Have questions about publishing, growing, or going paid on Substack?
The Substack team, and your fellow writers, are here to help!
We’re gathering the writer community and members of the Substack team together in this discussion thread to answer writer questions for an hour. 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.
Some updates and reminders from the Substack team:
Polls: Today we are excited to introduce polls on Substack! We have regularly heard writers ask for polls at Office Hours. Now, polls can be added to any Substack post from the “More” drop down in the Editor. Give it a try!
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Podcasting: Last week we shared a guide to going paid with your podcast on Substack. The first article in a new podcasting 101 series. More from this series is coming soon, and we have exciting audio feature updates to share in the coming weeks too.
Resources: Have you visited our Resource center? Here you’ll find insider tips and expert advice for writers on getting started, growing your list, building a community and more.
Got questions about Substack or feedback about what’s new? You’re in the right place! Leave a comment in this thread.
Thanks for being here at Office Hours today. We experienced technical issues sending out the Office Hours thread via email today. Thank you for your patience!
We'll be checking in on the thread over the next day and be back next week at the scheduled time to answer your questions.
Celebrating one year on Substack this week! I started with a handful of essays from by BlogSpot page and 16 friends / family members whom I’d cajoled into signing up. Now I’m at 57 posts and 146 subscribers, with no plans to slow down! Thank you to Substack for making this splendid and fun environment, and enabling my writing to flourish!
Hey all! Happy Office Hours, and here's a little encouraging thought for your week: Is your Inner Critic allowed to drown out all the other good, creative influences in your writing journey? Don't let it! Our Inner Critic is a vital part of the team, and they have a specific job to do during revisions, but NOT during the initial phases of writing, and NOT to keep you from creating without shame. When they escape their boundaries they can do serious damage! Don't let them bully, discourage, or silence you. Make sure you're balancing them out with patience and compassion for yourself and plenty of play! And as always, remember: DON'T give up! 🌿
How do YOU keep your Inner Critic from stifling your creativity? Give us your tips!
I am so new here that I barely understand what is happening and how this works!
Seems like we are adding comments to the bottom but they are a range of topics, are we only talking about polls? Are we talking about anything specific or can we? I literally started on Substack last week and am looking forward to writing another newsletter tomorrow.
I just wanted to participate here so this might be completely irrelevant and not a good use of anyone's time, but just wanted to be part of it!
I think polls will be a great way to drive content - not in the sense of "what do you want me to write about?" but to give me more sense about what's relevant to my readers.
I write about food and culture and some of the questions that I'm going to ask will be things like "Do you shop at a farmers market?" or "Has inflation changed how you shop for food?" and those answers can drive the direction of my content.
Shoutout to the Substack team for their continued innovation and commitment to writers. Just have one ask: several writer friends want better ways to render chapters to their serials and be able to toggle to different chapters. Can chapter buttons but put on one row? Currently custom buttons have a carriage return.
Thanks to all my subscribers and writer friends for being a great support. Looking forward to another paid subscriber as my next win. I’m a busy bee! Gotta run! 😘
A kudo and a plea: Thanks for the info and the easy way to use polls! My plea: can someone confirm what happens when I recommend more than five substacks to new subscribers or visitors using the recommendations feature? I thought they would rotate but it is not clear that they are. Is there a way to manually rotate/select those that appear ? If not, would you consider making that easier to do? I would like to make sure to share those newsletters that I'm loving. Thank you.
I don’t use pills but I do ask questions on Facebook and gauge reaction. So far my question about women and beauty as we age has struck the strongest nerve, with around 175 comments.
Ooh! I love this new feature! I think it’s a good way to commit people to reading the piece. Also, I would love a quizzes feature while you’re on this line of development. :)
I’m some questions or feedback around UI, currently I have 2 newsletters in the same account but they are not linked, I’m finding it a few steps too many to toggle between them.
Could we have a toggle button?
2. Header and Footers don’t appear in the app, this means that I have to think of many permutations of how The newsletter will show up in all the different scenarios…
Could we have some version of footer or header in the app?
Hi all. I am new here and love this resource. Thanks to everyone for sharing such great insights. My subscriptions are basically zilch, so I'm looking forward to implementing some suggestions found here to see how they help grow my numbers.
I have a question regarding video usage. I have terrible YouTube numbers (last video had 5 views) and I really want to see how I can get videos to get both more views and engagement here. Has anyone here switched from YouTube to just using the video feature here? Has it made a difference? Any advice?
