5 things you might not know about Substack and why they matter

I was going to call this “How Lenny Rachitsky earned $65,000" but I think I need to back up a little so it makes sense.

Nov 18, 2022

Couple of days ago, some guy tagged me on a Medium post. He was crushed about how badly his earnings tanked. He used to earn $400-$1000 every month. In October he earned $32. He tagged me because he knew mine have tanked, too.

So I wrote about why writers throw in the towel.

And I know writers write because they have to. It’s like Kafka said. A non-writing writer is a monster courting insanity.

But it’s nice when it puts something in the coffers, too. Except more and more, it’s not. We’re like McDonald’s workers. Disposable. Replaceable.

It’s an entirely different thing to earn $32 when you’ve never earned a penny for writing and to earn $32 when you used to earn $1000. You know? The first writer is a super great replacement for the second.

The first writer is still excited and seeing “all” the potential.

When you’re the latter, it gets real easy to say screw this. Can’t do it anymore.

It’s not just Medium. I was looking at the ProBlogger writer’s job board a couple of days ago. Businesses are offering the “competitive” rate of 3-4 cents per word. With research, citation and optimized for seo, please. That’s 1500 words, researched, cited and optimized for $45. Why not just chain us to our computers?

But then I got thinking.

Half the problem is that at most sites, writers don’t own their own audience. Doesn’t matter if I have almost 18K readers at Medium if my post doesn’t make it into their feeds. And those people on the job boards? Same thing. They own the readers.

There’s one place that’s different.

Here. At Substack.

I hadn’t really poked around too much. You know? So I decided to learn a bit more.

First, they don’t own my readers, I do. There’s no feed. If someone follows me, they get my emails. Period, end of conversation.

But here’s another difference I noticed once I dug in.

It’s not about mad writing chops here. It’s not about who’s the best writer or who the “powers that be” decide is hot today. It’s about shared interests. That’s all. There are people sharing recipes who have thousands of paid subscribers.

Which means they’re making at least several thousand a month.

Sharing recipes. Wtf. lol.

I don’t earn anything here. I started this newsletter to stay in touch. I work at home. No office. No water cooler. No one saying good morning, how was your weekend? So I look forward to these conversations. I think Covid did that to a lot of people.

But once I started poking around, I began to see potential I didn’t see before.

Like, people are making actual incomes here. That’s also when I stumbled across the story about how Lenny Rachitsky earned $65K the first year he went paid here.

Whether you’re a writer or just someone who could use a little more in the coffers every month, I think maybe what I found is worth sharing. Here’s a few things you might not have known about Substack…

1. You can actually see what is working here…

Medium has hidden that from us. No idea who is doing well or what’s earning well. They have hidden all of that from us. Same at Vocal. No idea what’s working.

Substack has a page called Discover. Incidentally, ignore the first couple of categories. Featured and Favorites are the popular kids listings.

But if you click into the topics, you can see what’s actually making a decent income. Some will surprise you. It surprised me. There’s some esoteric stuff doing well. Also, I saw a bigger focus on shared interest than writing chops. That was good to see.

I’m disappointed there’s so few topics, but maybe that will grow. Might shoot them another email and ask if they’re planning to add more topics. :)

2. You can email readers without a post going up.

I wanted to know if I could reach just some of my readers without a post going up. I’m working on something fun and wanted to share it with my frequent readers first. So I reached out and asked support.

Turns out, yes. They said go into the dashboard and filter the list how I want. Once I select only “part of” my list, I can click the “email” button and email some of my readers without a post going up. I thought that was handy to know.

3. You can add external links to your nav bar

If you have a website or you’re kicking butt on TikTok or whatever, you can connect that to Substack. Real easy. Just go to your dashboard and settings. Then scroll down to the nav portion. There’s a space to add links. Including external. It’s not just for pages on Substack. (Need to clean up my site this weekend so I can add it.)

4. There’s more than one way to get paid here

I thought I’d have to write twice as much to have a paid newsletter here. Most people with paid members offer a free version, with extra posts for the paid members.

Nope. Turns out that’s not true. You can do that. But you can also leave all your posts public and just add payment options for people who love what you’re doing. Like sponsorships. Which means you don’t have to write twice as much to get paid.

5. But also a caution - only one publication per Stripe account

I’d thought about adding sponsorships to both this publication and History of Women. But no. Not unless I want to set up another Stripe account. You can only connect one paid publication per Stripe account. Stripe does allow people to have multiple accounts, but if you don’t want to, it’s helpful to know in advance.

Hope that was helpful if you’re contemplating whether to write here or not.

Hello, Writer!

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