Which parts of drafting a post on Substack do you love, hate, or want to see changed?
The Substack product team, and your fellow writers, are here to help!
Today we’re hosting Office Hours with two special guests: Nick and Jasmine from the Substack Product team. They’re leading a new effort to improve the tools we provide writers to create posts on Substack, and would love to hear your thoughts!
Imagine you are in your writer dashboard and go to make a post. Better yet, go in and start to make a post.
As you are writing and creating a post, we’d like to know:
Which of Substack’s writing tools could you not live without?
What aspects of drafting a post leave you incredibly frustrated?
If you could ask the product team for one brand new feature for this drafting page, what would it be?
We encourage you to use the 🤍 button to let us know which writers you agree with.
Nick and Jasmine will be here from 9 am - 10 am PST / 12 pm - 1 pm EST gathering feedback and responding to requests.
Greetings everyone! This is my favorite time of week. Stoked to see everyone here, and thank you to those that return over and over to help us and other writers.
My question for you all today is: What should our product team should focus on - what changes to the publishing tools would have the biggest impact for writers?
Hi Nick and Jasmine! I’d say my most desired drafting feature would be simple text wrap for images. There are lots of times I want to insert a smaller image into the post without disrupting the flow of text.
I just want to mention that the clean and easy nature of Substack is a gorgeous thing. Whatever I/we ask for, I wouldn't want it to muck up a good thing.
Hey y'all! In addition to the Product team, I also work on Writer Resources & Development at Substack. I would love to hear what existing Substack tools/features you find confusing and would love more guidance from us on how to use.
The thing that got me excited about Substack was its simplicity. I can appreciate that we need some tweaks here and there. But please, let's not crap it up with MS Word's overcomplicated publishing options and functionality. It started out as a place to write and publish without too much hassle. I hope it stays a reasonable facsimile of that.
Anything that increases discoverability would be a huge asset, as both a reader and writer. I know you do the shout-out threads, which I appreciate, but I wonder if that filters for a particular kind of writer.
- Sidebars, could be useful if users are serializing novels or doing an essay/blog series
- Integrate Twitter, Tik Tok, and Instagram videos like YouTube so you can play the videos straight from Substack like you can with YouTube.
- If a person uses a GIF as their top image on the post, that GIF could be displayable as a button on their Substack page and social media button instead of a black and white Substack logo.
- Embedded survey/polling questions.
(Sorry if this comes across as nitpicky. I really do love the platform!)
Hi guys! So I actually created a post today where I was seeking some specific feedback from my subscribers. I ended up creating a survey in SurveyMonkey, but it would be really cool if there was a way to capture specific responses either via a poll/survey or some other means besides asking for people to comment below.
Add tags or categories, so that readers can access old articles. This should be a basic feature…can’t tell you how much frustration that causes our readers. Thanks.
Hey everyone — Nick here from the Substack design team here! Looking forward to hearing your feedback today, especially which parts of writing a post on Substack bring you the most 🗡💀p-a-i-n💀🗡 today.
Bugs? Missing features? Pet peeves? Thanks in advance for your honest takes 🙏
I would also love an "undo" feature. If a mistake is made while composing a post, to be able to quickly "undo" changes would be very helpful, rather than having to go into the draft history to retrieve past draft versions.
The ability to embed YouTube playlists as well as single videos would be really nice. In some of my posts, I create playlists and I can't link them out in a friendly way. My current hack-workaround is to tweet it out and link to the tweet
I like Substack as a platform a lot, but Substack as an interface has the "IKEA problem." IKEA is great for making furniture if you know nothing about furniture making at all and have no tools but becomes worse for you as your skills and equipment increase. You don't *need* a power driver to create an IKEA desk, but if you *have* a power driver it doesn't help you because you can't use the power driver even if you want to.
For someone who "just wants to write" and has absolutely no technical know-how, Substack's interface is pretty close to perfect. It does the minimum with almost no pre-existing knowledge required, and that's about it. I've had some success writing in Word (or other Word-like processors) and then copying it into Substack from the clipboard, but that seems to be the only concession to a little more sophistication in production, and even that approach is quite kludgey.
