We’re focused on making continuous improvements to existing products plus launching new features that help you grow and earn money with ease. Do you ever wonder, “How might I use that new feature?” or “Can Substack do ____?” This thread is your chance to ask.
Upsell email: Substack Boost is our biggest investment to date in helping writers accelerate their growth. Boost writers get access features including dedicated upsell emails that goes out to your most engaged readers automatically at the optimal times in their subscriber journey. Learn more.
Group subscriptions: Updates to group subscriptions make it seamless to sell and manage subscriptions for both writers and group administrators. Now you can send a targeted group subscription offer or create a general group offer anyone can access. Learn more.
Did you know? Substack metrics are a powerful tool to get to know your audience. From your stats, you can learn where subscribers are in the world and what other Substack publishers your audience overlaps with.Visit our guide to Substack metrics.
Thanks for joining us today at Office Hours! The Substack team is signing off but we'll be back next week. In the meantime, checkout the resources listed at the top of the post.
Office hours is a fantastic way to meet other Substack writers, and to get some questions answered. But it's also so busy that it can be a really frustrating experience.
I wrote up an Office Hours survival guide. If you're new to Office Hours, or if you've been here but found yourself frustrated by the jumpy interface, take a look and get a few pointers about how to make Office Hours a more enjoyable experience.
There's tips about how to bookmark comments you're interested in, including your own; how to read longer comments without the page jumping around, and how to write replies without the page jumping around. There's also a short list of feature requests, that I think would make these discussions more enjoyable for both writers and staff.
Hi! I am wondering about the change in format for audio recordings. The side panel now covers a significant portion of the text, making it impossible to read while recording. I have to open the text in a new window and record on the other tab. I love that I can record directly in substack, so I hope there are some design shifts that make this a little easier! Thanks so much.
My two biggest wants & wishes for Substack are always:
1. The ability to have more tiers: and example would be a $3 and $5 monthly tier, and then two different yearly tiers (maybe $15-20, $50). Kind of like Patreon.
2. The ability to basic edit (like crop) images from the stock photos natively in Substack. I would use that function more if I could crop images to horizontal to work better in the layout.
3. Custom customer (subscriber) groups! Let me easily send an email to the folks who always open things or to the folks who don't. It would make it easier to engage with those specific groups to upsell to a paid or increase the engagement.
Hey Substack, your platform is brilliant! I'm checking on my minor request for the analytics page, to add a column on each post's report that shows a simple chronological list of opens/reads, with the most recent open/read at the top. That way we can get a quick look to see who the most recent reader was since the last time we looked, without having to guess or search around. I believe this was submitted to your programming people and they were going to look at it. It would be extremely helpful and I'm sure it would be easy to add. At the moment it takes forever to figure out. How's it going? Thank you!!!
Who employs proof-readers or copy-editors? I catch most copy mistakes before "send" but inevitably, a few hours later I re-word things on the version that lives on the substack website.
I've noticed that a lot of people have been suggesting the implementation of a "Tip Jar" for occasional support, in addition to the existing monthly/yearly plans. I think this is a great idea, and I also have a suggestion for an even more advanced system. What if authors could set a specific amount for each post, which readers/sponsors could contribute towards in order to unlock the content for everyone? Once the threshold is met, everyone can access the post. This system could also include a badge system or leaderboard, which would make it feel like a special type of sponsorship. It's possible that many companies or individuals with Substacks would be interested in sponsoring content in this way.
Additionally, it could work in parallel with the current paid system since it wouldn't affect it. I'm looking forward to everyone's feedback.
hey substack team! so this is a massively small detail in the grand scheme of things, and I don't know if it's just me: but every time I try to embed a link to another Substack in one of my posts, the layout icon to change how I'd like the card to appear NEVER shows up on the top of the embed. If I want to switch the link card from vertical to horizontal or vice versa, I have to scroll up a ton to find the layout icon. It's always hiding like five paragraphs up, hovering in the void. I love Substack but scrolling to find that tiny little icon is the absolute bane of my existence. 😂
I propose that Substack employ S. E. Reidm and put her in charge of attitude on their social media venture.
I see two themes emerging in Google News and other sites that indicate more people are looking for a purpose in life and have realized that fear driven hatred is not the solution to our manifold problems but a contributor to the overarching struggle between democracy and autocracy.
Here is a slightly mangled copy of her “invitation to “join the discussion.”
open, honest, gracious, and curious.
