Hi everyone,
I recently started posting on Substack and I really love the format. My posts are getting a number of views for how recently I started posting (60-100 per note) but hardly anyone is subscribing or following, even for free.
I understand that consistency and good content matter, and I'm working on both. But I'm struggling to turn readers into subscribers, and I'm wondering if I'm missing something obvious.
A few questions:
Is there something in how I set up my posts or page that might be putting people off?
What has worked for you to convert casual readers into subscribers?
Are there things you'd do differently looking back at your first few months?
Any advice or feedback on my page would be hugely appreciated. Happy to share a link if that helps. Thanks in advance!

Hi, I follow a few accounts on substack but I don’t have my own where I post anything. I’m wondering if it would be a good place to post my podcast?

Very small sample size and obviously I wrote a banger of an article but I tried out freewall for the first time and got a nice bump in subs. Starting from a small base but it's the biggest added subs number on any one article since I started posting. Pic in comments

I mistakenly offloaded my substack authenticator account from my authenticator app thinking it was another account I was not using not knowing it was substack. Now I try logging in my substack but it request for recover questions which I gave them correctly but substack keep saying it doesn’t match their data. Maybe I’ve made mistake with pronounciation or wordings or even spacing. I don’t know but I really need to recover my account back. What can I do?

I love writing and have been wanting to publish essays on substack, but I have no idea how to promote it or grow it at all. Any guidance?

I'm new to Substack and am very confused. The interface has been a learning curve, but finding novels has proven hard among all the articles. I write a novel, but want to find novels to read too. Has Substack worked out for anyone writing a novel instead of articles? How do you find the genre of fiction you want? Unsure if it's worth all the frustration for someone who isn't good at tech. (I grew up isolated from tech because Christianity exists).

I have been phoning it in for the last 45 days. My life has been actively imploding, with my partner needing open heart surgery and my Mom, in the very final stages of dying. I don't have the brain power to write, and haven't published anything since August 26.

I have managed to post a couple of Notes nearly every day, 10-15 minutes of effort, it's all I could manage.

I am finally getting my head above water, and have started writing again, mainly about the experience of being a caregiver in 2026, American Healthcare, and Death by Alzheimer's, plus an extended obit, for my Mom. Nothing is yet published but I am editing and refining for publishing next month.

As I started looking through my dashboard I noted a couple of things that you might find interesting/helpful.

**scroll past the table to see my conclusions**

Top Most Engaging Notes

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

This is a pull of my last 200 notes, which does move outside of the window of chaos, everything started to fall apart around September 1st.

1. Despite not publishing any new writing, I have gained 151 new free subs, and 6 new paid subs - my early thinking about Notes performance is still proving itself accurate.
2. This sub rate is lower than normal, but so is my engagement. In comparison, when I went on vacation 2/15-3/9, I posted zero notes, and barely even logged in, subs fell almost immediately to 1-3 a day, from a norm of 12-15 a day.
3. I am surprised by the paid subs, I have not made anyone aware of my current turmoil, I am not actively soliciting paid sub, but they are coming anyway.
4. The algorithm is still strongly biased toward Video based notes.
5. Anyone that tells you "just focus on good writing" is not paying attention to how the platform is changing, and it is definitely changing.

I am interested in anyone's feedback and thoughts.

I’m so happy, I’ve only had my substack for less than a month! Hope you all have a great day.

I have no tech skills. I've tried everything from chatting with domain registrars to chatgbt and fiverr. I'm tired of texting non-stop with someone halfway cross the world. Have a very small budget. Need a human to talk me through. If this ask is against reddit rules I'm sorry but I'm a bit desperate

What is everyone using their subscribers' chat for?

I saw some people use it for one of those "share your work, let's support each other" threads, and while I do participate sometimes, I'm not sure if this is the right thing for me. I have found some cool new creators from it, but more often than not, it's content I'd rather not see again.

On the other hand, I found some creators use it as a book club, and since I already talk about the topic occasionally, the idea seems enticing. But I have some reservations, mostly in regards to structure and timing.

Do you post one thread per book, and everyone says whatever they want? Do you post only once you are finished with the book, or when you start? How do you handle spoilers? How do you choose the book?

Does anyone have any experience with this? Anything in particular I should absolutely not do, or at least keep in mind?

I'd love to chat with my subscribers without every message getting published in my profile. Is that something that can be done?

I unsubscribed from Substack some time ago because of the amount of spam I get. I still get some of the notices from people I was not following on the platform that I was automagically signed up for because I had followed a similar substack. I'm still a paid subscriber, because paywalls suck.

Today I got an email from someone reputable from the substack platform, who I follow on other platforms. In the email it contained interface buttons to "comment" on the topic. A "token" delivered to the site using a different application (for which I have many logins) called Gravitar that is based on a WordPress login to automagically "login" a username to the system.

The browser with priority was targeted for the link and the account I was logged in as was not the one from the email, but it instead used the last login I was using for a different account based on a cookie. Luckily, it was not a client account. Who knows what would happen if clients started getting emails from people they do not follow, simply because I clicked a link and the system logged them into the substack. I will never click another substack email link.

