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 this discussion thread to answer writer questions for an hour.
Just getting started on Substack? Here’s a setup guide to get you started and help make your Substack stand out. If you’ve got questions about starting out, post in the comments below.
Worried about burnout? Fellow writers Emily Atkin and Haley Nahman have written about the constraints they’ve implemented to preserve their energy and write great pieces. Share your strategies to help with burnout in the comments.
You can now personalize the way you invite readers to subscribe. Our product team just shipped an update that allows you to customize the “Subscribe” button with a caption.
Drop your questions in the thread by leaving a comment, and we’ll do our best to share knowledge and tips. Our team will be answering questions and sharing insights with you in the thread today from 10 a.m.–11 a.m. PST / 1 p.m.–2 p.m. EST. We encourage writers to stick around after the hour and continue the conversation together.
Thank you for joining us at Office Hours today. We hope that you were able to connect with fellow writers and Substack team members to get some of your questions answered.
We will be back next week at the normal date and time, Thursday Nov. 18, 10 a.m.–11 a.m. PST / 1 p.m.–2 p.m. EST.
In the meantime, we encourage you to continue the conversations with fellow writes in the thread and visit the Resource page: https://substack.com/resources
Talk soon,
Katie + Bailey + Rose + Jasmine + Kelsa + Ben + Jamine + James + Jonathan + Jack + Seth + Kerianne + Becca
I did a cross promotion yesterday with another Substack newsletter and the results were fabulous. We both picked up 50 new subscribers!
I also found that using the feature that customizes where you can put the paywall in a post worked great. I inserted that to a recent post just before the recipe and picked up 8 new paid subscribers.
Love this new Subscribe feature today. Thank you Substack for all you do!
One way I avoid burnout is by periodically reminding myself that, even though I have a readership, ultimately I write my newsletter for myself. It's a creative project I chose to take on, and if I'm not having fun, why do it?
So allowing myself to experiment and write a goofy / weird / format-breaking post every so often – even if I don't think it'll do well in terms of open rate or click throughs – is how I break out of a "factory" mindset.
I am here to help out with marketing, promotions, and ways to get found.
Check to see if Google has indexed your newsletter:
Just type "site:yourblog.substack.com" into google search bar and see which articles are making their way to the first page of Google. Once indexed, Google will organically help your articles reach a top spot IF they are well written, and adhere to Google's policies. But SEO takes time.
I am once again asking substack to fix the discover feature. When searching my primary keyword, (climb, climbing,) my newsletter consistently ranks below others that have nothing to do with the topic. (basketball, for example.) I'm sure these are lovely newsletters, but I feel like I'm getting boxed out of my own niche.
No questions this week. Just wanted to say I'm happy to be here and available during Office Hours. This is a great way to connect with other writers.
If anyone wants to connect with me separate from Office Hours I write a newsletter on rediscovering the art of integrity as a real, imperfect, fallible person. Come over and check it out!
Thanks to Substack for linking to some other experiencing burnout. I'm not there (yet?) but I am finding it challenging to keep going at the pace I've set for myself, which I've done in an effort to provide a good balance of free and paid content. I publish twice a week, one free, one paid, with some big extra work (for mostly paid but sometimes also free) thrown in there every six weeks or so, with the seasons. I go through periods where I am so into it, I love it as much as I ever have, and others where I wonder how I can go on.
I'm not really going anywhere with this except to say publicly, if anyone else is in this place, you're not alone.
Really happy to see such regular feature drops from the Substack team. I've found that when I need a feature as a writer, more often than not, Substack already has it.
Kudos to the team. 🤗
Please do subscribe to my newsletter for a fun poem every week!
Publishing fiction every day (446 and counting) has almost assured that I will burnout spectacularly at some point. I'm hoping that when I do the wreckage is as entertaining as Hunter S Thompson at his most unhinged, or nonsense words Lewis Carroll would have been jealous of.
