Plans of Change
How things will unfold
Thank you!
We at Change are very grateful to you, our subscribers—not only for having you as such a loyal readership, but for taking the time to respond to our Survey regarding your preferences for the second year of Change.
Thanks to your responses, some of which were surprising (Stafford Beer defined information as “that which changes us”), we will be making some changes to Change, in order to provide you with an even better reading experience.
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Length of Articles and Posts Going Forward
The length of our pieces has ranged widely over the past year of weekly Change posts—from a number of 3-minute reads (leading one avid reader of Change to plead with us not to place them on such a starvation diet!) to very long posts, including a number of single-instalment marathon reads, and including some articles requiring as many as nine (count ‘em, 9) instalments.
Yet, when it came to preferred length of articles, many readers didn’t have a preference. However, amongst those who did, the preference was for Change to mix it up, and for those who did express a preference for a particular length the most favoured length was for a 6– to 12– minute read.
And as far as the maximum number of instalments readers felt they could cope with, responses varied considerably. Of those of you who expressed a preference, no one but no one was in favour of articles with 6 to 8 instalments (the maximum number we offered as a box to select on the Survey).
So you’ll be pleased to know that next week we will be publishing the final instalment of the very last one of those shaggy-dog cliffhangers—the one that required nine instalments in all (one long article, “Questioning Truth,” followed by a further 8-instalment article developing the ideas and showing their practical applications).
It has been one of our favourite pieces of the past year, and alas we had quite a bit to say on the topic. But as Aristotle intoned, “the guest will judge better of the feast than the cook,” and if there was a consensus on this point at all, it was for articles ideally to be published in 2 to 5 instalments.
So this is what we’ll aim for going forward, particularly if we find we cannot say what we have to say on a topic in an article taking around 6 to 12 minutes to read.
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When We’ll be Publishing in the Coming Year
Regarding when we publish, the overwhelming majority of you favoured fortnightly publication, and as far as days of the week were concerned, for some inexplicable reason ;) no one was a fan of getting these posts in their inbox on Mondays. Nor did anyone at all want Wednesdays or random days of publication.
With the exception of one lone Tuesday fan (who, if they are British and into football, must be feeling like a proud Millwall supporter), absolutely everyone else either didn’t have a preference or preferred the weekend or just before—the most favoured day by far being Friday. So we will continue to publish on Fridays.
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Content
We were relieved to find that twice as many Survey respondents found the posts always “easy to follow” than found them “sometimes difficult to follow.” And no one responding to the survey found the posts “often difficult to follow.” I suppose that’s only to be expected, because they wouldn’t still be here!
Most people found the posts “interesting,” “challenging in a good way,” and above all, for most respondents, “thought-provoking.” No one found the posts on Change either too pedestrian or too radical, and the few who expressed a view on the question felt there was just the right level of technicality and conceptual content.
Again, the respondents who expressed a view on practicality (less than half) were equally divided between issues of Change being “of real practical benefit to my work / daily life” and being “not practical enough.” Both are good news—for sure, we aim to please, but much more than that we aim to be useful to our readers, to improve readers’ work and lives.
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Media of Change
All of you who responded had a view on media. The most popular option was written pieces with a podcast, with most of the rest of you wanting written pieces, while the remainder preferred either podcasts or just for us to mix it up between written pieces and podcasts.
So we’re planning to keep everyone happy by offering podcasts of published written pieces, mixing it up, and in no particular pattern, depending on the topic.
Just when the podcasts will start, or how exactly we’ll be doing them (read by the author? by someone else? mix it up?), we’ve yet to agree amongst ourselves, but we plan to start podcasts sometime in the coming year. Exciting! Change is going multimedia!
So far, throughout our first year, we’ve been offering only written posts. Yet most of you, to our surprise, have so far tended to read Change in the rather rough, hot-off-the-press versions dashed off in the emails, while only 20% of you said you used the Substack Reader app.
This means, to our embarrassment, that 80% of you have been reading posts rushed off to “publish and be damned”—in order to beat the proverbial deadline in the midst of terrific work pressure from our day jobs—emails regrettably riddled with typos, uncorrected factual errors, slight misquotes or misattributions, innocent but embarrassing errors, and occasional outright howlers.
These regrettable glitches were invariably caught (often by you, our readers—thank you!) and corrected within 24 hours, and most were caught and corrected within an hour or two of publication. But the corrected, polished Final Edition only appears online or appears on the Substack Reader app.
This also means that most of you may therefore be missing out not only on reading the most accurate, complete and up-to-date version of each post—which is the version found in the free Substack Reader app for iOS and Android—but are also missing out on the superior reading experience offered by the Substack Reader app, since the posts are automatically optimized for reading on the app.
And don’t worry, we don’t get a commission for people downloading the free Substack app—we’re just embarrassed by our silly errors, unworthy mistakes despite careful research, writing and editing, inadvertent misquotes, and sentences that don’t scan. And we do think the Substack Reader app is terrific, and one of the many, many reasons why we chose Substack as our preferred publishing platform in the first place.
Our Change Community
You expressed great interest across the board in live and recorded Zoom discussions of the articles, moderated discussions with author/editor participation and especially Q&A exchanges with the authors. (These, like the podcasts, will only be available via the Substack Reader app or website).
There were no respondents who felt they’d be “interested in these things” but simply didn’t have the time.
So we will now have to be thinking about introducing some new elements to Change over the coming year or two, taking these responses on board. Finding the time for this in our crazy work and travel schedules will be a daunting challenge, but we’re doing this for you, our community, so, hey, we got this.
To build a home for such a community is a major part of why we are here in the first place—to serve as a literary rallying-point for the community of individuals, often isolated in their views at their workplace, to come together and find support for their ways of thinking. For those of you who responded (or would have responded) that you “didn’t know anyone else who would be interested,” this is why we are here, and why we’re glad you found us.
We had in the past often found ourselves in the same boat as you. Or rather (oops, by definition, merely) in a similar boat, similarly adrift somewhere out at sea, unaware that there were so many of us lone sailors of the new epistemology out there, like the heroic 850 “little ships”—the small private boats—that landed at Dunkirk in 1940 and saved the lives of 336,000 British, French, and other Allied soldiers cut off by enemy troops and stranded on the beach. Change welcomes the Dunkirk spirit!
We were therefore most heartened to learn that the majority of you, our faithful readers, had already shared posts or recommended Change to others (including one stalwart partisan who did both, while also being reluctant “to reveal to [some] other people their interest in such radical ideas as these”).
Some of you said they hadn’t thought to share/recommend the articles or the publication they enjoyed—well, now that the thought has crossed your mind, perhaps you won’t be able to get rid of it.
Others said that their only reason for not sharing Change posts or recommending Change to those they thought might appreciate it, was that they didn’t use the Substack Reader app where you could do either job with a single click and not have to feel the need to write a line or two in a covering email (if it was someone you hadn’t been in touch with in a while). There again, the app would seem to come in handy—just sayin’…
And from now on, starting next week, we’re going to have three buttons instead of two—one each to share an individual post, to share the publication Change, or to subscribe. And if you are a reader who hasn’t subscribed yet, why not subscribe? It’s free, and you can help support us by your show of solidarity as we see our numbers grow.
Envoi
Anyway, thanks again to all of you for all your support and suggestions, this past week and over the past year.
Without your support we wouldn’t still be here bothering to publish Change at all. So it’s true that we couldn’t do it without you, we wouldn’t have stuck it out for a whole year of weekly deadline stress without your growing support, and with your help going forward we can spread the word and grow our wonderful little Change community of “movers, not shakers.” See you next week, and fortnightly thereafter!
—The Editors