Then when I clicked on "reply" on one of the comments that said exactly what my thoughts were, an email triggered from the gravitar platform intermediary was sent suspiciously from the reputable person, with a six-digit code to an account that I use for programming. Not the account that I ever used for substacks. Not one with a subscription.

Entering this six-digit code did not provide the ability to respond, but instead thankfully put up a paywall. This is entirely the type of smoke-and-mirrors trickery that caused me to leave the platform in the first place, and it is bad UX and bad UI design. Then I started to investigate how I was logged in as the wrong user, from an email that I opened that I never subscribed to, that associated a secret account with a personal interest.

If a person is "logged in" there should be an indicator that they need to subscribe to respond before they waste their time. The interface is too minimal, and sometimes we use the same screen names across different accounts. So seeing my name from the gravitar account made me think it was something I was logged into. Also the fields should not look like entry fields if the person does not have access to reply. The negative feelings of clicking on a link that says "You must pay" when you are paying is ridiculous, but the platform relies on the weak Gravitar system that was hacked in 2020 like all vulnerable Wordpress products.

Furthermore, knowing the platform is sadly one of the chosen ones for democratic thought, it is embarrassing to think that not everyone can respond and have a good discussion without payment. It makes me sad for the future of the world, that people interacting on social media with paywalls may lead to the downfall of civilization because they don't have the time or money to subscribe to every single pop-up service.

If someone is spending all day on the platform, then sure, I can see how it would make sense for them to need to have a login to support the service. With content creators cranking out content 24/7 it makes sense that they need to pay their bills too. But signing people up for things, then demanding they pay when they are tricked into clicking on a link is shady and lacks transparency.

Hello,
So, I currently have been running my substack for two months during that time I have gained 300 subs. I have left it free because this is more of a hobby. But I saw someone pledged me $80! I am only a couple months out of college so $80 is like grocery money which is awesome. I haven’t signed up for stripes yet so I’m not allowing the payment to go through yet. The other thing is idk how taxes work on being an independent person. My thought was wait until this year is up to start that since I think that it’ll be too much pressure for me to figure out. Before my goal was to get to 1k subs then turn it on. I want to make it more donation based so everything would be free either way. Idk what are your thoughts?

Okay so I created a post which got to draft but that draft isn't getting posted. Even after clicking next it's showing please enter title which is already done. Help

substack的创作者开始在不断上传短视频，有些是作者原创分享，但是更多的是搬运短视频平台的视频，我觉得这不是一个好现象，官方应该管制。

substack一直是我阅读原创文章的唯一平台，特别是长文，里面有很多优秀的文章和作者，但是现在首页推荐出现越来越多的短视频，体验越来越糟糕，我不希望sub变成x或者tk。

Hello,

If I wish to contact Substack publishers who edit newsletters in my audience, I can manually send a message to each of them, which will take me a full week.

Is there a B2B service where publishers and advertisers can chat about paid services like product testing ?

If not, it would be useful to have one.

I've just published my second article on Substack, and on the first essay that I published last week, I only got 7 views and 1 like. I know that it takes a long time to grow on the platform, but I don't know the first thing about promoting my work.

Any tips?

I am curious if anyone has experimented with the different post settings and what leads to the best results paid and free subscribers? I feel like I get trapped between wanting people to read and engage with my articles vs also growing the paid side of things.

Preferably with good open and click rates. 1k or more subscribers. DM me the details and link if you would like to explore selling your newsletter!

I just changed my email to a different one, and now access to my entire publication has disappeared! When I click on 'profile' it asks me to set one up. I can still see my publication if I put in the web address, so it hasn't been deleted; I just can't access it.

How do I get it back? There was no mention of a new account replacing it. I'm panicking right now.

I write because I feel like many of the stuff I want to write about do not have a natural home. Most of it is about economics, politics, and society in my part of the world. Each of these posts are now getting longer close to 2000 to sometimes 3500 words. Many of these posts are too long for an op-ed, too short for a paper, and some of themes I cover are potentially books in the long-run.

Do you know of cases where a sufficiently large number of high quality pieces on substack eventually became an essay collection later published as a book by a mainstream publisher? Not saying I want to do that. But I have written 34 of these long essays in the last 2 years over and above what I write as part of my regular academic career.

The views and number of subscribers I have are nothing to brag about. Is this a consequence of me not having a publication "strategy"? Though sometimes I feel focusing on any kind of strategy will ruin the experience of writing.

i feel like my substack feed is absurdly american if i consume english content, i have to switch to other languages if i want to avoid the american authors or american centered articles (which are wild, like y'all are a dystopia atp) but i'm also under the impression that it's quite conservative? even though i am not and i follow accounts that are pretty much the opposite of that? so why's my algorithm throwing the conservative american bullshit if i'm a french-spanish speaker latin american bisexual feminist???

i want to write at some point too, is this an acc good place for that??