Fran Magazine: Year 3

Another year of being Fran

📝 Thanks for reading Fran Magazine, a biweekly blog by Fran Hoepfner (me). The way this works is that Wednesday (regular) issues are free for all and Sunday (dispatch) issues are for paid subscribers only. Consider subscribing or upgrading your subscription for access to more Fran Magazine, and feel free to follow me on the website formerly known as Twitter or the website currently known as Letterboxd.

Housekeeping

This post is not even crazy long, but Substack is telling me that it’s nearing email limit length. My apologies. I’ll say it again: this post is not even crazy long!! Press the button on the upper right-hand corner of the post to read in anther browser tab, or just go to the Substack app. Thanks and sorry!!!

Happy (early) birthday Fran Magazine

Fran Magazine’s formal birthday is January 13th — nice, a Capricorn — but last year I pretended that Fran Magazine’s birthday was January 11th — also a Capricorn. For the record, we can consider Fran Magazine like one of those celebs whose Wikipedia page has a question mark by their age, like Rosamund Pike.

Consider this issue both a celebration of the start of the third (!) year of the magazine as well as a introduction for some of the last month’s new subscribers following The New York Times endorsement of it all.

First things first:

I say this at the top of every issue, but truly, sincerely, thank you from the bottom of my heart! Not only has the magazine proven to be a valuable source of income, but more than a lot of things in my life: I have fun writing Fran Magazine and I have fun talking with the people who read it. One of my most stalwart cultural beliefs is that your audience is what you make them out to be, and I am grateful to have such a smart, eager, interested, curious, and thoughtful set of readers who like and comment and email when things come up. I have a good time here, and I hope all the rest of you have a good time here too.¹

What is Fran Magazine? Who the hell are you?

I am a writer with brown hair and glasses — just like all the rest of them!!!

The phrase “Fran Magazine” started out as a joke on Twitter: whereas a number of my peers had byline-centric bios that crammed in as many credits as possible, I always felt I lagged behind. Who did I really write “for,” anyway, except myself? Thus: EIC of Fran Magazine. President of my own blog.

This Substack and my writing focus on popular culture, some of that very popular and some of that not very popular at all. I am most frequently writing about film, but I am also interested in classical music, books, and the occasional celebrity story. If you are new to reading the publication, and would like a chance to read a few of the most popular stories, here are some of those along with a few of my favorites:

Wednesday issues are free to all — subscribers or not. I share these on Twitter and Instagram when I remember to do so. The Sunday Dispatch — a weekly culture diary — is for paid subscribers only. Why should you pay to get one extra post a week? Well…

Fran Magazine financial transparency hour

When I started writing Fran Magazine two years ago, I was working part-time for a vaguely evil tech client and freelancing. Within two months of launching the magazine, the team I was working with for the vaguely evil tech client dissolved the group. I was lucky enough to have Brandy Jensen scoop me up to write part-time for the new iteration of Gawker… that iteration of that particular website happened to be shut down within a month of my celebrating Fran Magazine’s first birthday last year. So here we are.

I said I would write Fran Magazine until I could get a full-time job with benefits or trick Substack² into giving me some kind of writer grant they’re always giving to, like, ethical altruists (?) or transphobes and not anyone doing anything useful or, more importantly, nice and fun³. At the time of writing, however, I have neither a full-time job nor a writer grant from Substack to make up an offensive opinion to peddle for American cash. That’s not to say that I’m not trying to do the first one — I spent the bulk of last year applying to jobs, not only in media but also in general copywriting, communications, and educational publishing. I’ll spare you the stories of these applications — or else save them for a paywalled post — but suffice it to say, no dice. If you have any idea of what type of industry I should pivot to (legal copywriting? girl plumber?), I’m open to suggestion. If I go back to grad school, however, all of my friends will make fun of me which I can’t afford (literally, emotionally) at this juncture. All said and done, another year of Fran Magazine.

