Readers’ impressions of your publication aren’t just about your writing. They also respond to the overall look and feel of your Substack website and posts. We recently introduced new features, including homepage layouts and tags, adding to a suite of ways you can customize and organize your Substack.
Today, we invite writers to share how they are using these tools and ask questions about how they work.
Plus, read stories about how writers with varying design skills, interests, and resources are finding a way to create an aesthetic that matches their writing.
I'm not sure I've done anything particularly different, but I do enjoy the colour balance and layout of mine at the moment. https://slake.substack.com/
I'm working on getting better at my cover images now that we have a more visual layout. I've also been filling in the links and recommendations settings to get that old-school blog feel going on, and organizing posts by section (this was before the new tag system which I am really looking forward to using, but haven't had a chance to really think through and implement yet).
Would love any thoughts or feedback, but yes, I'm proud of how my publication has grown and with the work I did implementing the new changes that let me highlight older posts better.
I would like to be able to post the appropriate emoji, but I am a man who comes from an era when people read more, wrote more, thought more and were infinitely more literate.
(Sorry if I sound like a pain in ass; then again don't I love to be the consummate, cantankerous, crabby pain in the ass)
As I said, I wouild like to post the appropriate emoji but I don't know how to access the list of emojis
WHEN LITERATURE DEGENERATES INTO ELEMENTARY SCHOOL ARTS AND CRAFTS
I am interested in words and ideas.
I am not interested in yellow or purple fonts
I am not interested in cutesy, pretty frills and adornments on one's substack page
I am not interested in an endless superfluity of fluff, foolishness and frivolous girlish chatter.
I want to be ablt to convey ideas without having to learn about the infantile bitchy vissisitudes of social meda maniacs.
Why do so many things on social media and on writers office hours remind me of Tricia Nixon's Whitehouse Wedding. I just can't stand the attention to form. I don't have the energy to master form.
In any event, I will now take my leave and let you kiddies frolic in the petty world of prettifying posts.
Hi David. I understand what you are trying to convey. The use of emijos here are not for fun or frivolity; they are to flag questions and suggestions so that the busy Substack team can quickly scroll and make certain they don't miss support issues and suggestions in the long stream of conversation here.
Regarding the rest of your post; I don't care to get involved in that drama.
The phrase "frivolous girlish chatter" might be sexist, but it is more than outweighted by my posts which have been very supportive of many aspects of feminism. I refer you, for example, to my post which delineates 8 specific and fatal flaws in Alito's abortion decision. This was posted to my newsletter on or around May 10, 2022 and bears this address: https://davidgottfried.substack.com/p/alitos-abortion-decision-exquisitely
Re Male Fragility: Some scientists note that testosterone levels and sperm counts are going down and that the incidence of gynocomastia (man tits) and serious aberrations in the genitals of male neonates (new borns) have been going up. (One of them is a horrid conditon in which the opening, for the emission of urine and sperm, is at he base of the penis instead of the head) Some scientists note that this may be the consequence of A) some pesticides and plastics which in some ways behave like derivatives of estrorgen AND B) birth control pills containing estrogen and/or its derivatives. Women on the pill excrete more estrogen, this gets into the water -- and in the Great Lakes some colonies of fish are becoming extinct because the male fish have lost their male attributes.
🟧 - hi Substack team. I know this isn't strictly on topic, but could I ask whether we can have post stats include App opens as well as email opens? Or that it shows you one versus the other?
I want to take a moment to thank the team at Substack for listening and responding to our asks. I know it’s not possible to do all of them at once, but week after week I see updates and new changes. Thanks for being responsive!
I like the steady approach they've been taking to releasing new features - it allows us to experiment with each one in a sensible way so we can figure out if they fit into our workflow or not.
🧠Hello all, and happy Office Hours! Here's a little bit of encouragement from one small newsletter to all of you:
Today, I'm going to preach to myself. And I hope it resonates with some of you, too! Recently I was reading a journal that I kept during the early days of March 2020. And one line that I wrote to myself stood out: "You are not weak, or this would not have been tasked to you."
At that time, I didn't know all of the hardships that were coming my way. I didn't know about what was about to happen with my job, propelling me into writing fulltime. I certainly didn't know what Substack was! I just believed in the impossible belief that I was in the right place, however lost I felt.
Writer, hear me: you are not weak, or this craft of writing would not have been tasked to you. This is not an easy adventure, but it's a good one. Please don't stop, and please don't be discouraged. You're stronger than you think!
Most importantly: keep going, keep writing, and DON'T GIVE UP! 🌿
Yes!! Thanks S.E.! I've been feeling like a powerful writer for over a week now and it feels good to advocate for myself and my work, and to have fun in the process!
Hello S.E.! Missed your pep talks! I’m having a hard time finding the time to write, but doing my best. I’m going to start preparing my essay for next week today, wish me luck! And check it out, along with the rest of my stuff, at: sismanandrew.substack.com!
Thanks as always for your encouraging words! I, too, was propelled into writing after an unexpected job loss and other hardships (some of which are ongoing). But writing has helped my mental health enormously, at least when I remember that what matters most to me is not how many subscribers I have or how much money I make. It's the connections I make with others who relate to my struggles and appreciate my honesty and willingness to share the things that help me cope.
🟧 I'm very happy to see the introduction of tags, but I have some questions about how to use them.
I went through and added tags to all my posts. Most posts have one to four tags; the tags refer to the main topics that each post centers on. I ended up with 24 tags at this point, and 10 of those tags have enough posts that I want to call readers' attention to them. I created a page called Topics. This page lists the tags that have two or more posts, and a brief description of why readers might be interested in those particular posts:
I would expect tags to appear on a post's page, because that's how almost every site that's ever implemented tags has used them. When a reader finds a post interesting, they click on one of the tags, and they can find more content that's relevant to their interests. As far as I can see, Substack doesn't do this!
So, my questions are:
- Is there any plan to have tags appear on post pages automatically? I don't want to have to add them manually, and manually-added tags are really susceptible to link rot. But, I want to see them there because they're great for helping readers find relevant posts.
- Can you explain some of the thinking behind tags? It really feels like, given the current implementation, they're an attempt to address people's confusion around Sections rather than implementing a full tagging system. These seem like categories, not tags.
🧠I speak, Eric, as one who has yet to utilize tags! But, as I'm planning to, here's how I was planning on using them (based on what I hear is their purpose): To sort my different "lanes," I was going to use them to gather them together. I have several numbered "Inside Tracks" articles, all of them where I take a song, and dissect a handful of different available covers.
There's my "Audio Autopsy"s, where I highlight and dig deep into an artist or album that got little sales or airplay back in the day. Then, there's "GROW BIGGER EARS" where I make a themed Playlist on a certain topic....like songs about wanting or about air flight!
The point of doing that seemed to be looking ahead to something like tags (as I'm imgagining them to be). For you or anyone who writes in such a categorized fashion (however infrequently and tags or no tags), you might find it helpful to create some titled lanes like the above. If nothing else, I could actually start separate Substack categories or pages using any/either/or a couple of those titles and their accompanying articles!
Oh, dang.......I was hoping that answer was going to be under the donut discussion! Well, I'm anxious to give tags a try.....I seem to do well with creative titling, and when I came up with those separate categories, I, of course, wanted to quiz myself to make sure the premise would/could be repeatable and sustainable, and yes, yes, and yes! Thanks, Terry....'cause I know you're familiar with what I'm prattling on about!
✏️Has it occurred to anyone that because we are all writers and 'creative' solutions are going in as many colourful and imaginative directions and perhaps difficult for more techy types to address 😂 Just a thought
Great point. I would love to use tags like I did in WordPress, but if Substack does not automatically create a tag "hierarchy" on the sidebar, then how are users supposed to find and make use of tags? I post every day and I'm willing to go back through 400+ posts to tag them all, but not without an effective process to use the tags.
Thank you for articulating your situation. This is a perfect use case for clarifying the distinction between tags and categories. If Substack offers you tags, you're going to add those in a much different way than if Substack offered you categories.
If you add tags and then Substack handles them as categories, that's going to be a mess. :/
✏️Sounds like Substack has mixed tags with implementation of categories which is what many have been asking for Eric. I reminds me of someone teaches me how to dance..step one...cross two..turn. Ah! forget it just let me feel the music and that has made all the difference
Yeah, an interesting aspect of this rollout is that just tagging posts doesn't actually do anything. You then have to either add some tags to your navigation bar, or build a standalone page to collect tags (manually), or add tags to the actual post (manually).
No other tagging system I've ever seen makes you take that second step. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but Substack really needs to clarify how they want people to use tags. For example it's going to look pretty dumb on my part if I manually add tag links at the end of all my posts, and then a week later Substack puts tags into the header or footer automatically. Not to mention a bunch of time lost on our end!
That’s true. What I basically did was to remove Sections and replace them with Tags. Let’s see what comes next. Right now I don’t have so many posts but on the long run it might be hard to reshuffle everything just to use a new feature. So I hear you about the tags.
Oh right. But what difference does it make in practical terms? I suppose it work quite well if you have lots of sections. Trouble is, I've written so m any articles, I can't face the thought of going through them all tagging them. It would take me longer than the life of the universe. I wish there was a way of doing bulk tagging
🧠I tried out tagging on my last article but fell into the trap of when I have used hashtags, tags, or categories, I end up with too many, which probably defeats the purpose. On my WordPress platform, where I also publish, I was a little more successful in creating categories and listing posts that way, plus I have tagged as descriptors. Anyway, I will play around with the tags on Substack and see its benefit. I just looked back at my last post and don't see any of the tags; maybe it's because I didn't enter them separately. https://www.inmindwise.com/p/what-i-learned-from-my-fathers-death
That's why it really needs to be clarified. Tags are meant to be a larger set than categories. Tags exist at a finer level of detail than categories. This distinction becomes more significant as the archive grows, so some people are feeling it more than others at this point.
I'd like to hear this as well! I've only added two tags to a handful of posts so far. I like how you consolidated all the topics under one link at the top of your page, rather than listing them all across the top. May do that myself the more I write.
It's certainly helpful to hear what the team is thinking. I would hope that the team figures out whether these really are tags, or if they're meant to be categories.
I think that distinction is important because it affects how people use them. If they're clearly tags, many of us are going to end up with 40-60 tags. If you implement standard tagging features, that should work. If you implement features that only expect writers to have 3-10 tags, like categories, that might break things for people who have used tags in the traditional way.
Tags are great! Please implement the rest of a traditional tagging system! They're a very clearly understood way for people to find the content they're interested in from a writer with a deep archive. :)
Becca thank you so much for that reply (and Eric for bringing up tags!) I recently figured out how to use tags for my own publication, but had the hardest time figuring out how to set up my top-line navigation. I had originally done it as a Page, and then listed the various posts within the page, but I wanted a simple list. You can do it via tags... just put the tag itself into the Nav, but that does not allow you to put in that short description below, which I really wanted.
Looked through the Help Center but there was nothing on sections vs tags vs pages (at least I couldn't find it!) and then finally figured out it was a SECTION I needed to set up, like this:
I think you got right to the confusion that many people have. As the feature set grows, I would love to see Substack put out a How-to guide about the distinction between tags and sections. What content-discovery problems are tags meant to solve? Which ones are sections meant to solve? To be fair to substack, these questions are harder for a combined newsletter/ archive site than a site that just deals with newsletters or just deals with blogs.
If writers' thinking is aligned with Substack's thinking, we'll all end up in the right place. If we're both thinking different things, we'll end up confused and our readers will as well.
✏️Hi Eric, thanks for the guide you provided for the Interface issues a while back. When I jumped on today I noticed Substack had whole sections on Tags and Pages, but using them can be a bit of a hike, so we'll see 😊
Completely agree Eric. My main confusion was not so much tags vs sections but pages vs sections. As in, how is a page different from a post as opposed to a section?
Somewhat related to that, I'm also finding the search engine in the Help Center doesn't pull up a lot of articles relevant to the search query... hopefully that will improve over time as well.
Thank you Terry ❤️ I'm big on visual design, so it was important to get it right. All of this ofc takes precious time away from writing, and yet, and yet... it ADDS to the writing, so it's all time well spent.
Yes. It's funny: I can spend half an hour writing a great article, and then 2 hours finding the best illustration for it. Last year I met someone who selects the illustration in five minutes, and then spends two hours writing the article! But the two aspects definitely enhance each other methinks.
I'm willing to bet that someone doesn't **always** publish that way. I've worked with photography and design for many years—it's like a rubber band. Sure, you can find a great image in 5 minutes. I've done that. You can also spend an hour (been there too), because what you have in mind takes longer to find. Ditto with writing.
But the fact we can write great articles in such a short span of time only demonstrates the years of long hard work we've got under our belts isn't that so Terry! :)
✏️I love selecting the images Birgitte but sometimes can't find that one companion piece sitting in my head, so I just leave it until it flows out of the writing which has then taken on new meaning ...'that's the stuff' Recall the 'Creative' Writing teachers of old who preached the top down method and turned untold #s off ever becoming writers. 'Start where ya start and go where ya go Follow the pen and let the inspiration flow' 😊
If tags are still a work in progress, I wonder if you’re considering a feature that allows the writer to organize them in some kind of index (much the way Squarespace does: https://jmelliott.org/journal)?
Yes, I almost always go to the About page first--or at least second, after reading an article I've liked. I'm always surprised to see so many with the canned Substack suggestion. There's no better way to introduce yourself to people you want as subscribers!
I think my About page, on the other hand, is too detailed, so I probably need to simplify it for new potential readers. My About page came from more historical and promotional material on my professional WordPress website. So I agree with you about the page but not overdo it, which might be counterproductive.
I agree. I started with the default About page and revised it a few months in after I had a better idea of my focus and subscriptions have picked up since (not sure if causal or just correlation).
Great to see this perspective. Have seen others suggest it should be short, whereas mine is pretty long. But I really prefer just explaining my entire rationale as well as goals + ethics so that my readers know what to expect and what I find important.
I concur! Mine is long as well. I feel the only person that has the ability to truly assess how long or short an About page should be is the person that it is about.
🧠Thank you for sharing these tips, super helpful- I’m not put off by long articles, but if they’re blocks of text, it can be hard to absorb! I’ve created decorative dividers and sharing the high resolution png files with paid subscribers along with other illustrations. I love reading and I think that combined with simple illustrations and pictures can add some extra magic 🪄
Hi Emily, I had never seen that in any other newsletter before. Though I am not an artist like you but I am going to take you as an inspiration and make something other than lines for the dividers. They say copying is the best way to flatter.. Though I will not copy you but I am really inspired by your out of box thinking here. Thank you :)
Ah that’s lovely Sheetal! If you’re looking for an easy way to do some of your own, Canva is a great simple design tool to use and has free stock illustration assets that you could use!
Interesting idea. However, I am afraid that this will up the email size too much, with longer posts, especially with images/graphs, I sometimes go right up to the max size. But using lower resolution images could still work perhaps.
Yes Robert, I have reduced my images to large. Love the effect of the wide view esp to effect and enhance the relax factor perfect for some themes. But can be a bit much for readers in desktop view. When I started I previewed my drafts on mobile view only
I've gotten the too long error message a few times but the emails still are complete. Does anyone know what the actual limit is? And is it length (word count) or size (pics, embeds)?
