An Author's Guide to Substack

Trying to wrap your head around Substack? Here's a guide for authors

Photo by Content Pixie on Unsplash

If I could sum Substack up in a sentence to a newbie, I’d say this:

Substack streamlines the enewsletter creation and blog writing experience by combining the two while also giving you the chance to expose your content to more people and monetise it.

So are you ready to dip your writerly toe in? Here's a guide:

Setting Up Your Substack Account

• Sign Up: It’s pretty easy to sign up. Just head to Substack.com and select ‘Start publishing’. You’ll then be taken through the steps to set up your author account, which are:

  1. Your name

  2. Your bio

  3. Publication URL: This is essentially what you choose to call your publication.

  4. Customise Your Page: Once you’re in, you can use your Dashboard to customise how your Substack page will look and work. Just click on the dashboard option, then settings. There are lots of options here for you to work through so just go through each one. This includes being able to upload a logo, design an eye-catching email banner and add a brief description.

  5. Decide whether to charge: This might be something you want to tackle once you get the hang of Substack and see what other content providers are doing. But what’s important to consider is can you offer something of real value? So, in the case of this Substack–Savvy Writers–the paid content covers more in-depth guides like this, access to my archive and also access to closed content on the Savvy Writers website. When I get to grips with my author Substack, Words and Dark Wings (link below), I might explore ways to monetise that for readers, too, such as free novellas and early access to proofs. Whatever you decide, when it comes to setting up the paid element of your Substack, it’s super easy with a few clicks from your settings.

Creating content

• What sort of content? A lot of people say in response to this question, just post the kind of content you’d post on your normal blog or social media. I slightly disagree. From what I’ve seen of the more successful channels, more long-form content seems to work, like articles in a newspaper / magazine and opinion pieces. So if we’re talking about content for your novel readers, then think about that value-added content you can offer. For my author Substack, I honed in on the forensic entomological side of my new crime series, the Dr Vanessa Marwood series. So I will be sharing weird and wonderful facts about insects and crime, interviews with forensic entomologist plus, maybe eventually, exclusives for paying readers such as early proofs and short stories. Take a look at what I’ve done so far:
  

• Creating your first post: Simply go to your dashboard, and select the option to create a new post. It’s all pretty straightforward if you’re used to uploading blog posts to your website or a blogging platform like Wordpress, though there are some extra features, like the ability to create AI images. Something that confused me was there’s no option to ‘save as a draft’, it just automatically does that while you’re creating your post. When you’re ready to publish your post, click ‘Continue’. If you’d rather keep it as a draft for now, I’d preview it just to ensure it’s all saved as a draft (which you can access from the Posts section of your dashboard).

• Send or just post? When you click on ‘Continue’, you’ll be presented with some options, including the option to add tags. But you’ll also notice the option to send your post as an email to your subscribers. This will automatically be selected as it assumes that each time you create a post, you’ll want that one post to be sent direct to a subscriber’s inbox. But you might prefer the idea of writing and publishing posts on the platform, and then sending a collection of them as an enewsletter when you’re ready (say each month) rather then emailing post-by-post. If this is the case, just deselect the option to send the post as an email. Once your post is published, you can see it on your home page. 

• Creating Notes, Threads, Episodes and Videos: You’ll notice there are other options too, beyond posts. Here’s a little overview of each one.

  1. Notes: I see this as being the social media part of Substack where you can share your own, and others’, short-form content (called ‘Re-stacks’, so basically like retweets).

  2. Threads: This is essentially the forum part of Substack, where you create a ‘note’, much like you’d create a topic in a forum. People can reply and create their own notes too.

  3. Chat: Here, you can pose a question or start a chat exclusively for your subscribers, so you can all chat together. You have the option for this to arrive as an email in your subscribers’ inboxes.

  4. Episodes: The audio part of your content

  5. Videos: The video part of your content

Sending an enewsletter:

1. Subscriber management: If you're transitioning from another newsletter platform, you can easily export your existing subscribers and import them into Substack. Just head to the ‘Subscribers’ tab in your dashboard. 

2. Header and footers: Make sure you’ve created a header and footer for your enewsletter. You can do this by navigating to your settings then clicking on ‘Publication Details’ to the left of the nav bar. Whatever you create here is what will appear each time you send something to your subscribers, whether that be one post or an enewsletter. 

3. Sending an email: Once you’re ready to send an enewsletter (and by enewsletter, I mean the way we’re . used to sending them: as an email with a series of topics and links), follow these steps:

• Gather all the public URLs of the posts you want to link to

• Navigate to your dashboard then the ‘Subscribers’ section

• Scroll down until you see your imported list of subcribers, and any subscribers you’ve gathered since. Select the box in the top left (to left of ‘Subscriber) then go ‘Select everyone’ which should appear in yellow to the right. Then select ‘Email’

• In here, write an intro then cut and paste all the items you wish to share. If they’re Substack posts, a preview will automatically be created for you featuring the image, preview text and a link, much like a block in, say, Mailerlite or Mailchimp. The good thing about this is the image, preview and link are automatically pulled in so no duplication, and no extra work for you. You can go in and edit the preview text, replacing it with the kind of copy you’d include in your enewsletter. Then you can send it, as you would an enewsletter. But there is a limit so how much you can include in these emails so keep an eye on that, but it’s good not to have them too long anyway,
  
  That’s everything. I hope it’s useful and I’ll update as I learn more.