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…
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