My number one reason for not joining Substack sooner
And it might not be what you're thinking (time, never enough time)
‘Time to write’ is firmly on the Unicorn side of the wish list, but it isn’t the main reason I’ve not yet ventured onto Substack as a writer.
The number one reason is …discoverability.
For the record, there is much to like about Substack. I’ve been watching it closely for the last few months, in large part because my clients are writers and often ask me ‘should I start a Substack’.
The promise of being paid directly (on time!) for your work, without having to subject yourself to the spin-cycle pitching machinery of traditional print and digital media, is certainly alluring. And while I’ve been skulking around the digital corridors of the platform, I’ve been struck by the thoughtful and supportive way in which readers (who are often also writers) interact with what they are reading.
Comments are detailed, people’s responses are nuanced and sensitive. Compared to the rough-and-tumble (putting it politely) of other established social media platforms it is a sanctuary.
However, I have been worrying at a loose thread in the platform’s promise of writers’ independence for months, and have come no closer to an answer to the question: how do writers get discovered?
There is a small degree of discoverability built into the platform with restacking and notes helping readers put articles they’ve enjoyed into the orbit of their own subscribers - assuming they have any - but this is relatively unsophisticated and not a reliable source of discovery for most writers.
The only way for readers to otherwise discover new writers is to search for articles using key words in much the same way as we’d use Google. Finding what we really want to read in this way is onerous and time-consuming and will become increasingly difficult as the number of writers on Substack increases.
Looking at the accounts I’ve been following over the last few months, it’s clear that those doing well (especially in terms of paid subscribers) have been able to funnel people over to Substack from a pre-existing audience.
Whether it’s from published books, a large audience on another social media platform, local forums and contacts, a large email list, or a national profile as a leader in a particular space, success on Substack relies largely on writers occupying significant ‘real estate’ outside the app.
What this means for most writers is that Substack is an ‘as well as’, not ‘instead of’ platform, especially if they want to generate any income from it.
Before it becomes economical to produce exclusive content behind the paywall, writers need to have a base of free subscribers to convert over to paid subscription with the promise of extra value from a writer they already trust.
But where do the free subscribers come from? The writer has to funnel them there from outside the app.
How does the writer do that? They have to work for free, building another audience somewhere else with content that demonstrates their worth.
Phew. That is A LOT of work before anyone is getting paid anything.
But hopefully that’s also about to change.
This week, Chris Best, Co-Founder and CEO of Substack, posted ‘An Algorithm for Quality’ in which he explained that the development of the new app, plus ‘improvements to support discovery across the Substack network’ are the platform’s current focus.
Yes, I’m afraid the much-maligned ‘algorithms’ are making their way onto Substack, although Best was at great pains to emphasise that these algorithms will appeal to the ‘best’ versions of ourselves, rather than the algorithms we are used to that drive and feed our ever-shrinking attention spans in a perpetual death-loop.
Best writes,
‘We are committed to building technologies that cater to the version of you that sits at the breakfast table on a Sunday morning and thinks carefully about what you’ll spend the next 30 minutes reading.’
How long it will be until this virtual enlightenment is unleashed on us all is unclear, and of course it remains to be seen how successful Substack will be with their lofty aims, but for writers this definitely feels like a positive move.
If the promises Substack are making bear fruit, increased discoverability means it will become easier for writers with small platforms outside Substack to find more readers inside Substack. The responsibility for whether or not we then get paid will be entirely ours, dependent on whether our work is good, we prove our worth, and our readers believe we are worth the investment.
