Exploring Substack and Direct Sales Strategies

I'm going to do a post, we're going to do a talk about Substack. I'm this kind of person. I did a lot of talks already. I am justifying my existence by saying my Substack has almost 200 subscribers, 200 members and 21,000 subscribers. This is the thing. You see that one in the middle that says looking to begin, grow or monetize your Substack, start here. This is all pulled from this post, which is 50,000 words. This will not be 50,000 words, I promise you. But if you want more information on Substack, I will give you so much information on Substack there. You'll be like, please stop giving me. so much information about Substack, but I won't. Okay, so let's talk before we talk about Substack specifically and generally why you need direct sales. It's because retailers are screwing you most of the time. Specifically one, but not all of them and not all of the time, but they make it really hard sometimes, sometimes to like keep your business running successfully if you don't have access to your data. So there's one thing that I'm about, it is controlling. the data. I'm going to go back and say like I actually love retailers but I think you also need to be able to control the data which is where direct sales comes in. Our business is all about how to do direct sales and still be retailer friendly. So but with direct sales you control the data. You build the relationship. You're able to make more money. You're able to point them anywhere that you want. You increase the customer lifetime value of your business. and that is so important. It drives me crazy that authors don't know who buys from them. Like for Kickstarter, for instance, you get a buyer list in the same way you get a buyer list here. You actually see who's reading and buying and purchasing your stuff with direct sales and it's really important because if you're going to make business decisions based on what people tell you in surveys and such, it's really a good idea to know which of those people are buying your thing and which of them... are trolls or not interested or just for some reason haven't unsubscribed or they really like reading your emails but they don't or they hate read your emails you have a buyer list you actually know who is buying from you subscriptions are one of the five pillars of direct sales the five pillars are landing pages web stores conventions kickstarter or crowdfunding and subscriptions so subscriptions are not a lot and then retailers are like the other part of your business probably 50 retailers 50 direct sales and then across those five modalities so subscriptions are about somebody paying you money for some sort of special backstage area, additional content. Sometimes they literally just really want to support you. Usually you make less money per month, but it's across a longer period of time, and it gives you some stability. Direct sales is really hard because there's no stability. You're not necessarily going to make the same amount of money for ads month after month. A Kickstarter happens in condensed periods of time, and so subscriptions are a really good way to smooth out and figure out how to make an amount of money to every month that will keep building and sustain you and that keeps going over time. There are two types of subscriptions. This is a post that I just did this week on my Substack. There are two kinds of subscriptions. The first is a publication model, something like the New York Times, Washington Post, Vanity Fair, and then there's the association model which is like Ally, Triple A, Elks Lodge. I Publication models rely on organic reach and volume. They are mostly built by disseminating widely. Associations are kind of the opposite. They're about belonging and identity. Substack is a subscription That helps when you have a publication model, especially, which we'll go into in a little bit. So Substack combines a blog, a newsletter, a payment system, customer support, all integrated seamlessly with a simple interface. This is from Substack specifically, and they are blowing smoke up themselves to get you to buy it. But this is what Substack says they are. I don't disagree, but it is only one piece of an overall ecosystem. So let's talk about a couple different subscription models. Patreon is more an association model, but the thing with Patreon is Patreon takes and handles the payment, you deliver the content, they handle the sales tax, you handle the customer support, you control the data, and you can move off platform. So there are two pieces to think about with direct sales. One, do you control the customer data? Two, do I control the payment gateway? Why is it important to control the payment gateway? Because if you want to move off Patreon, you physically can't do that. Like there's no way to easily move all of the customer data. So when you start building on Patreon, you kind of are stuck building on Patreon. If you've ever tried to move, if you've ever had a Patreon, try to move it off. be like maybe I like ream you probably will have a patreon and a ream or a patreon or a sub stack or you will just nuke your patreon if you control the payment gateway then yes you have to pay sales tax but on top of that you can control the payment gateway and point it wherever you want Now, Substack. Substack is a subscription platform that handles their payments through Stripe. So you control the payment gateway. You deliver the content, you handle sales tech, customer support, but you control the data completely. Patreon is still a direct sales platform, but it is it is not quite as direct as Substack or somewhere where you also control the payment gateway. What you get from Substack or somewhere where you control the payment gateway is ultimate freedom to go other places that also plug into that gateway. Let's compare this to Kindle Vela. In Kindle, Kindle handles the payment, they deliver the content, they handle the sales tax, they handle the customer support, they control the data. If you move off the platform, you just have lost everything. You just don't get any of the things that you had, except for the people that made a decision to go off platform to support you on some other gateway. So this is not direct sales. You see how the other two are different versions of direct sales? So a lot of advantages of subscriptions, predictable money every month, the ability to test out products, build a deeper relationship, allow you to monetize. Additionally, you get to have a. Consistent yes predictable money every month is the most important one, but these other things are very important however It's a bear to get there I'm not gonna lie to you like there's a whole lot of disadvantages of subscriptions our Kickstarter launched on Monday And it made eleven thousand dollars. I make about six thousand dollars a year from my sub stack That's a lot less money for doing I probably a lot more work but they builds over time and compounds and so that is really the advantage but the disadvantage is right now it is the hardest of this of the direct sales pass to get going and what generally happens is it's very very very very low and then it has hockey stick growth if you've ever seen like these things really catch like some of them are like an inch up but usually even when there's an inch up there's like a vertical line somewhere where it starts working and most people you The unfortunate thing about directs about subscriptions is it's kind of like it runs on hope until it works and I mean that's not a great way to run your business but man when it starts working it really starts working and it makes things a whole lot easier, which is why it is only one of the pillars, along with retailers, to build a successful author business. You can't just do it only on subscriptions or you will be very sad for long periods of time. There are three good ways to make money in subscriptions. Early releasing, additional content, and special access. So early release means you're giving people chapters early. This is really popular in the Royal Road fantasy. model. It's basically they give the chapters away for free. Then if you want to support them, it's like for a dollar, you get one chapter ahead, five chapters ahead for $5, 10 chapters ahead for $10. Royal Road is only integrated with Patreon. So I kind of don't know why I even mentioned it because it's just going to confuse you. But that is what we mean by early release. You get things before it is released to other people. Substack has a setting where when you're releasing something you can set it for paid and then release it and let it release for... in two weeks or three weeks for free. So you can, in the settings, make this happen where you release something paid and then it becomes free later, which I think is a pretty cool feature. Additional content is another one. This is where you're making new short stories or epilogues or bonus scenes, or maybe you have an entire serial that you're doing. inside your membership platform. And then access is you're providing access to you. This is the one that I have the most problems with because I have chronic fatigue, brought on by long COVID, so I don't have the ability to really give special access to me without like seriously like jacking up my health. But if you are the kind of person who can get out in front of your people. It's a great way to give them more of you, which is what a lot of them probably want. So providing special chats with subscribers, hosting live streams, creating events, like everything that is like more access to you. Okay, so that is general subscriptions. Now we're going to talk about Substack, specifically. So what is unique about Substack? One, their focus on organic reach. their recommendation engine, their integrated social media, curation, couponing, and decentralized centralization, which is a really techie word, but I'm going to explain what I mean. so we can have some context. I have a pretty successful publication I would say. I have gotten almost 3,000 subscribers from the network since March from how their network works since March that we're going to talk about and like I paid zero dollars for them and they open at about a 40 to 50 