If you think of options as being on the spectrum from "IKEA" to "hand-coding CSS and HTML" that you should work from opposite ends of the spectrum. Take minor steps from both ends of the spectrum instead of starting from the simplest and complexifying. For example, if you could include a REST API (or any API for that matter) that did just two things (download HTML from a post, upload HTML to a draft) that would be a start from the complex side. People like me would be able to do a lot of the complex work on our own systems and that complex work could help your devs build a better system, most likely at no cost to you. I suspect that many of your devs would also like to work on something super geeky like that.
I'm happy to talk to anyone who would like more information. You can see that I write *on Substack* on these very issues at https://osiris.substack.com.
I absolutely love how easy it is to drag and drop my own images. I also like how pasting a YouTube URL makes a perfect video display. Substack’s handling of media is really nice, and I hope they keep making it easy to add these kinds of elements for different media types. So far, everything I have wanted to use has been as smooth as my great aunt’s buttery potatoes.
1) Ability to embed Tiktok videos like with Youtube and Vimeo videos. It's a huge source of videos.
2) Make it clearer for readers who are logged out in their browser/device that they need to log back in if they want to pay. Some readers want to become paid but can't figure out because when they click "subscribe" all their see is the "enter your email field" and they don't know what else to do since they're already subscribed to the list.
3) Crypto should have it's on category on the leaderboards, rather than be spread all over finance, business, and tech.
4) I'd like the ability to separate sections with the three stars * * * that they have in books, rather than just the lines.
5) A way to embed surveys/polls natively inside newsletter, rather than link out.
Being able to create and then use a template for threads and posts would be super.
On each, I copy and paste, "Paid subscriptions make this reporting possible," in headline 4 then I have a custom button that says, "Subscribe if you like, pay if you can."
If I could make a template that would have that already there, it would be extremely helpful.
Two requests in particular: Give us a way to center text, and give us the option for a Spotify playlist that displays more than the first song. Thanks for your help!
This is a small issue, but I would like the ability to center text. I write fiction and often separate sections of text within chapters with three asterisks (* * *). It looks wrong and distracting set against the left margin. Is there some workaround or keystroke I’m not aware of? Thanks.
Sometimes I am able to put a caption under pictures, other times I can't. Is there a particular method I should use? My preference is to add captions in smaller type size than the main text of the post.
I would like to see the ability to add social media buttons at the end of a post. "Follow on Twitter" or whatever so people can get reminders in their preferred venue
It'd be great to be able to duplicate a previous post (like "duplicate slide" in Powerpoint), so that you could duplicate, edit, and keep formatting, etc. Also, please add tags.
Hi - I missed this today! +1 for Strikethrough. And an option to centre align the text (or at least pull quotes, if not all text) would be super helpful. I'm all for not having too many formatting options - the minimalism is why I love Substack!
Putting two images side by side is also not possible at the moment. Sometime you just want people to be able to compare. They have to scroll up and down.
It would be great if there was a Like button we could add ourselves (like the “share this post” and “leave a comment” buttons).
Right now, the button is small and it is at the end of the article. This makes it is easy to forget and can skew a writer’s perception as to whether their community enjoyed a specific post or not.
Likes are not the primary focus (quality writing is) but they are are a good and useful metric nonetheless.
Besides that, I am loving Substack! Keep up the great work.
Overall, I think Substack posts are very easy to format and put up, and the final result (after some trial and error!) is a neat, clean newsletter that is easy to use.
But I do wish we could have a little more flexibility in layout, specifically in the following two ways:
1. I would like to be able to centre text
2. Right now images can only be placed as separate image 'blocks' that are automatically centred. Is it possible make image placement a bit more flexible, with text wrapping for instance?
My name is Rishi, I write 10+1 Things: 11 interesting things curated by a human, not an algorithm.
Things I would love to see:
1. Support for markdown text. I write my drafts in markdown. So everytime I paste the draft into the editor, I spent a lot of time formatting.
2. Support for text wrapping of images.
3. A readability score or some score based on Substacks algorithm to see how readable the post is. I think this is crucial as people read mostly from their email client.
Thanks again for the diverse set of topics every week on this thread!
