A Year And A Half On Substack. This Is What I have learned.

I joined Substack three years ago today. It took another year and a half to press publish for the first time. Boy oh boy was I optimistic. This was it! I was leaving my weekly podcast and I was going to take all the time that it took to oversee weekly episodes being made and booked and researched for, and commit those hours to being a writer. Substack was going to be the place where I cultivated community around my writing. I wanted agency over my own output and everything I made, be it a video or an essay or an interview, and unlike social media, Substack could even contribute to my income.

In the back of my mind I worried that promising a regular newsletter was perpetuating the pressure that I had put on myself by trying to deliver a weekly podcast. But I felt strongly, having looked at other people on Substack, reading the welcome letters, the lists of things you GOT from them in exchange for subscriptions, that I needed to be able to provide something definitive.

So I joined, with the promise of my weekly newsletter The Rooster, putting my recommendations behind a paywall at the end. I managed to bring some subscribers with me, via my pre-existing mailing list. I noticed a sense of unease among regular Substackers, at a wave of new high profile users coming in, with their big databases of followers. Was I one of these? I didn’t like the feeling of being an imposter. I persisted, hoping that my output could prove my intentions were pure; I wanted to write and connect with other writers. I threw everything at the wall. I started holding regular Subscribers scheduled chats, which felt like large excitable Whatsapp groups. I recorded video updates. Published my first gift guide. Posted Winter playlists, recommended my favourite jeans and books and the perfect can of soup. I did a themed month around ‘Movement’ in which I interviewed writers and boxers and yoga instructors and my sister, and wrote a piece about my becoming a footballer in my forties.

Meanwhile on Substack itself, everything was changing. The arrival of the app, and of Notes and of a system of followers that sat adjacent to subscribers meant that over the course of my first 18 months, Substack essentially changed form, from being a writing platform to a social platform. Now, if you open the mobile app and go to any Substack users profile, instead of being served a list of their posts, the first thing you see is ‘Activity’. The Notes feed is king. Or as this Ditch The Template article says,

The front door of your Substack has moved. People are meeting you through notes now.

Every single article on growth I have read for this piece ( and believe me there are endless articles on this theme; articles on how to write articles on how to gain subscribers from writing articles, Substack is eating itself ) says that engaging in Notes is the single thing that changes subscriber growth fastest. The long articles are still there but they are now second place. Substack is about community and conversation. If you’re the best writer in the world, you can’t just post an article and fuck off and expect subscriber growth, or even expect new people to see it, because Substack only rewards you if you are an active participant on the app. So in order to be successful on here, you have to show up consistently, which is a nice way of saying, be glued to your screen all day. The how-to-grow articles say that ideally you should post three to five notes a day. Two to three hours apart. You should host Substack lives and scheduled chats. One even said that before you post a long form piece, if you spend a few hours restacking and commenting on other peoples notes, the algorithm will boost your piece more.

I get it. Social media is an attention economy. But there is a conflict there for me. Demanding attention is antithetical to writing as a practise. Writing, especially of the fictional, literary kind, is an interior practise. You need no distraction, complete immersion. You need time and headspace to allow the ideas to drift in. Then you need more time and head space to transmute those ideas into a written pieces. I think that there is something to be said for Substack being a platform that at the very least doesn’t punish writers who just want to write something, post it up and then go back into their cave again.

As for me, in the last eighteen months, my free subscribers have grown slowly and steadily but my paid subscribers sit at the same number, somewhere between 200 and 250.

I spent a long time trying to figure out how to serve these paid subscribers without compromising my original intention of using my time on here to WRITE. I learned quickly (after the ‘my favourite jeans’ piece, that writing snappy shopping lists felt too jarring next to trying to write long form pieces about memory or longing) that I didn’t want to turn Changes into a magazine or a culture platform. I could activate my paywall, only post pieces behind there, send out special offers for subscription discounts, make my Substack into a business and a brand and thus commit to a regularity that felt frightening. But how to do that when you want to write personal essays?

Then I met Cariad Lloyd when she came to one of my literary salons and she said, you have to treat your paid subscribers like the best type of friends. They are invested in you. They don’t need to hear from you all the time. They are just happy to hear from you when they do.

This helped enormously and somewhere after hearing it, I chose to accept that I would write when I please. When I have something to say, to share. I had to hope that the paid subscribers could get enough from the quality over the quantity of the writing.

In the last six months, whilst finishing a novel and judging a literary prize, my output has declined. I publish my newsletter The Rooster monthly these days and that feels manageable. I haven’t written a long form piece for six months. But I have found great relief in realising I could invite other people to contribute! Now I publish the Changes Interview once a month, where people answer six questions on change. And now I have more time on my hands, I look forward to being able to write more essays on here. For better or worse, Substack continues to evolve, but It remains a place that I can write freely and openly. That feels valuable to me.