percent open rate so like they're really good subscribers that that are on this network and they want more content, especially value-based content. So one of the ways that I get all of my subscribers, or a lot of my subscribers, is through recommendations. The probably most brilliant thing that Substack did was create a recommendation engine where you can choose to recommend other publications. And when someone subscribes to your publication, they are asked if they want to subscribe to other publications as well. The same thing where if someone recommends your publication after they become a subscriber, they immediately are asked if they want to join like your publication. If you have a hundred, you can see I recommend a hundred publications, they're only asked to join four and they rotate. So if people ask me how to do this for fiction, because Subsect's not super set up for fiction, and like this is the secret I think, like you just have to find all of the people in your genre and create a mini recommendation engine, for all of your all of the fiction ones are like recommending each other and like it has to probably won't Have organic reach on its own because sub stick is more set up for like journalists and rumors and nonfiction But if you can figure out how to work with all of the people in your genre and recommend each other then like you can like I Think you could have an incredibly successful fiction publication Especially if you start cross posting and working together in more than one way. Integrated social media. So they have a system called Notes, which is on their page, which is on the app and on their main website, where you can interact with other writers, other authors. There's not a lot of fans on, there's not a lot of readers on here. I'm not going to lie, if you're a fiction person, you're like, Notes is probably not going to be as helpful unless you... are using it to comment on each other's work and do all the things that you would do in a fiction Facebook group or something. And you're using it in that way. So I think it can be really powerful to connect and find and have an enjoyable, low-key conversation with a bunch of other writers. But there's not a ton of readers here. But it is a very low-key. It's like how I wish Twitter worked. ever. Okay, so there's also a curation part of Substack. So Substack actually like encourages organic growth as opposed to Patreon which actively hampers organic growth and silos everything and a poker platform like Reem which is somewhere in the middle but like the substack is they want you to grow they need you to grow because you only get one payment platform like you only get one price unlike patreon that has ten you can have a million tiers you only get One in Substack, so like they need you to grow. This is why it's great for the publication model. Like they are very, very, very into promoting everyone and having you find more awesome stuff in a way that I don't think I've ever seen except for on Kickstarter. So this is their explore area where like in on the page you can actually look to find cool publications that they recommend. recommending, who is the biggest names in your specific niche. And so people use this to find new cool things. They also have things like weekly stacks where they send out articles you might like and a bunch of other stuff. They are very interested in getting people to subscribe to more publications and becoming paid clients, paid members. So you can see. see this is the literature section I am ranked 22 overall which like I mean I won't lie it's a bit of a flex like I'm using myself as an example but they do pet keep lists like this as well one of the most powerful things that I think sub stack does is allow couponing and so patreon as far as I know doesn't do it I don't think ream does it where you can coupon give someone three months off you So give someone six months free, give someone a year free, give someone a lifetime free, give somebody 10% off, 20% off, 30% off. It's like this is when I saw this part. That's when I said, oh, I get it. I could bring all my people over and give them a bunch of free months. It made complete sense in a way that I've always been frustrated by other sites. Okay, so all of that I say in order to get to this very, very. techie concept of decentralized centralization. So your publication lives on its own subdomain that is quarantined off pretty much from all of the other ones. But you also get the benefit of the centralization of the substack network, the sub end of notes, and in general of just how they interact all of the things together. One thing to really, that's really I like a lot of people don't like is that all of the publications have roughly the same look to them. So it feels very natural when people are going from publication to another. They all have the same splash page to sign up. You know what you're doing once you're in the network and it makes friction a lot less. We also get the benefit of their own payment gateway, so if your stuff is already saved, you don't have to have people re-enter it. So it's a really techie concept to talk about all of the things that I just talked about, but combine them together. I think it gives the best decentralization and centralization in one place. All right, so... Whew. Let's talk about designing your substack, which is probably why most of you are here and getting it to grow. So I want to note, because I don't remember if I put this page up again, you can see how all of this kind of has a similar brand identity. Like that's one of the most important things that you can do. Like it doesn't have to be mine. Please don't make it like mine. But like it has to be relatively consistent. Like I am a very visual person. So I look for striking imagery and like kind of like an anti-authoritarian like vibe to like rebellious vibe to what I do. But like what's important mostly why I bring this up is because like it's consistent. In the same way that like a series has to be consistent branding, like an author probably is consistently branded at least if they don't have a bunch of pen names, you want to keep a similar brand. It's probably the number one thing that you can do on Substack to improve your Substack today. Especially imagery, because I will be honest, people, Substack imagery sucks. Most people have very bad Substack imagery, and I don't know why, because they have an AI generation, they have stock photos, and still, for some reason, 80 to 90% of Substacks that I run across have really bad imagery. And so, all right, so let's talk actually how to do this. Step one is choosing your category, which is to go back to that. So what I recommend is go to the Explore tab I talked about before, where they are already curating the best of the best content and the best of the best publications. And pick one of these things, like I see culture, technology, politics, there's about 20 or 30 categories you can pick. And just look at them and see which one vibes with what you're going to do. There's a fiction one, there's literature, there's culture, technology. Wherever your thing fits, start then reading the recommended articles, subscribing to the publications. Once you subscribe to them, subscribe to the recommendations, all of this will start getting your notes area filtering the people that you follow or subscribe to. You'll start seeing them in your notes feed. You'll start seeing who comments on those things, who they choose to share posts with. A lot of people do roundups. So just like if you start doing those things. You will start seeing and sort of getting vibes and like a lot of this is like vibes man So I will say this you get two categories But they only you only show up in the first category you choose so while it's okay to have a second category I think I my second one is fiction. I don't show up in fiction I only show up in literature, which is the my number one category you can I recommend looking at this. What they'll say is like X number of subscribers and like some of them like in order to get to the top have a you need a boatload of subscribers to get anywhere. But other ones are like pretty small and like you can actually legitimately get there with with like a well designed page and time. Okay, so we talked about this but in general if you go to the main page and you scroll down You'll see on the right hand side. It says recommendations And so even if you don't want to subscribe to a publication you can still see the recommendations and I go from there And then you can go to every publication if you go to the about pretty much is it has the owner and Like that's my little one with the little check mark. That's that's another little flex I'm very pretty proud of that one And then you can see what they are what they are reading and also what they are saying on notes So they have a second when you go there Default to their posts then you can see their notes their likes and their reads you can just see what they are following and like Start going through and like drilling down. It does take a bunch of time but like it's, I mean it's pretty fun work if you like the thing that you're writing about because you're basically just reading other people who have really cool thoughts about that thing. So, here's my rule. People are like, how do I know which ones and who they're targeting? If you can't tell, don't use them. They're bad. Publications are not bad, but they are bad models. A lot of people got on Substack in the same way that people got on Kindle and you're in like 2008 and you're like how does this book looks like it was drawn it was like the covered by a four-year-old how is it so successful it's like well they've been doing it since the beginning so like they can get away with things that like you can't if you're starting now now you need to see like you need to clearly establish what you're targeting and who you're targeting if they cannot do if you cannot do that easily you probably should not use them as an example This is a very wonky way to talk about your voice. People usually don't like it broken down to them in a step-by-step process, but I'm going to do it because I'm up here. You're over