The Haterade Annual(ish) Report

Plus: your survey results!

Friends, Romans, perverts—this one’s all about the business(?) side of Haterade and may not interest you unless you’re into writing in general or stealing the identity of this writer in particular. Skip it with my blessing, and know that some newer, sexier #content will be coming your way in a week.

My dad was a high school band director, which meant I spent a sizeable portion of my teenage years practicing saxophone etudes in our spider-filled basement. If you don’t play an instrument, all you really need to know is that etudes are hell—they’re short, boring, technical compositions that you pretty much only play in lessons or auditions. They exist as a structured form of practice, the musicians’ answer to running drills.

I started Haterade in November 2020 as a goofy version of etudes—as a way to keep practicing as a writer when my beat had disintegrated and I felt unanchored. Over the past 14 months, it’s morphed into something else. More joy for its own sake, less focus on careerism or prestige. Less etude, more sax solo from Baker Street. BUH-BWEE BWEE BWEE-DUH BWEEEEEEEE, MOTHERFUCKERS.

It’s also helped me feel a lot more settled about my work and the reality of having a day job and writing when I can. I might not be able to make a career as a writer in a narrow, traditional sense, but writing is always going to be both the thing I love most in the world and the way I try to love the world. I’m going to keep doing it!

Anyway, thanks to everyone who’s read, shared, emailed, tweeted about, or donated to Haterade this year. I don’t have anything cool or funny to say about it: it means so much to me.

*Kai Ryssdal voice* Let’s do the numbers.

I’m going to use the rest of this post to highlight a bunch of embarrassing stats about how the newsletter is doing and share a few results from the reader’s survey last November.

Why? I don’t know. I believe in financial transparency, I suppose, but I also believe in being honest about the kind of writer I am and what success looks like to me, right now. If nothing else, it’s a commitment device to keep me from affecting faux humility OR pretending to be a big shot when I’m not.

But mostly, I’m writing this because it’s the kind of thing I wanted to know when I was starting out.

After a little more than a year:

• Haterade has 1,472 subscribers, 55 of whom have donated or bought merch (Thank you! It is never expected and always a delight). The biggest bumps in subscribers came after I was a guest on The Distraction and after I wrote a Defector Funbag. Some day, I’ll send Drew Magary a fruit basket. Or a subscription to a mayonnaise-of-the-month club.

• I’ve received about $1,940 in straight donations and $500 in donations for merch (garlic bread chapstick and Haterade koozies) for a 14-month gross total of $2,440. ¹

  If you divide that $2,440 by 29 posts, that comes to a rate of $84 per post. That would be a really shitty freelance rate, but I am not a media company, and I also haven’t made too hard a push for people to donate, so I’m OK with that.²

• Post views have ranged pretty widely, with a low around 800 (for this one) and a high around 6,000 (for this one). Average view count across posts is 2,124. I honestly don’t know if this is good or bad—I never get metrics on how many people read my stuff when I write for Real Publications, so I don’t have a great baseline. Still, if you told me a couple of years ago that 6,000 people would want to read something I’d written about appletinis, I’d feel pretty chuffed.

Goals for 2022:

1. Finally create a shitty website so people don’t have to debase themselves by sending me Twitter DMs if they want to hire and/or yell at me. This seems very achievable. I learned some HTML and CSS around 2003, when I was a superuser of both Neopets and LiveJournal, and I feel confident that nothing in web design has changed since then.

2. Write more of the stuff that I’m emotionally invested in and less of everything else. Which means: more Haterade, probably. Which means: not taking on tedious assignments or listicles just because the outlet’s prestigious or the story will “raise my profile” or whatever. One of my old creative writing professors has harangued me for years, with increasingly unconcealed frustration, about pitching “bigger” outlets. But I’ve tried, and I just can’t make myself care about that. I’m not here to be famous. I’m here to ruin your day and have a good time.

Survey Results!

Back in November, some of you took a reader survey! I asked about paid subscriptions, desired merch, preferred topics, and where you were from (at the time, 80 percent Midwest and 70 percent Kansas City in particular).

Happy to share the full results with anyone who wants ‘em, but the most interesting breakdown is probably this:

I had a wild hair about instituting subscriptions at the time, but I have since combed it.

I wasn’t sure I wanted to institute paid subscriptions generally, but this breakdown convinced me it’s probably not a great idea. At some point, I might institute a paid option without locking down any content, but a full paywall is probably not in the cards. I have a job that pays my bills, and I don’t want to lose folks by imposing a cost burden. Haterade subscribers are, frankly, some of the nicest and most supportive readers I’ve encountered, as evinced by these very different (but equally lovely) responses to the final survey question:

Option A:

And Option B:

I don’t know how to be anything but weird, so I’ll do what I can. Thanks for keeping me sane over the past year. I hope I helped a little on your end, too.

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If you missed the reader survey, you can always send any feedback to lizcook.kc@gmail.com. And if you have topic requests or any vaguely food- or drink-related questions for future mailbags, send those over as well!

1. I still have six purple and 13 black koozies left, so hit me up if you need one! $5 if you live in KCMO and I can hand-deliver, $6 mailed. Venmo is @lizcookkc / info for other platforms sprinkled across the newsletter. If you ordered a koozie in the past but haven’t received it yet, let me know ASAP, also. Those all should have gotten to their destinations by now.

2. For what it’s worth, I didn’t subtract my koozie printing or “ingredient costs” from this, so net income would be a lot lower—the mouse tape and packing peanuts and Runzas add up.