(You can also chortle at me talking about Notes not forcing me down political rabbit holes, while the video clearly shows a couple of political livestreams in the corner. Sigh)

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If you’re curious about the weekly serial I mention, which is now 100% complete, you can check it out here:

Remember, if you’re not interested in my Substack-related stuff, you can simply turn it off in your account preferences. Easy!

Important thing: I’m now putting all of my Substack-specific witterings inside a section called Everything Substack. This means that you can pop into your account and joyfully turn off that section, if it’s not of interest. You’ll still get all my other articles and my fiction.

It’s been a running joke for years that Substack’s editor lacked any kind of justification options.

That changed a couple of weeks ago.

In today’s video I poke at a bunch of recent features, but justification is potentially a big one for fiction writers. Most text on the web is left-justified, which is more a result of technology and tradition than anything else. Early browsers and HTML defaulted to left-justification, and that’s stuck through the decades.

The result of this, I suspect, is that many of us subconsciously code ‘left justified’ with news, online opinion pieces, reviews and so on. Meanwhile, most of our literature, whether in print or digital, has continued to be fully justified. I wonder whether this has been a subtle barrier for those of us attempting to present our fiction via newsletter.

Choice now exists, which means we can alternate depending on preference and context. I suspect I will fully justify my fiction in future, while keeping my non-fiction left-justified. While this can seem like obsessing over irrelevant details, these subtle cues can help or hinder readers when they’re attempting to settle into a new story.

Some other bits:

The trio of , and got together to talk about serial fiction and it’s a good time:

Tell Me a Mystery

The Substack Serialize Test

Listen now

2 months ago · 40 likes · 14 comments · Tell Me a Mystery, Scoot, and Eric Falden

Whenever I see familiar faces from around the online fiction community showing up together in live streams or other collaborations it always reminds me of this scene:

Also, interesting piece here about the potential for ‘the Substack book’:

Sorry, We're Prosed

Here comes the Substack book

I read Emma Gannon’s new book A Year of Nothing in one sitting earlier this year…

Read more

2 months ago · 114 likes · 29 comments · Alys Key

Given I’m in the middle of planning out a bunch of books, I’m going to have to think long and hard about that one.

Also enjoying:

• Finished catching up on season 3 of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. It was all excellent, although the final episode got a little overtly mystical at times. One of the best ensemble casts I can remember.

• Started playing Blue Prince and The Sexy Brutale, both quite fiendish puzzle games. Early days, but both are fascinating. Increasingly I find myself drawn to story-puzzle games over action. I’m not sure if that’s because action games are too samey, or that I’m simply getting old.

• Started watching Shogun, which has been on the list for a while. Three episodes in, it’s very good. Hiroyuki Sanada is phenomenal. We’d been meaning to watch it for a while, and visiting the samurai exhibition at the British Museum finally tipped us over the edge.

• Finished playing Old Skies, a puzzle adventure meditation on death, life and what it all means. I will be writing about it over on at some point.

Finally, I stumbled upon a small and excellent bookshop on Sunday:

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Today I’ll be poking at the latest version of Substack’s stats, as of December 2025, as well as third party tools like Search Console and Google Analytics 4. This is, clearly, going to be specific to Substack, but if you’re using a different email platform it’ll likely have similar analytics — and if it doesn’t, you should ask the developers why not.

Before we get started, though, a quick note. When it comes to numbers and charts, remember that, unless you’re very specifically running a business, they’re optional. If you’re here to write, that’s your only important target. Don’t be distracted by big numbers and charts that go up: that way madness lies. They can help you get towards your goals, but don’t let them become your goals.

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The dashboard overview

Right. A lot has changed in Substack’s dashboard since I wrote that 2023 article. Each change brought with it utter rage from some corners of the community, but I rather like what they’ve done.

When you hop into your Dashboard, you’re now greeted with an overview of three key stats and a nice big chart. What is shown depends on whether you have paid subs turned on or not.

Along the top I get Gross annualized revenue, Paid subscribers and Total subscribers, each complete with the main number and a percentage change. Clicking on one of these metrics displays the relevant data on the chart, and I can change the date range using the menu at the top-right.

