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.

Check out this caption.

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).

Hamish McKenzie @hamishmckenzie

Twitter is an amazing tool and an awful place.

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:

1. Publish only to the web

2. 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.

1. Including footnotes.