In Substack We Trust: Navigating the Tension Between Powerful Tools and Platform Dependency

A panel transcript

A couple weeks back I was at a panel at NonFictionNow at Notre Dame about the pros and cons of Substack as a platform. The panel was moderated by book publishing industry journalist Jane Friedman. In addition to me, the panel included book critic Ann Kjellberg (Book Post) and Amran Gowani, author of the forthcoming novel Leverage.

During the panel, we talked about how Substack helps people build an audience and how it sometimes doesn’t; why its tech overlord owners are kind of evil; why I need to download my subscriber list more often, and more.

Jane created a transcript of the discussion, which she kindly granted me permission to reprint here for you all. It’s below. (Jane’s the one asking the questions, if that wasn’t clear.)

BUT! Before you get started; since we are talking about trying to make a living on substack, I will remind you that I am trying to make. a living on substack. If you find my writing valuable, consider becoming a subscriber. I’m having a sale today; it’s 40% off, $30/year. I can’t do this without you!

—

Let’s start with your writing and publishing background and how you came to Substack.

Ann Kjellberg: I started Book Post, a book reviewing newsletter that’s not all written by me. It sort of behaves like a magazine. I commission people to write the pieces and publish them through Substack, which is a somewhat niche element of the Substack universe, but not unheard of.

Before I started the Substack, I worked for 30 years at the New York Review of Books. So, I had a long life in old media. Before that, I worked at Farrar, Straus and Giroux, a book publisher, and I’ve worked in an independent bookstore. And I’d also started a literary magazine called Little Star.

Substack came to me when they were in beta and invited me to do a Substack version of my literary magazine. Around that moment, Trump had just been elected, and my boss, Bob Silvers, had just died. So, the New York Review of Books was in transition, and there was a lot in the air about the future of journalism, about the future of print media. And I felt a real sense of urgency around coming up with new ways of communicating with people around deliberative, thoughtful, well-grounded ideas. I thought, “How are we going to find ways of communicating substantively in a digital landscape?”

So, when Substack came to me with the idea of a literary magazine, I thought about it for a while and decided I wanted to do something different [even though] I wasn’t planning to start a book review.

Noah Berlatsky: I’m a freelance writer. I write about politics. I write about culture. I write about whatever people pay me for. I also do work-for-hire stuff. I do some ghostwriting. I do really whatever I can manage. Um, I’ve been doing that since 2003. I started my Substack, Everything Is Terrible, maybe three years ago. I also write pretty much weekly for Aaron Rupar’s Public Notice, which is one of the biggest liberal politics Substack newsletters. He’s got hundreds of thousands of readers. People reading me there often come to read my own Substack.

Amran Gowani: I was a former corporate guy. I used to work at a pharmaceutical company and investment bank. I was a business journalist for a while. And I had a midlife crisis, and I started writing full time, I started writing novels.

Because of my previous life, I had no experience with social media. So I decided I was going to build my online presence in 2022. I was late to Twitter, I was late to Facebook, late to Instagram, etc. And email newsletters were kind the hot idea at the time because of Substack.

I found a lot of success building my email newsletter audience. I quite enjoyed using the platform early, and I think I just got a little tired of it over time, which we’ll get into the reasons why, as it became more like a social media platform and less like just a classic email newsletter or online blogging platform. So I transitioned over to Ghost, which is a open source, independent platform that a lot of large publications work on. My full-time job is novelist, then I use my email newsletter as a marketing tool and a brand-building tool.

We’ll first start with the good parts of Substack, or why Substack is such an attractive solution. Ann, what has Substack made possible for you that might have been difficult or maybe even impossible on other platforms?

Kjellberg: At the time I began it, there was no prospect of doing something like this. There had been a great efflorescence of blog culture, but that had been destroyed by the collapse of digital advertising. And there was a lot of skepticism around algorithmic distribution in the social networks, especially after Cambridge Analytica. So there was a lot of uncertainty around how we were going to be able to distribute ideas as print magazines were losing their foothold to free online writing.

I was really influenced by the writings of a tech writer named Jaron Lanier, who had pointed out early the dangers of social media and had put forward subscriptions as an alternative. He said that when people have paid for something, they have more of a sense of connection and investment in it.

So the email newsletter, as Jane said, has many benefits. At the time, it seemed to me like crazily old-fashioned. I couldn’t believe it was really going to rise in this way, but it has a direct connection with the audience, and you also know who your audience is. You have a list of everyone who’s receiving it and that you can take that with you wherever you go.