Haven’t had that problem yet with the decorative illustration elements, but I did run into trouble when attempting to include a couple of gifs in one of my articles…
Thanks for reminding us of png files to be used as dividers! I've seen them in a few of the Substack publications I read, but always forgot to create some and add them to my own writings. It definitely adds to the visual presentation.
Can I ask how you add decorative dividers? I can't figure it out. I go to those sites that offer dividers and when I try to apply them there's always too much white space around them. As if they're images, instead. Thanks.
I am using png images with transparent backgrounds, Ramona. There is more white space, but I get around it (to some extent) by making the image file short and wide, 2000px x 300px. Canva is a great tool for this if you’re looking for something simple
I tend to use white space and headings rather than lines where possible. I always think a line can look too final, and deter the reader from going further. Probably just all in my head
One really amazing thing about being on writer hour is to find great writers you won't otherwise. Why is not appearing on my notes I wonder but I am so glad I was here as I found your newsletter really really good. Subscribing right away Terry.
all this praise is going to go to my head. If you wish to comment further, please contact my secretary (Her name is Minty and she wears a yellow collar)
Definitely worth experimenting to see what works for you - I'm very much a "tidy things into boxes" kind of person - but I know that's not for everyone!
I have a newsletter going out tommorow that will be longer than my usual ones. These tips will really help me make sure my paragraphs aren't too long or overhwelming fo rmy readers. Thanks!
Very helpful, I have used many of these suggestions, and all seem helpful. I used to break things up with images or photos but founds this took too much time and often would break up the flow too much for readers or be distracting.
🧠 I have set a goal of spending 15 minutes on Notes every day to interact with other writers and find new substacks to subscribe to. This has brought more traffic to my own publication and created a couple new free subscribers.
✏️ Any other personal essay/humorists over here? Also, I'd appreciate feedback on the project I'm currently working on "40 before 40" I'm writing 40 essays before I turn 40 years old in December as a memoir-ish exercise in writing.
I've been also spending some time on Notes, but after the euphoria of the first weeks, I got tired of reading and answering snippets. It's very distracting. I'm currently taking a break from Notes and focusing on my short story.
Some people are made for social media. But some are not. I fall in the second category. It’s a pity because it’s a good feature for getting traction but ultimately I’m here to write and tea good writing. Don’t want to end up twitting.
Your 🧠 point reminded me that I need to add to peruse Notes daily! And add an allotted time for reading more Stacks too. I have an app I use for time management to even remember to take my vitamins in the morning, so adding those other important Substack tasks will be helpful.
I love that challenge you've given to yourself! I adore personal essays and never looking into humorists so I'll follow along for any answers as well (thanks for asking!).
I've been finding my footing over on my Substack, but have written a small handful of personal essays, and while this is the end of my 2-week break, my brain finally unplugged and flowed out a ton of essays, poems, and pieces I'm scheduling and editing for the very near future.
Personal essays are what I love to write though, so definitely check out anything that isn't a "Friday Reflection" on my page for 'em. Haha. That's the final tag I'll add for now on my backend: personal essays--so they're easier to find! Gonna do that today or before the weekend.
I write about navigating losing my mom after caregiving for her full time for 8 years, death, and thoughts on re-discovering yourself and (soon) more thoughts on God and my changing relationship with Him and spirituality.
Good luck on the 40 before 40 challenge you've given yourself! I know you can do it! :D
Hi Walter, I always try to put humor into my essays, so it will at least put a smile on my face. Of course, your getting the 40 done depends on how soon you turn 40. I've just turned 80, so my goal is to stay active, and alive, keep my humor, and maybe write many more essays before I lose my wit.
Hey Walter, good to see another essayist/humorist on here. I like your idea of time blocking for Notes. I think I need to start doing that to. What do you typically post? Something funny?
My advice is write here consistently and build up an audience. For nonfiction, the platform is always a selling point with agents/editors. Or you can self-publish. Humor can be tricky because not everyone will find you funny. Be sure to stay true to yourself and attract the people who find you funny.
Recently I started a series called 40 before 40. I'm trying to write 40 essays before my 40th birthday in December. English as a Second Language is about how I learned English in Mexico and I think it's a good mix of funny with heart: https://open.substack.com/pub/walthercantu/p/english-as-a-second-language let me know what you think.
Hey Walther! I write personal essays and memoir, so if you like reading that, give Practice Space a try! I post biweekly, and the essays range from musings on death to the stories behind my favourite T-shirts. I'd also love to spend more time on Notes, and maybe I should take your example.
My Substack is about hand-drawing data vizzes, so normally posts come with my own doddles 😀. If I need though, I like to use my own photos, I tend to take a pic of pretty much anything around and hence have a large collection
I need to get deeper into this now that I have 500 subs…game on! BTW, I use www.pexels.com for free imagery - just need to mention the source and photographer…great content there…
Pixabay is great too, and of course the "Search" function for images in Substack itself queries Unsplash, another free resource, and credits the author if you use the images in your newsletter.
Thanks, Terry; this will be valuable to me, as I'm thinking of designing my own book cover for my next book. So far I have been using Canva to make up collages of pictures from their stock photos for my posts.
Substack recently also added the option to generate your own images. I have been playing around with that for a bit, it makes some great art that AI of theirs.
Congrats on your numbers! I'm starting to get into the new features too, but I don't yet have much experience with them. What's your favourite of the newly added features?
Too early to tell impact...#1 growth driver is a publication Recommendation from a Top Substack Author with 10,000 subs....flatter honestly and let it happen organically...
Congrats James. I finding great examples of writers beyond my orbit and seeking their process, asking for feedback and their immense knowledge that comes from doing the work . So, I would love to pick your brains if you have some time. I will be immensely grateful to you for this ..
What advice would you give yourself if you were starting a new publication on Substack without carrying forward your existing subscribers?
If there are only 3 things you could do in a day to grow the publication, what those 3 things would be?
I have 28 subscribers and 240 posts , that says something about me . LOL. But I never really worked on getting subscribers and substack was not a good platform for me as I had none to begin with. I learned it slowly but now I am putting myself out there and meeting people like yourself.
A quick tip that I saw elsewhere and wanted to share here: It can be worth having a "header" to your email which briefly re-introduces your publication, so that readers can remember why they subscribed to you. For example, at the top of mine I have:
"Hi there. You’re reading "Ironclad Creative,” my newsletter to help freelancers, content creators, and business owners deal with the challenges of an ever-changing world. If you want to work effectively, create beautiful content, be successful, and build trust, then I hope you find inspiration here.
If this newsletter is useful to you, I’d love it if you could forward it to a friend, share it, or hit that like button. Thanks so much! Paul."
I don't know if it helps, but I figure it can't hurt!
Edited to add: You're welcome to copy this wording for your own newsletter if it's helpful :)
Don't know if it would help with current subscribers, but you sharing that additional info here just made me become a free subscriber! I do include a header with each email thanking subscribers and encouraging them to like, comment, and/or share, but it doesn't re-introduce what my newsletter is about.
This is mine: Hi, I’m USA Today bestselling fantasy author, editor, and publisher Russell Nohelty. I sit at the intersection of craft and commerce, helping writers navigate the sticky bit between writing something that lights them up inside and building an audience of superfans that adore their work.
I don't remember if I added that, but thank you for posting that here! Added it to my small list of "tune-ups" to check into on the back end. :)
I also added a virtual "tip jar" to my email footer (and maybe header? Again, gotta check!) and I've gotten two lovely tips so far (but also don't know if it came from an actual newsletter. Don't think so though because I ALWAYS forget to mention that people can "buy me a one-time matcha" if they'd like).
I just added a little quip that said something along the lines of “you can also buy me a (one-time) matcha to support my writing!” that linked to my BuyMeACoffee page.
I forgot you can add buttons! I thiiiiink the buttons need HTML and I don’t think you can embed code in on Substack?
But adding a link’s been working pretty well (two lovely people tipping me!)
Generally, I don't like a lot of stuff that comes before the actual post ... but normally it's stuff about why someone should subscribe. I like your idea of a "why you're here" reminder and am going to consider implementing that. Thanks!
I don't have Publication Details or Email banner, header, and footer settings under Settings... I only have Publication and it shows my substack name and picture. As with so many of these options that others find so easy, when I go follow the directions, it doesn't work that way on my page.
I haven't added this info, but it sounds like a good idea, and I have noticed it on other Substacks. Is it OK to use a closely related version of yours? I know it is useful, but I struggle with what I call clutter, which I why I haven't added it. I'll give it a whirl and see if there is any notable reaction...
✏️ Hi! Longtime listener, first-time caller. I'm wondering if people have success with doing occasional (or even regular?) stories outside their niche? I normally write humorously about travel/trying new things, and all of the anxiety-inducing problems adventuring can bring. But I'm working on a sort of essay about my quest to clear out years' worth of emails from my inbox and become a more organized person. In a way, this is trying a new thing (i.e. getting my life together), so I thought I might be able to use it for Substack. But the essay is more serious and less focused on actually, you know, leaving the house to try new things. How have people fared when they venture outside of what they've been doing? I am sure it depends on many factors, but I'd love to hear others' experiences. Is it better to try to frame it as something that sort of IS related to my niche, or to own it and say "I'm doing something different this week?"
I recently introduced lyric essays into a mix of otherwise very straightforward and linear writing. People are loving it! I did mitigate the risk on the first one by saying explicitly that it was an experiment and asking what people thought about it. This way readers don't think they are suddenly going to get something totally different from now on. I think ultimately changing it up sometimes makes you a more interesting writer. I say go for it!
When I came on to Substack I decided to write about everything, especially stuff outside my niche. The only problem I think is that people elsewhere who know me for my niche aren't as interested as I hoped they would be. It's been great fun though, and really expanding in many ways
I write about everything, too – and never had a niche. I was a jobbing social researcher/writer in my working life and took on anything I thought I could do. Now, I write about whatever takes my interest as an active 81 year old. Would you join me in pressing Substack to create a category for those of us who don't fit into any category? I have raised this several times, managed to get the attention of one Substack person who said he would think about the issue, but no action as yet. I promised them that one of my strong personal characteristics is that I am persistent. And I am.
Getting the attention of a Substack person who said she/he will think about it is good going. I managed it once. I get the impression that all suggestions go into a pot, and they look into them as and when.
I think everyone's advice is spot on: as long as you lead the reader with "This is new writing territory for me," they'll be fine.
I'd also toss in that I have a growing list of "does this fit, does this not fit?" topics that I think ALSO can make great guest posts. So that's something to keep in mind if a piece of writing feels really far out, maybe it's meant for someone else's readers. : )
Thank you, Amanda! That list is a fantastic idea. Really enjoyed your most recent post, the meatball story was both hilarious and painfully relatable. Why is it that sometimes the low-effort thing you throw together at the last minute gets the most love?
Okay, first of all, you know I'm committed to adding a comment here, because the page jumped three different times as I was trying to get my thoughts together, but I persevered. LOL!
My $02 is that there is no reason not to share this quasi-tangent. It is relevant to many, it's a version of trying something new, and as long as you find your way back to your chosen subject-matter next time (or the time after that), your readers will probably appreciate the slight variation of theme. Sounds interesting!
I HATE when the page jumps around when you try to comment! Haha
I agree with ya! I think one of the most freeing things about Substack is that you (or at least I) feel like you can FINALLY give yourself permission to BE YOURSELF.
Of course, listen in to what your community is loving or wants, but I know I personally stopped trying to strategize moves to most optimized content and just post and see what happens! Always putting my happiness and wanting to express *me* over trying to stay in some strict standard or rule I'm only making myself, ya know?
I like your idea of always keeping your community in the loop. Just mention that you were wanting to write about something new and hope they enjoy it!
Definitely give yourself permission to explore different topics and try new things. Maybe even make it a series or sometimes series you can now create into a section readers can return to.
Than you, Cierra! I like the idea of a series; I was thinking about that. I saw your recent post mentioning the negative toll of Substack Notes and I agree. It's always a balance between being yourself and wanting validation and popularity for your writing, right? I mean, it almost feels crass to say so, but that's part of what we are all seeking, I think.
Thank you so much for persevering, Elizabeth! I really could have shortened things up by using the phrase "quasi-tangent" in my original comment haha. Loved your "Dog People" post about sweet Basil.
I saw your "like" pop up over there, Emily - thanks for reading. We see Basil when we FaceTime our daughter (who still works with the same family), and we were able to spend time with him again last September, when we ventured to Oz to visit. What a journey. If your travels haven't taken you down under, I highly recommend it!
I've been thinking about the same thing as I start to explore ideas that are not specifically "real life through popular fiction" I think specificity is helpful for readers to opt in and set expectations. It's also helpful to give ourselves a framework to eliminate decision fatigue, but it's worth pushing against when it begins to limit expression. In the end, our experiences and our pov are the thruline of all our work- regardless of change in theme or tone or structure. That said, I think it's worth considering if these new ideas are outliers or signifying a new chapter in your creativity that may need a dedicated space carved out.
I haven't quite reconciled how to apply this to action for myself, so I'm curious to see everyone else's thoughts!
Thank you, Tami! This is pleasantly optimistic (outsourced or otherwised) and also extremely useful. Also, your Substack is so visually appealing! I love it the concept and the execution.
I've been in my professional niche for so many years, and it always, in some way seems to be integrated into my work. I try more now to keep it on the personal side as it brings me more into the passion and emotions of the story. I do too frequently fall into being educative or academic, but it is always about learning the craft of creative non-fiction. My last essay: https://www.inmindwise.com/p/what-i-learned-from-my-fathers-death
Thank you, Ron! I liked that this essay was emotional and personal, but also included "Points to Ponder" at the end to invite reflection by your readers.
Your "quest" sounds intriguing to me, so I would say go for it. It's not like switching to another niche (like politics or finance). It's a human story that sounds relatable.
My advice is to A) not apologize for it. B) put any explanation at the bottom of the page rather than the top. You'll see over time how your readers respond and if it merits another section.
I send a mix of subjects with my newsletters and I think when you’ve found your voice, what you write comes through and people will respond positively. I wouldn’t be afraid of exploration because the change of pace might actually resonate with more people.
You don’t necessarily have to say you’re doing something different, maybe start a narrative with what your train of thought is at the moment. Readers will get the idea of where you’re going.
I have started sections and I have headers for each post coming from a different section. I would just introduce a new section to your readers in the first post that deviates. We should be able to grow as writers and people in our Substacks and as long as we're upfront with our readers, I think that is ok.
I've been experimenting with different themes and topics and try to sign post it when I introduce it. Some may like it because it's your unique voice. Others may skip because it's a different topic. All good.
I'm all for trying new things out and I do warn readers when I do that. I think if you've built enough trust with people, they'll be willing to roll with whatever you send them.
🧠 Some tips that I've accumulated from my own experience with Substack
1) Watch out when pasting passages with quotes! When pasting in from other editors, sometimes you can end up with smart quotes that go the wrong way. I use the browser's find feature to do a quick scan though to make sure the quotes are all straight.
2) If you paste text with embedded links from a Substack post into a Note, it looks fine when you paste it…but then barfs once the Note is posted. Give your Note a look once it's posted to make sure it looks right.
3) Take some time to dig through all the settings in your writer dashboard. Some things are buried many layers deep, or hard to find. For example, did you know you can manage which blurbs that other writers have written about your substack that appear on your welcome page?