One thing we all have to learn about publishing a newsletter is that it’s a long game. Your numbers will go up and down, and if you’re sweating over them every day, or even every week, you’re going to burn yourself out from the anxiety. Looking at a multiple-month timescale is more useful and healthier.

For example, here’s my 7-day chart for total subscribers:

Phew. People must have really hated that last chapter of my weekly serial Tales from the Triverse! Right?

Something you need to get used to when you start writing a newsletter is this:

Every time you send a newsletter, people will unsubscribe.

This is inevitable and not something to worry about. You haven’t done anything wrong, but it does take some mental gymnastics to look at it the right way. Each person that unsubscribes in that context is helping to make your list more relevant, more precise. The people remaining at the ones who really want to read your stuff. This compounds over time, and in that way your subscriber list is constantly being finessed, heading towards being more and more targeted towards people who enjoy your work.

Here’s my total subscribers chart over 30 days:

That doesn’t look so bad! Ups and downs, but generally heading in the right direction, I think? Though, it’s kind of plateaued for the last couple of weeks, which could be a bit worrying. Here’s the 90 day view:

You can see there are multiple plateaus, but if you draw the trend line it’s perfectly healthy. This is the main point to take away here: obsessing over short term changes is a bit pointless, because the long term is all that really matters.

Some individual newsletters might bring in a ton of new subscribers. Others will lose you subscribers. Neither matter as much as what happens cumulatively, over a six month period or more.1

Growth reports

Next, let’s take a look at the Growth report, found under the Audience section in your dashboard. These charts debuted in 2025 and focus on three areas: Unique visitors, New subscribers and New revenue (if you have paid turned on).

Look at this colourful, funky thing:

This is my Unique visitors chart. In this case, a ‘visitor’ is someone who ended up on simonkjones.substack.com, which somewhat separates them from my subscribers who will be receiving posts more directly (to email or the Substack app).

The different coloured bands represent the top sources for my visitors. The big grey blob is ‘Direct’ traffic, which in analytics terminology is the system shrugging and muttering “I dunno.” More interesting are the other colours, and if you hover your mouse over your own chart you’ll get a handy legend:

‘Direct-to-app’ means someone clicked a link somewhere (probably in an email I sent) and wound up in the Substack app. ‘Google’ is search traffic. ‘Substack’ means they came to me via somewhere else on Substack, such as another writer’s newsletter or Note.

At the bottom of the pop-up you can see a summary of what I sent out via Substack on that day. This is useful for correlating activity on the chart with new posts or Notes.

Below the chart is a table of the same data, although often with more granularity. There’s a useful categories menu to filter the results. For example, I can look at traffic that has come specifically from AI:

In my Substack settings I have AI scraping blocked, so I imagine I’d have higher numbers here if I was willing to jump into that particular pit of snakes.

You’ll likely have more visitors than subscribers, because only a subset of visitors will go on to subscribe. This is where we start to get into conversion funnels, but that’s a topic for another time.

Here’s my New subscribers chart:

As you can see, far fewer people are subscribing than visiting (though many of those visitors will already be subscribers). And while 7% of my visitors are attributed to Substack, 62% of my subscribers are attributed in some way to the platform.

In other words: Google brings me a helluva lot more viewers, but relatively few really engage. And think about your own Google behaviour: how often do you Google something and then go on to become a fully signed-up member of wherever you end up? More often you follow the link, get the info and scamper away into the night.

Substack, on the other hand, brings far fewer people to my newsletter, but they are vastly, vastly higher quality leads. These people (you may even be one of them, so - hello!) are more closely connected to what I’m actually writing, and that connection makes it more likely that they’ll be interested in subscribing and reading more from me.

None of us should rely solely on Substack for finding readers, but there’s no denying that it’s a very effective engine for building a readership.

Stats reports

Right, let’s get to the meat. 🥩

The Stats section is a collection of many different reports, some more useful than others.

Network

This report is essentially a promo piece for Substack. It’s them saying “you’d better never leave!”

I’m only half-joking. Look at this:

The various shades of on-brand orange represent my subscribers who were in some way already connected to the Substack ecosystem. The implicit suggestion here is that I might not have got any of those subscribers if I was using a different newsletter platform, like Buttondown or Ghost.