As we’ve seen in all sorts of creator-driven digital enterprises, building a connection with your audience that’s direct and personal has become a linchpin of how to survive as a writer in a digital environment. So a newsletter has a very direct mechanism for that. There was also an article in 2008 that was contributive to this way of thinking about creator economies by Kevin Kelly, who developed the 1,000 Fans model. He said that in digital economies like BuzzFeed and all those that used algorithmic distribution in advertising to make money, you had to pull in millions and millions of visits to get any economic benefit.

But another view was that you could make a living for yourself if you had just a thousand real fans. And if you can find those thousand people who really love what you do, you can charge them enough, and they will always come back to you. So this idea was kind of the basis of these new monetization ideas. So subscription model newsletters fulfilled a whole bunch of these things. Now you often hear, for example, in local journalism that even independent journalists who work for the Washington Post or the Wall Street Journal are encouraged and begged to go out and build connection with their audience. Writers of books are asked by editors, “Have you built a connection with an audience?”

So a newsletter is a direct way of doing that, because you know who these people are. For me, it was really important that Substack took care of the tech, they took care of this difficult business of connecting the money with the platform, and they also had a platform that was flexible and simple and looked nice and worked really well.

Then the secondary part of it that worked for me—it was a big shift that began to take place where social media really fell away as a valuable resource for writers and journalists. In the beginning, many of us got lots and lots of traffic from Twitter and from Facebook, then they became much less amenable to us. So growth became much more challenging. How do you get your work out there to people who don’t already know it? And when Substack came to me, they didn’t have a model for that. They said, “People will share your newsletter.”

Then, over time, they began to develop these network effects, which have both benefits and downsides. These network effects were providing you with all of these new readers, just as all the other sources of new readers were really falling away. So it became a pretty irresistible proposition.

And for me, I’ll just speak a little to the upside of the Substack network effects before people start talking about the downside. I get most of my new traffic, and my new subscribers through recommendations of people I truly admire, like Garth Greenwell, Alexander Chee, Alicia Kennedy, people who have just come to my thing, I don’t know these people at all, they recommend it, and they bring all sorts of readers who never would’ve heard of me before. So this is a tremendous benefit. And even if I don’t always manage to keep them, there’s no other way that I would’ve found these people.

The great thing about Substack Notes is that ... it encourages and lifts up links into your pieces. So it draws people out of the social feed into writing, into more serious and lasting writing that you’ve done for yourself. So these benefits of the Substack network have really been helpful to me as a small and serious, not particularly viral or splashy outfit.

Berlatsky: I’ve kind of experimented with various platforms over the years, and Substack’s been the only place where I’ve actually made sort of a substantial income from crowdfunding. Substantial for me is $2,500 to $3,000 a month. I’m not rich, but that’s a significant chunk of what I need to make from freelancing to sort of keep the bills paid. I have 900 paid subscribers now. There’s a real ceiling on how much they’ll pay, but like $30 to $50 a year maybe.

Why that happened is in part because of Substack’s network effects, because I write for Aaron Rupar, who has a huge audience, and he recommends me because he’s kind. And people find me that way. That’s probably where I get a third to a half of my subscribers. And I get recommendations from others.

It’s kept things afloat as other venues kind of disintegrate, which keeps happening. I’ve had two major clients dump me this year. I mean, that happens every year. Every year, you’ve got to rebuild the whole thing because everything is collapsing around you, for 20 years. [laughs]

The other thing that kind of got me a lot of followers, and this is not reproducible, but when Substack started Notes, I got on fairly early and for whatever reason, the algorithm decided that I was the Notes mascot. [laughs] So for three weeks or something, everyone who joined Notes saw, like, just me practically on their feed. I had 1,000 followers, not paid, just like 1,000 people following me, and it went up to 3,500 in two weeks. And there was one day where I got 1,000 followers, and there was one hour where I got 400. That made it feasible to write more for the platform, which then enabled me to keep going.

So Substack’s been very kind to me because of the way the network is set up, which is the good thing. But also, it’s kind of just luck. So I happened to get lucky on this platform, which is cool, but I don’t know that that’s a huge recommendation of the platform in particular.