there. Okay, so if you want to know about your voice, these are the six things that I think go into your voice. There's probably more, but these are the ones that I fit in that post. What is your universal fantasy? If you have not read seven-figure fiction, go do that. First thing you should do is follow me. Theodore Taylor's Substack? What are the psychological triggers that inform your fantasy? I'm not saying psychological bad triggers. Like, what are the tropes? What are the things that you're using to inform that fantasy with your audience? What are the tropes that inform those psychological triggers? What are the themes in your work that reinforce those tropes? What lived experiences inform those themes? And then what prose style reinforces those lived experiences? Wow, that takes all of the magic out of writing, but like, I mean, it's not, that's what I think goes into voice, and just time and doing it over and over and over again. If you don't know the answers to these questions, probably just keep writing things, and eventually you'll be like, wow, I've written ten things, and they all have these three themes. Now, maybe that's a thing that I should follow. The reason I have this publication is because I have been writing about the same topic for 10 years, and I was like, I'm probably going to keep doing it for 10 years, like if I've done it for 10. So I was like, probably that's a good use of my time. The nice thing is if you decide in six months that you want to rebrand, you can do that, and Substack's pretty forgiving of that. okay step three brand identity um so how long are your posts a lot of people recommend five fifteen hundred words or less mine are over five thousand words i mean i think it's taste to order but probably probably 1500 words is what most like when people ask what an episode of a serial should be it's about 1500 words like it feels like just it feels right but it might not be right I'm what kind of imagery will you use what is your unique selling point what is your seven word bio so this is the seven word bio I help writers build sustainable thriving businesses that's seven words I used to say build sustainable businesses but I was like that's only six words that's not going to be very informative people are going to be confused so like I made it seven words I think and so what is yours this can be a thing for fiction or nonfiction I've watched everyone that I've ever seen who can put their thing into seven seven words has really really really like improved their business because the first thing that you want to do when you meet someone is know very succinctly what they're doing the next thing part of this in brand identity is the logo the wordmark and the title so the top left is the logo the middle is the wordmark word mark, it's the words, and also the title is like part of the word mark. I did not know what a word mark was until I started this, so it's just like the branding of your title and like what font you're using. Okay, step four, about page. This is the first paragraph of my about page. It is possibly the single most important thing about your publication, except that please don't use ugly imagery because it will make me sad. It is that you can see the universal fantasy at the bottom. We strive to give authors agency in a world that too often seems intent on stripping it away. That is like the entire reason for my publication to exist is to give authors agency. The name of my publication is in there. And then it's very, very, very quickly by reading this paragraph, you should be able to be like, that is the vibe that I want. Or no, that's not the vibe that I want. I am not everyone's vibe and that is really okay. And Substack is all about having niche vibes and really like finding the things that resonate with you. After that one paragraph, the rest of it should reinforce that. So if I'm trying to give you agency, I better know what I'm talking about. So the rest of this is kind of about what I have done and all of the ways that I've been able to build my business, what I do to be like, do you like me yet? Yay! Okay, so all of that then goes into the short bio, which is this one sentence, which is the singular most important sentence in all of Substack, so I'm glad I made it really small. It is the distillation in one sentence. sentence what your whole publication is about. It's going to be a lot of the universal fantasy, but this is the one that people will see everywhere. When people look at your publication, when people like to get like mini vibes from from it like this is the sentence they're going to read which is why it is so important why did i put it at the end just like a blurb it's easier to write the blurb after you have the book and so as you i i find it easier to start broad and like distill it down after i know and i do my editing you can do it the other way like i don't care like do it however way vibes for you um step six this is if you're not doing sub stack and you're like i don't want to do subs like i just want to do a blog this is the key to to doing a blog is write five to ten, they call them epic blog posts, but at least any kind of post before you get started so people can read through and you start getting those numbers up and then it will start pushing it to more and more people. So I would publish them all in like one week. This is very analogous to like how a lot of people will publish a three to five to seven book series at the beginning of a month in KU so they can take advantage of the entire month except that you're doing this not in KU. because it's Substack not Kindle. Trying to maintain a consistent voice, become involved in notes, Substack is the thing called office hours which seems to happen randomly. If it happens, it happens on Thursday at 10 a.m. Pacific Time, 1 p.m. Eastern Time, but it's magic whether they do it or not. If you have been on Substack before and you have then you know that like sometimes the magic office hours fairy comes and sometimes they choose something completely different and I don't have that I do not know how or why they do it that way. It's just their vibes. Okay so welcome emails. You do not get an autoresponder with Substack. It is one of the big failings of Substack. It is very annoying. They give you one welcome email and the one that they produce for you is ungodly bad. It's like the coffee in Paris, it's just this Paris is just ungodly bad and like so in the same way like Like, these welcome emails are not great. So what you need to do is, for free subscribers, tell them why they should go paid. Tell them why they should go paid in every post as well. Don't make it a big part, but, like, make it a part. Then for paid subscribers, make it easy for them to find all of the reasons, because the most depressing part is that people unsubscribe and unstop paying over time, and so you have to, like, replace that money and more money unless you don't want your money to go down. I know because some months I'll make like a $2,000 more and then other months I'll make like right now it's like a hundred dollars more and it's like I'm putting out the same content it's just more people are unsubscribing or I'm paying their member benefits and I don't know why. Eight. The main reason to think about Substack, I think, is because you can import your emails to this platform and then give them a free trial to your membership to see what they would get by being subscribed. So free trials and such are a big thing in tech, and this is a way to just say, hey, I'm giving you a really nice free thing that's going to have a ton of value. If you like my email list, which is mostly promotional, you'll probably like my Substack, which is like... a free chapter a week and a bunch of value x y and z other things so um there's a so people often say then like well can i really move my list between these two things and like there is a a um doctrine of like uh an interoperability so you can move things from just like you can move subs from from MailChimp to MailerLite. I'm not a lawyer, but like my understanding is that you can move them from MailChimp to Substack. It's like, it's a similar thing. But you should ask a lawyer. lawyer if you really want opinions I will never not say I'm not a lawyer on camera but that is how I view things in general that is how my team views things in general section step 9 section so this is one of my favorite bonuses for substax so I do not like being committed to doing things long term so but I have a lot of content so what I did is I created a bunch of different sections and each of those sections is a free is a story or a book or something that I wrote that is available to paying members. So it's free to paying members. And I just kept making sections. And each one of these sections, I think I have 20 or so, is either free to everyone or a paid member benefit. It was really hard to make this thing. But I'll tell you, it works for me every day. I no longer have to upload. the vessel or worst thing in the universe. The biggest thing that I do not like about Patreon is their reader is garbage and the only legitimate way you can give something to somebody on Patreon is to give them a PDF and I hate that somebody could pay $5 or $1 and get all of the PDFs. So what I like about this is how I set it up is you can do a PDF but each post is embedded on Substack so they cannot copy and paste it and get it. I mean, I guess they get copy and paste it, but like they can't easily get it off there. They have to read it on platforms. What really is a subscription? I spent so many, so much of my time agonizing about how I could give a book to a, to a fan who may have only gotten paid me $5 and then still also expect other people to pay. So this is how I do it. Like if you want to pay me $5 a month, you can read a bunch of my work, but you have to do it on the app. If you want to buy it, you can buy it and then you own it forever. And that's how the sections work for me. Last one that I'm going to go over, although there's a lot more in that post, is about pages. So just like any other website, you get the ability to create different pages. I like to create a page for all of the work that you get for