a little selfie I took while visiting The Land last week

The 1st June, the halfway point of the calendar year, marked the two year anniversary of this newsletter, A Day Well Spent.

I was still in the thick of my little Pathways book tour two weeks ago, so didn’t get a chance to pause and properly register the moment.

Now that books are starting to land on people’s doormats around the world (people are tagging me in pictures, especially today – this is so exciting!!), things are a bit calmer and so I thought it would be nice to put down some of my thoughts about writing in this corner of the internet, two years in.

Here’s what I have so far written about being on Substack:

• Welcome to A Day Well Spent: for people seeking pathways to purposeful living - month 0

• Substack can be cruel but here's why I love it - month 2

• How I grew from zero to “bestseller” in 5 weeks - month 2

• Things I’ve learnt from 1 year on Substack - month 12

I’ve found it an interesting exercise to compare how I think about it today with back then.

These are the learnings I’ve had over the past 12 months about Substack, writing here and nurturing my online community.

I’ve peppered this article with entirely unrelated pictures of some of the wildflowers I snapped at The Land last week. I cannot quite express just how overjoyed I was to meet each of them - I had to literally be dragged away…

Numbers shmumbers

The number of total readers for this newsletter has steadily increased over the past two years, currently around 7,500.