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Wendy Elizabeth Williams's avatar

Cork, you are always the best! Kind, quirky, wise and you write so well about the epic flows and blocks of a life well-lived. Nothing goes in a straight and smooth line...but we keep going. Please keep writing your wisdom, it is truly needed. God bless and keep you and yours with this Thanksgiving! Wendy

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Cork Hutson's avatar

Thank you so much, Wendy. Happy Thanksgiving to you as well.

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Charles R. Jarvis's avatar

This guy always offers good stuff.

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Cork Hutson's avatar

Well, thank you very much, Charles. Much appreciated.

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Martin's avatar

Thanks Cork, look forward to your future posts

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Jordan Jankus's avatar

Hi Cork! We both started Substack around the same time, and I can identify with your initial output, which has since become more modest. I produced a lot of content during my first year, then moved my focus to working on a nonfiction work about my daughter and lifelong learning (which is stalled at this point). I am grateful for the gift of the Substack platform, which allowed me to renew my focus on writing during my retirement. You've had such success in building your subscriber lists! I can't remember all the pieces I've written, and I wondered if you found it helpful to catalog your posts, providing an easy way for people to find your best posts. Did this work for you? Congratulations on your writing adventure, and I sincerely wish you a blessed Christmas this year.

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Cork Hutson's avatar

Hey Jordan. Yes, for sure it's been a journey. The subscriber list is still a mystery to me. The first year, I paid a lot more attention to it because I wanted to understand how to grow it. I read a lot about what others were doing and incorporated what I thought could work. I had a goal of 200 by the end of 2023 and in December I was stuck between 194-199 for more than a month. Nothing I wrote moved it forward. Then a couple of weeks after my first year anniversary date I crossed that line.

The second year I decided to abandon obsessing over #s and just write, while reading/commenting as much as possibly on what others write. The subscriber base kind of took a roller coaster ride sometimes reaching 30-40/month and sometimes much less. Thankfully, I doubled it by mid-November. So now, I am sitting at 409 for Life UnCorked and 265 for The Talking Pen (my creative writing site) which I don't publish as much on.

As I outlined in my latest post (last one for the year) https://corkhutson.substack.com/p/sabbatical-month-31-days-pause, I am taking a 31 day Sabbatical leading up to my 2nd anniversary on January 6, during which time I will be contemplating how to move forward, setting goals, etc.

Yes, I have established tabs that interface with tags to categorize/organize the posts for both sites. I will send you a private chat message or email if you prefer to outline how I did that. You can go to my main site page to see how it looks. What is a good email for you?

Appreciate you, my friend.

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Cork Hutson's avatar

Copy that. Will work on it a have it out to you sometime tomorrow.

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