signing up for a paid member. So I have fiction and nonfiction benefits, but you can also create other kinds of pages, landing pages and such. such a pretty Like it's very very limited the functionality of what you can do on Substack and that is intentional but you can absolutely make these pages and I highly suggest you go look at my Substack others and like play around with the pages. One of the coolest features is the podcast if you do a podcast the arbitrage on podcasts are just incredible right now because no one's doing them and they show up in your reader really easily. When should you go paid? Today, I don't know, like you should start letting people, if someone wants to pay you money, you should let them, as long as you're going to continue to make the work. You can, however, turn on pledges, which is people who pledge your support before you actually have to pay for it. So you can continue to be free and just let people like build up the pledge and then like turn it on when you have enough money to justify it. And like that can work for you as well. People ask me what if I don't want to. have anything behind a paywall. The most successful Substack publication of all time is this letters from an American. They have nothing behind a paywall. All of their stuff is just people supporting because they want this person to keep doing the work. And that is the biggest reason. I asked people for like several months why they would pay money to me for stuff that I give away for free generally. And they're like, I just want to support you doing this work. I need, like, I want to support you. And when people want to support you again, You should let them. I'm most so all of my work come up. Hold that story. Let me finish this part. So people ask me about fiction. This is my actual analytics. So you can see that setting up a direct sales environment is nonfiction. Magic is fiction. And they have like roughly fiction. Fiction and nonfiction have roughly the same number of reads, so I thought I would have a massively fewer reads for my fiction work than my nonfiction work, but like, I just don't see it. I see that both of these things are enjoyed by roughly the same amount of people. So I do think it is harder to market fiction on Substack. But when asked, is there a market for fiction on Substack, I would say it pretty definitively says, at least for my work, that there is a market for fiction just like there is for nonfiction. And the people like reading them just about the same amount. So final thoughts. Memberships are the hardest business model to get started. I'm sorry. Like, I want to give you better, like, rosier outlook, but it's just true. Like, that's why you should be doing it while you're doing other parts of direct sales. So it's just, like, as it's growing, it's growing, and it's working for you over time. Substack is the best for organic growth. So the reason why no other platforms work for me is I had to bring everyone to the party. And, like, I don't want people to all I don't want to have to spend time marketing my fiction, my substack, when I want people to buy my books. And there was a thing I just never could could get over. I just couldn't get over the two. Like I would, I have to spend months doing my Substack, but really I also want to release books. So Substack allowed me to focus on organic growth. Um, and uh, I made, but I made sure that it was designed to to work on Substack. So like I designed a publication that was made for organic growth on Substack. Just like if you're going to make a public a book that is made for KU, like you would want to follow all of the tropes and things that work to take advantage of their organic network, you also want to do that on Substack if you can. But you can also build a recommendation engine to work. that is our book that is our quiz hey that's the sub stack that i just pulled all of this information from that's pretty nice of me it'll also be we'll also send it to you after the the thing if you joined the mailing list always that lovely question that someone asks that person first can you go to the mic just because i know they're going to ask me to go to the mic if you Sorry, I just feel like I'm drinking from the fire hose of all the information. I just didn't understand because you were showing the one that nothing was behind a paywall, so I was asking for your author stack, is it free or a paywall? It used to be. So the paywall, how my paywall used to do was it is free and after three weeks everything goes behind a paywall. Now most of the posts are free, but some of them are behind the paywall. All of the books are behind a paywall, so it's not an either-or thing. Each section is pretty much behind. Every book that I have is behind a paywall. But I have a serial called the God's Verse Chronicles, which is a weekly serial that I do, which is free to everyone. The more free things you have, the better, like, traction you're going to get. But no one... Fewer people will pay you if everything's free, so it's kind of like you have to do both. You have to operate... You're putting some new free content every so often and then putting new paid content as well. Yes, if you want to see how... So Emma Gannon, she runs a thing called The Hyphen, and she... When she got 1,000 paid subscribers, she started to go exclusively behind a paywall for almost all of her thing. I would say that is a, I mean, most people won't get there, but, like, that's a pretty good number. If you have that many people, I am vain. I want the most amount of people to read my books. work so like I only have 175 paid subscribers so like I have 10,000 to 12,000 read my thing and like that's more important for me than the money that I'm making the expense so my easiest one to get to get behind is if you want to do a paywall is after three weeks everything will be behind a paywall or start with the paywall and then say it will be free after three weeks okay thank you you're welcome Yes, can you, in the section where you talked about your writer's voice, you had the seven steps. You mentioned the title of a book, and I didn't write it down. Oh, Seven Figure Fiction. Also, Theodora Taylor, who wrote it, has a sub stack called Universal Fantasy, which is very, very good. Thank you. I didn't know that Reem existed until this week and I'm curious about it. What do you think about splitting audiences? Bad idea? Good idea? I mean, Monica always talks about going wide with your subscription. She's like, it's a nightmare. I would never do it. But then she did it. And so, like, I mean, I don't know. Like, I feel like it's easier to go to where people are and let them pay the way that they want to pay already. So if you're going to be wide with all of your stuff, you should, like, really. really be wide. To clarify, I was talking about splitting them. So like for instance, fiction on Reem. Oh yeah, that's what Monica does. She has a fiction on Reem and a nonfiction here. I am lazy. I know it doesn't seem that way sometimes because I did like 100 things all the time. But like I... If it's good enough for Playboy to have fiction and nonfiction on their thing, like it's good enough for me. That's what I said at the very beginning. I'm like, if you can have those two things work in concert with each other, then probably somebody will like, like an author, some amount of them will like it. like fantasy and like author news. And like, that's how I did it. But fiction is a lot easier to do like multiple tiers of. The one thing that I will say for splitting fiction is I would, I mean, I love reading more than Patreon, but. But for fiction, like, Patreon integrates with Royal Road and Wattpad. And so, like, it makes it easier to use the organic growth on those free platforms and then pull them into a, like, Patreon-free thing. But, like, man, it's really hard to not own the payment processing. Hi there, so I'm in, when I started my Substack I started using tags. It's very similar to helping authors, so kind of a good vibe there. When it comes to doing tags, how do they affect visibility? Because I know it's not like a hashtag, you can actually search for it or something, I'm not sure what that looks like. Yeah, it's on. On your public, it's, tags are really on your publication. They're not like outside of that. So yeah, it's not going to help your visibility outside the publication. But people are, like when people read a post, they'll, like it will show the tag and they can click on it and show other tags. So it's a way for navigation within the publication itself. Yep. And then quickly, for using Notes, have you been, when it comes to Notes, do you comment on other people's Notes and do you find some interaction that way to kind of build relationships? Yeah, I absolutely comment on it. I don't think that it's really, if Notes is a platform that's great for publish, for like getting your own traction, but it is great for like making other people's traction. If you post really, it's all... Building relationships, yeah. Right, it's like everything that was, that worked on Facebook 10 years ago that hasn't worked for eight years now works on Substack and you can be a real... real genie and like seem like a genius by like just being like I'm gonna try this silly strategy that worked on done on Facebook and like magically it works now thank you yep last one there's a lot here that's really appealing my question is the cynic in me thinks that in two years this is gonna go the way of medium how can you what what gives you hope that it'll last you own the data like you want you can medium says that you have a publication, but you really don't, like you really, even if you have a newsletter, it's like their newsletter. So like the, I mean, and I talked to somebody, I don't know, like maybe it'll end tomorrow. Like maybe Amazon will end tomorrow. Like, I don't know, like maybe the internet will. fry. But I own the data. As long as I pull out the data once a month, I have only lost 30 days of growth. And so I don't have any loyalty to Substack except to say, man, there's a lot of arbitrage here right now in this moment. And yes. So I don't know if I have faith. I have faith in owning the data.

