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We asked Holly Whitaker to share advice on her writing practice. Holly writes Recovering, a newsletter that looks at recovery as a way of living that is accessible to everyone. Holly started blogging in 2013 after going sober, which turned into a sobriety school, a digital recovery startup, and New York Times bestseller Quit Like a Woman. She is also working on her second book and a podcast. Read on for her advice, or listen to her read it aloud.
Dear writer, how does your Substack fit into your wider writing practice and online presence?
Before I knew I was a writer, I was an accountant. My job title was Director of Revenue Cycle Management Operations, and the only essays I wrote were soul-destroying emails I cc’d your boss on. If you would have told me back then that one day I’d be explaining how something called a “Substack” fits into my “writing practice” and “online presence,” I would have done what I did the other night at a comedy show, which is spit on someone. Because of laughing.
But that’s where it started. I was wearing lots of Ann Taylor Loft and formatting spreadsheets by day, and by night—because I was newly sober and exploding inside and having to pretend everything was normal over here, and there was nothing to see, folks—I wrote for a WordPress site, anonymously. I start my answer there because that’s where it counts and what I want you to get from this answer. I didn’t start writing to build an online presence or even to have a writing practice, but because I needed to write. I had to write. I didn’t know what else to do. I was lost. I was alone. I was stuck in the wrong life. I had a lot to say and I didn’t know who to say it to. That was 2013.
“I didn’t start writing to build an online presence or even to have a writing practice, but because I needed to write. I had to write.”
In 2021, by then a New York Times best-selling author and someone who had been featured in Vogue multiple times and had sold hundreds of thousands of books and counted among her assets a very loyal and large social media following, I grabbed a Substack handle for the same reasons I secured that WordPress domain way back when: I was lost, I was alone, I was stuck in the wrong life. I had a lot to say and I didn’t know who to say it to.
What I mean to tell you, fellow writer, is that I didn’t start a Substack as a strategy, as a way to hone my writing chops or build a brand or make a living. I started it out of desperation, as a lifeline. Much like 2013 and the now-defunct littlemisssurrendered.com, Substack was the only thing that made sense, and even that makes it sound like it was more planned than it actually was.
When I say I was lost (in 2021), I mean I was not sure what I stood for anymore. I’d recently been squeezed out of an organization I founded; I’d lost many of my friends; I lived alone in the woods on a dead end road, and my cat was who I talked to the most, and my identity was hanging in a closet somewhere. My head was a soupy mess of ideas, and my thought loop was nihilistic, and everything I believed in felt fraught, and I was scared I’d written myself into a corner or that maybe I had peaked and it was all downhill from there. Back then, the thing that felt so great about Substack was that it wasn’t some blog people might attend or even a Mailchimp that might turn into a sales pitch. Substack was a place where readers had to figure out how to sign up, a place where they had to agree to get your emails on a regular basis, a place with barriers to entry, (in some cases) a cover charge, and those things were not available on social media or a blog site. People had to want to read me, effort to read me, and in some way all that made my writing holy again. It created a boundary, a haven, a netting between myself and the scant few that might follow me here from places where I was more well known and my art was consumed in the blur of a scroll. Here, I started to experiment with a different voice that felt closer to my own. Here, I started to test out what it might feel like to write instead of catch eyes. Here, I got honest in a way that I don’t think I’d been anywhere else. Here, I started charging for my words, daring to believe that my writing wasn’t some side project but the main event. In 2021, trying to figure out what to do with the rest of my life, I thought “maybe writer.” Some 50 Substack essays later, I think “writer.”
What has been so delicious about writing on Substack is that it isn’t something that fits into my wider writing practice, like some piece of a puzzle—it is my writing practice. Writing here also isn’t something that fits into my wider online presence, because in being here, I have learned that an online presence isn’t something I care to curate the same way I once did, if at all.
Read more: #1 Being All Of It
I think we ask people things like I am being asked because we want to know the formula, the juice, how to replicate or establish or build. We are conditioned to believe that it doesn’t matter unless there are clicks, impressions, likes, comments, engagement; that our work doesn’t matter unless we’re known. I’ve been successful in the measurable ways because I followed those playbooks, but that has always left me miserable. Here, I have not followed the playbooks, I have done a lot of it wrong, but I have written like it matters, like what I have to say matters. If there’s any advice I have to give, it’s that. Sure, pay attention to the technical bits, the hacks and the best practices, and drive your engagement and whatever. But write like it matters and like what you have to say matters. Write like it’s 2013 and no one knows who the hell you are or cares what you have to say, and do it anyway.
Sincerely and truly yours,
Holly Glenn Whitaker
Subscribe to Recovering on Substack, and you can also find Holly on Instagram and her personal website.
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We asked Robert Reich to share his advice on learning to use his writing and drawing skills to illustrate his Substack. Read on for Robert’s advice, or listen to him read it aloud above.
This is the fifth in a recurring series of longform writer advice, following Alicia Kennedy’s advise on learning to listen, Embedded’s Kate Lindsay’s advice on creating trust with your readers, Lance’s Anna Codrea-Rado’s advice on learning to celebrate just how far you’ve come, and Mason Currey’s advice on creative growth.
Could you use some advice or inspiration from a fellow writer about creativity, motivation, and the writing life? Submit your question for consideration for a future advice column by leaving it in the comments below.
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We asked Helena Fitzgerald to share her advice on navigating isolation as a writer. Helena writes Griefbacon—a newsletter on the weirdness of relationships for “the last people at the party after everyone else has gone home.” Listen on for her experience of solitude in writing, or listen to her read it aloud above.
Dear writer, how does isolation play into your writing experience? When do you crave it, and at what point do you seek support, collaboration, or edits? How do you come up for air when the loneliness of writing becomes too much?
*This is the fifth in a recurring series of longform writer advice, following Alicia Kennedy’s advice on learning to listen, Embedded’s Kate Lindsay’s advice on creating trust with your readers, Lance’s Anna Codrea-Rado’s advice on learning to celebrate just how far you’ve come, and Mason Currey’s advice on creative growth.
Could you use some advice or inspiration from a fellow writer about creativity, motivation, and the writing life? Submit your question for consideration for a future advice column by leaving it in the comments on Substack.
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We asked Alicia Kennedy to share her advice on interviewing. She calls From the Desk of Alicia Kennedy Podcast, her weekly podcast that’s part of her food newsletter, “a curated conversation series.” She recently wrote about her belief in unscripted, unedited interviews here. Read on for her advice, or listen to her read it aloud above.
Dear writer and podcaster, what’s the secret to a good interview?
My podcast always begins with the same question: “Can you tell me about where you grew up and what you ate?” This establishes the conversation in some straightforward biography, while also grounding it in the flavors and food philosophies that have shaped the guest’s life. From there, the audience and I will get to go deeper, but the guest sets the terms of the conversation by choosing what and how much to share. Do they become wistful and nostalgic, or do these memories seem painful? Are they tinged by grief and loss, or by joy and whimsy? The question sets the tone and tenor of the rest of the conversation.
To me, a good interview is governed by the same thing as good nonfiction writing: curiosity. I’ve made mistakes before by doing interviews with people whose work I, frankly, was not curious about, and that means I’m just going through the motions. But what makes an interview good for the audience—whether a listener or reader—is that the people having the conversation are actively engaged with each other, and ideally with each other’s work. As an interviewer, I want the people listening to feel like they’re overhearing a natural conversation, something that would happen spontaneously after the plates are cleared away from the dinner table and all that’s left is some wine and cake.
There also needs to be a spirit of generosity on the part of the person being interviewed. When people come on who’ve never bothered to listen to a past episode and don’t respond generously to good-faith questions, it can feel like pulling teeth. I’ve learned for myself, whether I’m the host or the guest, that I shouldn’t show up unless I can get locked into having a generous conversation. This means being curious and being engaged, of course, but also believing that every question is a good question, a worthwhile question, and if I think perhaps it hasn’t been phrased well, that I can reframe it in my response.
I want the people listening to feel like they’re overhearing a natural conversation, something that would happen spontaneously after the plates are cleared away from the dinner table and all that’s left is some wine and cake.
In order to facilitate better conversations, I send my guests the questions a week ahead of time. This provides not too much time to overprepare and thus kill spontaneity, but it does allow them to get a sense of the trajectory of the conversation and tell me whether they’d prefer to go in another direction. I want guests to be comfortable and know that it will be a safe space for anything they wish to talk about, and I like to establish their boundaries ahead of time.
I try to ask big, open questions, too, so that the guest feels free to take their response in any direction. Specific questions, I’ve found, lend themselves too easily to simple answers. The worst feeling is to receive a “yes” or “no” in response. Though sometimes one can want to flex just how deep they’ve researched in their questions, I find it better to be looser and to let the guest guide the conversation a bit, because their spontaneity will also be more compelling to the listener.
In writing these bigger, more open questions, I dive into all the person’s work and also try to listen to or read past interviews. I want to honor the subjects that drive the guest’s life while also bringing something different to it, something less anticipated. My questions that I ask to everyone are very important for this reason, such as in how I begin, but also in how I finish, which is with the same two questions. Each guest responds to the same questions in new ways.
I want to honor the subjects that drive the guest’s life while also bringing something different to it, something less anticipated.
I used to ask just, “For you, is cooking a political act?” but I change it up based on whether the guest has told me they like to cook or not. If they don’t, I ask about writing or bartending or whatever it is they put all their soul into. I’ve begun to add the question “How do you define abundance?” because the concept of “abundance” keeps working its way into my own writing—how we define it, yes, as well as how to cultivate it and how to reframe it in a world that tries to tell us abundance looks one way, means one thing.
My podcast is, in this way, an extension of my writing, a way to engage with its themes with folks who’ve done different kinds of work in food and culture, who can bring new perspectives to themes I work with consistently. We all eat and engage with food differently, and I want to honor that diversity through generous, curious conversation.
Sincerely,
Alicia
This is the fourth in a recurring series of longform writer advice, following Embedded’s Kate Lindsay’s advice on creating trust with your readers, Lance’s Anna Codrea-Rado’s advice on learning to celebrate just how far you’ve come, and Mason Currey’s advice on creative growth.
Could you use some advice or inspiration from a fellow writer about creativity, motivation, and the writing life? Submit your question for consideration for a future advice column by leaving it in the comments below.
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As we kick off the Substack category tour, we asked Kate Lindsay, co-author of Embedded, to share some writer-to-writer advice about creating trust with your readers. Co-founded with Nick Catucci, Embedded is a twice-weekly guide to new internet creators including trends and weekly interviews with “very online” people. Read on for her advice, or listen to her read it aloud above.
Dear writer,
How do you approach reading, as a writer? How does the lens of your own audience impact how and what you read?
Dear writer,
I’ll admit, there was a period of time when I was too jaded from working in the digital media industry to read any online content. At my first writing job, I wrote seven stories a day, sometimes waking up as early as 6 a.m. to fit it all in. By the time I’d worked at a few different publications, I could tell when an article was actually an SEO grab masquerading as a legitimate piece of writing, or a piece of clickbait meant to make people mad, and I wasn’t interested in feeding the machine with my own reading habits.
While I’d like to think this particular era of digital media is on its way out, you still see shades of it when the latest viral moment prompts every outlet to scramble for its own unique take. So many websites are writing the same thing. This can be helpful: When Yellowjackets was airing, I was so deep in the show and its fan theories that I read every perspective I could find in hopes of getting all the crumbs. But this strategy doesn’t work universally. For instance, I similarly consumed Covid-19 content in the first year of the pandemic, but I realized that this wasn’t actually reading—it was anxiety-spiraling.