I love how easy it is to insert images, and I get frustrated by the lack of some simple editing tools (like changing the justification of the text, sub- and superscript)
I'd like to be able to send out content at different times to paid and unpaid subscribers (I haven't gone paid yet but I'd like the option when I do!)
One tool that would is the use of a limited number of hashtags inside the article that would automatically show a popup of the same hashtags inside other articles that we have written at investrly. Longer term maybe hashtags across the community to connect the network more.
In the meantime we continue to invest early in substack as our newsletter of choice and hope you will continue to share our message:
Hey folks — just wanted to report back on our progress so far! Jasmine and I have culled through each and every comment to better understand your needs as writers. Here are a few that rose to the top:
## Overall
- Keep it simple and don't add too much!
## Publishing Experience
- MANY writers want an easy way to create post templates or at least duplicate drafts
- The "Publish" button is really scary when you're not sure what happens next
- Several requests to "preview" posts on different devices before sharing
- Adding tags to posts could help with discovery and organization
## Formatting
- More comprehensive support for markdown would really help our more expert writers
- Pasting from Google Docs could be more seamless and consistent
- Writers want more formatting options — especially strikethrough, underline, superscript, and center alignment. We'll discuss this as a team and balance against adding too much complexity.
- Lots of bugs with footnotes — we need to dramatically improve quality here
- We learned that links in footnotes could not be underlined — that's fixed now!
## Accessibility
- We need to support right-to-left languages!
- An explicit "undo" button may help improve usability for some
- We learned that some Cyrillic characters were not rendering correctly — that's fixed!
## Embeds
- Writers want to make their posts richer through more types of embeddable objects. Here are a few of the most popular requests. As with formatting controls, we'll need to carefully weigh any additions to ensure Substack stays simple!
- Reader polls
- Syntax-highlighted code blocks
- Images with wrapping text
- Basic tables support
- TikTok embeds
- Native video, hosted on Substack
- Common file types like pdf and excel
- Playlists from Spotify/YouTube
Next, we'll start working with our engineers on product changes to address these needs. Look out for more updates soon!
Might have missed this earlier, but a template we can save (with body templates for headers, text, icons etc) so that we can reuse structures for different newsletters would be amazing ❤️
Paula here from Stained Page News. I write about books, and probably 90% of my images are book covers. I would be THRILLED to be able to align left photos with text wrapping instead of having them hang out centered and awkwardly tall. 🙏
Apologies for missing this. Will (manually) put it on my calendar for next week. Would be ideal for me if you included a calendar invite compatible with Mac calendar.
My primary feature request is for an inline spell check. Google Docs does this incredibly well, so seamlessly that I didn't realize there was no spell check when I sent out my first issue. My workaround at the moment is once I've finished a post, I copy / paste just the text into a Google Doc and look for the highlighted issues there, and pop back into my post and fix them one by one.
Minor feature requests for the editor:
* Find / Replace
* A center text button
* A strikethrough option (sometimes strikethrough is really effective)
* MAYBE a "scratchpad" feature? Now I keep my half-formed ideas external to Substack, but it would be nice to keep them somewhere in Substack that doesn't have the danger of accidentally posting to my readers.
Hello all. I believe I read about a mentorship program and/or the possibility of a one-on-one phone call with a member of the Substack staff...? Would love to sign up for one or both of those as soon as possible from your end, if it is still available. I haven't officially started my newsletter yet, although it is up there at crimeandpunishment.substack.com
Greetings everyone! This is my favorite time of week. Stoked to see everyone here, and thank you to those that return over and over to help us and other writers.
My question for you all today is: What should our product team should focus on - what changes to the publishing tools would have the biggest impact for writers?
Hi Nick and Jasmine! I’d say my most desired drafting feature would be simple text wrap for images. There are lots of times I want to insert a smaller image into the post without disrupting the flow of text.
While you are here in the thread, we encourage you to use the 🤍 button to let us know which writers you agree with.
I just want to mention that the clean and easy nature of Substack is a gorgeous thing. Whatever I/we ask for, I wouldn't want it to muck up a good thing.
Love: how easy it is to embed tweets and other media. So easy and clean!
Want: the ability to save a template so I don't have to copy and paste the different sections of my newsletter into a new post every time.
For the love of God, add tags!
