Everything I've learned from failing on Substack

Another day, another Substack Note from someone who joined the platform yesterday and is now celebrating their 200th paid subscriber. Or someone who joined last week and has just quit their job to Substack full time.

I mean… is it just me who’s currently being bombarded with this kind of thing every time I log in here?

Because, don’t get me wrong: I’m happy for all of those people and Ima let them finish. No, seriously: good for them. I don’t blame them in the slightest for wanting to shout about their success, because you better believe that if I had 200 paid subscribers, I would be shouting about it. I would never shut up about it. I would literally change my name to Amber ‘200 Paid Subscribers’ Eve. Yes I would. Try me.

But, lately it seems all the algorithm ever shows me is these un-relatable success stories, and, I’m not going to lie, they always leave me feeling just a little bit deflated. A little bit less than. A little bit, ‘WTF, how are all these people signing up to Substack and having overnight success with it, while I’ve been here for YEARS and no one’s ever heard of me?’

No, seriously: HOW?

So, if you’re in that position too, and your Notes section is making you feel like you’re the only person in the world who isn’t killing it on Substack, then allow me to de-influence you by saying that I’m not either.

I’m not even remotely ‘killing it’ on here.

I joined this platform in October 2022, and I’ve been steadily losing subscribers ever since. Sure, there’s been the odd spike in subscriptions, and I even hit the ‘Rising In’ and ‘Bestseller in Fiction’ lists a couple of times (go me!), but despite what that might suggest, I have never been a Substack ‘bestseller’ (Which means someone who has more than 100 paid subscribers), and my stats for the last year look like this:

I’m like… the opposite of ‘aspirational’. I am un-aspirational. An anti-influencer. Wait: is that a thing? Should I make that my thing?!

Anyway.

Before this all starts to sound horribly self-pitying, (because, believe it or not, that’s not what this post is supposed to be about…), let me just say that absolutely none of this is remotely surprising to me, and I’m not here for pity. Because, last week I sat down and had a good look at my newsletter. I scrolled through the archive, doing my best to try to view it through the eyes of someone who’d never seen it before, and I did a deep dive into the analytics in a bid to figure out which posts worked, and which ones didn’t.

(Spoiler alert: it was most of them. Most of them didn’t work. D’oh!)

My conclusion from all of this?

Yeah, I probably wouldn’t subscribe to my newsletter either, tbh.

So, instead of feeling sorry for myself, and wondering why other people are signing up and immediately shooting to Substack stardom, while I languish here un-noticed, here’s everything I’ve learned from failing on Substack…