Have questions about publishing, growing, or going paid on Substack?
The Substack team, and your fellow writers, are here to help!
Today we’re gathering the writer community and members of our Community, Product, and Writer Development teams together in a thread to answer writer questions for an hour.
Need some guidance on going paid? To get started: As part of Substack Grow, we shared a guide through the process of setting personal goals, rooting yourself in a confident mindset, and developing financial expectations for a publication on Substack.
Want to reference or build on other Substack writers’ ideas? Our product team just shipped an update that allows you to "Reply on Substack" — this creates a new post with an embed referring to the post you'd like to reply to.
Drop your questions in the thread and we’ll do our best to supercharge each other.
Our team will be in the thread today from 9 am - 10 am PDT / 12 pm - 1 pm EDT answering questions with you.
I have tried office hours and get no help. Please help me. I deleted all my data and account and started over. My email for Substack is John@LogicallyCorrect.com . I have three posts Open Borders, Moral and Logically Correct Amnesty, and Hacker’s Modus Operandi. If I enter in my browser Substack.com then enter in the search box Voices or Greenwald I get Greenwald’s posts. No matter what I enter in that search box none of my stuff comes up. Please help me.
How can I get my writings to be found by people that have heard about Substack and try to find posts etc.? Any direction would be greatly appreciated.
Hey Substack team, very dumb question but I tried googling this without any luck. How can I increase the white space in between my paragraphs. They appear quite close together in the emails that get sent out.
Hello from The Wndering Journo in Australia! I produce the Streets of Your Town substack and podcast which I embed in the newsletter. Could you please do one of your workshops at a time that isn’t 2am for us down under types? Really keen to get your perspective on growing my audience in a country with significantly less population than the US.
There was a power shortage and I didn't get this until after the fact. So disappointed that I missed it. Also, I'm getting notifications just 20 minutes before each workshop. Not enough time to plan to be there. Not fair!
Another question that I have is to know if something is a good idea to send by email (multiple email) to my followers asking for que content, how they feel, what they could improve, surveys (you should let attach them)... I mean, interact with the followers to engage them.
I write sans niche. My newsletter, White Noise (https://www.whitenoise.email/), covers books and behavior, psychology and philosophy, fiction and fact. What is the best way to grow and scale something that is so amorphous in its subject matter? I welcome any and all tips, conversations, and questions :). Thank you to Substack for providing this precious space!
Hello everybody. If you have read me in the introduction of all writers you ll know that I am Spanish (also my substack) and my english is not perfect, but I try my best.
First lesson was amazing and charged of very useful tips.
I run a finance substack making deep investment ideas and analysis about public companies and I am followed by thousands of users on twitter and substack. I know that I could start a payments substack just now, but I prefer to wait until I have a bigger audience, something between 5000-10000.
This is my doubt. How could I explain to my followers the change from free to paid and let them know the value of being paid?I want to make them know that the content is really good (I receive tons of emails congratulating my work) and they should pay. This is my biggest doubt, be able to broadcast correctly the message.
How have people gotten over the hump of their first plateau regarding gaining subscribers? I may eventually look to go with paid subscriptions but for the time being I just want to continue to grow my audience. I got about seventy subscribers rather quickly and though a few are added each week or so, it has leveled off considerably. For someone looking to just grow their audience and remain free for a while, what can people recommend for growing their audience once their growth has slowed somewhat? Thanks to anyone who may have some advice on this.
I would like to be able to change the currency and set the minimum amount for a paid tier on Substack as, for someone who lives in Brazil, US$5 minimum is way too much to get it started. Do you have any plans on doing that?
After one year, I finally had a paid subscriber dispute a subscription claiming they did not recognize the charge. I am a local journalist who knows many of my subscribers, and I write a personal thank you to each person who steps up and pays me. I got a notification from Stripe of this Saturday morning, and I provided evidence that the person is an active reader, as well as my correspondence. Unfortunately, I lost the dispute.
