How to Substack
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Now sit back and enjoy another edition of Read Max.
Greetings from Read Max HQ, now back in Brooklyn after a lovely weekend in Altadena, Calif. and environs. (Shout-out to my hosts Max and Leah, gold-star Read Max subscribers, as well as Side Pie, Rancho Bar, and Lost Books in Montrose, where I picked up a cool copy of Ross MacDonald’s The Underground Man.)
Today, October 18, is Read Max’s third anniversary. (Also my friend Aurora’s birthday--happy birthday Aurora!). As I did for the first anniversary and the second anniversary of Read Max, I’m going to write a little update on subscriber numbers and future plans for the newsletter (spoiler: I’m going to keep doing it), and write out the advice I give people when they ask me about doing a Substack.
But before I get to the meat I want to offer a big and obsequious thank-you to the subscribers of this newsletter, and even bigger, and even more obsequious THANK-YOU to the paying subscribers. I started this newsletter thinking of it as a one-year experiment to tide me over as I sought out freelance journalism and screenwriting work. But much to my surprise, the newsletter has turned out to be not just my most consistent but also my most (emotionally) rewarding and (financially) remunerative source of income--effectively and actually my full-time job. It’s been a rough few years for writers; many of my most talented friends have been out of work for months or working piecemeal at best, while those that do have jobs are waiting for the other shoe to drop. During the Writers’ Guild strike, and in the fallow period that’s fallowed, and at a moment when there are fewer outlets paying good money for freelance journalism, I’ve been extraordinarily lucky to have a stable (and growing) income that doesn’t rely on corporate spending decisions or ad markets out of my control.
But that income only exists because a few thousand people (that’s you guys) have reached into their wallets and pulled out their credit cards to affirm that good (or, at least, sometimes good), human writing is worth paying for directly. As I say every year, I find this quite moving and kind of extraordinary--to get direct, unquestionable affirmation and support for … whatever it is that I do, from an audience that genuinely appreciates it (that literally values it!), after a career spent writing to the huge, dismissive, anonymous, passer-by audiences that happened upon my work via Google or Facebook or Twitter.
So, you know, thank you for subscribing, and thank you for paying for this. Thank you to everyone who’s written in with recommendations for books or movies or suggestions for newsletter topics--they are uniformly terrific, and I’m sorry that I can’t reply to every single one. Thank you to the regular commenters, who are funny and lively and often make me feel like I missed the point of my own blogs. Thank you especially to anyone who’s forwarded the newsletter to friends or recommended it to anyone (or bought a gift subscription)--word-of-mouth is by far the best way to find new subscribers.
And if you don’t pay, well… as I say every week, if you get about one beer’s worth of enjoyment from my newsletter every month, or ten beers’ worth every year, consider paying about that price to ensure the lights remain on and the newsletters keep coming:
How to Substack
This newsletter has now been around for long enough, and is just widely read enough, that every once in a while I get a call from a friend or an acquaintance asking for advice on starting and maintaining a Substack. My advice is always roughly the same, and I thought it might be useful to write it down here for future reference. To be clear, the below advice is not the only way to be a successful small-business owner on the Substack platform, but it does represent my basic understanding of how the job works.
Understand the job
My standard joke about my job is that I am less a “writer” than I am a “textual YouTuber for Gen Xers and Elder Millennials who hate watching videos.” What I mean by this is that while what I do resembles journalistic writing in the specific, the actual job is in most ways closer to that of a YouTuber or a streamer or even a hang-out-type podcaster than it is to that of most types of working journalist. (The one exception being: Weekly op-ed columnist.) What most successful Substacks offer to subscribers is less a series of discrete and self-supporting pieces of writing--or, for that matter, a specific and tightly delimited subject or concept--and more a particular attitude or perspective, a set of passions and interests, and even an ongoing process of “thinking through,” to which subscribers are invited. This means you have to be pretty comfortable having a strong voice, offering relatively strong opinions, and just generally “being the main character” in your writing. And, indeed, all these qualities are more important than any kind of particular technical writing skill: Many of the world’s best (formal) writers are not comfortable with any of those things, while many of the world’s worst writers are extremely comfortable with them.