I launched my bookstack on Tuesday. It was a great success. It launched with 39 subscribers. I also comped all my prelaunch subscribers the paid version for life. Half the subscribers are friends and family, and the other half was my IG followers.
What I did was create a short message about my bookstack, then I texted it to my friends and family on both text and Facebook messages. Then I also messaged every one of my 400 followers on IG the same message. I got to about 300 before IG stopped me from being able to do it.
Any feedback on how I handled things? Any advice on how to get more followers? How often do you use the "share" buttons? I used the "Leave a comment" button" after each section of my email because I wanted to encourage engagement.
Question for you guys, about changing prices: Substack makes it easy to change our subscription prices in Settings. However, any changes we make only affect people who pay to subscribe *after* you make the change.
Is there a way to, say, reduce the price of my paid subscription from $50 a year to $35 a year that will also reduce it for everyone who already has a paid subscription? (And do I need to do that in my Stripe dashboard?)
On burnout. I know I can't commit to posting certain days. I post a monthly piece on the first, and one that will remain "free" on the 15th. Other than that, I give myself permission to post 6-8 other pieces. I keep a number of growing pieces in "drafts" and work at them. In this way, I always have something to add to, to grow. And at points through the month I check to see how many pieces I've posted, to review reader questions, to note what is inspiring me. Something of an "unscheduled" schedule. Much like any writing, it's coming to know and work with HOW you work. Then honouring that. Sometimes, those pieces that come out when dead tired are those that most resonate.
Hi there, Substack newbie and just wanted to give my appreciation to this platform. I am a teacher, my newsletter For the Love of Words (oliviamardwig.substack.com) has already been a fantastic way for me to share my educational materials, and of course my love of reading and writing to families. I am hoping to have a feature where I can have folks donate a subscription to a low income students. I know you can gift a subscription, which I LOVE, but is a donation possible? Thanks!
I'm confused about burnout. Branding is stressful. Promotion is stressful. Burnout has never even crossed my mind, though.
One scientist told me this:
13) What are the most exciting projects that you’re currently working on and why are these projects exciting?
You shouldn’t work on any projects that don’t excite you—every project you’re working on should be exciting.
And you should do bold things, but at the same time you need to do normal things in order to eat and pay your rent and pay your health insurance—it would be irresponsible to do only bold things.
Customizing the 'Subscribe' button with a caption is a great way of inviting readers to subscribe. Hope it is going to have an impact on my newsletter's number of subscribers.
How can I improve search engine optimization? It would be nice if my posts could be found by title or author name. (There seems to be a significant delay before the posts are searchable.)
Thank you to Substack this week for making office hours available for us. I started Feb of this year writing personal stories and thoughts about what it is like for a traditional healthcare provider to incorporate eastern healing and meditation and how I have journeyed in this culturescape of fear and not enoughness to lead a life of increased conscious awareness and tools I use to stay present and grateful. Shout out to YouTopian Journey for awesome graphics and writing. And, just found Sol Report—so good. Thank you Substack!!!
This is a big question, but is there any discussion happening about what it would mean to help writers monetize or generate subscriptions through high-performing articles "after the fact?" An article I wrote early on continues to accrue a lot of views, but I'm not converting those to subscriptions.
Hi, I also wanna say how much I enjoy substack. I originally started my newsletter on squarespace (which still hosts my website) but the tools and analytics and resources here are just so good. I'm a dad of a 3 and 5 year old and sharing the humor behind being a dad as well as the stories that shaped me growing up has been super fun (https://dadstories.substack.com/). One of my biggest obstacles to growing my newsletter is feeling "spammy" -- like I'm plugging it too much on social media. Any advice to overcome this would be greatly appreciated!
I’m a full steam ahead type of gal so I launched my Substack, The FLARE, heedless of any real advice. It seems that’s a point of trepidation for some but for me, that’s a strength. My questions are, though: How do you plan a launch? What are your strategies? What are offering and how much are you scheduling ahead of time?
I want to launch serial short stories and maybe even commissions in the future.