This is YOUR space to discuss with each other, not just engage with me! Because of this, SAFE SHARING is my highest priority. If you are not engaging safely and with grace with others, you will have to leave. Period.
Hi everyone: I’ve been adding new bylines to my Substack — they enjoy it as well as my readers. However, I’d like to give those writers a share of any new paid subscriptions their posts garner. What would be a fair percentage, do you think? Heard about anyone doing this? Sure, I’d rather pay them a flat fee, but it’s too soon for that. AND, does Substack have a reporting feature taht I could check week to week, or month to month, to see which posts generated (x) number of paid subs?
Love the new voiceover feature for my children’s stories at Mosswood Tales! Is there a stats figure to see how many subscribers are using that feature? Thanks!
I'd really like Substack to offer a $15/year subscription option so that more people can access more contributors. I'd be happy to pay the same $5 fee that goes to Substack from a $50 sub.
A minor technical question. When I reply to a comment, sometime the text box disappears while I'm typing and I have to hunt for it, usually near the top of the comment thread. I think this happens because my engagement with the comment pushes it up in the list, but it would be nice to finish my reply before the content moves off of my screen. Any simple hacks for getting the text box to stay put until I post my reply?
Does Substack have data that gives insight on the ideal length of a post? I see a lot of posts — many of them with high engagement — that are much longer than most blogs or newsletters. Personally, even if I'm super-interested in the topic, I'm not proud to admit that I'll often do a quick scroll of a post and, if it's really long, skip past it. I know others do the same. What does the data say?
P.S. I'm sure genre, formatting, images, etc. are factors. Just wondering if there are general findings in the data.
This week is my second birthday celebration posting my newsletter Tumbleweed Words on Substack! I’m not much of one for self-promotion and love the organic community I am growing over at Tumbleweed Words. But I thought I’d shoot my shot for once and ask fellow Substackers who subscribe or enjoy my newsletter to take less than a minute and support my newsletter with a Substack recommendation—any support is greatly appreciated! Link available below via my recent post.
Today I did my first cross-post and noticed it shows up on my Dashboard but not my publication homepage https://www.getflack.com/. Can I control what posts show up on the homepage?
I hate to say this, but the "I recommend these newsletters" feature pushes me away from this platform because it's a walled garden. The top newsletter I'd recommend uses a publisher different than substack. But non-substacks don't appear to be enter-able in the recommendations widget.
Hi! I have my own Substack page but I am thinking of launching a new one as a local newspaper type thing. Multiple writers/reporters, all local news. How do you advise setting such a thing up on Substack? Are there existing examples that you know of? Thanks! -Steven Saint Thomas
I'm barely a week into using this medium and I am quite enjoying the ease and the fact that I can send my thoughts directly to the inbox of my friends. It refrains them from needing to navigate 100+ tabs should they decide to open my webpage, bla bla bla! To say the least, it's going well so far. I just have one suggestion / point of improvement that you might be willing to consider.
In the subscribers list, would be so heartwarming if you could please add an option for a customized note for each subscriber. Like, just beside their name - friend@thanks.org [Custom message: "Hey Friend, just thought you should know that this was inspired by our conversation. Enjoy the read."] Would really be amazing to have this option before the newsletter is sent out. This is just for thoughtful measures.
Otherwise, kudos to this platform that I am thoroughly enjoying. Looking forward sharing more of my work in this community.
This is a wonderful means of support. I’ve received two boost paid subscriptions in the last few days. It enables a discount without publicizing a sale price for everyone. Thanks, Substack wizards! Lauriestone.Substack.com.
I have almost 200 audio podcasts in the Evening under Lamplight Podcasts, most of which I had produced on Anchor before moving them all to Substack (a move I am delighted with). I had produced the podcasts in several series, each series devoted to a specific topic (Shakespeare's Tempest, Dante's Inferno, Stevenson's Fables, Dante's Purgatorio, etc.) so that now I have ten series. But many are mixed together, so an Inferno podcast might be followed by a Tempest podcast, and so on.
My question is whether it's possible to rearrange the order of our podcasts, or to have some system of indexes, so someone following, say, the Purgatorio podcasts can quickly go from one to the next.
I thought about setting up a different podcast for each of the series, but that seems far too complicated.
Hi there! I have a question/suggestion about categories for when people join Substack.