Maybe that’s true, or perhaps it’s simply that in 2025 who doesn’t have a Substack account of some sort? Whether as readers or writers, most of us read someone who uses the platform. Having my subscribers come from Substack-connected places isn’t as remarkable a thing now as it once was.

In other words, did these people subscribe because I use Substack and so do they, or was that largely incidental? It’s not really possible to tell.

Audience

Here you’ll find a completely different chart, with most probably a larger number than your subscriber number:

This is your Total followers. This combines your subscribers with people who ‘follow’ you via other means on the Substack platform, such as on Notes.

(if you’re not familiar, Notes is Substack’s version of Bluesky, Threads, old Twitter etc)

There’s been a lot of hand-wringing and general fretting about the idea of a ‘follower’ on Substack. The concern is that it’s a mode of engagement which we don’t ‘own’: we can’t take our followers with us if we leave the platform, for example. “It’s social media all over again!” cry the people.

Well, it is social media all over again. But do remember that this is an additional layer on top of/at the edges of your publication. It doesn’t really affect what you do with your newsletter one way or another.

What it does do is provide a light touch way for people to stay connected to each other without necessarily committing to reading everything they publish. For example, I follow lots of serial fiction writers but don’t necessarily subscribe to all of them. This is no judgement on their writing: I’d simply never have time to read all of those serials every week, but I am still 100% interested in what that writer is doing. Without the ‘follow’ option, I’d have no simple way of keeping tabs.

Crucially, a ‘follow’ has the potential to turn into a subscribe. It’s the very top of the funnel. Unlike other social platforms, a Substack ‘follow’ can very easily make the jump, because links between short- and long-form content are actively encouraged rather than penalised.

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Further down the page you’ll find a map of how much of America reads your stuff, because America is the most important country:

You can, if you want, change the map to ‘World’, but this is very much a secondary concern:

Maybe one day Substack will allow us to pick our local country or continent.

For now, the choice is between the USA or the World, except the World option still includes the USA. This may all be an elaborate metaphor on Substack’s part.

Keep scrolling and you’ll find the audience overlap, which at least for me used to be far more interesting. Here’s what mine looks like today, in December 2025:

What an incredibly weird line-up! Audience overlap shows the publications that my subscribers crossover with. 14% of my subscribers are also subscribed to Letters from an American, for example, which is about US politics and history.

Thing is, all six of these overlap publications are simply massive publications. The crossover has far less to do with what I and they write, and more to do with them having a huge number of subscribers.

Many of my subscribers share the common trait of breathing. There’s a big overlap.

Correlation, not causation.

I mean, Story Club and In The Writing Burrow are both about writing fiction (more-or-less), so that does make a bit more sense. But it’s not like I’m about to email Margaret Atwood or George Saunders and ask them if they want to ‘do a collab’.

And Bari Weiss’ The Free Press? The politics in Tales from the Triverse would, I can only imagine, raise a few eyebrows from that readership.

None of those overlap publications are especially useful to me.

Anyway, my line-up back in 2023 looked like this:

George was still there, at least! But the rest of that line-up is far more interesting, and thematically much closer to what I write. I can confidently say that anyone who enjoys my writing would likely enjoy those six publications as well. The 2025 list? Not so much, and vice versa.

I’d be intrigued to find out if the audience overlay list is as generic for you as well, so do let me know in the comments.

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Retention

If you have paid subscriptions turned on, the Retention report is by far the most stressful report on this list. It’s purpose-built to make us feel bad and despair that nothing we’re doing is working.

Or maybe that’s just me.

Anyway, you get a chart showing the horrendous tug-of-war between new paid subscribers arriving and old paid subscribers departing. It’s a never-ending struggle to stay afloat. Important if you’re running your Substack as a business, of course, but if you’re just here to write it’s the sort of pressure that doesn’t really help.

Slightly less depressing is the paid cohort analysis, which show how long people are sticking around after subscribing:

Look a those little affirmative ‘Good’ pats on the head. I wonder what it does if your numbers are not good? Is it a red cross and the word ‘BAD’?

All that said, it is quite useful to get a sense for how long people are sticking around.

