Created by Randy Ingermanson - "the Snowflake Guy"
America's Mad Professor of Fiction Writing

Advanced Fiction Writing Blog

Why I’m Switching to Substack

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in Marketing

Successful Fiction Writing = Organizing + Creating + Marketing

I blog weekly on one of the above three topics, alternating between them. This week, I’m blogging on Marketing. My topic today is Substack, a marketing platform for writers. 

What is Substack and Why Should You Care?

Substack started out as an email service provider that was free to all writers. Most email service providers let you start out free, and then they start charging you when you have “enough” subscribers. But Substack is free to all writers, no matter how many subscribers you have, with one very important caveat. 

What’s the caveat? Substack makes no money unless you also earn money. If you earn money, they take a percentage. And Substack makes it easy for writers to “monetize” their writing. Writers can split up their content into a “free tier” and a “paid tier”. The hope is that they’ll attract fans with their free content and then some of those will find it worthwhile to pay for the premium stuff. This model is a lot like Patreon. Substack handles the money transaction and takes a 10% fee, plus the credit card charges. 

The most successful writer on Substack is said to be Heather Cox Richardson, an American history professor who writes a daily column on history and politics. She has more than 3 million subscribers, and is said to earn somewhere between $500k and $1M per month. Yes, per month. 

Substack is More Than Just Email

But Substack has evolved quite a lot over the years. It’s not just an email service provider anymore. It allows you to organize your content into “Publications”—each of which is effectively a mini-website, hosted right there on Substack at no charge to you. Part of that “Publication” can be a blog. Part can be a podcast. You can set up Chats with your subscribers. You can do Live Video. You can post “Notes” in a social-media feed hosted by Substack. And you can use Substack’s Recommendation feature to recommend the Publications of writers you like; writers who like you can in turn recommend your Publication. Substack itself will recommend Publications to readers who might be interested. 

The important thing is that all of this is free to the writer, unless they’re earning money. That’s what caught my attention a few years ago. Free is good. I have used a number of email service providers over the years. I used to use MailChimp. Several years ago, I switched to ConvertKit. Both of these are expensive. I have a bit more than 1000 subscribers for my fiction newsletter and blog. This blog, the Advanced Fiction Writing Blog, has around 6600 subscribers. And with the features I currently use on ConvertKit, all those subscribers costs me a fair bit. 

I do like ConvertKit. It’s a powerful tool for serious marketers who produce a lot of content. But I haven’t been producing that much lately. So I don’t get much value out of  the terrific features ConvertKit has. I use just enough of those features that I have to pay. So I’ve been thinking about other options for the past few years. 

Switching Takes A Lot of Work

Let’s be clear that setting up a Publication on Substack takes some serious effort. Recently, I’ve had a lot more time for my writing. I decided a few weeks ago that it was time to take a hard look at Substack and see if it would be worth all the work to switch. 

So I took a couple of hours and did some online research. What I learned is that Substack has made a lot of progress in the last couple of years. As I noted above, it ties together email delivery, a website, a blog, a podcast, live-streaming video, and social media. With that pesky “monetization.” 

But it all looked very confusing, so I decided to invest in a course. The one I chose is Substack for Authors, created by a fiction writer named Jaime Buckley. That link will take you to the sales page for Jaime’s course. That link is not an affiliate link. Jaime is not paying me a dime to recommend his course. He doesn’t even know I’m recommending it. But I do recommend it. Very highly. 

I worked through the course in about a week. It’s got 11 modules, each containing multiple videos plus PDF downloads. The transcript of the videos is provided online. I took a lot of notes. What I particularly liked is that Jaime tells you both the why and the how. Both of those are important. You need to work out your why first. Jaime has a very nice marketing philosophy, very much in line with the one I’ve held to for a long time—marketing is about helping people. Once you understand why you’re doing stuff, Jaime also tells you how to do it. Without a lot of fluff. If it only takes 5 minutes to explain something, he doesn’t stretch it out to fill up half an hour. I really appreciated that. My learning time is valuable. 