I produce Skipped History, which focuses on overlooked bits of US history. I know a lot of the population writ large is interested in learning more about various kinds of history at the moment, but when going through the signup flow, it's hard to find newsletters that focus on specific subsets of the past (e.g. US history, Latin American history etc.).
My question/suggestion is, as Substack grows, might it be advisable to add more categories to the signup flow, or to test out a more specific set of follow-up prompts after users go through the first prompts (e.g. after clicking "Design," you'd see further prompts for a few different types of design people might be interested in)? Or maybe once you click on a category when signing up, newsletters are organized under a few different subheadings?
I'm sure y'all are keen to avoid adding any friction to the flow, but maybe gaining a little more information would be a good way of helping new users find newsletters that better match their interests, generating paid signups, and reducing churn. Just an idea (that you've likely already considered) from the inestimably less intelligent product team at Skipped History HQ.
I think it would be great if on the "Explore" page of the InBox you could break down the "Fiction and Literature" pages into subsections: Short stories, serials, Sci-Fi/Fantasy, Romance, that sort of break down.
Payments with Indian cards to writers in India aren't going through -- and support has been incredibly unhelpful. I meticulously shared the exact issue and also checked with Stripe if there was something to be done from their end, and there isn't.
There's a two-step process to saving Indian cards (unlike in other countries) and I would really, really appreciate if someone from the product team looked into this. Most other platforms have done this already so it shouldn't be too difficult. Here's the instructions from Stripe: https://support.stripe.com/questions/guide-for-saving-cards-in-india
I run the Visual Storytelling Newsletter with free and paid subscribers. Is there a way to serve one type of CTA button (say Give a Gift Subscription) to paid subscribers and Upgrade to Paid CTA button for free subscribers? This would be extremely helpful. Right now I'm resorting to serving one CTA while addressing both segments which makes it too long and not quite personal.
A guest writer cross-posted their piece from my newsletter to their own newsletter audience. Love how easy that is for them -- but curious if I'll get any stats on how many people viewed the piece and how it performed through the cross-posting?
Regarding the triple-threaded Writer Office Hours, at first I thought it might be an improvement over the extremely long single threaded versions of the past. After going through the experience, this week, of juggling THREE extremely long comments threads, I can say with certainty it was overwhelming.
Not only that, but after leaving a response on two of the three threads, my email filled up with almost 70 (so far) notifications. Did the notification algorithm change? As I recall, I used to only get notified about direct likes and comments to my own comment. But, now it seems I receive an email for every comment anyone makes anywhere in the thread. I know there is a way to mute notifications, but I still would like to know about comments and likes directly associated with the comments I have made.
Hi! I have a question. Is it possible to see the visits to all pages, including about? I see the visits to posts, but not to individual pages. If I go to the posts I can see individual post traffic, but nothing about the other pages.
Wouldn't it make sense to combine the analytics of the posts and subscribers with "stats"? That way we have one dashboard where we can view traffic, sources, shares, subscribers etc?
I started nine days ago and still trying to figure out stuff. Maybe down the line, once I have more content to offer, the subscription may become more relevant. A bit unrelated, but I was wondering... are there plans to allow for text alignment options?
I know the team has left the thread, but still, in case they are looking back at this: I would love better web3 integration. The promised embedding of NFTs does not work (and is limited to OpenSea anyway). It would be wonderful if it starts working. Also in the payment/subscription part. It would be great to be able to token gate my newsletter. Or give people the ability to collect an edition as NFT for support. I wouldn't mind if it was a special NFT on which a fee for Substack was included. In principle that should work with the righ smart contracts.
I would like an automatic email sent for trials that's between the 7-day trial on paywalled posts and the new upsell email. Basically: send the most engaged readers an offer of a free trial (set at the writer's preference of time). I write once a week- two go to paid, two go to free subs. So a 7-day trial isn't enough for someone to know it's "worth it." I know I can manually send an offer to the top readers but automated would be great, too.
Quick question. BOOST helped to convert one of my loyal readers to a paid subscription. HOORAY! He signed up for a $50 subscription and got it for $40 (yay for him!). Thing is, I offer a "Founding Membership" honor to those who subscribe for $50/year, so now I'm having a crisis of conscience. Do I give him that "Founding Member" honor, even though he only paid $40? If so, it doesn't reflect this in my subscriber stats...