Gowani: I’d say the single most important factor for why you’d want to set up shop on Substack is the network effect. It’s the recommendation engines, the featured publications, the sharing, the internal Notes platform. That’s really powerful.

So, I’ll focus on two things that I really benefited from Substack. Networking, not necessarily the network effect of getting more subscribers or more followers, but actually meeting other writers. I tend to write humorous satire, short-form comedy, sketch-like comedy, and then I write fiction.

I was able to, by virtue of being a fairly visible guy on Substack, meet other novelists that then became my friends, that became people who introduced me to literary agents, who wrote blurbs for me. These things were extremely powerful. Some of my closest literary associates were people I met on Substack who were also firing up their own newsletter, writing personal essays, writing short fiction, writing craft advice. And so by just being in a network where there’s a lot of other really talented people that you can kind of like glom onto and then get them to pay attention to you, you can make some connections that downstream can become very powerful.

I met Jane at a writing conference, but then Jane is visible on social media platforms that I’m on. And she thinks, “Okay, I need someone who’s loud and obnoxious to talk on this panel. So I’ll send him an email.” Right? And so that, these things can pay dividends down the line.

I didn’t start in the media and the creative game. It’s something I came to in midlife from careers in corporate. I had no credentials. I don’t have an MFA. There’s nothing to suggest that I know how to write anything. And so Substack is a platform that has no gatekeepers. I could just get on there and show people that I know how to write. Nobody’s gotta give me permission. I used Substack to build my creative newsletter. I didn’t find financial success because a creative newsletter is a completely different animal than an actual paid newsletter with a real content strategy. That’s a whole other panel.

So I use the Substack as a creative writing platform where I can write humor, satire, and show my capabilities. And when I was fishing for literary agents for this novel, my agent that I ultimately signed with, he went to my Substack, and he said that that influenced his decision. He’s like, “Not only did you write a book that I want to represent, I could see the vast scope of the work that you were able to produce.”

And if I would have just pitched all those things to McSweeney’s or New Yorker Shouts and Murmurs, none of them would have been published. Right? That took the gatekeeper wall down for me so I could put my work into the world and get people to pay attention to it.

When I started my newsletter, I brought 150 subscribers with me—friends, family, acquaintances, old colleagues. And I was able to 10x my audience in three years with essentially no credentials, other than just I’m putting compelling or interesting work into the world. That helped me find literary agents, meet other writers, and ultimately sell my book.

I want to talk about Substack as a platform or publisher since it’s clear they make choices influencing visibility. Noah, you wrote a piece a couple years ago saying, “Substack doesn’t love the little guy.” You critiqued Substack’s favoritism towards certain voices. Could you tell us more about that?

Berlatsky: I don’t think it’s really changed. I was comparing it to Bandcamp, which is a music platform. And Bandcamp’s really interested in getting you to find things that you weren’t necessarily thinking of, that you didn’t know about, that you wouldn’t necessarily find on your own. So their publicity material, which I wrote for a while, is people writing about different scenes—the techno scene in Austin or in Brazil or wherever, right? So that you might find work that you hadn’t ever thought of by bands that aren’t that big and give them a few dollars.

It’s pretty political, it’s a very deliberate decision. They’re a bunch of lefties, and they want to be egalitarian and help you find cool stuff. When I was writing there, they said “Don’t pitch us mainstream acts because you don’t need to do that because everybody knows about them.”

That is not how Substack works. Substack is not really interested in getting you to find the little thing that you hadn’t thought of but might enjoy. Substack heavily promotes people who you’ve already heard of.

When I was writing in 2023, the people who had just come on were Hamilton Nolan. He had a huge audience already. Seymour Hersh, who unfortunately has a huge audience because he’s a conspiracy theorist and jerk. So they look in general for people who are already successful, and they give them more publicity, and they encourage you to go to them because they give them more credibility. They think that you’re more likely to pay money for people who you’ve already seen elsewhere.

[Looks at Ann Kjellberg] Your experience might be a counterindication.

Kjellberg: Yeah, I’m sitting here wondering about that.

Berlatsky: They did come to you because you had credentials outside, though.

Kjellberg: I was bringing in authors that people would have heard of. I would say that I never got any of these perks, you know? I [joined] before they did that. I didn’t get support or help from them. Pretty soon after things started to bulk up, I didn’t really hear from them. They would have liked it if I’d been a huge splash, but they realized that I wasn’t operating in a way that was going to work that way.