Hi-- I write about addiction and recovery and have podcast--"Breakfast with an Alcoholic'" at https://thanksforlettingmeshare.substack.com and love being here! I wonder if there are some benchmarks/metrics that are available so that I could get a clearer picture of where I am and where some of the thresholds might be? Would it be possible to share anonymized data from across substack--or something like that?
Thanks so much, did I mention that I love it here?
Wow oh wow oh -- da bomb! Love the option for polls, SS folks. THANK YOU. 😍
A request that's critical for me: Something I loved about working in WordPress back in the day was that I had the ability to take a published post and shift it back to DRAFT mode, so it stayed in my dashboard but was no longer publicly on the site. Please add an option like this! 🙏🏼
Hi there!! I’m a fiction writer here on substack and I am releasing a novela in a serial format.
Finding unique ways to promote this project has been difficult. What, aside from posting on twitter and other social media, would be a good way to bring more attention to it?
How do I report a spam subscriber? I deleted them, but in my stats, that email is viewing my newsletter every minute, making my stats really ridiculous. (I wish they were authentically that high). I don’t know how to alert the Substack authorities. Thanks.
Ok, I'll jump in headfirst instead of dipping my toes. First and foremost, polls sound awesome. Once I have more people who are interacting and following me, I'm assuming polls will be a great tool to hear and listen to my audience, and cater to what people want to hear (without sacrficing what I want to talk about).
That leads me to my second point. How do you figure out what to talk about? For now, I'm just getting started with online writing and more strucuted writing. I had an identity as a writer for such a long time, and I write a lot of short promos these days, but now I'm getting in the flow of figuring what it is that I want to do. I appreciate the journey of figuring it out, but when I see quotes like 'do many things outside. do one thing online.' it seems counterintuitive to my non-linear thinking.
What have you done to figure it out? Did you try writing about different subjects until you 'settled'? What's your journey been like? This is @everyone and @anyone who wants to listen.
Trying to grow on social media? I created the first newsletter-specific social media tool. Many of the features integrate directly with your newsletter. You can auto-generate social media posts for all platforms and schedule them to auto-post. I now spend only 15 minutes on promoting my newsletter on social media each week and have had great results!
Polls sound like a great way to engage audiences and collect general vibes about a topic.
I'm new to Substack and have a more basic question.
I've been sharing a weekly newsletter using MailChimp and grew my list of free subscribers to 2k. The newsletter is to drive thought leadership and consulting/training. What are your thoughts about the sensible way to migrate the newsletter to Substack with free and paid options without upsetting existing subscribers?
I'm new to Substack and to being a published author ... my first novel has just been released. I find Substack a wonderful writers' environment for using my portal "AFTERTHOUGHTS" to share political essays I'm writing and build a following as part of my next book project. Can I share information about my recent publication, a novel, from my Substack portal? Are there Substack protocols with which I should be compliant in promoting my book projects such as fiction and essay books? Phil Church
Hey everyone. How have you grown on social media? What has worked and was hasn't?
I'm writing my publication about helping newsletter creators grow across the internet. My latest issue was about the top 5 different tools you can use to grow your newsletter on social media!
Can amyone help with info on how writers can do a financial arrangement and contract with illustrators for creating illustrated work/books for Substack?
E.g. Substack has comic artists and writers who collaborate to make work. How do they get paid and how does the agreement work?
Hi Substack folks! Thanks for hosting these threads each week and for implementing features that writers mention in them.
Quick question though... if "office hours" is at 2am in the part of the world we're in, is there another way we ought to raise new feature suggestions?
Hey team! Sharing my latest from my biweekly newsletter on behavior, books, and the brain: White Noise :)
“By perfecting our minds, bodies, souls, we are made more perfect for those around us.
By loving ourselves, we are better able to love others.
From the highest of highs to the lowest of lows, our relationships make up the colorful threads that together weave our live’s tapestry. When we unspool these four virtues, we increase our likelihood of living a Good Life.”
Creating more interaction, immersion and community can be done through Polls, and I'm curious how it can be implemented in a Newsletter format.
As someone who does this a lot on LinkedIn posts, and who asked for this feature, I'm pretty satisfied with the quick turn-around of Substack's team on this feature.
I actually think Polls can be used to get audience feedback on the subject matter in various places in most Newsletter formats, not just as a way to "survey" our audience at the end.
Polls to me can help Creators sync public opinion on a "shared narrative or reaction" to something that happend in the real world. How could micro-feedback loops inform your story-telling?
Will there be metrics on which Email accounts participate on polls? Is there the ability to adjust for how long they are live? I'll have to experiment with this feature to better uncover its scope.
A lot of creators don't mix up emojis, embedded Tweets, Videos, Curated bullet lists and other types of formats within their Newsletter (including me). Polls is yet another Substack tool within our Creator tool-kit. Highlight your hyper links guys! I can't wait!