4) Now that we have Tags, use them instead of Sections unless you have a really really good reason to want people to be able to sub/unsub to different sections. That said, don't get too excited about putting in a million tags; you'll probably want to change them, etc, and most people will just use the search on your archive page to find posts.
5) Also in Settings: consider turning on the Notes tab, so that people who find your Stack can also find your Notes.
6) Revisit and update your Home, About and Welcome pages regularly. Don't forget that you may have pinned certain posts and may want to update those as well.
Keep writing, have fun, and as Charlie Becker put it recently, "Do the weirdest thing that feels right."
AN ORDINARY DISASTER
A book-length memoir of a man thrashing against being alone—and then learning to live with the fact that we are _all_ alone, serialized right here on Substack:
I don't REALLY want to take the time to do so, BUT I'm thinking that you're right about the tags helping with cleaning up my sections. So many summer projects!
I did know about the blurbs that others wrote about you, and i have it enabled, but for some reason they don't appear on my homepage. I wonder whether it depends on the number of subscribers one has
🟧 Suggestion for Substack on the new homepage layout. I'd love to be able to specify which article I want in which spot on the homepage. To get them to land where I want them in the five highlighted posts, they have to be selected in a very specific order. I'd love to be able to say I want this article in spot 1, this article in spot 2, etc. without having to figure out what order to pin them in.
🟧 -Hi! I've been talking in Notes with many smaller creators who are concerned about the way substack mostly seems to promote larger accounts. Smaller accounts can have a lot of trouble gaining traction, and often feel like they're yelling into the void. The fact that search doesn't work very well on notes doesn't help.
Again, these concerns do seem to resonate with a lot of creators. I hope substack will consider ways in which it might create regular forums for highlighting smaller accounts, and perhaps search features that make it easier to locate topic specific writers, or people with a smaller footprint.
Totally agree, and I suggested new threads in Writer Office Hours, including one specifically about how to stand out among the many newsletters and get discovered when you don't have many subscribers.
Thanks Noah for this acknowledgement. I am on of those writers who are writing for close to 8 months ( daily ) and I have 28 subscribers - half of which is my family . It gets disheartening and I came to substack after reading many articles on Medium on how this is great to launch your writing career... well, that did not happen. 8 months were a long time to teach me that if there is potential -- it is far far away in future.
So , I am thinking of going to Medium to earn my living and keep writing on Substack because I actually like it here. I like the community, the platform and the management.
Also side note( if someone wants to make writing as their full time profession then marketing yourself is a good skill worth learning --- I think this is where I sucked as Substack had no way of finding my little hole)
🟧 Congrats on the latest tags addition! One comment about tags.
I think the homepage navigation bar can become super busy if we have too many topics. Therefore I suggest placing tags in 2 places: 1) Allocate a nicely designed sub-menu for topics generated from tags and 2) place respective tags at the footer of each post.
Briefly, I agree with your main point. The way it's currently implemented tags feel more like categories. I ended up making a Topics page: https://mostlypython.substack.com/p/topics
Making a page like this manually feels like it might work, because it's a curated selection of tags. But adding tags manually to each post is incredibly inefficient and brittle. Tags really should appear in the header alongside the like and share buttons, or in the footer in a similar manner.
I've added tags to two of my posts but I really don't know what they do! Where are they? Who sees them? They don't seem to function like tags on every other website, unless I'm missing something.
If you haven't already done so, you might want to read through the replies to the comment that I linked to. There are a lot of people who've found the same thing. Basically, tagging your posts doesn't do anything that's visible to readers at this point. You have to either create a page that shares tag links, add them to your navigation bar, or manually add them to a post. I don't suggest adding tag links to posts manually, as it sounds like Substack is thinking of implementing that themselves.
Saw that! With you on automatically adding tags to posts. Adding to this, another idea could be having a tag cloud that is automatically created on the main page.
🟧I have recently started new Substacks in different languages. Has your team considered offering more tools for writing in different languages. Buttons for example; don't save custom text, so I have to continue to type in my URL and text each post. Google translate doesn't include all languages such as Mi'kmaq which is a language I really need. I had a lovely conversation with a sub from France 😊 Since this is an online platform providing more options to communicate in different languages seems worthy of discussion and implementation. Becca
🟧 Could we have the option to add a drop-down menu of links to the navigation bar, please?
In my case, each email contains several themed sections and I would like to add anchor links to my Homepage (i.e. https://unfoundvideo.substack.com/i/116898342/components) to let visitors drop right into the section that attracts them from the archive. I'm sure other writers would find it handy too. Thanks!
This is a great suggestion. Our team has experimented with something like this in the past, and I passed it along for consideration as they build out tagging tools.
Thanks! Yep... the links could aim anywhere, but linking to sections in previous emails makes the archive more navigable, and is a bit more precise than using tags (at least for my email format, I'm sure for others.) Our archives are going to get pretty big as the years roll on...
🟧 - So excited to implement tags on Adventure Snack! I've been looking for a way to organize my games by genre for awhile (fantasy, sci-fi, etc).
Are tags planned to work only within individual Substacks for the time being? Or should I be tagging with the idea that in the near future, a reader could stumble to my Substack through a public tag?
Great question! There's currently no plan to make tags searchable/discoverable across Substacks - we currently see them as simply an organizational tool within individual publications, as you said. But we may explore public tags in the future.
And I'm happy to hear that tags are useful for your newsletter!
🟧 I use drafts as my filing cabinet/drawing board. Nadav Is there any way to place drafts I am currently working on, at the top without having to scroll down through to find material? 😊
🟧 Hi all! I love all the tools you are providing so us writers can add a bit of creativity to the appearance of our Substacks. This is really important for long form writing, so can I make some further suggestions? I would love if pull quotes actually pulled left and right a little into the white space outside of the main block of text, with maybe the option to add an image. I would love to be able to add drop capitals to differentiate sections. I would love to have the option to justify text rather than ragged right. I would love to be able to centre headings. I have no idea how difficult it might be to implement, but I wonder if the Substack team might consider such changes for the future.
Great! It's not just me then 🤣 I think these things help to break up long chunks of text and make it seem more inviting and visually interesting. Form is just as important as content, isn't it? 💕
🟧 You know that there are people who use Substack that don't live in the USA, right? I know that may be difficult to believe but some of us live in "other countries". 😱
We love seeing writers from all over the world using Substack and know we could have better tools to support them. We are a small team and over time also hope to offer programs like Office Hours to support writers in otehr time zones. Where are you, Prickly Cactus?
My comment was meant for the Substack people re the email we get every week that mentions two USA timezones but forgets that there are writers here that don´t actually live in PST or EST timeszones...wherever those are!
🧠 I use my Substack to teach and help writers master the art and business of the literary newsletter and strengthen their writing habits. That means offering workshops via Substack like this one coming up. I’m using video, which is fun. https://www.writersatwork.net/p/workshop-the-art-of-the-literary
Just subscribed to get the workshop and all your info. Your invitation to the workshop was terrific and I'm curious to know how well it works. Guess I'll know on May 23 when I show up for the workshop! Looking forward to it.
I'd like to know this, too. Substack's CEO recently did an interview I found very disturbing that included a refusal to say there would be any effort to moderate content, even if it violated Substack's policies. He all but issued a personal invite to right-wing extremists to say whatever they want on Notes. It bothered me so much that I haven't encouraged my subscribers to use Notes and rarely post or read there myself.
Hey Timothy, when you create a new section, you also create a new email list. We recommend when you just want to organize your work, you use tags. But, if you have a large mailing list, and some people only come to you for your poems, then you might consider creating sections so they can opt into just getting poems.
I really like sections. They're useful for me because I write about different things at different times. I use them myself when I want to find something I've written a while back. If I know the content I'll know which section it's in.
I echo what Ramona says here. I think the tags will help me clean things up some, but at the same time having a section helps me compartmentalize the specific focus of a post under the bigger umbrella of my Substack's theme.
I have sections for things that would generally be considered different sections of a newspaper or magazine/that would be something some people will like but not everyone.
✏️ Would pages be a good option to share a freebie with EXISTING, FREE subscribers?
I know that I can add a link with the freebie to my welcome email for new subscribers. But I'm trying to get it to existing subscribers as well, without it being publicly viewable on my Substack.
To my fellow Substackers: do you prefer black text on white background, or do you enjoy a bit of background color? What about black background and white text? I know that can be hard to read for some. Thinking of starting up my second Substack soon and am in the design planning stages now.
I think people that need dark more (black on white) will tend to use the app because they can set all publications to show that way. Also, people can use their device settings to put on high-contrast or color filters if they need or want them. So, I think the most universal thing is to use black on white, or very close (super dark greys, very lightly tinted backgrounds, etc).
I have a light color buff background on my newsletter with black lettering. Enough to keep the contrast crisp and not cause my subscribers eye-fatigue, but I'm constantly debating whether or not to change that back to white background...
Looking at yours now Susannah... it looks a tad gray on my desktop. That's the one variable we cannot control, is the color setting on our readers' computers and other devices. Also, they might have it set to a day or night setting (blue vs warm shade) and that can affect the color too. So maybe a little lighter or closer to white even if not 100% white will do the trick. Definitely worth exploring, and maybe testing it on different devices.
🟧 I posted this as a reply to another writer's post asking about Substack's plans to address content concerns on Notes: I'd like to know this, too. Substack's CEO recently did an interview I found very disturbing that included a refusal to say there would be any effort to moderate content, even if it violated Substack's policies. He all but issued a personal invite to right-wing extremists to say whatever they want on Notes. It bothered me so much that I haven't encouraged my subscribers to use Notes and rarely post or read there myself.
Am I the last one to have a look at the new features? Can't wait to dive in, but it's been so hectic at home I'm finding zero time or energy to write. Barely squeezed out a post written in 30 second bursts. Is it even possible to maintain a writing habit with young kids?
Yes! I tend to go in waves based on time and energy. My flow seems to be to bang out three posts I can schedule ahead, and then take a couple weeks off where I just jot down ideas. I’ve been writing here for a couple of years now and have a pretty deep archive, but it hasn’t been steady progress if viewed week-by-week. I do notice my stats do better if I can keep at least one post per week going out (and for me, that always involves scheduling ahead because I can’t predict which weeks I will have energy to write and which weeks I won’t). Don’t know if that’s any help, but I wish you the best in achieving your goals. Motherhood is consuming, especially while they are young!
That does help, thank you! And it's a really good idea. I also tend to work in bursts of productivity - it would definitely be a better feeling to have the products of that burst spread over the next few weeks
I hear you. I’ve been getting up early to write but this morning my daughter announced we were going downstairs at 3.30am so I’ve missed my writing slot today! 🥴
Yeah they can be so unpredictable that any expectation of a stable routine is bound to end up in disappointment. My smaller one wakes up around 4 am so I've not really entertained the idea of trying to wake up before that (that would be called not going to bed haha) but maybe when she's less sadistic I will try this 🥲
Ooof! I felt that haha! Yeah it’s hard. I often write in short bursts with the pomodoro technique (25 mins) and on my phone notes as well - throwing out all the rules to actually make stuff happen!
🧠 I love the new site design changes! Since I put a lot of effort in the cover images of my posts, I find that having a layout that highlights those images is very helpful. I think it helps new readers easily see what a post is about and click on it if it sounds interesting.
✏️ Does anybody have any advice on a prominent way to offer student/senior discounts? Is there a way to do this on the subscription page? I have a note on my About and Intro pages, but I’m not sure, following feedback from a reader, that these are prominent enough. Thanks in advance...
Agree with all the above - I’ve done this multiple times. When you go into the old post click something so the update button shows and then go ahead and add tags it doesn’t alter the publish time/ date.
✏️ Related to customizing and organizing -- how often, if ever, do you reshare old posts, or link to them in your current posts? And, is there some unwritten guidance on how much time you let elapse before you recycle your content? Here's an example: I wrote this piece last Mother's Day. https://elizabethbeggins.substack.com/p/my-caterpillar-teacher
It's pretty timeless. I worry that sharing anything after just a year could be tedious for engaged readers, but I have gained a lot (for me) of new subscribers in that time. Thinking maybe it's best to link it in a new post.
Thoughts appreciated. I know there's no one right way; just curious how others approach this.
I have a 13 year old blog that I'm using as a source for Substack posts. I generally find that I can add a paragraph that adds some new thinking, a different twist or highlight. I will do the same with Substack when it's time to recycle some of these posts.
I wait at least a year (as my newsletter is monthly) and make the reposting free to everyone, as a sample for free subscribers to consider upgrading to paid (and to nudge paid subscribers to check out the archives they may have missed). Important to edit / customise the accompanying email headers accordingly.
🟧 I’d love to embed my substack onto a page in my website. I’ve already added the sign up code from there, but I’d love to go one step further. I’ve also seen someone (not sure who and how) with a page on their substack that looked like an embedded page from their website and would love to know how to do that. I love the customisation here, I’ve added my wordmark and customised my colours and I’m so pleased with how cohesive and personal it’s looking. Will be continuing to explore further ways to customise 🤩
🟧 Thank you for the Notes tab! If you added an option to replace the Most Popular home page column with a Notes feed, my life would be complete. Do you have any plans to do this?
Those of us who work in multiple media formats could use a Notes feed to pull in our videos and other media that might be hosted elsewhere (YouTube, etc.), and make our home page a real hub for all of the content we're creating.
Yes, customizable welcome pages would be a great help. I would especially like the option to replace "no thanks" with something like the old "read it first." I don't see a way to do that anywhere.
Glad you found it, I was just about to point you to it! In case others want to find it, it's called "Opt out message on the welcome page" in the dashboard settings.
I will say, though, that we experimented with many different opt-out messages, and "No thanks" performed the best at converting readers to subscribers in general. But at the end of the day, you guys know your specific readers better than we do, so we left that setting in there.
And thanks all for the feedback on wanting more welcome page customization!
Honestly, I haven't tried any of the new tools yet. I've been busy with other projects, including creating a free "Depression and Anxiety Survival Kit" that I'm very proud of. You can get it here: wendigordon.gumroad.com
🧠 I have loads of sections, and would like to add one or two more. Part of the reason is that until recently we didn't have the tags facility. But I just wondered, given that the navigation bar is getting crowded now, how other writers have handled this situation. I write at https://terryfreedman.substack.com/ by the way. Thanks in advance for any suggestions.
Substack added this “newsletters” feature that bundles your sections in one tab in case you don’t want them all crowding your navigation. Just a thought (my navigation is still crowded, but that’s how I like it ;-)
Yeah, each link works just like the sections in your navigation, but if you choose to hide them from your navigation header, you can still show them in this tab.
I did an experiment and removed the section for my upcoming book “The Gifts of Heaven” from the top navigation, and it still appears in this “newsletters” tab.
Thanks, Robert. Yes, I think now that tags are possible, and apparently linking to tag URLs if I've understood @claire venus correctly, I'll try that, in secret at first!
Really good question, Terry! I only have two additional sections, and I'm happy with just those for now. I have a tendency to micromanage things like this, and I've been holding fire on setting up any more in an effort to keep things simple. I might have a play with tags sometime (although truth be told, I'm struggling to keep up with all the fabulous new stuff available to tinker with on Substack!!!). 🤣
✏️ I'm curious if anyone has had luck expanding a substack from one writer to several writers and/or bringing in a contract copy-editor to help out?
