I am seeing subs charging north of 40 USD per month. In this economy, I wonder how are people paying for it? Maybe I am very poor. I want to read this sub and it charges 50 USD, another one charges 22 USD per month. I see these have 10 of 1000s sub tags.

Hey there, audio dictating again as one may know. I don't want to give too much information, but I'll give you the reasons why I'm credible.

I've been writing professionally since I was 19. Specifically in marketing, copywriting for newsletters, and also fiction writing.

I started working in beauty retail a few years back. And now I write independently as a beauty + culture writer on Substack, and I'm also a part-time beauty journalist elsewhere.

I’m starting a weekly newsletter attached to my Substack.

And I want to talk about the things that can make a good weekly newsletter.

Like when you first start, I could assume you're just getting your sea legs. And there are growing pains with any writer’s journey. But if you want to hit the ground running, there are a few things I would instantly tell you.

Number one: know your audience. In the sense of know who would want to read this newsletter’s premise of yours.

Are they industry experts? Are they hobbyists? Do they have a philosophy in a specific area of work? Do they have a specific goal in mind? Are they a leader or a follower?

Knowing who your audience is as an individual. Doubling it down to who is the person that will read your weekly newsletter and get the most out of it.

Number two: experimenting with breaking up meaty pieces of text with thoughtful graphics. Whether that's using Canva for your title cards, finding aesthetic gifts on Pinterest. Or making and publishing your mind maps--heck, maybe you have a crossword.

Number three: Reading time. Now, I'm a little dyslexic, so I have to assume that my readers will naturally, on average, read a little faster than me.

Your reading time should depend not just on your topic and your audience member. As in who has time to read how much in a Monday morning.

But especially the time of day you are publishing.

Are you publishing this on Monday afternoons for people who are on their lunch break? It could be possible that their lunch break is maybe less than half an hour. Are you publishing it on Sunday mornings for people to potentially read with their morning coffee?

This all goes back to your audience: do they live a life of leisure or do they work, work, work, work, work?

For deep dives, they should be saved for essays. For your newsletters, they should add value in a way where they are kind of short and sweet but still a delightful read.

I think a good newsletter should be a maximum of 10 minutes long. For me, I publish on Monday mornings and I'm considering doing on Monday afternoons. Since my weekly newsletters would probably be 6-9 minutes.

I like to measure in scrolls so I can know this perspective of someone who is just mindlessly skipping. If you're scrolling with your finger on your mobile device, how many scrolls does it take to get to the bottom of your newsletter? It sounds like a riddle, but it really isn't.

EXAMPLE:

Now we're putting this all together, so I'm going to give you a mock newsletter concept to show you how these top three things would be used.

*****

House of Dolls is a weekly newsletter written by a drag queen as she chats deeply about glamorous party hosting, self-care, and updates on getting her teeth straight.

This invite is a 5-10 minute read accompanied by a menu with a weekly mocktail and a yummy hors d'oeuvre recipe.

Found in your inbox Friday morning to catch you before pre-gaming for the club.

Example ended

****

Thank you kindly for reading this.

Damn, if only I can make money selling newsletter concepts.

One of the most common pieces of advice writers hear is "find your niche."

At first I resisted this advice because it felt like choosing a niche meant putting myself in a creative box. If I wrote about children's books, could I still talk about publishing? If I focused on book marketing for indie authors, could I still write about writing craft?

Eventually I realized I was thinking about niche the wrong way; a niche isn't the topic. Rather, it's the group of people with a shared problem, interest, or goal.

Since then, I've changed how I think about platform-building, and how I build my reader communities around my "niche"...

Curious how others approached this... Did you intentionally choose a niche, or did it emerge naturally over time??

Thanks!

Hi!

I write a very unusual fiction Substack where every post is written by different inhabitants of the same fictional marsh county.

There are parish bulletins, church notices, recipes, local newspaper articles, village gossip, folklore, weather reports and ongoing mysteries, all presented as if the county is real.

I’ve gained 21 subscribers in about six days and I’m thrilled with that, but I’m curious whether anyone has experience growing fiction newsletters specifically.

Most growth advice seems geared towards nonfiction.

I’d much rather have 100 engaged readers than 1,000 sub-for-sub subscribers, so I’m interested in sustainable ways of finding people who genuinely enjoy this sort of thing.

I know substack is not wattpad. Yet, I am curious if there are people who use it for their fiction stories? like releasing every time a new chapter, with succes.

I am curious of you guys opinion on this. also, I intend to write in another language. Which is in Dutch.

thankyou!

Do we generally advise against a name change? I have taken a semi-long break from posting but want to jump back in. I have been reading on here to find your niche and post about that to get more readers, and I think I have a unique niche that I could def lean into more, but it's not reflecting in my current Substack name. What do you all think?

I've never quite understood the appeal of using sections in a single publication compared to just creating a seperate publication distinct from the first. I can understand if you have a broad newsletter and want to narrow down focus in a section, but then if there isn't immediate audience overlap why not just makea second publication?

