About

Welcome!

Unmarked Bounty is a live experiment in building useful, profitable newsletters without building a personal brand.

I'm Riley, a pseudonymous writer documenting what I try, what it costs, what works, and what doesn't.

I don't know yet whether any of this will work.

You get to watch me try, in real time.

Why faceless?

A lot of creator-economy advice starts with the same assumption: build a personal brand, become visible, and grow an audience around you.

But not everyone wants, or is able to, make their face, real name, location and private life part of the product.

I'm interested in all the other possibilities.

Can I build something useful, trusted and profitable while keeping my real identity private?

How I'm approaching it

My background is in qualitative research. I have a PhD and years of experience in higher education, so I'm approaching Unmarked Bounty as an experiment.

I'm bringing together three main kinds of evidence:

1. What experienced creators and publishing experts say works
   I'll learn from people already building newsletters and online businesses, including people specifically working in faceless and pseudonymous publishing. I'll credit their work, test and adapt their promising ideas, and systematically work my way through all 83 episodes of Growth in Reverse.
2. What researchers are finding
   I'll dig into relevant academic research on creator burnout, digital labour, privacy, online safety and other questions surrounding the creator economy.
3. What happens when I actually try things.
   I'll test the strategies myself and report what happens, including failures and null results.

Watch the experiment

My view-only Watch Me Work spreadsheet records the hours I work, what I accomplish, my energy before and after each session, the things that get in my way, subscriber numbers, and what I spend.

I am also building a Tactics Tracker for paid subscribers - a searchable database of all the strategies I test, with the numbers and outcomes from each one. This is an easily searchable resource that brings together the information available to free subscribers in the full-length posts.

My Growth in Reverse experiments are a key part of this. For each episode, I'll identify strategies that seem transferable to pseudonymous publishing and decide what I'm going to try. Then I'll come back a few weeks later and tell you what happened.

Null results always count. If I try a growth strategy and gain precisely zero subscribers, you get to hear about that too.

Who is Riley?

I write under the pseudonym Riley McKenna.

I'm pseudonymous for safety reasons. I've written about the circumstances that brought me here in my first post, When a Door Closes.

Start here

• Want to read the beginnings of the story? Read When a Door Closes.
• Want the receipts? Open Watch Me Work.
• Want the experiments? Subscribe to my newsletter to see the what happens when I put growth strategies and advice into action, as an anonymous writer.
• Want to find your own route? Take the What Kind of Treasure Hunter Are You? quiz.

I don't know what my map will look like yet. I'm drawing it while I'm travelling.

Riley McKenna

(a pen name, for safety reasons)