Writers share some of the unexpected and useful things they’ve learned along the way about digital mail platforms like Substack.
Rachel Choy, The Offcut
Reena Gupta, Merryana Salem and I started the Offcut because as writers of colour we were frustrated by white editors who wanted a ‘diverse’ team while quietly supporting white supremacy behind the scenes. We wanted a place to be able to write on our own terms and not be penalised for speaking out about Palestine and against racism.
We’ve found that a publishing niche—for us, it’s well-thought-out points of view on movies, TV and internet trends—is really helping us find our audience. Merryana’s dissection of the hype around Andrew Garfield’s Chicken Shop Date appearance, for example, attracted 31,000 reads and almost two hundred subscribers. There’s so much out there, and we want to make sure we are adding something new.
Max Easton, Barely Human
Though it’s now something of a pseudo-social-media hub, when I started a Substack in 2021, it felt like a tidy merger of a blogging platform and a newsletter. It was a good change of pace, and the advantages of a payment system allowed me to use it as a way of running a zine and cassette subscription service for my underground music project, Barely Human. I liked the versatility it offered: a way of uploading archived music writing, running some Q&A’s with members of the international punk community and the chance to explore esoteric ideas for mini-essays that I’d never be able to publish elsewhere (I’m currently writing about the legacy of the SST Records ‘Corporate Rock Sucks’ bumper sticker and T-shirt—who would publish that?). The newsletter element has also opened up some great email conversations with people who are interested in the things I talk about in there, and I’ve made new friends as a result.
The only issue I’ve had has been the creeping culture of financialising your ideas. I’d originally used Substack as a way to escape such pressures. I suppose the main thing I’ve learned from my dash with Substack is that you don’t have to wear a trench coat with all your writing strapped to the inside pockets and that its utility as a connection between writer and reader is much more interesting than using it as an earner.
‘The only issue I’ve had has been the creeping culture of financialising your ideas.’
Nick Feik, Nick Feik
Newsletters (whether on Substack, Beehiiv, Medium or whatever) are an opportunity to build up a direct relationship with readers. They’re a subscriber platform, an archive, a place to test new writing, and they generally cost nothing. Best of all, they offer freedom and independence. I wish I’d started mine earlier in my career.
In an era where freelance pay rates are so low, a freelance writer’s reach and audience are valuable assets and should be cultivated. So, even when collecting your freelance fees, don’t give your work away: unless you’ve signed a contract that explicitly says otherwise, you own the copyright to your published content and should be able to run your work on your newsletter/website/blog too. This is how you’ll build your audience.
A freelance writer’s independence is an asset too—one that writers and journalists at mainstream media houses generally lack. Newsletters are the place to express and explore this. I started a Substack not just to collect the things I’d written over the years but because it afforded me the freedom to write the political and investigative pieces I wanted to write. No more waiting for responses or rejections from busy editors; if a piece was worth writing, I wanted to write it. If you have your own site, at least you know that your writing won’t be wasted; you will be finding your readership while honing your own writing and thinking.
Given the dearth of big left/progressive publishing outlets, they can’t be relied upon to provide the kind of platform for things I’d like to write, when I’d like to write them. I have also found that large and mainstream media are much more limited in the scope of their thinking, less willing to explore niche or unpopular ideas and subjects, and less willing to mount unconventional or unfashionable arguments. They do provide audience reach, editing and occasionally legal protection, so don’t discount them, but your world as a writer must be bigger than the constraints that the mainstream media will place on you. Go forth and back yourself.
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Bri Lee, News & Reviews
I started News & Reviews in 2021 because in the years since Eggshell Skull was published in 2018, I’d been gathering an audience of readers on Instagram, but increasingly I hated how that platform made me take and share images of myself (especially my face) for the algorithm. I’d be trying to talk about advocacy and writing, but if I didn’t post with a selfie, nobody would see. And then Instagram started prioritising video, and it was the final shove. Now my newsletter is the main place I reach people, and it’s way better.
