How to write a substack

Enjoy a wealthy and happy life as a professional writer

If any of you are thinking of starting your own substack, this is based on a note which I’ve sent to a couple of friends. Much of it is shades of the blindingly obvious, but it may be of help…

Being a pessimist by nature, I was at first a bit sceptical when I heard about this thing in America called Substack. While I enjoyed blogging in the 2000s for the Telegraph, and read lots of interesting and well-informed online writers, there didn’t seem a way of monetising it. And yet they’ve made it work for a lot of people.

I especially like Substack because, like a lot of writers, I'm not especially good at pitching and selling myself, which is a polite way of saying ‘socially inept’. If you aren’t good at self-promoting but enjoy writing for its own sake, and put in the hours, you can make a decent living.

There is typically a ratio of around 10:1 to 20:1 between free and paid subscribers, although this varies; if you have 2,000 unpaid subscribers you might therefore be looking at £1,000 a month at the least, assuming you set it at £5 a month, which is my rate.

If you build on that, then soon enough you’ll have an income. A few writers in the US are in the $million a year region, and though the British market is smaller, it’s still growing and there is money to be made.

Starting out, the majority of my new subscriptions came from Twitter, but they now arrive more from other Substack recommendations. It’s easy to recommend another site – on the dashboard it has the ‘recommendations’ option which even I can follow. You can also see who recommends you, and why. 

Elon Musk has also made it harder to link from ‘X’, as I suppose we have to call it, in part by blocking substack URLs, although you can get around that by linking it to another address – I have the IT skills of an eighty-year-old so some Gen Z person explained it to me (Fr Fr).

Social proof is important, so it’s good to get some vaguely famous/respected/high-status people to say nice things about you, your writing or work, and put that in your About section. Having said that, I haven’t actually got around to doing that myself.

The About section lays out what your purpose is, why people should follow you, and also why they might want to fund you. People are sometimes willing to donate to someone they see as fighting a cause; I suppose mine is opposition to the runaway progressivism that is culturally all-powerful, which is usually called woke but is slightly hard to define. I don’t like emphasising any mission because I want to sell my writing as a service; otherwise, I’d feel like too much of a grifter and that isn’t what Substack is about. There are other sites where you can raise money to fund your holiday because ‘the woke mob have cancelled me/my family won’t talk to me because I attacked BLM!’

However, if people feel you are providing some sort of public service, shining light on an area no one else does, I imagine they are more willing to financially support you.

On top of the paid subscribers, people have the option of giving you a donation, which can be set at $99 or $199. I’ve had two so far – there was a third which was an accident, and which I refunded – and sent an email expressing my gratitude. I felt sort of uncomfortable at the idea of this parasocial relationship to start with – like I should go out to dinner with them or something – but some people just appreciate what a writer does, have disposable income, and don’t really expect anything else in return except to continue writing. 

Substack recommends starting with the paid option on, although that will pressure you into writing more; some people will start giving you money before you’ve produced any paid content, so you’ll feel obliged to produce. For those who need that extra push, that might be a blessing. However for younger writers, who want to have a real job first but are interested in building a platform in the meantime, keeping it free might be preferable until they are ready to commit to writing full-time.

I set my comments to only paid subscribers very early on, before I even placed a post behind a paywall; it’s one of the perks of paying and I feel if there aren’t entry restrictions the quality of people will fall to a point of near-anarchy. I’ve only deleted a handful of comments although once or twice I’ve had to reply to people and say I’d rather they didn’t adopt too much of a hostile tone (towards other commenters). I’ve blocked and refund one paid subscriber because his views were too extreme; he was perfectly polite when I told him, and off he went.

In my experience the comments are much nicer than under most articles at publications, because there are greater incentives to civility; people accept that it’s your site and so it’s a sort of benign dictatorship rather than New York in the early 1980s, as some newspaper comment sections feel like. Also, a lot of regular commenters on those sites actually hate the columnists, while everyone on your Substack is a fan.

It’s also important to respond to the comments, as many as possible if they are paying. It’s an expected part of the service and your relationship with paid subscribers is obviously much closer than with regular readers of your articles in a magazine. Some also might not be totally au fait with IT and will email you asking to unsubscribe because they don’t understand how to do it themselves. My advice is to always be polite and to not be disheartened; they may well come back.

