The Scheme for Full Employment

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The Scheme for Full Employment is a 2003 novel by Magnus Mills, in which he imagines an England that has finally solved the problem of work, and that solution is called the Univan. Univans are delivery vans, and thousands upon thousands of people now have jobs driving them, loading and unloading them, and repairing them. What do the Univans carry? Spare parts for other Univans. Where do they take them? To Univan repair facilities across the country. In other words, Univans constitute an economy unto themselves, a self-perpetuating cycle that exists to provide work for the otherwise unemployed.

The novel is short, elegant, and deadpan hilarious in its dissection of the world created by and (predictable spoiler) brought down by the Univan. You should read it¹ ! But I’m telling you about it today because the novel has come to my mind frequently over the past three months as I’ve written this reasonably high-quality newsletter, because it somewhat accurately describes the economy of Beehiiv, the platform from which I send this thing.

Since November, people have often asked me why I chose Beehiiv over Substack, or occasionally what Beehiiv, like, is. So: Beehiiv is like Substack without the Nazi problem. It also has a different economic model. Whereas Substack is free to use but takes a cut of a newsletter writers’ paid subscriptions, Beehiiv charges a monthly or annual fee based on the size of your subscriber base, and that’s it. Upgrade your subscription now, and I get to keep it all, minus the 2.9% + 29¢ per transaction fee that Stripe takes in, which reduces those $1-a-month contributions to 63¢ a month. Oof. Luckily, your paid subscriptions have added up to $474.09 since November 1. That’s not nothing!

But Beehiiv has other ways of allowing us ‘sletterers, as we call ourselves, to earn dough. First, there’s an ad network. All those ads you see in Trying! come from there, not from the diligent efforts of my ad sales team to recruit clients. Advertisers are doing this semi-blind: As I understand it, they’re looking for newsletters with a certain level of readership and engagement, plus “interest tags” that match up with their targets. The tags on Trying! are Travel, Food, and Creativity. (We’re only allowed three.) The offers come in automatically, I accept all of them, I place them in the email on the appointed day, and you all duly click on them to earn me money. Clicking them multiple times does no good—the robots count each reader-clicker only once. Hey, look! There’s an ad coming right now! You know you’ve got to click this one, just to fulfill the experiment. And yes, clicking those inline links in the previous sentences—and in this one—should count as well.

Last month, I earned about $250 from 17 ads. (I won’t know the exact figure until sometime Monday.) That’s pretty awesome! Thank you! Seriously, thank you. It’s truly gratifying to have you reading these emails, at least until you hit the ad, click it, and get whisked away into a world of THC gummies and author portfolios, finding yourselves so enmeshed in their promises of e-commerce riches and SAAS gold that you forget to return to finish reading the essay. That’s okay, I don’t mind. I’ve already got your $1.32. Ha ha ha.

Ha.

But it wouldn’t much of a circular economy if the money just flowed out to me, with a bit reserved each month to pay my Beehiiv bill, would it? That’s where Beehiiv’s Boosts come in. Boosts allow us newsletter writers (as you call us) to promote one another’s newsletters—for a fee. Right now, I am offering $2 for every subscriber that a host of other newsletters send me. Perhaps you reading this signed up for Trying! via Journalists Pay Themselves, Japanetic, Freelance Opportunities!, or Wealth Waves. My dashboard tells me 83 of you signed up this way, so that cost me $166, and let me tell you: You are worth it! In fact, I would gladly have spent $2.25 for each of you. Maybe even $2.50. Because all each of you has to do is click two of my ads, and I’ve earned back my investment. Three and I’m in the black!

Meanwhile, if you sign up for, say, the Spine Tingler newsletter—a roughly monthly email that blends horror and musical theater, which is kind of brilliant—I get $1.20. In fact, through the month of February, Beehiiv itself is doubling all those Boosts, so I’ll get $2.40 for each of you who signs up for Spine Tingler. IDK, give it a shot?

(Weirdly, as I was writing this, three new “offers to Boost” came in: from MMA Alliance, Boxing Alliance, and TopFeed AI. Do you think fans of boxing, mixed martial arts, and the grift known as artificial intelligence really want to read existentialist essays, or are they just trying to cash in on Beehiiv’s promotion? Go to the comments and let me know if I should accept!)

And so that’s the economy here: We pay Beehiiv to allow us to pay one another for new subscribers, a couple of bucks at a time, and when we hit certain thresholds of subscribers, Beehiiv charges us a bit more, but that’s okay because all those new subscribers are clicking our ads, which gives us more money to pay other newsletters to persuade their subscribers to subscribe to us, and so on and so on, until we all have 1 million subscribers, we’re all earning seven figures, and we’re all paying Beehiiv $100,000 a year. At that point, we’ve won and the whole thing shuts down and we retire to Bora Bora².

Is any of this sustainable? For my own sake—and, fine, for that of the other, bigger, unreasonably high-quality ‘sletterererers—I hope so. I mean, I started this newsletter to force myself to write again in the face of a media economy that had collapsed to the point where it no longer made sense to do it for a living. The 10 cents I earned per word writing for the Viet Nam News back in 1996 has somehow become a halfway decent rate in 2025. And I can’t stop myself from thinking that at that rate, the 150,000 or so words I’ve written since November would have earned me $15,000—or that at a 1990s magazine rate of $1–$2 a word, I could take the rest of the year off. I try not to think about that too much. But sometimes, as we all know, trying equals failing.

Still, this platform lets me do the work I love and at least feel like there’s the potential to earn some dough, even if it sometimes seems as if it will be decades before that money becomes meaningful. I sincerely hope it doesn’t wind up like The Scheme for Full Employment, although if the newsletter economy does come crashing down—as all bubbles seem eventually to do—I hope the catastrophe is as witty, hilarious, and satisfying as it is in the book. 🪨🪨🪨

Now That I’ve Got Your Attention…

I’d love for you to tell me what I should do with Trying! next. After February 14—which will be daily email no. 106—I’ll be taking about a week off for vacation, and when I come back, I want to change up (to some degree) what this newsletter is and does. And I’d love you to tell me what you’d like to see in the next iteration. So take the survey!

It’s Good and I Like It: Garfunkel and Oates

Garfunkel and Oates have been around a long time at this point, but I always forget they exist—until one of their brilliantly clever songs or videos happens across my feed. Here’s one that popped up yesterday that I really liked:

Notes

1. Sorry for the Amazon link, but it’s unavailable on Bookshop.org except in ebook format.

2. Bora Bora used to be such a great and common punchline! But you don’t hear much about it these days.

Read Yesterday’s Attempt