I'm thinking of starting to grow a bit more/faster and wondering if you all have any insights into how that works for you all, particularly around process. :)
There’s always room for guest writers or you can add one to your post. There’s plenty who have done that. Elle Griffin runs The Post which I think has a few writers.
I’ve done posts with a writer invited as a co writer. I guess working with a copywriter it depends whether you want to give them your log in or work with them off the platform? Like how much control you want?
hi All, anyone any thoughts on engagement rates and what to expect? I'm recently new, have about 1,000 visits and about 50 free subs. All in about 2.5 months. Is this par for the course or not? Views and experiences welcome!!
🟧 and ✏️ I make all wordmark/email header/welcome page/icon graphics with a transparent background. But I recently updated my newsletter icon, and also with one graphic in my last newsletter- they aren't transparent! I re-downloaded them from Canva and that did not solve the issue. Some work just fine. Anyways, wondering if anyone has some insight!
I have to ask first - when you download them from Canva are you making sure they come down as PNGs. Even if you always had them as PNGs before, Canva may have reset your settings. That's the first things to check. PNGs preserve the transparency, JPGs add a white background. I hope this helps! :-D
🟧 I recently changed the name of my newsletter and I was wondering if I can redirect the links on older posts to the new publication? The posts are all there but since the name changed they did not automatically redirect. This is making me go to previous 240 posts and change the links myself. Any suggestion? The publication is https://mindbodygoal.substack.com/ and an example of old post with broken link is -https://mindbodygoal.substack.com/p/i-have-big-goals-and-i-have-rules
There's a setting in the dashboard called "Change your subdomain without breaking links", which you can only do once. In your case, since you already changed it, you could maybe change it back to the original subdomain (using "Change your subdomain"), and then use the "Change your subdomain without breaking links" tool to change it to mindbodygoal once again. That should hopefully convert all your links automatically.
When you click your publication page it will say it’s name in the middle. If you upload a “stylised” word mark this replaces the default text with your publication name. It’s hard to get it to look good in my opinion so I’ve just left mine alone.
I love the new features (layout, tags, Notes) - it arrived at just the right time as I had an idea for content that didn't fit in my newsletters because of the frequency of publication. Notes solved that problem. The magazine layout turns out to support my content - pin my monthly theme post/newsletter and weekly prompts float around it. It's so cool, I love it!
🟧 - I have several sections on my site, and I would like to add people to a specific one, but not the main one. Is there a way to do that? Or to segment a list so only people not on one list or on two lists gets an email?
🟧 Will there be more than two threads in Writer Office Hours at some point? I'm very grateful for the attempt to provide some organization by topic, since it used to be impossible to wade through all of the comments to find those most helpful and relevant to me. However, the current thread options are so limited. Even just a third "miscellaneous" thread would be nice, but I'd especially appreciate more specific threads like "how to get more paid subscribers," "how to stand out and get discovered when you don't have many subscribers," and "newsletters about topic x (mental health in my case)."
🟧 Great work so far (especially tags). An improvement I'd like to see next... I'd like an additional level of organization for the navigation bar - a customizable drop-down option that would let me group multiple items under a single nav bar item (versus the current long and undifferentiated line of links). So I might make a top-level nav bar item called "Topics", and on the drop-down tied to that item I'd link to each of my tag pages (etc.). I already see this on some sites (Bulwark+ has exactly what I want https://plus.thebulwark.com/) but I guess they did that with some extra coding that's not in my skill set...
🟧 - Thank you to the Substack team for doing these office hours every week! I’m wondering if Substack will ever offer multiple tier-based pricing (like Patreon)?
I’m just starting out with my newsletter and I’d love to be able to allow my readers to support me at different levels and receive different benefits for this.
I would love that, or just the ability to set a price lower than the current lowest option of $5/month. There is one newsletter on Patreon by someone I especially want to support because they have helped me so much, so I subscribe for $1/month. It's the best I can do right now, and I think some of my subscribers might upgrade to paid if a lower priced option were available.
Yes, great reflection. I think the £1/$1 a month option on Patreon has been instrumental for a number of creators. I first came across it with Amanda Palmer, and it’s a lovely way for people to show support of the writers and artists they follow, and be a part of the community, and accessible for more people. I’d love to be able to allow this on my newsletter as well as 2-3 additional monthly tiers.
There are some really great tools now to personalise our Substacks. I've been experimenting with the "Feature" view and then having the most popular posts in a bar along the middle which seems to work well.
One thing I've noticed is that the dimensions of the thumbnails are a little narrower now so I've had to adjust those in my latest post. One to look out for with your old posts that might not looks as good now.
My latest post is here, and covers public speaking and how to nail that important presentation. Enjoy!
You are right. There was a small adjustment. If you’re using one of the feature option, the image aspect ratio for the center image has changed to 3:2. If you use images with text in them (for example), you may need to adjust their aspect ratio to integrate with the new design.
To help organize the conversation, please use one of the following emojis when you start a new comment.
✏️ - when asking questions or seeking feedback from fellow writers
🧠 - when sharing strategy or advice for fellow writers
🟧 - when asking a question you hope the Substack team can help answer
Use your emoji keyboard or simply copy and paste the emoji at the beginning of your comment.
✏️ I'm an example-learner. If you're super proud of your new page and think it's fab, please post a link. TIA.
I think I can still customise a few things but I'm pretty happy with mine https://doodlingdata.substack.com/
Love your doodles!
I love it!
I'm not sure I've done anything particularly different, but I do enjoy the colour balance and layout of mine at the moment. https://slake.substack.com/
TIA if you click :D
https://www.brighterdaysdarkernights.com/
I'm working on getting better at my cover images now that we have a more visual layout. I've also been filling in the links and recommendations settings to get that old-school blog feel going on, and organizing posts by section (this was before the new tag system which I am really looking forward to using, but haven't had a chance to really think through and implement yet).
Would love any thoughts or feedback, but yes, I'm proud of how my publication has grown and with the work I did implementing the new changes that let me highlight older posts better.
I've been working on this publication for just about 3 months now. I'm excited to see how it's coming along: https://artmasiah.substack.com
Wonderful animation work. Are you the artist?
Thank you! Yes I'm the artist
https://theinvestorsjournal.substack.com/
This is my Substack, I've really enjoyed writing and I like the new options to customize your page.
I'm still learning but I spend some time every week on a cover image: https://unpopularpsychology.substack.com/
Like your color scheme and the uniformity of it all...
Thank you! :)
I'm also clicking on various pics to view pages.
I would like to be able to post the appropriate emoji, but I am a man who comes from an era when people read more, wrote more, thought more and were infinitely more literate.
(Sorry if I sound like a pain in ass; then again don't I love to be the consummate, cantankerous, crabby pain in the ass)
As I said, I wouild like to post the appropriate emoji but I don't know how to access the list of emojis
WHEN LITERATURE DEGENERATES INTO ELEMENTARY SCHOOL ARTS AND CRAFTS
I am interested in words and ideas.
I am not interested in yellow or purple fonts
I am not interested in cutesy, pretty frills and adornments on one's substack page
I am not interested in an endless superfluity of fluff, foolishness and frivolous girlish chatter.
I want to be ablt to convey ideas without having to learn about the infantile bitchy vissisitudes of social meda maniacs.
Why do so many things on social media and on writers office hours remind me of Tricia Nixon's Whitehouse Wedding. I just can't stand the attention to form. I don't have the energy to master form.
In any event, I will now take my leave and let you kiddies frolic in the petty world of prettifying posts.
Hi David. I understand what you are trying to convey. The use of emijos here are not for fun or frivolity; they are to flag questions and suggestions so that the busy Substack team can quickly scroll and make certain they don't miss support issues and suggestions in the long stream of conversation here.
Regarding the rest of your post; I don't care to get involved in that drama.
"frivolous girlish chatter"?! oh yes, please do leave us, David. Pretentiousness and sexism = losing combo
The phrase "frivolous girlish chatter" might be sexist, but it is more than outweighted by my posts which have been very supportive of many aspects of feminism. I refer you, for example, to my post which delineates 8 specific and fatal flaws in Alito's abortion decision. This was posted to my newsletter on or around May 10, 2022 and bears this address: https://davidgottfried.substack.com/p/alitos-abortion-decision-exquisitely
Have you ever heard of the concept of masculine fragility? Could be of interest. Great that you're not anti-abortion.
Re Male Fragility: Some scientists note that testosterone levels and sperm counts are going down and that the incidence of gynocomastia (man tits) and serious aberrations in the genitals of male neonates (new borns) have been going up. (One of them is a horrid conditon in which the opening, for the emission of urine and sperm, is at he base of the penis instead of the head) Some scientists note that this may be the consequence of A) some pesticides and plastics which in some ways behave like derivatives of estrorgen AND B) birth control pills containing estrogen and/or its derivatives. Women on the pill excrete more estrogen, this gets into the water -- and in the Great Lakes some colonies of fish are becoming extinct because the male fish have lost their male attributes.
If you're on PC, you can press "WINDOWS KEY + ." to make the emoji list appear.
You can also simply highlight the emoji above from the list and copy and then pase it into chat.
The use of the emojis by the Substack team is presumably just to make their and our life easier when scrolling these big threads.
I don't understand this. If you don't like "pretty frills" etc you don't have to use them, do you? What's the problem?
🟧 - hi Substack team. I know this isn't strictly on topic, but could I ask whether we can have post stats include App opens as well as email opens? Or that it shows you one versus the other?
Katie, where do I we get these emojis, do they automatically come up when we type?
I want to take a moment to thank the team at Substack for listening and responding to our asks. I know it’s not possible to do all of them at once, but week after week I see updates and new changes. Thanks for being responsive!
I like the steady approach they've been taking to releasing new features - it allows us to experiment with each one in a sensible way so we can figure out if they fit into our workflow or not.
Just subscribed to your newsletter, Paul. There’s always something to learn.
Kate, a pleasure to have you here :)
I was just going to and discovered I already have. Wonder why I haven't been seeing your posts in my inbox :-(
Hrm - that's a little odd - Spam folder, maybe?
No. I think I just looked at the wrong times!
But, would it be too much to ask to have donuts supplied every Thursday?🍩🍩🍩🍩🍩🍩
I think Writer's Office Hour is BYOD... :-p
Well, of course, Susannah! Silly (and diabetic, but only slightly overweight) me!😊
LOL
Should’ve asked for pizza. Offices certainly provide that.
Hang on, Chevanne...........I'm busy: "Dearest Bailey.................."
😆
✏️Yes, I find Kate that the Substack team has been addressing asks more about efficiently
Yea, it makes you feel like the Substack team is actually working with you real-time.
Agree. I love these weekly updates and the rolling addition of new features.
well said, Kate
🧠Hello all, and happy Office Hours! Here's a little bit of encouragement from one small newsletter to all of you:
Today, I'm going to preach to myself. And I hope it resonates with some of you, too! Recently I was reading a journal that I kept during the early days of March 2020. And one line that I wrote to myself stood out: "You are not weak, or this would not have been tasked to you."
At that time, I didn't know all of the hardships that were coming my way. I didn't know about what was about to happen with my job, propelling me into writing fulltime. I certainly didn't know what Substack was! I just believed in the impossible belief that I was in the right place, however lost I felt.
Writer, hear me: you are not weak, or this craft of writing would not have been tasked to you. This is not an easy adventure, but it's a good one. Please don't stop, and please don't be discouraged. You're stronger than you think!
Most importantly: keep going, keep writing, and DON'T GIVE UP! 🌿
Yes!! Thanks S.E.! I've been feeling like a powerful writer for over a week now and it feels good to advocate for myself and my work, and to have fun in the process!
Hello S.E.! Missed your pep talks! I’m having a hard time finding the time to write, but doing my best. I’m going to start preparing my essay for next week today, wish me luck! And check it out, along with the rest of my stuff, at: sismanandrew.substack.com!
Like all the others, I, too, am so grateful to you for sharing the words of wisdom you imparted to yourself... and now to all of us. Deep bow 🙏🏾
Thank you S E Reid. I wish you the same . Your words are inspiring many right now like myself. I wish the same gratitude for you :)
The weekly S. E. Reid motivational fist pump. Always enjoy 👊
Thanks as always for your encouraging words! I, too, was propelled into writing after an unexpected job loss and other hardships (some of which are ongoing). But writing has helped my mental health enormously, at least when I remember that what matters most to me is not how many subscribers I have or how much money I make. It's the connections I make with others who relate to my struggles and appreciate my honesty and willingness to share the things that help me cope.
🟧 I'm very happy to see the introduction of tags, but I have some questions about how to use them.
I went through and added tags to all my posts. Most posts have one to four tags; the tags refer to the main topics that each post centers on. I ended up with 24 tags at this point, and 10 of those tags have enough posts that I want to call readers' attention to them. I created a page called Topics. This page lists the tags that have two or more posts, and a brief description of why readers might be interested in those particular posts:
https://mostlypython.substack.com/p/topics
I would expect tags to appear on a post's page, because that's how almost every site that's ever implemented tags has used them. When a reader finds a post interesting, they click on one of the tags, and they can find more content that's relevant to their interests. As far as I can see, Substack doesn't do this!
So, my questions are:
- Is there any plan to have tags appear on post pages automatically? I don't want to have to add them manually, and manually-added tags are really susceptible to link rot. But, I want to see them there because they're great for helping readers find relevant posts.
- Can you explain some of the thinking behind tags? It really feels like, given the current implementation, they're an attempt to address people's confusion around Sections rather than implementing a full tagging system. These seem like categories, not tags.
🧠I speak, Eric, as one who has yet to utilize tags! But, as I'm planning to, here's how I was planning on using them (based on what I hear is their purpose): To sort my different "lanes," I was going to use them to gather them together. I have several numbered "Inside Tracks" articles, all of them where I take a song, and dissect a handful of different available covers.
There's my "Audio Autopsy"s, where I highlight and dig deep into an artist or album that got little sales or airplay back in the day. Then, there's "GROW BIGGER EARS" where I make a themed Playlist on a certain topic....like songs about wanting or about air flight!
The point of doing that seemed to be looking ahead to something like tags (as I'm imgagining them to be). For you or anyone who writes in such a categorized fashion (however infrequently and tags or no tags), you might find it helpful to create some titled lanes like the above. If nothing else, I could actually start separate Substack categories or pages using any/either/or a couple of those titles and their accompanying articles!
Now, off to go play with tags!
That would work well I think, Brad
Oh, dang.......I was hoping that answer was going to be under the donut discussion! Well, I'm anxious to give tags a try.....I seem to do well with creative titling, and when I came up with those separate categories, I, of course, wanted to quiz myself to make sure the premise would/could be repeatable and sustainable, and yes, yes, and yes! Thanks, Terry....'cause I know you're familiar with what I'm prattling on about!
Indeed. Always glad to suggest things to a fellow prattler!
✏️Has it occurred to anyone that because we are all writers and 'creative' solutions are going in as many colourful and imaginative directions and perhaps difficult for more techy types to address 😂 Just a thought
Great point. I would love to use tags like I did in WordPress, but if Substack does not automatically create a tag "hierarchy" on the sidebar, then how are users supposed to find and make use of tags? I post every day and I'm willing to go back through 400+ posts to tag them all, but not without an effective process to use the tags.
Thank you for articulating your situation. This is a perfect use case for clarifying the distinction between tags and categories. If Substack offers you tags, you're going to add those in a much different way than if Substack offered you categories.