You see that one in the middle that says looking to begin, grow or monetize your Substack, start here. This is all pulled from this post, which is 50,000 words. This will not be 50,000 words, I promise you. But if you want more information on Substack, I will give you so much information on Substack there.

You'll be like, please stop giving me. so much information about Substack, but I won't. Okay, so let's talk before we talk about Substack specifically and generally why you need direct sales. It's because retailers are screwing you most of the time.

Specifically one, but not all of them and not all of the time, but they make it really hard sometimes, sometimes to like keep your business running successfully if you don't have access to your data. So there's one thing that I'm about, it is controlling. the data.

I'm going to go back and say like I actually love retailers but I think you also need to be able to control the data which is where direct sales comes in. Our business is all about how to do direct sales and still be retailer friendly. So but with direct sales you control the data. You build the relationship. You're able to make more money.

You're able to point them anywhere that you want. You increase the customer lifetime value of your business. and that is so important. It drives me crazy that authors don't know who buys from them. Like for Kickstarter, for instance, you get a buyer list in the same way you get a buyer list here.

You actually see who's reading and buying and purchasing your stuff with direct sales and it's really important because if you're going to make business decisions based on what people tell you in surveys and such, it's really a good idea to know which of those people are buying your thing and which of them... are trolls or not interested or just for some reason haven't unsubscribed or they really like reading your emails but they don't or they hate read your emails you have a buyer list you actually know who is buying from you subscriptions are one of the five pillars of direct sales the five pillars are landing pages web stores conventions kickstarter or crowdfunding and subscriptions so subscriptions are not a lot and then retailers are like the other part of your business probably 50 retailers 50 direct sales and then across those five modalities so subscriptions are about somebody paying you money for some sort of special backstage area, additional content. Sometimes they literally just really want to support you. Usually you make less money per month, but it's across a longer period of time, and it gives you some stability. Direct sales is really hard because there's no stability.

You're not necessarily going to make the same amount of money for ads month after month. A Kickstarter happens in condensed periods of time, and so subscriptions are a really good way to smooth out and figure out how to make an amount of money to every month that will keep building and sustain you and that keeps going over time. There are two types of subscriptions. This is a post that I just did this week on my Substack.

There are two kinds of subscriptions. The first is a publication model, something like the New York Times, Washington Post, Vanity Fair, and then there's the association model which is like Ally, Triple A, Elks Lodge. I Publication models rely on organic reach and volume.

They are mostly built by disseminating widely. Associations are kind of the opposite. They're about belonging and identity. Substack is a subscription That helps when you have a publication model, especially, which we'll go into in a little bit. So Substack combines a blog, a newsletter, a payment system, customer support, all integrated seamlessly with a simple interface.

This is from Substack specifically, and they are blowing smoke up themselves to get you to buy it. But this is what Substack says they are. I don't disagree, but it is only one piece of an overall ecosystem. So let's talk about a couple different subscription models. Patreon is more an association model, but the thing with Patreon is Patreon takes and handles the payment, you deliver the content, they handle the sales tax, you handle the customer support, you control the data, and you can move off platform.

So there are two pieces to think about with direct sales. One, do you control the customer data? Two, do I control the payment gateway?

Why is it important to control the payment gateway? Because if you want to move off Patreon, you physically can't do that. Like there's no way to easily move all of the customer data.

So when you start building on Patreon, you kind of are stuck building on Patreon. If you've ever tried to move, if you've ever had a Patreon, try to move it off. be like maybe I like ream you probably will have a patreon and a ream or a patreon or a sub stack or you will just nuke your patreon if you control the payment gateway then yes you have to pay sales tax but on top of that you can control the payment gateway and point it wherever you want Now, Substack. Substack is a subscription platform that handles their payments through Stripe.

So you control the payment gateway. You deliver the content, you handle sales tech, customer support, but you control the data completely. Patreon is still a direct sales platform, but it is it is not quite as direct as Substack or somewhere where you also control the payment gateway.

What you get from Substack or somewhere where you control the payment gateway is ultimate freedom to go other places that also plug into that gateway. Let's compare this to Kindle Vela. In Kindle, Kindle handles the payment, they deliver the content, they handle the sales tax, they handle the customer support, they control the data. If you move off the platform, you just have lost everything.

You just don't get any of the things that you had, except for the people that made a decision to go off platform to support you on some other gateway. So this is not direct sales. You see how the other two are different versions of direct sales? So a lot of advantages of subscriptions, predictable money every month, the ability to test out products, build a deeper relationship, allow you to monetize.

Additionally, you get to have a. Consistent yes predictable money every month is the most important one, but these other things are very important however It's a bear to get there I'm not gonna lie to you like there's a whole lot of disadvantages of subscriptions our Kickstarter launched on Monday And it made eleven thousand dollars. I make about six thousand dollars a year from my sub stack That's a lot less money for doing I probably a lot more work but they builds over time and compounds and so that is really the advantage but the disadvantage is right now it is the hardest of this of the direct sales pass to get going and what generally happens is it's very very very very low and then it has hockey stick growth if you've ever seen like these things really catch like some of them are like an inch up but usually even when there's an inch up there's like a vertical line somewhere where it starts working and most people you The unfortunate thing about directs about subscriptions is it's kind of like it runs on hope until it works and I mean that's not a great way to run your business but man when it starts working it really starts working and it makes things a whole lot easier, which is why it is only one of the pillars, along with retailers, to build a successful author business.

You can't just do it only on subscriptions or you will be very sad for long periods of time. There are three good ways to make money in subscriptions. Early releasing, additional content, and special access.

So early release means you're giving people chapters early. This is really popular in the Royal Road fantasy. model. It's basically they give the chapters away for free. Then if you want to support them, it's like for a dollar, you get one chapter ahead, five chapters ahead for $5, 10 chapters ahead for $10.

Royal Road is only integrated with Patreon. So I kind of don't know why I even mentioned it because it's just going to confuse you. But that is what we mean by early release. You get things before it is released to other people. Substack has a setting where when you're releasing something you can set it for paid and then release it and let it release for...

in two weeks or three weeks for free. So you can, in the settings, make this happen where you release something paid and then it becomes free later, which I think is a pretty cool feature. Additional content is another one.

This is where you're making new short stories or epilogues or bonus scenes, or maybe you have an entire serial that you're doing. inside your membership platform. And then access is you're providing access to you.

This is the one that I have the most problems with because I have chronic fatigue, brought on by long COVID, so I don't have the ability to really give special access to me without like seriously like jacking up my health. But if you are the kind of person who can get out in front of your people. It's a great way to give them more of you, which is what a lot of them probably want.

So providing special chats with subscribers, hosting live streams, creating events, like everything that is like more access to you. Okay, so that is general subscriptions. Now we're going to talk about Substack, specifically. So what is unique about Substack?

One, their focus on organic reach. their recommendation engine, their integrated social media, curation, couponing, and decentralized centralization, which is a really techie word, but I'm going to explain what I mean. so we can have some context. I have a pretty successful publication I would say. I have gotten almost 3,000 subscribers from the network since March from how their network works since March that we're going to talk about and like I paid zero dollars for them and they open at about a 40 to 50 percent open rate so like they're really good subscribers that that are on this network and they want more content, especially value-based content.

So one of the ways that I get all of my subscribers, or a lot of my subscribers, is through recommendations. The probably most brilliant thing that Substack did was create a recommendation engine where you can choose to recommend other publications. And when someone subscribes to your publication, they are asked if they want to subscribe to other publications as well. The same thing where if someone recommends your publication after they become a subscriber, they immediately are asked if they want to join like your publication.