Substack will also help with technical problems. The young people who work there, who all seem to be called Chud or Brank or something similarly American, are extremely helpful and quick to respond. However, you’re completely responsible for any libel or copyright infringement so I’m very cautious about pictures – Wikipedia commons or IMDB are good.

So far, I haven’t really found any secret formula for successful posts. Substack rewards all sorts of lengths and styles, you can have anything from 400-word updates to endless epics (although I think there is a cut-off point at 6,000 words; I’ve never reached it so don’t know exactly). It definitely rewards frequency, though, and the most successful posters seem to be doing it three, four or even five times a week; Freddie deBoer is especially prolific, as an example.

The articles of mine that get shared the most are basically just the better ones, but even if a piece doesn’t set the internet on fire, it usually brings in some new subscribers. In this way it’s more satisfying than regular magazine articles, because you can at least see it’s helped a bit in growing your base, rather than your hard work just disappearing into the ether and no one caring, which can be a bit depressing and make you feel like Thomas Chatterton.

Scheduling and planning are important. In my view, much of the writing on Substack is better than newspaper comment pieces because it allows people to plan ahead and work on things as they go along; in my experience the longer the time between first draft and publication, the better the piece. 

Newspaper commentary is about instant reactions and personally my immediate thoughts about a topic aren’t usually very interesting, and three days later I completely disagree with what I wrote. I like the fact that I’m not under pressure to have an opinion on a subject, and if I feel uncomfortable about a piece I’m about to publish, I can just keep it in drafts. I might never publish it, but it can always be cannibalised for something else one day.

You can choose what ratio are free for everyone to read, but I would suggest somewhere between a half and two-thirds being for paid subscribers only; sometimes a two-part article, the first free and the second paid-only, can draw in extra paid subs.

The paywall is also a blessing, because it allows writers to have a bit of protection from the crowd. This has become a problem in the past 15 years with social media, which means that your column is not just read by your paper’s readers but also read, and shared, by its enemies. Before the 2000s columnists didn’t have to worry about being today’s Twitter central character, and for most people it’s not a pleasant experience. If, like a lot of writers, you’re something of a ‘vulnerable narcissist’, you’ll want to avoid this, and having control of your own paywall makes a big difference.

When Substack first began making waves, it was among writers who typically had been vaguely aligned with the Left or centre but felt too constrained by its intolerance and orthodoxy: Bari Weiss is the supreme example, but there is also deBoer, Matt Taibbi and Andrew Sullivan. I like it for a slightly different reason, being someone with conservative views who doesn’t want to be too controversial. 

I suspect that a situation where every article is out there to the baying mob has encouraged a certain amount of conformism in the commentariat because journalists, as Nicholas Nassim Taleb once pointed out, are obsessed with popularity among other journalists. Unsurprisingly, I’ve become something of an evangelist for this platform, and encourage everyone who asks to try it. 

As an added thought, I would select the option that sends you an email every time you get a new subscriber and not the one telling you someone has unsubscribed; I found it helpful at the start when the prospect of having a large list seemed daunting. Sometimes the follower numbers just don’t go up for a while, or even decline despite posting; it’s important not to fret, because if you keep going they will rise again. I also wouldn’t worry if a particular piece might have put off readers; so long as you’re happy with its quality, audience capture is more of a danger than alienating your base. Because you’re not writing for a newspaper, I also find it easier to accept that a commenter might have a justified criticism of your argument, might understand the subject better, and to change your opinion. It feels harder to accept that you’re wrong when you’ve sold your argument to a publication.

You will also lose some paid subscribers, but don’t be put off, because everyone does; remember, even Our Lord had a traitor among his followers. When I went on holiday for two weeks last year my paying numbers went down a fair bit, so now I always make sure something is scheduled; but even if not, there is inevitable natural loss and churn, and as long as the general direction is positive it’s nothing to worry about.

It will seem like an incredible slog to start with, like looking up a mountain. I remember reading someone tweet that they had 3,000 subscribers, and it just seemed impossibly distant a prospect, but eventually you’ll find yourself looking back at that far-down point in the distance.

Good luck!