Yeah, I'm Trying to Make Money on Substack
and it's totally great if you're not, or, drama happens & Internets gonna Internet
Substack seems to be going through some growing pains lately among its users. Or—perhaps more accurately—there’s been some back-and-forth lately in both Substack posts and Notes about how people use the platform and how Substack’s algorithm operates. Generally, I try to never wade into the discourse. I even made some stickers a while back that say JUST SAY NO TO DISCOURSE on them. But I am, today, feeling an urge to wade into the discourse, and I am, for once, not going to fight that siren call.
Here’s my opening gambit: I am trying to make money on Substack. I know. Money. Gross, right? (How dare she!) It’s not the only thing I’m trying to do on Substack. I find this a fun place to give myself deadlines, assign myself subject matter, and explore topics I might want to write about later. I’ve also been reading political opinions that oppose my own, essays that leave me practically singing with joy over their beauty, and learning about topics I know little about. I am also a self-employed, disabled woman who left her day job in 2014 because the stress of a 9-to-5 was causing me to hallucinate dogs running around where there were none, and my physical body was too unpredictably weak to let me do anything that I couldn’t dictate on my own schedule. My long-term disability ran out (and you can read about my experience with being followed by a private investigator here). In the years following, I struggled to find something money-making to do (because capitalism!) that I was equipped for and might not totally hate.
I got lucky in that after struggling to teach things like restorative journaling, putting out my shingle for book editing and book proposal coaching, and doing one-on-one work with small business owners who needed help with branding, I published a successful, award-winning, and best-selling book, and I realized that I knew enough to teach creative nonfiction. I therefore founded The Unexpected Shape Writing Academy for ambitious writers living with limitations. But online teaching is generally not enough to replace the income for a full-time job unless you’re teaching other people how to make money with their small businesses, and so I do other things, too:
I draw and sell pet portraits.
I give talks through my speaking agency.
I have some amount of royalties and freelance writing work.
I started a Substack that has both free and paid subscriptions.
Many people do not have paid subscriptions at all here. Many people see the money they make from their paid subscriptions as a nice bonus, and their creative expression is the main goal, often because they have a full-time job doing something else. Both of these things are great. It’s just not my personal situation. I hope very much to create a community that allows ambitious writers living with limitations to find one another and learn other things (and this has happened through the free Unexpected Shape Cafe, which is located on the Skool platform), and I also hope to provide a high-caliber creative nonfiction education for paid subscribers to my newsletters, who get to access workshops about things like writing personal nonfiction about the body (the topic of the last workshop I taught). I try to make a paid subscription to my Substack worth it; just signing up for one gets you access to a video course called The 10-Day MFA. You can also read most of my posts for free when they’re first published. I like that I can make that decision, and it’s one that remains for now.
What I have seen on the platform in the last few weeks, especially on Notes—which is not a particularly new feature—are a few kinds of grumbling:
The purity of Substack, in which people are slow and do not hustle and write beautiful things for people to read, is being violated by people who are trying to sell things.
It is too hard for people to get views, checkmarks, and other markers of “success” on Substack if they haven’t started with some kind of fame or large mailing list.
I see the points of both of these varieties of complaints. Let me address them separately.
The purity of Substack, in which people are slow and do not hustle and write beautiful things for people to read, is being violated by people who are trying to sell things.
I admire the idea that people would like a pure home for writing, free of any of the nonsense we are assaulted by regularly in the outside world. I see that it is maybe annoying to see people like me trying to promote things like classes and paid subscriptions. But I have not been around Substack long enough to see this “pure” version of the app that people mourn; I have always seen people trying to sell things on here.
For some people, the complaints against the monetization of Substack feel more like complaints against the crassness of how the selling is done, rather the selling itself.
recently taught a workshop about putting “marketing gems” inside Substack so that they’re subtle enough not to annoy people. I appreciate stuff like this, and I, in fact, paid them money to take that workshop.For other people, the complaints do feel like complaints against monetization and selling in general. Maybe I’m a cynical brat, but I understand that Substack as a company has to make money, and one of the main ways they make money is by taking a cut of paid subscriptions. Therefore, they will be incentivized to help us sell paid subscriptions.
It is too hard for people to get views, checkmarks, and other markers of “success” on Substack if they haven’t started with some kind of fame or large mailing list.
This is a point that I feel more fully.
recently talked about the UX of Substack making it hard for people to find less-viewed, less-subscribed-to Substacks. I second this and hope Substack & Co. will consider it.Regarding people coming here with fame or a large mailing list: I came with a bit of both. I arrived at Substack with a 7000+ mailing list that I started from 0 in 2012. It took me about eleven years to bring that mailing list to Substack. I also nurtured my career for over a decade, had some combination of luck and skill, and am now a Known Quantity in the writing world. I am not so deluded as to think that publishing (or really anything?) is a meritocracy. Several things happened in order for my career to not sink to the bottom of the ocean by the time my second book came out. I am grateful for this. I do also believe that hard work is important to become a great writer, which
wrote about here.Having given my feelings on the discourse, I anxiously await your reply. But I hope that you are willing to be gentle and open to discussion about what are some hot-button topics for many. We’re all just doing our best out here, after all.
Esme,
As you wrote, Substack is a company set up to make money. The Substack community has become a big part of my intellectual life, and it is important to me that Substack can sustain itself. I realize that means the company will have to make decisions that often prioritize increasing their revenues and will seldom if ever make decisions that will decrease revenues.
I have no issues with checkmarks or with people marketing themselves. Yes, sometimes the marketing is elegant and sometimes it's cheesy, but what else would we expect?
The reality is that five years from now, Substack will need to be a lot bigger with many more paying subscribers and more writers in order to give their investors a decent return.
There is a solution, by the way, for people like me who are on Substack not for the money but for the opportunity to write and be read. You can choose to donate your revenues to a charity that is meaningful to you. That way, you are sustaining Substack and putting the revenues you earn to a good use. I decided to do this a few months ago with this post.
https://robertsdavidn.substack.com/p/a-new-option-for-my-subscribers
I came to substack as an artist, escaping the nasty business model of Instagram - and I naively surprised to see writers playing out the whole 'it's crass to make/ask for money' drama that cripples so many artists. I think it's passed on by university teachers who have not made money form their own work (for whatever reason) and make money from teaching young artists. They pass down this whole distance from the hassle of having to exchange their own art for money to the students, and a viscous cycle is born.
But artists are often not very good with words - but writers are so good! They can spin elaborate, convincing stories around this debate that artists can only dream of constructing! And write a lot about it all, too!
Thank you for your post