I've written to this person once to ask what happened, as they did not respond. They are also continuing to read the newsletter, as I can track their activity. Most of my content is free, but subscribers know that they are paying me to do my work. I'm still waiting to hear from him.
My question to other writers: If this has happened to you, how did you resolve it? Did you ban the person, or revoke their free subscription? I'm trying to figure if I should shrug this off, or some up with a better way to win the disputes.
It would also be great to be able to set up a collective, where you pay one price and get access to multiple newsletters, and the money is split automatically between the creators involved.
I run my newsletter of LA Jewish news and features on two platforms, Substack and Mailchimp, and the issue with getting readers to become paid subscribers is largely the same: readers have grown accustomed to free content, and are extremely reluctant to pay for it. It seems that this core issue needs to be addressed editorially by the host both in their contacts with media and on the home site as well. Address this issue: Why is it important to support creators of content?
I'm trying to figure out how to manage multiple publications on Substack and it's been a little hit and miss. Is there a resource that covers this? I didn't want to create separate accounts and emails for each one so I created another publication under my existing account. But it seems very hard to switch between them and manage it. Maybe this isn't how you're supposed to do it? I just want to follow best practices here.
Big question that has been popping up a lot lately: How do you explain substack to prospective followers? (Authors please also weigh in if you have an answer to this.)
I love substack. I get the idea behind substack. I've found a lot of people are confused when they click the link I give them to my newsletter, and land on the welcome page. "What is this? Do I need to subscribe? Is it BETTER to subscribe? etc.
I think this one will go away as this model continues to gain prominence. But meantime; I feel like I'm finding myself having to explain the platform as a whole to a lot of prospective readers.
A few Q's (would love advice from other writers too!):
--What is the best way to encourage readers to comment? I can tell a healthy percentage of my readers are opening my email, but I would love to get them engaged!
--Is there any easy find other Substack writers in my same area? I write book reviews, so I imagine there are plenty of other people with similar substacks. I've found a few reading through threads like this, but I'm eager to read more!
Since I see this wasn't answered, I will ask again. Are you working on the ability to embed a pdf that can't be downloaded? I have a library of books I would like to make available, but I don't want them to be able to have them on their device.
Here's my current suggestion of the week for developers. I'd love to have an option to "view" my paid posts as a free subscriber. Where exactly does the line fall for what they can see and what they can't? I often post links in mine that I want to be exclusively for paid subscribers, so I try to add verbiage at the top to push those links below the free preview line. But I'm not really sure exactly how many lines of text I need to get below that line.
Also, I've seen someone post in the past but would suggest again, it would be great to be able to specifically set the line between what free readers can view and what is for paid subscribers only. I think that would address someone's comment on here about having a truncated post for free subscribers and a full post for paid subscribers within the same post.
Just remembered I had another question/request - it would be great if we could push content to paid subscribers so they get it, say, a day or two before free subscribers do - I think that would be a great asset for us fiction writers
Hello all. I do have a question about going paid: my long term goal is to make a living from my freelance writing one way or another and hope to rely heavily on Substack for that income; however, I would love (and kinda need) to earn some short-term money, however small, from my Substack. Keep in mind that I have not sent out a newsletter yet, but intend to start publishing within the next month. I'm holding off just a bit because I want to make sure I am in a good position to write regularly and not miss any of my own publishing deadlines, plus I want to learn more. So what I have done so far is to activate my Stripe acount so that anyone who wants to support my work at any time can do so, but all of my content will remain free until such time as I build an eager readership. Just wondered what the Substack team and anyone else here thought of that approach. Thanks!
Thanks for everything you do, Substack! I would like to suggest a better breakdown in the Stats section. It's so general right now I can't get a handle on which pieces work better than others and get better readership. Or which days of the week draw more readers, etc.
I know it would be a big job but the more info we can draw about our stories, the better. Thanks.
