When I embarked on this writing journey two-and-a-half years ago, in addition to reviving and repurposing this website from its former life as a marketing high ed blog, I also created a Substack account. All the cool kids were doing it, and I wanted to be among them. I was thinking I could simply automate a feed from this WordPress blog to push my content to “the stack,” as the cool kids call it.
After several attempts at automating post exports, it hasn’t worked out. The only thing that showed up whenever I attempted this was the header and any introductory text (see below). Nothing more.
So instead of trying to dig into the coding and risk FUBARing this site, the Substack site, or both, I decided to use the Notes section of Substack to manually share snippets about something I’ve posted here.
I like the Notes function of Substack because it has more of a social media feel to it. It’s a bit like Twitter, which I like. When I open Notes, I can see what people I follow are sharing or talking about.
When Substack rolled out the Notes feature in April 2023, here’s they described its purpose:
In Notes, writers will be able to post short-form content and share ideas with each other and their readers. Like our Recommendations feature, Notes is designed to drive discovery across Substack. But while Recommendations lets writers promote publications, Notes will give them the ability to recommend almost anything—including posts, quotes, comments, images, and links. Our goal is to foster conversations that inspire, enlighten, and entertain, while giving writers a powerful growth channel as these interactions find new audiences.
Glorious.
A lot of other writers use Notes as a social media-style means of updating readers with short items. Here’s a snap of my recent Notes activity:
I guess I’ll keep sharing links to things I post on this site to Substack Notes and hope a bit of traffic will trickle over from there.
Phenomenal growth
Since its founding in 2017, Substack’s growth has been phenomenal, with 35 million users (subscribers and authors) nine years later. Five million-plus of them pay money to read, view, or listen to content on Substack. (Substack recently added video and podcasting to its suite of offerings.) “Today, 52 newsletters on Substack earn at least $500,000+ annually,” reports Backlinko. “These newsletters are estimated to generate at least $40.2 million in subscription revenue.”
Historian Heather Cox Richardson’s “Letters from an American” is by far the most profitable, brining its author $5 million in annual subscriptions. Of course, Richardson, like practically every other Substacker I’m aware of, also offers a freebie option, but those who subscribe apparently receive additional content or other goodies.
Other journalists and writers are also cashing in. But I’m not one of them. I never intended my Substack to make any money, so I was surprised when a couple of months ago, one of my 42 subscribers pledged $50 in annual support. This pledge came, apparently, from the goodness of this person’s heart, since I offer no incentive for anyone to subscribe and never expected anyone to pay for content they can read for free. If anything, the way I use Substack–as a social media feed where I (mostly) share links to content not hosted on Substack–seems like a disincentive to subscribers.
Most writers on Substack I interact with aren’t there to make bank but to use the space as yet another platform for sharing their thoughts, stories, poetry, etc. Others are using the platform to host some very fine literary magazines.
Despite all the hype about Substack, I’m reluctant to do much more with my presence there. I have a well-established presence here on WordPress, with 200 or so subscribers, and also on Medium, where I have 963 subscribers. (I use Medium also as a place to cross-post from WordPress, and I do it manually and sporadically, and yet the subscriber count remains steady.) Then there’s Twitter (4,938 followers, many of them inactive) and my Facebook group “Andrew Careaga, writer,” which has 285 members. And Instagram and Threads and Bluesky and…
The point is, Substack may be the hot platform for writers right now, and there are a LOT of terrific writers on that platform. But there are still a lot of writers using WordPress, and a lot of good literary magazines use WordPress, too. There are also some terrific literary magazines are cropping up on Neocities, including Burial Magazine, Michigan City Review of Books, Mucky Mondays, and, coming very soon, Sunday Morning.
Writers can make money (in theory) from any platform, but Substack’s subscription model seems to hold some allure for some writers. And it’s nice that subscribers who want to pay writers for content are able to do so without much hassle. (Substack gets its share; of the $50 donated to me by a reader, Substack pocketed $8.10 of it.) Still, a lot of writers and online magazines continue to offer their content for free, on Substack and elsewhere, and that isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
In conclusion, I leave you with this note from one of the first writers I started following on Substack, Sherman Alexie, who is also one of the more active big-name authors I follow.
Top image by StockSnap from Pixabay
Thank you for this post about Substack. I appreciate everything you share about tools, processes and platforms.