Art Versus Commerce on Substack

What is the Best Way to Approach Substack?

Photo by Jonathan Greenaway on Unsplash

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Well, once more into the breech, dear friends. In other words, the answer to the question, What is the best way to approach Substack is: I don’t know.

That’s the most honest answer, anyway.

Really, it depends on what you’re after. If you just want to make money—and I think this is a small minority—then your best bet is to get off Substack immediately, go to college, work your ass off, and get into finance, tech or engineering, something like that.

I kid.

No, if you just want to make The Big Bucks your best path on Substack is to 1. Already have a built-in audience; 2. Niche-down (meaning find one specific idea you pound home relentlessly, such as politics, feminism, race, trans; etc; anything with good outrage benefit); 3. Build up a solid following (say 10,000 subscribers or more) for free…and then start pay-walling the fuck out of that bitch. Once you get 100 paid subs you’ll get that delicious orange check mark and that will make readers think you’re special, cool and above the crowd.

Of course I’m being parodic, facetious, sarcastic and absurd.

It’s almost never that easy. (Although sometimes it does happen.)

The truth is that most writers on Substack—seasoned and beginner—won’t make much money and won’t gain much of a following. That’s just the way it goes, online and in real life. Most people won’t produce a newsletter that enough people are interested in to generate that kind of reproduction, aka re-stacking, sharing, telling friends and family, etc.

Most writers, then, will exist on Substack in sad obscurity, just like most writers outside of Substack. Just the way it is.

Therefore, in my opinion, the best path forward isn’t the polar opposite of the money-obsessed “elites” on the platform, meaning making every post free, not caring about money one iota, never mentioning paywalls and just writing for writing’s sake (though some do this and even make money because people appreciate it and like giving financially to those who don’t ask—or let’s face it sometimes beg—for money).

Rather, it’s the middle path, as the Buddha advised.

This means you write as truthfully as you can. You put your heart into it. You work hard. You try to write seriously and authentically, thinking of your subject but also of your readers. You turn on paid subscriptions and gently start to paywall *some* posts, and leave other posts free. This way readers are encouraged, some of them, to jump on board and start paying.

Admittedly, it’s a delicate balance. I don’t know if I do it elegantly or well, to be truthful. My stack—Sincere American Writing—currently has 2,035 subscribers with 92 paying. (Because of a weird glitch—Substack is working on it—my current subscriber number says I have “5.”) Not bad. My newsletter is slowly but steadily growing. The paid subs, however, seem to have balanced out and slowed. I’m not sure why that is.

When I started this newsletter it was totally focused on politics. This was in August, 2022. Mainly, I was writing from the perspective of a center-Left Democrat who had become fed up with hard-left identity politics and desperately wanted to see the culture and the party of the Left recenter itself in the middle, where the vast majority of Americans sat.

But over time that started to bore me. The same frustrated diatribes against “Wokeism,” the same wretched news bullet-points, the same torrid, overworked journalism outrage that didn’t actually matter except to a handful of under 30 leftist elites who ran media and The New York Times. It was utterly vapid, useless and boring.

So I started writing more about what I truly care about: Writing itself, literature, books, the writer’s life, memoir, fiction, snippets of novels I was working on, some cultural issues pertaining to life in 2024 as a man, some issues of race and gender, some politics here and there.

And my stack, as I said, has been growing.

There’s no right way to “do” Substack. Whatever works for you is gold. However, there has been, of course, a dynamite blast of how-to essays over the past year advising writers what to do, what not to do, how to “succeed” on Substack, what readers “want,” how long your posts should be, the voice you should write on the platform in, etc. I’m sure there’s some truth to much of this, but there’s also a whiff of bullshit.

In the end: Substack is all about freedom: Freedom of speech, expression, control, direction, you name it. It’s not Facebook or even Medium. You can write what you want, how you want, free or paid, often or not, in whatever form you like. That’s the brilliance of the platform. It’s not perfect, for sure, and I worry all the time that the founders will sell it to someone who’ll start putting restrictions on it that’ll sever the cord of freedom we currently enjoy. Or that the obsession with new possibilities will corrupt the platform somehow, make it less fun, less usable, less free. Or that AI will make everything go sideways.

But, for now, this is the platform I choose to use. It gives me the wide berth I need as an artist, the ability to write the truth as I understand it from my own unique point of view and to say what I want and how. As a writer and hyper-individualist, this is crucial. They don’t own our data. We own our own platform. There are no ads.

Personally, I do not use the app anymore. It prevents the platform from feeling like dirty social media. Instead, I focus on the writing, which has always been the goal.

So whatever you’re writing: Do it truthfully, do it authentically, if you feel inclined ask people to support you financially. But whatever you do, don’t sacrifice your morals or integrity just to get paid for a while.

It ain’t worth it.