I’ve created two separate Publications on Substack under my account. One of them is for fans of my novels, and I named it Randy Ingermanson Novels. The other is for people who want to learn how to write and market their novels, and I named it Advanced Fiction Writing. Don’t look for either of these Publications yet. I’ve made both of them Private while I’m setting them up. There’s nothing worse than a half-baked Substack Publication that doesn’t have anything yet. 

Transitioning my Fiction Newsletter/Blog to Substack

I decided to work on the Substack about my own novels first, because that one is simpler. I don’t have any initial plans to monetize it. I’ll simply use it for my existing fiction newsletter and my existing blog about my novels. One thing I’ll be adding is a weekly post with a chapter of my novel-in-progress. Then I can get feedback from my True Fans as I’m writing the book. And I’ll have weekly behind-the-scenes posts about things that my True Fans would find fascinating about the most recent chapter posted. 

I will also replicate my occasional blog posts about my fictional world on Substack. I found it extremely easy to import the existing 60 blog posts that I’ve written over the last 8 years into Substack. It took about 2 seconds to pull them into Substack. Then I took a couple of hours to tweak the content on each post, mainly to insert a note saying that the post was originally published on my blog. But I also added what Substack calls Custom Tags that help the Substack search engine know what content is in each post.

So my Substack Publication for Randy Ingermanson Novels is almost done. It’s taken me a total of about 22 hours, spread out over the last couple of weeks. I think I have about 2 hours left to go, and then the Publication will be ready to launch. (Launch means that I’ll import my email list from ConvertKit into Substack.) I’ll hold off launching for a bit, because I also have a whole other Substack to create, and that’s going to take a similar level of effort. 

Right now, I don’t have any paid tier set up for this Publication. Maybe I will in the future, if I can think of something my True Fans might want to pay for. Some of my True Fans have been reading my fiction for many years. They might want to support the cause, and they might have ideas for cool things I could put in a paid tier. But I’m not too concerned about that right now. Mainly, I want to stop paying for email delivery. 

Transitioning My Advanced Fiction Writing Blog to Substack

Now that I’ve figured out how to do stuff on Substack, the transition of my Advanced Fiction Writing Blog will be fairly easy. But there’s still a lot to do. I expect that I’ll get it all done in about 25 working hours, spread out over the next couple of weeks. 

It’s nice that Substack can import hundreds of blog posts in an eyeblink, but I don’t want to import everything. I’ll focus on the most relevant blog posts over the last few years, the “evergreen” content. 

My regular free content will be very similar to what I’ve been doing already. My current plan is to post one blog post every week—on Organizing or Creating or Marketing. That’s a level of effort I can manage quite well. I will do all in my power to maintain the same standard of quality that I’ve always had for my Advanced Fiction Writing Blog (and the Advanced Fiction Writing E-zine before it). 

Will I have a paid tier on Substack? Yes, I will. But the content will be different than the free content. I still need to work out the details, but the core idea is to do what I call “Deep-Dives”. Each of these will go a lot deeper than I can go in a 1000-word blog post. I would like to produce a Deep-Dive on a regular schedule. I’ll decide the precise subject of each Deep-Dive after getting input from paid subscribers. And I’ll keep an archive of all the past Deep-Dives, so paid subscribers will have a growing library of material they can’t get anywhere else on the web. Because the Deep-Dives will focus on the things that I do best, that nobody else teaches. 

I can imagine other payware products that fans of this blog might like, but I’m not going to promise what I can’t deliver. One thing at a time. I have a nice list of “maybe someday” ideas. But I won’t do anything without consulting the loyal fans of Advanced Fiction Writing. Because you know what you need most. If I can deliver what you need, that’s a good deal for both of us. 

Is Substack For You?

You might be wondering if I recommend that you try using Substack to market your own work. I’m agnostic on that question right now. I’ll have a better answer in six months or a year. I’m don’t like recommending things I haven’t tried. 

