A production assistant for every show

Supercharge growth with Substack’s new video clipper and more time-saving tools

Today we are introducing a new video clipper, which helps you create and share the best short segments of your videos, plus an overview of the various ways Substack’s production tools can save time and help you grow.

Substack is focused on using the internet’s powers to simplify and accelerate your work. While the first generation of sovereign creators had to duct-tape together a website, mailing list, and payment system, Substack brought everything in one place, enabling them to forget about the tech and focus on what they do best—creative work.

We’re now adding to this stack by building design, marketing, and accessibility features seamlessly into the creation workflow. Together, this suite of tools acts as a simple yet powerful production assistant for your independent show. 

Create a shareable video clip

A great video clip is like a great headline. It grabs viewers’ attention and provides a preview of your subject and style before they commit to watching. For many show creators, sharing clips to discovery platforms like TikTok, Twitter, and YouTube Shorts is the secret ingredient to their subscriber growth. Moreover, sharing clips to Substack Notes introduces your show to a wide audience of viewers who see a direct path to becoming a subscriber.

We built a new video clipping tool to make it easier than ever to clip short segments of your videos and share them on Notes and other social channels. 

To create clips, upload a video to a post draft and click on the sparkle icon. You can choose from several automatic clip options, or make your own by selecting “Create” and selecting from the transcript. Clips can be customized with captions and multiple orientations, and will end with a screen advertising your Substack logo and URL. For a full walkthrough, watch this video tutorial:

Alex Kirshner

, who hosts the college football podcast

Split Zone Duo

, writes: “Getting an automated transcript in what feels like seconds is a big deal for us. At the end of every episode recording, we think about what might make sense as a social media clip. The transcript saves us a lot of time, and it syncs up really nicely with the recording.”

We recommend sharing clips both before and after publishing your post—before as a teaser to entice people to subscribe, and after to encourage people to watch the published video. 

Alex KirshnerJun 12

Fresh episode of Split Zone Duo just off the podcast presses for you. We love talking about college football but especially college football HISTORY, and this was a fun walk down memory lane of the most “pre-fired” coaches in recent memory. Never lose track of how weird Larry Coker’s Miami tenure was. There’s nothing quite like it.

7

1

The best clips are often just a couple minutes long and focus on a single complete idea, especially one that’s striking, provocative, or insightful. (Check out

Dwarkesh Patel

’s Twitter profile and

Glenn Loury

’s Substack profile for inspiration on what works best.)

Learn more: How can I create a clip of a video on Substack?

Generate transcripts and captions for your show

Last year, we announced a new tool that creates automatic transcriptions of podcasts and videos. Now these transcriptions are integrated into video captions, improving convenience and accessibility for publishers and subscribers on Substack. 

This feature gives creators more time to focus on crafting compelling content, rather than spending precious hours (and dollars) on transcription.

Ask for help with your Substack 

Substack’s support team is one of the best benefits that you and your readers have access to on the platform. But it can take time to wait for a written response, and sometimes you want an answer immediately.

To scale our work, we trained a custom chatbot on the entire library of Substack help documents, blog posts, growth guides, subscriber database, and other resources—for example, try asking it “How to move a podcast to Substack.” Bestselling AI writer

Timothy B Lee

and his commenters called the Substack support bot “remarkably fast” and “friendly.” Our support team is constantly reviewing answers and updating the bot with new knowledge, and it can even take actions, like processing subscriber refunds, on its own. 

You can access the Substack chatbot here or on your writer dashboard, by clicking the orange “Ask a question” button. And if the chatbot can’t answer a question, it can connect you with a human support agent.

Read more: Introducing new support for writers, including a powerful chatbot, moderation tools, and a dedicated writer success team

Enhance your posts with images

In addition to stock images provided by Unsplash, you can generate images for your posts directly within the Substack editor.

Click the image icon in the editor menu, then click “Generate” from the dropdown. You can specify both a prompt and a style, then instantly insert the image into your post. These images are created with Stable Diffusion. 

Listen to posts in the app

We integrated text-to-speech features into the Substack app, making it easy to listen to posts read aloud when you’re on the go. 

Simply open a post in the iOS or Android app, then click the play button in the top right to play an automated voiceover. (This feature is automatically enabled for most posts.)

These features represent Substack’s ongoing efforts to make it as easy as possible to start and grow a thriving media business. Think of our product like a show-in-a-box. In minutes, you can upload an episode and have it instantly distributed to every podcast platform, hosted on a customizable website, shared to a discovery feed on Substack Notes, and ready to earn recurring subscription revenue from your community of fans. And you’ll own your work and mailing list, no matter what.

Try these tools and more on your publication: