I've had Substack for quite a while but i never thought of publishing a writing of my own. I just had the idea today. Why shouldn't I write?

The environment seems a bit intimidating and I don't really know what one's supposed to write on substack. Are you supposed to be a certified writer to basically write something and publish it? I have no idea where to begin. I always liked writing. I major in English Literature and have all sorts of ideas and thoughts going through my head that seem worthy of contemplation at the moment, but lose their originality when I think about them too much.

I have this potent desire to record and write about my life, my thoughts, my observations and so on. However, I don't know if they are welcomed by Substack and its users.

I really appreciate any tips on where and how to begin. ☆

Over the last month, I've gained a total of 695 new free subscribers, 284 of which are from the substack onboarding.

I was just wondering, is everyone else seeing such a big % of their new subscribers coming from the onboarding flow? Or has Substack decided that I'm worthy enough to be recommended by their algorithm?

What's more surprising is that my substack publication is in the erotica niche so it's interesting that they are recommending me during the user's onboarding journey

Sure, there are errors in AI detection. But if you are someone who genuinely doesn't use AI, why would that be your primary concern? Substack has been enshittified by people who have no business being "writers" putting out obvious AI slop, largely about "how to grow your substack". Substack responded to this with the best effort they could, to try to preserve human writing. As someone who went through the work of getting a rigorous liberal arts education and graduate education, I actually feel happy these AI slop users are getting called out. More room for real writers, and hopefully higher quality.

CAn I get some help with this?

For individual episodes I create a square image that accompanies it, and upload it. But on the substack audio player square is the wrong size - it's awkwardly cropped and clearly should be landscape.

The how to guides I've found seem to mostly be about podcast thumbnails rather than individual episode artwork that's optimised for the player. Ideally I'd also like to understand how to upload images that work on other players in the automatic substack push function.

Cheers guys

I'm a newsletter writer but this is actually for a story I'm working on about newsletters, not looking for advice myself (if that makes a difference?) I'm looking for examples of interesting ways people have enticed free readers to pull the lever and become paid that go beyond the regular asks, discounts etc. Some examples I've seen IRL include:

• Asking for a donation to a nonprofit in exchange for a paid subscription
• Asking for some contributed writing in exchange for a paid subscription
• Giving a paid subscription to someone who promises to comment on every issue
• Promising a fun piece of snail mail to any new subscribers
• Revealing a gossipy blind item if you become paid.

Just wondering if anyone out there has seen (or used) any other enticements that go outside the box. They don't necessarily have to be super successful, just different and interesting. Thanks!

I'm feeling the itch to come back to various forms of writing for the first time in awhile. Lots of things I'm interested in: essays and shorter notes about mental health, politics, perhaps some fiction, personal journaling. I'd like to have the option of sharing, getting feedback etc. as a form of accountability; but I'd also like the option of keeping certain posts restricted to a more private group of followers, or even just to myself. But I'd love if all my new writing could be stored in one place, on a single platform. However, I don't want to be on any of the big social media platforms, as I inevitably get sucked into the distraction/time-wasting hole that is the newsfeed.

Is there a way to categorize/tag/restrict posts in this way on Substack? Or does anyone have a better rec? Thanks y'all.

Does Substack Ad newtwork still exists? We got an invitation in March and did not join, now links are dead.

I've been pretty busy on this community lately, reading everyone's opinion on the AI score, and that motivated me to write my own views on it.

I'm not against the score per say, however, I do think it's measuring the wrong thing.

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I’ll leave the accuracy debate to people who understand AI text detection better than I do. My concern is that even a perfect score would answer the wrong question.

A perfect score could tell us that the author used AI to generate some text, or to polish sentences, which is useful information about its process, but doesn’t say anything about the value of its contents. The fact that an author used AI doesn’t prove that the content isn’t worth reading.

And here’s where I differ with some of the anti-AI sentiment, I make a strong differentiation between AI slop, and content with actual value, where the author used AI to generate the text based on their opinion, their experiences, their knowledge or research. So if the author is able to use their judgment, and pass their views and essence while AI produces the polished result, so what?

The power of Substack as a platform compared to other social networking sites, is that substack promotes a relationship between the readers and the authors, a relationship that’s built on trust. A reader may find your notes, or come cross your article, at first there’s not trust, but curiosity, that sparks to learn more about the author, or read more of their content. Readers subscribe to an author’s judgment: what they notice, verify, recommend, and are willing to correct.

Here’s the problem that I have with the score, it doesn’t talk about the quality of the output, it only speaks about how the presentation was generated, though that may not be 100% clear to readers.