Almost all of you are novelists, so I think you’ll be interested to hear how my Substack Publication Randy Ingermanson Novels works out for me. I have no idea how it’ll do. I don’t have any immediate plans to monetize it. But I do hope to do a better job in interacting with the True Fans of my fiction. From what I’ve seen, Substack gives a writer all the tools they need to create community. So we’ll see. I’m eager to try it and find out. 

Probably a few of you also write nonfiction. If that’s you, you’ll be able to watch me run my nonfiction Substack Publication Advanced Fiction Writing in the coming months, after I launch. You can’t see anything yet, as I said earlier. I’ll keep both my Publications in Private mode for at least another couple of weeks.  

Once I’m convinced I’ve worked out all the kinks, I’ll do a launch on both my Publications. And then you’ll see what can be done on a nonfiction platorm on Substack. I will make mistakes. I’m human, and mistakes are a particular skill of mine. I trust you, my Loyal Fans, to push back graciously when you see a mistake, and to help me get things on track. I would love to have a fabulous Substack Publication that helps you reach your writing goals, a place where we can all learn together. If that happens, then the project is a success. 

Stay tuned…

Your Life Goals Document

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in Career Management

What is the big picture for the next 5 years of your life? 

Imagine that you time-travel 5 years forward to visit your Future Self. Imagine that you discover that Future Self has just been forced to quit doing the “fun stuff.” (You get to define what the “fun stuff” is, and nobody gets to criticize your choices.)

Now ask Future Self, “What do you most regret not having finished?”

You’re Guaranteed to Regret Something

Let’s be honest—this is a scary exercise. No matter how much you get done in the next 5 years, you’re guaranteed to regret something. That’s the nature of life. It’s fast-paced. We all put more on our plates than we can possibly eat. We all get side-tracked by stuff coming out of the blue. We can’t do it all.

So this is really an exercise in defining those pesky priorities. 

This all came home to me less than 2 months ago when suddenly my day job wasn’t there. I’ve been at the same job for 20 years. Doing cool sciencey kind of stuff. Don’t ask me what I was doing unless you’ve got about 3 hours, because I’ll talk your ear off. And you really don’t want to know. The point is that suddenly a big chunk of my “fun stuff” was off the table. Maybe permanently, maybe not. And that forced me to think about what other “fun stuff” I’d been sidelining because my day job was keeping me too busy. I got a rare chance to rethink my priorities.

To make it all crazier, just before my day job evaporated, I had spent about 3 weeks in bed recovering from a tough injury to my hamstrings/glutes that left my sciatic nerve irritated 24 hours a day. At the time, it felt like “this is never going to get better.” That was miserable. Would I ever get to work on the fun stuff again? Of course I did get better, and I’m back in the saddle doing the stuff I consider fun. 

But it forced me to think about what I’d regret most if I couldn’t do any more fun stuff, ever again. That’s a hard question. A scary question. A question we all will eventually have to face, because there will come a day when each one of us has to hang up the spurs. And we can’t predict when that’ll happen.

Here Are My Answers

My answers are not the same as your answers, because we’re different people, and we define the “fun stuff” differently. But I encourage you to think hard about this, because it might just change your life. 

To help jiggle your neurons a bit, I’ll tell you my own answers. Here are the things outside my day job that I’d regret not having done, if I had to quit right now:

  1. Fiction writing. I am currently writing a novel. When it’s done, it’ll be my 9th published novel. I have another 5 that I really, really, really want to write. I know the titles for most of these, and I know what they’ll be about. They’ll complete the two main series of novels that I’ve been working on for my entire writing career. This is right at the top of my list. I would be very sad not to finish them all. 
  2. Marketing. All novelists hate marketing. But if you want to get your novels read, you need to market them effectively. There are things I could do to get my novels out there more. I’d like to do some of those things. I’d be quite sad if I didn’t do at least some of these. 
  3. Project Chronologicus. This is a project that pulls together my love of history, math, and software development. I want to write code that can mine ancient historical documents for chronological information and then construct the best timeline of events. “Best” has a precise mathematical definition, accounting for the natural fuzziness in all historical documents, while also detecting possible outliers or errors in the data. This would be useful to me in writing my historical novels. It would also make a few thousand historians happy to have a tool like this. This is an unsolved problem, so it might fail. But I’d be sad if I didn’t at least try. We climb mountains because they’re there.