If you add tags and then Substack handles them as categories, that's going to be a mess. :/
✏️Sounds like Substack has mixed tags with implementation of categories which is what many have been asking for Eric. I reminds me of someone teaches me how to dance..step one...cross two..turn. Ah! forget it just let me feel the music and that has made all the difference
I used tags for the first time today. Besides creating tags and tagging my posts, this is how else I used my tags:
1. I used them in navigation bard instead of sections (which I was previously using)
2. I used them as Homepage links to direct users to my book in progress and upcoming writing project.
For now, I see Tags as a replacement for Sections. Let's see what comes next. I liked your topics page idea for using tags.
Yeah, an interesting aspect of this rollout is that just tagging posts doesn't actually do anything. You then have to either add some tags to your navigation bar, or build a standalone page to collect tags (manually), or add tags to the actual post (manually).
No other tagging system I've ever seen makes you take that second step. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but Substack really needs to clarify how they want people to use tags. For example it's going to look pretty dumb on my part if I manually add tag links at the end of all my posts, and then a week later Substack puts tags into the header or footer automatically. Not to mention a bunch of time lost on our end!
That’s true. What I basically did was to remove Sections and replace them with Tags. Let’s see what comes next. Right now I don’t have so many posts but on the long run it might be hard to reshuffle everything just to use a new feature. So I hear you about the tags.
It still looks like sections to me, Claudia. At tthe top I mean
That's the trick, but they are tags. You can see it in the URL: https://claudiabefu.substack.com/t/cli-fi
It's a 't' instead of an 's'.
PS I meant to say thank you, Claudia
🤗 always a pleasure chatting with you, Terry!
Likewise, Claudia 😃
Oh right. But what difference does it make in practical terms? I suppose it work quite well if you have lots of sections. Trouble is, I've written so m any articles, I can't face the thought of going through them all tagging them. It would take me longer than the life of the universe. I wish there was a way of doing bulk tagging
Sections are like different newsletters from which the read can unsubscribe. Can’t do that with tags.
I only have 14 posts. And it took time to switch everything around. Don’t know if I would do that with your amount of articles… 😶
Oh yes, thanks for clarifying and reminding me. Perhaps I'll make future would-be sections into tags instead
🧠I tried out tagging on my last article but fell into the trap of when I have used hashtags, tags, or categories, I end up with too many, which probably defeats the purpose. On my WordPress platform, where I also publish, I was a little more successful in creating categories and listing posts that way, plus I have tagged as descriptors. Anyway, I will play around with the tags on Substack and see its benefit. I just looked back at my last post and don't see any of the tags; maybe it's because I didn't enter them separately. https://www.inmindwise.com/p/what-i-learned-from-my-fathers-death
That's why it really needs to be clarified. Tags are meant to be a larger set than categories. Tags exist at a finer level of detail than categories. This distinction becomes more significant as the archive grows, so some people are feeling it more than others at this point.
Great question. I added tags on my last post and am hoping they don't appear to my readers.
Really awesome question. I am waiting for the answers too. Wow thank you Eric
Curious about this too
Great questions Eric
I'd like to hear this as well! I've only added two tags to a handful of posts so far. I like how you consolidated all the topics under one link at the top of your page, rather than listing them all across the top. May do that myself the more I write.
Thanks for the question and the suggestion about tags.
It's certainly helpful to hear what the team is thinking. I would hope that the team figures out whether these really are tags, or if they're meant to be categories.
I think that distinction is important because it affects how people use them. If they're clearly tags, many of us are going to end up with 40-60 tags. If you implement standard tagging features, that should work. If you implement features that only expect writers to have 3-10 tags, like categories, that might break things for people who have used tags in the traditional way.
Tags are great! Please implement the rest of a traditional tagging system! They're a very clearly understood way for people to find the content they're interested in from a writer with a deep archive. :)
This is a key distinction to think through and for Substack to speak to for UI purposes if nothing else.
I originally was going to tag posts with tags but wound up using 10 less descriptive categories because I wasn't clear what the UI would be.
Like you, I build a page with tags but deleted it because it didn't look like an Archive page but rather just another post with a published date.
🟧 Is there a plan to auto-generate a Tags page like Archive?
And, if not, is there a way to hide the published date header on a custom page?
Thanks!
Becca thank you so much for that reply (and Eric for bringing up tags!) I recently figured out how to use tags for my own publication, but had the hardest time figuring out how to set up my top-line navigation. I had originally done it as a Page, and then listed the various posts within the page, but I wanted a simple list. You can do it via tags... just put the tag itself into the Nav, but that does not allow you to put in that short description below, which I really wanted.
Looked through the Help Center but there was nothing on sections vs tags vs pages (at least I couldn't find it!) and then finally figured out it was a SECTION I needed to set up, like this:
https://themuse.substack.com/s/the-literary-cafe
Am now a happy Substack camper. :)
I think you got right to the confusion that many people have. As the feature set grows, I would love to see Substack put out a How-to guide about the distinction between tags and sections. What content-discovery problems are tags meant to solve? Which ones are sections meant to solve? To be fair to substack, these questions are harder for a combined newsletter/ archive site than a site that just deals with newsletters or just deals with blogs.
If writers' thinking is aligned with Substack's thinking, we'll all end up in the right place. If we're both thinking different things, we'll end up confused and our readers will as well.
Substack team, please write this short article!
✏️Hi Eric, thanks for the guide you provided for the Interface issues a while back. When I jumped on today I noticed Substack had whole sections on Tags and Pages, but using them can be a bit of a hike, so we'll see 😊
Completely agree Eric. My main confusion was not so much tags vs sections but pages vs sections. As in, how is a page different from a post as opposed to a section?
Somewhat related to that, I'm also finding the search engine in the Help Center doesn't pull up a lot of articles relevant to the search query... hopefully that will improve over time as well.
✏️Yes Birgitte, I have yet to find sufficient answers to my queries in 'help center'
looks nice, Birgitte
Thank you Terry ❤️ I'm big on visual design, so it was important to get it right. All of this ofc takes precious time away from writing, and yet, and yet... it ADDS to the writing, so it's all time well spent.
Yes. It's funny: I can spend half an hour writing a great article, and then 2 hours finding the best illustration for it. Last year I met someone who selects the illustration in five minutes, and then spends two hours writing the article! But the two aspects definitely enhance each other methinks.
I'm willing to bet that someone doesn't **always** publish that way. I've worked with photography and design for many years—it's like a rubber band. Sure, you can find a great image in 5 minutes. I've done that. You can also spend an hour (been there too), because what you have in mind takes longer to find. Ditto with writing.
But the fact we can write great articles in such a short span of time only demonstrates the years of long hard work we've got under our belts isn't that so Terry! :)
Yea, I'm a quicker writer than I am an illustrator-finder too!
✏️I love selecting the images Birgitte but sometimes can't find that one companion piece sitting in my head, so I just leave it until it flows out of the writing which has then taken on new meaning ...'that's the stuff' Recall the 'Creative' Writing teachers of old who preached the top down method and turned untold #s off ever becoming writers. 'Start where ya start and go where ya go Follow the pen and let the inspiration flow' 😊
If tags are still a work in progress, I wonder if you’re considering a feature that allows the writer to organize them in some kind of index (much the way Squarespace does: https://jmelliott.org/journal)?
Ooh, liked nested tags into high level categories?
Exactly! That would be my ideal :-)
Having a detailed About page has really helped with subscribers. I see so many Substacks with nothing in their About page.
I don’t always have time to read through newsletters so reading the About page gives me an idea of who you are and what you write about.
If there is no About page, I skip the Substack.
Yes, I almost always go to the About page first--or at least second, after reading an article I've liked. I'm always surprised to see so many with the canned Substack suggestion. There's no better way to introduce yourself to people you want as subscribers!
Yes! It is one of the first pages I go to.
Off to re-examine my About page ... thanks!
Ditto!
I love me a good about page!
Would you be open to give me feedback on mine?
https://mindbodygoal.substack.com/about
Looks good! You have clearly defined what you write about. ❤️
Thank you Jenovia. Means a lot :)
Thanks Sofia :)
I just went and revised my About page to make it more interesting. Thank you!
I think my About page, on the other hand, is too detailed, so I probably need to simplify it for new potential readers. My About page came from more historical and promotional material on my professional WordPress website. So I agree with you about the page but not overdo it, which might be counterproductive.
I agree. I started with the default About page and revised it a few months in after I had a better idea of my focus and subscriptions have picked up since (not sure if causal or just correlation).
Great to see this perspective. Have seen others suggest it should be short, whereas mine is pretty long. But I really prefer just explaining my entire rationale as well as goals + ethics so that my readers know what to expect and what I find important.
I concur! Mine is long as well. I feel the only person that has the ability to truly assess how long or short an About page should be is the person that it is about.
Great point
I love the look of the new Substacks and the customization options.
I also wanted to mention some other visual and formatting best practices and areas that we can improve when we're writing our newsletter.
- Use clear and distinctive titles and headings that help to signpost the reader as they're going through your writing.
- Break down complex subjects into bulletpoints, these are great for "unordered lists" where you don't need to make statements in a particular order.
- For complex points where you're walking the reader through, step by step, use numbered lists.
- Keep paragraphs short, and just cover one or two key points in each one. Give the reader time to absorb that before moving onto the next para.
- Make good use of whitespace to give the reader's eye a break as they're reading through your newsletter.
- Use horizontal lines and images to break up the text.
- Make sparing use of bold and italic text to highlight important points.
- Use block or pull quotes to add some distinct formatting and call attention to specific areas of your newsletter.
All of these techniques help to make your content more readable, which improves engagement and makes it more likely to be shared.
🧠Thank you for sharing these tips, super helpful- I’m not put off by long articles, but if they’re blocks of text, it can be hard to absorb! I’ve created decorative dividers and sharing the high resolution png files with paid subscribers along with other illustrations. I love reading and I think that combined with simple illustrations and pictures can add some extra magic 🪄
Hi Emily, I had never seen that in any other newsletter before. Though I am not an artist like you but I am going to take you as an inspiration and make something other than lines for the dividers. They say copying is the best way to flatter.. Though I will not copy you but I am really inspired by your out of box thinking here. Thank you :)
Ah that’s lovely Sheetal! If you’re looking for an easy way to do some of your own, Canva is a great simple design tool to use and has free stock illustration assets that you could use!
I will try that Emily . Thank you :)
I've not seen this before either and it's striking. I may want to play around with this idea sometime.
Absolutely. I think decorative dividers are a great idea - anything that gives the eye a rest.
Interesting idea. However, I am afraid that this will up the email size too much, with longer posts, especially with images/graphs, I sometimes go right up to the max size. But using lower resolution images could still work perhaps.
Yes Robert, I have reduced my images to large. Love the effect of the wide view esp to effect and enhance the relax factor perfect for some themes. But can be a bit much for readers in desktop view. When I started I previewed my drafts on mobile view only
I've gotten the too long error message a few times but the emails still are complete. Does anyone know what the actual limit is? And is it length (word count) or size (pics, embeds)?
Pretty sure it's size, and its got something to do with gmails message size limit if I recall correctly.
Haven’t had that problem yet with the decorative illustration elements, but I did run into trouble when attempting to include a couple of gifs in one of my articles…
can you get gifs to move inside posts? when I post gifs they do not move
Agree, skyscrapers (aka long tall blocks of text) are tough to climb. Give us something to grab onto!
I agree.
Thanks for reminding us of png files to be used as dividers! I've seen them in a few of the Substack publications I read, but always forgot to create some and add them to my own writings. It definitely adds to the visual presentation.
Can I ask how you add decorative dividers? I can't figure it out. I go to those sites that offer dividers and when I try to apply them there's always too much white space around them. As if they're images, instead. Thanks.
You'll have to find images with .png rather than .jpg. The background for .png is transparent, so it won't show.
Thank you!
I am using png images with transparent backgrounds, Ramona. There is more white space, but I get around it (to some extent) by making the image file short and wide, 2000px x 300px. Canva is a great tool for this if you’re looking for something simple
nice drawings, Emily. I've subscribed. My own drawings tend to be simpler. I should have called mine "Draws while I was writing"!
Thanks Terry!
You're welcome
I think decorative dividers are a game changer for me as a reader
Thanks Claire!
Great tips, thanks for sharing!
I tend to use white space and headings rather than lines where possible. I always think a line can look too final, and deter the reader from going further. Probably just all in my head
One really amazing thing about being on writer hour is to find great writers you won't otherwise. Why is not appearing on my notes I wonder but I am so glad I was here as I found your newsletter really really good. Subscribing right away Terry.
Thank you so m uch! I agree, Sheetal. Just subscribed to yours too :-)
:) that's an honor.. See you there .
all this praise is going to go to my head. If you wish to comment further, please contact my secretary (Her name is Minty and she wears a yellow collar)
:D
Well, will have to take appointment from Minty Mam
I tend to agree with your thoughts on "Lines'.
🟧 But I'm wondering just how much we can control the spacing? Doesn't it default to double space no matter how much white space we actually add?
I think soi, Joan, if memory serves me well. My preferred way of breaking up text is through subheads and pictures
I should include more subheadings...
I've never looked at lines in that way, but you've made me take a closer look at how I use them - thanks!
You have to draw the line somewhere, Becks. That's what I always say
Definitely worth experimenting to see what works for you - I'm very much a "tidy things into boxes" kind of person - but I know that's not for everyone!
Me too. But it is getting a bit unwieldy! A shame in a way that we can't have cascading menus or whatever their called, you know the nested ones.
I was of the same mindset, Terry but used a few lines between sections recently and liked the look. Continuing to evolve ...
Thanks, Bruce. I didn't know you could do that
Not official Sections but rather sections ( different chunks of content).
Oic
Thank you for these tips, Paul! Saving them...! 😊
Glad to be of service!
how, Rebecca? have you copied and pasted>?
Yup! 😊
great idea
✏️I agree with all your Writing directives Paul and have them in place in my articles. Bold and Italics features may be used differenty perhaps?
All solid tips, Paul and I agree with you.
I've been employing many of these and still refining formatting week to week. I welcome any feedback from you or others. It's how we all get better.
I have a newsletter going out tommorow that will be longer than my usual ones. These tips will really help me make sure my paragraphs aren't too long or overhwelming fo rmy readers. Thanks!
Very helpful, I have used many of these suggestions, and all seem helpful. I used to break things up with images or photos but founds this took too much time and often would break up the flow too much for readers or be distracting.
Thanks Paul, good points, all.
These are great tips. Thank you!
Couldn't agree more! I do most, if not all these practices naturally so I'm glad I'm on track! ;)
All very good tips.
🧠 I have set a goal of spending 15 minutes on Notes every day to interact with other writers and find new substacks to subscribe to. This has brought more traffic to my own publication and created a couple new free subscribers.
✏️ Any other personal essay/humorists over here? Also, I'd appreciate feedback on the project I'm currently working on "40 before 40" I'm writing 40 essays before I turn 40 years old in December as a memoir-ish exercise in writing.
Happy Thursday!
Great commitment! Do it now, before you have to write 80 before 80!
😂
LOL facts
I've been also spending some time on Notes, but after the euphoria of the first weeks, I got tired of reading and answering snippets. It's very distracting. I'm currently taking a break from Notes and focusing on my short story.
I'll keep that in mind.
