Celebrating a Substack one-year anniversary with smiles and gratitude

The response from my cherished hometown will stay in my heart forever

It's been a full year since I made the switch to Substack from the local newspaper that employed me for the first 55 years of my journalistic journey.

My how time flies when you're on Mr. Toad's Wild Ride.

I'll save you the sordid details of last year's parting on what is now an incredibly happy First Anniversary with Substack, but if you really must know what happened, it's all chronicled right next to this piece with the title "A Sad Ending, but a Tremendous New Beginning," that was penned the day the guillotine dropped in May of 2024.

I now refer to it all as the "First 55 Years" of my writing career, as I continue the newly titled "Second 55 years."

I'll let you know if there's a "Third 55 years" somewhere down the road.

Within 15 minutes of the crushing news reaching my loved ones, the Red Headed Girl of My Dreams and I convened a family meeting with the kids and the name "Substack" kept coming up.

My first thought was that "Substack" must be some sort of new sandwich shop in town and they needed someone to write ad copy for them.

"Turkey, avocado, bacon and Swiss on toasted French" rattled through my brain as I tried to figure out how selling submarine sandwiches would help pay the rent.

"No," they said in unison. "It's a site for writers where people subscribe to your work."

Sure, sure, I thought. I'll probably get 50 subscribers, max. But it would sure be nice to keep writing, even if I couldn't make a living at it.

Was certainly worth a try.

I soon met up with a tech wizard downtown named Brian Bolz and he put a ton of time and effort into getting me up and running before handing off all those complicated duties to our son Mick, another tech genius who grabbed this spiraling football and ran with it.

In a town as small as Davis, word spread quickly and I was soon overwhelmed by the response.

In the first five days we had subscribers in all 34 Davis precincts, not to mention subscriptions from 46 states, plus Manitoba and Saskatchewan.

Launch Party - May 15, 2024

Thanking the crowd

My Sweetheart, Shelley, decided it was time for a "Launch Party" just five days into this new project and it felt like half the town showed up at The Breezeway on E Street that Wednesday afternoon to eat pizza, sip lemonade and hear me thank them all for such a tremendous show of support at an incredibly difficult time.

But the life-changing surprises kept coming.

Nearly a week into my new Substack career, longtime colleague Wendy Weitzel, whose Comings & Goings column was easily the local paper's most-read feature, announced she was leaving the paper because of how it had treated me.

It was a show of solidarity that was both bold and courageous, but she stepped out into the cold and took a stand because she felt it was the right thing to do.

All I can say is thank God for Wendy Weitzel.

Although there was no promise of anything at all when she gave up a column she had written for several decades, she decided to give Substack a try and quickly became a double bestseller and one of its most highly rated features. (You can read Wendy’s Comings & Goings column here).

I suppose this might be a good time to explain how the Substack model works.

Those of us who are writing or creating on Substack are independent contractors, not employees. We are not salaried by Substack.

We work for ourselves, not Substack, though Substack is incredibly helpful in trying to expand our subscriber base.

Substack offers both free and paid subscriptions, but writers are compensated only for paid subscriptions. Free subscriptions are offered so that readers are exposed to your writing, with the hope that one day they will upgrade to being paid.

From the reader's standpoint, getting a free subscription allows them to dip their toes in the water and see if this is the sort of writing they'd like to spend their dime on. If so, great. If not, it's nice to have them aboard for as long they'd like to stay.

Substack accounts for all the subscriptions and does all the accounting and paperwork, so all folks like me have to do is write. We never even have to submit an invoice to get a paycheck.

Substack is more than generous in its compensation, taking just 10 percent of the price of the subscription and automatically and instantly depositing the other 90 percent in the author's account.

There is no middleman.

Ask other creators, such as painters and poets and pottery makers, what percentage of a sale they get when it's someone else who is doing the selling. Certainly not 90 percent.

But leaving any financial considerations out of the discussion, by far the best part of what Substack has done is to allow me to continue writing a regular column in the same manner as I did for the last 55 years at the local newspaper.

After all those years of writing a highly opinionated column, I figure I've offended everyone in town at least twice. But I try to be consistent and not play favorites. Pretty soon I might be praising one of those politicians who last year I suggested should go dunk his head in Putah Creek.

I can have my opinion and you can have your opinion. Sometimes people get angry, but it's tremendously counterbalanced by the love and kindness I feel every day in my beloved hometown.

I absolutely cherish the opportunity to remain in Davis and write about all of us - the good, the bad and the quirky - and sometimes comment on the world around us as well.

For my way of thinking, I have the best job in the world.

Only now, my relationship with the readers is direct.

I don't have to navigate through an editor and a publisher and a CEO and a paper carrier to get my writing into someone's hands.

And it's direct for the reader, too. A reader can subscribe or not. Or can cancel without having to cancel any other Substack subscriptions they may wish to keep.

Not so with a newspaper, which is an all or nothing proposition. You buy the whole thing or you buy nothing. You can't pick and choose as you can with Substack.

A year ago, part of me actually hoped that Substack might truly be a sandwich shop where I could get my favorite tunafish sandwich with extra mayo, but I'm thrilled beyond measure that it's a thriving platform for my writing and the work of so many others throughout the country and around the world.

And to those of you who have so generously subscribed to The Wary One, I promise to keep pounding out columns and stories and thoughts on the news of the day until I can no longer type. If I'm lucky, I'll be able to make you smile and laugh every now and then along the way.

As always, I'd love to hear from you, either in the comments section or with a personal email.

I have loved this town since the day I arrived on my fifth birthday. The town has now loved me back.

Your support through these last 12 months has meant the world to me.

Thank you all from the bottom of my heart.

Reach me at bobdunning@thewaryone.com