Hello. I’m three months in and loving Substack. The issue I wanted to ask about though is spam filters. Does Substack have relationships at an enterprise level with Gmail, Outlook, etc? If so, is there anything Substack can do to get Gmail, Outlook et al to stop coding Substack newsletters as spam? Even my own newsletter ends up in my own spam folder even though I constantly tell Gmail that it’s not spam.
Is there a way to upload a pdf or google doc write-up to Substack and have it transform into a Substack article? I am using a number of charts and tables and it has been a challenge to get the formatting right in the Substack editor. It would be easier if I could create the doc in Google Docs, probably convert it into a pdf file, upload the pdf to Substack and then have it seamlessly converted into a Substack note. Thanks.
Hello, does the substack integrated visit counter count my won visits to the newsletter? How does it make the difference per visit/ per click, is it by IP adress?
Is there a way to create and then duplicate template stubs that are just drafts? I use similar headed sections each issue of “The TfC Ramble” where I talk about the intersection of tech and comics. Currently, I duplicate a previously distributed post and then erase the section content each time, keeping just the headings. Is there a simpler way?
The novel I’ve been serializing is now complete. I don’t know what I’ll do next on my substack (perhaps a sequel?), but until I’m sure of what I’m offering, I don’t want anyone signing up for a new yearly subscription. How do I change the subscription choices to just free or monthly? I do not want to pause the subscriptions in progress, just prevent new ones.
I want to make sure I've got something right. If I have a monthly subscriber and I send them an offer (coupon) to upgrade to yearly at a discount, can they just click the link and automatically "upgrade" to the yearly price, or do they have to cancel their monthly subscription first, then use the coupon for the yearly subscription? Thanks.
Thanks for joining us today at Office Hours! The Substack team is signing off but we'll be back next week. In the meantime, checkout the resources listed at the top of the post.
Office hours is a fantastic way to meet other Substack writers, and to get some questions answered. But it's also so busy that it can be a really frustrating experience.
I wrote up an Office Hours survival guide. If you're new to Office Hours, or if you've been here but found yourself frustrated by the jumpy interface, take a look and get a few pointers about how to make Office Hours a more enjoyable experience.
https://mostlypython.substack.com/p/using-substack
There's tips about how to bookmark comments you're interested in, including your own; how to read longer comments without the page jumping around, and how to write replies without the page jumping around. There's also a short list of feature requests, that I think would make these discussions more enjoyable for both writers and staff.
Hi! I am wondering about the change in format for audio recordings. The side panel now covers a significant portion of the text, making it impossible to read while recording. I have to open the text in a new window and record on the other tab. I love that I can record directly in substack, so I hope there are some design shifts that make this a little easier! Thanks so much.
My two biggest wants & wishes for Substack are always:
1. The ability to have more tiers: and example would be a $3 and $5 monthly tier, and then two different yearly tiers (maybe $15-20, $50). Kind of like Patreon.
2. The ability to basic edit (like crop) images from the stock photos natively in Substack. I would use that function more if I could crop images to horizontal to work better in the layout.
3. Custom customer (subscriber) groups! Let me easily send an email to the folks who always open things or to the folks who don't. It would make it easier to engage with those specific groups to upsell to a paid or increase the engagement.
Hey Substack, your platform is brilliant! I'm checking on my minor request for the analytics page, to add a column on each post's report that shows a simple chronological list of opens/reads, with the most recent open/read at the top. That way we can get a quick look to see who the most recent reader was since the last time we looked, without having to guess or search around. I believe this was submitted to your programming people and they were going to look at it. It would be extremely helpful and I'm sure it would be easy to add. At the moment it takes forever to figure out. How's it going? Thank you!!!
Who employs proof-readers or copy-editors? I catch most copy mistakes before "send" but inevitably, a few hours later I re-word things on the version that lives on the substack website.
I've noticed that a lot of people have been suggesting the implementation of a "Tip Jar" for occasional support, in addition to the existing monthly/yearly plans. I think this is a great idea, and I also have a suggestion for an even more advanced system. What if authors could set a specific amount for each post, which readers/sponsors could contribute towards in order to unlock the content for everyone? Once the threshold is met, everyone can access the post. This system could also include a badge system or leaderboard, which would make it feel like a special type of sponsorship. It's possible that many companies or individuals with Substacks would be interested in sponsoring content in this way.
Additionally, it could work in parallel with the current paid system since it wouldn't affect it. I'm looking forward to everyone's feedback.