My Life Goals Document

I created what I call a “Life Goals Document” that has 5 Project Groups:

  • Fiction Writing
  • Marketing
  • Chronologicus
  • Learning 
  • Software Development

As you can see, 3 of these Project Groups are the big 3 categories of things I would regret not doing. The other 2 Project Groups support them in some way.

I filled in below each of these Project Groups with small projects or milestone tasks that I could conceivably work on this year. It’s really enough to look ahead just one year. I can’t see beyond this year, and I don’t want to put too much on my lists, because that would get too overwhelming. 

These lists are what I call “quasi-sorted.” The first item on each list is the next logical project or task to tackle. I highlight it in blue to indicate that it’s the next thing. Everything below it is highlighted in green to indicate that it’s for “later.” But the green items aren’t sorted. I won’t know for sure what order to do these tasks until I get there. 

Once I finish a task, I change the highlighting on it to be yellow, to indicate that it’s done. So each Project Group list shows some tasks highlighted yellow that are completed. Then it shows one task highlighted blue that’s the current thing. And below that are all the tasks highlighted green that are for later this year.

Every day when I’m deciding what I’m going to work on today, I take a quick look at my Life Goals Document. It reminds me what’s important. Because I already know what’s urgent. The urgent stuff always gets done, because it’s urgent. The important stuff needs to get a little airtime too, or it’ll be forgotten. I don’t want to forget the important stuff. 

Now It’s Your Turn

Want to play? You can do the same thing I did. Here some steps that can help you put together your own personal Life Goals Document that will carry you through the rest of this year:

  • Pretend for a moment that you will get absolutely nothing done in the next 5 years, and ask your Future Self what they regret not having done the most. Keep the list short. This should be Future Self’s biggest regrets, not all possible regrets. 
  • Make a Life Goals Document. It should have a few main Project Groups for this year. Just for this year. Let next year take care of itself. Include any of the Project Groups on your Biggest Regrets list that you think you could actually work on this year. 
  • Fill in some actionable tasks or projects on each of your Project Groups. Don’t go overboard here. Keep it reasonable. What could you get done this year, given the amount of time and energy you have right now? If color-coding helps you, then color-code your Life Goals Document. If it doesn’t help, then don’t. 
  • Make time every day to look at your Life Goals Document. Not to make you feel guilty. Just to keep your neurons firing on what the “fun stuff” is. The important fun stuff. The stuff you don’t want to regret. 

Baseball players like to say, “keep your eye on the ball.” That’s good advice if you want to hit that thing flying toward you at 90 miles per hour. 

If you want to get the fun stuff done, then the analogous advice is, “keep your eye on the fun stuff.” Because real-life is flying at you at 90 miles per hour, every day of the week. A lot of it is urgent but not important, so you have to do it. But some of it is neither urgent nor important, and you can let it go by without any regret if you’re constantly keeping your eye on what the real fun stuff is. 

Every Character Has A Story

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in Craft

One of the most important tasks you can do when writing your novel is to write your one-sentence summary. 

I blogged about this fairly recently, and nothing has changed since then. If you need a review of how the one-sentence summary works, I highly recommend reading that earlier blog post. 

But if you only write a single one-sentence summary for your novel, you’re leaving money on the table. A lot of money. 

As an example, here’s a one-sentence summary of The Hunger Games: A 16-year-old girl volunteers to take her sister’s place in an arena where twenty-four teens will battle each other to the death.

