How to use the Substack editor
Hi! This is a draft post. Did you know that there are a bunch of nice formatting options in this editor?1 For example:
Block quotes are a nice way to put a quote or excerpt from a source. They make it clear that it is a quote.
Of course, you can also do bold, italic, links, and all that good stuff.
Headings and Embeddings
You can add headings to your posts. Just use the “Style…” dropdown in the toolbar. You can also embed different types of content. To add an image, just drag it in here or use the image selector tool in the toolbar.
You can resize an image by selecting it and dragging the arrows on the bottom-right of the image. Add captions and alt text by clicking on the image, then clicking the three dots on the upper-right.
To embed a tweet, Instagram photo; YouTube or Vimeo video; Spotify, SoundCloud, or Bandcamp audio track; or GitHub Gist, just paste the relevant link on a new line (don’t grab the embed code; it won’t work).
To delete a post, click on the Settings button (just to the left of Publish), and scroll down and find the delete button.
Buttons
Add buttons to your post that tell your subscribers to share a post, check out a special offer, or even custom buttons like this one:
You can add buttons from the “Buttons…” dropdown in the toolbar.
Publishing your post
Ready to publish? You have two options:
Publish only to the web
Publish to the web & send as email
Substack posts default to publishing to both the web and email. To publish a post only to the web, click the “Publish” button, then, on the next screen, make sure the box beside “Send email to…” is unchecked.
Note: Posts can only be emailed out once. Once you have sent an email out, the only way to send it again is to create an entirely new post. Any edits you make to a previously-published post will only be reflected on the web. So, there’s no need to worry about accidentally spamming your subscribers with repeat emails.
Finally, if you import posts from some other site’s archives, you can backdate them so they are published in the correct order and associated with the correct publication dates. To do so, after you have published a post, go into that post’s Settings (just to the left of the Publish button) and select the desired date.
Including footnotes.
Waiting for strikeout formatting!
Testing 123
Is it possible to publish on web only, and then send same article out to email list at a later time?
What about GIFs? I can't seem to get them to work.
They should work! See, for example, https://erin.substack.com/p/dance-like-no-one-but-cnbc-is-watching
Did you figure out how to get gifs to work? I'm still trying and none of them work and I'm simply copying the www.gif etc.
You can drag and drop gifs from your desktop into the Substack editor.
Thanks!
How can I import my contacts to build my email list please?
If I've imported a post from my WordPress blog, does that stop me being able to send an email to subscribers?
The option doesn't appear after I hit publish
That's correct. Imported posts cannot be sent out by email. But any new post you create on Substack can be emailed out.
How can we set external links in our "About" page to open in a new window? Right now all the external links I've added to my "About" page are opening in the SAME window and replacing the view of my "About" details.
Just now received a reply from Support. Apparently this problem was a bug which has since been fixed. :-)
How can we add a text link that will activate the sharing option? I tried inserting the following code as a text link, but got an error message instead of the pop-up sharing option: %%share_URL%% ~ Thanks in advance!
Just now received a reply from Support. Apparently the share code needs to be all lower case: %%share_url%%
How can I add a photo by line?
You can turn that on in your settings. First, enable bylines. Then you'll see an option to add images to bylines.
Is there any way we may submit an embed format to substack? We have it supported by embed.ly which is supported by Medium and a range of platforms but can't include it in substack.
Thanks, this will help, I think.
I'd love to know how to DELETE an entire draft
Go into settings while editing a post and scroll to the bottom to find delete
Rookie mistake. Thank you, @Hamish.
Is there an undo edit function? Or a way to revert to the previous saved version of a draft post? Because I just, somehow, deleted most of a post in progress and I see no way to recover the text one second later. Even Notepad lets you do that. Notepad!
Have you tried command+z (or whatever the hotkey for 'undo' is on a PC)? If you're still having trouble recovering the text, please write to support@substack.com and we'll see what we can do.
I wrote a sad lament to "hello" @substack while you were posting this comment. I'll forward it to "support" Thanks!
Is there any way to SIZE elements we insert via your wysiwg interface, whether imported jpg images of our own or links to external sources, like a YouTube video?