All this is to say, I’m somewhat precious with what I consume, and definitely read a lot less than perhaps you’d think for someone who calls themselves “chronically online.” I like pieces that work to clarify a moment with reason rather than drum up anxiety for clicks, and I have a natural aversion to reading whatever piece has my Twitter timeline in an uproar—because it was probably designed to do just that.
“I like pieces that work to clarify a moment with reason rather than drum up anxiety for clicks.”
This was one of the first things I noticed about writing Embedded: I no longer have to cater to SEO, or try to get someone’s attention on a timeline. We’re writing for readers who, by nature of signing up, already want to read us. So our coverage can be more thoughtfully catered to them in a way that feels helpful, not exploitative.
Our best-performing pieces for Embedded are often the ones that seek to make the reader feel understood. Our newsletter is about the internet, but rather than highlight what’s dystopian about this time, I always try to focus on the things about it that are uniquely human, or voice something we all experience that hasn’t been formally put to paper. Similarly, the pieces I love and share with others aren’t ones that are particularly spicy or that make me want to get up and go do something, but that reflect back to me a thought or experience that makes me feel seen.
This isn’t to say you need to try to broadly appeal to your readers. Curating our My Internet series has taught me that the internet may be getting bigger, but people still find and occupy their own particular corners of it. The 2020 National Book Award nominee Rumaan Alam follows Mary-Kate and Ashley fan accounts. Former New York Times columnist Ben Smith is on Geocaching reddit. Writer Taylor Lorenz loves bird TikTok. Investing in a niche may not reach the most readers, but the people you are writing for will be real and engaged and appreciative, which is, ostensibly, why we all started doing this.
“Investing in a niche may not reach the most readers, but the people you are writing for will be real and engaged and appreciative, which is, ostensibly, why we all started doing this.”
I’ve also learned that people will pay for writing, and we should continue to normalize that. For My Internet, we always ask people what they pay for online, and some have named publications from the New York Times to Insider to Study Hall to, of course, their favorite Substacks. But when you step back and look at social media as a whole, everyday people in the replies and comments are routinely astonished when something is paywalled. Sure, running into a paywall is annoying, but the fact that you’re annoyed you can’t read something is the reason to pay for it! If you want to read good stuff, then you have to free writers from the advertising model that forces quantity over quality, and that means people with the means to give their money, doing so.
If all else fails, I’ll leave you with these two pieces of advice: Trust recommendations from humans, not algorithms, and treat your clicks like currency—give them to the kind of content you want to see more of, not less.
Sincerely,Kate
This is the third in a recurring series of longform writer-to-writer advice, following Mason Currey’s advice column on creative growth and Anna Codrea-Rado of Lance on learning to celebrate just how far you’ve come.
Could you use some advice or inspiration from a fellow writer about creativity, motivation, and the writing life? Submit your question for consideration for a future advice column by leaving it in the comments below, or entering it (with the option to remain anonymous) using this form.
Bonus: Reading Room
Reading Room is a new mini series with writers like Anne Helen Petersen sharing their favorite publications to read on Substack. Kate is a thoughtful reader and researcher, both of her peers and of the online spaces that she covers. We asked Kate to share what she is reading.
Kate Lindsay’s recommended reads:
* Substack I’m most excited to open ASAP: Today in Tabs—it breaks down the exact discourse I recommend against reading, but now I can still know what people are talking about.
* Substack most likely to make me think: ¡Hola Papi!—I keep rereading this post about stepping back from social media. I’m like, did I black out and send this letter?
* First Substack I subscribed to: That’s gotta be Garbage Day, and I still open every single one! I recently cited this one, about how social media is digesting the crisis in Ukraine, in my own writing.
* Substack I subscribed to most recently: After School—one of the only places to report on Gen Z that isn’t patronizing. I think this Gen Z gift guide is a perfect example of how hard its author, Casey Lewis, works to be accurate and comprehensive.
* Substack I recommend to friends most often: Rachel Karten’s Link in Bio is essential for understanding the professional social media space. I love this one about the personal social media accounts of people who run brand accounts.
Visit Kate’s profile page to see more from her current reading list. Subscribe to Kate and Nick’s publication on Substack, Embedded, and you can also find them on Twitter here and here.
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As the year draws to a close, we asked Anna Codrea-Rado to share a piece of writer-to-writer advice about taking stock of one’s creative accomplishments. Anna writes Lance, a publication all about building a freelance career without burning out. Read on for her advice, or listen to her read it aloud above.
Dear writer,
How do you stop to recognize what you've accomplished? And how do you refocus and refresh when starting a new chapter?
Dear writer,
On the eve of a breakup, a past boyfriend said to me that I’d never be happy because I’m always looking for something else.
Over a decade later and the memory of that remark still stings. Not because I regret dumping him, but because he’d touched on something that I was (and still am) prone to doing: ambitiously going after something but not stopping to appreciate its fruits.
I share this relic from my relationship graveyard to confess that I too struggle to recognize my accomplishments. And before I can attempt to answer what you can do about that, first I want to ask: why can’t you recognize what you’ve accomplished?
Earlier this year, I wrote my first book and while I knew it was a huge milestone, I couldn’t feel it. So much so, that I felt uncomfortable whenever other people told me how proud I must be of myself. I started calling this inability to see my own success "productivity dysmorphia.” The pursuit of productivity spurs us to do more while at the same time robbing us of the ability to savor any success we might encounter along the way. As for why it happens, personally, I think the biggest culprit is our toxic work culture which not only moves the goal posts, but then tells us that if we miss, that’s our personal failing.
The pursuit of productivity spurs us to do more while at the same time robbing us of the ability to savor any success we might encounter along the way.
There’s a badly wrapped gift to be had here: This stuff isn’t your fault! This partly explains why I’ve only ever had mixed results in my attempts to do something about it. Because believe me, I’ve tried all the hacks for recognizing my achievements. The big one is writing down your wins at the end of each day. Seems like a no-brainer for a writer, right? Make yourself feel better about your writing by writing about it? And indeed, scribbling “Wrote 1,000 words today” in my bullet journal does make me feel smug.
When I’m fretting about my newsletter, a game I like to play is zooming in and out of the graph in the “Subscriber” tab. There, I can see my growth over the last 30 days, 90 days, and all time. My 30-day chart looks like a rollercoaster; a rickety track of dizzying climbs preceded by stomach-flipping descents. Then I toggle to the 90-day view and things look a little gentler. At the “all-time” setting, all the bumps are smoothed out into a healthy line that clearly points upwards. At that distance, I have an uninterrupted view of how much further along I am now from my starting position.
These tactics (or maybe it’s better to call them reflections) have definitely helped me better appreciate my achievements, but only ever after the fact. It’s a bit like how I experience the benefits of exercise, not so much in the moment of doing it, but only after a period of inactivity when I feel terrible for its absence.
As the French political theorist, Germaine de Staël wrote, “The human mind always makes progress, but it is a progress in spirals”. And so, I don’t think the move is to throw out these acts of reflection, but rather to accept their limitations.
“The human mind always makes progress, but it is a progress in spirals” ~ Germaine de Staël
Then the question becomes, how can we recognize our accomplishments in the moment?
For me, the answer lies in getting back to why I write in the first place. I believe that the writing subjects we’re drawn to aren’t random. Richard Bach, the American writer said, “We teach best what we most need to learn.” And I think the same is true for writing—I write best about the things I need to work out for myself.
I find this to be particularly important to remember at the close of one chapter and the beginning of another. And if you too are at a similar crossroads right now and struggling with which direction to take next, try asking yourself the following question: Even if no one read me, what would I write about?
It’s easy to lose sight of why you’re even writing in the first place, so recentring can be a powerful way to help you get unstuck. Asking yourself this simple question will help you reconnect with your writing and remind you why you’re even doing it in the first place. You’ll be surprised how clearly the answer will come to you. And remember, the sheer act of even asking these kinds of questions is a celebration of how just far you’ve come.
Sincerely,Anna
This is the second in a recurring series of longform writer-to-writer advice, following Mason Currey’s advice column on creative growth.
Could you use some advice or inspiration from a fellow writer about creativity, motivation, and the writing life? Submit your question for consideration for a future advice column by leaving it in the comments below, or entering it (with the option to remain anonymous) using this form.
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Last Wednesday, we hosted a workshop with Elle Griffin of The Novelleist to learn about how to serialize fiction on Substack.
When Elle finished writing her first book, she began to research the best way to publish it, but what she found was distressing. 98 percent of books published in 2020 sold less than 5,000 copies, and traditional publishing offered few viable paths for less established authors to make a living. Elle summarized her learnings in a Substack post called, “The one where writing books is not really a good idea.” The article’s sharp analysis of the publishing industry hit a nerve, garnering the post more than 70,000 views.
In the article, Elle analyzes online platforms like Wattpad, Patreon, Amazon, and Substack as potential alternatives to traditional publishing. She makes the case that while there isn’t yet a perfect home for fiction online, Substack presented the most promising opportunity to publish and monetize her serial novel.
We asked Elle to host a Spotlight On because of the rigor with which she has approached serializing her fiction on Substack. Elle has also been uniquely generous to fellow writers in the fiction genre – finding and gathering nearly 500 writers in the Substack Writers Unite Discord group, and also spotlighting other writers on her own Substack.
The transcript has been edited for length and readability. You can listen to the full interview as a podcast in this post.
To sign up for future writer interviews and workshops, head here.
Why did you decide to serialize your upcoming novel on Substack?
After I finished writing my novel, I set out to do what every writer does: pitch it to agents. I pitched more than 120 agents, and they all rejected it.
As I was going through that process, I realized why all these agents were rejecting my book. It’s a strange little gothic novel. It’s a book that will appeal to a certain kind of person, but it won't appeal to every kind of person.
If you're a big publishing house, what you're looking for are blockbusters – the Dan Browns of the world who are going to write a novel that’s going to sell millions of copies. The publishing house takes 70% of those royalties, and that's how they fuel their business. Meanwhile, only 0.01% of books will sell more than 100,000 copies. In fact, 96% of books sell less than 1,000 copies total!
Well, my book is definitely not a blockbuster. If I'm only going to sell 1,000 or 2,000 copies – because that's about as big of an audience as I can picture – how can I effectively monetize it? If I put the book up for sale on Amazon for $3 each, then my family and 100 other people might find it, and I'd make a couple hundred bucks.
At the same time as I was researching the publishing industry, the creator economy was emerging. New tools are allowing creative people to monetize a really niche audience. It only takes 1,000 people paying $8 a month for a creator to make a living of $100,000 a year.
Writers were tapping into the creator economy through Substack, but most weren’t writing fiction yet. I knew writers charging people from $5 a month up to $40 a month; on Substack, there were people earning millions of dollars a year.
Here's this platform that already has the business structure ready to go, so I wanted to try it for fiction. If there are 1,000 people out there who are willing pay $8 a month to subscribe to my novel as a serial, then that would work out financially for me. I could fund my writing. After all, this isn’t a new idea. The Count of Monte Cristo, Charles Dickens, and more classic books were all initially serialized.
How have you grown your email list so far?
I started my Substack in February, and it has grown by almost 1,000 readers in the last two months.
In trying to grow my audience on Substack, I figured the easiest way would be to learn from other Substack writers. I stalked everyone I could find on Twitter who used the combination of the word “fiction” and the word “Substack” in a tweet. I messaged them and invited them to a Discord server so we could learn from each other. There are hundreds of fiction writers in the community now, all talking about what has worked and not worked for each of us. We have a little spreadsheet called “cross promotions” where we put in our Substack URL and genre so we can contact each other and exchange mentions of one other’s work.
But what was most helpful for growth was writing two articles that took me a really long time to produce. One took me all of 2020 to research. The other one took me another six months to research. Those two articles were about the publishing industry at large. It turned out that they resonated with people because publishing is a black box, and there are a lot of writers also trying to understand how it works.
