How I changed my working life by moving to Substack

The numbers speak for themselves

As a writer, I spent six years slogging away on Patreon, only to move to Substack and quadruple my subscriber number in under four months. I’m no mathematician, but I like those numbers.

“That should be on a billboard!” was the reaction when I first told this mini success story at a recent Substack Writers’ party. The person who gave that response was a friend of the co-founder, to contextualise the enthusiasm. But nonetheless – I shared the excitement, and want to share the ‘how’. And as my billboard is being repaired at the moment (ahem), I decided to do what I literally do best and explain why I think the numbers jump happened for me right here on Substack.

Some background: As a journalist of 15-plus years and a recent reluctant freelancer (read: the magazine I was editing closed down) I decided back in 2017 that, to keep myself writing regularly until work picked up, I would join Patreon. Setting up a blog felt passé, and in lieu of another visible platform, I signed up. My goal was (and still is) to bring the glossy magazine read that I’d worked so hard to curate – that indulgent, entertaining and escapist me-time experience; online, given the amount of print titles winding up all around me.

The promise, from Patreon, was simple: A place to write and charge patrons for that writing, which creamed a 10 percent fee off your monthly take-home. I was okay with 10 percent, I reasoned, and so I started writing. 

A few months in, I had over a hundred paid subscribers and was thrilled – I had bothered my modest 20K Instagram audience enough that some of them signed up, along with friends, family and industry peers. 

Fast forward about five years and hundreds of posts later, and in spite of the promising start, I’d plateaued in a major way. I had thoroughly rinsed my Instagram following many, many times over and whoever hadn’t signed up wasn’t going to at this point. Friends and family were either happily paying or avoiding eye contact at the Christmas dinner table. Growth, now, was painfully slow. 

Each time a new post went out to my audience, I’d lose a few subscribers. It was almost like the mailshot was a reminder to them to unsubscribe – each time I’d press ‘post’ I’d shudder to think how many unsubs I’d get. Finding new subscribers was the hardest part, however. In a world where livelihoods now rely on engagement online, in many forms, no one shares for free anymore. Unless something is heavily click-bait driven, announcing a celebrity death or entering a competition of some sort, you may forget it. Your post called Why Everyone At Fashion Week Looks So Bored (a real piece of mine, yes) won’t inspire much sharing unless you happen to have direct quotes from Anna Wintour herself in it. Hence, the plateau.

Aside from the subscriber road block, I was becoming increasingly tired of the lack of updates and the creator user experience – having written on Wordpress for years before I worked in magazines, I was used to a certain level of pliability and adaptability in how I wrote and how it would look. Patreon was polling its creators but few meaningful changes materialised. Oh, and another *minor* thing – the 10 percent skim off the top? Between the jigs and the reels it used to come up to 18 or 19 percent, with additional charges that weren’t made plain enough to me at the start. Not cool. Not cool at all.

Just when I was about to jack it all in and retrain as a school teacher (anyone who knows me would rather send their children to be taught by Patrick from Spongebob Squarepants) I saw a post on Farrah Storr’s Instagram.

Farrah, former editor of Elle UK and Cosmopolitan, was announcing her new role as Head of Partnerships for Substack. I knew her a little from a chance encounter we’d had at a speaking event she did in Dublin, and we’d kept in touch online. I was intrigued… If she was on board, it felt like Substack might just be in the business of putting creators first.

Reader, as the statistic I revealed at the top of this post would indicate: I was right.

And I’m dying to tell you why. Here are the six key things I believe Substack does to level-up the creative experience for those making content, and to bring new voices to wider audiences all the time – some insight into the jump in my own numbers.

The charges are what they are, with full transparency

There’s no denying it: We writers need to know how much we earn. For many of us, a steady income source like one from Substack is the only ‘reliable’ money we get. And let’s be honest here – the majority of us aren’t exactly popping on our diamond slippers to shuffle into our seaview home offices every day, are we? Money is still taboo to talk about, but that doesn’t negate its importance. Substack knows this.

You can be easily found and shared

The biggest issue for me with Patreon was the discovery block. Substack has multiple channels along which a profile, piece or quote can be shared. There’s the Notes feature, there’s the Recommendations feature (after you subscribe to one Substack, that writer’s own recommendations appear immediately for your perusal) and there’s the option for earning free subscription time via referrals. 

There’s Substack Reads, which brings writers to new eyes, among many other routes to new markets. Substack even provides shareable imagery based on your post automatically, making the social media side of things easier (particularly for those less au fait with the whole thing).

Writers have almost endless personalisation options

In the ‘back end’ as the tech kids say, there are ways to customise your user experience. You can change not only the look and feel of your homepage, but the way you speak to your audience via email, the note that appears at the top/bottom of each post, and even the audience receiving what you create. You can impose a paywall wherever you like, or not at all. You can gift subscriptions. There are endless ways to alter the features to suit yourself and your readers, however…

…There aren’t TOO many

Sometimes, choice fatigue gets us right when we need it least. And when you want to clear your mind to write, too much faffing can be counterintuitive. So while yes, you can change things, a lot of the groundwork (donkey work) is done for you. You have choice, but not to the point where you’re frazzled and frozen with indecision. Goldilocks would like it here, I feel.

The environment is a supportive one

Cross posting and cross promotion is encouraged among writers and is something you see often. It’s an environment of support, rather than competition, which I think is fostered from above: The company as a whole promoting the welfare and success of its writers gives writers permission to seed that positivity out to the wider network.

The Substack app is incredibly good, and so is the customer experience

While yes, it’s clear that Substack champions writers, it’s also clear they’ve put thought into the paying customers’ experience too. The app is intuitive, the feed of posts (with the read time note, the ‘paid’ flag and the reminder of just how far into a post you’ve read) is expert level, and it is beyond easy to sign up and pay for your favourite writers’ work.

I’m by no means the most-subscribed-to person (very far from it, in fact) and my goal of bringing the women’s magazine experience online is still a work in progress, but I’m far happier with my work life now that I’m reaching more people and see potential in it, too. I write, I engage with a supportive network of readers and writers, I get paid. It’s transactional but with such strong meaning to it.

This aspect of my work is now less about screaming into a void and hoping someone will pay you for the privilege of listening, and more about confidently using my skill as a writer and knowing its value will be rewarded. It takes talent, sure, and it absolutely takes hard graft. But support from the platform you’re helping to build is a key part of the creation puzzle, and Substack has the missing piece.

A.

Photo by Shelby Miller on Unsplash