Berlatsky: Right, and then they weren’t necessarily giving tons of publicity to the thing that was not a huge splash.

Kjellberg: I never felt that they gave me tons of publicity. They never used me as an example of anything, even very early on when they had very few Substacks. There was one moment when Hamish McKenzie, one of the founders, recommended that I put my own writing behind the paywall, and the writing that I’d commissioned, make it for free.

And I really didn’t want to do that, because my whole point was these are writers of established reputation, they’re serious people, they deserve to be paid, and you should pay them. And the writing I was doing is just kind of froth, to get people’s attention. But I think Hamish— they were trying to get at this get-behind-the-scenes mentality. It’s featurization of books’ content. Instead of doing criticism, you do the author at home and so on. I think that they were realizing the work I was doing was not flashy enough to rise in their numbers, and that I wasn’t probably a good bet for them. [laughs]

Berlatsky: Right. Which is more or less what I’m saying. They want flashy, they want big. The idea is to get a few big Substacks that have tons of subscribers, and that’s where they get their money. As opposed to Bandcamp, where the model is we’re gonna show you tons of stuff, and you give a little bit of money to a lot of people. One of the reasons Notes is often so cranky [laughs] is because people there, they may dwell on it. Everybody realizes that the platform doesn’t really care about you unless you’re huge. There was some poor woman who came on, and she was a name, and people were just vicious. They went after her. They were—

Kjellberg: Is that Glennon Doyle?

Berlatksy: That’s right. They were like, “This isn’t what Substack’s about.” And I’m like, “Of course it is. What are you doing?” [laughs] So anyway, I thought that was horrible. It’s not her fault.

Gowani: Substack takes a 10 percent cut of the subscription revenue. So their incentive is to sell subscriptions. One of the things, to Noah’s point, it’s a lot easier for George Saunders, who everyone knows and loves and writes a great craft newsletter, to sell 5,000 incremental subscriptions than it is for 5,000 randos to sell even one subscription each. And so they have an incentive to promote the George Saunderses of the world, and that’s the good case. And then there’s the Matt Taibbis and the Glenn Greenwalds and those guys that can also make quite a lot of money for them that, whether you agree with their content or not, Substack gets 10 percent whether it’s good or bad.

Kjellberg: Of course the guys at the top of the platform are in it for the money. Maybe we shouldn’t pay so much attention to that and we can ask, what does it do for you? It is true that if you publish well on there, your own work, and you bring in your friends and you try to get them to talk to other people, it will come out beautifully. It’s a very good way to be visible and to build an audience.

Then you ask yourself the question, which I ask myself, how much you want to be a part of this operation? Which we’ll get to. But the one other thing I wanted to say is that maybe the effects that you’re talking about are slightly less visible outside of politics. Because politics is their most successful vertical. But if you’re in cooking or gardening or literature or something where there’s not so much money, I think there is a bit less of that incredible velocity of fame.

Let’s discuss Ann’s point—how much do you want to be a part of this operation? Amran, you wrote an essay you wrote called Substack’s Heart of Darkness Volume Two [laughter] where you talked about the content moderation challenges on the platform.

Gowani: I wanna say the outset that if you want to avoid terrible things on the internet, you should just never log onto the internet. So I’m not gonna blame Substack for being awful. Okay?

The gist of the essay is that it gets to the tension that Jane was talking about with them. All the tech companies try to thread this needle and none of them get away with it, for anyone that’s paying attention. But Substack tells you, “Hey, we’re like the power company. We just give you electricity and we give you natural gas and then you do whatever you want with those things. We don’t have anything to do with it.” Except that’s not true, because they send you the electricity and the natural gas and then they tell you, “You gotta watch this video and here’s these newsletters we want you to subscribe to and you gotta listen to this guy on this podcast.”

And so they’re not operating as a utility. They have algorithmic promotion. They have editorial curation, and they have these things that make them a publisher. So fine. You know, being on the internet’s hard. I don’t have all the answers. I’m not trying to blame them for everything that’s wrong with the internet, but I blame them for talking to me like I’m stupid. Right? And I blame them for talking to all the users like they’re stupid. And you don’t have to listen to me. Like, this guy, Ken White, he was on Substack and left, I believe, in 2023. And he said all this stuff a lot more eloquently than me. And he’s one of the preeminent First Amendment defense attorneys in the world.