I shared those two articles a bunch of different ways, including on Hacker News. You can share your link on there, and sometimes they go viral and sometimes they don't, but one of mine did. That article had something like 60,000 views in one day, and a lot of subscribers came from that one piece of writing that really resonated.
How are you approaching charging readers for a serialized novel?
Fiction writing is not the same as writing nonfiction on Substack. With nonfiction, you're expecting rolling admissions. You're getting new subscribers every month, and it doesn't matter where those new people start reading because the next article you publish isn't necessarily attached to the last one.
For fiction, the posts are sequential, so I’m following the funding model you see with an online course. In these courses, you have to take the first class before the second class. There is a clear order, and people running courses often open enrollment just once a year. During those enrollment periods, they send tons of promotional communication encouraging people to sign up for their course. After that period, the promotions die down.
That's how I'm going to approach it with my novel. September is my “enrollment period.” My plan is to publish the first four chapters in September to my entire newsletter list for free. At the bottom of each of those posts, I’ll tell readers that in order to keep reading in October, they’ll need to subscribe and pay an annual fee. I’m charging $10 a month or $50 a year, so my hope is to encourage everybody to buy into the full year in September – essentially, they’re buying the whole book by doing so. When October hits, my audience should be locked in. Everybody will be signed up to get the book as paid posts, and all of them will be receiving installments at the same time.
I plan to do this same process every year. This first book will be done in June. I'll have July and August off, and in September, I’ll start my second book. So there will be a new book in the same window of time as when Substack starts saying to readers, “Hey, by the way, your annual subscriptions are about to renew.”
I think this annual approach is easier on writers who aren't used to asking for money because you just need to do so once a year, and then you can focus on writing.
Elle’s extra tips for fiction writers
* Use sections to delineate different topics and chapters. In addition to writing her novel, Elle publishes a Substack newsletter about fiction writing. She uses Substack’s sections feature to separate her posts into categories for readers, and shares in her demo (above) how other fiction writers are using sections to guide readers through the chapters of books.
* Prepare for readers to join mid-story. Update: since this workshop was hosted, we have created a feature that allows writers to enable “next” and “previous” buttons on their posts in the Publication Details section of the settings page. This allows readers to quick navigate to sequential post.
* Consider paid plans unique to fiction writing. Elle plans to publish four free chapters that go out to her entire list. After that, her chapters will be gated and paid. Elle noted that you can also try a founding member plan. Sasha’s founding plan includes a print copy of the book when it’s completed. Learn more about how to customize your subscription settings.
Hoping for more tips on how to start a fiction publication on Substack? Join Elle’s Discord community here.
Spotlight On is a series of live events hosted by Substack. The goal is to learn from writers across categories who have experienced success on Substack. Stay tuned for our next events here.
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Last week, we hosted a workshop with Tony Mecia of The Charlotte Ledger to discuss covering local news on Substack.
Tony worked in journalism as the business reporter and editor with the Charlotte Observer before he decided to strike it out on his own. He started The Charlotte Ledger and grew it the old-fashioned way, building relationships locally and relying on word-of-mouth from friends. Today, The Charlotte Ledger is a thriving business with a team of freelancers and regular contributors.
Writers like Tony have paved the way for independent local news on Substack. In our workshop, we brought together the greater community of local news writers to learn from Tony’s experience and absorb best practices for local news publishing on Substack.
Hamish McKenzie, the co-founder of Substack and a writer himself, hosted the interview with Tony and discussed his journey publishing, growing, and going paid. At the end of this post, we also share Tony’s quick tips for polishing your newsletter.
The interview has been edited for length. You can listen to the full interview as a podcast in this post.
To sign up for future writer interviews and workshops, head here.
Why do you care so deeply about local news?
My background is in local news. I worked as an editor and reporter here in Charlotte for more than 10 years. I saw the connections that you can make here reporting, and how important it is to have somebody in your local community who is watching out for citizens, not paid for by marketing or advertising, and who can actually report honestly and straightforwardly. We've lost that, especially in smaller to mid-sized markets like Charlotte.
As local news in Charlotte weakened, I started looking at my options. I wasn’t going to move somewhere else. I don't want to move to Washington or New York for a job in journalism. I've lived here for more than 20 years. My home is in Charlotte and I care about Charlotte. So I thought, well, maybe I can start something.
At this time, there were a lot of national newsletters – Morning Brew, The Hustle – but there weren't a whole lot of folks using the newsletter format as a vehicle to report original local news.
Tell me about the moment you decided to go independent. What were you most nervous about?
The difference between writing nationally and locally is that your potential audience is a lot smaller when local. If I'm writing about cybersecurity or technology or national politics, the whole country may read that. Charlotte's a city of about 900,000 people in a county of 1.1 million in a region of 2.3 million. But I just thought, let’s try it.
I started in March of 2019. The first editions went to 12 friends and family members. My mom was very happy to get it. I posted it on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn, since our focus is business-adjacent news in Charlotte. I asked that folks read, and if they liked the writing, that they please tell people about it. I had no idea what was going to happen.
What I found was the readership just kept growing. The total list is just a very steady upward line. That made me think, okay, I've got something here. We were publishing three mornings a week, and it was all free at that point.
How did it feel making the leap to paying subscribers?
The Charlotte Ledger was free for almost an entire year. The typical advice from Substack is to wait three months, or less in some cases, before going paid. But I was nervous that our growth would slow down once because we'd be putting a lot of writing out for paid subscribers that would no longer be shareable.
That actually hasn't been true. That first day when we turned on the paid subscriptions, I expected that a handful of people would sign up, but money just started pouring in. It was a few thousand dollars, and I thought, wow, this actually resonates with people. People are willing to pay for this.
It was a tremendous feeling. It wasn’t as if it was so much money that I could retire, but it was a good feeling to know that what you're producing is worth something to somebody.
If I had to do it over again, we probably wouldn’t have waited an entire year before turning on paid subscriptions. That hesitancy was just because of my nervousness. Waiting a year, with no income, with no revenue coming in is a long time. It worked out – my wife works, and we had some severance from a previous job and all that – but in hindsight, we should have turned on paid a little faster.
Why did you decide to cover business news rather than just local news in Charlotte?
I'm not opposed to doing local news, and we do a fair amount of general news, but our theory has always been that we want to do writing that's better than what's already in Charlotte, and we want to do writing that's different than what's already in Charlotte.
The number of business reporters here in Charlotte had declined, and I saw an opening content-wise. My background was in business news. It’s something that I knew and felt comfortable covering. There's a pretty big market for it in Charlotte. We’re a business town with banks and tech companies. It's a pretty big city. Business writing also has the advantage that if the newsletter is useful to an employee, they can charge the subscription cost to their company as a business expense.
What wisdom can you pass on to other local news writers who are considering Substack?
Two things. First, it's hard for journalists whose background is in reporting a story to all of a sudden have to think like a business person. But you need to think about your audience. There's a temptation with local journalism to think, “I'm writing about Charlotte, so anybody in Charlotte is going to be interested in it.” To succeed, you’ll need to hone that down a little bit more.
Ask: Who are you trying to appeal to? And how will you find them? You need to think strategically about who the people are who are most likely to read your work, then determine where they hang out physically or online and how you could reach them where they are. Use your marketing or business brain on those strategy questions.
Second, you're not alone. I've gotten a lot of good advice from fellow local news writers – City Hall Watcher in Toronto, The Mill in England. I'm not saying that we've got all the answers, but we've done this for longer than most people in the local news space on Substack. Steal good ideas from other people.
Tony’s quick tips for local news writers
* Don’t overthink your paid vs. free strategy. The Charlotte Ledger has days of the week where their posts are free. Their “paid days” are Wednesdays and Fridays. On occasion, they cover free topics that may be outside their publication scope because the team believes they may be shareable.
* Let free readers know what they are missing. For every paid post, The Charlotte Ledger sends out a shorter “teaser” version to their free subscribers. If free subscribers want to read the rest, they need to subscribe. Because of this tactic, The Charlotte Ledger sees new subscriptions even on “paid days.”
* Include guidance about subscribing at the top of every email. “Although we don’t want to be ‘annoying,’ we do have to think like a business.”
* To promote locally, consider partnerships. There are no magic growth hacks with local news. Instead, you’ll need to do a lot of little promotions consistently. Partner with a variety of people in your community to get in front of different groups. Tony has partnered with Charlotte’s local radio station, local Facebook Groups, and even hosted an awards show to ensure members of his community bump into The Charlotte Ledger.
* 10,000 readers is a useful benchmark. If you believe you can build a list of 10,000 free readers, you have a strong chance of converting 10% (1,000) of those people into paid subscribers. That’s enough to support a livelihood.
Hoping for more tips on how to start a local news publication on Substack? Check out our comprehensive playbook here.
Spotlight On is a series of live events hosted by Substack. The goal is to learn from writers across categories who have experienced success on Substack. Join us for our next Spotlight On: Fiction with Elle Griffin.
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In early June, we hosted an interview with Mike of Nongaap Investing to discuss finance writing on Substack. Mike is a former activist investor who writes about investing, corporate governance, board dynamics, and the power of incentives.
We asked Mike to speak in part because he’s a lot of fun, and also because Mike’s an inspiring example of the success we are seeing many finance and investing writers experience on Substack. He’s doing so well that he even turned Substack into his full-time focus and sits among the top paid publications in our Business category.
Linda Lebrun of the Substack Partnerships team hosted an interview with Mike and discussed his journey publishing, growing, and going paid. At the end of this post, we also share Linda’s quick tips for polishing your newsletter.
The interview has been edited for length. You can listen to the full interview as a podcast in this post.
To sign up for future writer spotlights and workshops, head here.
What surprised you most about what happened when you started writing on Substack?
The biggest surprise was that anyone would even read my writing in the first place.
My goal was just to become a more focused thinker for myself, not for anyone else. To get such a positive response very early in the process was a shock. I’m still shocked, even today, that anyone would pay to read my stuff. I just checked, and I think I’m number two in the Business category. That there are enough people out there that not only want to read about corporate governance but want to read it enough to pay a few dollars a month, remains amazing to me.
What benefits did writing have for your career as an investor?
The forward button for a newsletter may be the most powerful networking tool you’ll ever have. That endorsement is social proof of someone who followed you forwarding your writing on to someone they respect.
I tell folks who are trying to break into the investing world not to wait until they are in an interview or pitching a stock to put themselves out there. Your writing or thinking doesn’t have to be perfect to get started. Think of writing as a journey where you are iterating and demonstrating how you look at the world and how you think of the world. Doing that will help you find other people that respect and align with your own perspective, instead of trying to purpose-build a pitch or a stock thesis retroactively.
It seems that meeting people has been even more satisfying than the business value you’ve seen from your Substack.
Absolutely. I think Substack is an even more powerful networking tool than a business tool for the average writer. You can 10x or 100x your professional reputation as long as you stay authentic with what you’re trying to do. People pick up on that, and you’ll build a real bond.
The people who you really want to reach in life – the really interesting thinkers – everyone in the world wants to get an introduction to them. Few things actually open the door like a thoughtful piece focused on that person’s company or preferred style of investing. If you say something thoughtful, they’re more likely to come to you than they would in any other networking effort. You’re demonstrating that you would be an interesting conversation.
What are key pieces of advice you have for writers who are just getting started?
Don’t be afraid to grow slowly. There’s sustainability when you’re willing to go slow.
I know there’s pressure to build up your subscriber base as quickly as possible. That’s a valid way of doing it, but for me, it was important to not feel like I needed to push all of my writing out at once because that wouldn’t have been sustainable. You need to make sure that you find a cadence that fits your style and your life, because this is a marathon, not a sprint.