What is the role of SEO in writing our newsletters? Do we need to stack our posts with keywords so that people searching for our content online will find us?
My question is not about polls (but they look like a great thing!)
How do I create a post that is on my substack but not mailed out to anyone? I want to have a stand-alone page or two and then link to it later on as bonus material.
Once you post your article, the share link puts this "?sd=pf" onto the end of your article url. I've seen it in search engines. What does this stand for and what is it?
About the polls: they are nice, but I need more space for the options. Why are they so short? I have a philosophy Substack, so sometimes phrasing the options in a bit more detail is necessary. And there's a lot of space there, anyway. Thanks!
I was unavailable for office hours yesterday but was wondering if someone in the community could answer a quick question. Yesterday I noticed that in the app, there was an audio option in many articles to listen to the article read by an AI voice. How do I add this feature to my posts? I couldn’t find anything about it in the support page. Thanks.
I’m using Stripe for processing my paid subscriptions. I want to sell merchandise as well and it makes sense to use Stripe for that too. Anyone have experience with adding that component to their Substack? I’ve had trouble implementing the Stripe instructions for adding that component. Thanks!
Ok I'm a noob and this is A LOT but now I guess I have to learn how to make a poll and also be on time for these little talks. I love how supportive this community is!
Hi Everyone,
Thanks for being here at Office Hours today. We experienced technical issues sending out the Office Hours thread via email today. Thank you for your patience!
We'll be checking in on the thread over the next day and be back next week at the scheduled time to answer your questions.
See you then,
Katie, Bailey, Kelsa, Jasmine, Lulu, Chris, Jack, Mills, Kerianne, Jomarc, Alex, Shaiyan, Kellyn, Rishi, and Varun
📊How do you plan to use polls?
We’re eager to hear creative ways you plan to use the new feature to engage with readers.
Celebrating one year on Substack this week! I started with a handful of essays from by BlogSpot page and 16 friends / family members whom I’d cajoled into signing up. Now I’m at 57 posts and 146 subscribers, with no plans to slow down! Thank you to Substack for making this splendid and fun environment, and enabling my writing to flourish!
Little win share: 2 days ago one of my issues made it to the homepage of Hacker News and racked up +20,000 views in a couple hours.
I will have a pretty unusable stats page for 30 days (all the other days are flat at the bottom in comparison) but feeling pretty accomplished ❤
Hey all! Happy Office Hours, and here's a little encouraging thought for your week: Is your Inner Critic allowed to drown out all the other good, creative influences in your writing journey? Don't let it! Our Inner Critic is a vital part of the team, and they have a specific job to do during revisions, but NOT during the initial phases of writing, and NOT to keep you from creating without shame. When they escape their boundaries they can do serious damage! Don't let them bully, discourage, or silence you. Make sure you're balancing them out with patience and compassion for yourself and plenty of play! And as always, remember: DON'T give up! 🌿
How do YOU keep your Inner Critic from stifling your creativity? Give us your tips!
I’m really happy to see polls being rolled out! I’d like to do a lot more surveying of both paid & free subscribers and this’ll let me do it.
I am so new here that I barely understand what is happening and how this works!
Seems like we are adding comments to the bottom but they are a range of topics, are we only talking about polls? Are we talking about anything specific or can we? I literally started on Substack last week and am looking forward to writing another newsletter tomorrow.
I just wanted to participate here so this might be completely irrelevant and not a good use of anyone's time, but just wanted to be part of it!
I think polls will be a great way to drive content - not in the sense of "what do you want me to write about?" but to give me more sense about what's relevant to my readers.
I write about food and culture and some of the questions that I'm going to ask will be things like "Do you shop at a farmers market?" or "Has inflation changed how you shop for food?" and those answers can drive the direction of my content.
Shoutout to the Substack team for their continued innovation and commitment to writers. Just have one ask: several writer friends want better ways to render chapters to their serials and be able to toggle to different chapters. Can chapter buttons but put on one row? Currently custom buttons have a carriage return.
Thanks to all my subscribers and writer friends for being a great support. Looking forward to another paid subscriber as my next win. I’m a busy bee! Gotta run! 😘
GRATEFUL for polls! Thank you. That saves going outside (and $$)! YES... to finding our what readers want.
A kudo and a plea: Thanks for the info and the easy way to use polls! My plea: can someone confirm what happens when I recommend more than five substacks to new subscribers or visitors using the recommendations feature? I thought they would rotate but it is not clear that they are. Is there a way to manually rotate/select those that appear ? If not, would you consider making that easier to do? I would like to make sure to share those newsletters that I'm loving. Thank you.