If Ken says it, then you should listen to him. I’m just repeating what he said, basically.... You either have to say, “We don’t put our thumb on the scale at all,” and then not put your thumb on the scale. Or acknowledge, “We’re putting our thumb on the scale, and if the grossest stuff on the platform is what makes us the most money, then that’s where we’re gonna put our thumb and we’re gonna try to make the most money.” Just be honest. And it’s the lack of intellectual honesty that riled me up the most.

Berlatsky: These guys are tech libertarians. You know they’re all tech libertarians, right? I mean, everybody who runs this stuff. Part of the reason that they promote Richard Hanania is because he makes money, but part of it is because they think he’s cool? So it makes you queasy. I mean, I’m still on there. I’m reluctant to abandon this place that has actually made me able to have a sustainable income. I’m still on Facebook. They’re all awful, but you’ll see people say that Substack is not awful, and that is false.

Kjellberg: I don’t really want to come to their defense but maybe I’ll just provide slight pressure in another direction. I think that Substack made wrong decisions in certain [areas]. ... They shouldn’t have anyone on there who’s violating the terms of service. But there is kind of countervailing danger, which is kind of the Bluesky problem. If you only have platforms where everybody is in ideological unison, then it becomes a totally homogeneous environment, and then we have the kind of siloing that prevents anyone from learning anything or growing.

I think we do want to have platforms in which people where people who disagree with each other can cohabit. There should be terms of service that prevent hate speech against marginalized groups, and those terms of service should be enforced. And the algorithmic or promotional systems shouldn’t give priority to voices on the right because they think that’s cool or because they think that will bring them higher-paying customers.

But I think we have to accept that if we’re going to be on any sort of platform, we’re going to be there with people saying things we find heinous. And that includes being published by Simon & Schuster, or being published in The New York Times, or being on Twitter, or really anywhere we want to be if we’re participating in American life in any sort of full way.

Ann, you’ve expressed some skepticism in the past about who Substack is attracting, particularly in the writing and publishing community. Like, is Substack just attracting writers to the platform rather than readers? So you end up in this kind of echo chamber of writers marketing to other writers rather than finding their readers.

I think that’s a problem. Substack markets itself as a platform for writers, and those of us who are in this situation of writing about writing on Substack then find ourselves speaking to writers. That is a siloing problem. The whole point or reason that I’m doing short books coverage is that I want books coverage to have broader reach in America. So, I really don’t think Substack has at all cracked the problem of how we can have more pervasive, substantive news reading.

All right, let’s talk about money. What moves the needle for you in getting people to pay?

Berlatsky: I tried paywalling some things for a while, and nobody cared. The thing that’sactually brought in people who pay is when I do sales. My Substack is already, like, pretty cheap. It’s $50 a year, which is at the bottom. Once a month I have a sale where I cut it, where I have a 40% sale. Then people are paying $30. And that seems to be what people are willing to pay me to write. [laughs]

I’ve had pretty consistent growth. It’s not off the charts or anything, but people keep coming on, and I’m getting more people than I’m losing in general. Sales are really easy to set up. Substack’s tools are really intuitive and easy to use. It’s kind of like the big draw and, you know, I also am just like constantly asking people to pay me. Which is grim and tedious for everyone, but that’s capitalism.

Kjellberg: One thing that people talk about a lot among ourselves on Substack is kind of the Patreon mentality. You basically convince people to support you because they love you, not because they’re getting their money’s worth, because they can get a cheap subscription to The New Yorker or to The Atlantic for the same amount. It does become this idea of forging a relationship and making people feel that they’re part of a project. But I would say, especially as these recommendation methods become more successful and churny, we all end up with a lot of free people who aren’t that committed to us. So, it becomes harder to convince them to pay.

Gowani: I threw the towel in on monetization. Jane and I did a business clinic in November 2023. I think all the answers you’re looking for, what’ll move the needle and won’t, are in that video. You have to have a clear value proposition and you have to be consistent, those are two clear things. Noah’s political coverage: They know what to expect from him. He delivers three times a week. People say, “Hey, I’m willing to pay for that.” Ann’s doing book reviews and literary criticism, and people are saying, “Okay, I know what I’m getting, and then I want to support her, and I’ll become a patron.”

But it’s going to become increasingly difficult to do that. I would recommend everybody go in eyes wide open that you’re not going to start a Substack and start making any money until you start really delivering value and showing consistency.

