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It’s not uncommon for a company to develop a side project that overshadows the main business. For instance, there was an online snowboarding shop whose developers started building out their payment processor: a tool that became Shopify.

This blog, Woman of Letters, also started as the off-shoot of another project. In 2022, I signed a contract with Princeton University Press to write a defense of the Great Books movement: a 20th-century educational program that encouraged ordinary Americans to read their way through the canon of world literature.

At the time, I had spent the previous fifteen years working through a list of Great Books that I had compiled in my early twenties. During this period of time, the Great Books movement itself came back into vogue and started to play an influential part once more in America’s culture and politics—a change that I think is mostly positive, even though it’s allied to other right-wing trends that I find disturbing.

I worked on this book (tentatively titled What’s So Great About The Great Books?) through the spring and summer of 2023. Around that time, I started thinking, “Hmm, to make this book a success, I should start connecting with potential readers.” I had been blogging on Wordpress for years under a variety of names (first Blotter Paper and then The War On Loneliness). I mostly wrote about the writing-life and publishing, with only occasional mention of books I was reading. But my format wasn’t really working—the world was saturated with author-blogs and mine wasn’t offering anything special.

As a result, I hatched a scheme to rebrand my web presence and transfer it to Substack. This happened in the summer of 2023. My intention was to only write about the Great Books and classic literature—any contemporary publishing topics would be paywalled and not a major focus.

Over the course of that first year, from summer 2023 to summer 2024, my blog grew slowly, from 200 initial subscribers to around 600 in June of 2024. Then in 2024, I got really depressed—I’d released two novels that year to little fanfare. I felt like there was no point working on books anymore. So I decided to focus my full energies on this newsletter.

I revamped the format, started posting fiction, covering contemporary literature, and engaging in a variety of other experiments. Somehow, this was the rocket-fuel that the blog needed, and ...