Now that I’m trying, via The Republic of Letters, to rebrand my Substack identity from scrappy outsider to, like, benevolent uncle, it seemed like nothing could achieve that better than a post offering unsolicited advice. So a few thoughts, not necessarily on what I do but what I’ve noticed:
First of all, disregard most Substack growth advice. The people peddling it are focusing on trying to ‘optimize’ your engagement, but Substack will really only work for you if, as they say in AA, you have a “sincere desire” to express yourself through it. To get meaningful ‘results’ requires so much time and effort that it really has to come from pretty deep inside you, it really has to be something you genuinely enjoy doing, and in order to maintain that level of excitement and interest within yourself over the long haul there’s really no point in messing around with the hacks: just do whatever really nurtures you. Masses of files sitting on your hard drive, frustrated pitches you can’t place anywhere, inchoate ideas you can’t express to anybody you know, are all good places to start.
If you want to grow on Substack, you are going to have to write A LOT. Every so often, somebody will pop up, write a couple of breezy clever posts and get some massive number of subscribers, and I will think that this theory is disproven, and then that person will always turn out to be some TikTok star I haven’t heard of. I don’t think there’s any other way to grow than to just be prepared to put out an immense amount of content on a regular basis for a long time to come. It’s a different mentality from trying to place a feature in a magazine or working towards a thesis or something like that. There’s no culmination really. It’s very unlikely that you will write one post that blows everybody’s mind and then the agents all come along — and you shouldn’t want that. If done right, this is a very pure form of writing and of audience engagement and if you’re serious about your creativity you should want that for, really, the rest of your life. But the amount of content needed to generate sustained interest can be daunting, and it’s important to figure out a rhythm that’s right for you. I sometimes find it helpful to pretend I’m made of rubber — something about that image gives me the sense of flexibility and solidity that I feel like is right for the platform. If you find yourself feeling kind of lonely a couple days after a post, then you’re probably getting into the right mentality. The posts are, above all else, a conversation, and a really nice way of engaging with other people in an atomized world.
You should try to be on friendly terms with the void. Early on, if you don’t already have some following from somewhere, it may be slow, slow going. It’s of course impossible to avoid checking the metrics. You will check them and they will make you sad. And the important thing is to not be discouraged. The reason people aren’t reading you isn’t because you are a loathsome insignificant nit of a human, as a voice in your head is busily informing you, but because there are thousands of other worthy people toiling away on Substack who are really not so different from you and the masses simply have not discovered your work yet. In this period, you want to just post, think about ‘community engagement’ (below), and not burn through all your best material. It may be helpful to imagine yourself as a lighthouse or a piece of sonar equipment emitting a steady signal. What you should be aware of is that — unlikely as it may seem — the void will answer back and you want to be ready for when that happens. I was doing my regular posts, assuming that no one, really, was reading them, and then one, a critique of Substack growth advice, blew up. I stood by what I said in the piece, but it was directly critical of a perfectly kindly, intelligent writer who really just wanted writers on Substack to do well. My point is that that can easily happen to you. You don’t want to be chasing virality, but just know that you may end up being defined (at least within this community) by something kind of off-handed, and you want to make sure that every single thing you post is reflective of your underlying values.
You almost can’t overestimate the patience of this community. In different forums here I’ve been involved in a lot of wrestling about what a good rate of publication is, and at what point audiences start to burn out. And the truth is that they don’t really. I think the sad reality of our era is that people are checking their email and their apps all the time, people are constantly looking for interesting content, and they are willing to give you a hearing pretty much every single time. You just want what you write to be worthy of their attention, which is a whole other set of questions.
Probably the single most effective thing you can do early on is to reach out to people you admire on the platform and ask them to look at your Stack. (The Chat feature makes this easy.) The thing to know about successful people is that they’re reachable, just like anybody else, and they usually do want to help out, but they get swamped by emails. You want to reach out when you genuinely feel that you have a body of work that will impress somebody when they see it, when you feel that you have some kind of inner commitment to the platform and aren’t wasting that person’s time, and when you are reasonably sure that you are not in the midst of a psychotic episode. You always want to be really calm and professional in how you frame these requests. People who put out lists of recommendations with their Stacks are the ones where you have the clearest ask, but you’ll be surprised at how many Substack ‘whales’ will suddenly start quoting from writers with far less engagement. If that happens to you that can be a big break in your subscribership, so when you reach out you want to reach out with the kind of post that that writer may find themselves tempted to quote from.