Tom White from www.whitenoise.email here! I write a semi-weekly newsletter on books, behavior, and the brain.
Are there plans to make Substack more SEO friendly? I find that my posts seldom rank even after solid traction and traffic from different sources. I welcome any and all tips on this front!
Is there anyone on Substack that is writing about a product, how to use it, tips/tricks, ideas and soliciting their users/customers feedback by say adding a survey in each issue? If so, could you make and intro so that I could learn best practices/ideas from their experience? I'm trying to craft a substack that our customers would want share with others.
Does anyone have any recommendations for making welcome emails after people sign up? I'm trying to keep it simple but make sure people get an idea of what the newsletter is about.
How do I expand readers? I don't want to start charging for my publications until I have a decent amount of folks reading. My plan is to always generate free content and have the more elaborate content be paid. Thanks.
I am having issues with my substack going to spam, and I mean my personal email spam! This started two weeks ago on my Yahoo account. Any fixes? I also think this is causing a vast amount of my subscribers not to see my substack.
I just set up paid subscriptions and was wondering if in the future you will add a separate benefits bullet for Annual subscribers? I am going to offer an added benefit to annual subscribers but just plan on explaining that in the welcome email and paid subscriptions launch post. Thanks!
I have questions! I see that some folks have made their main page more of a "home" page with other links, customized colors, etc. - I cannot figure out how to do this but I want to in my holiday week off upcoming. Suggestions? I am also planning to add some kind of subscription option.
I have expressed my alienation and exasperation about our digitalized world. I fear I probably sound like some antique relic of a bygone age. Although I may be older than most of you (I am 64), believe me, my generation knew what COOL was and nothing was as cool as charging down the street, throwing rocks, while someone is blasting "Street Fighting Man," by the Stones, on a boombox.
In any event, this is a quatrain I wrote which tries to articulate my dismay at the itty bitty world of bits and bytes.
The tyranny of binaric thought
The stilling of the nuanced voice
The menu selection that misses the point
That never gives me one true choice
David Gottfried, Copyright, 2019
PS. I write a lot more than this sort of poetry. Try my pungent and provocative essays
A quick question for the substack dev team . . . is there a way to italicize text in my post titles? I reference the names of books, films, and paintings every once in a while, and I would like to use italics instead of quote marks if I could! Thanks for any help you (or anyone else) can give!
I have slots open for cross promotions. All that I ask is that you have 100+ subscribers and your newsletter is a fit for what I write about. https://youtopianjourney.substack.com/
I write about technology themes, companies and strategies. I have two questions:
1. Have you noticed a difference in open rates when the newsletter goes from "[Publication Name" vs "XYZ from [Publication Name]" vs just the author name?
2. This week I made a makeshift referral program using Google Forms. Initial results have been great. Is the product team working on something like this?
Also, I would love to cross-promotions. If you're writing about technology and are interested, hit me up!
Here's a product-improvement recommendation for the Substack team:
I like the new option to put a paywall "line" in a post, withe very thing below the line for paid users only.
What I'd like to see is the ability to have a *beginning* and an *end* to that line.
Sone newsletters have multiple sections, and sometimes you don't want to put *everything* below the line behind a paywall, so if you could just pick a section and have the rest stay unlocked, that'd be very flexible and fantastic.
Thanks again for hosting this Substack, was dope! As always, I am open for cross promotions (if it makes sense), inviting writers to our Twitter hype group for Substack writers, and generally helping each other grow. Rock on.
As far as I can figure out, it's not possible to edit the group labels or site titles in Recommended Links. So changing or updating means starting all over again. Am I missing something? And if not--is there a plan to improve usability for this feature?
Thank you for joining us at Office Hours today. We hope that you were able to connect with fellow writers and Substack team members to get some of your questions answered.
We will be back next week at the normal date and time, Thursday Nov. 18, 10 a.m.–11 a.m. PST / 1 p.m.–2 p.m. EST.
