Product news for writers: Private Substacks, group subscriptions, Chat updates, and more
At Substack, we believe great writing is valuable. We’re focused on building simple tools that allow you to grow your audience and earn an income directly from subscribers, on your own terms. Learn about the new tools we’ve built for and with writers below.
Please chime in, in the comments section, with your feedback.
Do your best work all in one place
New tools we have shipped to make it easier than ever to kickstart or maintain a publishing cadence on Substack.
Private Substacks now work much like private Instagram profiles. Curious readers can request to subscribe to your Substack, and writers can then approve or decline access to them.
Updates in Chat make it easier to start the conversation with existing subscribers. When posting a new chat, you can toggle to also send it out to your subscribers via email. And, when publishing a new post, podcast, or video, you can instantly start a conversation in Chat by automatically sharing the link with a caption in your chat.
Duplicate posts enable writers to easily re-use templates instead of reformatting each post from scratch. Click the three-dot menu by one of your posts and "Duplicate to drafts."
LaTeX support expands capabilities for math and science writers. Now writers can embed math equations into any Substack post using LaTeX.
Toggle between Substack publications with ease. Writers with more than one Substack publication can use the dashboard dropdown menu, writers can easily toggle between publications they own.
Inline footnotes allow readers to hover over the footnote number to see a preview of it inline with the text.
Great writing is valuable
Few things express trust in media better than a paid subscription. We build tools that help writers supercharge their paid subscription strategies so they can make more money.
Pledges are an easy new way for readers to support your work. When subscribing to a free Substack, readers can now pledge and commit to paying for a future subscription. The writer then knows that they can rely on those recurring payments if they enable paid subscriptions. Writers can enable paid subscriptions without changing what they publish. We started rolling out Pledges in December, and the feature is now available to all writers.
Group subscriptions now empower writers to sell “enterprise” or bulk group subscriptions, allowing a company to pay a fixed price for an unlimited number of “seats” to your Substack. Create a group subscription offer.
VAT tax compliance helps the growing number of writers around the world making their home on Substack to remain tax-law-compliant. Writers who configure Stripe Tax will have taxes correctly calculated for subscribers in relevant tax jurisdictions.
Writer feedback
Being EU VAT-compliant was a must-have for my Substack publication, given that I’m a European business. With most newsletter products, this compliance can only be achieved through accountants doing manual work.
Substack integrating Stripe Tax has made a huge difference in automating both invoice generation and tax calculation and making VAT compliance invoices self-service from my customers, removing a massive administrative and compliance burden from my shoulders. No other newsletter service has built anything similar.
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Grow your audience
When you publish on Substack, you not only get the best, easy-to-use tools for subscription media businesses, but you also get a world-class growth team that is always searching for ways to drive growth for your publication.
Audience insights is a new tab in the Stats section of your dashboard showing writers where subscribers are located around the world. The new insights also display audience overlap with other publications to help writers refine their strategies and grow their audiences.
Search improvements allow readers to search keywords to find posts, publications, and people across Substack from the Substack web reader, helping writers find new readers for their work. At the publication level, a search button is now prominently featured on the web in the top right corner of your Substack. When searching keywords, the top three relevant posts will appear.
Boost is our most energetic investment to date in helping writers accelerate their growth. Through Boost, writers like
, , , , and more entrusted us to ensure their publication benefits from cutting-edge growth features and experiments, all aimed at expanding their audience and increasing their revenue. Put our team’s comprehensive data and expertise to work for your publication with just one click.
In case you missed it: The Substack network is growing! One year ago, growth and marketing still mostly sat on the writers’ shoulders. The Substack network drove closer to 10% of free subscriptions in January 2022. Through a suite of new features we launched this year—recommendations, our new apps, improvements to the web and discovery platforms, and more—Substack is now driving 40% of all free subscriptions and 12% of paid subscriptions.
For more information on the new and improved tools and features, visit the hyperlinks above. We hope you give them a try.
As always, please feel free to leave feedback and ideas in the comments.
Do your best work, supported by your subscribers on Substack.
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