How much you want to learn from this stuff is up to you. For example, I can look at my retention over time and note that the people who subscribed in May did not stick around:

The retention from those May subscribers was unusually lower than in all other recent months. Interesting! Why was that? I have absolutely no idea, but if I could be bothered I could go back and trawl through my output that month to see what happened. Maybe I wrote something accidentally controversial on Notes, or Google search brought in a bunch of people that liked one article, then realised they’d made a terrible mistake.

What I’m actually going to do, though, is nod sagely in the direction of that chart, then ignore it and carry on with some writing. Not to repeat myself, but unless you’re actively running a business I’d generally advise you do the same.

Sharing

This report is a simple table showing which Substack users have brought you views and subscribers via direct sharing of your posts. You can re-sort according to views, subscribers or paid subscribers.

I have to admit, it’s a rather heart-warming to spot names that you know on the list. Perhaps more than the ‘audience overlap’, this might be a good source for potential collaborations.

Referrals

Not to be confused with sharing, or indeed with referral traffic from other websites or campaign, the Referrals report instead relates directly to ‘gifts’ that your paid subscribers can give to their friends.

This is something that can be turned on or off in your publication’s settings:

It’s slightly obscure, IMO.

Use or not, depending on your predilection for turning your customers into unpaid marketing interns.

Notes

Confusingly, ‘subscriber notes’ have absolutely nothing to do with Substack’s Twitter-like Notes platform. 🤷

Instead, these are nice little notes that paid subscribers can leave when they upgrade their subscription. They’re really useful for a) making you feel warm and fuzzy inside and b) providing insight into why people are subscribing.

You can also (with the person’s permission) download the quote and share it as a testimonial. This is one of my favourites:

I have no idea why this is in the ‘Stats’ area, because it clearly isn’t statistical in the slightest. Qualitative, I suppose?

Traffic

Modern long-form newsletter platforms, like Substack, Ghost, Beehiiv and Buttondown, provide decent websites alongside the email functionality. As such, web traffic is an important part of the overall equation, unlike with more trad marketing platforms such as Mailchimp which were designed for single mailshots that don’t exist outside of a subscriber’s inbox.

My traffic chart has weird regular spikes, twice a week:

Those are when I send my newsletters. Inevitably, people click buttons in the email and end up on the website. At the same time, a new post has the potential to bring in new readers who have seen a link somewhere.

The date range can be adjusted at the top of the page, all the way back to when you created your publication. In my case that’s July 2021, and going all the way back looks like this:

You can see the long game at work here. For the first year and a half, web traffic grew slowly but steadily. In early 2022 it started to pick up, then jumped a year later in autumn 2023. That’s when I started making ‘how to’ videos, incidentally — Substack features like Recommendations and Notes also played a part.

You can filter the chart by traffic source, which is when things get really interesting. Check out this mad thing:

Up until mid-2022 I didn’t really get any traffic from search (by which I mean Google search). That started building in late-2023, after I’d built up a decent back catalogue of material. It could also be that Substack improved their own overall SEO game.

But look at those two crazy months in 2024: October and November. Hands up if anyone can remember a big political thing that happened in October and November 2024?

So, I don’t write about politics. My fiction is full of politics and social commentary, of course, but I’m not ‘a political writer’. And I definitely wasn’t writing about the US election. And yet…!

My best theory is that the US election and Twitter’s transformation after Musk’s buy-out caused a large exodus of people to different platforms, including Substack. Plus there was, of course, an awful lot of political commentary happening on Substack. At that time, Googling ‘what is Substack?’ often pointed people towards my video of the same name:

I’d like to say that this was some devious grand strategy from me, but it really wasn’t. I’ve always enjoyed making tutorials, and that video was intended to help out other fiction writers like myself. Fast forward a year to 2024 and there were a lot more people trying to answer the question ‘what is Substack?’

Two things to note here, though:

1. Those spikes did not last. Traffic went back to normal afterwards.

2. The surge in subscribers and even paid subscribers that I had during this period was short-lived. I suspect people liked the video, subscribed happily, and then a week later I sent them the latest chapter of my weird science fiction and fantasy crime serial and they ran away screaming.

Below the chart is a table, where you can sort by views, users and subs. This is pretty handy if you want to know what people are doing — you might find that you’re getting a lot of view from one source, but all your subscribers are coming from somewhere else.