Hey y'all! In addition to the Product team, I also work on Writer Resources & Development at Substack. I would love to hear what existing Substack tools/features you find confusing and would love more guidance from us on how to use.
The thing that got me excited about Substack was its simplicity. I can appreciate that we need some tweaks here and there. But please, let's not crap it up with MS Word's overcomplicated publishing options and functionality. It started out as a place to write and publish without too much hassle. I hope it stays a reasonable facsimile of that.
Anything that increases discoverability would be a huge asset, as both a reader and writer. I know you do the shout-out threads, which I appreciate, but I wonder if that filters for a particular kind of writer.
I love the simplicity of the editing tools.
Some suggestions:
- Strikethrough text
- Tags (ability to add 3-5)
- Allow for images to be side-by-side with text
- Sidebars, could be useful if users are serializing novels or doing an essay/blog series
- Integrate Twitter, Tik Tok, and Instagram videos like YouTube so you can play the videos straight from Substack like you can with YouTube.
- If a person uses a GIF as their top image on the post, that GIF could be displayable as a button on their Substack page and social media button instead of a black and white Substack logo.
- Embedded survey/polling questions.
(Sorry if this comes across as nitpicky. I really do love the platform!)
Hey everyone — time to go back to the design lab! Thanks so much for your detailed feedback — here's what happens next:
1. Jasmine and I will synthesize all your feedback to identify the top issues.
2. We'll work with our engineers to prioritize and work on fixes over the next few months.
3. As we build new things, we're going to start updating our changelog (and maybe this thread?) with more detailed patch notes.
Anything else on your mind? Feel free to tag us on Twitter or email support@substack.com <3
Til next time!
Hi guys! So I actually created a post today where I was seeking some specific feedback from my subscribers. I ended up creating a survey in SurveyMonkey, but it would be really cool if there was a way to capture specific responses either via a poll/survey or some other means besides asking for people to comment below.
Text alignment! Centre align especially.
Please, I beg of you, allow me to centre text. Less urgent but also needed is the ability to add a footnote within an image caption. Thanks.
Add tags or categories, so that readers can access old articles. This should be a basic feature…can’t tell you how much frustration that causes our readers. Thanks.
Welcome to this week's Office Hours! We're eager to hear your thoughts and dreams for publishing and draft tools.
We already had a few requests come in from writers on an earlier post we shared about today's thread. I will share them below.
Add the option to apply Strikethrough to text please!
Hey everyone — Nick here from the Substack design team here! Looking forward to hearing your feedback today, especially which parts of writing a post on Substack bring you the most 🗡💀p-a-i-n💀🗡 today.
Bugs? Missing features? Pet peeves? Thanks in advance for your honest takes 🙏
I love how simple the UI is, and I appreciate that very much.
I would like to be able to embed Instagram links, as an artist who speaks about their latest works through the newsletter.
I would also love an "undo" feature. If a mistake is made while composing a post, to be able to quickly "undo" changes would be very helpful, rather than having to go into the draft history to retrieve past draft versions.
The ability to embed YouTube playlists as well as single videos would be really nice. In some of my posts, I create playlists and I can't link them out in a friendly way. My current hack-workaround is to tweet it out and link to the tweet
I like Substack as a platform a lot, but Substack as an interface has the "IKEA problem." IKEA is great for making furniture if you know nothing about furniture making at all and have no tools but becomes worse for you as your skills and equipment increase. You don't *need* a power driver to create an IKEA desk, but if you *have* a power driver it doesn't help you because you can't use the power driver even if you want to.
For someone who "just wants to write" and has absolutely no technical know-how, Substack's interface is pretty close to perfect. It does the minimum with almost no pre-existing knowledge required, and that's about it. I've had some success writing in Word (or other Word-like processors) and then copying it into Substack from the clipboard, but that seems to be the only concession to a little more sophistication in production, and even that approach is quite kludgey.
If you think of options as being on the spectrum from "IKEA" to "hand-coding CSS and HTML" that you should work from opposite ends of the spectrum. Take minor steps from both ends of the spectrum instead of starting from the simplest and complexifying. For example, if you could include a REST API (or any API for that matter) that did just two things (download HTML from a post, upload HTML to a draft) that would be a start from the complex side. People like me would be able to do a lot of the complex work on our own systems and that complex work could help your devs build a better system, most likely at no cost to you. I suspect that many of your devs would also like to work on something super geeky like that.