Hello everyone, I'm Rachel, I write The Links which is a soap opera - serialised fiction in 3 minutes, 3 times a week. I'm interested in doing cross-promotion/guest posts etc at the moment - my readers lean female/urban and interested in books/TV/podcasts/pop culture - if anyone has a newsletter they think would be a good fit for cross-promotion or a guest post, please let me know! I'm setting up a series of guests posts for The Links so if anyone's interested, again, let me know! email: thelinks@substack.com
My question for Office Hours is that I've seen some Substacks where hyperlinks are coloured to match the theme colour - but I don't seem to have that option, is it some kind of hack?
We write about end of life and caregiving conundrums, if this interests anyone. Our focus is on courageous conversations and we are wondering……Instagram or Twitter?
Does Substack offer any help for writers who don't have a social media following? Are there any tools to help your posts reach an audience? If I were to post an article for free, how would that get any traction potentially if I didn't already have a following somewhere else? Thank you!
I'm a content development consultant for a high profile non-profit related to the future of work/education space. I'm new to Substack and wondering where to get started. This non-profit has a large list of contacts from website and social media traffic.
Am I seriously limiting how many paid subscribers I will get by only posting once every two weeks and by keeping most of my content free? Should I reconsider these if I hope to make an income from my Substack?
The audio episode feature is excellent, thanks for reminding me of it. I seem to recall an announcement, but didn't look into it. My newsletter is a blog of poems, one a week, and often I'd rather be speaking the poems out (to help readers), I will definitely go back to some of my older posts and publish them as audio recordings.
One question I have regards specific formats when styling. Since the only real content on my posts is a poem with line breaks, I'm stuck having to deal with paragraph breaks instead: the line height spacing is egregious. I've gotten around this by taking screenshots of a finished poem and uploading it as an image. Is there anything in development to tackle custom CSS in the email formatting?
I love the new embed post feature. But it is so big that a reader doesn’t know to keep scrolling on a phone to see there’s more text after it. Can it be made smaller or a rectangle instead of a square ? Also is the text inside the box the beginning of the post or can that be adjusted to maybe just be controlled the way we want it like the social media box ?
Another UX problem. When a free subscriber opens a promotion link, the list of benefits doesn't appear. (This is when the Founding member plan is off). I believe the benefits should always be there.
I just finished and recorded a Zoom interview with a well-known musician for my Substack. I am thinking about using some selected video/audio from the interview, though I don't plan to podcast it. My Substack is about writing first. But looking for suggestions from the team for tools to integrate some video into the article when it runs. Thanks!
A have spotted an UX problem. When a free subscriber clicks on a .........../subscribe link they should go to the page with the paying options (Choose a subscription plan). But very often the free subscriber isn't logged in their account and is therefore redirected to the welcome page. This also happens with promotion links, too. It would be better if for logged out free subscribers these links go to the page with the paying options (Choose a subscription plan) with an additional "Enter your email" field.
I include a *LOT* of links in my posts--especially to performances of music. The click rate is very low. How accurate are the numbers provided in the Substack dashboard? If the numbers are a lot lower than I expect, what does that mean?
When I click on my own articles when logged into my Substack account, I wish Substack would recognize me as author and not count my views among the total views.
Also, any SEO tips other than creating a good title, good URL, and other such basics?
I have tried office hours and get no help. Please help me. I deleted all my data and account and started over. My email for Substack is John@LogicallyCorrect.com . I have three posts Open Borders, Moral and Logically Correct Amnesty, and Hacker’s Modus Operandi. If I enter in my browser Substack.com then enter in the search box Voices or Greenwald I get Greenwald’s posts. No matter what I enter in that search box none of my stuff comes up. Please help me.
How can I get my writings to be found by people that have heard about Substack and try to find posts etc.? Any direction would be greatly appreciated.
John Piccolo
How do I place the subscribe button in a post?
