Ah, well! That went well, I think? First newsletter in the can and now we are back for round 2. Alarmingly, my first email had a 90% open rate within the first 12 hours. I wasn’t going to look but Beehiiv automatically sent me the stats haha oops. That’s both cool and yes vaguely alarming in a wow no kidding?? kind of way. I suppose “thank you” is what I mean to say here. Thank you. And welcome back!

I appreciated hearing from a handful of you last week, though I’m sorry I’ve not had an opportunity to reply. I did read your emails and your kind words made me smile! Me replying to non-work related emails is my own personal “do you wear wigs?” Have I read your email? Yes. Will I reply to your email? Maybe?! When will I reply to your email? 😳🤣

This email is shorter than the first… I don’t have as much to cover or introduce, and I really didn’t get up to much in this past week. People tend to think I am very busy leading a very exciting life, but the reality is that I am mostly just extremely protective of my downtime. I still get FOMO about things, but I’ve rarely ever felt pressure to fill my downtime with activities; I’m not sure if that’s because of chronic illness exhaustion or anxious introvert exhaustion or because outside is expensive and inside is where all my stuff is (and my dog). I drink a lot more fancy tea than I do fancy cocktails these days, but honestly that makes me relish the opportunities I do have to go out with friends even more.

Done and done: had a group call with the biz coaching cohort (it’s the start of our fourth and final month!), shot two customs and… injured my back in the process, took an AFK day to rest & repair, edited and delivered one custom, finally(!) put away all my laundry, made a new recipe, made a few quarts of a really nice chicken-veggie stock for the freezer.

Coming up: my three main goals this week are to bleach and dye my hair, edit the other custom I shot, and keep working on my chainmaille project before the show next weekend. Low-pressure goal to make a slow-rise bread before I make soup at the end of the week, but I’ll settle for a day-of quick rise if needed.

I was actually going to include this in the closing section and then it struck me how profound this quote is when you remove it from the context of an extremely silly and somewhat demented game show. I was going to say something about how, like most things, I’m making this whole newsletter thing up as I go. “But as Sam Reich says at the beginning of every episode of Game Changer…” I was going to say. And it’s true! Kind of rude in its simplicity if you ask me, but it’s true. The only way I’m going to learn how to consistently deliver a newsletter is by actually writing and sending one. The only way I’m going to get good at it is by learning what works as I go. And the only way to start doing that is to start doing it.

If you’re not feeling called out enough by that, see also: Things that aren’t doing the thing. Fucking brutal.

At the beginning of every month I settle in with some tea, light a nice candle and hit the sheets… the spreadsheets.

Y’all… if you have ever bought into the claims that doing OnlyFans is easy and that OF girls are just jorkin’ it on camera all day, living the dream, I am sorry but there are sooooo many spreadsheets. Data analytics. Graphs. Conversion ratios. The Works! And I do not enjoy it (okay sometimes I do), but I do it anyway because monitoring these stats is vital for understanding the health of my business and what’s working vs. what’s underperforming.

So I sat down this week to run some numbers and tbh I was not happy with what I saw! My main OnlyFans page has long been my frontrunner in terms of subscriber count, tipping, and overall revenue. But, my Fansly page has finally overtaken it, at least in terms of total revenue. It’s a bummer to see but it happens, platforms go in and out of style as much as individual creators do, and I don’t take it personally (although my bank account does). I think the OF bubble we saw during the lockdown years has definitely burst, and casually subscribing to creators on the platform as a novelty/luxury spend really doesn’t vibe with the current economy. But this shift in how my pages are performing does put me in a pickle…

My OnlyFans has always been more high-touch than my Fansly, I think largely by merit of it being my older platform but also because the two sites have different features and functionally, so I’ve been using each platform a little differently and maybe haven’t fostered those connections on Fansly. (And no, “high touch” is not a pervy sex work-specific term; it simply means that there’s a lot of direct interaction between me and my customers/clients/subscribers.)

The bottom line here is… the bottom line. 🤑 Logically I have to prioritize where the money is. Even though it’s more work to be posting the same content across multiple platforms, I have relationships on OF that I have zero interest in ending. So the question becomes: how can I ease off the OF gas and begin putting more of that energy into Fansly? To call back to the Vibe Check above… the only way to learn is by playing; I won’t know for sure what will work until I try. So I spent a day diving into my notes and started implementing some new strategies, on both pages. Which is simultaneously exciting and monotonous, as I have around 3 years’ worth of content on Fansly to review and update, and 5 years on OF. I also need to be cautious not to shift too suddenly or change too much at once; the goal here is the improve the subscriber experience (and streamline my workflow) over the coming months without disrupting the experience for others.

I don’t want to dive in too deep on what’s changing juuust yet; it’s easier for me to start dabbling a bit and then discuss when there’s something to discuss. I will say that overall I’m excited to finally be putting some of these changes into play! Plus there’s a few ideas that came to me at the last minute but I think will be fun. Or maybe they won’t be fun or work well at all! “The only way to win is by learning.” We’ll see. This work is equal parts experimentation and being consistent, and figuring out how to do both at once in whatever measure is needed for the day. And that’s what the data analysis and spreadsheets are for.