Substack is a business, but it’s also a personal development tool, a networking tool, and for me, an opportunity to get better as an investor. You’re going to get better with every piece you put out, and you’re going to slowly build an audience that will hopefully help you push the forward button and spread the word.
Linda’s quick tips for finance & investing writers
* Customize the “About” page to explain what readers can expect from you.
* Customize your “Thank you for subscribing” email. Consider including examples of some of your best past posts so new readers can dive right in.
* Include a preview image before you share a post. Consider using Unsplash to source images.
* Fill out your writer profile to demonstrate knowledge about the topics you cover.
* Social sharing helps people know your publication exists. Two helpful, simple tips for promotion: include your Substack link in your social media bios and pin a Substack post to the top of your social media profiles.
Spotlight On is a series of live events hosted by Substack. The goal is to learn from writers across categories who have experienced success on Substack. Join us for our next Spotlight On.
Should we be hosting a Spotlight On session with you? Tell us more about your Substack here.
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We spoke with Paula Forbes of Stained Page News, a newsletter about cookbooks. For her, it’s a place to geek out about cookbooks - where she can write about news, recipes, and upcoming releases.
Paula has a multifaceted view of the culinary world. She worked as a professional cookbook critic for over a decade, writing for publications like Eater, Epicurious, Lucky Peach, and Food 52. She also has a background in cooking for restaurants, and in 2008 she published her own cookbook, The Austin Cookbook.
We talked about the worlds of food blogging and cookbook writing, what makes a good cookbook, and what it was like for Paula to write her own cookbook after years of reviewing them.
Links
* Stained Page News, Paula’s newsletter
* Paula on Twitter
* The Austin Cookbook, Paula’s cookbook
Highlights
* (2:23) Paula’s writing journey, from writing cookbook reviews to blogging to starting her newsletter
* (12:38) Why people buy cookbooks, even though so many recipes are online now
* (18:42) How the 2008 recession coincided with the rise of food bloggers
* (25:44) Paula’s favorite types of cookbooks, and the overall qualities that make good cookbooks
* (37:34) The process of writing a cookbook
On similarities between cooking and writing:
The feeling you get from cooking in a restaurant and writing a solid blog post that goes up really quickly is very similar to me. A very speedy, quick strategy is involved. You have to be very efficient.
On having a community of newsletter readers:
I think that in the grand scheme of things, you're never going to make it rich with a cookbook website or TV show. But being able to focus on a self-selecting audience who has said, "Okay, I'm interested in this topic. I'm interested in cookbooks. I want to hear what you have to say about them.” It amplifies what you're saying so much more.
On the process of writing a cookbook:
It's a hell of a process. You have to be so organized and you have to be just on top of everything. It's so much more data than just writing the text of the thing. Cookbooks are so much work and I have so much respect for anyone who tries to write one.
Transcript
Nadia (00:22):
We see a lot of food writers on Substack, but your publication, Stained Page News, stood out to me because you're specifically focused on cookbooks - which just said to me that this person isn't just really into food as a broader topic, but you have this truly geeky obsession with cookbooks specifically that I really want to hear more about. How did you come to fall in love with this topic?
Paula (00:44):
Way back when I graduated from college, I originally thought that I wanted to go to grad school and go into academia. And what I wanted to do was ... This was not really a thing that existed then, but I wanted to look at food cultural history of the 20th century through the lens of books as a literature.
Paula (01:19):
I applied to grad school a bunch of times and didn't get in because people kept saying, "You're a great candidate, but we don't have anyone here who can help you study that." So, in the meantime, I started writing book reviews, freelance, for a Typepad blog because this was what, 2007, 2008? And then later for outlets and I've been covering cookbooks ever since.
Nadia (01:52):
Wow, this got me even more excited about this topic. So, you really are coming at it from a researcher mindset way back in the day of wanting to just understand cookbooks as a genre, it sounds like, before you got into writing. You mentioned writing on a blog in the early days and then writing professionally and now you have a newsletter on Substack - how does that experience of early blogging compare to writing today?
Paula (02:23):
That's why I started the newsletter, it’s because I missed blogging. So, I started writing cookbook reviews and later just about everything else for a blog called Eat Meat Daily that no longer exists. And they looked at the liberal arts of food. It was art, it was film, it was books. And just generally weird stuff with a good sense of humor.
Paula (02:52):
So, I started there and that was a very late odds style blog. And then from there, I moved on to writing for Eater, which is a different style of blog.
Nadia (03:13):
So, for folks who haven't read Eater, can you tell us a little bit about how it's different?
Paula (03:23):
I can't really speak to their current style of blogging, but when I worked there, it was very quick hit news, re-blogs, everything with a sense of humor - sense of humor and a point of view of restaurant insiders. But the two were different and that one was very much ... Eater was very much volume-driven when I worked there, so it was very much get in, get out of the story. Get it up, have the best headline, that kind of thing.
Paula (04:02):
And I missed that. I also have a background in cooking in restaurants and the feeling you got from cooking in a restaurant and writing a really solid blog post that goes up quickly is very similar to me. A very speedy, quick strategy is involved. You have to be very efficient - so figuring out how to do that in my head scratches the itch of like, "Okay, now I'm working." And that doesn't really exist anymore in media, near as I can tell, at least not in my circles.
Paula (04:48):
So, I missed it. I missed talking about cookbook news which I didn't really see anyone doing. And I just started tweeting stuff. And then, people started picking up stuff I was tweeting and I was like, "Well, this is not great because I'm a freelance writer, and I would like to be making some money off of the scoops I'm finding." There is one in particular that was after Anthony Bourdain passed away.
Paula (05:29):
They announced that they were going to be publishing a book that he had been working on when he passed away. And so, I tweeted about it and everyone linked to the tweet. People magazine linked to the tweet. It was wild, and I was just like, "Why am I just throwing the stuff up on Twitter when I'd be writing it?" So, that's a very long way of saying that the newsletter scratches both the quick hit, how much information can you relay in one sentence thing that I got from blogging, and also fills the hole of the cookbook news that I wasn't seeing other places.
Nadia (06:14):
That makes sense. It sounds so simple but I feel like the addition of an email list really just changes that relationship. Even if you have a popular blog post and it goes super viral and everyone is reading it, you never really know who's on there and they kind of go off into the ether and do something else. But when you have a place for people to subscribe and get more of it, then it's you're actually building this relationship within an ongoing audience.
Paula (06:41):
Yeah, and especially with a topic like my topic which is so focused. I think that in the grand scheme of things, cookbooks are not ... You're never going to make it rich with a cookbook website or TV show or whatever but being able to focus it at a self-selecting audience who has said, "Okay, I'm interested in this topic. I'm interested in cookbooks. I want to hear what you have to say about them.” It amplifies what you're saying so much more.
Nadia (07:13):
I'm curious whether you feel like you've created a different sense of community because you're this independent writer at the center of your work versus writing about cookbooks and reviewing them on say Eater or Food 52’s communities.
Paula (07:29):
Gosh, not really. I don't allow comments on my newsletter.
Nadia (07:35):
Oh, interesting.
Paula (07:37):
So, I actually did on today's newsletter but it's a rarity for me. The newsletter management for me is very much about the path of least resistance in many ways. And it came down to: did I want to spend a ton of time moderating comments? And I've decided that that was not for me.
Nadia (08:03):
I really like that. I respect that. Actually, I noticed that you started writing Stained Page News a few years ago and then you went on hiatus and then you brought it back. And I just thought it was great because a lot of writers struggle with getting into this rhythm and feel maybe over-obligated to do more or maybe respond to or moderate comments or write all the time and consistently. Do you have any advice or learnings from this experience of being able to step away and come back again?
Paula (08:36):
Yeah. Gosh, how did that happen? I mean, the money is the big part of that, not to get into the weeds about the money - but as a freelancer, you can only spend so much time on things that don't pay. So that was part of why I stepped away, just I couldn't excuse it anymore. I couldn't make the time and I wasn't about to give up weekends or anything. You know, freelancers deserve downtime too.
Paula (09:07):
So, having an outlet where I could make some money off of it was honestly a huge, huge deal for me. I priced it pretty low, I think. It's five bucks a month and I did that specifically because I know that things come up where you can't do it occasionally and I didn't want people to feel like we're paying her 20 bucks a month or whatever it is, and then she doesn't write. That's not to say ... I write pretty much every week.
Paula (09:45):
But things come up. You get sick. You want to take a vacation, whatever. It's not going to happen every week, but I do think that if you're consistent in your publishing week to week, you will see it in open rates and you will see it in click-throughs and you will see it in the number of people who respond to the newsletter and it snowballs for sure.
Nadia (10:09):
You mentioned one of the reasons for stepping away is that you couldn't justify it as a non-paid thing you're doing versus the other paid work you had to focus on. Had you considered doing paid subscriptions previously? I know you did end up adding them when you moved to Substack.
Paula (10:28):
I didn't. It hadn't really occurred to me as an option. I had tried to figure out how to do affiliate links. Amazon doesn't let you do affiliate links and emails as I'm sure you know and people listening might not know. But I was doing a thing where I would send the email and then I would put the text of the newsletter on my website, but I really have to completely reformat it just so I can put in the Amazon links and then no one was ever using that.
Paula (11:01):
So, it's this huge thing and I was just like, "There's just no way. There's no way I'm ever going to be able to make money off of this." You all made the paid subscription thing really easy honestly.
Nadia (11:16):
How has having paid subscriptions changed your relationship with your writing if at all - since I imagine it does allow you to focus a little bit more time on that?
Paula (11:25):
Yeah. I feel a responsibility to my readers even though I tried to price it affordably. I'm never, ever, ever going to take for granted the fact that someone would give me money to read an email from me. So, I definitely take that into consideration. For example, recently, I used to send my newsletters Wednesdays and Fridays because new cookbooks come out on Tuesdays so I wanted it to be when books would come out and also that there had been articles written about the books would run Tuesday or Wednesday when food sections publish also.
Paula (12:11):
So, the Wednesday articles are the free article and the Friday issue was the paid and I was noticing that the Friday paid issue was kind of skimpy. So, I moved it to Tuesdays so that there would be more time and more time for things to happen so that I could give my paid subscribers a meatier issue every week.
Nadia (12:38):
That makes sense. I'd love to just dive into cookbooks themselves since we've been talking about you and your publication a bit, but you also write about this really fascinating topic that you have a lot of insight into. I would love to just maybe kick things off by talking about why people buy cookbooks.
Nadia (12:57):
I think about the cookbooks I've received from my mother. She loves cooking. I do too, and so food has become this way for us to bond - especially when I was younger and making that transition from angsty teenager to a person that my mother can actually converse with.
Nadia (13:13):
And so, my experience of cookbooks has been that they bring us closer to other people or remind us of a sense of place. Does that align with what you've seen? Why do people buy cookbooks in a world where so much cooking now happens through online recipes?
Paula (13:29):
Sure. I mean, gosh, I think there are tons of reasons why people buy cookbooks. Where do I start? So, first of all, I think that there are two different ways that people react or interact with cookbooks, which is that some people are very recipe-driven. I'm going to follow this recipe. I'm going to panic if I have parsley and not basil. I'm going to frantically text my friend, Paula, to see if I can cut it down to serve four instead of eight, that kind of thing, because I do get these texts.
Nadia (14:07):
You must be that person for all your friends.
Paula (14:11):
And then the other people who just glance at it and, "Oh, kale, potato, sausage soup, great." And just do whatever they want. So, I think you start there. So there's just two schools of people. The people who are real sticklers for the recipes are the people who are buying very generalist cookbooks. I'm talking about The Joy of Cooking or New York Times Cookbook, those kinds of things, How to Cook Everything by Mark Bittman.