Email

This report is slightly confusing as it crosses over with the individual post stats, while claiming to be email-specific. I suspect it’s a legacy terminology issue more than anything.

Anyway, I like this table! It can be sorted according to any of the columns, which is hugely useful in this case. If I order by ‘free subs’ I can see which of my articles encouraged the most sign-ups. I can sort by ‘paid subs’ as well, which is even more useful. Likes, comments and shares are also here, making it easy to see which posts had the most engagement. It seems that some of the stats are specific to when the email was sent (such as opens) and others are about subsequent behaviour of the post on the website (e.g. views, subscribes).

What you do with those insights is up to you, but I do like being able to poke at it. It can also be a useful way to dig into the archive and re-share previously successful posts.

Unsubscribes

Never look at this report.2

Surveys

Did you know you can set up and run fancy surveys from within your newsletter? Well, you can! I have one that automatically pings out to new subscribers in their welcome email. Quite a nice way to get some insights into who is subscribing (though I desperately need to update it).

Anyway, this is an entire other topic for another time.

Talking of which, I think there are some follow-ups to today’s post that I should probably delve into at some point, namely:

• Individual post stats, of which there are A LOT

• Podcast stats

• Google Search Console

• Google Analytics 4

Let me know if any of those sound like they’d be useful.

I quite like data. I really enjoy having these stats at my fingertips. But not everyone does, and that’s totally fine. Numbers like this can drive you crazy, especially if all you want to do is write some stories or journal posts.

Funnily enough, Substack have actually recognised this, adding a setting to hide a lot of the numbers:

You can find that in the ‘Privacy’ section of your publication’s settings.

Regardless of what you do with the data, remember to stay true to your original purpose.

2

My favourite feedback I received from a former paid subscriber was this:

Today’s newsletter is part of my Substack for Beginners series. The concepts might also be useful for other platforms. Customise what’s in your inbox here.

Putting your head about the parapet is a risky thing. As humans we have a built-in hesitation to do so, for fear we’ll be spotted and attacked. Millennia of ingrained self-preservation is hard to igno…

Read more

But hear me out — there’s something quietly clever going on with how the internet is starting to make a new kind of sense. After years of platforms becoming ever more isolated, to the point where simply posting a link to another site can get your posts silently suppressed on Twitter or LinkedIn, over here in the world of newsletters the opposite is taking place.

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I use Substack for this newsletter, and they’ve been doing some joined-up thinking when it comes to multiple platforms. On the one hand, Substack itself is becoming increasingly diverse in its capabilities: you can write text articles, obviously. But you can also publish video, audio and livestreams. It handles long form essays as well as short form notes. You can embed links to other places without being punished: Substack’s designers understand that being a place to discover other things (especially things which are not on Substack) is what gives it value as a platform. This is a lesson that Twitter learned and then forgot.

There’s a flipside, though. Substack doesn’t care about your work only being on Substack. The reality is that no matter how much they add video features, they’re not going to get to a YouTube-scale audience, and YouTube already has wide support across devices including televisions. While you can listen to audio in the Substack app, people already have their preferred podcast apps.

Not a problem. When you publish using Substack’s tools, you can automatically distribute that material to YouTube and podcast libraries, as appropriate.

This video, for example, will also be available on my YouTube channel. The voiceover audio from my usual weekly posts also goes out on Spotify, Apple podcasts and YouTube podcasts. Readers, viewers and listeners don’t have to use the Substack app. They can use their favourite apps and encounter my work without having to learn something new. I can go to where those people already are, and I don’t have to do anything extra — after the initial setup, Substack does it all automatically when I hit ‘publish’.

As such, I can concentrate on making the best article (or video, or chapter, etc) and publish via my newsletter. Almost for free, I then get new stuff showing up on YouTube and in podcast libraries. We can all have a DIY mini-media empire without having to jump through lots of flaming hoops.

It’s very empowering, and something of a quiet game-changer. That’s what today’s video is all about. I hope it’s useful!

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Community has always been the bedrock of the internet for me. The entire point of the technology was to link people together, removing the geographical barriers that had always existed.