In the meantime, we encourage you to continue the conversations with fellow writes in the thread and visit the Resource page: https://substack.com/resources
Talk soon,
Katie + Bailey + Rose + Jasmine + Kelsa + Ben + Jamine + James + Jonathan + Jack + Seth + Kerianne + Becca
I did a cross promotion yesterday with another Substack newsletter and the results were fabulous. We both picked up 50 new subscribers!
I also found that using the feature that customizes where you can put the paywall in a post worked great. I inserted that to a recent post just before the recipe and picked up 8 new paid subscribers.
Love this new Subscribe feature today. Thank you Substack for all you do!
One way I avoid burnout is by periodically reminding myself that, even though I have a readership, ultimately I write my newsletter for myself. It's a creative project I chose to take on, and if I'm not having fun, why do it?
So allowing myself to experiment and write a goofy / weird / format-breaking post every so often – even if I don't think it'll do well in terms of open rate or click throughs – is how I break out of a "factory" mindset.
The "subscribe" button with a caption is a wonderful feature -- thank you for adding it!
I am here to help out with marketing, promotions, and ways to get found.
Check to see if Google has indexed your newsletter:
Just type "site:yourblog.substack.com" into google search bar and see which articles are making their way to the first page of Google. Once indexed, Google will organically help your articles reach a top spot IF they are well written, and adhere to Google's policies. But SEO takes time.
Read "StackHacks - 6 Steps for More SubStack Subscribers with SEO" in my marketing section at https://pau1.substack.com/p/6-steps-for-more-substack-subscribers
to help Google searchers find your articles. Best of Luck to all!
That is a terrific new 'subscribe' button! Thanks for the update, team.
I am once again asking substack to fix the discover feature. When searching my primary keyword, (climb, climbing,) my newsletter consistently ranks below others that have nothing to do with the topic. (basketball, for example.) I'm sure these are lovely newsletters, but I feel like I'm getting boxed out of my own niche.
Substack we could use a referral program to help not only grow our lists, but reward the true fans of our work.
Love that we can now customize the subscribe button. Thank you product team!
New subscribe button is great! Thanks team!
No questions this week. Just wanted to say I'm happy to be here and available during Office Hours. This is a great way to connect with other writers.
If anyone wants to connect with me separate from Office Hours I write a newsletter on rediscovering the art of integrity as a real, imperfect, fallible person. Come over and check it out!
Love the idea of customized subscribe button, Thanks!
Thanks to Substack for linking to some other experiencing burnout. I'm not there (yet?) but I am finding it challenging to keep going at the pace I've set for myself, which I've done in an effort to provide a good balance of free and paid content. I publish twice a week, one free, one paid, with some big extra work (for mostly paid but sometimes also free) thrown in there every six weeks or so, with the seasons. I go through periods where I am so into it, I love it as much as I ever have, and others where I wonder how I can go on.
I'm not really going anywhere with this except to say publicly, if anyone else is in this place, you're not alone.
Really happy to see such regular feature drops from the Substack team. I've found that when I need a feature as a writer, more often than not, Substack already has it.
Kudos to the team. 🤗
Please do subscribe to my newsletter for a fun poem every week!
https://hellouniverse.substack.com/
An updated subscribe button? Hallelujah! Hopefully this will help me on my quest to hitting my first 100 subscribers :)
Publishing fiction every day (446 and counting) has almost assured that I will burnout spectacularly at some point. I'm hoping that when I do the wreckage is as entertaining as Hunter S Thompson at his most unhinged, or nonsense words Lewis Carroll would have been jealous of.
I launched my bookstack on Tuesday. It was a great success. It launched with 39 subscribers. I also comped all my prelaunch subscribers the paid version for life. Half the subscribers are friends and family, and the other half was my IG followers.
What I did was create a short message about my bookstack, then I texted it to my friends and family on both text and Facebook messages. Then I also messaged every one of my 400 followers on IG the same message. I got to about 300 before IG stopped me from being able to do it.
Any feedback on how I handled things? Any advice on how to get more followers? How often do you use the "share" buttons? I used the "Leave a comment" button" after each section of my email because I wanted to encourage engagement.