Paula (14:42):
But also a lot of the books that are like weeknight dinners, the healthy food that still tastes good, basic pastas, those kinds of things, things that are very action-oriented. So, those consumers of cookbooks, people who are like, "I'm buying this book because I literally want to make this thing for dinner."
Paula (15:04):
Then you have the other people who are buying them for inspiration for ideas, launch pads, and those are people who are maybe buying more restaurant books, international cookbooks, books that are very visual. There's also professionals buying cookbooks and there's also people who are buying them to read them as literature. And there are people who are buying them as status objects to have on their coffee table.
Paula (15:38):
And there are people who are buying them as souvenirs. I went to this restaurant on my vacation and then now I want their cookbook as a totem of that time that I spent at that restaurant. So, I think there's a lot of different reasons that people buy cookbooks.
Nadia (15:56):
Yeah, sounds like it. You had a little brainstorm right there. Do you find that cookbook publishers nudge authors into appealing to one of these certain kinds of markets the way that we might expect an editor for someone who's writing in journalism to maybe nudge them towards certain kinds of audiences? Does that happen with cookbooks?
Paula (16:21):
Absolutely. I would even take it a step further and say those certain publishers tend to publish different books for different audiences. I mean, that's not 100% true across the board, but if you look at Phaidon for example, they are known for doing these big artsy chef and restaurant books from renowned chefs around the world. But then also they do these “food bibles” where it will be the big book of Irish cooking - or those are the most recent ones. That's not the title but it's called The Irish Cookbook.
Paula (17:01):
Anyway, they've done them for Indian, Thailand and Mexico and all these different countries. So, they gear that way, these big books. You got Ten Speed which does a lot of books with chefs. Each publisher finds their niche and cultivates that audience. Of course, there are outliers to all of that, that people will tell me about the second they listen to those.
Nadia (17:29):
I guess there are a lot of different types of cookbook authors as well, right? I'm thinking about the domestic brand types like Martha Stewart or Chrissy Teigen or chefs or food critics. And so, there's just like different publishers that appeal to different types of authors?
Paula (17:49):
Mm-hmm. There are so many more cookbook authors than you would ever even think of. There are a lot of people who write small volumes that are a book about jam, or a book about Jewish baking or a book about ... I don't know. I don't even cover the diet books but there are a whole thing of cooking for diabetes and all of that. So, there are all these wings of cookbook authorship that it's pretty endless. There's a lot to write about.
Nadia (18:22):
How do cookbooks intersect with the rise of food blogging in the last 10 or 20 years? You've got like Spin Kitchen or pioneer women types who've written their own cookbooks. Do you see food blogging as this democratizing force for cookbooks - of allowing you entrance into the market? Or did it negatively impact the demand for cookbooks?
Paula (18:42):
How do I put this? I think that the demand for cookbooks is not linked to food blogging. And the reason that I will say that is because I think that the demand for cookbooks was more tied to the 2008 recession which coincided with the rise of food bloggers for maybe the same reason, which is a very complicated way to answer that question.
Paula (19:13):
What I will say is that, like you said, a lot of the big names of that first generation of food bloggers have written cookbooks to great success. And also that people are still doing that. And then these days, you tend to see also YouTubers and Instagram influencers who write cookbooks as well.
Nadia (19:41):
I had no idea that the 2008 recession coincided with the rise of food bloggers. And as I'm hearing that, I'm just thinking about right now experiencing the COVID pandemic that we're seeing right now and how that is correlated with a rise in people writing on Substack and I'm wondering if it's similar forces at work. Can you tell us just a little bit about what that was like in 2008?
Paula (20:03):
I mean, that was mostly just due to the fact that people couldn't afford to eat out anymore so they were eating at home. There was also, at the time, cultural discovery. I was a young person then, and so, it just seemed like everyone I knew was 25 and teaching themselves how to cook.
Paula (20:24):
I'm sure that's not what it looked from the outside, but what I do know is that book sales started going up and then there was this real big boom in cookbook publishing and it's been chugging along ever since. Near as I can tell in the current crisis, cookbook sales are doing okay, maybe even up.. But anecdotally I’ve noticed - and I've been covering this for 10 to 12 years -
Paula (20:55):
I've noticed significantly fewer book deal news coming across my desk, so that's a little troubling to me. But hopefully, people are just being cautious and it will pick up again in the fall.
Nadia (21:09):
That's really interesting to think about. What is the role of narrative in cookbooks, because I mean, as we're just thinking about the different types of people that buy cookbooks and why, there is this tendency for me to initially think of cookbooks as essentially how-to books. But then, you can look at it through this narrative lens as well where then I start thinking about them in relation to this broader genre of food memoirs.
Nadia (21:35):
I'm thinking about Tamar Adler's An Everlasting Meal which straddled both genres of cookbook and memoir. Where's the line between something being a memoir about food versus a how-to sort of cookbook?
Paula (21:50):
Yeah, I mean, I don't know that there needs to be a line there. I think that what you're doing with the memoir is you're trying to evoke the feeling of being in a place and time. And you're trying to represent something you remember as best as you can remember it. And I think that a recipe does the same thing in a much more obviously tactile and real world way but that that can be part of the experience of evoking this memory, I'm thinking specifically about restaurant cookbooks.
Paula (22:30):
Restaurants aren't supposed to last forever. They're a business that is born and has a heyday and then probably someday end - hopefully with everyone retiring very happy and well off. But in the meantime, it's a feeling that can go away. I mean as we're learning the hard way right now, the atmosphere and the buzz of a busy restaurant and the food it cooks, it's not a forever thing. Gosh, I didn't mean to get this depressing. But that narrative follows that, can evoke that and can be a record of what that energy was while in existence.
Nadia (23:22):
It's just like, I mean, that just also makes the case for books more broadly. It's a really beautiful take, and I appreciate it because it just makes me think about how when we are talking about online food blogging versus cookbooks and how those two things can coexist. And similarly, just writing in general, there's a place to write tweets. There's a place to write blog posts and there's always going to be this place to write books just because it is like this more permanent record or a marker in time as you were saying to capture a certain sentiment that maybe a short form can't always do.
Paula (23:59):
Yeah, absolutely, and that it can look at it from different angles. You can have a cookbook where you involve the pastry chef and you have some sample playlists from the music that plays in the restaurant. You have the photographs of the space. And maybe you have a few testimonials from customers and that kind of thing and then all of it builds and adds to become as close as you can get to the restaurant itself.
Paula (24:29):
And I think that the recipes are a key part of that because you can say, "Okay, well, what about an episode of some TV show where they interview chefs and go to restaurants and things." But it's the food, the food is the thing. And so, when you have that recipe, you can understand how the food has been ... Even if you don't make them at home, even if you don't recreate it in your own kitchen, you can still read about it and say, "Okay, well, they made it with this brand of soy sauce instead of this brand of soy sauce because so and so was from here. But at this market, they only have this."
Paula (25:03):
And then, "Oh, they have this wild technique where they salt mushrooms two hours ahead," whatever. You read the thing and you learn all this stuff about what went into this restaurant in a way that you can't learn otherwise.
Nadia (25:23):
Yeah, that sounds like it’s like the recipe isn't just a process or a list of steps but it's a peek behind the curtain to see what really goes into, especially as you're saying, with a restaurant cookbook. What's the mark of a good cookbook for you?
Paula (25:36):
What's the mark of a good cookbook? I don't know.
Nadia (25:41):
I mean, just what are your favorite types?
Paula (25:44):
Yeah, I was going to say there's a difference between a good cookbook and a cookbook that I get excited about. I like really weird cookbooks. I mean if something surprises me, that's going to get me excited. Weird art, weird design makes me excited. Sort of over-the-top writing makes me excited.
Paula (26:12):
But what makes for a good cookbook - that most people who aren't the crazy cookbook lady are going to think is good - is I want to be able to open to three separate pages and want to make one of the recipes, I would say, is big. I think that information beyond the recipes that you can use in multiple settings is important for me.
Paula (26:42):
A really good cookbook, if I'm going to keep a cookbook in my kitchen, I need info in it beyond the recipes that are useful to me in more than one way. So, say you have a book on sourdough and sourdough starters. I want to be able to read about how the starter can be applied to bread versus pizza versus muffins or whatever. And that to me is a book that's not just a one-off disposable cookbook. That's a book that has earned its keep on its spot on my shelf.
Nadia (27:27):
What are some styles or trends that you've seen in cookbooks over the years? Especially just comparing like modern, let's say post internet style cookbooks - are they really different from the cookbooks of the '50s?
Paula (27:39):
Oh, gosh.
Nadia (27:39):
We're going all the way back, maybe the '90s.
Paula (27:44):
I mean cookbook, you would be shocked how much cookbooks have changed. I bought this cookbook recently from 1999 and the photographs, if you didn't know it was from 1999, you would think from the '80s. You would not be able to guess.
Paula (27:58):
So since I've started writing about cookbooks, the big things have been most books drop the jackets. So we don't do jackets anymore. There was this big trend towards unfinished paper. So it was this matte finish that in my opinion made the photos look blurry as opposed to a glossy finish paper, which people like because the unfinished paper is thicker and it makes your book look bigger. But I think it made the photography look terrible and we seemed to be moving away from that a little bit, so that's good.
Paula (28:40):
The big trend recently has been the white covers with the photos with the white border around the photo. Alison Roman's cookbooks have that. What else? As far as topics go, there was a big restaurant push that we seem to be coming out of where it’s just like, "Oh, if you're the big chef in your size town, you should have a cookbook." There's always been nerdy bread boy books. There are always men who write these like “my bread journey” cookbooks.
Paula (29:22):
Now, we're seeing more regional international cookbooks which I think is good. Like not just, I don't know, China but specific regions of China. That kind of thing I think is great.
Nadia (29:37):
I love it. I love the aesthetic ones, the changes that you mentioned. I'd love to just see your collection of cookbooks all lined up chronologically. I imagine you could just visually see how much they have changed over time.
Paula (29:50):
Probably, yeah.
Nadia (29:52):
Fun project. How does an author go about getting a cookbook published? Is it similar to getting books published in general? Is there anything special about the cookbook genre?
Paula (30:01):
How you get a book published, I mean it's about the same. It's similar to the nonfiction world where you write a book proposal and then you get the advance and then you write the cookbook with proposals. You need a whole list, all of the recipes listed ahead of time so you know what every single recipe in the book is going to be. And you also have to develop them.
Paula (30:32):
So, I'm working on a proposal right now and I think we have 12 full recipes and then five to eight sub-recipes that are real short. Here is the stock that goes into the soup kind of thing. And then of course, the cookbook publishers are often specialized publishers. They're not publishing novels and other things but they're part of those publishers.
Nadia (31:01):
How do they coordinate all that gorgeous photography? I mean, design falls under the publisher. Where do all the photography come from?
Paula (31:10):
Well, I can tell you how it worked on my book.
Nadia (31:12):
Yes, so I'd love to hear about your book.
Paula (31:15):
So, I wrote the Austin Cookbook. I wrote it in 2016. It came out in 2018. We shot the photography ... I worked with a photographer from Dallas-Fort Worth named Robert Strickland who's an excellent photographer, A+ to Robert. He came down for two long weekends when we shot all of the food where we worked with the food stylist for studio food shots. And then, I don't know how many weekends he came down to shoot the restaurants. And we shot some of the food in the restaurants also. So, the book is a collection of restaurant recipes from Austin restaurants.
