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Substack is working on improving this by adding discoverability features, but there’s already a lot of competition from other publications and journalists.Įveryone struggles with audience growth. But unless readers are stumbling upon your work while browsing in the app itself, it’ll be a challenge for them to find you. When you publish your content on Substack, your existing readers and paying subscribers will receive email notifications about it, and they’ll be delighted. It’s a middle-of-funnel strategy, something that works well when people already know who you are. Reminder:Email is *not* a top-of-funnel strategy.

Since most users are creating free newsletters, however, this puts Substack in a less-than-desirable position. Substack's payment provider is Stripe, and the platform charges a 10% cut on subscription payments, which is how it makes money.

The software company also has the Substack Defender program, a legal support program that helps with legal reviews and issuing cease-and-desist letters on behalf of a writer.

🔗 Related: How to Pitch the Media in 2023: 72 Outlet How-Tos Like YouTube videos, well-designed Instagrams, or entertaining TikTok accounts, quality Substack publications can help attract and gather like-minded groups of people. Journalists want the ability to post to their community immediately, and many want to escape content farms. Traditional media industry juggernauts like The New York Times and Vanity Fair risk disruption by Substack. You can put content behind a paywall and require readers to pay to read an article, or you can publish content free of charge.

On Substack, writers can do creative work, publish their ideas on the web, and move on. Substack lets you escape the “social posts hamster wheel” that has become so common in online publishing. Substack Notes is a new feature the company rolled out in April 2023. The top ten publishers on Substack collectively have hundreds of thousands of paying subscribers, whose dues add up to millions in annualized revenue.

➡️ Casey Newton’s wildly popular Platformer, one of the best paid newsletters on tech, has exclusive insider scoops you can’t find anywhere else-most recently a day-by-day update of the inner workings of Twitter as Elon Musk took over. ➡️ Food and beverage writer Alicia Kennedy accidentally enabled the paid newsletter button on Substack last year, and soon had 400 paying readers, according to an interview with Digiday. ➡️ Boston College professor and historian Heather Cox Richardson, one of the biggest Substack writers, writes about the intersection of history and politics to hundreds of thousands of readers. The platform’s pared-down design and writing tools can give thought leaders a way to bring new subscription revenue to life and be paid for the work.

From that perspective, I'm grateful for Substack. So what does starting a Substack entail, really? Let’s go over Substack's features, how it stacks up against other email service providers (ESPs), and what independent writers should consider.įor many people, a Substack newsletter has created a resurgence of interest in email distribution lists and publishing, even though email marketing is well over 20 years old. For some content creators, Substack is not the right pick.The Substack app is silky smooth, and the addition of Notes in 2023 added a solution for short form content.You can use the platform for personal writing or news, and send digital newsletters directly to a reader’s dedicated inbox.Nevertheless, Substack has become a magnet for great writing in recent years, and has emerged as one of the great journalistic totems available today.

However, seasoned newsletter writers know that the money on Substack isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

You can grow a free newsletter, or use your Substack to introduce subscription fees for your premium content.

In the age of ChatGPT and other writing AIs, personalized writing will become more valuable.

#Substack newsletter software#

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