My advice would be to seriously consider what value you’re offering people. Don’t always be trying to sell something. If you only wait until you’ve got a book coming out to start a newsletter, you’re doing it wrong. Remember that old saying: ‘I went out to find a friend, but did not find one there. I went out to be a friend, and friends were everywhere.’ Think of it in terms of giving, not getting. I’m not trying to get followers. I’m trying to build a really high calibre, high quality community of readers. I’m trying to get people excited about their inbox at 5pm on a Wednesday.
The most successful newsletters are either personal or expertise-driven. People’s inboxes are already clogged. If you don’t have a clear ‘offer’, you just won’t get opened. Also, I see a lot of people explode with newsletters, then burn out after about six months. If you’re going to take money from people, be sure you can deliver. My growth over the years has been almost entirely slow-and-steady. Just put out reliably good material. I chose a weekly format, and I’ve barely skipped a week (aside from scheduled holiday breaks) since 2021. That commitment is a lesson in and of itself. It’s like exercise or learning a new craft—the only way to genuinely get better is consistent commitment. News & Reviews has 11,600 subscribers now.
‘Think of it in terms of giving, not getting.’
Patrick Marlborough, Yeah Nah Review
I’ve been freelancing for close to twenty years and the industry has never been as dire and/or as dumb as it is now. I was tired of having my writing hobbled by the watercooler worries of professional hacks and content huffers who pay me below minimum wage, so I thought I’d ship out and court defamation on my lonesome. I chose Substack because I’m a moron, and it looked like the easiest to use. Since then, they’ve turned into this hellish panopticon of sad-man Linkedin posting and those idioms about writing that are shared by people who can’t write. Nightmare stuff—hate it! The market is just flooded with drek. I’m only here because the bottom fell out of the industry, and I’ve lived through enough bottoms falling out to know that the bottom is about to fall out of this one. The arc of content bends towards slop, tragically. I guess my advice is: there are more of us than there are of them, comrade—the wall is coming for them, and we will soon be free!
Thankfully, I kinda already had an audience. I never went to journalism school or did a masters in writing or what have you, but what those who did seem to have in common, always, is a lack of voice (see: boring). In my newsletter, I can be as bombastic and autistic as I wanna be, and that’s a hoot for me—people are attracted to the sight of a village idiot having a good time; they wanna sit in the mud with you and play alongside you, I figure. That said, please subscribe to YNR: two hundred paid subs would genuinely change my miserable life, and I’m almost there!
Rick Morton, Nervous Laughter
Writing a newsletter is the (almost) socially acceptable form of blogging that had swept the internet in the mid-to-late 2000s. I have done both, though the recent foray has been better for my writing. It just feels more professional, perhaps because people can pay me to do it. With that comes the work, of course. And there is a lot of work. I spend about a day a week—spread out over the week—writing and arranging my pieces. I do this because I care and actually have an audience, which is a treat. It would be better to find out before you hit ten thousand subscribers that the platform you chose, Substack, is increasingly becoming a deliberate and willing tool of the far-right political project. There are other excellent hosts for newsletters, and I am transferring mine to the open-source Ghost as I write. It is easy to start a newsletter and hard to keep it going. There are already so many; all the more reason to make it a good one.
Roumina Parsa, here i am
Starting a newsletter helped me get over myself. I think that’s an important lesson in being someone who shares their art—insecurity is just a form of procrastination. There’s truly no one else out there who cares as much as you about your successes or failures, which is both fantastic and terrible but ultimately freeing. I encourage all my friends who write to start a newsletter. Do it anonymously. Do it imperfectly. Do it without concern for the aesthetics or the metrics or what you think being a ‘real writer’ means. You put something out there and maybe in a few months you read it back and think it kind of sucks (which is how it goes because you are always growing), but then you see that nothing happens. There’s no punishment. If it ever comes, some permanent feeling of belonging, I’m yet to experience it. I earn it every time I write. I give myself permission to be a writer, and external rejection or acceptance come to mean almost the same thing because I already did the hard work of making the writing exist.