ใช่ฉันต้องการเงินอย่างมากในตอนนี้ฉันเบื่อชีวิตลำบากแบบนี้เต็มทนแล้วชีวิตลูกจ้างทำงานไปวันแบบไร้อนาคต และไม่มีจุดหมายปลายทางเลย ทำไมคนที่จ่ายเงินฉันถึงได้ล่าช้านักรอมาหลายปีแล้วยังไม่เห็นวี่แววจะรีบจ่ายเงินให้ผมไวๆเลย
Hi Substack team, another one from me. Our number of email opens is way higher than our subscriber list. Could you also explain that metric?
Hey Substack team, very dumb question but I tried googling this without any luck. How can I increase the white space in between my paragraphs. They appear quite close together in the emails that get sent out.
Hello from The Wndering Journo in Australia! I produce the Streets of Your Town substack and podcast which I embed in the newsletter. Could you please do one of your workshops at a time that isn’t 2am for us down under types? Really keen to get your perspective on growing my audience in a country with significantly less population than the US.
There was a power shortage and I didn't get this until after the fact. So disappointed that I missed it. Also, I'm getting notifications just 20 minutes before each workshop. Not enough time to plan to be there. Not fair!
Hello again!
Another question that I have is to know if something is a good idea to send by email (multiple email) to my followers asking for que content, how they feel, what they could improve, surveys (you should let attach them)... I mean, interact with the followers to engage them.
Thanks
I write sans niche. My newsletter, White Noise (https://www.whitenoise.email/), covers books and behavior, psychology and philosophy, fiction and fact. What is the best way to grow and scale something that is so amorphous in its subject matter? I welcome any and all tips, conversations, and questions :). Thank you to Substack for providing this precious space!
Hello everybody. If you have read me in the introduction of all writers you ll know that I am Spanish (also my substack) and my english is not perfect, but I try my best.
First lesson was amazing and charged of very useful tips.
I run a finance substack making deep investment ideas and analysis about public companies and I am followed by thousands of users on twitter and substack. I know that I could start a payments substack just now, but I prefer to wait until I have a bigger audience, something between 5000-10000.
This is my doubt. How could I explain to my followers the change from free to paid and let them know the value of being paid?I want to make them know that the content is really good (I receive tons of emails congratulating my work) and they should pay. This is my biggest doubt, be able to broadcast correctly the message.
Thank you everybody from Spain.
How have people gotten over the hump of their first plateau regarding gaining subscribers? I may eventually look to go with paid subscriptions but for the time being I just want to continue to grow my audience. I got about seventy subscribers rather quickly and though a few are added each week or so, it has leveled off considerably. For someone looking to just grow their audience and remain free for a while, what can people recommend for growing their audience once their growth has slowed somewhat? Thanks to anyone who may have some advice on this.
I would like to be able to change the currency and set the minimum amount for a paid tier on Substack as, for someone who lives in Brazil, US$5 minimum is way too much to get it started. Do you have any plans on doing that?
Thank you for coming to Office Hours today!
It's so rad to see you jumping in and sharing insights with one another. And, many of you who keep showing up.
We'll be back. Same time, same place next week! In the meantime, our resources are here for you: https://substack.com/resources and support for more technical questions: https://support.substack.com/hc/en-us
Happy writing,
Katie + Bailey
I would like to add an audio feed, I have a pretty good voice etc. How do I do that??
After one year, I finally had a paid subscriber dispute a subscription claiming they did not recognize the charge. I am a local journalist who knows many of my subscribers, and I write a personal thank you to each person who steps up and pays me. I got a notification from Stripe of this Saturday morning, and I provided evidence that the person is an active reader, as well as my correspondence. Unfortunately, I lost the dispute.
I've written to this person once to ask what happened, as they did not respond. They are also continuing to read the newsletter, as I can track their activity. Most of my content is free, but subscribers know that they are paying me to do my work. I'm still waiting to hear from him.
My question to other writers: If this has happened to you, how did you resolve it? Did you ban the person, or revoke their free subscription? I'm trying to figure if I should shrug this off, or some up with a better way to win the disputes.
What are the best tactics to growing subscribers lists?