I'm happy to talk to anyone who would like more information. You can see that I write *on Substack* on these very issues at https://osiris.substack.com.
I would like to be able to create a template for my newsletter(s).
Hi! Thanks for asking.
- More fonts
- Image Wrap
- Text Boxes to call out certain things
I absolutely love how easy it is to drag and drop my own images. I also like how pasting a YouTube URL makes a perfect video display. Substack’s handling of media is really nice, and I hope they keep making it easy to add these kinds of elements for different media types. So far, everything I have wanted to use has been as smooth as my great aunt’s buttery potatoes.
Hey!
Product improvement ideas:
1) Ability to embed Tiktok videos like with Youtube and Vimeo videos. It's a huge source of videos.
2) Make it clearer for readers who are logged out in their browser/device that they need to log back in if they want to pay. Some readers want to become paid but can't figure out because when they click "subscribe" all their see is the "enter your email field" and they don't know what else to do since they're already subscribed to the list.
3) Crypto should have it's on category on the leaderboards, rather than be spread all over finance, business, and tech.
4) I'd like the ability to separate sections with the three stars * * * that they have in books, rather than just the lines.
5) A way to embed surveys/polls natively inside newsletter, rather than link out.
Thank you!
Being able to create and then use a template for threads and posts would be super.
On each, I copy and paste, "Paid subscriptions make this reporting possible," in headline 4 then I have a custom button that says, "Subscribe if you like, pay if you can."
If I could make a template that would have that already there, it would be extremely helpful.
Two requests in particular: Give us a way to center text, and give us the option for a Spotify playlist that displays more than the first song. Thanks for your help!
I love the draft process. wish list: adding colors to the text?
This is a small issue, but I would like the ability to center text. I write fiction and often separate sections of text within chapters with three asterisks (* * *). It looks wrong and distracting set against the left margin. Is there some workaround or keystroke I’m not aware of? Thanks.
I'd like to see a table feature as there is in Word.
Deleting an image can cause bugs sometimes so that's worth exploring.
The option to align text and change font would also be useful although I appreciate that standardized font may be a feature of Substack.
Thanks! 🙂
Sometimes I am able to put a caption under pictures, other times I can't. Is there a particular method I should use? My preference is to add captions in smaller type size than the main text of the post.
I would like to see the ability to add social media buttons at the end of a post. "Follow on Twitter" or whatever so people can get reminders in their preferred venue
It'd be great to be able to duplicate a previous post (like "duplicate slide" in Powerpoint), so that you could duplicate, edit, and keep formatting, etc. Also, please add tags.
Would also like to see:
- Task Lists / Checklists.
- Inline code.
- Tables!
- Automated linking on footnotes URL's.
- Strikethrough.
- Emoji support!
Hi - I missed this today! +1 for Strikethrough. And an option to centre align the text (or at least pull quotes, if not all text) would be super helpful. I'm all for not having too many formatting options - the minimalism is why I love Substack!
Putting two images side by side is also not possible at the moment. Sometime you just want people to be able to compare. They have to scroll up and down.
It would be great if there was a Like button we could add ourselves (like the “share this post” and “leave a comment” buttons).
Right now, the button is small and it is at the end of the article. This makes it is easy to forget and can skew a writer’s perception as to whether their community enjoyed a specific post or not.
Likes are not the primary focus (quality writing is) but they are are a good and useful metric nonetheless.
Besides that, I am loving Substack! Keep up the great work.
If you gave me strikethrough and polling, I'd be happy (for at least a year 😝)
Overall, I think Substack posts are very easy to format and put up, and the final result (after some trial and error!) is a neat, clean newsletter that is easy to use.
But I do wish we could have a little more flexibility in layout, specifically in the following two ways:
1. I would like to be able to centre text
2. Right now images can only be placed as separate image 'blocks' that are automatically centred. Is it possible make image placement a bit more flexible, with text wrapping for instance?
Hi!
My name is Rishi, I write 10+1 Things: 11 interesting things curated by a human, not an algorithm.
