Help me decide how to continue this Substack
Some personal reflections and questions
Dear Substack Subscribers, a wee personal note and some news.
First, the news. If you are any way involved in efforts to solve the Cyprus problem, you might be interested to read my article entitled ‘Deliberative democracy: the only way out of the Cyprus problem?’ Here is a short extract.
To mark the appointment of a new UN envoy, but one who will not be presiding over the resumption of new negotiations to solve the Cyprus problem, this is a rather long recommendation on how to address the structural defect in the current negotiations process in a way that ensures that the outcome, whatever it is, can be supported by the leaders and has democratic legitimacy.
Summary of key points
Why the current process is structurally defective.
Why the piecemeal approaches so far can never be enough.
When the voters don’t trust the politicians, it is time to bring them in.
Addressing the specific Cyprus context.
What if the answer is partition?
Read the rest on the Financial Mirror here.
Second, for those of you have reports to write back to HQ/capitals, I have published ‘Sapienta Cyprus Insights: The New UN Envoy’. It is a text-only reports of 3 pages, with a briefing under the following headings.
What is happening?
Why is it significant?
Further details
What to expect: scenarios
Impact on security/international relations
You have until midnight Cyprus time today, Thursday 11 January to take advantage of the steep discount (€40 ex VAT instead of €100). When I have finished fighting with technology I hope to work out how to display only prices with the VAT included. You can find the report here.
Finally, a personal note and request for your thoughts.
It is has been a while since I have posted anything here, mainly because I have been going around circles wondering what I should do with it and, if I am brutally honest, how to monetize parts of it.
I do not believe in “guilting” readers into paying. I believe it simply builds up resentment and is not sustainable. If I am ever to put some or all of this into a paid model, it has to be a “must-have”. But Substack is a subscription service, so it has to be something that one “must have” over and over. And that also means it must be something I can produce over and over, at least once per week.
I tell myself there has to be a market for something between €0 per year and €1,900 per year—the cost of my monthly Country Analysis Cyprus, which analyzes six subjects in great depth every month and is subscribed to by some of the biggest companies and organizations in the world. The clients are high in quality but not high in quantity, otherwise I would not be writing this.
But deciding how to pitch something at, say, €100-€200 per year is where I normally come to a grinding halt. My current pattern of work is to chain myself to my desk for up to two weeks each time to produce 10,000, bang up-to-date words on Cyprus. For each of the six subjects I challenge myself to find something that no one else has noticed. This is fairly straightforward for banking, the macroeconomy, public finances and the economy of northern Cyprus, as hardly anyone else has the time or will to input and analyze all that data, some of which exists only in PDF format, so I always find a nugget that you really ought to know if you are investing in Cyprus but non-subscribers, including some credit rating agencies, do not know. For Cyprus problem and energy issues I try to find angles, potential scenarios and even potential solutions that no one has thought of.
This kind of deep dive makes it difficult to come up for air to and write something on even a weekly basis. But I suspect it is something I shall have to do if I am to make Substack work. At the same time I do not want to cannibalize the monthly reports. So round and round I go not deciding.
So here is my question. Since I started this Substack I have dotted around writing different kinds of articles. These include deeper dives, such as the value of Russian business to Cyprus or why the Cyprus economy seems to be made of Teflon; The Week in Cyprus (curated links); Cyprus Pocket Brief (the executive summary of Sapienta Country Analysis Cyprus); Sapienta Cyprus Selection (curated links to mainly international news affecting Cyprus) and some backgrounders. You can find the full archive here.
Which of these do you find most valuable? If you had to pick only one, which one would it be? And, maybe separately, which one do you think people might pay for? (These might not be the same: all the advice says put popular stuff up for free and then put ‘access to the writer’ and other kinds of goodies behind the paywall.)
Let me know your thoughts, either in the reply to the email or in comments on the Substack app. The comments are normally public.
Thank you for your interest so far and if it is not too late to say so, Happy New Year.