Berlatsky: Some people don’t have to monetize it at all. But you can also have it monetized and not have a paywall, which is mostly what I do. There’s a subscribe button, but basically everyone can read it. Heather Cox Richardson, the most successful single person on Substack, the payment is voluntary. Anybody can read it for free.

Kjellberg: So there is that Patreon mentality.

Berlatsky: Yeah. When I put a paywall up, it isn’t like suddenly people said, “Oh, I have to read that.” People just skipped it.

Last question before we open it up to the audience: let’s discuss platform dependence. What if Substack gets sold tomorrow to Elon Musk and God knows what he does with it. [laughter]

Berlatsky: [expletive]

Or what if Substack changes the rules of the game in a way you don’t like? Do you pay any attention to these risks? Are you doing other things to kind of shore up your position so that you could depart and not lose all your money?

Kjellberg: Well, one of their important selling points is that you can take your list. Everybody sort of waits for the moment when they no longer allow that. I still download my list once a week, or I try to, so that I can always take those people with me to Ghost or somewhere else. I don’t think that I would find it too hard to leave Substack. It would just be painful for me to have to handle the backend. The bigger problem is just for me to know when, for moral reasons, I should overcome my inertia [laughs] about staying there. The Substack network is working so well internally, and it’s giving a lot of us a kind of false security. We’re not really developing alternatives for discovery in online writing. It’s really a wasteland. I mean, Bluesky I enjoy a lot, but I don’t get much traffic from them. I don’t know about you.

Berlatsky: I get some traffic from Bluesky. And I’ve been growing there. I mean hopefully wherever Aaron goes, he’ll take me with him.

I probably should download the list. I haven’t done that because I hate to think about it. I just feel like it’s inevitable that it’ll go belly up, and then I’ll be screwed. Because that’s what’s happened to me through my entire freelance career, you know? Something goes belly up, and I’m screwed. I’m probably not preparing enough.

Gowani: Given my background in the business world, this is something I think about way more than your average creative person. I used to follow the venture capital space. Substack raises money from venture capitalists, mostly Andreessen Horowitz. They’re running at a loss, they’re losing money, and they’re hoping to hit an inflection point and take off. Well, they’re never going to take off. They might get to profitable, but they got valued at like $650 million in 2021, and that’s just lunacy.

They’re not even close to that valuation by any reasonable metric. I’m not even rooting against them, honestly. They’re just not close to where they need to be to justify that valuation. They’re very small potatoes in the tech scene, and they have outsized cultural impact, which is kind of fascinating because they are drawing the thought leaders and the journalists and the politicians. I mean, Pete Buttigieg has a Substack now. It’s kind of like become a little bit of the new Twitter where thought leaders congregate.

In terms of platform dependency, one of the reasons I left for Ghost was because I felt like I didn’t have control of my experience anymore. When I first got to Substack, you create your newsletter and they had some chat room functions where you could go hang out with the other writers, and that’s how I did a lot of my networking early on and grew my subscribers. Then they introduced Notes, and I’m not a big fan of social media. And now it’s built into the app. I used to love to read on the app. Then they introduced Notes, and I don’t use the app anymore because I just don’t need another thing to be clicking on and distracting me. I already have enough of that. Then they introduced live video and when you open the app, they jam a video in your face. I would be on TikTok then if I wanted live video jammed in my face. ...

It was all these encroaching choices where they’re taking away power from the user. I don’t have any serious monetization potential on Substack. I just want a place where I can use a platform, enjoy myself, build a fanbase of people that are interested in my creative writing, and control my experience. At Substack, they’ve basically taken that away from me.

Now, the flip side, if you don’t have a newsletter or if you want to start an independent publication, I would strongly encourage you to start on Substack. Take what you can get and then run when you’re ready. And that’s kind of what I’m doing. I still traffic on Substack Notes. I treat it as a social media channel that I can go in and crack some jokes or see what my friends posted, and then I can leave. But that’s the extent of my experience there.

Audience question: Is there any downside to never monetizing? Just for context, I’m newer to Substack and I’m on a much more modest level. I don’t want to have to do it all the time. So there’s nothing wrong with just treating it like a free newsletter?

Berlatsky: No, there isn’t. On Notes, if you’re not monetized, I think they down-rate you. But there’s no reason that you can’t just do a free newsletter and send it out to people who want to read it.

Gowani: If you don’t have a compelling business proposition for why people should be paying you, you probably should have a free newsletter.