Paula (32:06):
When all the photography was done, I sent that to the publisher. And I also sent them an email with a million links to Flickr and Instagram and all these things that I just thought looked Austin-y, murals and colors and just all kinds of random stuff I thought might be useful. And then they had their designer put it all together. They had a fun idea where some of the font for the headings of the recipes was inspired by old Tex-Mex menus and stuff like that. It's all very evocative of the thing, and I think that that's right that it should be like that.
Nadia (32:56):
It's kind of cool because as a writer, I imagine there aren't that many genres that are so photography heavy. Producing this cookbook is really an entire production process of not just writing the words but also having a vision for the visuals and knowing how you want to portray them.
Nadia (33:17):
And so, you're not just writing out words but you're also having to think in terms of imagery and layout, which just draws upon many more skills and maybe some of those other writers are comfortable with.
Paula (33:29):
You know though, it's not dissimilar from blogging.
Nadia (33:32):
In what way?
Paula (33:34):
If you're thinking about white space, you're thinking about how do I break this up with headers so that it's easily skimmable? You're thinking about how long are people's attention spans? It's not writing a novel. You're not going to have a wall of text. So how are you guiding the readers' eyes across ... I mean I didn't design the book, but how are you breaking up that information into these digestible little chunks.
Nadia (34:06):
That's a really good point. I guess I'd never really thought of that. I'm such a text-heavy person. I'm just like I can't do anything that involves images. The writing that I do doesn't really have any images in it and stuff. But you're right, I definitely think about the breaking up of paragraphs and texts. And there's sort of different styles too.
Nadia (34:22):
Some people really lean into the long rambling style and enormous paragraphs. And they make use or work for it. And then other people do that one line, one dramatic statement per paragraph. So, yeah, you're right. I mean even bloggers have to be thinking about how they visually lay things out to draw people in.
Paula (34:41):
Well, for my newsletter for example, certain sections I do bullet points. I always bold cookbook titles and cookbook author names. I'll bold a few keywords in a quote. And that's the same muscle. It's like, "Here's where I want you to look."
Nadia (35:00):
Right. You still need to draw people's eye in even if you're just writing text without photos. We talked a little bit about the fact that you wrote your own cookbook and you wrote that after being a cookbook critic for over a decade now. After years of reviewing other people's cookbooks, what prompted you to cross over and try to write your own?
Paula (35:24):
It was something I always wanted to do. And it was an opportunity that came up. It was not my idea to write the book. It was an opportunity that came up from my agent. And I was like, "Yes, absolutely." I wanted to experience the process of it because for example before that, I was reviewing cookbooks and I always ... Obviously, a lot more people than the author are going to the cookbook but I always use the author's name as sort of this authorial presence when I would talk about the book.
Paula (36:04):
But I think it was really useful in showing me how much of the process is actually totally out of the hands of the author. Things like a common complaint you'll hear about cookbooks if you go to an Amazon review is that the ingredients are on a different page than the instructions. You have to flip back and forth between the ingredients and the instruction. And often there's no getting around that but there's also just like 17 people who influenced that.
Paula (36:37):
So I think that going through the process of publishing a cookbook was really illustrative to me of just how many hands are in the thing. And this is not a shade on my publisher, Abrams - they were great. But just living the experience, I think, really informed my ability to review cookbooks. I'm probably going to do more. We'll see.
Nadia (37:05):
More cookbooks? They're addictive, book writing things. I just published my first book. It's a nonfiction book and it definitely had that same sort of takeaway as like wow, so many people go into writing this final thing. Unfortunately, your name appears as the author which means that if everything is amazing, then the credit goes to you and if there's anything wrong with it, then it also looks like something that you wrote which is this very weird experience.
Nadia (37:34):
I'm curious about your research process just to sort of trade notes. I love the book writing process now in retrospect - but during it, it was miserable in a lot of ways because you're just trapped in front of your laptop and you're typing all the time. And I have this very glamorous image of cookbook writing by contrast being this feast of the senses where you're cooking and you're hosting taste test parties. You're going out to eat for inspiration. Take me down a notch, what is the process of writing a cookbook really like?
Paula (38:06):
It's a little bit of that.
Nadia (38:08):
Damn it.
Paula (38:08):
It was a lot of sending emails. So, my book was recipes from restaurants. So it was a lot, a lot, a lot of emailing chefs and publicists. And chefs are not necessarily known for email etiquette or even having a computer in their office in their restaurants, so it was a lot of trying to track people down reminding them, "Oh, yeah. I'm Paula Forbes with the project where we're doing all the Austin restaurant cookbooks or recipes," and reminding them who you are and all the things. So that was probably the first four months of it.
Paula (38:54):
And then I did do a lot of recipe testing. I had a dinner party every Friday for about three months.
Nadia (39:02):
You're everyone's favorite friend.
Paula (39:05):
I don't know. A big thing with me was I didn't want to waste the food, but it got to be a lot of work and it got to some weird dinner parties when you started only having a few recipes left and you're like, "Well, these things don't really go together," but you'll eat it and you'll be happy.
Paula (39:27):
So, it was that and then very heavy on copy edits are huge in cookbooks - like you always want the ingredients in the order they appear in the recipe for example. What else? It's like that. We had to wait until my book was published in metric and then, what do you call it, imperial.
Nadia (39:52):
Imperial, yeah, I guess so.
Paula (39:56):
Cups and teaspoons.
Nadia (39:58):
Right, that one.
Paula (39:59):
So there was a lot of how do we translate this, figuring how much stuff weighed months after you had tested it, that kind of thing.
Nadia (40:12):
You had recipes in your book that were from restaurants but then you also had to test them out yourself. Are you adjusting their recipes at all or is it just to ensure that someone reading it could then replicate the same experience?
Paula (40:30):
I cut the size down. So, often, their chefs would send me just their actual recipe which made five gallons of enchilada sauce or whatever it was. And so, I would have to cut that down to the amount of enchilada sauce that would go on one lasagna pan of enchiladas and then also talk about how to make the enchiladas, because that would be different than how they would make it in the restaurant. But the recipes themselves I didn't change. So the amount of chili powder or garlic or the taste of the thing is the same but just at a home scale.
Nadia (41:10):
Got it. And so, it's like you're co-writing with the restaurants in a sense, because they're agreeing to give up their recipes for your book and you have to convince them of that, I assume. And then you're taking that and putting in this right narrative and context that people will enjoy them.
Paula (41:29):
And you know it's also a lot of interviews and telling their stories and that kind of thing, too.
Nadia (41:38):
Just to wrap up, you've had this privileged experience of seeing cookbooks on both sides, both as the author and as a person reviewing them. Did that writing experience give you more empathy for others writing cookbooks?
Paula (41:55):
Yes and no. A good friend of mine once told me that bad recipes are stealing. You are stealing money from people who spent that money on their food and they were expecting to be able to make X and if it doesn't work, and that's on you, that's stealing. So I still firmly, firmly believe that and I don't think anyone has any business publishing recipes that are not thoroughly tested and worked. So, that's what I'll say for starters.
Paula (42:36):
But yeah, I mean I think it's a scary thing to write a cookbook. I think I know every single weird thing in my cookbook that no one will ever, ever notice. And they don't keep me up at night but I know they're there. There's no mistakes in it or anything, just you know - you always know the weird thing like, “Oh, that condensation on that glass and that photo is slightly off," or that kind of stuff that no one cares about.
Paula (43:06):
Yeah, I have empathy for that. It's a hell of a process. You have to be so organized and you have to be just on top of everything. It's so much more data than just writing the text of the thing. It's so much work. Cookbooks are so much work and I have so much respect for anyone who tries to write one - unless they don't test the recipes.
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We invited Delia Cai, author of Deez Links, to speak to an audience of Substack writers in New York about how she grew her newsletter to 2,700 signups. Delia started her daily media newsletter as an intern at Atlantic Media.
This transcript has been lightly edited for readability. You can also check out the slides from Delia’s talk..
Takeaways
* Be your newsletter’s wingman. Talk it up to everyone.
* Borrow other people’s audiences to reach new readers.
* Build credibility by getting other people to write about you.
Why Delia started a newsletter
I write a newsletter called Deez Links. It’s basically a daily-ish media newsletter that sends you a link to something worth reading, tied to the larger media industry.
I started Deez Links four years ago, when I was just out of college. I had an internship at Atlantic Media that was cool, and not cool, in that I spent all of my time just reading news about the industry, and I was writing corporate memos. It was cool because I was learning a lot about digital media, but I was also just sitting in a cubicle all day, not interacting with other humans.
This was 2015, 2016, around when newsletters like Today in Tabs and Ann Friedman's newsletter were getting a lot of hype. I was reading those and I was like, “This is so cool. I want to try to do this. I want to try to write in some kind of outlet that isn't just in corporate memo speak and maybe I can just do this for my friends and it will just be a funny thing that I do during the work day.”
So I started Deez Links. It was on TinyLetter. I made the logo in three seconds in MS Paint. It was an extremely lo-fi situation.
I sent it out to my friends, friends from college, and friends that I worked with and I was just like, “I'm going to do this every day. Let me know if this is interesting.” I had no real aspirations for it other than just getting in the practice of writing about something every day.
Deez Links grew to about 500 subscribers by 2018, which was fine. It was mostly people that I'd met on the internet, or just people that I knew personally. Then I moved it to Substack in 2018, and since then it's gone through this amazing growth trajectory to where I had 700 subscribers and got a shout-out in New York Magazine and Vanity Fair. We're also doing this merch store which is really cool, which has taught me a lot already about ecommerce and supply chains.
Deez Links was mostly people that I'd met on the internet, or just people that I knew personally. Then I moved it to Substack in 2018, and since then it's gone through this amazing growth trajectory to where I had 700 subscribers and got a shout-out in New York Magazine and Vanity Fair.
Looking back over those four years, it seems like there's this very calculated path to growing the newsletter, and I have to be totally honest and admit there was not. I was just bumbling along. This was my passion project. I just tried a bunch of things, so I’ll share with you the three buckets of things that have worked out for me.
Be your newsletter’s wingman
So the first one is super obvious. It's just to be your newsletter's wingman.
I think the really wonderful thing about newsletters is they're so personal. They're tied to you and your name most of the time. Bring it up to your friends, your work friends, while applying for a job. I put my newsletter in my resume. And I was like, “I don't know if this is work appropriate, but this is what I got.”
When you start a newsletter, you may not have a lot of cred to go off of. You don't have a built-in audience unless you're already a writer on other platforms, and I didn't have that. I was just out of college.
Your first 500 subscribers are going to be the people who are just naturally invested in you, your friends and your mom. So you should make your newsletter an extension of yourself and bring it up all the time when you're talking to people in your circles.
I think the trick to this is always consider how to widen that personal circle, whether it's going to meetups, going to hangouts, or interacting with people on Twitter and making Twitter friends, which is my favorite thing. That way you're always adding to the circle and you're being your own best advocate for the newsletter.
Then at the end of the day, after you've bonded and had a normal human social exchange, you can say, “Yo, I have a newsletter. I write about X, Y, and Z. I would love to know what you think about it.” Telling them to Google it, or even texting them the link, is super easy. That way, you’re treating it as a way to stay in touch with people that’s less weird than, “Can I add you on LinkedIn?” It's like “Hey, we bonded. Do you want to support my art a little bit?”, which feels like a more natural ask.
Borrow other people’s audiences
The second tactic I stumbled upon was borrowing, or being exposed, to other people's audiences. I think this is the most effective one.
I ended up coming across this tactic in three different ways. One was with classifieds. When I first started out, I was thinking, “I'm a young woman in media. I feel like other young women in media would like this newsletter, what are they reading right now? What am I reading right now?”