Jessica Stanley, READ.LOOK.THINK.
Around fifteen years ago, aeons ago now, I was working for an ad agency which was trying to have a social presence—I set up an email newsletter for them and ‘curated’ (that’s what we called it then) relevant blog posts and inspiration so they could build their brand. This all took place on MailChimp. At the same time, I had moved to the other side of the world (from Melbourne to London), and I was trying to find a way to stay in touch casually with people that wasn’t a direct email, blog or Twitter. The answer these days would simply be WhatsApp or Instagram DMs, but because I’d gotten used to doing an email, that’s what I chose. READ.LOOK.THINK. feels like such a dated title now. I cringe at the words, the caps, the full stops: everything about it! But my intention was to find the beauty, cleverness and thoughtfulness that was, and still sort of is, possible to find online.
MailChimp began to charge money for hosting newsletters, so I leapt across to a then-new platform, Substack. I’m happy there, and I subscribe to a lot of other newsletters, but I don’t tend to monitor the news feed. I’ve been on high alert for a while since it seemed like Substack began trying to lure in the authoritarian right (including Nazis and TERFs). If it becomes a haven for them, I will have to bounce. Perhaps I would start instead on Ghost or Beehiiv.
I now have around six thousand subscribers, and at every event I’ve done for my novel Consider Yourself Kissed someone says, ‘we don’t know each other, but I love your newsletter!’ It’s helped me meet people I never would have met. I’m not naturally incredible at pushing myself forward to meet people, so having a sort of semi-intimate, discreet but meaningful digital stand-in has helped me get over that first hurdle of meeting new people. Sometimes I think I might stop the newsletter, but then I meet someone new and think, I can’t stop now!
My advice to writers is that there is absolutely nothing wrong with sending one email a month with links to any work you’ve made, as well as what you’ve been reading and watching. That is a baseline-useful newsletter, enough to be part of the conversation without taking it out of you, timewise. Don’t push yourself way out of your comfort zone. Writers should save energy and time for their real work, I think. You should be consistent, but not frequent, and never apologise for being ‘late’.
‘It’s helped me meet people I never would have met.’
Tori Watts, The Dating Chronicles
You don’t have to follow any rules. This applies to anything from grammar to any constraining ideas about how you think you should write or what you think an audience wants to read. That’s the thing about Substack—you tend to garner an audience when you lean wholly into authenticity, and that looks different for everybody depending on their subject matter. I didn’t create a Substack to bare a decade of my dating history to the online ether (largely because I didn’t believe that I could cross that threshold of vulnerability), but giving myself permission to be completely human and accountable has been surprisingly gratifying. Now I have the freedom to toy and tinker around with my own narratives, in my own voice, in my own time. There is a plethora of topics to choose from, but I’m learning that people really do respond to human experience and storytelling—it’s there that we look for parts of ourselves that we recognise in others.
Mekdes Yimam, The Raptorial
‘Post consistently’ is perhaps the most touted advice for bloggers and newsletter writers, the logic being that a regular schedule delivers on readers’ expectations and shows respect and appreciation for their attention. I didn’t always take heed, but I now see the benefits for more than just the reader. Posting consistently has required an intentional approach on theme and subject matter in each of the now thirty-six consecutive monthly issues of my Substack, the Raptorial, a newsletter on writing, reading and editing. The discipline of a monthly deadline has been beneficial to my writing practice, and with weeks between issues rolling by quickly, the act of paying close attention has become second nature, out of necessity, to ensure I have something to write about. When left to the amorphous post-whatever-whenever approach I’d taken with my currently dormant WordPress blog, there was less coherence and no boundary in scope, sometimes making it hard to know how or where to begin. But this approach had a platform-specific merit—my audience was a community of bloggers who provided a supportive space for my writing to land as and when inspiration struck (a gift for an emerging writer). In short, choose whichever approach works for where you and your audience are at!