The other way to expedite growth is to be very active in comments and community engagement. You may feel like a tool doing this — and you will be a tool if you are just doing it to boost your own exposure — but something curious may happen to you here. You may find that you actually are interested in engaging with other people, not just, like a predator offering candy, in luring them back to your own site, but because you find yourself drawn into their world. This for me is the real magic of the platform. It’s not intrinsically zero sum in the way that so much of traditional publishing is. J.K. Rowling probably doesn’t line up for an autograph of Stephenie Meyer’s book, but, here, there’s an all-boats-rising feeling. When you post on Substack (and post a lot), you really are asking a lot of others. At an energetic level, you really should give back, and the easiest way to do that is to cheer on others and support their work — and, yes, by the way they will remember that with gratitude and be more inclined to read your writing.
At some point in your Substack journey you will encounter trolls. There really aren’t so many of them compared to other platforms, but they do exist, and you want to be psychologically ready for them. What I find is that it’s very important to keep good energy in your Substack. I happen to enjoy a certain amount of provocation and like getting into arguments (they often seem to resolve themselves with surprising amicability), but you do want to know where the line is for you and to enforce it. For me, it’s that, while all ideas are in-bounds, an argument can never cross over into the personal, but, really, there is no reason to be shy about deleting a comment or blocking a user. The habits of the 2010s were to cry foul and appeal to the hall monitor to step in if there were harmful incidents, but Substack operates differently. The decisions are really all yours. I understand that there may be a gender disparity here — this is basically what the Glennon Doyle incident was about, that women may get more ‘ugly content’ thrown at them than men — but, really, Substackers have all possible tools at their disposal: they can delete the comments of anyone and block anyone, and I don’t really know what more is needed to ward off the trolls.
The money side of Substack still really hasn’t been fully worked out. My sense is that the leadership just hasn’t entirely wrapped its mind around the scale of the platform — that there are so many worthy Stacks that readers get overwhelmed and often don’t have paid subscriptions to any. I do think tipping for an individual article is a good idea and advertising may well change dynamics all across the platform, but the thing to say for now is: don’t quit your day job to write full time on Substack. It’s a beautiful platform and it opens up opportunities for expression and distribution that were unimaginable a few years ago, but if you’re being cold-hearted and professional about it, it probably makes most sense to treat Substack as a base and then try to place your clips elsewhere. In all the Substack v. traditional media debates, what tends to be elided over is that, for an individual writer, they really are pretty compatible. Professional editors tend also to be talent scouts and you may be surprised to discover that they are reading your Substack even if they keep quiet about it. You absolutely can keep the writing that’s for you on your Substack and then use your Substack as ‘clips’ and as a reference point as you pitch editors.
There is a level of Substack cunning that I haven’t gotten into here and don’t really know all that much about. Rachel Katz has a good piece on it here. Sarah Fay is a very good guide to thinking through these questions. My understanding is that there are diabolically clever ways of playing with the paywall, but I’m not really aware of them. My guess is that the money you make in tricking people into paying for your content doesn’t quite outweigh the loss of engagement from all the people who will click away as soon as they see the paywall pop up — and if you’re a writer building your career, having people actually read your work is the most important commodity. Everything else comes down the line. The Substack optimizers are right, though, that brevity is the soul of wit. Most people will not read a long post, and most people are skimming at whatever length you write (although one of the charms of Substack is that some people actually will read all the way to the end and will take umbrage with something you tucked away deep in some paragraph somewhere), and you pretty much always want to have a point in mind. I see a lot of posts where the writer has a great deal of preamble, and cute self-reflection, and you can’t actually figure out what they’re saying. Those are the posts where readers feel like their time is being wasted, and as much as this platform encourages experimentation and idiosyncrasy, it’s important to always remind yourself that the key commodity is the reader’s attention span. In a way that isn’t always obvious in traditional media, with its tendency towards grandstanding, writing on Substack really is a conversation. You are giving out content and readers are giving you attention and, hopefully, you are being as generous to other writers as your readers are being to you. In the end, that’s what the ‘optimization’ really is — it’s getting a bit (not too much, we’re writers after all) out of your own ego and putting yourself in the mind of the readers whose inbox you are assailing and whose precious screen-time you are taking up. You owe it to them to be worthy of their time.
This is genuinely fantastic advice. The fact that you can’t fake your passion or interest is central to success.
"Benevolent Uncle" was a band that had a small but fanatical following in the Seattle grunge era. I made that up but it could be true.