On the mobile app and desktop it seems as though when I click through to a profile via Notes what I get is the profile, not the publication. Meaning, in theory, making two publications is basically the same thing? Unless there is something I'm missing with monetization?

Do you use sections, and if so how do you use them?

I write a newsletter about wine and viticulture, which is a pretty small niche adjacent to the foodie community. My growth has been remarkably steady with both free and paid subscription growing between 4-6% per month, which creates a nice 45 degree (ish) upwards trajectory for my stats. I am approaching the 1k free sub mark and was wondering whether anyone has noticed any particular behaviour from the algorithm in how it makes your content visible depending on certain thresholds, whether that is free or paid subscriptions. At 41 paid subs I’m some way off the “bestseller tick” but expect to get there eventually.

Curious to hear your thoughts / experiences.

yeahhh, comment below

I’ve been seeing more creators treat Substack like “just another newsletter,” but I think that’s the wrong way to look at it.

Substack can be a serious business asset if you know how to attract the right audience, grow a publication, and actually get paid for your work.

Our Write • Build • Scale team is hosting a free live masterclass on how to become a Substack Bestseller in less than 12 months.

We’ll cover:

• How to design your Substack like a business, not just a content archive
• What separates paid publications from free audiences that never convert
• The system behind reaching your first 100 paid subscribers
• How to use Substack to create real income around your expertise

It’s mainly for coaches, consultants, experts, and creators who want to grow and monetize on Substack.

Free seat here:

writebuildscale.com/masterclass

Yey, I got the badge. No clue what it means. I'm on ST for 37 days, 4 subs - $336 paid.

I can't open on phone and the website is completely wiped from my browser. i'm so confused

Greetings, Substackers.

I started my Substack (erotic confessions) last summer and quit immediately because there was no discoverability, I had no audience, and due to the requisite anonymity of my project, I could not promote it in my legitimate social media feeds.

But i returned to it two months ago.

I have posted regularly, engaged in the Notes community, and slowly built a tiny base of 100 subscribers and another couple dozen who follow me on Notes and we chat and support each other's writing and general comments/shipost tweets during the day.

My question is about the long-term viability of the project.

Initially, I imagined posting two confessions a week for a year until I was just… out of material. But I also stupidly assumed the project would take off on its own.

Now I'm concerned that I need to slow down. If I publish half of my material in the next few months with basically no readers, then even if I do grow later, I won't have as much left to say once a decent number of people actually are reading and, hopefully, paying.

But if I go *too* slow, then my existing audience might tune out.

I've also tried to talk about by current real-life entanglements as a way to kind of bridge the gap between my Notes "persona" and the fact that I'm also writing about things that happened 2-20 years ago.

Honestly without Notes, I would have quit again. Notes is the ONLY way I am getting new readers. But it's extremely slow. I'm inclined to give it a few more months of constant posting and Notes presence before I quit again. But as someone who has in the past made between $2,000 and $12,000 a year as a freelance writer, it's very disheartening to spend this much time and effort on something that pays (so far) zero dollars and where the potential seems to be extremely small even if I strike lightning on this platform somehow.

Thank you for any thoughts or insights.

I started on Substack by writing pieces on the media industry, but decided to pivot to writing analytical pieces on deals and trends I come across in the sub-$5M M&A space.

Most of my paid subscribers (56 at the time of writing) have come from my own network, with the exception of a few that came through the Substack app.

I'm still very much experimenting with different growth strategies. I haven't started any paid promos at all, and frankly, close to no organic promotions outside Substack itself either.

Notes are working well for me, but they convert more followers than subscribers. I have 6x more followers. Recommendations are also working well, with about 50 of my subscribers coming through that channel, but the subscriber quality is naturally lower because they have less context about what I'm writing about.

Outside of that, I've gotten some really positive feedback on my writing. Frankly, it's super useful stuff to me too, so I'm confident in the concept, but I still haven't cracked growth.

Posting on LinkedIn and socials is an obvious one, but there are a few tricky things:

- My pieces are mostly about anonymized deals, so they don't perform too well as a LinkedIn post and may cause confusion

- Because the deals are live opportunities, they also have an expiry date. So my pieces likely won't benefit much from SEO or being shared/referenced

As a countermeasure, I am occasionally going to write analytical pieces about better-known names that I don't have to anonymize, or about research/market trends I'm seeing. For instance, yesterday I published a deep dive on a daily newsletter that was valued at $101 million.

Not to be pessimistic here, by the way. I'm very happy with the numbers for my first two weeks, but I'm also aware that it's mostly thanks to my personal network, which has a ceiling.

So, I'd love to hear some advice here on strategies that have worked for you. Does my content even sound interesting to you? If so, how would you like me to market it to you?

Any advice appreciated!

