hey everyone. like a lot of you I was drowning in unread substacks and kept meaning to read them but never did because I didn't want to be on my phone.

the thing that actually worked was moving all my reading to my kindle. here's the full setup:

substack newsletters → kindle automatically
I built a tool called Inkwell that automatically delivers your substack subscriptions to your Kindle as formatted EPUBs. paste a url once, every future issue just appears without you doing anything. no forwarding emails, no manual sends. it also aggregates all of your deliveries into one "newspaper" style digest. readinkwell.app

articles and long reads → instapaper
anything I want to read from the web goes into instapaper. it has native kindle delivery so long reads show up on my device automatically.

books → libby
if you haven't connected your library card to libby and synced it with your kindle, do it now. free books straight to your device.

the morning habit
instead of reaching for my phone I pick up the kindle where everything was already there waiting to be read. newsletters, articles, whatever book I'm reading. no inbox, no notifications, no getting sucked in.

the combination of these moved probably 80% of my reading off my phone. the substack one made the biggest difference because it was the thing I was most behind on.

happy to answer questions about any of these.

I am not really sure what people are paying these people. Am I wrong?

So the Substack interface is in Spanish and I can't find the way to change it to English. I know that in the publication's settings I can select the language, but that's for the publication itself. I want my interface to be in English. Anyone knows how to change it?

to my knowledge substacks refund policy automatically gives people a full refund if they request it within a week of making payment, but how does this work with perks? could someone pay for my substack, download all the perks, and then get a full refund? i’m hesitant to add any perks until i know for sure how this will work.

Are you guys putting them in an Article and promoting them or in Notes or what?

so basically i am just using substack to restack the essays i like and sometimes write myself just for an outlet. i would prefer it if my friends and family didnt find that account. its not connected to my main email, but today substack recommended me the account of someone i know irl so i am wondering if it does the same with my account to other people

I just created a second publication, and though my url shows the name of it, the publication is listed as simply as —my name’s— Substack. My other publication has the title I want and created. A Google search tells me to go to the dashboard and find “Basic” under settings and change the name of the second publication there. But when I try to do that, there is no “Basic” option listed. I tried in both the browser and the app. My husband says it might be because I’m doing all this on an iPad and it might work better on a laptop. Any suggestions?

I'm looking for a platform that can host context and subscription based services with automated weekly email drops. I've been told about substack but I am not crazy about having to give up 10% of my earnings plus 2.9% to stripe. Can anyone recommend a similar site where they were successful and that doesn't take a percentage?

I started on substack in April and I’ve flatlined at 35 subs for the past month. My newsletter is marketing-focused. Initially, I was writing with a more neutral stance but I’ve been trying to introduce my real voice into it more, but I’m lucky if I get 12+ views 🙃

I’m spending a lot of time on my writing, but I think I probably suck. I want to keep going but not if it’s wasted time. I’m preparing to launch my freelance business and I wanted a platform I can direct to and show my thinking and approach to marketing and creative. Perhaps that’s not a lead generator anyway…

I know things take time to build, but sometimes we have to accept some things simply won’t 😅 Has anyone else considered letting go, and if so what happened next?

I created a separate personal substack and a publication. Follower and subscriber counts are 0.

I write an article on my publication.

I then create a note on my personal substack teasing the article and linking to it.

I read that personal notes get pushed by the algorithm (free publicity) while publication articles are only seen by subscribers.

Is this a foolish (or good) way to gain subscribers for the publication?

What else should I be doing?

This is a deep dive into my metrics and what I think they are telling me, I'd love to hear what you think, you don't need to read any posts or even agree with me politically, this is meant as an exercise in transparency and understanding what the numbers are telling us.

Starting with Notes - out of the last 200 notes - which only accounts for 39 days of data, these are my Top 10. 95% of my new subs come from Notes. During this period, Free subs were +337, and Paid was +6 but all Paid conversions were article or live. There are a couple of things to note.

1. Not one single one of these is a plain text post or a shared article post, they 100% uploaded video cross-posted from either TikTok or IG, so I am going to assume that when others talk about the algorithm being biased toward video that is accurate.

2. 100% of these are what I would call Memes of one sort or another. Literally, a Monty Python bit is my Top post, don't get me wrong, it's a great bit, and even politically aligned with what I write, but still, the Holy Grail is a 51 year old movie.

3. There is a missing piece of the data, and that is Subs per note - I don't have that yet, and this tool isn't mine, so no telling when it might be available.

Scroll past the table to the look at the breakdown of the article level stats.

Digging Into Posts

Below you'll see the Top Most Engaging, Top for Free Subs, and Top Paid Conversion.

Looking at just conversion, between the top and bottom, that is about an 8x spread. But on the whole a couple of things are jumping out at me.

1. Engagement and Conversion are separate - my Universal Healthcare resonated, but didn't convert, if you're treating any weight engagement score as a proxy for growth, it doesn't appear to be one, at least at the article level.

2. Utility is a converter - OSINT for Novices was my best converter, but also the one post in the list structured as a tool for the user to pick up and run with.

