I had an epiphany, as my former boss used to like saying.
As I learn more about Substack's various features, and as my relationship with the platform evolves, I can read the writing on the wall and see that no one's going to subscribe to Dirty Grammar, so I should just eliminate that branch entirely and perhaps replace it with something else while it's still early days. So far, Dirty Grammar has no subscribers except for one dim bulb who apparently hit "subscribe for free" on what is a paying-only Substack. So he'll be no loss. He's not seeing anything now, as things are.
Also: I'm going to add my quizzes, tests, and answers right into my Tasty Grammar Substack. There will eventually also be video explanations that might be published once every two weeks or once a month after I master adding graphics and animation to videos. These will, of course, be for paying subscribers only.
By consolidating like this, I'll be saving myself a ton of work, thank Cthulhu. I currently put out two versions of every paid-subscription post: the "dirty" version and the dumbed-down, milquetoast version. By eliminating Dirty Grammar, I almost halve that workload ("almost" because there's a good bit of copying and pasting). Tasty Grammar might, as a result, become a wee bit more risqué when I port over the dirty originals (about commas), but I'll try not to make it as, uh, visceral or vivid as Dirty Grammar has been. And by adding the exams and explanations to Tasty Grammar, my subscribers won't have to pay extra to subscribe to a different Substack. I hope that encourages loyalty and prompts the hesitantly non-paying people to thinking about shifting over to pay the low, low fee of $5 a month or $50 a year.
As sad as I am to throw Dirty Grammar into the dustbin of history, I'm relieved not to have to work at content creation as hard.
I'll be making an announcement about all of this on Tasty Grammar soon. The announcement will be visible to both free and paying subscribers.
So, I realize it is probably a bit late for this now that you've already made your command decision, but I was under the impression that Dirty Grammar was just a lewd/bawdy version of Tasty Grammar. Here, though, you call Tasty Grammar the "dumbed-down" version... does Dirty Grammar offer more advanced explanations, then? If so, it might have been helpful to clarify that--I imagine there were quite a few people out there who thought, "Eh, I'm here for the grammar. Do I really need to pay for dirty jokes when I have the sum of human filth at my fingertips on the internet?"
ReplyDeleteIf Dirty Grammar isn't a more advanced dive into the muff, though, then the command decision was probably the correct one.
Except for the raunch, the content is 95% similar. Maybe "dumbed down" wasn't the best way to describe going from "Dirty Grammar" to "Tasty Grammar," but it worked in my head as I thought about the people who have a high tolerance for bawdy humor versus the delicate flowers who prefer their humor to be watered down to Bambi level. Sometimes, bawdy humor has its own sophistication, its own metalayers. Moving from that to something simpler and more innocent felt to me like "dumbing down."
DeleteI don't think anyone else has overthought the issue as much as you have, though, so congratulations!
Dirty Grammar is still up until I have a chance to port posts over to Tasty Grammar. Once they're all in my Tasty "draft" queue, I'll work on—yes—dumbing down the humor.
Overthinking is my super power.
DeleteGrammar is a dirty word for people like me anyway, and some would say my writing is a joke, so I'm probably your target audience. I would certainly not object to you incorporating the unfiltered "Dirty Grammar" rants into the "Tasty" version. I was going to subscribe to both until you let me know that it would mostly be repetitive. Seeing it twice won't make much difference to a slow learner like me.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the update and good luck going forward.
I would certainly not object to you incorporating the unfiltered "Dirty Grammar" rants into the "Tasty" version.
DeleteI doubt anyone says your writing is a joke. If it were, you'd have no readers.
As I commented to Charles, I'll port over the Dirty Grammar posts (many are ported over already) and "dumb them down" for the gentler humor of the Tasty Grammar Substack, so they won't be "unfiltered" when they appear. Basically, these are the comma posts that you know so well. (Or don't really know well at all. If only you used your brain to master Parts 1 and 2 of that series, you'd solve 90% of your problems.) They aren't scheduled to appear until late January of next year, and they'll go on through early March. In the meantime, we've got to get through the various parts of speech.