I loved Ann Friedman's newsletter. She had this huge subscriber base, mostly women, and her newsletter is tied to current events and news as well. I feel like that's my audience. And she does this thing where she’ll place classified ads on her newsletter. It costs $50 to write a 140-character line about why you should subscribe to Deez Links and put the link in there. So that went out in her newsletter and I got 70 subscribers from doing this, which doesn't sound amazing, but when I first started out, it was like great. I didn't have to meet 70 people to do this. I just put an ad in this newsletter with a very loyal following.
The other tactic that I accidentally came across, in terms of borrowing other people's audiences, was doing weekly Q&As. I first had this idea in 2018 where I was like, “I'm just going to do a Friday Q&A with someone in media, just ask them questions about their job.” Like if you cover Congress, what do you have to wear? What does that mean? Or if you do PR for the avocado industry, do you get free avocados? Just dumb questions that I would ask my friends anyway.
I started doing them with my friends, and then once I ran out of friends to bug, I started branching out to people I really admired on Twitter, people I knew from work. And just realized this golden rule of how the internet and media works: if you interview someone, they're very likely going to share it with their following, and that's how you get exposed to their audience.
If you interview someone, they're very likely going to share it with their following, and that's how you get exposed to their audience.
For example, I did an interview with Alana Hope Levinson, the Deputy Editor of MEL magazine earlier last year. When it came out, she shared it with her followers. And she had a huge Twitter following. Then MEL magazine tweeted out to all of their readers, and I was like, “Oh, this is how it gets done.” With each weekly interview I do, I've noticed I get a handful of followers, especially when it's someone who has a very loyal following and audience of their own.
Finally, honestly, the single biggest boost I got in terms of sign-ups was through a newsletter swap with this lifestyle site called The Good Trade. I wasn't super familiar with them, but their managing editor reached out to me at some point last year. I don't know if she found me through the classifieds, but she was like, “I love your newsletter. We have one, too, it's called The Daily Good. It seems like maybe we would have the same kind of audience. Let's do newsletters.” And I was like, “Yeah, sure.” But I had no idea what that even meant. I was just like, “I'm open to anything.”
What I found out it meant was basically just plugging each other's newsletters. They wrote their own line and I put it in mine. So I wrote, “If you love a good semi-spicy newsletter, subscribe to Deez Links and you get a daily-ish link to something gossip worthy happening in the media industry.” And that was it.
As soon as their newsletter went out, my inbox was just completely spammed and I got 400 sign-ups in one day from this. And I was like, this is really crazy. I didn't even know this community, this audience existed.
Get credibility
The third bucket of tactics is to get institutional cred. I mean that in very loose terms. One of the biggest things that worked out for Deez Links was when this email platform called Revue wanted to do a survey of the top media newsletters in the industry. It was a very unscientific poll. They were just reaching out to people in newsletters and saying “Hey, can you plug this poll? We just want everyone to take this survey.”
So I put it in my newsletter at the time and said, “Hey guys, if you like this newsletter could you vote for Deez Links in this survey?” I only did it because I thought maybe it would be really funny if we got in the running. But it turned out that enough of my subscribers voted for Deez Links that it showed up in the top five between America Press Institute and Digiday Media, really legit places.
When this came out I was like, “Oh my God, this makes us so legit.” And so again, people in industry were talking about it, there was a lot of buzz. A lot of people were like, “What is this one that I don't recognize? I'm going to Google it and subscribe and see what the deal is.” So when that came out I got about 200 subscribers.
Finally, the one that I'm most proud of is when Deez Links was named in Vanity Fair. I'm going to be totally candid and tell you it's because the editor who wrote this piece is a friend from college. When she was researching this piece, she talked to me and was like, “What do you think? What are some people that you think would be good to talk to?” And so I was like, “You should talk to the Substack people. You should totally mention these newsletters.” We just bounced ideas off each other. Then she just did me a hugely gracious favor and quoted me directly and included Deez Links in this piece about the state of newsletters. That was huge, because it felt like this vote of confidence. When this piece went out, I got around 200 or 300 subscribers and bragging rights forever.
I do want to acknowledge that there was a huge advantage in terms of starting my newsletter when I had a day job in media, and still do, and it automatically exposes me to this whole network of people with these followings and power, like the way the Vanity Fair writer had when she was writing this piece.
I also want to acknowledge that there is nothing that media people love talking about more than their own industry. So that also was a huge help. But nevertheless, I do think that no matter what industry your day job is in, no matter what your newsletter is about, it's a really good exercise to just think about, “Who is my intended audience? What do I think that they're listening to or reading now? And how can I find these middlemen or platforms that can serve as a megaphone for reaching this audience?”
Growing your subscriber base is like making friends
It's like when you move to a new city and you don't know anyone. You can go and try and meet people one-on-one, but it would take a long time. The better route is to call up your super-popular, super well-connected friend in the city and be like, “Hey, can you introduce me to all of your friends?” And they do, and that's just so much faster. You get exposed to these various communities a lot quicker, and you come with this vote of confidence from your popular friend.
It's cheesy to think about growing your subscriber base in terms of making friends, but I do think that it speaks to this very personal nature of newsletters. You're sliding to their inbox every morning, or every week, and your subscribers can just hit respond and tell you what they think. That's something really precious and beautiful. It does take longer to build up in ways that, say, maybe blogs were different. But I do think it's worth investing in those relationships, because once you become friends with these people, they’re there for you forever. They'll introduce you to their friends, and then your community just keeps on growing.
For more advice on growing your newsletter, check out how Sarah Noeckel's Femstreet went from zero to 5,000 subscribers.
Photo by Bess Adler
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We invited Emily Atkin, author of Heated, to talk to an audience of Substack writers in New York about how she successfully launched paid subscriptions. Emily left her job at The New Republic to start Heated, which offers original reporting and analysis on the climate crisis. Her newsletter is now her full-time job, bringing in six figures of revenue.
This transcript has been lightly edited for readability.
Takeaways
* Focus on building your free signup list first.
* Announce a paid launch date.
* Offer a discount for early birds.
* Every day during your launch week, give people a different reason to subscribe.
* A day before your first paid post, make a final pitch.
I write a newsletter called Heated. It’s been in existence for five months now, and it’s going well. It’s my full-time endeavor.
Being able to make a living off my writing has always been my dream since I was in college and I took my first journalism class. Eight years and a lot of failures later, Substack provided me with a platform to be able to succeed. It’s honestly allowed me to achieve my dream. I make more money now than I had at any salaried journalism job.
I make more money now than I had at any salaried journalism job.
I’m going to talk about how to grow your free newsletter into a paid newsletter. At this point, you’ll already have had a newsletter for a while. You’ll have enough subscribers that you think you can convert some to paying. You’re ready to go.
I’m going to share the tactics I used. You can adapt these however you like. I only launched my paid newsletter a little over two months ago, and I’m already in the six-figures range. I’m not a genius; I just followed a formula.
Make your newsletter free for as long as you can
Step one is to make a free newsletter, and make it original. Make it consistent. I think consistency is really important; that’s something I’ve heard from a lot of my subscribers. I have a little over 20,000 signups on my free list and a little over 2,000 on my paid list, including subscriptions I’ve given away.
Give your newsletter away for free for as long as you possibly can. Especially if it’s getting a lot of traction off the bat, and people are like, “I would like to pay you for this. Can I pay you for it?” Don’t let them. Hold on for as long as you possibly can, because almost all the paid subscriptions you’ll get will be conversions from your free list.
People don’t just sign up and pay. They want free content first, so they can decide if they want to pay. From my analysis, the average amount of time that people take to convert from free to the paid list is about a month, although I don't have much data yet.
Give your newsletter away for free for as long as you possibly can. People don’t just sign up and pay. They want free content first.
Foster your community. Make people want to pay for your stuff. Market your newsletter in a way that will almost make you uncomfortable, because it sounds like you're just talking and promoting yourself all the time.
Announce you’re going paid
So you've done all that, and you're ready to launch your paid subscription. Don't just put a paywall up. Give your readers at least a week's notice.
I write my newsletter four days a week, Monday through Thursday. So, two weeks before I put up a paywall, I said, “Okay, guys. Now's the time. It's been three months. Next week, I'm going to give you the ability to pay.”
I wrote that on the bottom of a Thursday newsletter, the last one of the week. I told my readers that I've written this newsletter for free because I wanted to demonstrate its value first. I said that next week, I’ll start accepting payments, and I'll announce the rates then, but it’ll still be free all of next week.
Once you turn on payments on Substack, the format changes. You unlock the ability to write preambles to your newsletter. That's where I did my marketing. I went personal on it. I was like, “Guys, I'm scared. I quit my job to do this. Please don't let me fail.”
That's another thing about newsletters. You can get personal. I did some positive marketing for this, too. I was like, “If this works, imagine how many more people we can reach; if I can hire a research assistant; if I had a copy editor...”
Kick off a paid launch week
The next week is your paid launch week, where you remind people every day that you’re going paid, but you still keep all your content free.
Make sure your content is really good all week. Put in extra work. Every day, in your preamble, try to give a different reason why people should subscribe.
Set your price high – higher than you’d think. During your paid launch week, offer a discount. I did 25% off the first two days and then 20% off the second two days so I could say, “All right, you missed 25% off, but you still have 20% off”. Then the price goes up from there.
For day one, I focused on a personal appeal and giving a discount. I made it feel like: “Today’s a special day, cue the air horn sounds!” Especially after you've been giving stuff away for three months, you've built up a community, so it should feel like, “Yay, now it's your turn.”
I made a personal appeal there that was, “I gave this to you for free, but it's not sustainable for me. I want to be able to do this every day. I want this to grow. I have so many aspirations for this. We, together, can make this a thing. Let's make it a thing.” People are like, “Yeah, let's make it a thing!”
I also do this thing where for every 100 people who sign up, I'll give 10 subscriptions away to people who need it. It helps. It's good because it helps grow your paid list, but it also gives your stuff to people who can't afford it. People are like, “Oh, okay, if I can afford it, I’d also like your writing to go to somebody else.”
For day two, I used the excitement from day one for momentum. You can send different emails to your free and paid list. So I sent an email to those who’d paid on day one that was like, “Guys, you signed up. Yes. Thank you so much. You're amazing.”
Then I sent an email to my free list that said, “If you're getting this message, that means you didn't sign up. How dare you? After all I've done for you.” But then I said, “This is the last day you can get 25% off, so you're going to want to do it today.”
Build upon your momentum from day one. Include quotes from people on Twitter who are signing up for your newsletter, even if it's just one of your friends.
For the next two days, experiment with different tactics. You know your community, so you’ll know best what would appeal to them.
For day three, I tried this messaging about how the fossil fuel industry poured billions of dollars into disinformation. My newsletter is about climate change, but it's specifically about powerful people and climate change. So for day three, I used that angle. I was like, “Let's combat this with information. Let's produce journalism that makes the truth louder than their lies. That can only happen with your support.”
On day four, I didn't do any marketing. I just did an ‘Ask Me Anything’ [AMA]. I used the discussion threads feature on Substack, which is a way to interact with your subscribers. On that day, people had a lot of questions about the paid launch, so I was able to go in there and answer their questions.
I did five newsletters this week instead of my usual four, because I just wanted more opportunities to promote my launch. I decided to make my last day something big, to demonstrate the value of this work that your money would buy.
On the last day, I launched a project I had been working on for a long time. I published a large anthology of fossil fuel advertisements. There was an embargoed study in there, some interviews, all this stuff. Instead of having my marketing preamble at the beginning, this time I did it at the end. I said, “This is an ongoing project. There's so much we're going to do, but it can only happen with your support.”
Make your final pitch
By the end of this week, you've asked people to pay you every single day. It’s now the weekend. Take a break.
The last thing that happens is to make your final big pitch. For me, this was the Monday after my paid launch week.