That’s pretty solid, as far as it goes, but it only tells the story as Katniss experiences it. Which is fair enough, because Katniss is the lead character, and she’s the only viewpoint character. 

But Katniss is not the only person in this story. The other characters are critically important. And none of them thinks Katniss is the hero…

Every Character Thinks They’re the Hero

In the story you have been experiencing since birth, you are the lead character. That’s the nature of being human. There is only one skin you can be inside of. In your life story, everybody else is a side character.

But this is extremely important to understand—everybody else is the lead character in their own life story. And in their story, you’re the sidekick.

We live out the story of The Hunger Games through the eyes of Katniss, so her story is important. But there are other characters in this story that also matter. Peeta. Haymitch. Cato. Cinna. 

Each one of these thinks they’re the lead character in the story. Let’s take a stab at writing the one-sentence summaries of each of these characters. 

Peeta: When a 16-year-old boy is forced into the Hunger Games alongside the girl he loves, he resolves to sacrifice himself so she can survive.

Haymitch: A former champion of the Hunger Games has to coach a girl who could potentially win, if she doesn’t mind killing the one person in the world who loves her.

Cato: An 18-year-old boy—who has trained all his life for the Hunger Games—is shocked and humiliated when a girl half his size outscores him during training week.

Cinna: A leader in the secret conspiracy to overthrow the fascist government finds the perfect symbol of resistance—if he can keep her alive.

Notice that none of these one-sentence summaries capture the full story. And some of them are downright inaccurate. (Peeta is not really the only person who loves Katniss; her sister Prim loves her too.) By their nature, one-sentence summaries distort reality. They’re too short to capture everything, and you’d be crazy to make them try. They are approximations to the truth. Be OK with that. 

Why Would You Do All This Extra Work?

It takes time and energy to write a good one-sentence summary. Each one might take you 10 or 15 minutes. Why bother? 

There are several good reasons to do this extra work:

  • It keeps you focused on the story while you’re writing it. 
  • It highlights where the essential conflicts are—which characters must be at odds with which other characters, and that helps you understand your novel better. 
  • It forces you to write 3-D characters, because you have walked inside the skin of all your characters, not just the “good guys”. 
  • It keeps your story from being a simple morality play, because you are constantly reminded that real life is complex and sometimes messy. 

Bottom line: If you know the one-sentence summary of all your characters, you will empathize with them better. You’ll know them better. You’ll write them better. That’s a win.

Homework:

Pick a novel. Any novel you’ve read, where you really know the story. It doesn’t have to be a classic novel or even a great novel. It just needs to be one you completely understand. 

1) Identify the 3 to 5 most important characters. 

2) Write a one-sentence summary for each. 

3) How well did the author give each character an interesting and reasonable storyline?

Now comes the hard work. Give yourself a one-hour time limit and do the same for the novel you’re working on right now.  This might be the most productive hour you spend in writing your novel. 

Networking and Notworking

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in Career Management

If there’s one word I wish had never been coined, it’s the word “networking.” It puts me in mind of Ned Ryerson, that over-the-top insurance salesman in the movie Groundhog Day. Ned is overly friendly to the lead character in the movie, Phil Connors, played by Bill Murray, but Ned doesn’t care about Phil. He just wants to sell Phil an insurance policy. 

I think we’ve all met a life insurance agent like Ned, and that can be uncomfortable. It’s just as uncomfortable to meet a writer like Ned. Someone who acts like your best friend because they’re looking for a favor. Maybe they want a free critique. Maybe they want an endorsement. Maybe they want an introduction to your agent or your editor. 

It’s not wrong for writers to want those things. After all, success in writing is strongly correlated with the size of your network. I read a remarkable book several years ago, The Formula, by Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, a network scientist. He looked at actual data to see what caused some people to be successful and some not. He found that success depends on performance, when this can be measured. But when performance can’t be measured, a person’s network drives their success.