Things I would love to see:
1. Support for markdown text. I write my drafts in markdown. So everytime I paste the draft into the editor, I spent a lot of time formatting.
2. Support for text wrapping of images.
3. A readability score or some score based on Substacks algorithm to see how readable the post is. I think this is crucial as people read mostly from their email client.
Thanks again for the diverse set of topics every week on this thread!
Love,
Rishi
What I like about the current editor:
1. Ability to embed tweets easily.
2. Simplicity of the design
I love how easy it is to insert images, and I get frustrated by the lack of some simple editing tools (like changing the justification of the text, sub- and superscript)
I'd like to be able to send out content at different times to paid and unpaid subscribers (I haven't gone paid yet but I'd like the option when I do!)
Hey there! A tiny thing: I wish I could italicize subtitles for post headings!
One tool that would is the use of a limited number of hashtags inside the article that would automatically show a popup of the same hashtags inside other articles that we have written at investrly. Longer term maybe hashtags across the community to connect the network more.
In the meantime we continue to invest early in substack as our newsletter of choice and hope you will continue to share our message:
empowering you to invest early in your future. 🌐 https://investrly.substack.com/welcome
Hey folks — just wanted to report back on our progress so far! Jasmine and I have culled through each and every comment to better understand your needs as writers. Here are a few that rose to the top:
## Overall
- Keep it simple and don't add too much!
## Publishing Experience
- MANY writers want an easy way to create post templates or at least duplicate drafts
- The "Publish" button is really scary when you're not sure what happens next
- Several requests to "preview" posts on different devices before sharing
- Adding tags to posts could help with discovery and organization
## Formatting
- More comprehensive support for markdown would really help our more expert writers
- Pasting from Google Docs could be more seamless and consistent
- Writers want more formatting options — especially strikethrough, underline, superscript, and center alignment. We'll discuss this as a team and balance against adding too much complexity.
- Lots of bugs with footnotes — we need to dramatically improve quality here
- We learned that links in footnotes could not be underlined — that's fixed now!
## Accessibility
- We need to support right-to-left languages!
- An explicit "undo" button may help improve usability for some
- We learned that some Cyrillic characters were not rendering correctly — that's fixed!
## Embeds
- Writers want to make their posts richer through more types of embeddable objects. Here are a few of the most popular requests. As with formatting controls, we'll need to carefully weigh any additions to ensure Substack stays simple!
- Reader polls
- Syntax-highlighted code blocks
- Images with wrapping text
- Basic tables support
- TikTok embeds
- Native video, hosted on Substack
- Common file types like pdf and excel
- Playlists from Spotify/YouTube
Next, we'll start working with our engineers on product changes to address these needs. Look out for more updates soon!
Alignment, if there could be left, right, center, justified alignment that would be super helpful.
Might have missed this earlier, but a template we can save (with body templates for headers, text, icons etc) so that we can reuse structures for different newsletters would be amazing ❤️
Paula here from Stained Page News. I write about books, and probably 90% of my images are book covers. I would be THRILLED to be able to align left photos with text wrapping instead of having them hang out centered and awkwardly tall. 🙏
Apologies for missing this. Will (manually) put it on my calendar for next week. Would be ideal for me if you included a calendar invite compatible with Mac calendar.
My primary feature request is for an inline spell check. Google Docs does this incredibly well, so seamlessly that I didn't realize there was no spell check when I sent out my first issue. My workaround at the moment is once I've finished a post, I copy / paste just the text into a Google Doc and look for the highlighted issues there, and pop back into my post and fix them one by one.
Minor feature requests for the editor:
* Find / Replace
* A center text button
* A strikethrough option (sometimes strikethrough is really effective)
* MAYBE a "scratchpad" feature? Now I keep my half-formed ideas external to Substack, but it would be nice to keep them somewhere in Substack that doesn't have the danger of accidentally posting to my readers.
Otherwise, it's going well!
Hello all. I believe I read about a mentorship program and/or the possibility of a one-on-one phone call with a member of the Substack staff...? Would love to sign up for one or both of those as soon as possible from your end, if it is still available. I haven't officially started my newsletter yet, although it is up there at crimeandpunishment.substack.com
Thanks!!!