I can see how that can get tiring. It's good to know when you need to walk away from it and take a break.
Some people are made for social media. But some are not. I fall in the second category. It’s a pity because it’s a good feature for getting traction but ultimately I’m here to write and tea good writing. Don’t want to end up twitting.
Your 🧠 point reminded me that I need to add to peruse Notes daily! And add an allotted time for reading more Stacks too. I have an app I use for time management to even remember to take my vitamins in the morning, so adding those other important Substack tasks will be helpful.
I love that challenge you've given to yourself! I adore personal essays and never looking into humorists so I'll follow along for any answers as well (thanks for asking!).
I've been finding my footing over on my Substack, but have written a small handful of personal essays, and while this is the end of my 2-week break, my brain finally unplugged and flowed out a ton of essays, poems, and pieces I'm scheduling and editing for the very near future.
Personal essays are what I love to write though, so definitely check out anything that isn't a "Friday Reflection" on my page for 'em. Haha. That's the final tag I'll add for now on my backend: personal essays--so they're easier to find! Gonna do that today or before the weekend.
I write about navigating losing my mom after caregiving for her full time for 8 years, death, and thoughts on re-discovering yourself and (soon) more thoughts on God and my changing relationship with Him and spirituality.
Good luck on the 40 before 40 challenge you've given yourself! I know you can do it! :D
Thanks for the encouragement!
Hi Walter, I always try to put humor into my essays, so it will at least put a smile on my face. Of course, your getting the 40 done depends on how soon you turn 40. I've just turned 80, so my goal is to stay active, and alive, keep my humor, and maybe write many more essays before I lose my wit.
Active and alive is good! I hope I'm writing at 80 like you!
Alex Dobrenko is a humorist. Occasionally hilarious.
Already following him, good stuff!
Hey Walter, good to see another essayist/humorist on here. I like your idea of time blocking for Notes. I think I need to start doing that to. What do you typically post? Something funny?
Oh wow, I just saw your profile. What advice would you give a beginner like me that wants to break into the essayist/humorist genre?
My advice is write here consistently and build up an audience. For nonfiction, the platform is always a selling point with agents/editors. Or you can self-publish. Humor can be tricky because not everyone will find you funny. Be sure to stay true to yourself and attract the people who find you funny.
Recently I started a series called 40 before 40. I'm trying to write 40 essays before my 40th birthday in December. English as a Second Language is about how I learned English in Mexico and I think it's a good mix of funny with heart: https://open.substack.com/pub/walthercantu/p/english-as-a-second-language let me know what you think.
Ooh, I love your 40 before 40 idea!
I have also seen that that works very well, as does commenting on others' work / notes.
Walther, so glad you mentioned this thing . I am working on my 40 goals before I turn 40 and I write that on https://mindbodygoal.substack.com/
Going to check out yours right away :)
What a small world!!
Let's go!
I write personal essays. Some of them are funny.
Oh that sounds a great framework
Hey Walther! I write personal essays and memoir, so if you like reading that, give Practice Space a try! I post biweekly, and the essays range from musings on death to the stories behind my favourite T-shirts. I'd also love to spend more time on Notes, and maybe I should take your example.
I love it, will check it out!
✏️ What tools do you use to find images or create visuals for your Substack?
I tend to go outside or walk through my house and think about what I could take a picture of that would fit whatever I am writing about.
Pexels and Google
Canva. Easy to use, lots of freely available images.
I use Canva for most of my images or visuals, if I don't have photos of my own.
Same!
Own images or embedded search 🔍
My Substack is about hand-drawing data vizzes, so normally posts come with my own doddles 😀. If I need though, I like to use my own photos, I tend to take a pic of pretty much anything around and hence have a large collection
I make my illustrations traditionally and then use Photoshop to clean them up for the web. :-D
I need to get deeper into this now that I have 500 subs…game on! BTW, I use www.pexels.com for free imagery - just need to mention the source and photographer…great content there…
Pixabay is great too, and of course the "Search" function for images in Substack itself queries Unsplash, another free resource, and credits the author if you use the images in your newsletter.
Pixabay and Pexel are both excellent. I compiled a list of 25 free image sites, some of which include famous works of art; there's also an AI search engine for images. https://terryfreedman.substack.com/p/25-websites-for-free-illustrations
A great list! It took me hours to find my way out. Great job Terry!
😂 Hours? I only shared it five minutes ago! Thanks, Ben!
Thanks, Terry; this will be valuable to me, as I'm thinking of designing my own book cover for my next book. So far I have been using Canva to make up collages of pictures from their stock photos for my posts.
A pleasure. Hope it proves useful, Ron
even better!
😂
Terry - an excellent resource - thanks!
Cheers, Paul. You're welcome.
I love how easy this search is and just wish it had a deeper stock collection.
Substack recently also added the option to generate your own images. I have been playing around with that for a bit, it makes some great art that AI of theirs.
Congrats on your numbers! I'm starting to get into the new features too, but I don't yet have much experience with them. What's your favourite of the newly added features?
Too early to tell impact...#1 growth driver is a publication Recommendation from a Top Substack Author with 10,000 subs....flatter honestly and let it happen organically...
Congrats James!
+1
Congrats James. I finding great examples of writers beyond my orbit and seeking their process, asking for feedback and their immense knowledge that comes from doing the work . So, I would love to pick your brains if you have some time. I will be immensely grateful to you for this ..
What advice would you give yourself if you were starting a new publication on Substack without carrying forward your existing subscribers?
If there are only 3 things you could do in a day to grow the publication, what those 3 things would be?
I have 28 subscribers and 240 posts , that says something about me . LOL. But I never really worked on getting subscribers and substack was not a good platform for me as I had none to begin with. I learned it slowly but now I am putting myself out there and meeting people like yourself.
Congrats on 500! And love Pexels when I'm in a crunch to create visuals.
A quick tip that I saw elsewhere and wanted to share here: It can be worth having a "header" to your email which briefly re-introduces your publication, so that readers can remember why they subscribed to you. For example, at the top of mine I have:
"Hi there. You’re reading "Ironclad Creative,” my newsletter to help freelancers, content creators, and business owners deal with the challenges of an ever-changing world. If you want to work effectively, create beautiful content, be successful, and build trust, then I hope you find inspiration here.
If this newsletter is useful to you, I’d love it if you could forward it to a friend, share it, or hit that like button. Thanks so much! Paul."
I don't know if it helps, but I figure it can't hurt!
Edited to add: You're welcome to copy this wording for your own newsletter if it's helpful :)
Don't know if it would help with current subscribers, but you sharing that additional info here just made me become a free subscriber! I do include a header with each email thanking subscribers and encouraging them to like, comment, and/or share, but it doesn't re-introduce what my newsletter is about.
Wendi, thanks for the subscribe! I'm a big believer in passing on tips that I've found helpful - a rising tide lifts all boats!
This is mine: Hi, I’m USA Today bestselling fantasy author, editor, and publisher Russell Nohelty. I sit at the intersection of craft and commerce, helping writers navigate the sticky bit between writing something that lights them up inside and building an audience of superfans that adore their work.
I don't remember if I added that, but thank you for posting that here! Added it to my small list of "tune-ups" to check into on the back end. :)
I also added a virtual "tip jar" to my email footer (and maybe header? Again, gotta check!) and I've gotten two lovely tips so far (but also don't know if it came from an actual newsletter. Don't think so though because I ALWAYS forget to mention that people can "buy me a one-time matcha" if they'd like).
For the tip jar, did you add a button with a link to something like buymeacoffee?
I just added a little quip that said something along the lines of “you can also buy me a (one-time) matcha to support my writing!” that linked to my BuyMeACoffee page.
I forgot you can add buttons! I thiiiiink the buttons need HTML and I don’t think you can embed code in on Substack?
But adding a link’s been working pretty well (two lovely people tipping me!)
Great, thanks! I may be wrong but I think you can use the "custom button" functionality where you'd just provide a link, no need to write HTML.
I'll check it out cause I completely forgot about those features on BMAC, so thanks for reminding me!
And you're welcome! :)
Generally, I don't like a lot of stuff that comes before the actual post ... but normally it's stuff about why someone should subscribe. I like your idea of a "why you're here" reminder and am going to consider implementing that. Thanks!
I think this is such a good idea and I tried to do that in my header but now lots of folks read in the app I’m like 🤯
I've seen this on a few and have thought about adding to mine.
Question: where do you put this? Manually at top of each issue or in Settings somewhere? If latter, does it only show up on emails and not in app?
Go to Dashboard > Settings > Publication Details > Email banner, header, and footer settings > Edit
I don't have Publication Details or Email banner, header, and footer settings under Settings... I only have Publication and it shows my substack name and picture. As with so many of these options that others find so easy, when I go follow the directions, it doesn't work that way on my page.
Thank you!
I haven't added this info, but it sounds like a good idea, and I have noticed it on other Substacks. Is it OK to use a closely related version of yours? I know it is useful, but I struggle with what I call clutter, which I why I haven't added it. I'll give it a whirl and see if there is any notable reaction...
Joan, absolutely - use it however you want :)
Thanks, Paul!
✏️ Hi! Longtime listener, first-time caller. I'm wondering if people have success with doing occasional (or even regular?) stories outside their niche? I normally write humorously about travel/trying new things, and all of the anxiety-inducing problems adventuring can bring. But I'm working on a sort of essay about my quest to clear out years' worth of emails from my inbox and become a more organized person. In a way, this is trying a new thing (i.e. getting my life together), so I thought I might be able to use it for Substack. But the essay is more serious and less focused on actually, you know, leaving the house to try new things. How have people fared when they venture outside of what they've been doing? I am sure it depends on many factors, but I'd love to hear others' experiences. Is it better to try to frame it as something that sort of IS related to my niche, or to own it and say "I'm doing something different this week?"
I feel like I’m taking my readers on a journey I’m on too and it’s mostly fine
love this short and sweet response! thank you!
You’re so welcome! ✨
I love this perspective!
I recently introduced lyric essays into a mix of otherwise very straightforward and linear writing. People are loving it! I did mitigate the risk on the first one by saying explicitly that it was an experiment and asking what people thought about it. This way readers don't think they are suddenly going to get something totally different from now on. I think ultimately changing it up sometimes makes you a more interesting writer. I say go for it!
Thank you, Rae! I think the mitigation note is a good idea, and a way to invite reader feedback. I just read and loved your laundry post!
When I came on to Substack I decided to write about everything, especially stuff outside my niche. The only problem I think is that people elsewhere who know me for my niche aren't as interested as I hoped they would be. It's been great fun though, and really expanding in many ways
I write about everything, too – and never had a niche. I was a jobbing social researcher/writer in my working life and took on anything I thought I could do. Now, I write about whatever takes my interest as an active 81 year old. Would you join me in pressing Substack to create a category for those of us who don't fit into any category? I have raised this several times, managed to get the attention of one Substack person who said he would think about the issue, but no action as yet. I promised them that one of my strong personal characteristics is that I am persistent. And I am.
Getting the attention of a Substack person who said she/he will think about it is good going. I managed it once. I get the impression that all suggestions go into a pot, and they look into them as and when.
Thank you Terry! This is helpful, and so is your Substack! Just subscribed :)
Very pleased it was, Emily. Just subscribed to yours as well. All the best, T
I do this often. I think the key is, like you said, to frame it in a way that people who are listening/reading can get something out of it.
I think everyone's advice is spot on: as long as you lead the reader with "This is new writing territory for me," they'll be fine.
I'd also toss in that I have a growing list of "does this fit, does this not fit?" topics that I think ALSO can make great guest posts. So that's something to keep in mind if a piece of writing feels really far out, maybe it's meant for someone else's readers. : )
Thank you, Amanda! That list is a fantastic idea. Really enjoyed your most recent post, the meatball story was both hilarious and painfully relatable. Why is it that sometimes the low-effort thing you throw together at the last minute gets the most love?
Okay, first of all, you know I'm committed to adding a comment here, because the page jumped three different times as I was trying to get my thoughts together, but I persevered. LOL!
My $02 is that there is no reason not to share this quasi-tangent. It is relevant to many, it's a version of trying something new, and as long as you find your way back to your chosen subject-matter next time (or the time after that), your readers will probably appreciate the slight variation of theme. Sounds interesting!
I HATE when the page jumps around when you try to comment! Haha
I agree with ya! I think one of the most freeing things about Substack is that you (or at least I) feel like you can FINALLY give yourself permission to BE YOURSELF.
Of course, listen in to what your community is loving or wants, but I know I personally stopped trying to strategize moves to most optimized content and just post and see what happens! Always putting my happiness and wanting to express *me* over trying to stay in some strict standard or rule I'm only making myself, ya know?
I like your idea of always keeping your community in the loop. Just mention that you were wanting to write about something new and hope they enjoy it!
Definitely give yourself permission to explore different topics and try new things. Maybe even make it a series or sometimes series you can now create into a section readers can return to.
Than you, Cierra! I like the idea of a series; I was thinking about that. I saw your recent post mentioning the negative toll of Substack Notes and I agree. It's always a balance between being yourself and wanting validation and popularity for your writing, right? I mean, it almost feels crass to say so, but that's part of what we are all seeking, I think.
Thank you so much for persevering, Elizabeth! I really could have shortened things up by using the phrase "quasi-tangent" in my original comment haha. Loved your "Dog People" post about sweet Basil.
I saw your "like" pop up over there, Emily - thanks for reading. We see Basil when we FaceTime our daughter (who still works with the same family), and we were able to spend time with him again last September, when we ventured to Oz to visit. What a journey. If your travels haven't taken you down under, I highly recommend it!
Haha I'd love to visit Australia! I'm glad things are working out there for your daughter. :)
I've been thinking about the same thing as I start to explore ideas that are not specifically "real life through popular fiction" I think specificity is helpful for readers to opt in and set expectations. It's also helpful to give ourselves a framework to eliminate decision fatigue, but it's worth pushing against when it begins to limit expression. In the end, our experiences and our pov are the thruline of all our work- regardless of change in theme or tone or structure. That said, I think it's worth considering if these new ideas are outliers or signifying a new chapter in your creativity that may need a dedicated space carved out.
I haven't quite reconciled how to apply this to action for myself, so I'm curious to see everyone else's thoughts!
Thank you, Tami! This is pleasantly optimistic (outsourced or otherwised) and also extremely useful. Also, your Substack is so visually appealing! I love it the concept and the execution.
Lol I'm so glad (And thank you so much!!)
I've been in my professional niche for so many years, and it always, in some way seems to be integrated into my work. I try more now to keep it on the personal side as it brings me more into the passion and emotions of the story. I do too frequently fall into being educative or academic, but it is always about learning the craft of creative non-fiction. My last essay: https://www.inmindwise.com/p/what-i-learned-from-my-fathers-death
Love this.
Thank you, Ron! I liked that this essay was emotional and personal, but also included "Points to Ponder" at the end to invite reflection by your readers.
Your "quest" sounds intriguing to me, so I would say go for it. It's not like switching to another niche (like politics or finance). It's a human story that sounds relatable.
My advice is to A) not apologize for it. B) put any explanation at the bottom of the page rather than the top. You'll see over time how your readers respond and if it merits another section.
Obviously, just one person's perspective!
Super helpful, thank you! Certainly not switching to politics or finance any time soon haha.
I've thought about this and one way I'm considering is by using Sections.
I need to look into that, thank you!