Here’s a direct quote of his findings: “But networks are singularly important in areas like art, where performance and quality are hard to measure. In fact, an interconnected web of relationships determines success in art to a degree that I, a network scientist, find stunning.”

Networks are Important, But…

If networks are so important, then networking must be just as important, right?

Hold on a minute. Not so fast. “Network” is a noun, and it describes something good and healthy. “Networking” is a verb that’s supposedly about building a network. But somehow, it’s a very toxic verb. What’s wrong with this picture? Is there a better way to build a network than by networking? A non-toxic way?

I actually think there is. I’m all for building networks. But not the Ned Ryerson way. Ned Ryerson is transactional; real networks are relational. Ned sees people in his network as a rung on the ladder of success. Someone to be stepped on. That’s what makes Ned toxic. Understanding what’s wrong with Ned is the first step to building a network in a healthy way. A better way. 

Notworking

I call the better way “notworking”. Your goal is to have a network of writer friends. The key word here is “friends.” Friends are not people you use to advance your career. Friends are people you travel together with on the journey. 

One place where you can build your network of friends is at a writers conference. That’s probably where I’ve met most of my writer friends. A typical conference has hundreds of writers, and you can’t possibly meet them all. You can’t add them all to your network. 

If you insist on “networking,” then you’re going to be sizing up everyone you meet at a conference, measuring them by how much they can help your career right now. And they’re going to see right through you, just like anyone can see through Ned Ryerson. Just like you see through people who are trying to “network” you.

What’s the better way to size people up? It’s simple. Look for other writers who are at about your same place on the journey AND who resonate with you. Maybe they write the same kind of fiction you do, and maybe they don’t. But the key thing is that they are a kindred spirit. 

When you find somebody like that, ask them how their writing career is going. It’s probably not going great. They may well be stuck on some issue that they just can’t get past. 

And maybe you can help. Maybe you’ve recently dealt with the same problem and figured out a way past it. If you can help another writer solve a real problem in their life, do so. Without asking for anything in return. Without even thinking about whether you’ll ever get something in return. Assume you won’t. 

Then again, maybe you can’t help. Maybe you’re stuck on the same problem. But at least you can offer empathy. That’s what friends do when they can’t help. 

If you talk to ten writers at a conference and find even one that you resonate with, somebody who can be a writing friend on your journey, that’s a win. You’ve added to your network, and they’ve added to theirs. In a few years, you’ll have a very nice network. And if you do this for the rest of your writing life, you’ll eventually have a large network. A non-toxic network.

That’s what I mean by “notworking.” It’s good and it’s healthy and it’s fun. But the larger your network, the higher the probability that one of your friends is going to be super-successful. And that’s where things can go south, if you’re not careful…

The Universe is Not Fair

The publishing world is just like the rest of the universe. It’s not fair. A very few writers will have huge success. Most will have little. There will be a large spread in the payoffs that people in your network receives. 

If you have a large enough network, you are going to know somebody who wins a major award or gets rich or gets famous, or all of the above. It may not be who you expected. It may not be in proportion to talent or skill or anything else you can measure. It may just be luck.

So how do you respond to this grossly unfair situation? Here are two things you can do: 

  • Resist the urge to cash in on your friend’s success. You can’t. They can’t distribute their success to you. Success doesn’t work that way. They may be able to help you some, and if they’re a decent person, they’ll try. But they can’t just pass success around like candy bars. Don’t expect them to. 
  • Resist the green monster, envy. Be happy for your friend. Set aside all thoughts that their success is rightfully yours. It isn’t. It probably isn’t rightfully theirs, either. Luck plays a large role in the publishing world. There is nothing you can do about that. Throw the dice with your friends, and cheer for the winner.  

The Bottom Line 

The publishing life is a journey. Build a network of true friends. Help your teammates all you can, with no expectation of reward. Accept help graciously when it’s offered. Stay in the game, give it your best shot, cheer for the winner, and be happy with your lot, whatever it is.

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