I’ll leave you with this, while we’re on the subject of comparison. Each platform has its own strengths and weaknesses, both for me as a creator and for fans (or so I hear). But only one of the platforms has owners who donated money in support of a genocidal foreign nation… and it ain’t Fansly. Do with that what you will.

(If you’re subscribed to my OF and you’re curious about switching😏 get your Fansly account set up and contact me there, I’ll give you the tour, maybe a little test drive. Vroom vroom.)

Did I tell you that I got a new camera? Perhaps I only posted about it on socials. Well icymi, I went to an estate sale last weekend and happened upon a Canon EOS M50 Mark II camera, with a zoom lens attached, for a paltry $295(?!). The lens alone is worth more than that? When I tell you the feeling I got when I first picked up this camera… it was like oh, this is my next camera. There were a few other contenders available that day but the M50 just felt good in my hands. Did I have a spare $300 in my wallet for spontaneous camera purchases? No, but that’s what credit cards and a go-getter attitude are for!

So I bought this camera, yeah? Woof. And I’ve been doing what I can to “learn” it without being able to really shoot with it much; this zoom lens will be great outdoors but it’s not really made for shooting beauty portraits in a small indoors space (does okay with subjects that are across the room though). I do have an adapter on the way so that I can use what I have for my Canon 30D—oh, right, I should mention that the DSLR I’ve used for most of my larger shoots in recent years is itself ~25 years old. 😅 She’s been lovely, a real workhorse, but the more I pushed her the more I saw it was time to consider upgrading. Fortunately, I’d been procrastinating researching cameras earlier in the week and knew the gist of what I wanted to look for… mirrorless, external monitor I could see from in front of the camera, 4k video, preferably Canon. Maybe I wasn’t financially prepared to upgrade my camera so soon, but feeling adequately informed about the tech sure helped when presented with the opportunity! It’s almost like I went looking for trouble, haha oops.

As I was saying, I have an adapter on the way to use what I have before I go impulsively collecting lenses I “need,” instead putting together a short list of ones to grab as I go. (If you have any spare M-mount EF lenses laying around, I have a PO Box…) I’ll be breaking the camera in next weekend by taking it to see some live music, and I’m really excited to see what she can do in that environment! I love event photography, I love live music, and I’m planning to add event (and portraiture) photography back into my repertoire of reasons people can give me money. After all, I have a credit card to pay down again. 😬 Or I suppose I could get into the lucrative business of pet photos? Why not.

🎵 Music - Bandcamp Friday was last week and, per the usual, I went in intending to grab a few albums from my wishlist. Then I saw that Serbian artist Monasterium Imperi was offering their entire discography of dark ambient Warhammer 40k-inspired church choir music at a discount. I’d already bought a couple albums over the years, but gods do I love me some dark ambient church choir music! So I grabbed that set. I’ve been listening to Edenium Archives as my sleepy bedtime music at night, and the newer Omnichants is great hype music. And no, I don’t play nor even read Warhammer stuff, I just am a fan of the rather niche genre of music that the 40k universe inspires. You too can grab the full Monasterium Imperi digital discography on Bandcamp for less than $15 American dollars.

👾 Gaming - So the Diablo IV x Berserk event really uhhhh fizzled out there before it even got going. I knew I was going to get a late start on it, but before I’d had the chance I started seeing tons of articles and posts about the hefty price tag for transmogs being premium content totalling over $150 for a full set of swag, with not much that interested me in terms of loot/drops. As someone who happily identified as a Blizzard girly during those earliest years of World of Warcraft, I can’t help but be disappointed by their continued preference toward endless paid expansions and microtransactions.

☕ Drinking - Speaking of tea. This Tower of London black tea from Harney & Sons is one of the best flavoured teas I’ve ever had. It smells stupid good, and it tastes divine. No honey needed. I tend to brew up two bags at a time in a small pot, or transfer the leaves to a strainer and blend it with a more neutral black tea. I usually prefer loose leaf teas so if you know of any along the lines of this blend, do tell!

I know I said this newsletter wasn’t really going to be focusing on spicy work, but this week things are certainly leaning that way. Through no fault of my own. There’s just… a lot going on with the industry, yeah? And with my own business.

I tend to focus on 1-2 projects per week, sometimes that’s spicy work and sometimes it’s entrepreneurial endeavors and sometimes it’s hobby stuff. It will definitely be interesting to document that through this newsletter, and maybe get a solid overhead look at how my neurodivergent brain timeblocks what its willing to focus on through any given week.

That’s it from me, then. Again, don’t forget to harass your local politicians. Or just check in on your neighbor, if they’re not a complete asshole. See you next week(?).

Clearly I still haven’t fancied up this footer section, and I realized that a lot of the style settings I thought I had customized didn’t take, so we still have some work to do. But not this week! Again, in the meantime, if you’re feeling inspired to do so, you can drop me a tip on Ko-fi, follow me on my SFW Instagram, or follow me on Bluesky (may contain tits and/or ass; please set your moderation filters accordingly). If you want to follow me on some other site odds are my user @ is merrickmonroe. And yes, please do still feel free to hit reply and say hello or commiserate about how making to-do lists aren’t doing the thing.