Anyways curious for your feedback. Thanks guys!
Question for you guys, about changing prices: Substack makes it easy to change our subscription prices in Settings. However, any changes we make only affect people who pay to subscribe *after* you make the change.
Is there a way to, say, reduce the price of my paid subscription from $50 a year to $35 a year that will also reduce it for everyone who already has a paid subscription? (And do I need to do that in my Stripe dashboard?)
On burnout. I know I can't commit to posting certain days. I post a monthly piece on the first, and one that will remain "free" on the 15th. Other than that, I give myself permission to post 6-8 other pieces. I keep a number of growing pieces in "drafts" and work at them. In this way, I always have something to add to, to grow. And at points through the month I check to see how many pieces I've posted, to review reader questions, to note what is inspiring me. Something of an "unscheduled" schedule. Much like any writing, it's coming to know and work with HOW you work. Then honouring that. Sometimes, those pieces that come out when dead tired are those that most resonate.
Hi there, Substack newbie and just wanted to give my appreciation to this platform. I am a teacher, my newsletter For the Love of Words (oliviamardwig.substack.com) has already been a fantastic way for me to share my educational materials, and of course my love of reading and writing to families. I am hoping to have a feature where I can have folks donate a subscription to a low income students. I know you can gift a subscription, which I LOVE, but is a donation possible? Thanks!
I'm confused about burnout. Branding is stressful. Promotion is stressful. Burnout has never even crossed my mind, though.
One scientist told me this:
13) What are the most exciting projects that you’re currently working on and why are these projects exciting?
You shouldn’t work on any projects that don’t excite you—every project you’re working on should be exciting.
And you should do bold things, but at the same time you need to do normal things in order to eat and pay your rent and pay your health insurance—it would be irresponsible to do only bold things.
Is there any way to see who has liked one of my posts? All I can see is how many people liked it.
Customizing the 'Subscribe' button with a caption is a great way of inviting readers to subscribe. Hope it is going to have an impact on my newsletter's number of subscribers.
How can I improve search engine optimization? It would be nice if my posts could be found by title or author name. (There seems to be a significant delay before the posts are searchable.)
Thank you to Substack this week for making office hours available for us. I started Feb of this year writing personal stories and thoughts about what it is like for a traditional healthcare provider to incorporate eastern healing and meditation and how I have journeyed in this culturescape of fear and not enoughness to lead a life of increased conscious awareness and tools I use to stay present and grateful. Shout out to YouTopian Journey for awesome graphics and writing. And, just found Sol Report—so good. Thank you Substack!!!
This is a big question, but is there any discussion happening about what it would mean to help writers monetize or generate subscriptions through high-performing articles "after the fact?" An article I wrote early on continues to accrue a lot of views, but I'm not converting those to subscriptions.
Any ideas?
Curious to hear from my fellow writers: what methods of promoting have you used? what have been the most and least successful?
The recently added "Insert a Paywall" feature is a real game-changer for me. Congratulations on this feature and your work!
Hi, I also wanna say how much I enjoy substack. I originally started my newsletter on squarespace (which still hosts my website) but the tools and analytics and resources here are just so good. I'm a dad of a 3 and 5 year old and sharing the humor behind being a dad as well as the stories that shaped me growing up has been super fun (https://dadstories.substack.com/). One of my biggest obstacles to growing my newsletter is feeling "spammy" -- like I'm plugging it too much on social media. Any advice to overcome this would be greatly appreciated!
I’m a full steam ahead type of gal so I launched my Substack, The FLARE, heedless of any real advice. It seems that’s a point of trepidation for some but for me, that’s a strength. My questions are, though: How do you plan a launch? What are your strategies? What are offering and how much are you scheduling ahead of time?
I want to launch serial short stories and maybe even commissions in the future.
Tom White from www.whitenoise.email here! I write a semi-weekly newsletter on books, behavior, and the brain.