Any advice for templating posts? We write at surgery.substack.com and appreciate any critiques or guidance on growth.
hey substack team! so this is a massively small detail in the grand scheme of things, and I don't know if it's just me: but every time I try to embed a link to another Substack in one of my posts, the layout icon to change how I'd like the card to appear NEVER shows up on the top of the embed. If I want to switch the link card from vertical to horizontal or vice versa, I have to scroll up a ton to find the layout icon. It's always hiding like five paragraphs up, hovering in the void. I love Substack but scrolling to find that tiny little icon is the absolute bane of my existence. 😂
I propose that Substack employ S. E. Reidm and put her in charge of attitude on their social media venture.
I see two themes emerging in Google News and other sites that indicate more people are looking for a purpose in life and have realized that fear driven hatred is not the solution to our manifold problems but a contributor to the overarching struggle between democracy and autocracy.
Here is a slightly mangled copy of her “invitation to “join the discussion.”
open, honest, gracious, and curious.
This is YOUR space to discuss with each other, not just engage with me! Because of this, SAFE SHARING is my highest priority. If you are not engaging safely and with grace with others, you will have to leave. Period.
The stats pages are an insightful feature of Substack. I’d like to suggest some changes that might improve the experience.
1) Make the default time frame “all time” rather than “last 90 days” on the charts and geographical maps.
2) Allow expansion of the state and county lists to reveal all subscriber locations.
3) Enable zooming on maps.
4) Add a csv export of all post data such as number of views, email opens, links clicked, etc. (all the stats on the post tab).
Hi everyone: I’ve been adding new bylines to my Substack — they enjoy it as well as my readers. However, I’d like to give those writers a share of any new paid subscriptions their posts garner. What would be a fair percentage, do you think? Heard about anyone doing this? Sure, I’d rather pay them a flat fee, but it’s too soon for that. AND, does Substack have a reporting feature taht I could check week to week, or month to month, to see which posts generated (x) number of paid subs?
Love the new voiceover feature for my children’s stories at Mosswood Tales! Is there a stats figure to see how many subscribers are using that feature? Thanks!
Greetings Substack! Could you tell us if Live Videostreams or Live Typing will be available? - Thank you:)
I'd really like Substack to offer a $15/year subscription option so that more people can access more contributors. I'd be happy to pay the same $5 fee that goes to Substack from a $50 sub.
A minor technical question. When I reply to a comment, sometime the text box disappears while I'm typing and I have to hunt for it, usually near the top of the comment thread. I think this happens because my engagement with the comment pushes it up in the list, but it would be nice to finish my reply before the content moves off of my screen. Any simple hacks for getting the text box to stay put until I post my reply?
Does Substack have data that gives insight on the ideal length of a post? I see a lot of posts — many of them with high engagement — that are much longer than most blogs or newsletters. Personally, even if I'm super-interested in the topic, I'm not proud to admit that I'll often do a quick scroll of a post and, if it's really long, skip past it. I know others do the same. What does the data say?
P.S. I'm sure genre, formatting, images, etc. are factors. Just wondering if there are general findings in the data.
Hello fellow Substackers!
This week is my second birthday celebration posting my newsletter Tumbleweed Words on Substack! I’m not much of one for self-promotion and love the organic community I am growing over at Tumbleweed Words. But I thought I’d shoot my shot for once and ask fellow Substackers who subscribe or enjoy my newsletter to take less than a minute and support my newsletter with a Substack recommendation—any support is greatly appreciated! Link available below via my recent post.
https://tumbleweedwords.substack.com/p/its-my-second-birthday-on-substack
P.S. I am here to support you all also—happy to be here today for year three! 😊
Hi team, miss you!
Today I did my first cross-post and noticed it shows up on my Dashboard but not my publication homepage https://www.getflack.com/. Can I control what posts show up on the homepage?
I hate to say this, but the "I recommend these newsletters" feature pushes me away from this platform because it's a walled garden. The top newsletter I'd recommend uses a publisher different than substack. But non-substacks don't appear to be enter-able in the recommendations widget.
ubstack has passed through the “Move fast and break things” (the blogosphere) phase and is now in the “move fast and *fix* things” phase.
Hi! I have my own Substack page but I am thinking of launching a new one as a local newspaper type thing. Multiple writers/reporters, all local news. How do you advise setting such a thing up on Substack? Are there existing examples that you know of? Thanks! -Steven Saint Thomas
Dear Substack Team,
I'm barely a week into using this medium and I am quite enjoying the ease and the fact that I can send my thoughts directly to the inbox of my friends. It refrains them from needing to navigate 100+ tabs should they decide to open my webpage, bla bla bla! To say the least, it's going well so far. I just have one suggestion / point of improvement that you might be willing to consider.