So excited we're finally getting polls. This is going to be an awesome feature!
I wish the new Poll feature didn't proclaim how many people have voted. It's a bit embarrassing when only two or three have!
I don’t use pills but I do ask questions on Facebook and gauge reaction. So far my question about women and beauty as we age has struck the strongest nerve, with around 175 comments.
I use this to help decide what to write about.
Ooh! I love this new feature! I think it’s a good way to commit people to reading the piece. Also, I would love a quizzes feature while you’re on this line of development. :)
Exciting! Can’t wait to try it!
I’m some questions or feedback around UI, currently I have 2 newsletters in the same account but they are not linked, I’m finding it a few steps too many to toggle between them.
Could we have a toggle button?
2. Header and Footers don’t appear in the app, this means that I have to think of many permutations of how The newsletter will show up in all the different scenarios…
Could we have some version of footer or header in the app?
Thanks!
Hi all. I am new here and love this resource. Thanks to everyone for sharing such great insights. My subscriptions are basically zilch, so I'm looking forward to implementing some suggestions found here to see how they help grow my numbers.
I have a question regarding video usage. I have terrible YouTube numbers (last video had 5 views) and I really want to see how I can get videos to get both more views and engagement here. Has anyone here switched from YouTube to just using the video feature here? Has it made a difference? Any advice?
@Katie Some of us had trouble getting in today. No link and could only get into last week's. Just so you're aware.
Hi-- I write about addiction and recovery and have podcast--"Breakfast with an Alcoholic'" at https://thanksforlettingmeshare.substack.com and love being here! I wonder if there are some benchmarks/metrics that are available so that I could get a clearer picture of where I am and where some of the thresholds might be? Would it be possible to share anonymized data from across substack--or something like that?
Thanks so much, did I mention that I love it here?
By the way I used to be able to correct typos on my comments. How come I can’t do that anymore?
I will use pills to ask readers what they want me to write more about: recipes or nutrition articles or a little of both
Wow oh wow oh -- da bomb! Love the option for polls, SS folks. THANK YOU. 😍
A request that's critical for me: Something I loved about working in WordPress back in the day was that I had the ability to take a published post and shift it back to DRAFT mode, so it stayed in my dashboard but was no longer publicly on the site. Please add an option like this! 🙏🏼
Hi there!! I’m a fiction writer here on substack and I am releasing a novela in a serial format.
Finding unique ways to promote this project has been difficult. What, aside from posting on twitter and other social media, would be a good way to bring more attention to it?
How do I report a spam subscriber? I deleted them, but in my stats, that email is viewing my newsletter every minute, making my stats really ridiculous. (I wish they were authentically that high). I don’t know how to alert the Substack authorities. Thanks.
Ok, I'll jump in headfirst instead of dipping my toes. First and foremost, polls sound awesome. Once I have more people who are interacting and following me, I'm assuming polls will be a great tool to hear and listen to my audience, and cater to what people want to hear (without sacrficing what I want to talk about).
That leads me to my second point. How do you figure out what to talk about? For now, I'm just getting started with online writing and more strucuted writing. I had an identity as a writer for such a long time, and I write a lot of short promos these days, but now I'm getting in the flow of figuring what it is that I want to do. I appreciate the journey of figuring it out, but when I see quotes like 'do many things outside. do one thing online.' it seems counterintuitive to my non-linear thinking.
What have you done to figure it out? Did you try writing about different subjects until you 'settled'? What's your journey been like? This is @everyone and @anyone who wants to listen.
Trying to grow on social media? I created the first newsletter-specific social media tool. Many of the features integrate directly with your newsletter. You can auto-generate social media posts for all platforms and schedule them to auto-post. I now spend only 15 minutes on promoting my newsletter on social media each week and have had great results!
https://newslettertosocials.com/
Hi everyone and happy Office hours!
Polls sound like a great way to engage audiences and collect general vibes about a topic.
I'm new to Substack and have a more basic question.
I've been sharing a weekly newsletter using MailChimp and grew my list of free subscribers to 2k. The newsletter is to drive thought leadership and consulting/training. What are your thoughts about the sensible way to migrate the newsletter to Substack with free and paid options without upsetting existing subscribers?
Many thanks!
Shlomi
Can we do a poll on how many participants get the "Office Hours are starting now" email two hours late each week?
