Growing a Newsletter Business -- in the Age of the Hanover Kings

How an 18th-century printer found a niche and made a good living writing the most successful newsletter in English history

I like to read about “success” on Substack, the platform that hosts this newsletter. As a literary historian specializing in an earlier century, I know “success” has many coats in its closet. When writers coach fellow writers about it, usually they measure “success” by subscriber count or revenues. And since we are all mortals here, those measures are highly appealing, like a good parka this time of year in my northern climate.

Because email newsletters and the Substack platform are young, I have not seen anyone list the attributes supporting long-term newsletter success. For this, we have to look farther back. Email may only be decades old, but writing on a defined subject with regular frequency has been around for centuries. One figure in English history looms out of the past with surprising relevance, demonstrating some very familiar methods of achieving “success” by short- and long-term measures.

Three hundred years ago in England, a peripatetic printer and newspaperman cherished an idea. He imagined a pamphlet or periodical that would gather up the best bits of prose, poetry, and opinion from all the daily and weekly papers. He would sell this curated digest as essential reading for those who wanted to know the news and ideas of the day. With over 200 papers printed in London and more in the country towns, it required a full-time reader to strain out the best material.

Edward Cave thought men of the growing middle class would pay for someone to curate the news.¹ He spoke to booksellers about his idea but could not interest anyone in a partnership. So he kept to his day jobs and saved his money.

What he accomplished in the 1730s and 1740s is instructive to modern newsletter writers because it seems that little has changed. For years, Cave discussed and refined his plan while building up a network of friends and acquaintances who would support him. For years, he refined his skill and efficiency at combing newspapers and choosing excerpts. In 1731, when the time came to scale up and find new audiences, Cave’s niche, his network, and his skills were ready for business.

Cave’s path is not for every writer, either in his time or ours. But his career closely anticipates the business advice given to newsletter writers today, showing that the same techniques have worked through massive changes in audience demographics and technology.

Before the trumpet fanfare gets too noisy, there’s a good chance you’ve never heard of Edward Cave. Business success is not the only way for writers to distinguish themselves. A future column here will consider the very different career of a writer close to Cave who never chose a niche. That one too was successful, by none of the same measures.

A modern view of St. John’s Gate, Clerkenwell (London), where Edward Cave found his niche amid medieval masonry

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The events of Edward Cave’s life read like bullet points in a well-focused resumé, though of course they would not have felt so purposeful in the living.

Born in 1691 to a cobbler and his wife in Newton, east of modern Birmingham, Cave began his professional life as a clerk and a printer’s apprentice. In his twenties, he followed newspaper and printing jobs from town to town. In his thirties, he was married and working at Bow, east of London, as a printer and a postal clerk. One of his responsibilities included “franking” the mail. This meant that he stamped newspapers and correspondence to and from members of Parliament for free passage through the post.

With city and country newspapers coming daily to hand, Cave began to write letters summarizing the news from one area and sending it to papers in another. He found a London editor willing to pay him for weekly digests of country news. His regular column was called a “news-letter.” From Gloucester in the west to Canterbury in the east and Stamford in the north, he established relationships with fellow printers, sending news from London to their local press.

Writing news-letters for so many audiences, in addition to his postal salary, might have made a tolerable living for Cave and his wife, but the gatekeepers of the franking privilege had unique temptations and stresses. At least twice, Cave was cited, fined, or imprisoned for abusing his authority, either by granting or withholding free postage. Some people resented him for being too strict about franking rules. Someone accused him of opening private mail. Whether he took advantage of his position or he simply drew accusations from people who resented his refusal to grant favors is unclear. In any case, Cave’s interest was media entrepreneurship, not political intrigue.

The printer / postal worker / newsletter-writer kept curating, clipping, and summarizing the contents of the daily and weekly press, all the while watching for an opportunity to divest himself of the worst parts of his job and fulfill a larger vision.

In 1731, just before his fortieth birthday, Cave saw his chance. He bought a print shop in St. John’s Gate, Clerkenwell, and launched the first number of a periodical that would have a startling success. Cave and subsequent owners would keep it running continuously until 1922, almost two hundred years.

But in 1731, even ten or twenty years’ success was by no means assured. Most eighteenth-century newspapers were short-lived, and proprietors were doing well if they could pay expenses and stay out of legal trouble in an era of divisive politics.² Convincing no one to share the risk with him, Cave launched The Gentleman’s Magazine on his own.