My earliest use of the internet was on Usenet, in the newsgroup scene of the 1990s. It was a bit like Reddit, but smaller, friendlier and less performative.1

The 2000s shifted into web forums, and then in the 2010s shifted wholly into the social media model. I have thoughts on how that went down, but that’s a larger topic for another time.

And now, here we are with Substack and the reborn newsletter scene more generally. It’s the most excited I’ve been about online communities for at least a decade. We’ll see how it goes — but in the meantime, this video should get anyone who is just starting out fully up to speed.

Enjoy!

This is the latest in my Substack for Beginners videos. If you didn’t sign up to this newsletter for that sort of thing, no worries! You can customise exactly what you receive in your newsletter settings.

Let’s be honest. This is not the most exciting video I’ve ever made.

However, it is vitally important and hopefully enlightening. Your Substack publication has a silly number of settings and it can be a nightmare trying to figure out what they all do. Handily, that’s what this videos is for. If you’ve been putting off customising your settings, now is the time - it will 100% give your publication a major boost.

If you find this useful, there’s more in the series here. And you can always say ‘thanks!’ with a lovely subscription:

I’ll be back on Friday with a new chapter of Triverse. 😃

This is the latest in my Substack for Beginners video series. Do remember, if you’re just here to read Tales from the Triverse or the usual newsletters, you can easily customise what you receive by visiting your account.

Hi everyone. There was a more innocent time when I thought I’d pump these videos out each week. 🤣 This one has taken a while longer th…

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The video today isn’t about how to be a good writer (you’ve already got that covered) but about how to make the most of all of Substack’s editor features.

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I cover things like:

• Formatting basics

• How to track word counts

• Version control

• Titles, subtitles and author

• Embedding images, video and audio

• How to add calls-to-action to your posts

• Using paywalls

Next time I’ll complete the tour of the editor by looking at post settings, previewing and the potentially scary process of sending. If that sounds useful, please do subscribe!

Wondering what else I do? Here are some good starting points:

Subscribe now

Subscribe now

This is the second part of my Substack for Beginners series. You can find part 1 here:

Let’s take a tour of that toolkit. In your Substack dashboard you can click a button to start a new post.

Post

These are the core of a Substack publication and are also the easiest to understand. A standard post is primarily text-based, like an essay or article or short story. It can include images, videos, embeds and all sorts, but text is the beating heart of a post.

Posts are sent out as a newsletter to your subscribers, and then they live on your publication website.

Video

Back on your dashboard, if you click the arrow next to New post you’ll get a bunch of other options.

The one at the bottom, Video, is the simplest to understand. It’s very similar to a normal post, except it puts a video front and centre.

This very post, the one you’re looking at right now, is a video post. It presents the video at the very top and prioritises that viewing experience.

Episode

Episode is for podcasts. Yes, you can run your own podcast via your Subsack!

This isn’t some kind of Substack-only fake podcast, either - you can have it show up in all the usual places for Apple, Google and Spotify users. The episode goes out just like a post to your subscribers, but also appears in the feeds of podcast apps.

You can even have custom feeds for your paid subscribers, and it’s all kept fairly easy to manage. Here’s ’s podcast showing up in my Google Podcasts app:

So far, these options have been fairly self-explanatory. Next we have two slightly more obscure options: Note and Thread.

Note

Creating a Note jumps you over into Notes, which…is a whole other thing.

The easiest way to think of it is as Substack’s version of Twitter, although that does it a disservice. And I’m referring to pre-2016 Twitter here, I suppose. In terms of features the comparison is mostly valid, but the feel is very different.

I’ll cover Notes in detail later in the series, but the key thing to know here is that a Note will not be sent out to your subscribers in the same, direct way as your other material. A Note will only be seen by people who actively use Notes.

A Note is also more public: anyone using Notes has the potential to see your Note, even if they are not a subscriber.

Thread

How about a Thread, then? No, it’s got nothing to do with Meta’s attempt at Twitter.

On Substack, a Thread is very similar to a normal post, except it’s presented and designed to maximise discussion. Instead of sending out a long-form article, a Thread should be a question: a short discussion prompt to get the conversation flowing.

