The Substack guide I wish I'd had

My December gift for paid members, hope you find this helpful :)

Young woman reading, oil on canvas by Gustave Courbet, 1866

This is the Substack Guide I wish I’d had when I was struggling. Substack says it’s too long for email so if you received it via email, just click the title to go to the online version. I hope you find it helpful.

I want to start with a pet peeve because it’s relevant.

I wrote on Medium for almost five years before I started on Substack and here’s something that happened there all the time. Some new writer would show up and start writing “how to succeed on Medium” articles and I’d watch their following shoot to the moon. Made me a little crazy. They’d always start with some “Woah, I doubled my views” or something like that and people click, read and follow out of curiosity.

And on some level I get it. It’s hard to get seen as a writer. And people struggling to get reads would wonder if “maybe” those people can help them. Maybe there’s the odd tip in there that might be helpful. But it feeds into a greater problem.

The problem was that those people had no idea how to get views to a personal essay or poetry because all they wrote was “make money” posts. Easy to get clicks and followers when you’re telling broke people how to earn a bit more. A lot harder to build a following writing about something that isn’t money or get clicks.

Meanwhile I’d be writing pieces like the hardest part of aging and getting a hundred thousand reads and making the top viewed list. But the “money” people got the following. It drove me a little crazy to watch that happening over and over.

I’m telling you that because there’s a lot of that going on Substack, too.

There’s legit help, too. But the crucial part is knowing the difference. Because if you don’t know the difference, it’s so easy to chase bad advice and tips that don’t help.

To illustrate, I’m going to showcase two women I know of on Substack.

The first is Sarah Faye. Sarah works with more Substackers than I even know. That’s her thing, and she does actual case studies. So if she says this is what I learned from thousands of Substackers, it’s worth listening to, okay? Because she’s not talking to the “how to Substack” crowd she’s working with real writers like you and me.

She’s working with people who write about art and literature and books and social issues and all the topics we’re struggling to get seen writing about. And there might be others like her, but I don’t know of any that have as much reach or credibility. Plus, her cats are freaking adorable lol.

The other woman I won’t name and if you know who I’m talking about, no names. I don’t do name and shame, that’s just one of the ugliest parts of the internet.

Woman #2 posts things like WOAHH I made fifteen hundred dollars and you can too. And tips. So many tips. Most of which are nonsense. Titles like If you aren’t doing THIS on Substack you’re GONNA FAIL. Here’s the REAL formula to GO VIRAL on Notes. I see those posts, see the hundreds of comments, it’s like Medium all over again.

She has one post where she tells people how to use tags. Hundreds and hundreds of tags the more the merrier and I want to scream no! No, no, no. This is not Medium. And I’ll come back to that later in the actual walk through of the settings.

The truth is there are no magic tricks to succeed. There’s no magic number of times to post on Notes, no magic formulas that will make you go viral and you aren’t going to succeed because you followed a step by step guide to make a wordmark in Canva.

The truth is, someone who writes about money and success has no idea how to grow an audience writing essays or poetry or fiction because it’s not what they do.

And me? I’m neither of those and I just want to be upfront about that.

I’m not here to teach. I’m just here to write about stuff that interests me. Mostly, I write about literature, writers and books. I just started another Substack called borked, in which I’ll be writing on the cultural issues that crawl up under my skin.

Sometimes I’ll share something I learned. And it makes me a little crusty that the few posts about Substack floated to the top of my most viewed list because those are not the posts that bring me subscribers. Views and subscribes are not the same and that’s worth remembering. My posts about Hemingway, the takedown of Ocean Vuong and every Vonnegut post — those are where my subscribers come from.

Point being, when I share, I want you to know they’re a case study of one. Me.

Just me realizing something I messed up and sharing it. Saying look, I did this wrong, maybe you’re doing it wrong, too. Because if I missed it, maybe you did too.

I’ve been writing since print magazines in the nineties and what I’ve learned is that every platform is different. What works on Medium isn’t what works on Substack, or Vocal, or in Lit magazines. Substack is the platform that took me the longest to get any traction with, and maybe you can learn from my ridiculously rough start.

I’m not afraid to say wow, I messed up and share it.

