HeyJaredThe Irresistible Writer By Derek Hughes
Showing writers how to use words to make money and change lives. Proven tips to build an audience online.
- Indexed issues, last 90 days
- 13
- Latest publication
- Sep 28, 2026
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- Earliest in this view
- Aug 24, 2026
Latest issues
I Wrote 916 Articles Around a Full-Time Job. I Procrastinated the Whole Time. (opens the original)
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At 7am last Tuesday the document had nothing in it. At 7.40am it still had nothing in it, apart from a comma I’d moved twice.That was going to be article 917. The first 916 didn’t make me immune.What’s changed is what it costs. That morning used to take the rest of the week with it. Now it’s sorted by bedtime, and Wednesday goes ahead as planned.You know the forty minutes I mean. You clear the time for it. Then you read two articles about writing instead, check your stats twice, change the font.
I Published 67 Articles In 6 Months And Almost Nobody Read Them (5 Lessons From The Years Before It Worked) (opens the original)
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I used to set an alarm for the job that didn’t pay me.It went at six. The one that actually paid me started at nine, which left three hours in a cold kitchen before anyone else was up. I did that for two years, until the writing earned enough that I could stop doing the other thing.Some mornings I made the coffee, opened the laptop, sat there for the full three hours. And left the house with nothing.Most people teaching Substack growth have never done that. They’re full-timers, or they came out
Still Using “Subscribe Now”? That Might Be Why You’re Not Growing (opens the original)
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Somebody at Substack wrote the closing line of your last post. It’s the reason people finished that post, thought well of you, and never came back.They have never read a word of your writing. They made the call once, years ago, for everybody at the same time. And it’s been sitting at the bottom of everything you have published since.Subscribe nowTwo boring words. You’ve poured everything into that post. And the one line whose entire job is asking a reader to stay has never
I Wrote For Months With Nothing To Sell. This 3-Question Prompt Gave Me 15 Product Ideas In An Afternoon. (opens the original)
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On Friday I sat in a dark room for three hours with my phone off and made money.The Odyssey, if you’re wondering. I came out, checked my phone in the car park, and there was a sale. The Substack Writing Engine.I built that thing last year and hadn’t looked at it since.When I got home I checked again. $1,076 in the last ninety days. Without any thought from me. It’d been selling on Tuesday mornings and Sunday nights and while I sat in the dark watching a man take twenty years to get home.You have
Your First 1,000 Subscribers Won’t Come From A Hack. (I Wasted Three Months Finding That Out) (opens the original)
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There's a folder on my laptop I haven't opened in two years. It's the reason this newsletter grew.It's full of screenshots from Twitter threads. Bookmarked YouTube videos. Posts from writers with 50,000 subscribers explaining exactly what they did. I spent three months filling it, and by the end I had so many tabs open my laptop sounded like a server farm.And I was growing slower than before.That’s the thing nobody mentions when they hand you a list of 47 ways to grow your Substack. The list its
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