I send a mix of subjects with my newsletters and I think when you’ve found your voice, what you write comes through and people will respond positively. I wouldn’t be afraid of exploration because the change of pace might actually resonate with more people.
You don’t necessarily have to say you’re doing something different, maybe start a narrative with what your train of thought is at the moment. Readers will get the idea of where you’re going.
Thank you, Chevanne!
I have started sections and I have headers for each post coming from a different section. I would just introduce a new section to your readers in the first post that deviates. We should be able to grow as writers and people in our Substacks and as long as we're upfront with our readers, I think that is ok.
I like your perspective here, Sarah!
Thanks!
Thank you so much, Sarah! I think that could be the way to handle it.
Good luck!
I think either approach is fine.
I've been experimenting with different themes and topics and try to sign post it when I introduce it. Some may like it because it's your unique voice. Others may skip because it's a different topic. All good.
I'm all for trying new things out and I do warn readers when I do that. I think if you've built enough trust with people, they'll be willing to roll with whatever you send them.
🧠 Some tips that I've accumulated from my own experience with Substack
1) Watch out when pasting passages with quotes! When pasting in from other editors, sometimes you can end up with smart quotes that go the wrong way. I use the browser's find feature to do a quick scan though to make sure the quotes are all straight.
2) If you paste text with embedded links from a Substack post into a Note, it looks fine when you paste it…but then barfs once the Note is posted. Give your Note a look once it's posted to make sure it looks right.
3) Take some time to dig through all the settings in your writer dashboard. Some things are buried many layers deep, or hard to find. For example, did you know you can manage which blurbs that other writers have written about your substack that appear on your welcome page?
e.g. https://YOURSUBSTACKHERE.substack.com/publish/settings/blurbs
you can check those blurbs by adding ?showWelcome=true to your URL, e.g.
https://bowendwelle.substack.com/?showWelcome=true
4) Now that we have Tags, use them instead of Sections unless you have a really really good reason to want people to be able to sub/unsub to different sections. That said, don't get too excited about putting in a million tags; you'll probably want to change them, etc, and most people will just use the search on your archive page to find posts.
5) Also in Settings: consider turning on the Notes tab, so that people who find your Stack can also find your Notes.
6) Revisit and update your Home, About and Welcome pages regularly. Don't forget that you may have pinned certain posts and may want to update those as well.
Keep writing, have fun, and as Charlie Becker put it recently, "Do the weirdest thing that feels right."
AN ORDINARY DISASTER
A book-length memoir of a man thrashing against being alone—and then learning to live with the fact that we are _all_ alone, serialized right here on Substack:
https://bowendwelle.substack.com/
I don't REALLY want to take the time to do so, BUT I'm thinking that you're right about the tags helping with cleaning up my sections. So many summer projects!
I did know about the blurbs that others wrote about you, and i have it enabled, but for some reason they don't appear on my homepage. I wonder whether it depends on the number of subscribers one has
they don't appear on your home page, they appear on the welcome page, and you can check by adding ?showWelcome=true to your URL, e.g.
https://doodlingdata.substack.com/?showWelcome=true
...e che piacere scoprire un'altro scrittore (scrittrice?) in Italiano! Il tuo stack mi sembra molto interessante!
Oh thank you Bowen, do you speak Italian ❤️🇮🇹?
Thanks for the answer too, is that what new subscribers would see though (that query param in the URL?
si, parlo l'italiano; ho studiato al universita di Padova, molti anni fa! Il scrivere e' un po più dificile, pero amo l'italiano lo stesso.
> is that what new subscribers would see (that query param in the URL?)
not sure I understand your question, but, yes, I'm pretty certain it is - try it out...
🟧 Suggestion for Substack on the new homepage layout. I'd love to be able to specify which article I want in which spot on the homepage. To get them to land where I want them in the five highlighted posts, they have to be selected in a very specific order. I'd love to be able to say I want this article in spot 1, this article in spot 2, etc. without having to figure out what order to pin them in.
Yes, this would be so helpful! I want my page to work like a magazine and moving posts would keep it fresh.
This! Would be fantastic to have more control over this. Have asked for this a couple of times as well.
🟧 -Hi! I've been talking in Notes with many smaller creators who are concerned about the way substack mostly seems to promote larger accounts. Smaller accounts can have a lot of trouble gaining traction, and often feel like they're yelling into the void. The fact that search doesn't work very well on notes doesn't help.
I wrote about some of these issues here.
https://noahberlatsky.substack.com/p/substack-doesnt-love-the-little-guy
Again, these concerns do seem to resonate with a lot of creators. I hope substack will consider ways in which it might create regular forums for highlighting smaller accounts, and perhaps search features that make it easier to locate topic specific writers, or people with a smaller footprint.
Thanks!
Totally agree, and I suggested new threads in Writer Office Hours, including one specifically about how to stand out among the many newsletters and get discovered when you don't have many subscribers.
Yes that idea would be great Wendi
Thanks Noah for this acknowledgement. I am on of those writers who are writing for close to 8 months ( daily ) and I have 28 subscribers - half of which is my family . It gets disheartening and I came to substack after reading many articles on Medium on how this is great to launch your writing career... well, that did not happen. 8 months were a long time to teach me that if there is potential -- it is far far away in future.
So , I am thinking of going to Medium to earn my living and keep writing on Substack because I actually like it here. I like the community, the platform and the management.
Also side note( if someone wants to make writing as their full time profession then marketing yourself is a good skill worth learning --- I think this is where I sucked as Substack had no way of finding my little hole)
Your sharing here just gained you another subscriber. :)
Thanks Bryce :)
Hoping you like reading the posts .
Yes, as a reader (as well as a writer) I find the search function needs a lot of work.
This!
🟧 Congrats on the latest tags addition! One comment about tags.
I think the homepage navigation bar can become super busy if we have too many topics. Therefore I suggest placing tags in 2 places: 1) Allocate a nicely designed sub-menu for topics generated from tags and 2) place respective tags at the footer of each post.
What do you think?
I wrote a longer top-level comment along the same lines: https://on.substack.com/p/office-hours-customization-77/comment/15881138
Briefly, I agree with your main point. The way it's currently implemented tags feel more like categories. I ended up making a Topics page: https://mostlypython.substack.com/p/topics
Making a page like this manually feels like it might work, because it's a curated selection of tags. But adding tags manually to each post is incredibly inefficient and brittle. Tags really should appear in the header alongside the like and share buttons, or in the footer in a similar manner.
I've added tags to two of my posts but I really don't know what they do! Where are they? Who sees them? They don't seem to function like tags on every other website, unless I'm missing something.
If you haven't already done so, you might want to read through the replies to the comment that I linked to. There are a lot of people who've found the same thing. Basically, tagging your posts doesn't do anything that's visible to readers at this point. You have to either create a page that shares tag links, add them to your navigation bar, or manually add them to a post. I don't suggest adding tag links to posts manually, as it sounds like Substack is thinking of implementing that themselves.
Saw that! With you on automatically adding tags to posts. Adding to this, another idea could be having a tag cloud that is automatically created on the main page.
I love the idea of subtopics / dropdowns eventually - I can see a need for that as newsletters niche down further into particular topics.
dropdowns: that was the term i was searching for earlier!
Exactly!
🟧I have recently started new Substacks in different languages. Has your team considered offering more tools for writing in different languages. Buttons for example; don't save custom text, so I have to continue to type in my URL and text each post. Google translate doesn't include all languages such as Mi'kmaq which is a language I really need. I had a lovely conversation with a sub from France 😊 Since this is an online platform providing more options to communicate in different languages seems worthy of discussion and implementation. Becca
Brilliant!
🟧 Could we have the option to add a drop-down menu of links to the navigation bar, please?
In my case, each email contains several themed sections and I would like to add anchor links to my Homepage (i.e. https://unfoundvideo.substack.com/i/116898342/components) to let visitors drop right into the section that attracts them from the archive. I'm sure other writers would find it handy too. Thanks!
This is a great suggestion. Our team has experimented with something like this in the past, and I passed it along for consideration as they build out tagging tools.
Ace, thank you!
Oh great idea! It’s almost a website isn’t it?
Thanks! Yep... the links could aim anywhere, but linking to sections in previous emails makes the archive more navigable, and is a bit more precise than using tags (at least for my email format, I'm sure for others.) Our archives are going to get pretty big as the years roll on...
wow I just asked the same question. Hope they add this!
🟧 - So excited to implement tags on Adventure Snack! I've been looking for a way to organize my games by genre for awhile (fantasy, sci-fi, etc).
Are tags planned to work only within individual Substacks for the time being? Or should I be tagging with the idea that in the near future, a reader could stumble to my Substack through a public tag?
Great question! There's currently no plan to make tags searchable/discoverable across Substacks - we currently see them as simply an organizational tool within individual publications, as you said. But we may explore public tags in the future.
And I'm happy to hear that tags are useful for your newsletter!
Good to know. Thanks!
🟧 I use drafts as my filing cabinet/drawing board. Nadav Is there any way to place drafts I am currently working on, at the top without having to scroll down through to find material? 😊
🟧 Hi all! I love all the tools you are providing so us writers can add a bit of creativity to the appearance of our Substacks. This is really important for long form writing, so can I make some further suggestions? I would love if pull quotes actually pulled left and right a little into the white space outside of the main block of text, with maybe the option to add an image. I would love to be able to add drop capitals to differentiate sections. I would love to have the option to justify text rather than ragged right. I would love to be able to centre headings. I have no idea how difficult it might be to implement, but I wonder if the Substack team might consider such changes for the future.
YES! on pull quotes, drop caps, justify text, centered text and headings.
Great! It's not just me then 🤣 I think these things help to break up long chunks of text and make it seem more inviting and visually interesting. Form is just as important as content, isn't it? 💕
Absolutely! Critical for readability as well as aesthetics.
Yes om drop caps and pull quotes!
🟧 You know that there are people who use Substack that don't live in the USA, right? I know that may be difficult to believe but some of us live in "other countries". 😱
We love seeing writers from all over the world using Substack and know we could have better tools to support them. We are a small team and over time also hope to offer programs like Office Hours to support writers in otehr time zones. Where are you, Prickly Cactus?
I live in London (England). Not so far away from anywhere, but definitely not the same time zone as California.
In the middle of the Atlantic..on the island of Fuerteventura in the Canary Islands.
As a Canadian, I often have noticed this as well. It may be getting slightly better!
There are other countries besides the U.S.? omg. Someone phone the president, quick... I don't think he has any idea..
I don´t think he´s the only one...
UK! 🇬🇧
I am in London. Just subscribed to yours.
Yes, I am in the US but my Substack reaches 53 countries, which is amazing. So I consciously try to not be too US-centric.
My comment was meant for the Substack people re the email we get every week that mentions two USA timezones but forgets that there are writers here that don´t actually live in PST or EST timeszones...wherever those are!
But thanks for your comment.
🧠 I use my Substack to teach and help writers master the art and business of the literary newsletter and strengthen their writing habits. That means offering workshops via Substack like this one coming up. I’m using video, which is fun. https://www.writersatwork.net/p/workshop-the-art-of-the-literary
Just subscribed to get the workshop and all your info. Your invitation to the workshop was terrific and I'm curious to know how well it works. Guess I'll know on May 23 when I show up for the workshop! Looking forward to it.
Fantastic! So great to have you. I'm really excited about it.
🟧 How is substack addressing concerns brought up by Sharon Hurley Hall? https://www.antiracismnewsletter.com/p/trolled-on-substack-notes
I'd like to know this, too. Substack's CEO recently did an interview I found very disturbing that included a refusal to say there would be any effort to moderate content, even if it violated Substack's policies. He all but issued a personal invite to right-wing extremists to say whatever they want on Notes. It bothered me so much that I haven't encouraged my subscribers to use Notes and rarely post or read there myself.
This @Substack , please.
For interested writers please also see Seth's comments about how the leaderhsip response has been even more dissapointing: https://substack.com/profile/25059164-seth-abramson/note/c-15063377?utm_source=notes-share-action
See also Noah's comments: https://substack.com/profile/2185926-noah-berlatsky/note/c-15084061?utm_source=notes-share-action
✏️ Those who use "sections," what's your thought process in what deserves its own section?
For example, I write 3 essays a month and 1 poem, but I'm not sure the poetry deserves a section rather than a tag... Curious your thoughts.
Hey Timothy, when you create a new section, you also create a new email list. We recommend when you just want to organize your work, you use tags. But, if you have a large mailing list, and some people only come to you for your poems, then you might consider creating sections so they can opt into just getting poems.
If you create multiple sections, then will you see multiple subscriber posts or one with x marks for which sections each is subscribed to?
I really like sections. They're useful for me because I write about different things at different times. I use them myself when I want to find something I've written a while back. If I know the content I'll know which section it's in.
I echo what Ramona says here. I think the tags will help me clean things up some, but at the same time having a section helps me compartmentalize the specific focus of a post under the bigger umbrella of my Substack's theme.
I have sections for things that would generally be considered different sections of a newspaper or magazine/that would be something some people will like but not everyone.
I went with a simple dichotomous design: Deep Dives (behind the paywall / longer reads) and Snippets (free articles, short reads). Works so far.
Erica Drayton runs multiple Substacks and sections within each. I’d reach out to her for advice.
✏️ Would pages be a good option to share a freebie with EXISTING, FREE subscribers?
I know that I can add a link with the freebie to my welcome email for new subscribers. But I'm trying to get it to existing subscribers as well, without it being publicly viewable on my Substack.
Yes, that would be a great use of pages.
Are pages indexed by search engines or hidden?
✏️🧠 - Honestly I have decided to stick to no navigation bar and homepage links.
I had to contrast my tendency to be the Master Categoriser to do that 🤪
But I feel like is saving me a lot of work before posting. So that I do not have to think which article goes where.
You can see it here: https://livmkk.substack.com/
I am seriously thinking to use Chat GPT to read my articles and come up with a good welcome message. Anyone has experience with that?
"... seriously thinking to use Chat GPT to read my articles and come up with a good welcome message."
Oh...!
My husband has had help on his about page with chat gdp. 😊 we all find self promo hard at times don’t we?
✏️ eheh Indeed. Important question from me: which info did he feed chatgpt with?
Oh I’m not sure! He said it’s been “getting to know him” over a little while so I think that helps. I’ll ask.
Great, thanks!
To my fellow Substackers: do you prefer black text on white background, or do you enjoy a bit of background color? What about black background and white text? I know that can be hard to read for some. Thinking of starting up my second Substack soon and am in the design planning stages now.
I think people that need dark more (black on white) will tend to use the app because they can set all publications to show that way. Also, people can use their device settings to put on high-contrast or color filters if they need or want them. So, I think the most universal thing is to use black on white, or very close (super dark greys, very lightly tinted backgrounds, etc).
I have a light color buff background on my newsletter with black lettering. Enough to keep the contrast crisp and not cause my subscribers eye-fatigue, but I'm constantly debating whether or not to change that back to white background...
Looking at yours now Susannah... it looks a tad gray on my desktop. That's the one variable we cannot control, is the color setting on our readers' computers and other devices. Also, they might have it set to a day or night setting (blue vs warm shade) and that can affect the color too. So maybe a little lighter or closer to white even if not 100% white will do the trick. Definitely worth exploring, and maybe testing it on different devices.
