Authors and Substack—Is the Platform Right For You?
I’ve been sending a newsletter for more than a decade, but only recently moved my ecosystem over to Substack. This decision took years, which is why I wanted to share more about my decision-making process, in case you’re someone harboring a fair amount of uncertainty regarding how to share your work online. As always, I’m not here to tell you do anything specific, but I will offer lots of ways to think about the topic of newsletters including questions to consider, and how to approach both free and paid versions. Like just about everything, newsletters are not one size fits all, so I want to help guide you to the best decision for you, which might be different from my own.
How Substack is Different From Other Newsletter Platforms
Substack is a writing platform that functions as both a newsletter and a personal website or blog. (It’s also launching new features all the time to compete with other social media platforms, like chats, threads, and direct messaging.) Although Substack started in 2017, it exploded in 2022 and 2023 when it seemed like every writer was jumping ship from other services, and others started Substacks who didn’t previously have newsletters.
I remember reading an article that quoted one of the co-founders who said: “We’re coming out of this era where platforms own people, and moving into this era where people own platforms. We have to prove to the writers we’re delivering enough value to them to keep them happy and help them succeed.”
In some ways, this simplifies things for both writers and readers, and depending on your situation, there might be more pros than cons. But something I kept going back to when gathering my own thoughts is that no matter which platform you choose, it’s never going to be perfect. With that in mind, it’s imperitive to get clarity on what your needs are, and go from there.
One of the key attributes that distinguishes it from other email service providers though is that Substack is free. And it’s always free, no matter how many subscribers you have, unless you decide to turn on the paid feature. Most email service providers—like MailChimp, ConvertKit, or MailerLite—typically have thresholds where it’s free for a certain number of subscribers, but once you hit a level like, 2,000 subscribers, they start charging a monthly fee, and that can range significantly and also jump depending on how many subscribers you have.
My Newsletter Evolution
I sent out my first newsletter in 2012 and used MailChimp. I’m not sure if it’s still the case, but it was free up to 2,000 subscribers and let’s be honest, when you’re starting with zero, the idea of accumulating that many subscribers feels really far away. After a few years, I did start getting close to that 2,000 mark, and by then a new service came out called ConvertKit. And at that time, ConvertKit was sort of the new kid on the block and actually had a lot of features that MailChimp didn’t have, like more robust tagging. Someone might click on a particular link, say to your book or a blog post, and you could instantly tag them as being “interested” in a particular topic, and you could also segment people by location, so that was tremendously useful when I was publishing my first book, doing more events, and beginning to dabble in creating online courses.
For a number of years with ConvertKit, I was paying $29 or $39 a month at most, but as I started inching closer to the next tier, the financial jump was significant, going up to about $80 a month. The business side of my brain sort of understood the logic behind it. One of the reasons ESPs charge in tiers based on the number of subscribers is they assume that the more people you have on your list, the more sales you’re making. That might be true if you’re actually selling things on a regular basis, like a service or a digital product or a workshop, but if you’re a writer who’s not doing that, it can become difficult to justify the fees if you aren’t making the income to support paying for the service.
And that’s when Flodesk appeared. Again, Flodesk was the new, shiny newsletter service that really blew everyone else out of the water when it came to visual design. Their emails are just beautiful and endlessly customizable, and they have all the same features as ConvertKit, but with one major difference: the price was so much lower. I was able to join during the beta launch which locked me in at $19/month for as long as I stayed with them, and the promise of that not changing at all whether I have 5 or 5,000 subscribers. Not having those pricing tiers was a HUGE draw, so once again, I decided to switch providers and I’ve been with them ever since, for at least the last couple of years.
I’m sharing this story to illustrate one of the reasons that kept me from exploring Substack initially: I was afraid to change what I was doing. The current iteration of my newsletter had been monthly for at several years, and it’s was on Flodesk, where I felt cozy and comfortable. Substack was new and unknown. But the more I considered my feelings, I realized that the way my newsletter looks now is not the same way it looked when I started it in 2012. It had a different name, a different cadence, a different provider. My newsletter has evolved over the years as new services became available, and as new features rolled out, and as my needs have changed. Moving to Substack feels like a natural evolution. It’s not really good or bad, it just is.
The Pros and Cons of Substack
This leads me to a section I’m calling “What I’m excited about” and “What’s giving me pause.” It feels a little softer than a general pro/con list. And this is the part that if you’re wrestling with the question of where to be online with your writing, and which service to use, and whether or not you should turn on the paid Substack feature, these thoughts and questions will help you sort through all of that for yourself.