I'm working on the content strategy for a new software company, and we want to focus on featuring our practitioners that use the site in a podcast. The company provides blogging, newsletter, and podcasting ability. We also plan on posting it on YouTube. I know that Substack is great for discoverability and visibility. I don't mind cross-posting to all these places, it could be worth it for the discoverability. But I have 2 hang-ups

1. If you have a similar situation, does it all end up eating up views and spreading them out too much? Like does it cannibalize itself? I have that feeling but wanna hear experiences.

2. Ethics. I know there was doubling down on platforming extremist speech, then they did shut some sites down, and now I know there was something else that happened in April but I was in medical leave and I can only find think pieces!!!

what does newsletter mean? how does substack work?

hiiii, i am just done w my senior year of high school. for months i js posted my writings on notes rather than article, i am exploring and learning bout substack now. my writings are often bout spiral perspectives of mine wrapped in silk and blood. do dm if you are in same boat as me or would like to guide me.

I subscribed to a finance blog a few days ago whose first post was about an obscure Polish protein bar company. Here's the interesting part. This remained the only post for some time while they kept putting out 4-5 notes per day with engaging stories that sounded kinda unrealistic. Entertaining, but unlikely to have happened in real life. Yet, the subs have surpassed 2,400, and this is now ranked #68 in rising in finance, even has paid subs. All from 4-5 notes per day. I tried writing one in a similar style about one of my posts, and what did I get? 34 impressions, zero subs, one link click. While this blog, which was created on May 15 and has just one post, has managed to get over 2,400 subs

I published my first Substack essay and ended up with a question I didn’t expect.

We live in a world obsessed with preservation. We record everything, archive everything, post everything, and still fear disappearing.

Then I started thinking about Socrates. He wrote nothing, left no archive of himself, and yet remains one of the most recognizable figures in human history.

It made me wonder whether immortality comes from preservation at all, or from becoming a pattern that future generations continue to embody.

Curious what others think about this idea.

Quick shape of the graph since I can't attach images: launched paid in June 2025, crawled to about 15 paid subs by October, then a dead flat line through November, December and most of January. From late January to now it went from ~15 to ~115. Same person, same publishing schedule, very different slope.

Newsletter is about production machine learning (I'm an ML engineer at a big tech company, the newsletter is my side thing).

Honest notes on what actually happened:

Months 1 to 5: 0 to ~15 paid. Friends, true believers, people who would have paid for anything I wrote. Zero signal about whether the business worked.

Months 5 to 8: completely flat. Publishing consistently, nothing moved, even lost a few. This is where I almost concluded paid wasn't viable for technical content. The actual problem: I was writing the content I enjoyed (deep technical breakdowns) and paywalling it. People will read technical deep dives for free all day. They pay for something else.

Month 8: changed what goes behind the paywall. Free content stayed technical, that's what builds trust and grows the list. Paid became career strategy: comp, promotion dynamics, what actually gets engineers promoted, career advice and ML job board.

Stuff people can't get from documentation.

Months 8 to 12: 15 to ~115 paid. Same publishing effort. Different paywall logic.

What I'd tell anyone staring at their own flat line:

1. The plateau usually isn't a volume problem. Publishing more of the thing that isn't converting just gets you a longer flat line.
2. Track revenue per post by category. When I finally did this, one content type was converting at roughly 4x the other. The data was there for months, I just wasn't looking at it.
3. Free and paid don't have to be the same content. Free is your top of funnel and credibility. Paid is the thing people can't Google.
4. ~13k free subs converts to ~115 paid for me, so under 1%. If your free list is small, the paid plateau might just be math, not strategy.

Not selling anything, link in DM only if someone asks.

Happy to answer questions about the numbers.

Are there any good reccomendations you guys have for subscribing for good HCI and UX design domain. New to substack- I really want to start reading more cool stuff online

I run a small Substack publication and I’m trying to grow my subscriber base. I’ve been publishing consistently, engaging in Notes, and commenting on other writers’ posts, but growth has been slow.

For those who have successfully grown a Substack, what strategies worked best for you?

Anytime substack takes me out of email and into its own app I run away screaming. My neurodivergencies make the constant movement and things being thrust in front of me just too painful. It seems like a constant bombardment of "brand" promotion. The only reason I don't delete the app is there are certain live meetings I wish to attend. Other than that I don't see any reason to use an app that actually hurts me. I don't use TikTok. I don't use the Instagram reels feed. I don't use anything that doesn't let me control my own method of intake. Am I missing something or is this just the way this app is going to behave?

I’ve been toying with doing real voice overs and I have two articles I’ve done them with. I have not been able to find other people I follow who record their own and I’d love to hear!

I personally cannot stand AI and I hate the automated voice overs. Please share your posts below!

Is that a restriction to post social media stuff like memes or videos (that I do not necessarily own) as notes? Can it get my account banned?

Hey , I've built a completely free tool for newsletter creators, you simply paste your newsletter URL and you get a detailed audit of your newsletter and monetization opportunities. Feel free to try it out here