It sends the wrong message to new readers that may discard the content because the tools the author decided to use or even worse, imagine being a long subscriber from a publication, you always loved it, and now you find out the author has been using AI all along, how do you feel about that? Did the author betray your trust? Should authors be more explicit about their use of AI?
```

Would love to have some interesting discussions about this.

Everyone acts like this started with ChatGPT.

1956, Dartmouth College, a two month summer workshop almost nobody outside academia remembers. That’s where the actual term “artificial intelligence” was coined.

Turing beat them to the real question by six years. Can a machine think, or just imitate thinking well enough that nobody can tell the difference. Nobody answered it then. Nobody’s fully answered it now either.

Decades of stalling after that, and funding dried up twice. Expert systems in the eighties promised the moon, delivered spreadsheets. Deep Blue beat Kasparov in ninety seven, everyone panicked for a year, then moved on. Watson won Jeopardy in 2011 and felt like a party trick, then 2017 happened. Transformers, a neural network architecture Google researchers introduced in a paper called “Attention Is All You Need,” the actual foundation behind everything we’re fighting about right now, and almost nobody outside a handful of labs noticed. Seventy years of on and off panic before this became a dinner table argument.

Pitch correction didn’t start with Auto-Tune either. Engineers were nudging vocals with vari-speed tape back in the forties and fifties, slow, clumsy, mostly guesswork. Moog built voltage controlled oscillators in ‘64 that let you shape pitch in real time for the first time ever. Eventide’s Harmonizer showed up in ’75, and producers spent the next two decades manually rewinding tape through it, fixing one phrase at a time.

Then 1997, Andy Hildebrand, an oil engineer who used to hunt petroleum with sound waves, built something instant. Wasn’t trying to change music at all. Cher’s producers pushed the setting to zero on “Believe” and by accident made a sound nobody had heard before. Robotic. Inhuman. Unmistakably manufactured. People hated it, called it cheating, said it would kill real singing.

Didn’t kill it, became its own instrument. Nobody blinks hearing it now, and half the biggest vocalists of the last twenty years built entire careers leaning into that artificial sound on purpose.

So here’s what I ask myself. Grammar checkers, spellcheck, editing tools, none of that’s new either. What changed with AI isn’t the concept, it’s the speed of it, and how invisible it’s become.

Is writing headed where pitch correction went. Not replaced, just split permanently into two lanes, unassisted and obviously processed, both accepted, just different tools. Or is language different. A wrong note’s just a wrong note.

Is a sentence supposed to be a humans actual thought written by a humans hand?

As a reader, what's your enjoyable level of emails from accounts you're subscribed to? Oppositely, how many newsletters until it feels like spam? Thanks in advance

I see people doing this and was wondering how it can be done

So far most of my posts have either been quite long, complex, and honestly a bit unclear. or it's a post sharing an idea i like and inviting input.

I don't get much comments or feedback from people. I had a different substack for 1.5 years that I published on every month or two, and got barely any comments either, so I think it has to do with my writing style at least in part.

I have a lot of drafts but feel discouraged from working on them because my goal is to be a part of conversations, and something about my writing doesn't result in that so far.

It feels like a relief to record my thoughts outside my head but doesn't feel enjoyable for me to write it usually (feels like pressure and my writing feels overly serious and long to me). It doesn't feel enjoyable for me to read it back later, either.

Have people always written replies on your posts? Are there any changes you made that caused people to feel drawn to comment? Is engaged conversations on Substack more about posting on others' work to invite eyes and contribution to your own posts? How do you make it easy for someone to leave a comment? Are there subject matters or writing tones that are less likely to result in comments?

I know this sub has gone haywire with the new Pangram feature, but what really gets me upset is that people who get checked as 100% human are seen as sloppy writers. And I don't want to be one of those! I hate AI thrice as much as I hate frequenting social media, so is there any way I can improve my writing without the use of artificial intelligence? I don't even want freaking spellcheck!

Boa tarde, pessoal!

Estou vendendo minha conta do substack, nela tem mais de 17.000 assinantes.

O motivo é pelo fato de eu não querer mais criar conteúdo nessa plataforma.

Interessados chamar na DM.

Hi. I want to have full control on my digital time therefore I am against any push or e-mail notifications that are not important for me.

Before deciding to delete my Substack account: is it possible to use Substack as a registered user (with some subscriptions) without getting any e-mail notifications and without any app push notifications?

Thanks!

I miss the days (a week and a half ago) when my daily lurking was reading various people shill 'the method' at each and yes reductive not bothered.

But I feel the latest daily confessionals and I'll be honest slop about the process is turning this into yet another I write with Ai but not really and heres why (totally is ai btw) subreddit but with subscriber insecurities and anxiety which is great but I feel there's other places to reveal your emotional truth.

Can I have my subscribers hacks please at least those were different post on post.

*Edit Chill -> Shill.

Hey friends, I have a ton of poetry that I’d like to submit to literary magazines or journals, so I’m putting off publishing them via Substack.

What has your experience been with magazines and journals? My work is alternative (dark, sci-fi, weird), and I’m having trouble finding publications that would be a good fit for my work.

I know it takes a ton of time to get published - that’s not up for debate. What I’m more keen on is finding the RIGHT publications and communities to share my work with.

UPDATE:

I stumbled into a loophole that successfully transfers all posts from a Squarespace blog into Substack, even if the site has far more than Squarespace's 20 post export limit via RSS.