I'm new to Substack and to being a published author ... my first novel has just been released. I find Substack a wonderful writers' environment for using my portal "AFTERTHOUGHTS" to share political essays I'm writing and build a following as part of my next book project. Can I share information about my recent publication, a novel, from my Substack portal? Are there Substack protocols with which I should be compliant in promoting my book projects such as fiction and essay books? Phil Church
Hey everyone. How have you grown on social media? What has worked and was hasn't?
I'm writing my publication about helping newsletter creators grow across the internet. My latest issue was about the top 5 different tools you can use to grow your newsletter on social media!
https://newslettertosocials.substack.com/p/top-5-social-media-tools-for-newsletter
Hi.
Can amyone help with info on how writers can do a financial arrangement and contract with illustrators for creating illustrated work/books for Substack?
E.g. Substack has comic artists and writers who collaborate to make work. How do they get paid and how does the agreement work?
Can anyone help? Thank you.
Simon
Can I migrate stories on Medium to Substack?
Hi Substack folks! Thanks for hosting these threads each week and for implementing features that writers mention in them.
Quick question though... if "office hours" is at 2am in the part of the world we're in, is there another way we ought to raise new feature suggestions?
Hey team! Sharing my latest from my biweekly newsletter on behavior, books, and the brain: White Noise :)
“By perfecting our minds, bodies, souls, we are made more perfect for those around us.
By loving ourselves, we are better able to love others.
From the highest of highs to the lowest of lows, our relationships make up the colorful threads that together weave our live’s tapestry. When we unspool these four virtues, we increase our likelihood of living a Good Life.”
https://www.whitenoise.email/p/virtues
OMG thank you for the polls functionality!!! Will try it out and let you know what happens! Yay!
Dear Substack team,
I was waiting for this feature for a long time!
In my newsletter 10+1 Things, I plan to use it at the end to engage users in interesting polls. Some ideas i can think right of the head are:
1. How much money would be enough for you to never work again? ( 1m/5m/25m)
2. How often do you use pen/pencil for writing?
3. What do you do in the last hour before you sleep? ( Meditate/Read/Write/Smartphone)
Very curious to do some experiments!
Thanks a ton again!
Creating more interaction, immersion and community can be done through Polls, and I'm curious how it can be implemented in a Newsletter format.
As someone who does this a lot on LinkedIn posts, and who asked for this feature, I'm pretty satisfied with the quick turn-around of Substack's team on this feature.
I actually think Polls can be used to get audience feedback on the subject matter in various places in most Newsletter formats, not just as a way to "survey" our audience at the end.
Polls to me can help Creators sync public opinion on a "shared narrative or reaction" to something that happend in the real world. How could micro-feedback loops inform your story-telling?
Will there be metrics on which Email accounts participate on polls? Is there the ability to adjust for how long they are live? I'll have to experiment with this feature to better uncover its scope.
A lot of creators don't mix up emojis, embedded Tweets, Videos, Curated bullet lists and other types of formats within their Newsletter (including me). Polls is yet another Substack tool within our Creator tool-kit. Highlight your hyper links guys! I can't wait!
What is the role of SEO in writing our newsletters? Do we need to stack our posts with keywords so that people searching for our content online will find us?
Weird, this email just came in at the end of the office hours.
My question is not about polls (but they look like a great thing!)
How do I create a post that is on my substack but not mailed out to anyone? I want to have a stand-alone page or two and then link to it later on as bonus material.
Once you post your article, the share link puts this "?sd=pf" onto the end of your article url. I've seen it in search engines. What does this stand for and what is it?
I'm setting up one newsletter but want to create a second newsletter with feeds visible only from the tab, not the home feed. Is that possible?
I want to create a post with a table with two columns. Is there a way to do that other than creating a photo (which wouldn't allow me to have links)?
About the polls: they are nice, but I need more space for the options. Why are they so short? I have a philosophy Substack, so sometimes phrasing the options in a bit more detail is necessary. And there's a lot of space there, anyway. Thanks!
I was unavailable for office hours yesterday but was wondering if someone in the community could answer a quick question. Yesterday I noticed that in the app, there was an audio option in many articles to listen to the article read by an AI voice. How do I add this feature to my posts? I couldn’t find anything about it in the support page. Thanks.
I’m using Stripe for processing my paid subscriptions. I want to sell merchandise as well and it makes sense to use Stripe for that too. Anyone have experience with adding that component to their Substack? I’ve had trouble implementing the Stripe instructions for adding that component. Thanks!
A slight correction: It's slandermen, not slandersmen that is the sexual harrasser. Please make sure he is backdoor banned from my substack.
Launching a paid version of my newsletter this week! Wish me luck!
Ok I'm a noob and this is A LOT but now I guess I have to learn how to make a poll and also be on time for these little talks. I love how supportive this community is!