So, part of your job as a Substacker is is “producing words” and part of your job is “cultivating a persona for which people might have some kind of inexplicable affection or even respect.” And then there’s a whole other part of your job, which is: “Internet marketing.” One thing that I like about Substack, and one reason I recommend it as a platform to people who are just starting out, is that it leverages its status as a platform to help you grow via network effects without you needing to do much. But you are the business owner here, and there are still internet-marketing type considerations you need to think about, at least to some extent. “Conversions” and “funnels” and “click-through rates,” and so on. This can be a rough adjustment if you are not a naturally entrepreneurial person, or have not been constructed as an entrepreneurial subject by virtue of being a college-educated millennial meritocrat, or if that subject-interpellation failed because you have Anxiety!
Write every week
This is, sort of, a corollary to the first thing above, but it’s also just the main substance of your actual work: You gotta write every week, preferably more than once. This is less a question of writerly gifts and more a question of commitment, and it’s a skill you can absolutely learn. But it requires a certain mindset. Before you start the Substack you need to ask yourself: Can I put a couple thousand words out on the internet under my name every week? Even when there’s no news? On a slow week in the middle of July, can I pull 1,200 relatively lively words out of my ass by Friday? Maybe most importantly, can I do so without feeling embarrassed, ashamed, or anxious about what I’m producing? As I’ve written before, with nearly every “content creator” job, at least at the start of your career, consistency is so much more important than quality. In baseball terms you want to be an Ichiro (hit for contact, put the ball in play, rely on speed) and not a Giancarlo Stanton (hit for power, strike out a lot, miss large portions of the season with injury). (No offense to Stanton, an incredible hitter who’s been helping carry the Yankees this postseason.)
Be patient
I tell people who are just starting that it takes at least a year of publishing weekly (ideally more) to even know if the Substack is going to eventually be “worth it,” and at least 18 months for it to actually become “worth it,” financially. This is not a guarantee of ultimate success, to be clear! You may plug away for a year and realize that there just isn’t enough growth or interest. But you won’t know until you hit the 12-month mark.
The reason for this--and the reason to counsel patience--is that Substack growth, at least for me and for most of the people I’ve talked to, is extremely inconsistent month-to-month, but relatively smooth year-over-year. Three years in, I can say that I net about 850 paid subscribers every year like clockwork. But those new subscribers come in fits and starts--I’ll spend months growing at an exponential clip, and then months plateauing, with no seeming rhyme or reason to the different growth rates. You have to be able to live through those unavoidable stagnant stretches without freaking out.
The “Blackbird Spyplane starter pack”
There are many ways to do a subscription newsletter, and in some sense as long as you’re producing two or three a week you’re doing it “right.” But I suspect that both writers and readers respond best to some kind of consistently structured output. I tend to recommend at least starting with the basic output structure of Read Max, which I find to be a good balance of effort and reward, but since I quite literally just borrowed my newsletter’s publishing rhythm from the great culture-and-commerce Substack Blackbird Spyplane, I’m going to call it here the “Blackbird Spylane starter pack.” The idea is basically:
One free post and one paywalled post every week.
The free post takes any form (column, interview, roundup, guide, explainer, etc.) and ideally stands alone. This post is facially the “main” output of your newsletter, but in the most cynical sense it’s marketing for the subscription product: It’s (ideally) widely shared and draws in new free subscribers who can be converted to paid.
The paywalled post offers some kind of value-add (shopping guides, book recommendations, link roundups), the contents of which are teased above the paywall. This is the main way you convert your free subscribers to paid--they want access to all the good, valuable stuff you’re offering behind the paywall. (Plus, I suspect it’s easier for readers to justify paid subscriptions if they feel like they’re getting something specific from it, rather than the more ambiguous and less urgent idea of “support.”)