In the subscribers list, would be so heartwarming if you could please add an option for a customized note for each subscriber. Like, just beside their name - friend@thanks.org [Custom message: "Hey Friend, just thought you should know that this was inspired by our conversation. Enjoy the read."] Would really be amazing to have this option before the newsletter is sent out. This is just for thoughtful measures.
Otherwise, kudos to this platform that I am thoroughly enjoying. Looking forward sharing more of my work in this community.
Belovedly,
Jolyn
This is a wonderful means of support. I’ve received two boost paid subscriptions in the last few days. It enables a discount without publicizing a sale price for everyone. Thanks, Substack wizards! Lauriestone.Substack.com.
I have almost 200 audio podcasts in the Evening under Lamplight Podcasts, most of which I had produced on Anchor before moving them all to Substack (a move I am delighted with). I had produced the podcasts in several series, each series devoted to a specific topic (Shakespeare's Tempest, Dante's Inferno, Stevenson's Fables, Dante's Purgatorio, etc.) so that now I have ten series. But many are mixed together, so an Inferno podcast might be followed by a Tempest podcast, and so on.
My question is whether it's possible to rearrange the order of our podcasts, or to have some system of indexes, so someone following, say, the Purgatorio podcasts can quickly go from one to the next.
I thought about setting up a different podcast for each of the series, but that seems far too complicated.
Thanks.
Hi there! I have a question/suggestion about categories for when people join Substack.
I produce Skipped History, which focuses on overlooked bits of US history. I know a lot of the population writ large is interested in learning more about various kinds of history at the moment, but when going through the signup flow, it's hard to find newsletters that focus on specific subsets of the past (e.g. US history, Latin American history etc.).
My question/suggestion is, as Substack grows, might it be advisable to add more categories to the signup flow, or to test out a more specific set of follow-up prompts after users go through the first prompts (e.g. after clicking "Design," you'd see further prompts for a few different types of design people might be interested in)? Or maybe once you click on a category when signing up, newsletters are organized under a few different subheadings?
I'm sure y'all are keen to avoid adding any friction to the flow, but maybe gaining a little more information would be a good way of helping new users find newsletters that better match their interests, generating paid signups, and reducing churn. Just an idea (that you've likely already considered) from the inestimably less intelligent product team at Skipped History HQ.
Thanks for reading!
I think it would be great if on the "Explore" page of the InBox you could break down the "Fiction and Literature" pages into subsections: Short stories, serials, Sci-Fi/Fantasy, Romance, that sort of break down.
Payments with Indian cards to writers in India aren't going through -- and support has been incredibly unhelpful. I meticulously shared the exact issue and also checked with Stripe if there was something to be done from their end, and there isn't.
There's a two-step process to saving Indian cards (unlike in other countries) and I would really, really appreciate if someone from the product team looked into this. Most other platforms have done this already so it shouldn't be too difficult. Here's the instructions from Stripe: https://support.stripe.com/questions/guide-for-saving-cards-in-india
Happy Office Hours everybody!
I run the Visual Storytelling Newsletter with free and paid subscribers. Is there a way to serve one type of CTA button (say Give a Gift Subscription) to paid subscribers and Upgrade to Paid CTA button for free subscribers? This would be extremely helpful. Right now I'm resorting to serving one CTA while addressing both segments which makes it too long and not quite personal.
Thoughts?
https://youtu.be/kPZwvMSU7Q8
A guest writer cross-posted their piece from my newsletter to their own newsletter audience. Love how easy that is for them -- but curious if I'll get any stats on how many people viewed the piece and how it performed through the cross-posting?
Regarding the triple-threaded Writer Office Hours, at first I thought it might be an improvement over the extremely long single threaded versions of the past. After going through the experience, this week, of juggling THREE extremely long comments threads, I can say with certainty it was overwhelming.
Not only that, but after leaving a response on two of the three threads, my email filled up with almost 70 (so far) notifications. Did the notification algorithm change? As I recall, I used to only get notified about direct likes and comments to my own comment. But, now it seems I receive an email for every comment anyone makes anywhere in the thread. I know there is a way to mute notifications, but I still would like to know about comments and likes directly associated with the comments I have made.