In January, an advertisement in the first number of the magazine explained the long-harbored plan, which was, first, “to give Monthly a [selective] View of all the Pieces of Wit, Humour, or Intelligence, daily offer’d to the Publick in the News-Papers,” and, second, to publish any “other matters of Use or Amusement that will be communicated to us.”³

Cave was uniquely qualified to expand his news-lettering into pamphlet or journal scope and address a wider audience after working in or adjacent to the printing and newspaper trade since his days as an apprentice. His country and city correspondence had created a widespread network of subscribers and promoters. He understood that the volume of daily news and opinion and literary material was too much for any single person to read “unless a man makes it his business” to consult all the available papers (“Advertisement”).

Edward Cave had been making that his business for the last decade while he worked as a postal clerk and wrote targeted news-letters for papers with a limited geographic audience. In launching The Gentleman’s Magazine, Cave did effectively what Substack writer

Luisa Skinner

announced when she “burned down” two successful, separate newsletters and combined them into one less than a month ago. He had refined his service to readers and his unique mission with multiple newsletters. Thanks to his prior experience, The Gentleman’s Magazine had a clear plan and method from the first number.

The rest “is history.” Cave earned enough from subscriptions to live by his magazine work and pay contributors, who included Jonathan Swift, Samuel Johnson, Benjamin Franklin, and other satirists, scientists, and original thinkers. At his death in 1754, the flourishing magazine continued in other hands.

To literary historians, Cave is known for applying the word magazine to a printed periodical for the first time (a point to develop further in a future post), but for our purposes, it’s clear that his curatorial newsletter expanded and went viral, eighteenth-century style.

Printer and publisher Edward Cave (1691-1754), dressed for success!

The business advice given to newsletter writers today might have been drawn from the career of Edward Cave, even though his name is now scarcely known.

1. The Niche. Today’s newsletter writers understand that they will attract more subscribers (especially paying subscribers) if they adopt a clear “niche” and deliver a reliable service to readers.

   Karen Cherry
   of
   PubStack Success
   advises, “A niche is a necessity for Substack. It’s how you get — and keep— subscribers who want to hear from you week after week.”

2. Time and Practice. Cave’s career also demonstrates what

   Summer Brennan
   pointed out in a popular post titled, in trouble quotes, “ ‘How to Succeed on Substack.’ ” She advised that no strategies of “success” can replace time and effort. To a reader,

It is easy for the work of successful writers to become invisible. The job of writing is often to make it invisible, to remove any trace of effort in the prose so as to provide a smooth and enjoyable experience for the reader.

The journeyman years of Edward Cave reveal what would have been invisible in his magazine: more than twenty years of experience, funneling toward an immediate hit in 1731.

3. Support. Growing a network of supporters is also important. Substack itself created tools like Recommendations and comments intended to help writers find the people who would support and spread the word about their mission. They added Notes in 2023. Cave developed his network by writing for newspapers in and out of London as an employee or correspondent.

4. Good writing, well-practiced, is a recurring theme of Substack guide and guru

   Sarah Fay
   . She has shown writers how to “Write Less, Please” and compiled a list of twenty creative writing teachers who can coach newsletter writers on their craft. Cave was accomplished in the style of his day. He practiced his writing alongside his printing from an early age, reading incessantly.

As I have been hinting all along, Edward Cave’s business success is exemplary in publishing history and relevant today — he confirms that the advice we hear about how to grow a newsletter also holds up over time — but Cave’s life is only one model of success. This post begins a new section at Quiet Reading with Tara Penry called The Once and Future Author. Posts in this section offer brief biographies of authors from the past whose careers shed light on some aspect of writing today. With Edward Cave, we are just getting started.

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Thank you for reading. One thing I don’t know about Edward Cave: did he express gratitude to his readers? I like to think he did. It is a deep pleasure to know I write for you, and that you might find something useful or delightful here. 🙏

1. For the word-hounds reading this, you might like to know that our verb “to cūrāte” did not exist yet in Cave’s time. The word would acquire its modern meaning — to select and arrange — thanks in part to Edward Cave and others who followed his example. The word “cūrate,” a noun with a schwa in the second syllable, referred to a cleric in the early 1700s. Here is the entry for Curate in Samuel Johnson’s dictionary of 1755.

2. One of Edward Cave’s early employers, Nathaniel Mist, was jailed, fined, and eventually exiled to France for printing slanders against King George I. In 1747, Cave was arrested for illegally reporting on a trial of treason in the House of Lords.

3. The Gentleman’s Magazine, vol. 1, no. 1 (Jan 1731), p. 46, Internet Archive.