The love of lists on Substack relentless. Case in point here I am, listing.

I have busy and less busy periods. The summer is sort of a write off. Excuse the pun. But Autumn feel dense with ideas and inspiration.

Substack has been a useful vessel to learn what I am and what I am not when it comes to writing. I am not a writer of hot takes or even think pieces on cultural moments. My most well received pieces are ones that arrive from a sense of bubbling confusion or frustration inside me that I need to appease, ie the pieces where I am really trying to answer questions of myself or something going on in my life…

The answer rarely arrives neatly on having written the piece but there is a sense in writing it, that I am closer to the core of why I’m feeling the way I feel..

My piece My Nonexistent Daughter touched people. People from magazines reached out to publish it. Substack feels like a safe place which is bezerk because it’s an online platform, but something about intentionally bearing it to the public, to people who haven’t sought it out off their own back, felt too vulnerable to me. So thats a learning; Substack, for me, is an incubator for personal revelatory essays and allows me to write in a way that I couldn’t for press.

I learnt a valuable lesson with this same piece regarding copyright. The piece centred around a postcard I own, which depicts an illustration by an artist, a postcard which I took a photo of and posted with the essay, crediting the artist. I genuinely thought this was enough. The artist reached out explaining I hadn’t asked permission. I took the photo down. Soon after I received a letter from a lawyer accusing me of infringing copyright and seeking thousands of pounds worth of damages. Substack could not help.

Substack is confronting in the way it asks you to be the arbiter of your works worth. The question to put a piece behind a paywall begs you to put yourself in the chair of a fellow Substack user and ask yourself to look at you and your writing objectively; would I pay to read this?

The positioning of the paywall itself can be remarkably stressful. Put it just before a personal disclosure and you can be accused of ‘showing hole’ as Shon Faye so brilliant articulated in her newsletter here.

I am quite over personal disclosure as a mode. I have found that I get the biggest subscriber booms when I reveal intriguing details about my personal life (just before the paywall). I have taken to calling this personal disclosure “showing hole”. A joke but it is pretty much the same marketing model you’d use on OnlyFans.

Put the paywall right at the start and it’s just infuriating for the reader, put it too far in and they might not bother to try and finish the article at all.

The access to data around subscriber growth is also jarring. When it’s going well it’s great, but the other way round; a graph depicting the slow declining popularity of your writing? No thanks!

Sometimes I find myself writing a personal piece about mothering or marriage or growing older or womanhood and I get this sense of a hall of mirrors.. my little thoughts refracting with the thousands of other thoughts from the women I follow writing about the same thing..I am one of a myriad of souls wringing themselves dry through writing on here..

I still haven’t cracked how to do community well - I love the scheduled chats I do with my subscribers. (People in there are kind and uplifting to each other. This creates a feeling of safety which means people share their feelings openly). But I need to keep working to strengthen the sense of community in Changes.

The emails from Stripe telling me I have been paid by Substack, no matter how small the amount is, always feel weighted with meaning. They are little prods, reminding me that there are individual people out there who have made the choice to financially support my writing. They never fail to make me feel grateful.

My favourite piece I’ve written on here is called One Note At A Time, a reflection on a trip to the hospital with my son for an MRI scan. I wrote it very fast as I was experiencing a cascade of emotions that I needed to get down on the page. Now I have it forever, that day. There are definitely better written pieces, but for me, the piece feels like a precious old photo. A portal into my past. Something I will treasure forever.

I have learnt so much on Substack. Whether it be practical life hacks like this piece from Lena Dunham’s GTG which introduced me to using the notes app as a filing cabinet for life, or Jasper Nathaniel’s reports illuminating the experience of Palestinian residences in the occupied West Bank, whether it’s the quietly devastating wisdom of Philippa Perry on her Ask Philippa Perry Substack or Patti Smith’s late night musings, this is a place that continues to be sustained by smart, interesting curious weird and wonderful people.

My favourite literary and personal writers Jeanette Winterson, George Saunders, Hanif Kureshi, Shon Faye, Lena Dunham, Laura Kennedy, Katherine May, Eva Wiseman, Naoise Dolan, Clover Stroud, Jessie Cave

Favourite writers on politics and injustice - Naomi Klein, Afua Hirsch, Caroline Criado Perez, Shon Faye

Favourite music writers - Nick Hornby, Laura Snapes

My favourite for lifestyle and culture - India Knight, Sophie Heawood, Pandora Sykes, Jess Pan.

Favourite for news and politics - Infinite Jaz, Tina Brown, Londoncentric, Channel 4 News