Here’s an example from my archive:

I’ve always been pleasantly surprised by how effective these are: when I first started using them I expected to get an awkward silence in return, but instead I’ve had some really in-depth debates and have met some great people.

Chat

Lastly, there is Chat.

‘What is chat,’ you’re wondering, given its total absence from the dashboard?

To get to Chat you need to use the mobile or web apps. In the app it’s the icon at the bottom-right of the interface. On the web you can find it by going to your account menu and choosing Chat, which will then hop you over into the web app.

Think of a Chat as a private conversation between you and your subscribers. Only your subscribers see them. The idea is for Chats to be more ‘live’ and of the moment than newsletters.

I’d say this is the least well-defined part of Substack at the moment, but it still has a lot of potential if you want to build a community around your writing.

Get more from Simon K Jones in the Substack app

Available for iOS and Android

Get the app

Your Substack publication

Those are all the pieces. You don’t have to use all of them, but they’re there if you want them.

All of this is why I tend to refer to a writer’s Substack as ‘a publication’, rather than ‘a newsletter’. Your publication can incorporate all sorts of different types of thing, making it your own little media empire.

It can handle your written material, your videos and your podcasting. It has community features built-in. You don’t have to go elsewhere for these features, or bolt-on some confusing third party plugin.

I think of Substack less as ‘a platform’, in the traditional way of describing Facebook, or Twitter, or YouTube, and more as ‘a toolkit’. It may well be the most powerful toolkit for independent writers that has ever existed.

Things change, of course, and Substack is developing all the time. Features I’ve covered today could be quite different 6 months from now. But as I covered in last week’s video, you own your data and your audience on Substack: even if the worst happens and you decide the platform is no longer for you, you can just pick up your stuff and go somewhere else.

Hopefully that won’t be necessary, though. Substack have built something exciting and important and largely unprecedented, so hopefully it’s here for a while.

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Next…

Next time I’ll be looking at writing a post: how to make it look good, how to embed media, how to make use of buttons and footnotes and the other bells and whistles. 

Thanks for reading and watching. Every Monday I send out a newsletter with tips for writers (like this one), and on Fridays I publish a new chapter of my ongoing science fiction serial Tales from the Triverse. If that sounds good do make sure you subscribe so that you don’t miss anything.

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Meanwhile, some other stuff on my radar:

pretty much nailed the fundamentals of writing an online serial:

A few years ago I judged a children’s book award and was primarily left wondering why incredible books are siloed off as being ‘just for kids’, so ’s piece gets a big thumbs up from me:

Haver & Sparrow

Illustrated books aren't just for kids

✨This VoiceOver was recorded unedited in my home so there may be word jumbles, throat clearings, and the occasional dog snore. I hope you enjoy it whether it’s something you need or prefer. This post contains several photographs so if you’re able to take a look at those, I’d definitely recommend it. You can tap on a photo to enlarge it, if you’d like a …

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3 years ago · 41 likes · 36 comments · Charlene Storey

Typically good stuff from here:

The Honest Broker

Why Did Social Media Go to War Against Writers?

Below I look at some surprising ways Substack has changed the media (and social media) landscape. This gives me a good excuse to recommend the new Substack app. It’s now my go-to source for informed writing—providing access to a smarter and more diverse group of authors, thinkers, and creators than I’ve found anywhere else…

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3 years ago · 612 likes · 130 comments · Ted Gioia

I went to NorCon with my son at the weekend, an amusingly-named local science fiction convention. It’s always a good time and hits a nice balance of merch and actual artists. My 10 year old got to chat with a bunch of manga artists, and it made me think about how this kind of opportunity didn’t seem to exist in the 80s and 90s. Or maybe I just wasn’t aware of them.

Either way, being able to meet and learn from artist and writer role models is so important, especially for young artists.

Lastly, a friend of mine linked me to an amazing use of AI. So much AI hype focuses on the frankly grim application of generative AI to take things away from artists, so this makes for a nice change:

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UPDATE: I have a more recent version of this video here:

Later in this series I’ll be getting into the nuts and bolts of how to use it: posts, threads, chat, Notes, podcasts.

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At the moment, Substack is still best thought of as a publishing platform for writers that mixes together the best bits of Wordpress and Mailchimp.