Ugh, this is pushing me to just making the background color white again.... Thanks for the feedback! :-D
My pleasure! And I know how much we can fall in love with our own color spaces... but critical to think of the reader experience!
I wrote about viewing in dark mode v light mode in my post this week - it’s such a lot to think about isn’t it?!
🟧 I posted this as a reply to another writer's post asking about Substack's plans to address content concerns on Notes: I'd like to know this, too. Substack's CEO recently did an interview I found very disturbing that included a refusal to say there would be any effort to moderate content, even if it violated Substack's policies. He all but issued a personal invite to right-wing extremists to say whatever they want on Notes. It bothered me so much that I haven't encouraged my subscribers to use Notes and rarely post or read there myself.
Am I the last one to have a look at the new features? Can't wait to dive in, but it's been so hectic at home I'm finding zero time or energy to write. Barely squeezed out a post written in 30 second bursts. Is it even possible to maintain a writing habit with young kids?
Yes! I tend to go in waves based on time and energy. My flow seems to be to bang out three posts I can schedule ahead, and then take a couple weeks off where I just jot down ideas. I’ve been writing here for a couple of years now and have a pretty deep archive, but it hasn’t been steady progress if viewed week-by-week. I do notice my stats do better if I can keep at least one post per week going out (and for me, that always involves scheduling ahead because I can’t predict which weeks I will have energy to write and which weeks I won’t). Don’t know if that’s any help, but I wish you the best in achieving your goals. Motherhood is consuming, especially while they are young!
That does help, thank you! And it's a really good idea. I also tend to work in bursts of productivity - it would definitely be a better feeling to have the products of that burst spread over the next few weeks
I hope to get to the point where I am writing ahead like you. So far, I've been writing every live every week.
I hear you. I’ve been getting up early to write but this morning my daughter announced we were going downstairs at 3.30am so I’ve missed my writing slot today! 🥴
Yeah they can be so unpredictable that any expectation of a stable routine is bound to end up in disappointment. My smaller one wakes up around 4 am so I've not really entertained the idea of trying to wake up before that (that would be called not going to bed haha) but maybe when she's less sadistic I will try this 🥲
Ooof! I felt that haha! Yeah it’s hard. I often write in short bursts with the pomodoro technique (25 mins) and on my phone notes as well - throwing out all the rules to actually make stuff happen!
Yes - using notes is definitely the one thing keeping this whole enterprise going
🧠 I love the new site design changes! Since I put a lot of effort in the cover images of my posts, I find that having a layout that highlights those images is very helpful. I think it helps new readers easily see what a post is about and click on it if it sounds interesting.
✏️ Does anybody have any advice on a prominent way to offer student/senior discounts? Is there a way to do this on the subscription page? I have a note on my About and Intro pages, but I’m not sure, following feedback from a reader, that these are prominent enough. Thanks in advance...
I send out my offer (50% off) at the start of each school year, with the requirement that they provide a school-related email address.
Thanks for the reply, George. I’m wondering whether to add something in the subscription ‘slots’ so readers know that a discount is available.
🟧 1. If I edit a post after publication, will the edits show up to readers (for instance, as strikethroughs)?
2. If I edit a post after publication, will the post have a new publication date/time stamp?
3. Can I add tags to previously published posts?
Thank you!
1. the edited text is visible on your substack (not in the emails), edit footnotes or sidenotes or stuff like that you can add yourself
2. timestamp stays the same but you can change it manually
3. yes , click edit and then through settings add the tags.
Agree with all the above - I’ve done this multiple times. When you go into the old post click something so the update button shows and then go ahead and add tags it doesn’t alter the publish time/ date.
Does anyone know any charities or small businesses using the platform yet? Are we all indies/ writers?
Good question Claire! That would be interesting to see
✏️ Related to customizing and organizing -- how often, if ever, do you reshare old posts, or link to them in your current posts? And, is there some unwritten guidance on how much time you let elapse before you recycle your content? Here's an example: I wrote this piece last Mother's Day. https://elizabethbeggins.substack.com/p/my-caterpillar-teacher
It's pretty timeless. I worry that sharing anything after just a year could be tedious for engaged readers, but I have gained a lot (for me) of new subscribers in that time. Thinking maybe it's best to link it in a new post.
Thoughts appreciated. I know there's no one right way; just curious how others approach this.
I often link old posts within new posts, but so far, I have yet to just reshare a post in its entirety.
I have a 13 year old blog that I'm using as a source for Substack posts. I generally find that I can add a paragraph that adds some new thinking, a different twist or highlight. I will do the same with Substack when it's time to recycle some of these posts.
I wait at least a year (as my newsletter is monthly) and make the reposting free to everyone, as a sample for free subscribers to consider upgrading to paid (and to nudge paid subscribers to check out the archives they may have missed). Important to edit / customise the accompanying email headers accordingly.
🟧 I’d love to embed my substack onto a page in my website. I’ve already added the sign up code from there, but I’d love to go one step further. I’ve also seen someone (not sure who and how) with a page on their substack that looked like an embedded page from their website and would love to know how to do that. I love the customisation here, I’ve added my wordmark and customised my colours and I’m so pleased with how cohesive and personal it’s looking. Will be continuing to explore further ways to customise 🤩
Love the accountant by day ... illustrator by night image!
Thanks so much Joyce 🥰
I did a screen shot on mine Emily. Great question!
🟧 Thank you for the Notes tab! If you added an option to replace the Most Popular home page column with a Notes feed, my life would be complete. Do you have any plans to do this?
Those of us who work in multiple media formats could use a Notes feed to pull in our videos and other media that might be hosted elsewhere (YouTube, etc.), and make our home page a real hub for all of the content we're creating.
🟧 I think customizable welcome pages would be awesome. I’d like to make the “no thanks” a bit more noticeable and maybe change up the layout
Yes, customizable welcome pages would be a great help. I would especially like the option to replace "no thanks" with something like the old "read it first." I don't see a way to do that anywhere.
I just found the text replacement option, so that problem is solved! But still agreeing that more customization would be great for the welcome page.
Glad you found it, I was just about to point you to it! In case others want to find it, it's called "Opt out message on the welcome page" in the dashboard settings.
I will say, though, that we experimented with many different opt-out messages, and "No thanks" performed the best at converting readers to subscribers in general. But at the end of the day, you guys know your specific readers better than we do, so we left that setting in there.
And thanks all for the feedback on wanting more welcome page customization!
Agreed!! People often think it’s a paywall and close it before looking any more into it. I know I’ve done it
How do you edit the alt text of an image? I find that when I try to delete the current text, the menu disappears and the text remains the same.
Oh wow yeah, it looks like if you click the text field, the menu disappears. That's definitely a bug - I'll report it to the team.
In the meantime, it looks like if you just start typing, without clicking the text field first, it works okay. Let me know if that works for you.
It doesn't Nadav. 😶
Hmm okay, thanks for letting me know. I alerted the team, hopefully they can fix it soon.
Hey folks! Did this ever get resolved? Looks like I'm experiencing the same issue today....
Are you using the top right menu that pops up on the photo/ image and caption etc?
Yes, I am.
Honestly, I haven't tried any of the new tools yet. I've been busy with other projects, including creating a free "Depression and Anxiety Survival Kit" that I'm very proud of. You can get it here: wendigordon.gumroad.com
🧠 I have loads of sections, and would like to add one or two more. Part of the reason is that until recently we didn't have the tags facility. But I just wondered, given that the navigation bar is getting crowded now, how other writers have handled this situation. I write at https://terryfreedman.substack.com/ by the way. Thanks in advance for any suggestions.
Substack added this “newsletters” feature that bundles your sections in one tab in case you don’t want them all crowding your navigation. Just a thought (my navigation is still crowded, but that’s how I like it ;-)
https://jmelliott.substack.com/newsletters
You can also hide extraneous tabs like the archive, etc if you prefer to prioritize other things.
I didn't know about this. Are each of those listed at that URL sections?
Yeah, each link works just like the sections in your navigation, but if you choose to hide them from your navigation header, you can still show them in this tab.
I did an experiment and removed the section for my upcoming book “The Gifts of Heaven” from the top navigation, and it still appears in this “newsletters” tab.
Thanks, I didn't know that. Where is the tabs option please?
The “newsletters” tab is in “settings” under “navigation” just below “archive”. It’s an eyeball icon you have to uncross.
i just fouind it thanks! I was looking on my phone, and the eyeball thing didn't show up. I like it. Very neat and tidy! Thanks for that
I think summary / list pages would be a way to mitigate an explosion of extra pages in the navigation bar.
Thanks, Robert. Yes, I think now that tags are possible, and apparently linking to tag URLs if I've understood @claire venus correctly, I'll try that, in secret at first!
Really good question, Terry! I only have two additional sections, and I'm happy with just those for now. I have a tendency to micromanage things like this, and I've been holding fire on setting up any more in an effort to keep things simple. I might have a play with tags sometime (although truth be told, I'm struggling to keep up with all the fabulous new stuff available to tinker with on Substack!!!). 🤣
Tags are really good. You should definitely give them a whirl. I agree about all the new stuff. It's like an avalanche, in a good way
I’ve added two tags urls to my navigation and one section! I’m nervous about sections because they can be problematic for subscribers
Thanks, Claire. That's a great idea. I didn't know you could do that on Substack (I've done it on other sites)
✏️ I'm curious if anyone has had luck expanding a substack from one writer to several writers and/or bringing in a contract copy-editor to help out?
I'm thinking of starting to grow a bit more/faster and wondering if you all have any insights into how that works for you all, particularly around process. :)
There’s always room for guest writers or you can add one to your post. There’s plenty who have done that. Elle Griffin runs The Post which I think has a few writers.
Thanks! Just wondering about pitfalls and any unexpected learnings from those who have done it?
I wouldn’t know. Elle Griffin is pretty accessible on Notes. I’d ask her.
I’ve done posts with a writer invited as a co writer. I guess working with a copywriter it depends whether you want to give them your log in or work with them off the platform? Like how much control you want?
Still sorting that out! I'm guessing I'd need to let them log-in on my side though.
This question is for the Substack team and fellow writers.
Is it advisable to 'tag' older posts prior to the introduction of the 'tags' feature?
Great question! I wrote about tags this week but that part is still missing for me.
hi All, anyone any thoughts on engagement rates and what to expect? I'm recently new, have about 1,000 visits and about 50 free subs. All in about 2.5 months. Is this par for the course or not? Views and experiences welcome!!
🟧 and ✏️ I make all wordmark/email header/welcome page/icon graphics with a transparent background. But I recently updated my newsletter icon, and also with one graphic in my last newsletter- they aren't transparent! I re-downloaded them from Canva and that did not solve the issue. Some work just fine. Anyways, wondering if anyone has some insight!
I have to ask first - when you download them from Canva are you making sure they come down as PNGs. Even if you always had them as PNGs before, Canva may have reset your settings. That's the first things to check. PNGs preserve the transparency, JPGs add a white background. I hope this helps! :-D
99% sure but I will definitely double check! Thank you :)
I’m struggling a bit with transparency and my word mark never works so I just take it out.
🟧 I recently changed the name of my newsletter and I was wondering if I can redirect the links on older posts to the new publication? The posts are all there but since the name changed they did not automatically redirect. This is making me go to previous 240 posts and change the links myself. Any suggestion? The publication is https://mindbodygoal.substack.com/ and an example of old post with broken link is -https://mindbodygoal.substack.com/p/i-have-big-goals-and-i-have-rules
There's a setting in the dashboard called "Change your subdomain without breaking links", which you can only do once. In your case, since you already changed it, you could maybe change it back to the original subdomain (using "Change your subdomain"), and then use the "Change your subdomain without breaking links" tool to change it to mindbodygoal once again. That should hopefully convert all your links automatically.
I have a related question: if I port a custom domain into Substack, will existing links continue to exist or get broken?
Yep, existing links will redirect to your custom domain!
Ok. Is this advice from substack or a suggestion?
This is official advice from Substack :)
Thanks Nadav. IT WORKED :)
Awesome!!
🟧 Is there a way to make the wordmark bigger? When I tried to customize it,it would always look so small..
can someone please explain what the wordmark is?
Found this which explains the different terms. https://on.substack.com/p/customize
When you click your publication page it will say it’s name in the middle. If you upload a “stylised” word mark this replaces the default text with your publication name. It’s hard to get it to look good in my opinion so I’ve just left mine alone.
I'd love this feature as well - at the moment, you'd need a microscope to read my wordmark!
I love the new features (layout, tags, Notes) - it arrived at just the right time as I had an idea for content that didn't fit in my newsletters because of the frequency of publication. Notes solved that problem. The magazine layout turns out to support my content - pin my monthly theme post/newsletter and weekly prompts float around it. It's so cool, I love it!
🟧 - I have several sections on my site, and I would like to add people to a specific one, but not the main one. Is there a way to do that? Or to segment a list so only people not on one list or on two lists gets an email?
🟧 Will there be more than two threads in Writer Office Hours at some point? I'm very grateful for the attempt to provide some organization by topic, since it used to be impossible to wade through all of the comments to find those most helpful and relevant to me. However, the current thread options are so limited. Even just a third "miscellaneous" thread would be nice, but I'd especially appreciate more specific threads like "how to get more paid subscribers," "how to stand out and get discovered when you don't have many subscribers," and "newsletters about topic x (mental health in my case)."
🟧 Great work so far (especially tags). An improvement I'd like to see next... I'd like an additional level of organization for the navigation bar - a customizable drop-down option that would let me group multiple items under a single nav bar item (versus the current long and undifferentiated line of links). So I might make a top-level nav bar item called "Topics", and on the drop-down tied to that item I'd link to each of my tag pages (etc.). I already see this on some sites (Bulwark+ has exactly what I want https://plus.thebulwark.com/) but I guess they did that with some extra coding that's not in my skill set...
🟧 - Thank you to the Substack team for doing these office hours every week! I’m wondering if Substack will ever offer multiple tier-based pricing (like Patreon)?
I’m just starting out with my newsletter and I’d love to be able to allow my readers to support me at different levels and receive different benefits for this.
Thanks!
I would love that, or just the ability to set a price lower than the current lowest option of $5/month. There is one newsletter on Patreon by someone I especially want to support because they have helped me so much, so I subscribe for $1/month. It's the best I can do right now, and I think some of my subscribers might upgrade to paid if a lower priced option were available.
Yes, great reflection. I think the £1/$1 a month option on Patreon has been instrumental for a number of creators. I first came across it with Amanda Palmer, and it’s a lovely way for people to show support of the writers and artists they follow, and be a part of the community, and accessible for more people. I’d love to be able to allow this on my newsletter as well as 2-3 additional monthly tiers.
I wonder about that!
Hello everyone
Great to be here again with you all.
There are some really great tools now to personalise our Substacks. I've been experimenting with the "Feature" view and then having the most popular posts in a bar along the middle which seems to work well.
One thing I've noticed is that the dimensions of the thumbnails are a little narrower now so I've had to adjust those in my latest post. One to look out for with your old posts that might not looks as good now.
My latest post is here, and covers public speaking and how to nail that important presentation. Enjoy!
https://neverstoplearning1.substack.com/p/how-to-improve-your-presentations
Hey Martin,
You are right. There was a small adjustment. If you’re using one of the feature option, the image aspect ratio for the center image has changed to 3:2. If you use images with text in them (for example), you may need to adjust their aspect ratio to integrate with the new design.