Are there plans to make Substack more SEO friendly? I find that my posts seldom rank even after solid traction and traffic from different sources. I welcome any and all tips on this front!
I would love to see on-time donations for those who want to support but may not be able to do that monthly. Also… an APP.
Is there anyone on Substack that is writing about a product, how to use it, tips/tricks, ideas and soliciting their users/customers feedback by say adding a survey in each issue? If so, could you make and intro so that I could learn best practices/ideas from their experience? I'm trying to craft a substack that our customers would want share with others.
Does anyone have any recommendations for making welcome emails after people sign up? I'm trying to keep it simple but make sure people get an idea of what the newsletter is about.
Glad to have arrived on Substack at the right time! Still finding my calling>>
How do I expand readers? I don't want to start charging for my publications until I have a decent amount of folks reading. My plan is to always generate free content and have the more elaborate content be paid. Thanks.
I am having issues with my substack going to spam, and I mean my personal email spam! This started two weeks ago on my Yahoo account. Any fixes? I also think this is causing a vast amount of my subscribers not to see my substack.
I just set up paid subscriptions and was wondering if in the future you will add a separate benefits bullet for Annual subscribers? I am going to offer an added benefit to annual subscribers but just plan on explaining that in the welcome email and paid subscriptions launch post. Thanks!
I have questions! I see that some folks have made their main page more of a "home" page with other links, customized colors, etc. - I cannot figure out how to do this but I want to in my holiday week off upcoming. Suggestions? I am also planning to add some kind of subscription option.
Here weeeee goooooooooooo
I have expressed my alienation and exasperation about our digitalized world. I fear I probably sound like some antique relic of a bygone age. Although I may be older than most of you (I am 64), believe me, my generation knew what COOL was and nothing was as cool as charging down the street, throwing rocks, while someone is blasting "Street Fighting Man," by the Stones, on a boombox.
In any event, this is a quatrain I wrote which tries to articulate my dismay at the itty bitty world of bits and bytes.
The tyranny of binaric thought
The stilling of the nuanced voice
The menu selection that misses the point
That never gives me one true choice
David Gottfried, Copyright, 2019
PS. I write a lot more than this sort of poetry. Try my pungent and provocative essays
is there a way to tag another Substack user in a post?
We have a twitter hype pod for substack writers, follow me @youtopianJ and I will add you.
A quick question for the substack dev team . . . is there a way to italicize text in my post titles? I reference the names of books, films, and paintings every once in a while, and I would like to use italics instead of quote marks if I could! Thanks for any help you (or anyone else) can give!
I have slots open for cross promotions. All that I ask is that you have 100+ subscribers and your newsletter is a fit for what I write about. https://youtopianjourney.substack.com/
Hi everyone,
I write about technology themes, companies and strategies. I have two questions:
1. Have you noticed a difference in open rates when the newsletter goes from "[Publication Name" vs "XYZ from [Publication Name]" vs just the author name?
2. This week I made a makeshift referral program using Google Forms. Initial results have been great. Is the product team working on something like this?
Also, I would love to cross-promotions. If you're writing about technology and are interested, hit me up!
Slightly OT, but I would love to hear more about the new discoverability features, and how we can best utilize those.
Here's a product-improvement recommendation for the Substack team:
I like the new option to put a paywall "line" in a post, withe very thing below the line for paid users only.
What I'd like to see is the ability to have a *beginning* and an *end* to that line.
Sone newsletters have multiple sections, and sometimes you don't want to put *everything* below the line behind a paywall, so if you could just pick a section and have the rest stay unlocked, that'd be very flexible and fantastic.
Thank you!
L
Thanks again for hosting this Substack, was dope! As always, I am open for cross promotions (if it makes sense), inviting writers to our Twitter hype group for Substack writers, and generally helping each other grow. Rock on.
As far as I can figure out, it's not possible to edit the group labels or site titles in Recommended Links. So changing or updating means starting all over again. Am I missing something? And if not--is there a plan to improve usability for this feature?