If you have a hundred, you can see I recommend a hundred publications, they're only asked to join four and they rotate. So if people ask me how to do this for fiction, because Subsect's not super set up for fiction, and like this is the secret I think, like you just have to find all of the people in your genre and create a mini recommendation engine, for all of your all of the fiction ones are like recommending each other and like it has to probably won't Have organic reach on its own because sub stick is more set up for like journalists and rumors and nonfiction But if you can figure out how to work with all of the people in your genre and recommend each other then like you can like I Think you could have an incredibly successful fiction publication Especially if you start cross posting and working together in more than one way. Integrated social media. So they have a system called Notes, which is on their page, which is on the app and on their main website, where you can interact with other writers, other authors.

There's not a lot of fans on, there's not a lot of readers on here. I'm not going to lie, if you're a fiction person, you're like, Notes is probably not going to be as helpful unless you... are using it to comment on each other's work and do all the things that you would do in a fiction Facebook group or something. And you're using it in that way.

So I think it can be really powerful to connect and find and have an enjoyable, low-key conversation with a bunch of other writers. But there's not a ton of readers here. But it is a very low-key.

It's like how I wish Twitter worked. ever. Okay, so there's also a curation part of Substack. So Substack actually like encourages organic growth as opposed to Patreon which actively hampers organic growth and silos everything and a poker platform like Reem which is somewhere in the middle but like the substack is they want you to grow they need you to grow because you only get one payment platform like you only get one price unlike patreon that has ten you can have a million tiers you only get One in Substack, so like they need you to grow.

This is why it's great for the publication model. Like they are very, very, very into promoting everyone and having you find more awesome stuff in a way that I don't think I've ever seen except for on Kickstarter. So this is their explore area where like in on the page you can actually look to find cool publications that they recommend. recommending, who is the biggest names in your specific niche.

And so people use this to find new cool things. They also have things like weekly stacks where they send out articles you might like and a bunch of other stuff. They are very interested in getting people to subscribe to more publications and becoming paid clients, paid members.

So you can see. see this is the literature section I am ranked 22 overall which like I mean I won't lie it's a bit of a flex like I'm using myself as an example but they do pet keep lists like this as well one of the most powerful things that I think sub stack does is allow couponing and so patreon as far as I know doesn't do it I don't think ream does it where you can coupon give someone three months off you So give someone six months free, give someone a year free, give someone a lifetime free, give somebody 10% off, 20% off, 30% off. It's like this is when I saw this part.

That's when I said, oh, I get it. I could bring all my people over and give them a bunch of free months. It made complete sense in a way that I've always been frustrated by other sites. Okay, so all of that I say in order to get to this very, very. techie concept of decentralized centralization.

So your publication lives on its own subdomain that is quarantined off pretty much from all of the other ones. But you also get the benefit of the centralization of the substack network, the sub end of notes, and in general of just how they interact all of the things together. One thing to really, that's really I like a lot of people don't like is that all of the publications have roughly the same look to them.

So it feels very natural when people are going from publication to another. They all have the same splash page to sign up. You know what you're doing once you're in the network and it makes friction a lot less. We also get the benefit of their own payment gateway, so if your stuff is already saved, you don't have to have people re-enter it. So it's a really techie concept to talk about all of the things that I just talked about, but combine them together.

I think it gives the best decentralization and centralization in one place. All right, so... Whew. Let's talk about designing your substack, which is probably why most of you are here and getting it to grow. So I want to note, because I don't remember if I put this page up again, you can see how all of this kind of has a similar brand identity.

Like that's one of the most important things that you can do. Like it doesn't have to be mine. Please don't make it like mine.

But like it has to be relatively consistent. Like I am a very visual person. So I look for striking imagery and like kind of like an anti-authoritarian like vibe to like rebellious vibe to what I do.

But like what's important mostly why I bring this up is because like it's consistent. In the same way that like a series has to be consistent branding, like an author probably is consistently branded at least if they don't have a bunch of pen names, you want to keep a similar brand. It's probably the number one thing that you can do on Substack to improve your Substack today. Especially imagery, because I will be honest, people, Substack imagery sucks.

Most people have very bad Substack imagery, and I don't know why, because they have an AI generation, they have stock photos, and still, for some reason, 80 to 90% of Substacks that I run across have really bad imagery. And so, all right, so let's talk actually how to do this. Step one is choosing your category, which is to go back to that.

So what I recommend is go to the Explore tab I talked about before, where they are already curating the best of the best content and the best of the best publications. And pick one of these things, like I see culture, technology, politics, there's about 20 or 30 categories you can pick. And just look at them and see which one vibes with what you're going to do. There's a fiction one, there's literature, there's culture, technology. Wherever your thing fits, start then reading the recommended articles, subscribing to the publications.

Once you subscribe to them, subscribe to the recommendations, all of this will start getting your notes area filtering the people that you follow or subscribe to. You'll start seeing them in your notes feed. You'll start seeing who comments on those things, who they choose to share posts with. A lot of people do roundups. So just like if you start doing those things.

You will start seeing and sort of getting vibes and like a lot of this is like vibes man So I will say this you get two categories But they only you only show up in the first category you choose so while it's okay to have a second category I think I my second one is fiction. I don't show up in fiction I only show up in literature, which is the my number one category you can I recommend looking at this. What they'll say is like X number of subscribers and like some of them like in order to get to the top have a you need a boatload of subscribers to get anywhere. But other ones are like pretty small and like you can actually legitimately get there with with like a well designed page and time. Okay, so we talked about this but in general if you go to the main page and you scroll down You'll see on the right hand side.

It says recommendations And so even if you don't want to subscribe to a publication you can still see the recommendations and I go from there And then you can go to every publication if you go to the about pretty much is it has the owner and Like that's my little one with the little check mark. That's that's another little flex I'm very pretty proud of that one And then you can see what they are what they are reading and also what they are saying on notes So they have a second when you go there Default to their posts then you can see their notes their likes and their reads you can just see what they are following and like Start going through and like drilling down. It does take a bunch of time but like it's, I mean it's pretty fun work if you like the thing that you're writing about because you're basically just reading other people who have really cool thoughts about that thing.

So, here's my rule. People are like, how do I know which ones and who they're targeting? If you can't tell, don't use them.

They're bad. Publications are not bad, but they are bad models. A lot of people got on Substack in the same way that people got on Kindle and you're in like 2008 and you're like how does this book looks like it was drawn it was like the covered by a four-year-old how is it so successful it's like well they've been doing it since the beginning so like they can get away with things that like you can't if you're starting now now you need to see like you need to clearly establish what you're targeting and who you're targeting if they cannot do if you cannot do that easily you probably should not use them as an example This is a very wonky way to talk about your voice. People usually don't like it broken down to them in a step-by-step process, but I'm going to do it because I'm up here. You're over there.

Okay, so if you want to know about your voice, these are the six things that I think go into your voice. There's probably more, but these are the ones that I fit in that post. What is your universal fantasy?

If you have not read seven-figure fiction, go do that. First thing you should do is follow me. Theodore Taylor's Substack?

What are the psychological triggers that inform your fantasy? I'm not saying psychological bad triggers. Like, what are the tropes?

What are the things that you're using to inform that fantasy with your audience? What are the tropes that inform those psychological triggers? What are the themes in your work that reinforce those tropes?

