Rob Henderson's Newsletter

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2024-12-22 18:00:04

Nearly five years have passed since I launched this newsletter in January of 2020. As I mentioned in this Substack Grow interview, back then it was hosted on MailChimp before moved it over to Substack in April of 2022.

After the first year, it accrued about 7 thousand subscribers. After two years, there were 14 thousand subscribers. By the end of year three, there were 27 thousand. By year four, 46 thousand. Today, there are more than 67 thousand total (free + paid) subscribers. With any luck, this number will continue to grow.

Writing online started as a side hustle when I was in grad school. The original iteration of my newsletter began as a hobby, and I found myself putting more and more work into it. It has become a primary income stream, which was unplanned. Over the past couple of years, I’ve turned down several offers from prominent outlets and magazines. I’ve discovered that few things give me more pleasure than sharing my writing directly with my readers.

The biggest piece of professional news this year for me is that my book, Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class finally launched. It outperformed expectations. Despite the fact that it was not listed on the NYT bestseller list even though it outsold other titles on the list. Despite the fact that I was frozen out of the bookstore promo circuit. Troubled was selected as a “best book of the year” by The Economist. It was also optioned for a scripted feature film.