(2024-10-18) Read How To Substack

Max Read: How to Substack. Today, October 18, is Read Max’s third anniversary

I started this newsletter thinking of it as a one-year experiment to tide me over as I sought out freelance journalism and screenwriting work. But much to my surprise, the newsletter has turned out to be not just my most consistent but also my most (emotionally) rewarding and (financially) remunerative source of income--effectively and actually my full-time job.

I’ve been extraordinarily lucky to have a stable (and growing) income that doesn’t rely on corporate spending decisions or ad markets out of my control.

every once in a while I get a call from a friend or an acquaintance asking for advice on starting and maintaining a Substack. My advice is always roughly the same, and I thought it might be useful to write it down here for future reference.

To be clear, the below advice is not the only way to be a successful small-business owner on the Substack platform, but it does represent my basic understanding of how the job works.

My standard joke about my job is that I am less a “writer” than I am a “textual YouTuber for Gen Xers and Elder Millennials who hate watching videos.” What I mean by this is that while what I do resembles journalistic writing in the specific, the actual job is in most ways closer to that of a YouTuber or a streamer or even a hang-out-type podcaster than it is to that of most types of working journalist. (The one exception being: Weekly op-ed columnist.)

What most successful Substacks offer to subscribers is less a series of discrete and self-supporting pieces of writing--or, for that matter, a specific and tightly delimited subject or concept--and more a particular attitude or perspective, a set of passions and interests, and even an ongoing process of “thinking through,” to which subscribers are invited. (vibe, Thinking Out Loud)

So, part of your job as a Substacker is is “producing words” and part of your job is “cultivating a persona for which people might have some kind of inexplicable affection or even respect.” And then there’s a whole other part of your job, which is: “Internet marketing.” One thing that I like about Substack, and one reason I recommend it as a platform to people who are just starting out, is that it leverages its status as a platform to help you grow via network effects without you needing to do much. But you are the business owner here, and there are still internet-marketing type considerations you need to think about, at least to some extent. (parasocial)

This can be a rough adjustment if you are not a naturally entrepreneurial person, or have not been constructed as an entrepreneurial subject by virtue of being a college-educated millennial meritocrat, or if that subject-interpellation failed because you have Anxiety!

Write every week
This is, sort of, a corollary to the first thing above, but it’s also just the main substance of your actual work: You gotta write every week, preferably more than once. This is less a question of writerly gifts and more a question of commitment

As I’ve written before, with nearly every “content creator” job, at least at the start of your career, consistency is so much more important than quality

Be patient
I tell people who are just starting that it takes at least a year of publishing weekly (ideally more) to even know if the Substack is going to eventually be “worth it,” and at least 18 months for it to actually become “worth it,” financially.

Substack growth, at least for me and for most of the people I’ve talked to, is extremely inconsistent month-to-month, but relatively smooth year-over-year.

Three years in, I can say that I net about 850 paid subscribers every year like clockwork

There are many ways to do a subscription newsletter, and in some sense as long as you’re producing two or three a week you’re doing it “right.” But I suspect that both writers and readers respond best to some kind of consistently structured output.

The idea is basically: One free post and one paywalled post every week. The free post takes any form (column, interview, roundup, guide, explainer, etc.) and ideally stands alone. This post is facially the “main” output of your newsletter, but in the most cynical sense it’s marketing for the subscription product

The paywalled post offers some kind of value-add (shopping guides, book recommendations, link roundups), the contents of which are teased above the paywall. This is the main way you convert your free subscribers to paid--they want access to all the good, valuable stuff you’re offering behind the paywall. (Plus, I suspect it’s easier for readers to justify paid subscriptions if they feel like they’re getting something specific from it, rather than the more ambiguous and less urgent idea of “support.”)

on a day-to-day level I don’t think about my work in terms quite as cynical gimlet-eyed as these--my main goal in writing every week is to obtain praise and validation from strangers in order to maintain my fragile sense of self, not to architect the perfect marketing funnel for disaffected lawyers, journalists, and software engineers with disposable income.

Experiment
The nice thing about publishing frequently and consistently is that it gives you a lot of room to experiment. Try out different rubrics, different tones, different subjects.

pretty consistent year-over-year net growth of about 13,000 new free subscribers and 850 new paid subscribers; as of publication this leaves me with a little over 2,600 paid subscribers and a little over 42,000 total subscribers. Substack counts my gross annualized revenue at about $141,000 (that’s a forward-looking projection, to be clear; over the past year I’ve made a little around $125,000 gross); the platform takes a 10 percent cut and Stripe takes a further 3 percent in processing fees

One lesson from this year is that podcast appearances are actually great for driving subscriptions, presumably because you get a kind of hour-long pitch (the thing you’re pitching is your personality, basically) in front of an audience already prepared to pay for subscriptions