This will be the last time your newsletter is free. After my final pitch, I put up a paywall, and now 75% of my content is paywalled. I told my readers that after three months, this will be the last time you're going to get it.
Write a post explaining everything that you've accomplished while your newsletter was free. If you’re thinking about going paid, you should always keep a list of every good thing that has happened, like getting a nice email, a good tweet, seeing your work cited in another publication – just any way you can say you've been influencing the conversation or making people feel good. You want to be able to say, “This newsletter is original in this way. Nothing else like this exists.”
Write a post explaining everything that you've accomplished while your newsletter was free. You want to be able to say, “This newsletter is original in this way. Nothing else like this exists.”
That's what I put into my final pitch. I showed what I’d accomplished in the past three months. I had sections about how this reporting is making a difference, how it’s shifting the national conversation, where it's been cited. Every amount of praise that has ever happened, I put into one place. “Vox called it great. Earther called it wonderful. Environmental Health News called it a unique blend of insight and smartass.”
Back when my newsletter was still free, I’d done a survey where I asked people to tell me why they liked the newsletter. I compiled that into a spreadsheet and used it for marketing. I was able to say things like, “Six people said that they felt less alone when they read this newsletter. It's helping you guys feel better, and that's what makes me feel better. So let's keep this going.”
Your first and your last pitch are the days where you’ll get the most subscribers. The first day you launch, you get a lot. The second day, especially if you do a two-day discount, you get a lot. Third and fourth day, you're like, “Uh-oh, it's over.” And then on the final day, you’ll get a lot.
The final step is to put up your paywall. After you do that, your daily audience will become much smaller. At that point, I probably had 18,000 free signups. All of a sudden, with my paid subscribers, it's 1,000. For the majority of the week, I'm now writing for a much smaller audience, which is actually way easier, because they like me enough to have paid me.
After launch week is over, you might panic because you think it's all over and no one will ever pay you again. But just keep that process going. Every time you have a free newsletter, try to say something to encourage people to go paid.
How do you know if you’re ready?
You might be asking yourself, “Am I ready to launch?” So I came up with a list of considerations that might help you decide:
* How many free subscribers do you have? Conversion rates tend to be around 4 to 10 percent, according to other Substackers I’ve talked to. If your free list isn’t very big, consider waiting.
* How much money do you want to charge? Have you asked your subscribers what they’re willing to pay, or looked at similar newsletters to yours?
* What impact have you made that you can point to? People like knowing they’re supporting something meaningful. Have you asked your readers for feedback?
* What makes you original and worth paying for? Before you launch paid, you should feel really comfortable saying why your thing is different than anybody else's thing and why it should exist. You’re going to have to make your case and do a lot of shameless self-promotion around it. It’s going to be awkward. Get over it.
If you have a highly specialized niche audience, you might be ready. That means people who like you, really like you. Some of the best advice I got was that you don't have to please everybody, but you have to please some people a lot. Not everybody has to like you, but a small amount of people have to really like you.
Your impact doesn't have to be big. Use language to make a small impact seem bigger. We were cited in this local paper with a circulation of 20,000. That might not feel big to you, but people like to feel like they're part of something. That's why the newsletter model works. Your readers want to feel like they're part of this community that's growing and making a difference.
The most important question, though, is: Do you feel ready?
The most important question, though, is: Do you feel ready? This process is really different for everybody. Since starting my newsletter, I've talked to many other Substack writers who are going through this, and their newsletters and communities are so different from mine. Their subject matter is different. Not everyone is a reporter. Some of us do creative writing. Some of us compile links. We all have different communities.
In the end, I feel like you'll just know. Even if you're scared, you'll have a gut feeling that you think it might be time, and you might be willing to make it work. Just trust that feeling, because that's what I did, and I'm still winging it.
For more advice on launching a paid publication, check out our guide to going paid.
Photo by Bess Adler
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We invited Walt Hickey, author of Numlock News, to share with an audience of Substack writers in New York how he thinks about spinning off multiple newsletters for fun and profit. Walt started off with Numlock News – where he writes about the numbers behind the news – then added paid subscriptions, an Oscar Awards supplement, and a book club.
This transcript has been lightly edited for readability.
Takeaways
* Multiple newsletters are a lightweight way to experiment with new ideas.
* Use your main newsletter to create spin-offs, so you never have to deal with the “zero subscriber” problem again.
* Get creative with your paid subscriptions. You don’t just have to send one free and one paid post. Depending on your topic, you might consider publishing paid content during a peak season, quarterly in-depth reports, or more.
I run a newsletter called Numlock. It’s a daily morning newsletter about the numbers inside the news.
I started it after working at FiveThirtyEight for about five years, where I’d started a newsletter called Significant Digits. As a guy with a math-y background, I realized that my biggest liability as a person in journalism was that I needed to get better at writing, and doing something every day was a really effective way of practicing.
I really enjoyed writing that newsletter, and then it hit a point where the scuttlebutt was that FiveThirtyEight was going to be sold. I looked at where Sig Dig was and realized there was more value in there than we were currently unlocking. The open rate was great. People enjoyed receiving it. In building the case for why FiveThirtyEight should keep me, I actually built the case for why I should leave and start my own newsletter. I did that, and it's been great.
How he started multiple newsletters
My main newsletter is Numlock, it’s my bread and butter. It’s what I've been doing for more than two years now. I have a product that I think is good, and that my audience thinks is good. As a result, I have a good “in” with people who enjoy reading my work. If I were to describe Numlock in Uber-for-pizza terms, what I think of is, “It's Good Morning America for nerdier folks.”
This being Substack, at a certain point, it came time to monetize, so I launched a Sunday edition. For $5 a month, I talk to either a writer who wrote a really cool story that I put in the main newsletter, or I talk to an author who's got a good book out. This is a really fun way to add value.
If you think about traditional media ecosystems like late night shows, there’s a reason they have written jokes in the beginning and then an interview at the end. It’s because interviews are easy to book, and people tend to like them a lot. It’s a nice way to have something that’s less work than the newsletter itself, but gives people more insight into the stories that we find.
But I’ve also started a couple of other spin-off newsletters, one of which is the Numlock Awards Supplement.
I’m a culture writer, and I love predicting the Oscars using math. It's a good time. I started about two years ago and wanted to keep doing it. I think we learn a lot about ourselves, and how we can predict things, through this institution that is very obscure. It's a fun little puzzle.
So I started a pop-up award season newsletter. It runs from November-ish, or whenever I feel like starting it, until Oscar night and the week after. It's a nice opportunity to talk about a thing I'm really passionate about, but not have to throw it at my traditional people who just want to watch Good Morning America and never talk to me again.
That spawned another idea. I love engaging with audiences, and discussion threads are such a cool feature that Substack has built. I wanted a way to tap into that without compelling people who just enjoyed the passive nature of newsletters to participate.
So I thought, again, having interviewed a lot of authors and seeing the response that that gets, my audience is one that enjoys reading things, learning new things, cool ideas, cool books and stuff like that. I figured one way to expand that was through a book club.
The Numlock Book Club is kind of a democracy, and it's also kind of an experiment. The idea was we're going to vote on books to read, and then we're going to vote on these books. Whatever book you pick, we're going to read, then it's basically just going to be a managed reading thing.
We've gone through three so far. We're in the middle of our fourth, and it's really fun. You get a chance to cover things that you wouldn't normally cover. You get to engage with readers that you might not normally be able or willing to, based on how you normally interact with your newsletter.
Spin-offs make it easy to try new things
Here’s the real reason that you should make spin-off newsletters. Who’s having fun in media anymore? I think about this question constantly, because I'm having fun in media, but many other people are not. So I made this list of all the people I could think of that are currently having fun in media:
* Top TV talent
* Private equity capitalists extracting enormous quantities of wealth for a style of business operation not entirely unlike the episode where Tony Soprano busted up that camping store
* Walt Disney
* People who make a living directly from their audience
* People that get residuals from NBC television shows that aired in the '90s and early 2000s
* Jake Paul
I can't be any of these except for one, but it’s really fun. To give you an example of other people who’ve tried this, I’d like to highlight the example of the McElroy brothers, which is a family of brothers who have podcasts.
They started with a podcast called My Brother, My Brother, and Me. Then they tried to do one episode about Dungeons and Dragons, and it went well. So they spun that off and made a podcast called The Adventure Zone, which ended up becoming a lot more popular than the original podcast. Eventually, they started adding some other weird spin-off podcasts. Some of these then turned into other opportunities to cross-promote.
The idea is, if you like The Bachelor, you can listen to Rose Buddies. If you like medical history, you can check out Sawbones, which promotes everything else they have. Everything they do internally plugs into one another.
So if I’m a person who likes the first thing, I can eventually wind my way to other things that I like. Maybe you don't want to listen to Sawbones, but you might be really down for The Adventure Zone. And this also turns into other opportunities like a book, or a graphic novel, or the fact that they had a podcast called The McElroy Brothers Will Be in Trolls 2 and eventually it happened – they're in Trolls 2.
Spin-offs are great. They address a lot of things that are annoying about starting a newsletter from scratch, namely that you know the people who like you the most already. They're the ones who currently subscribe to your newsletter. So you can reach the people who are most likely to subscribe to your other newsletter.
Spin-offs are great. They address a lot of things that are annoying about starting a newsletter from scratch, namely that you know the people who like you the most already.
The Golden Rule I've found is that every new subscriber is slightly easier to get than the previous subscriber, because networks scale. It's very difficult to go from zero to one. Going 10 to 11 is easier. Going 99 to 100 is easier than that, and so on. So you never really need to relive the “zero-subscriber newsletter” that really takes guts to send.
As long as you come into it like that, you can say, “I don't know if this is going to last forever. This is just a fun little thing I'm going to do on the side.” But your spin-offs have an opportunity to bolster the way that you interact with your audience. You might get that hit. You might make a sidebar newsletter that ends up being bigger than your initial one. Nobody really knows what's good anymore, but experimenting a lot is a good way to try that.
Also, collaborations are great. I do my Oscar Awards one with the person I’m dating, who knows much more about the Oscars than I do.
Get creative with paid subscriptions
The internet spent a lot of time figuring out how to really optimize ads. We know a lot of ways to make money off advertising to people. We also now know that, yes, subscriptions are great. Last night I wondered: what is the average frequency with which a paid newsletter sends out paid posts?
I pulled the top 25 Substack newsletters and found that 14 of the 25 were sending about even amounts: one paid post for one free post. Some were more like me, where you do five free, one paid. And then some were the opposite direction, where you get five paid and then one free per week.
So we know what tends to do well when it comes to subscriptions, but I want to point out a few other business models that I think people should try. There are different ways to use subscriptions that are not simply, “Half my posts are behind a paywall and the other half is free.”
For instance, you can use what’s almost like demand-based pricing. If there's an election going on, in October lots of people are going to be interested in that stuff. And so maybe you have something that’s like, “We're an elections newsletter. In October, only paid subscribers get the really timely material.”
On the other hand, you could have a paid-only edition that arrives quarterly or yearly. You just have to figure out what you need to promise and then deliver on that. It doesn't need to be once a week. It doesn't need to be twice a week. It doesn't need to be once a month. As long as you figure out your social contract with your readers, you can do whatever you want. It can come in the form of, “I cover an industry and once a year, you're going to get a big report from me and that's what the money's for.”
You can promise to do 20 paid-only editions per year and only send them when there's actually news on your beat. I'm not going to monetize my Oscars newsletter, but maybe I have one that’s awards all year-round, and then I only send the paid editions when the news is hot, which is going to be in January and February. There are all sorts of ways that you can use ancillary newsletters to both experiment with content and experiment with delivery formats.
For more advice on growing your newsletter, check out “How to build community around your publication.”
Photo by Bess Adler
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