Math magazine

The publication has an audience of about 4,600 total subscribers and a little over 500 paid subscribers. I’m lucky enough to net somewhere between half to a third of my income, depending on the month, writing the magazine. I can’t afford to not do it, but I certainly could always afford to make it more of a priority. There’s a possibility where another 500-something people opt for a paid subscription, and Fran Magazine does become my full-time job. I’m not opposed to this — though, like other freelance work, Substack does not yet provide any kind of benefits, etc. to its writers.

Prices for Fran Magazine will not go up this year. It’ll still be $50 for a year or $6 a month. I published 89 Fran Magazine posts last year, and if I do the math correctly (always a gamble, though my math GRE scores were better than anyone thought they would be), this averages out to about $250 per Fran Magazine post, which average around 1200 words. This is consistent with the lower end of my freelance rate, making it a worthwhile endeavor. There’s a possibility that you’ve seen my byline for other publications — Vulture, Slate, NYT, etc. That work is great with high visibility, but it is wildly unpredictable and never totally consistent. Though my Stripe payouts for Substack vary from week to week, the averages are regular enough that I am able to budget accordingly.

I really encourage people to pay to subscribe to the magazine — not because I financially benefit so much as I am able to financially sustain myself. Given this is my most steady line of employment right now, it seems unlikely I will somehow start the calendar year getting laid off for the third year in a row — but you never know!

The Substack of it all

As you may or may not be aware, Substack has a Nazi problem. I think this is bad, to be clear, and if it is your choice to step away from giving money to Substack or Substack writers, by all means, I think you should do that. I’ve never run a tech company before, so take this with a grain of salt when I say: it would be very easy for Substack to say that they won’t monetize or platform literal and self-identified white nationalists, and they should do that, but they won’t do that. You and I know from every tech narrative over the last several years that these companies do not feel actual motivation to curb hate speech.

For the time being, Fran Magazine will stay on Substack. It’s possible that might change in the future, but for now, I’m staying put. I don’t ideologically support any major platform I use (minus Letterboxd??). That includes Gmail, my favorite app, where people used to tell me to kill myself for what I wrote at Gawker about Taika Waititi. That said, if you want to make a big pitch for buttondown or another email newsletter platform, please write me an email. My address is what you imagine it probably is.

What to expect in 2024

Okay, that’s all been grim, but we’re here to have a good time! Last year I said I was going to do one really crazy post in 2023. Did I do that? Um, not really, but I did break down the Maestro trailer and sort of lose my mind in Maestro fever. Here’s what to look forward to in 2024:

• Regular Wednesday issues, regular Sunday Dispatch issues

  • plus ça change, etc.

• May bookclub

  • Last year we all got together and read Middlemarch, which was so much fun even though I had to grade final papers and read a 400 page vampire book for a review. This year… maybe things will be less crazy? What should we read? I’m open to suggestions, though I have a small list going of entertaining tomes.

• Rereads column

  • I’m going to introduce a very willynilly “rereads column,” as my big reading goal for the year is to dedicate half of my leisure reading to rereads. I’m doing this in part because I loved that Vivian Gornick book from a few years ago that was about rereading, and also because so much of my brain has been liquified by a combination of the pandemic and writing “circling back” emails for the last three years that I think revisiting things I don’t remember well will be clarifying and exciting and fast(er) and fun. On the docket for the year are the Neapolitan quartet, Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men (my favorite novel?), EM Forster’s Howards End (the best novel?), some Roths, some Morrisons, some Steinbeck. These columns will be informal, but paywalled.

• Merch

  • I am going to figure out how to make merch. I mean it this time!

I said it before, I’ll say it again: thank you so much for reading. Another year!

1. And if you don’t, it’s fine to unsubscribe!! Nothing can hurt my feelings; I used to work in comedy.

2. More on Substack in a moment.

3. I’m not actually sure they still do this. But they should start up again and do it for me.