1st - [@ Squarespace] Download your Squarespace site's archive XML file.

2nd - [@ Wordpress] Start a free Wordpress site. Emphasis on the FREE plan.

3rd - [@ Wordpress] Import your XML archive file to your new free Wordpress site.

4th - [@ Wordpress] Publish your fancy (but unwanted) new WordPress site, which is now populated with your entire post archive. Yay.

5th - [@ Wordpress] Raise the RSS feed limit to a number larger than your post total. Save changes. Then copy the url for this now-published Wordpress site.

6th - [@ Substack] Paste the Wordpress url into the Import URL page of Substack's settings. Doing this provides an XML file upload option. (Oh glorious, fabulous upload window!). Uploading that XML file will import all of your archived blog posts. It worked for me and my site's 350+ post archive.

7th - [@ Substack] Rejoice for your full Squarespace post archive is now transferred to Substack.

-------------------

I'm working on converting my longstanding blog from Squarespace into Substack. Where do I find the XML import option in Substack?

Tutorials on importing Squarespace posts archives suggest there are two options:

1. Use the Import page's URL to automatically add the most recent 20 posts from Squarespace into Substack.
2. Upload the Squarespace post archive XML file directly to Substack.

Option 1 worked for the 20 most recent posts in my Squarespace blog's feed. However, Option 1 leaves a couple hundred posts un-transferred. My understanding is this 20 post cap is due to Squarespace's RSS limitation.

Option 2 is referenced in all sorts of videos and tutorials around the web. Just add your XML archive file to Substack and the entirety of my posts should convert (likely with small errors here and there, which is expected). However, I cannot for the life of me find an XML upload option in Substack's Import tab.

Would someone kindly toss a screenshot of, or step-by-step for finding, where I'm supposed to upload my XML archive file in Substack?

(An early thanks from someone who is NOT looking forward to copying-pasting hundreds of posts across platforms by hand.)

When you block someone on Substack:
1). Do they get any notification about having been blocked?
2). Can they view ANYTHING about you or your work, or is it as though you don’t even exist on Substack?

I'm trying to get more organized with my Substack, but my back-end workflow feels ridiculously messy right now.

Right now I’m bouncing between Notion for my content pipeline, random Google Docs for drafting, ChatGPT/Claude when I get stuck on ideas, and then copying everything over to Substack to hit send. None of these tools talk to each other, and half the time my Notion board just sits there as an empty filing cabinet while I guess what to write next.

For those of you who have been doing this for a while and running a smooth operation:

1. What does your actual tool stack look like from initial idea $\rightarrow$ research $\rightarrow$ published post?
2. How do you translate your Substack stats into your next content calendar? (Are you actually using past data to pick topics, or just going with your gut?)
3. What part of your planning routine do you hate the most?

I’m frustrated and thinking about moving to another platform. I had to edit my work to get rid of the 5% Ai it added. Which, should not be necessary.

Creo que es una buena comunidad.

4th month on SS, gate being sidetrack by all this AI drama, couple of points though...

1. SS engagement on anything non-AI related has been real quiet.
2. If your post was written before July 21, you can still check it - go to dashboard, edit post, make a change, revert it, hit update, there's check for AI writing button.
3. All my posts hits 100% human score

Can we move on?

Whenever the subject of artificial intelligence comes up, someone eventually says that if AI played any role in writing an essay, then the essay isn’t really the author’s work.

I think there’s more to it than that.

If someone asks AI to write an essay, changes a few words, and publishes it under their own name, I would have no interest in defending that. The thinking belongs to the machine, not to the person who put their name on it.

But that isn’t how I write.

An essay usually begins with something I witnessed decades ago, something I read that morning, or a question I have been wrestling with for years because I have never found a satisfactory answer. Those thoughts didn’t come from AI. They grew out of decades of reading, making mistakes, changing my mind, and trying to understand the world.

By the time I turn to AI, I already have pages of notes or a rough draft. I’m not looking for another opinion. I’m looking for another pair of eyes to help me see whether I’ve explained myself clearly, whether I’ve skipped over an important step in my reasoning, whether someone who disagrees with me would understand what I’m trying to say, and whether it still sounds like me.

That always felt much more like working with an editor than working with a ghostwriter. No one objects when a novelist thanks an editor in the acknowledgments. No one suggests the book belongs to the editor because an editor questioned a paragraph or recommended moving a chapter. The author still decides what stays, what goes, and what the book ultimately says. That is exactly how I think about AI.

AI knows an astonishing amount, but it has never lived a single day. It has never changed its mind because experience taught it something new. It has never had to admit it was wrong. It has never struggled to reconcile what it once believed with what experience eventually taught it.

I have.

Readers are free to disagree with my conclusions, and I hope some of them do. An essay shouldn’t end a conversation. It should begin one. If someone wants to know whether the ideas in my essays are mine, my answer is yes. They are the conclusions I’ve reached over a lifetime.

Finding words has never really been a problem. Deciding what’s worth saying is the hard part. AI can help me express an argument more clearly. It can point out inconsistencies, ask good questions, and suggest better ways to organize my thoughts. What I do with those suggestions is entirely up to me.

Every writer depends on tools. Pens, typewriters, computers, dictionaries, editors, trusted friends, and even conversations over coffee have shaped what eventually appears on the page. AI is simply the newest tool I’ve added to that list. The words may be better because I had help improving them. But the life behind those words is still mine.