Welcome to Indulgence Gospel After Dark!

🧈🧈🧈It’s time for your June Extra Butter! Today we are giving you a behind-the-scenes look at how we make Burnt Toast. And yes, finally addressing some of the butter-related Internet rumors about Virginia’s personal life. 🧈🧈🧈

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Extra Butter Episode 4 Transcript

Corinne

Today is a really special episode of Extra Butter because we are celebrating three years of Burnt Toast. Virginia, can you believe it has been three years?

Virginia

It feels like it’s been forever and also no, not at all. It’s wild.

Corinne

How are you celebrating?

Virginia

Probably buy a plant. 

Corinne

Oh, yeah. I was going to say brownies. Or cake. 

Virginia

Oh, I should see if my mom wants to make me a butter cake!

Corinne

Oh my God. Yes!

Virginia

For people that don’t know, my mother is an amazing cake baker, and we have a family tradition where she takes requests to make elaborate cakes for many occasions, including the dumpling cake she just made for my sister’s baby shower. 

Corinne

It was extremely cute.

Virginia

Yeah, so three years is very cool and weird. We have definitely grown in ways I could not have predicted when I decided I was going to turn on paid subscribers. We had 700 people on the list. Now there are over 54,000. I have to not think about the numbers too much sometimes. It’s a big stage. 

But it’s it’s exciting! And I’m excited to dish a little today about how we make it happen. So we’re going to talk about how the podcast is made, we’re going to reflect a little bit on where we started, where we’ve come from, the journey of Burnt Toast. And we’re going to talk a little bit about the recent New York Times profile. 

Corinne

I thought the best place to start might be to talk a little bit about how Burnt Toast started. How did you get the idea to start a Substack? How did you know about Substack? What was your vision for the newsletter?

Virginia

Well, I have to give credit to who is the pre-you. She was my research assistant who worked with me a lot on my first book and various articles and things. We were doing a newsletter to market my first book on TinyLetter, but Jessica is younger and cooler than me and writes a great environmental Substack called Pinch of Dirt that I encourage folks to check out. It’s very fun, especially if you like lots of hiking and nature writing. So Jessica was like, “The youths are on Substack.” And I was like, “What is a Substack.”

She migrated the list from TinyLetter over to Substack and helped me figure out what we were doing. And I remember her saying, sort of in passing at that point, “Oh and lot of people are turning on paid subscriptions and maybe you’ll want to do that sometime.” And at that point, I was still locked into “I write for mainstream media outlets.” I was just like, no, why would I do that? 

And then I started following a lot of Substacks, and reading more and it became, Wait, why would I not do this? Because I was also becoming increasingly frustrated with doing the kinds of stories I wanted to do at mainstream media outlets. And then I lost two big anchor clients in 2019 and 2020. I’d been writing a column about kids and food and body image for the New York Times Parenting section. And I had been doing a lot of work for Medium. Medium was great. I had great editors there and they would let me do pretty in-depth diet culture investigations, but then they changed their whole structure and were like, “LOL we don’t pay writers anymore.”

I was like, “Well, it’s interesting because I am a writer who still needs to be paid, so that won’t work.”Then The Times reorganized and cut my column, which is just the perennial freelancer thing where you have a couple of anchor clients, they run their course and then you pivot and start hustling up some new anchor clients. And I had been doing this for almost 20 years, I was so tired. This was also January 2021. That’s when I was like, Let’s make Burnt Toast into a thing. I spent about six months working on it before I turned on paid subscriptions that June.

Corinne

And how did the podcast start? Did you always know that that was in the future of Burnt Toast?

Virginia

No, not at all. I would have told you when I started, “I’m absolutely never doing a podcast.” My best friend and I had done a podcast together, Comfort Food. We did 80-something episodes and it was really fun, but we made zero dollars on it. It cost us quite a lot of money to make because we had to pay an audio editor, and it was just a ton of time.

It’s really hard to start an independent podcast and make money at it, because you have to get your numbers so big to get advertisers interested, or to get picked up by a podcasting network. Podcasting as an industry has gotten really messy.

So during 2020 when both of us had no childcare we were like, “we have got to put Comfort Food to bed,” which was the right decision. I really liked making a podcast, but I was like, “There’s no way to do it that makes financial sense for my life.” Maybe in retirement or something. 

But soon after I became working on Burnt Toast more wholeheartedly, Substack was like, “We are in the podcasting game!” And because they knew I’d done a podcast, they reached out and were like, you should really do a podcast for Burnt Toast. And I was like, no thank you, I would not like to do that. But then they covered the cost of Tommy, our amazing audio engineer, for the first year. So I knew I could make it sound good. And Tommy is amazing to work with and makes it so much easier.

Also: Part of what makes a successful Substack is publishing multiple times a week. I cannot churn out a reported essay or a first-person essay more than once a week. Honestly even that is a big lift, so I knew that I needed another type of content in the mix.

But I would say for at least the first year, I was still like, is the podcast working? Or is this just so much more work? Are we getting anything out of it? Once we were able to start adding paywalls to the podcast episodes, it started to make a lot more sense to do. Because it’s impossible to grow an independent podcast to big numbers, but if you already have your newsletter community, then it’s a different thing. So we’re never going to be Maintenance Phase—and we’re not trying to be Maintenance Phase. It’s a different model. 

Then of course once I started making it with you—I think that was the other point where I was like, “Well now I really want to make the podcast.” It’s so much more fun to do it with someone.

Corinne

It has been really fun! Should we talk a little bit about how the podcast and newsletter get made? 

Virginia

Or how many texts I send you a week?

Corinne

I mean, texting works for me. How do you find people to bring on the podcast?

Virginia

You and I are constantly brainstorming. You’ll see something, I’ll see something. We do get pitched a lot, too, but I think we’re a hard podcast to pitch. I get sent a lot of books, so I’m always looking at authors. And we want to support other fat activists and other feminists and folks working in these same spheres. Then also, we’ll get a reader question and we’ll be like, oh, who would be a good expert to answer that? Or like some crazy fatphobic thing happens in the media, right? 

Corinne

A news thing.

Virginia

We’ve started having editorial meetings now, too. So we’re more official. That’s an exciting recent development since our retreat. We stepped it up.

Corinne

How does production flow work? Like, once we have like an idea for a podcast? We kind of plan out like, “this week we’ll be runnin