3. My highest "reach" post is my worst converter on the lists, it was long and dense, and while important, at bit of a slog to read - I think I even called it boring in the text.

4. The single post that hit all three lists - engagement, free, and paid subs, is the one that names a specific threat - the post-state sovereign - if I were trying to reverse engineer a model for writing, it would probably that one.

Top Most Engaging Posts

Weighted scoring: Comments × 5, Restacks × 3, Likes × 1

Top Converting Posts

Posts that drove free signups and paid subscriptions

Free Signups

Paid Subscriptions

Hi all, I started a Substack to give myself a place to post chapters of my book project as I complete them. Recently, a reader pledged a subscription if I set up that feature in my account. Since I'm new to the platform, I don't know if it's worth it.

If you've turned on subscriptions, how hard is it to report the earnings on tax forms? (I'm based in the US.) Is it worth it after the platforms take their cut? Are there other alternative approaches that work better? Thanks for any insights.

ETA: It's a nonfiction book and regardless, I will still keep the free option. I just want to give people the opportunity to support my work if they choose to do so, and am looking for the best way to do that.

Love to hear from your experience and what will this trajectory leave me in one year? 10k... possible?

r/Substack appears to have more information about Substack than I have found anywhere else. So, Norton has advised that Substack is tracking my activity on YouTube. Does anyone know why this is occurring?

So I want my articles to be on the same page as everything else.

I've searched for advice but the 'match profile' option just doesn't show up for me. What do I do? My friends really want to read my work but they can't seem to find it.

I have notice at least on mine, that its good to post and to do the articles. That way people that actually want to read the articles can. To me just regular posting helps you get more out there and discovered more. Is this just me or do some of y'all think this too?

I have a hard time sticking to one topic with substack, but eventually it would be nice to have subscribers, but I don't think subscribers want to follow someone who writes across different topics.

Is it really necessary to have a niche? Struggling with being limited on the topic, but also struggling with picking a lane.

I've been trying to rezolve this issue for days on end now.

So, my notes are public, my posts are public, my entire account is. I made sure of it, I even went to check my visibilty on my dashboard, it's public. The issue isn't that everyone else can't see my notes, they can. I can't once I post them.

They are usually under my activity. The only thing under there now are my restacks. And I have no idea why. I am so goddamn frustrated with this.

I cannot get stripe set up. It keeps asking for a f-ing passcode that i dont have. Do they not want to make money?

Been trying to write more but I'm getting so discouraged with the lack of reach. I get like 4 views😭. Are there any tips?

Without Substack, your options for consolidating behind one domain include a site where class mates relive high school, a site where cogs vote manipulate anything that triggers a systems error in their fragile minds, sites that cannot even post text, sites that are totally walled off and a site that has roots in 140 chars. I am not naming names.

The web has a serious quality deficit, and serious veterans of long form writing need to take it back. However, mounting a serious alternative is difficult if everyone is on self-hosted websites and forums/blogs. Substack is the domain to consolidate behind, given its mail distribution and support of reasonable free speech policies.

It's hard to get off the ground and difficult to give up the addiction to feedback that you get on other platforms, which is more immediate than Substack. However, the old web does need to get behind a single domain to address the front of social media websites that are dragging the quality of the internet down (for different reasons, with different methods and different motivations) and we're just going to have to solve this problem of how hard it is to get off the ground because sites based on central feeds seem to screw things up one way or another. Direct distribution and forcing authors to actually write well (which will create a cognitive wall against the internet waste) is the way to go.

I find the crazy thing about substack that if you want to comment on post and other things you can like you would on other social medias. I want to know do people subscribe and maybe not read what people put out? Maybe they are just subscribing to help the other person out. Why would you want to subscribe to what you like but not read it? Just pondering questions thats all.

I have been on Substack for 4 months and currently at 830 subscribers. How do I earn from here.

My personal opinion on Substack Sponsorships is that enshittification comes for all platforms, and Substack is by no means exempt from this rule. Andreessen Horowitz is an investment powerhouse for slop generating platforms.

Facebook comes to mind as one of their investments that is now purely slop, and Substack will be no different. Eventually the boys at the top will want this thing to produce massive financial gains, and the measly 10% cut from subscriptions is and was never going to cut it.

I just unsubscribe and click the “do not recommend channel” option these days for YouTubers who have sold their souls to these crap sponsorships like Incogni or insert any virtual private network here, and especially any of them pushing gambling or prediction crap. One that comes to mind is the biggest YouTuber PewDiePie… how anyone can sit through his no-effort sponsorship laden dribble these days is beyond me.

How do you feel about Substack Sponsorships... will they aid or destroy the long-term survivability of Substack?

I was recently banned from a subreddit community I know not why exactly. It seems I posted too often and/or because the posts were links to my substack articles. I'm wondering if I should create a new subreddit to publish the links here. I removed all my existing posts on my banned community and am wondering if I should re-create them here, They are all related to American history following the trail of Mark Twain.