For Substack specifically, here are the things that make me excited.
The service is free, so it has a low barrier to entry—anyone can start a Substack and immediately start building a readership without having to pay, regardless of how many people subscribe.
Substack makes its money off of the paid subscriptions (it takes 10%) as opposed to advertising like on Facebook and Instagram
It functions a bit like a blog and a bit like a newsletter so in some ways it’s a great hybrid that has potential to create some community around what you’re writing about
It’s not beholden to algorithms because when people sign up, your new posts go directly to their inbox just like a regular newsletter, which means there’s a better chance of them seeing it and engaging with your writing. I do like the fact that people can comment on your posts and you can build a bit more of that community around your work and your ideas. As a footnote to this though, 10% can be a big chunk of your income depending on your subscriber numbers. For example, let’s say you have 1,000 readers paying $10/month. That’s $120,000 a year in revenue, and Substack will take $12,000 of that. That still leaves you with a significant amount of money, but another way to look at it is that you’re paying $12,000 to use Substack’s service, and is it really worth that? Maybe, maybe not.
It’s not a social media platform, though it has some of those qualities and is morphing into a social media site as I write this, BUT, it might be a good place to reignite your love of writing in a way that feels like the days of blogging in the early aughts.
And here are the things that are giving me pause.
For the same reason I’m excited that it’s not a social media platform, I am a little concerned that it might start to feel like one eventually and just want to be mindful about that. For example, it felt really simple until they introduced threads and chats, which to me, feels like too much right now.
Although Substack makes it easy to get paid for your work (and writers are historically undervalued and underpaid) just because you can turn on paid subscriptions doesn’t mean you’ll be ready to leave your day job any time soon. This approach has worked really well for some journalists who have been let go from major outlets and have essentially created new jobs for themselves writing on Substack, but I don’t think all writers are going to have that experience, and when income is offered as a major selling feature of course it’s enticing, but that brings with it a layer of responsibility that you might not be ready for or want.
Everything looks the same. One of the things I really loved about Flodesk in particular is how beautiful the emails look and how easy it is to customize, but you can’t really do that with Substack. All the emails look the same, save for the colors which you can change, and I worry that the emails I send might not stand out or feel as special or just get lost in the sea of Substack.
Something else giving me pause is that Substack currently recommends kind of a “more is better” approach when it comes to building your audience and keeping them engaged, and I have seen a lot of writers following this guideline of posting essays and things twice a week which just feels wildly undoable for me right now, so I don’t really like the sense of urgency that’s being created because I’m more of a slow and steady person.
You can’t really use it effectively for marketing. If you are selling a workshop or a service and want to send sales emails essentially, Substack isn’t set up to do that very well. Even if you’re not selling anything, you also can’t send a welcome sequence, so everything you want to say when someone joins your list has to be put in the first and only welcome email they receive after signing up.
Substack is public. Unlike a newsletter from Flodesk or ConvertKit that goes to your inbox, Substack’s email is also published to the world wide web, so whatever you’ve written effectively becomes like a blog post on your page. And they’re sort of spinning it like writers don’t even need a website anymore and you can just use Substack, but I don’t know, there’s something sort of intimate and personal with the emails, and I wonder if you know it’s public for anyone to read, will that change the way I approach my own writing there? I don’t know. But it’s something to think about just in terms of how they treat the writing you do publish on Substack.
Should You Start a Paid Newsletter?
Expanding on some of these ideas a little bit, I wanted to break down two things. First, the original question of ‘should I start a paid newsletter?’ and what some of those implications might be. And second, final thoughts to consider if you’re thinking about starting a Substack but are on the fence about it. I also want to reiterate that there are no wrong answers here, just some offerings to think through.
Personally, if you’re just starting out with a newsletter and don’t have many people on your list, going paid might not make sense. It takes time to build trust and a readership that could support paid subscriptions long-term, so that’s something that would need to be built up over time first. I know when I first join someone’s newsletter who might be new to me, I’m not immediately inclined to pay because I’m still figuring out if their work is valuable to me at this time in my life, getting to know who they are, etc. so I think it’s a lot easier to turn on paid subscriptions if you’ve been writing for a while and have readers who have been with you for the long-term.
If this is a question you’re currently sitting with, the first thing I would think about is how that idea feels in your body. When you close your eyes and think about having a paid newsletter, does the idea of turning on paid subscriptions feel motivating, or feel like it might cause added pressure?