Hi! I have a question. Is it possible to see the visits to all pages, including about? I see the visits to posts, but not to individual pages. If I go to the posts I can see individual post traffic, but nothing about the other pages.
Wouldn't it make sense to combine the analytics of the posts and subscribers with "stats"? That way we have one dashboard where we can view traffic, sources, shares, subscribers etc?
Thank you!
I started nine days ago and still trying to figure out stuff. Maybe down the line, once I have more content to offer, the subscription may become more relevant. A bit unrelated, but I was wondering... are there plans to allow for text alignment options?
I know the team has left the thread, but still, in case they are looking back at this: I would love better web3 integration. The promised embedding of NFTs does not work (and is limited to OpenSea anyway). It would be wonderful if it starts working. Also in the payment/subscription part. It would be great to be able to token gate my newsletter. Or give people the ability to collect an edition as NFT for support. I wouldn't mind if it was a special NFT on which a fee for Substack was included. In principle that should work with the righ smart contracts.
Wow. I was wrong then. I thought they paid to have that work outsourced...they are smarter than I !
I would like an automatic email sent for trials that's between the 7-day trial on paywalled posts and the new upsell email. Basically: send the most engaged readers an offer of a free trial (set at the writer's preference of time). I write once a week- two go to paid, two go to free subs. So a 7-day trial isn't enough for someone to know it's "worth it." I know I can manually send an offer to the top readers but automated would be great, too.
Quick question. BOOST helped to convert one of my loyal readers to a paid subscription. HOORAY! He signed up for a $50 subscription and got it for $40 (yay for him!). Thing is, I offer a "Founding Membership" honor to those who subscribe for $50/year, so now I'm having a crisis of conscience. Do I give him that "Founding Member" honor, even though he only paid $40? If so, it doesn't reflect this in my subscriber stats...
I love the boost feature - I’d love to see a test email if possible?
Hello. I’m three months in and loving Substack. The issue I wanted to ask about though is spam filters. Does Substack have relationships at an enterprise level with Gmail, Outlook, etc? If so, is there anything Substack can do to get Gmail, Outlook et al to stop coding Substack newsletters as spam? Even my own newsletter ends up in my own spam folder even though I constantly tell Gmail that it’s not spam.
Is there a way to upload a pdf or google doc write-up to Substack and have it transform into a Substack article? I am using a number of charts and tables and it has been a challenge to get the formatting right in the Substack editor. It would be easier if I could create the doc in Google Docs, probably convert it into a pdf file, upload the pdf to Substack and then have it seamlessly converted into a Substack note. Thanks.
I used the LaTex feature to make a simple table. It works great when people read the post in their email or the app, but when they read on the web they just see the LaTex commands. Here’s the post that has this problem: https://open.substack.com/pub/winwindemocracy/p/2023-03-thinking-about-ai-part-2?utm_source=direct&r=8ezqn&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web. Am I doing something wrong or is this a bug? Other suggestions?
That's really nice. Thank you.
Hello, does the substack integrated visit counter count my won visits to the newsletter? How does it make the difference per visit/ per click, is it by IP adress?
Is there a way to create and then duplicate template stubs that are just drafts? I use similar headed sections each issue of “The TfC Ramble” where I talk about the intersection of tech and comics. Currently, I duplicate a previously distributed post and then erase the section content each time, keeping just the headings. Is there a simpler way?
Is there any way to control the order of links in the navigation bar?
The default is: Home | Archive | About
When I added a page, it became: Home | New Page | Archive | About
I'd like it to be: Home | Archive | About | New Page
Is there any way to control this?
I just started serializing my novel as a different section in my main publication.
https://idiotspit.substack.com/s/still-life-of-desert-animals
Does anyone have any experience promoting things in this way?
Hi, I have a rather naive question--how do you insert video into your post? Thanks!
The novel I’ve been serializing is now complete. I don’t know what I’ll do next on my substack (perhaps a sequel?), but until I’m sure of what I’m offering, I don’t want anyone signing up for a new yearly subscription. How do I change the subscription choices to just free or monthly? I do not want to pause the subscriptions in progress, just prevent new ones.
I want to make sure I've got something right. If I have a monthly subscriber and I send them an offer (coupon) to upgrade to yearly at a discount, can they just click the link and automatically "upgrade" to the yearly price, or do they have to cancel their monthly subscription first, then use the coupon for the yearly subscription? Thanks.