But if you want more than that, please do not get sucked into the clickbaity Substack Success circles here. Find someone legit and credible to help you. Credibility is where the rubber meets the road and to ignore that is just feeding the clickbait beast.

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If you’re struggling, this is probably why…

Here’s a slice of humble pie, showing you how badly I did on Substack. So bad, just wow. Kicking butt on Medium but utterly failing here. Five years to get three thousand subscribers. Five. Years. Last December I had 3K subscribers. See?

It’s almost embarrassing to see how long I plugged away with little to no results. A whole year in, I hadn’t even hit a thousand subscribers, for cripes sakes. A year ago, I had fifty thousand followers on Medium. And here? Pfft.

Know why I struggled? Frankly, because I had no focus and I wrote horrible titles.

Which is extra embarrassing considering how well I was doing on Medium.

Why? I wish I could answer that. I think I was using Substack like a journal. Just a little sandbox where I came to play and wrote whatever was on my mind. And I didn’t really ask myself, why would Substack share this with tons of strangers? I should have.

Because look, if we are lucky enough that Substack decides to distribute our writing in the Substack Network, total strangers have only two things to go on. Title and the cover image. Those are what stand out and make someone click. Or not.

And me? I wrote utterly stupid titles. Truly, epically stupid.

I actually published a piece with the title “An apology and two things.” 🤦

I wrote another where the title was “Regret.” That’s it. One word.

And now that I fixed that, I see it everywhere. Every time someone tells me they’re struggling I go look and it’s almost always titles. Half the time, I can’t even tell what the article is about by the title. And I recognize it because I did the same thing.

And if that’s not bad enough, they use cover images that aren’t helping. Same old Unsplash images I’ve seen a thousand times and a title that tells me nothing.

But it’s not just that...

Sometimes it’s an entire disconnect with what we’re doing. Here’s an example…

I ran across a Substacker who writes fantasy books. She was hoping Substack would help get her books into the world, but so far, it’s not. Know what she writes about? Being a mom, being a nurse, being a wife. Being tired. Her family, her sisters, her husband. Her struggles and frustrations with the world of self publishing.

And I just — face palm.

Makes me want to say what the hell are you doing? How do you think writing your journal online is going to sell your books? Why do we do this? That woman could have a beautiful fantasy substack and draw all the fantasy lovers and — ugh.

But if I told her that? She’d tell me all the reasons not to get focused.

It’s always easier to see lack of focus looking at someone else than yourself. It’s really hard to assess the sensibility of what we’re doing than what someone else is doing.

We’re just lost little ships on a very big and endless sea and when someone hands us a microphone, we use it to talk about ourselves. Or we just write whatever shows up. And that’s fine to some degree, we should write for ourselves, write what we love. But we lack a container to put it in. Here’s what I mean by that.

Just over a year ago, a friend said if I stop and figure out why my Substack exists, what I’m “about” here, that knowledge would inform my writing. It was like a glass of cold water in the face. A friend I trust and respect, saying I have no clue what I’m about.

And once he said that, I started seeing that everywhere, too.

I’d hover over my commenters to see what they write about and the descriptions always fit half the world. I’m a mom and a writer. Or a dad and a writer.

Well you and half the world.

Pair the generic description with weak titles that tell me nothing about what the articles are about and of course we’re going to struggle. Just like I did for five long years. I had a generic description that was too long and got truncated in my profile box. And crappy titles and no idea who would be interested in what I write.

If I don’t know why anyone should read my writing, how are they supposed to?

It’s really easy to look at Substack like any other writing site. Open the blank page and type. It’s worth remembering that the roots of Substack are as a newsletter platform. And yes, Notes is much like social media, but the question remains — why would anyone want your emails landing in their inbox weekly? What’s the common ground between you and them? Because if you don’t know that, they sure won’t either.

Some people come here with an intent. To share book reviews, or women’s issues or politics. But not everyone does. A ton of people come here to just “see what happens” and mostly what happens is not much.

So those two issues — bad titles and lack of common ground with the reader — those are why most people struggle. They’re why I struggled. And there’s nothing in the dashboard, no tips or tricks that will fix them. Only you can.

But once you fix them? There’s a ton of great little tools here that you might not even know about. So I want to dive into the dashboard and show you some of the stuff you shouldn’t miss in there.