The key pillars of Substack

The three absolute key things to know:

1. Substack is free to use

2. You own your data, including your subscriber list

3. You have the option of monetising your work via paid subscriptions.

This means you’re in control of your material. There are no ads, and there’s no algorithmic chicanery getting in-between you and your readers. Bottom line is, If someone subscribes to you, they will receive your newsletter.

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How Substack works for readers

People can read your Substack material in three places. On the web, you get a nice website that contains your archive and presents everything in a magazine-like format. Take a look at my home page - you can see the latest posts, my most popular articles, browse the archive, or jump to a particular section.  You don’t have to be a subscriber to check out the website.

Then there’s the email newsletters. Each one of the articles on my Substack website was also sent out via email to my subscribers. Many readers will never go to the website and will read entirely via email. A lot of my readers have never even heard of Substack: all they know is that they’re reading newsletters from me.

There’s also a Substack app. This is entirely optional, but offers an additional way for people to read, alongside the work of other Substack writers. This provides a streamlined reading experience on mobile.

Substack features & formats

Substack is very writing-focused but it also makes it easy to embed images, videos and audio.  A publication on Substack is also a great way to build a community, if you want. You can open up discussion threads and allow people to comment on your work, or turn off those features if they’re not of interest. I’ve met some amazing people this way, as well as found new readers - and other writers.

You can make your articles free for everyone, exclusive to paying subscribers, or a bit of both using a paywall partway through. Subscribers can pay per month or annually and you get to set your own pricing. Substack takes a small cut, 10% which I think is a fair exchange considering the quality of the tools they’re providing.

The risk is low

Perhaps the best thing is that you can take all of your subscribers and content and go somewhere else at any time, really easily.

This is excellent for two key reasons:

1. It makes using Substack relatively low risk - you’re not locked in, and you’re not going to lose everything if you leave, like when you try to quit Facebook or TikTok or Twitter (or X, or whatever Musk is calling it. And

2. It motivates Substack the company to keep improving in ways that benefit writers. Their priority is writers, and helping writers make money, because that’s how Substack makes money. The consequence of this is that their priority is not advertisers. And even if someone like Musk comes along in the future, buys Substack and runs it into the ground - it won’t make all of your hard work meaningless. You’ll be able to just pick up your stuff and go elsewhere.

Alternatives to Substack

There are alternatives, of course. Ghost is probably the closest you’ll get in terms of features. You could use a combo of services, like Mailchimp and Wordpress. Buttondown is a really good small-scale newsletter service run by one guy. Last I checked, it was really good.

I’m using Substack for now, though, and that’s what this series is going to be about. If you’re using Substack, or thinking of using Substack, make sure you subscribe so that you don’t miss upcoming episodes.

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Next up:

If you’re wondering who the hell I am: I’m a UK-based writer of science fiction and fantasy. I’ve been writing online, weekly serialised stories for almost 10 years - you can read my latest project, Tales from the Triverse, over here. I’ve been exploring Substack as a platform for fiction writers for the last three years.

Meanwhile. How was your weekend? I went to the Out There festival in Great Yarmouth, a coastal town near where I live. Lots of outdoors art and performance and music. Think of it like a really, really, really colloquial SXSW without the networking.

Also found this alleyway while I was there:

What else? I recorded a podcast interview on Sunday which was enormous fun. Hopefully I’ll be able to link to that in the newsletter next week. It’s always a curious experience talking about my writing. I’m much more familiar with talking about other people’s writing, and talking about my own requires a significant gear shift.

This popped up in my notifications:

Which makes me think two things: 1. I get the feeling the audience for reading serial fiction is growing on Substack. No real hard data to back that up, just a general feeling. I think we’re headed in the right direction, though. And 2. I really should replace those old generic MidJourney images with some illustrations of my own.

Some bits:

• The Cull #2 is out. It’s continuing to be very good. Check it out here.

• There was a discussion of serialised novels over on Notes, with wondering what was out there. If you’re working on something, it’s worth jumping into the conversation.

• If you like urban fantasy, in which my Tales from the Triverse has at least one foot, you’ll probably find something of value in this Urban Fantasy Freebies giveaway.

• Prefer something more overtly fantastical? Check out this Fantasy Realms free reads giveaway instead.

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