Kjellberg: They made a big deal with me early on about frequency of posting. And it is a grueling obligation if you feel that you must post twice a week for the rest of your life. I think it is important to be regular, but I’m not sure how often. I don’t know, what do you think about that?

Berlatsky: People often post just once a week. People sometimes post less than that. I post pretty much every day, but I’m nuts. I’ve been writing every day for 20 years. That’s how you have a middle-class income when you’re not a superstar writer, is you just write all the time. For me, I’m just writing there instead of elsewhere.

Gowani: Substack will pressure you—all the little things making it clear that if you’re not monetizing your newsletter, like what are you doing? But that’s the wrong mentality. Again, think about what your bigger objective is as a creator, as a personality, as a journalist, whatever you’re trying to accomplish. And if a paid newsletter doesn’t make sense, then don’t do it. Don’t feel pressured to do that.

Audience question: You guys are all really established at this point. What advice would you actually give someone who’s starting from scratch? Where do you even start?

Berlatsky: This is not super thrilling to hear, but the best way to start getting an audience is to write for somebody who’s got a platform. Looking around for other ways to get your name out there is useful. Building up a social media presence, wherever that may be, can help drive people to your newsletter.

Gowani: Substack is a place where I could just put work into the world. I don’t want to give you a platitude about how if you do great work, it’ll get discovered. That’s obviously not true. People do great stuff all the time and are obscure, and people make garbage all the time and make millions of dollars. So it’s not that simple.

But if you do make good work and put it out there, you just have to commit to it. I started at 150 subscribers of people that I knew, and it took me about a year to double that. But then it only took me a year to triple that, and then it only took me another year to grow that by another 50 percent. ... You have to be ready for the long haul and consistency.

Kjellberg: Maybe nobody has said this because it’s too obvious, but the first thing you should do is just go to your relatives and your friends and the people you went to school with, and you say, “I’m doing this thing. Please help me out by just reading the first few and saying that you like it and leaving me a comment.”

I share everything that I do to my personal Facebook page, and I often tell a little story about why I’m especially happy to have this writer, so that my friends understand what this means to me. And I gotta say, some of my friends have been the biggest help. They’ve shared it with people that they felt would like it, and they’re your little kernel to get it moving.

Oh, and you know, some writers, I saw this especially during the campaign, I mean during the pandemic, [laughs] when it was hard to get, um, events together. Writers group together and share each other’s stuff and go to each other’s readings so that they, they will always know that there’s a little bunch of people.

Audience question: We talked a lot about the various sort of discoverability functions and levers inside of Substack. But there’s also recently been a flurry of media about the way Substack is serving as a bridge to legacy media or traditional publishing. The Naomi Kanakia piece that was in The New Yorker recently about her novella that was published on Substack. So, I’m wondering, for those of you who are not on Substack, what are the challenges to discoverability that you’re finding outside of that closed garden ecosystem?

Gowani: I’ve changed my thinking around the value of the newsletter and who it’s for. I think of my newsletter more as like a value-added service for fans. ... I still maintain my presence on Substack Notes, as I mentioned. And then I use other social media channels [but] I’ve not had success driving subscriptions through Bluesky. I’ve not had success driving subscriptions through LinkedIn.

But Substack ironically is a place where I can still get people’s email addresses because I write something funny or I write something quippy or something insightful. They say, “That guy sounds interesting.” They click subscribe in Substack. I send them an auto-generated email that says, “I’m gonna be porting your email over to my platform on Ghost, expect an update soon.” So I’m getting the best of worlds here. I found a way to hack the system a little bit.

Friedman: One of the most bitter moments of my professional life was when someone told me, “I can’t wait until you move your paid newsletter to Substack.” So it is a real issue.

I do have a modest social media foundation that helps a little bit. And I also have a separate free newsletter that keeps me visible. But the thing that helps me most of all, hands down, is when people talk about what I’ve written. That seems so simple, right? But it’s really hard to get people to talk about a paid newsletter. [laughs] I’m hoping that the free edition helps. That’s only been out a couple months, but I have seen some positive effects of that. Some people feel a little anxious about screenshotting or sharing some of the paid stuff because they feel like maybe I’ll get mad or something, but it’s a great marketing and publicity effect. I love it when people are tempted and then do share some of what I’ve published. It’s fine. I would never object. Hint, hint.