What lived experiences inform those themes? And then what prose style reinforces those lived experiences? Wow, that takes all of the magic out of writing, but like, I mean, it's not, that's what I think goes into voice, and just time and doing it over and over and over again.

If you don't know the answers to these questions, probably just keep writing things, and eventually you'll be like, wow, I've written ten things, and they all have these three themes. Now, maybe that's a thing that I should follow. The reason I have this publication is because I have been writing about the same topic for 10 years, and I was like, I'm probably going to keep doing it for 10 years, like if I've done it for 10. So I was like, probably that's a good use of my time. The nice thing is if you decide in six months that you want to rebrand, you can do that, and Substack's pretty forgiving of that.

okay step three brand identity um so how long are your posts a lot of people recommend five fifteen hundred words or less mine are over five thousand words i mean i think it's taste to order but probably probably 1500 words is what most like when people ask what an episode of a serial should be it's about 1500 words like it feels like just it feels right but it might not be right I'm what kind of imagery will you use what is your unique selling point what is your seven word bio so this is the seven word bio I help writers build sustainable thriving businesses that's seven words I used to say build sustainable businesses but I was like that's only six words that's not going to be very informative people are going to be confused so like I made it seven words I think and so what is yours this can be a thing for fiction or nonfiction I've watched everyone that I've ever seen who can put their thing into seven seven words has really really really like improved their business because the first thing that you want to do when you meet someone is know very succinctly what they're doing the next thing part of this in brand identity is the logo the wordmark and the title so the top left is the logo the middle is the wordmark word mark, it's the words, and also the title is like part of the word mark. I did not know what a word mark was until I started this, so it's just like the branding of your title and like what font you're using. Okay, step four, about page. This is the first paragraph of my about page.

It is possibly the single most important thing about your publication, except that please don't use ugly imagery because it will make me sad. It is that you can see the universal fantasy at the bottom. We strive to give authors agency in a world that too often seems intent on stripping it away. That is like the entire reason for my publication to exist is to give authors agency.

The name of my publication is in there. And then it's very, very, very quickly by reading this paragraph, you should be able to be like, that is the vibe that I want. Or no, that's not the vibe that I want. I am not everyone's vibe and that is really okay. And Substack is all about having niche vibes and really like finding the things that resonate with you.

After that one paragraph, the rest of it should reinforce that. So if I'm trying to give you agency, I better know what I'm talking about. So the rest of this is kind of about what I have done and all of the ways that I've been able to build my business, what I do to be like, do you like me yet? Yay! Okay, so all of that then goes into the short bio, which is this one sentence, which is the singular most important sentence in all of Substack, so I'm glad I made it really small.

It is the distillation in one sentence. sentence what your whole publication is about. It's going to be a lot of the universal fantasy, but this is the one that people will see everywhere. When people look at your publication, when people like to get like mini vibes from from it like this is the sentence they're going to read which is why it is so important why did i put it at the end just like a blurb it's easier to write the blurb after you have the book and so as you i i find it easier to start broad and like distill it down after i know and i do my editing you can do it the other way like i don't care like do it however way vibes for you um step six this is if you're not doing sub stack and you're like i don't want to do subs like i just want to do a blog this is the key to to doing a blog is write five to ten, they call them epic blog posts, but at least any kind of post before you get started so people can read through and you start getting those numbers up and then it will start pushing it to more and more people. So I would publish them all in like one week.

This is very analogous to like how a lot of people will publish a three to five to seven book series at the beginning of a month in KU so they can take advantage of the entire month except that you're doing this not in KU. because it's Substack not Kindle. Trying to maintain a consistent voice, become involved in notes, Substack is the thing called office hours which seems to happen randomly.

If it happens, it happens on Thursday at 10 a.m. Pacific Time, 1 p.m. Eastern Time, but it's magic whether they do it or not.

If you have been on Substack before and you have then you know that like sometimes the magic office hours fairy comes and sometimes they choose something completely different and I don't have that I do not know how or why they do it that way. It's just their vibes. Okay so welcome emails. You do not get an autoresponder with Substack. It is one of the big failings of Substack.

It is very annoying. They give you one welcome email and the one that they produce for you is ungodly bad. It's like the coffee in Paris, it's just this Paris is just ungodly bad and like so in the same way like Like, these welcome emails are not great.

So what you need to do is, for free subscribers, tell them why they should go paid. Tell them why they should go paid in every post as well. Don't make it a big part, but, like, make it a part.

Then for paid subscribers, make it easy for them to find all of the reasons, because the most depressing part is that people unsubscribe and unstop paying over time, and so you have to, like, replace that money and more money unless you don't want your money to go down. I know because some months I'll make like a $2,000 more and then other months I'll make like right now it's like a hundred dollars more and it's like I'm putting out the same content it's just more people are unsubscribing or I'm paying their member benefits and I don't know why. Eight. The main reason to think about Substack, I think, is because you can import your emails to this platform and then give them a free trial to your membership to see what they would get by being subscribed.

So free trials and such are a big thing in tech, and this is a way to just say, hey, I'm giving you a really nice free thing that's going to have a ton of value. If you like my email list, which is mostly promotional, you'll probably like my Substack, which is like... a free chapter a week and a bunch of value x y and z other things so um there's a so people often say then like well can i really move my list between these two things and like there is a a um doctrine of like uh an interoperability so you can move things from just like you can move subs from from MailChimp to MailerLite.

I'm not a lawyer, but like my understanding is that you can move them from MailChimp to Substack. It's like, it's a similar thing. But you should ask a lawyer. lawyer if you really want opinions I will never not say I'm not a lawyer on camera but that is how I view things in general that is how my team views things in general section step 9 section so this is one of my favorite bonuses for substax so I do not like being committed to doing things long term so but I have a lot of content so what I did is I created a bunch of different sections and each of those sections is a free is a story or a book or something that I wrote that is available to paying members. So it's free to paying members.

And I just kept making sections. And each one of these sections, I think I have 20 or so, is either free to everyone or a paid member benefit. It was really hard to make this thing. But I'll tell you, it works for me every day.

I no longer have to upload. the vessel or worst thing in the universe. The biggest thing that I do not like about Patreon is their reader is garbage and the only legitimate way you can give something to somebody on Patreon is to give them a PDF and I hate that somebody could pay $5 or $1 and get all of the PDFs. So what I like about this is how I set it up is you can do a PDF but each post is embedded on Substack so they cannot copy and paste it and get it. I mean, I guess they get copy and paste it, but like they can't easily get it off there.

They have to read it on platforms. What really is a subscription? I spent so many, so much of my time agonizing about how I could give a book to a, to a fan who may have only gotten paid me $5 and then still also expect other people to pay. So this is how I do it.

Like if you want to pay me $5 a month, you can read a bunch of my work, but you have to do it on the app. If you want to buy it, you can buy it and then you own it forever. And that's how the sections work for me.

Last one that I'm going to go over, although there's a lot more in that post, is about pages. So just like any other website, you get the ability to create different pages. I like to create a page for all of the work that you get for signing up for a paid member. So I have fiction and nonfiction benefits, but you can also create other kinds of pages, landing pages and such. such a pretty Like it's very very limited the functionality of what you can do on Substack and that is intentional but you can absolutely make these pages and I highly suggest you go look at my Substack others and like play around with the pages.

One of the coolest features is the podcast if you do a podcast the arbitrage on podcasts are just incredible right now because no one's doing them and they show up in your reader really easily. When should you go paid? Today, I don't know, like you should start letting people, if someone wants to pay you money, you should let them, as long as you're going to continue to make the work.