It would also be great to be able to set up a collective, where you pay one price and get access to multiple newsletters, and the money is split automatically between the creators involved.
Are you working on any workflows that allow creators to send a series of emails to their new subscribers?
I run my newsletter of LA Jewish news and features on two platforms, Substack and Mailchimp, and the issue with getting readers to become paid subscribers is largely the same: readers have grown accustomed to free content, and are extremely reluctant to pay for it. It seems that this core issue needs to be addressed editorially by the host both in their contacts with media and on the home site as well. Address this issue: Why is it important to support creators of content?
I'm trying to figure out how to manage multiple publications on Substack and it's been a little hit and miss. Is there a resource that covers this? I didn't want to create separate accounts and emails for each one so I created another publication under my existing account. But it seems very hard to switch between them and manage it. Maybe this isn't how you're supposed to do it? I just want to follow best practices here.
Thanks for the log in invitation.
Question. How does Substack work and what are the rules and obligations for each side of the agreement?
Or, hoe does one get this information?
I have a 20,000 person mailing list. If I move this to substack will every one get a double opt in confirmation, or can I stop this from happening?
I also have found for me that Instagram works somewhat for subscribers. A few here, a few there. @youtopianjourney. What is yours?
Big question that has been popping up a lot lately: How do you explain substack to prospective followers? (Authors please also weigh in if you have an answer to this.)
I love substack. I get the idea behind substack. I've found a lot of people are confused when they click the link I give them to my newsletter, and land on the welcome page. "What is this? Do I need to subscribe? Is it BETTER to subscribe? etc.
I think this one will go away as this model continues to gain prominence. But meantime; I feel like I'm finding myself having to explain the platform as a whole to a lot of prospective readers.
What does "RSS Email" mean in the settings and what could be done with it?
A few Q's (would love advice from other writers too!):
--What is the best way to encourage readers to comment? I can tell a healthy percentage of my readers are opening my email, but I would love to get them engaged!
--Is there any easy find other Substack writers in my same area? I write book reviews, so I imagine there are plenty of other people with similar substacks. I've found a few reading through threads like this, but I'm eager to read more!
PS. I LOVE reply on Substack. Great idea!
Is this only a chat or Zoom too?
Since I see this wasn't answered, I will ask again. Are you working on the ability to embed a pdf that can't be downloaded? I have a library of books I would like to make available, but I don't want them to be able to have them on their device.
Here's my current suggestion of the week for developers. I'd love to have an option to "view" my paid posts as a free subscriber. Where exactly does the line fall for what they can see and what they can't? I often post links in mine that I want to be exclusively for paid subscribers, so I try to add verbiage at the top to push those links below the free preview line. But I'm not really sure exactly how many lines of text I need to get below that line.
Also, I've seen someone post in the past but would suggest again, it would be great to be able to specifically set the line between what free readers can view and what is for paid subscribers only. I think that would address someone's comment on here about having a truncated post for free subscribers and a full post for paid subscribers within the same post.
Just remembered I had another question/request - it would be great if we could push content to paid subscribers so they get it, say, a day or two before free subscribers do - I think that would be a great asset for us fiction writers
Please change the free subcribe option from "None" to "Free." "None" is confusing in my opinion. "Free" is easy to understand. Thanks.
Hello all. I do have a question about going paid: my long term goal is to make a living from my freelance writing one way or another and hope to rely heavily on Substack for that income; however, I would love (and kinda need) to earn some short-term money, however small, from my Substack. Keep in mind that I have not sent out a newsletter yet, but intend to start publishing within the next month. I'm holding off just a bit because I want to make sure I am in a good position to write regularly and not miss any of my own publishing deadlines, plus I want to learn more. So what I have done so far is to activate my Stripe acount so that anyone who wants to support my work at any time can do so, but all of my content will remain free until such time as I build an eager readership. Just wondered what the Substack team and anyone else here thought of that approach. Thanks!
Are you developing an ios/android app?