Really take into account where you are with your writing life, and a lot of things can play a role here.
Is writing your full-time job? If so, a paid newsletter might be a really complementary income stream to what you’re already doing.
You might also want to think about the cadence and what kind of posts are behind a paywall, if any.
Now there are a few ways go approach this.
You could make everything free all the time, but just ask that people choose a paid subscription to support your work, almost in the vein of how you might donate to a museum or other public institution when you visit or something like that.
You can also make certain kinds of posts free and others paid. I see a lot of writers doing this model where they might post weekly and two of those posts each month are free and two are paid. Some writers on Substack make everything paid and then offer previews to entice you, but I don’t love this approach mainly because again, especially if I’m new, someone is asking me to pay to support their work without me knowing anything about them. So I’m more in the camp of the first two options where you either make it all free and ask people who are your core supporters to subscribe, or have a system where certain posts are free and others are behind the paywall, and then to make that clear to people who are signing up.
Now, the flip side is if you’re someone like me who has a day job, a paid newsletter might just feel like more work you’re not prepared to commit to. Once you go paid, it can change your relationship to the work itself and sometimes become more of a burden and responsibility that takes you away from your own creative projects. Again, everyone will feel differently about this but I’ve noticed for myself that when I consider the idea of offering a paid newsletter, I feel less free. And what I mean by that is that when money is exchanged, expectations begin to exist. I feel a certain sense of responsibility to show up at a certain time, with a particular kind of content. My work has become a product.
Again, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing and not everyone will have this response, but that’s why I think it’s a good idea to know not only what you’re getting yourself into but why, and to have a lot of clarity around whether or not you want this responsibility in your life right now. As always, permission to change your mind later on.
This actually happened to me, kind of in a backwards way. Some of you may remember that I actually ran a paid newsletter on Substack for a year and a half called The Nest, which was for memoir. This was 100% paid, I didn’t have a free option, and I did monthly posts for a year and a half. And while I was writing that newsletter, I really did love it. And then I simply realized that the newsletter’s life cycle was feeling closer to completion. I had inadvertently done what I always do, which is create another job for myself. So in addition to being a full-time parent, a part-time employee, and a writer whenever I can find the time, I now had a job writing a newsletter. And even though I enjoyed it and felt really inspired by the work, I had to acknowledge the role it was playing in my life and that I just wasn’t in a season to sustain it longer than I already had.
A couple more questions if you’re considering Substack. This one comes from Amelia Hruby, host of the Off the Grid podcast, who reminds us: “I think you should be really clear with yourself and really intentional with your strategies on any platform that you’re using, no matter what it is.”
Are you a content marketer right now? And what I mean by that is, are you someone who sells products and services? If you sell workshops, for instance, or book coaching, or promote programs that you’re running on a regular basis, Substack might not be the best vehicle for that. I’ve seen some business owners keep their funnels and systems in other platforms, and then just write more ‘for fun’ on Substack in a casual way, but they’re not using it as the main driver to sell to their customers and readers.
You might also consider what kind of community atmosphere you’re looking for. Platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Substack—they all offer something a little bit different and utilize different skill sets. If you’re sort of over making videos and stories and not having your posts reach more people on Instagram, Substack might be a great option. On the other hand, you could have a delightful community on Instagram and it brings you joy to be there, so you might not see a need to put your writing on another platform.
Finally, you might simply ask: Does this sound fun? Does the idea of having a Substack make you curious? Excited? Are you hoping it catapults your visibility? Are you looking for a low-stakes way to get back in the habit of writing and sharing your work, regardless of how many people read it? Or maybe you want to be there because everyone else seems to be, and you have FOMO? That’s completely valid. You might want to take some time to journal about these ideas because I think we make the most aligned decisions about anything when we know what we want, need, and what our circumstances look like at any given time.
As we wrap up, I want to acknowledge one simple truth: change is hard.
I’ve been writing a newsletter for almost 12 years, and I consider it this intimate, personal space that I’ve lovingly cultivated, and I don’t want to lose that feeling with a new platform. At the same time, I have to remember that the current iteration of my newsletter on Flodesk isn’t what I was sending out back in 2012. This isn’t the first time my newsletter ecosystem has shifted, that’s the nature of technology and communication to evolve so it’s not necessarily a bad thing.
It’s just different. And again, there’s really no answer that’s right or wrong,
No matter where you are in your writing life and with a potential newsletter, I hope this post has given you some ideas to mull over as you take the next steps in your writing life.