You can, however, turn on pledges, which is people who pledge your support before you actually have to pay for it. So you can continue to be free and just let people like build up the pledge and then like turn it on when you have enough money to justify it. And like that can work for you as well.

People ask me what if I don't want to. have anything behind a paywall. The most successful Substack publication of all time is this letters from an American. They have nothing behind a paywall. All of their stuff is just people supporting because they want this person to keep doing the work.

And that is the biggest reason. I asked people for like several months why they would pay money to me for stuff that I give away for free generally. And they're like, I just want to support you doing this work.

I need, like, I want to support you. And when people want to support you again, You should let them. I'm most so all of my work come up.

Hold that story. Let me finish this part. So people ask me about fiction. This is my actual analytics.

So you can see that setting up a direct sales environment is nonfiction. Magic is fiction. And they have like roughly fiction. Fiction and nonfiction have roughly the same number of reads, so I thought I would have a massively fewer reads for my fiction work than my nonfiction work, but like, I just don't see it.

I see that both of these things are enjoyed by roughly the same amount of people. So I do think it is harder to market fiction on Substack. But when asked, is there a market for fiction on Substack, I would say it pretty definitively says, at least for my work, that there is a market for fiction just like there is for nonfiction. And the people like reading them just about the same amount.

So final thoughts. Memberships are the hardest business model to get started. I'm sorry. Like, I want to give you better, like, rosier outlook, but it's just true.

Like, that's why you should be doing it while you're doing other parts of direct sales. So it's just, like, as it's growing, it's growing, and it's working for you over time. Substack is the best for organic growth. So the reason why no other platforms work for me is I had to bring everyone to the party. And, like, I don't want people to all I don't want to have to spend time marketing my fiction, my substack, when I want people to buy my books.

And there was a thing I just never could could get over. I just couldn't get over the two. Like I would, I have to spend months doing my Substack, but really I also want to release books.

So Substack allowed me to focus on organic growth. Um, and uh, I made, but I made sure that it was designed to to work on Substack. So like I designed a publication that was made for organic growth on Substack. Just like if you're going to make a public a book that is made for KU, like you would want to follow all of the tropes and things that work to take advantage of their organic network, you also want to do that on Substack if you can.

But you can also build a recommendation engine to work. that is our book that is our quiz hey that's the sub stack that i just pulled all of this information from that's pretty nice of me it'll also be we'll also send it to you after the the thing if you joined the mailing list always that lovely question that someone asks that person first can you go to the mic just because i know they're going to ask me to go to the mic if you Sorry, I just feel like I'm drinking from the fire hose of all the information. I just didn't understand because you were showing the one that nothing was behind a paywall, so I was asking for your author stack, is it free or a paywall?

It used to be. So the paywall, how my paywall used to do was it is free and after three weeks everything goes behind a paywall. Now most of the posts are free, but some of them are behind the paywall. All of the books are behind a paywall, so it's not an either-or thing.

Each section is pretty much behind. Every book that I have is behind a paywall. But I have a serial called the God's Verse Chronicles, which is a weekly serial that I do, which is free to everyone. The more free things you have, the better, like, traction you're going to get.

But no one... Fewer people will pay you if everything's free, so it's kind of like you have to do both. You have to operate... You're putting some new free content every so often and then putting new paid content as well. Yes, if you want to see how...

So Emma Gannon, she runs a thing called The Hyphen, and she... When she got 1,000 paid subscribers, she started to go exclusively behind a paywall for almost all of her thing. I would say that is a, I mean, most people won't get there, but, like, that's a pretty good number.

If you have that many people, I am vain. I want the most amount of people to read my books. work so like I only have 175 paid subscribers so like I have 10,000 to 12,000 read my thing and like that's more important for me than the money that I'm making the expense so my easiest one to get to get behind is if you want to do a paywall is after three weeks everything will be behind a paywall or start with the paywall and then say it will be free after three weeks okay thank you you're welcome Yes, can you, in the section where you talked about your writer's voice, you had the seven steps.

You mentioned the title of a book, and I didn't write it down. Oh, Seven Figure Fiction. Also, Theodora Taylor, who wrote it, has a sub stack called Universal Fantasy, which is very, very good.

Thank you. I didn't know that Reem existed until this week and I'm curious about it. What do you think about splitting audiences? Bad idea? Good idea?

I mean, Monica always talks about going wide with your subscription. She's like, it's a nightmare. I would never do it.

But then she did it. And so, like, I mean, I don't know. Like, I feel like it's easier to go to where people are and let them pay the way that they want to pay already.

So if you're going to be wide with all of your stuff, you should, like, really. really be wide. To clarify, I was talking about splitting them.

So like for instance, fiction on Reem. Oh yeah, that's what Monica does. She has a fiction on Reem and a nonfiction here. I am lazy.

I know it doesn't seem that way sometimes because I did like 100 things all the time. But like I... If it's good enough for Playboy to have fiction and nonfiction on their thing, like it's good enough for me. That's what I said at the very beginning. I'm like, if you can have those two things work in concert with each other, then probably somebody will like, like an author, some amount of them will like it.

like fantasy and like author news. And like, that's how I did it. But fiction is a lot easier to do like multiple tiers of.

The one thing that I will say for splitting fiction is I would, I mean, I love reading more than Patreon, but. But for fiction, like, Patreon integrates with Royal Road and Wattpad. And so, like, it makes it easier to use the organic growth on those free platforms and then pull them into a, like, Patreon-free thing.

But, like, man, it's really hard to not own the payment processing. Hi there, so I'm in, when I started my Substack I started using tags. It's very similar to helping authors, so kind of a good vibe there.

When it comes to doing tags, how do they affect visibility? Because I know it's not like a hashtag, you can actually search for it or something, I'm not sure what that looks like. Yeah, it's on. On your public, it's, tags are really on your publication. They're not like outside of that.

So yeah, it's not going to help your visibility outside the publication. But people are, like when people read a post, they'll, like it will show the tag and they can click on it and show other tags. So it's a way for navigation within the publication itself. Yep. And then quickly, for using Notes, have you been, when it comes to Notes, do you comment on other people's Notes and do you find some interaction that way to kind of build relationships?

Yeah, I absolutely comment on it. I don't think that it's really, if Notes is a platform that's great for publish, for like getting your own traction, but it is great for like making other people's traction. If you post really, it's all...

Building relationships, yeah. Right, it's like everything that was, that worked on Facebook 10 years ago that hasn't worked for eight years now works on Substack and you can be a real... real genie and like seem like a genius by like just being like I'm gonna try this silly strategy that worked on done on Facebook and like magically it works now thank you yep last one there's a lot here that's really appealing my question is the cynic in me thinks that in two years this is gonna go the way of medium how can you what what gives you hope that it'll last you own the data like you want you can medium says that you have a publication, but you really don't, like you really, even if you have a newsletter, it's like their newsletter. So like the, I mean, and I talked to somebody, I don't know, like maybe it'll end tomorrow.

Like maybe Amazon will end tomorrow. Like, I don't know, like maybe the internet will. fry.

But I own the data. As long as I pull out the data once a month, I have only lost 30 days of growth. And so I don't have any loyalty to Substack except to say, man, there's a lot of arbitrage here right now in this moment. And yes.

So I don't know if I have faith. I have faith in owning the data.

Transcript for:Exploring Substack and Direct Sales Strategies

Transcript for:
Exploring Substack and Direct Sales Strategies