Thanks for everything you do, Substack! I would like to suggest a better breakdown in the Stats section. It's so general right now I can't get a handle on which pieces work better than others and get better readership. Or which days of the week draw more readers, etc.
I know it would be a big job but the more info we can draw about our stories, the better. Thanks.
Hello everyone, I'm Rachel, I write The Links which is a soap opera - serialised fiction in 3 minutes, 3 times a week. I'm interested in doing cross-promotion/guest posts etc at the moment - my readers lean female/urban and interested in books/TV/podcasts/pop culture - if anyone has a newsletter they think would be a good fit for cross-promotion or a guest post, please let me know! I'm setting up a series of guests posts for The Links so if anyone's interested, again, let me know! email: thelinks@substack.com
My question for Office Hours is that I've seen some Substacks where hyperlinks are coloured to match the theme colour - but I don't seem to have that option, is it some kind of hack?
We write about end of life and caregiving conundrums, if this interests anyone. Our focus is on courageous conversations and we are wondering……Instagram or Twitter?
Does Substack offer any help for writers who don't have a social media following? Are there any tools to help your posts reach an audience? If I were to post an article for free, how would that get any traction potentially if I didn't already have a following somewhere else? Thank you!
I am very glad that the share icon has been changed. Good job 👍
I'm a content development consultant for a high profile non-profit related to the future of work/education space. I'm new to Substack and wondering where to get started. This non-profit has a large list of contacts from website and social media traffic.
Am I seriously limiting how many paid subscribers I will get by only posting once every two weeks and by keeping most of my content free? Should I reconsider these if I hope to make an income from my Substack?
The audio episode feature is excellent, thanks for reminding me of it. I seem to recall an announcement, but didn't look into it. My newsletter is a blog of poems, one a week, and often I'd rather be speaking the poems out (to help readers), I will definitely go back to some of my older posts and publish them as audio recordings.
One question I have regards specific formats when styling. Since the only real content on my posts is a poem with line breaks, I'm stuck having to deal with paragraph breaks instead: the line height spacing is egregious. I've gotten around this by taking screenshots of a finished poem and uploading it as an image. Is there anything in development to tackle custom CSS in the email formatting?
I love the new embed post feature. But it is so big that a reader doesn’t know to keep scrolling on a phone to see there’s more text after it. Can it be made smaller or a rectangle instead of a square ? Also is the text inside the box the beginning of the post or can that be adjusted to maybe just be controlled the way we want it like the social media box ?
Another UX problem. When a free subscriber opens a promotion link, the list of benefits doesn't appear. (This is when the Founding member plan is off). I believe the benefits should always be there.
I just finished and recorded a Zoom interview with a well-known musician for my Substack. I am thinking about using some selected video/audio from the interview, though I don't plan to podcast it. My Substack is about writing first. But looking for suggestions from the team for tools to integrate some video into the article when it runs. Thanks!
Are unsubscribed list only the ones who leave a comment or all off them? Sometimes I see a small dip in that revenue chart but can’t figure out why.
The open rate vs the views makes no sense to me. Open rate could be like 40% and then views are five times the subscribers. How does that happen?
A have spotted an UX problem. When a free subscriber clicks on a .........../subscribe link they should go to the page with the paying options (Choose a subscription plan). But very often the free subscriber isn't logged in their account and is therefore redirected to the welcome page. This also happens with promotion links, too. It would be better if for logged out free subscribers these links go to the page with the paying options (Choose a subscription plan) with an additional "Enter your email" field.
Is it common to have lower open rates if you write a daily newsletter vs. once a week, or should it not matter?
I include a *LOT* of links in my posts--especially to performances of music. The click rate is very low. How accurate are the numbers provided in the Substack dashboard? If the numbers are a lot lower than I expect, what does that mean?
When I click on my own articles when logged into my Substack account, I wish Substack would recognize me as author and not count my views among the total views.
Also, any SEO tips other than creating a good title, good URL, and other such basics?