I want to be clear that this is my own reverse-engineered understanding of why BBSP works well (or, at least, why it worked on me), not Jonah and Erin’s account of their work, and on a day-to-day level I don’t think about my work in terms quite as cynical gimlet-eyed as these--my main goal in writing every week is to obtain praise and validation from strangers in order to maintain my fragile sense of self, not to architect the perfect marketing funnel for disaffected lawyers, journalists, and software engineers with disposable income. Nevertheless, I think it’s good to have a basic understanding of how this business actually works. The important questions are: How are you putting your work in front of new readers, and how are you turning those free readers into paid readers? The BBSP starter pack is not the only way to answer those questions, but it’s a good, straightforward means of doing so.
Experiment
The nice thing about publishing frequently and consistently is that it gives you a lot of room to experiment. Try out different rubrics, different tones, different subjects. Move your subscription touts around--at the top, at the bottom, in the middle. What’s working for me may not work for you; the only way to tell is to try it out.
Read Max in 2024
Subscriptions
As mentioned above, I’ve seen pretty consistent year-over-year net growth of about 13,000 new free subscribers and 850 new paid subscribers; as of publication this leaves me with a little over 2,600 paid subscribers and a little over 42,000 total subscribers. Substack counts my gross annualized revenue at about $141,000 (that’s a forward-looking projection, to be clear; over the past year I’ve made a little around $125,000 gross); the platform takes a 10 percent cut and Stripe takes a further 3 percent in processing fees. But even less fees and expenses that’s enough for me to live on and pay for housing, childcare, tickets to see Megalopolis once, etc. By this time next year I am hoping to have enough income to see Megalopolis several times in a row. Also I want to buy a Surly Preamble since my beater Schwinn got stolen.
Other revenue streams
In addition to subscribers, the newsletter makes a small amount of money through affiliate links (~$400) and advertisements, as above (~$2,000). The affiliate links don’t generate much cash because they’re behind the paywall, and I suspect that I make a lot more money from converting readers than I would through affiliate marketing. (Plus a lot of the books I recommend aren’t easily available through affiliate-enabled stores).
The advertisements I think of as an ongoing experiment--I don’t have a strong need for the income but I also don’t have a strong urge to turn it down. (Let me know if you think I should!) So I will probably allow the Read Max advertising program to continue in a kind of uncultivated and unadvertised way, available upon request to people and publications with aligned interests. (Feel free to email me for a rate card!)
Other projects
I spent a few months this year experimenting with podcasts as a form, and many people have emailed to ask if and when the Read Max Experimental Audio Product will return. I don’t really have a good answer--I enjoyed doing it, and I’d like to do it more, but it adds a significant chunk of time to a work-week that’s already pretty full, and it’s not precisely a natural medium for me. (Plus it requires me to “plan ahead” and “apply myself,” two things I have never done and will never do.) But now that I have a couple bigger freelance projects behind me, I may have the time to develop something more consistent.
(One lesson from this year is that podcast appearances are actually great for driving subscriptions, presumably because you get a kind of hour-long pitch (the thing you’re pitching is your personality, basically) in front of an audience already prepared to pay for subscriptions. I brought in a ton of new subscribers from my appearances on TrueAnon, ScriptNotes, and Josh Citarella’s podcast, among others--a good reminder that self-marketing is actually good.)
This year also marks the first time since starting the newsletter that I’ve taken an Actual Vacation, and managed to pre-schedule two weeks’ worth of re-run newsletters so I could stay away from my computer. It worked quite well as both a business strategy and as a way to actually relax--certainly better than last year, when I tried to drop to one-a-week for a “vacation.”
I think that’s it from this year’s annual report. I’m always a little nervous about writing about this newsletter as a business, since I don’t want to come off as cold and calculating about what precisely it is that I do--but on the other hand, I think readers tend to like this kind of openness and transparency, and at the end of the day I truly am grateful to make money writing online in a relatively unalienated way, even if alienation keeps threatening to emerge. Thanks again to the 2,600 of you who are paying to subscribe to this textual YouTube. I spend a lot of time trying to make the writing valuable to people, and the best indication I have that it is valuable is the number of people who pay. Here’s to at least three more years!
Worth celebrating! Grateful for your work
This was fascinating. Thanks for the insights.