Closing The Mortar

At the start of this year we launched The Mortar as a new way of helping people to read great stories from independent publishers around the world. Six months later, I’m sorry to say it’s time to end the project for now.

We sank a huge amount of time and effort into The Mortar, but it needed more. And honestly, I should have seen that from the start. I knew we were going to have access to fantastic stories, and I fell into the trap of thinking that would be enough to make the whole thing work. Because if you’re sending out great stories, paired with lovely, thoughtful, original illustrations by real human artists, people will want to see that, right?

Of course lots of people actually did want to, and I’ve had loads of lovely feedback over the last six months from readers telling me how much they enjoyed what we were doing. We’ve consistently had an open rate above 60%, which is excellent, and there’s a long list of stories that I would still love to include in the selection.

So why stop now?

When we started The Mortar, I acknowledged that we weren’t paying writers for their work, and we were paying illustrators just £20 per piece. I didn’t feel good about asking people to work for free, or virtually for free, but I reasoned that you have to start somewhere, and we could increase the rates as we attracted more paying subscribers.

I didn’t think it would be easy getting people to pay, but I did think we could pull in lots of free subscribers, and gradually persuade them that the stories were worth paying for. Unfortunately that didn’t happen, and I think the biggest problem was that I underestimated how hard it would be to bring in those free subscribers in the first place.

Looking back on it now, I should really have anticipated that. After all, everybody is already drowning in emails, so asking people to sign up for another one is a relatively hard sell. The real problem, though, is that my week is already full up with things I should be doing to run Stack, and I never got my head around promoting The Mortar as its own thing. That’s my biggest regret from all this – I know we were sending out superb stories, and I know we didn’t do a good enough job of putting them in front of new people.

The result is that we ended up with just 39 paying subscribers. That’s not quite enough to cover the modest outgoings of our Beehiiv plan and the monthly fees for illustrators, but more worryingly, it showed no signs of picking up and turning into something more sustainable. Six months is long enough to get a feel for a project, and faced with the reality that I wasn’t going to suddenly find more time in my week, there’s no question that The Mortar has to close.

Doing things differently

But I still think it could work. The problem here was resources – I put myself at the middle of it all, which meant I became a bottleneck. But maybe there’s a different way of doing it that gets rid of that obstacle. For example, what if The Mortar could be run by a much bigger team of people, all of them sharing the various jobs of finding stories, clearing the rights, preparing posts and promoting the subscription? I think that sounds like an exciting way of achieving the same aim of helping people to read more stories from independent publishers.

Also, I definitely felt the limitations of running The Mortar as a newsletter. I liked using Beehiiv as a platform – I was able to do almost everything myself without getting our developer involved, and building and managing posts was easy. But when the idea for The Mortar first came to me, it was as a print magazine. The magazine page gives a better reading experience than screens, allowing for far more control of the way text is displayed, and more playful use of illustrations. Lots of the stories we shared on The Mortar were long, and I know I enjoyed reading them in print much more than in the single scrolling column of text that we sent out to our subscribers.

I’ve worked in magazines for long enough to know that distributing print is far from easy, but it does bring the advantage of a real, physical product that can appear in real places in the world. As a newsletter, The Mortar struggled to look like anything more than just another Substack, so it’s not surprising that it struggled to cut through the noise and show people why they should care.

I started the newsletter because it was cheap and easy, intending that it should be a stepping stone towards print. That didn’t happen, but the experience has shown the importance of proper resources. I never really thought I could run a magazine on the side, but now I know that if we do ever go down the road of making The Mortar into a print magazine, it needs to have its own dedicated team behind it.

Looking to the future

Leaving the newsletter behind is painful, but the good news is that I’m going to get a chunk of time back in my week for doing other things. I have a long list of jobs to focus on for Stack, starting with the results from our recent reading habits survey – watch out for that coming very soon. But I’m also keen to keep on trying new things, so if you enjoyed The Mortar, or if you want to speak about developing it, or doing something else along the same lines, please do drop me a line.

Because the best thing about running The Mortar over the last six months has been all the brilliant people I’ve been able to work with, not least all the publishers, writers and illustrators who literally made the project what it is. All of their thoughtfulness, generosity and understanding was massively appreciated, and I hope we’ve helped them to reach more readers and viewers.

I need to say a big thank you to Holly Catford, who volunteered her services as art director. She was the one who persuaded me the stories should all be illustrated, and then she stepped up and actually made it happen. Without her energy and expertise, and her vast contacts book, The Mortar would not have looked anywhere near as good as it does, and it probably wouldn’t have made it as far as six months.

Thanks also go to Elizabeth Goodspeed, who served as guest editor for a week last month; to Yuki Holley, whose work and support on the newsletter has been invaluable; and to Vicky Burgess, who makes Stack happen, and is always on hand with patient advice when I need it. And of course thanks very much to everyone who signed up for The Mortar, and opened the emails, and sent messages of support. And special thanks to those who gave us a real, material boost by paying for it – I’m sorry we couldn’t find more people like you!

The Mortar’s archive will remain online, and now all the stories should be free to read. If you haven’t already seen it, please do take a look – there’s some superb writing up there, and it makes a wonderful snapshot of the stories that independents have published over the last year or so. And if you want something that will help you stay up to date with great independent publishing over the coming years, please subscribe to Stack! We deliver a different magazine every month to thousands of people around the world – they never know what they’re going to get next, but they do know it will be a beautiful, intelligent publication they probably wouldn’t otherwise have picked up. We’ve got some brilliant titles lined up through the rest of this year, and I’d love to send them your way…