The Substack Model: How to Go From Zero Readers to Paid Subscribers - 519

What if your next reader wasn’t on Amazon… but already waiting for you on Substack?

This week, Sinem Günel, bestselling Substack creator and co-founder of Write, Build, Scale, unpacks how nonfiction authors can turn Substack into a powerful engine for audience growth, idea validation, and steady income.

You’ll hear how to test book ideas before you write them, build a loyal subscriber base that actually engages, and create paid content people want to subscribe to.

If your book marketing feels like a one-time push, this conversation will shift how you think about long-term visibility.

Key Takeaways

• Why Substack works for authors
  It’s not another platform to “manage.” It becomes your home base where readers return, respond, and stay connected.
• Build before you publish
  What if your book had an audience before it existed? Substack lets you test ideas and watch what resonates in real time.
• Turn readers into revenue
  Paid tiers don’t work because you ask. They work because readers feel they’re getting access they can’t get anywhere else.
• Grow without chasing algorithms
  Substack’s built-in discovery tools reward participation, not perfection. The more you show up, the more you get seen.
• Stop publishing in a vacuum
  Growth doesn’t come from writing more. It comes from interaction, conversation, and showing readers you’re paying attention.

Tune in and rethink how your book connects, grows, and sells, long before and long after your launch.

Here's how to connect with Sinem to download her free resources and templates

Substack Starter Kit

YouTube

Substack Mini Course Accelerator

*************************************************************************
When Visibility Feels Hard, Podcast Guesting Changes the Game

If you know your book deserves more reach but visibility feels like a struggle, podcast guesting can open the right doors.

Podcast Connections gets you in front of the audiences who need your message and your expertise.

Contact them at PodcastConnections.co

*************************************************************************

Transcript

Susan Friedmann [00:00:00]:
Welcome to Book Marketing Mentors, the weekly podcast where you learn proven strategies, tools, ideas, and tips from the masters. Every week I introduce you to a marketing master who will share their expertise to help you market and sell more books. Today, my special guest is Sinem Grunell. Sinem is a writer and creator helping people turn ideas into income through clear thinking and consistent writing. She's a Substack bestseller, educator, and co-founder of Write, Build, Scale. Her work focuses on writing, creator businesses, and building communities that support long-term growth. Sinem, what an absolute pleasure it is to welcome you to the show, and thank you for being this week's guest expert and mentor.

Sinem Günel [00:00:52]:
Thank you for having me. It's a pleasure.

Susan Friedmann [00:00:55]:
So as I mentioned to you earlier, I have not touched on Substack as a subject in all the episodes that we've done on this podcast. So I was like, you are the first one, so we're going to go to town on this. I'm excited. You and your team have definitely become the go-to experts on Substack, but For any one of our listeners who perhaps has never heard of Substack, how would you explain it to them?

Sinem Günel [00:01:26]:
That's actually a really tough question because Substack is growing rapidly right now and they are adding new tools to the platform every week. So I'll try to keep it simple, but I want to mention it can be a lot of things. For a lot of creators, Substack is like a blog. They publish long-form writing, and that's where their writing lives. For some writers and creators, it's a replacement of an email service provider. So it's like a newsletter platform. For others, it's more of a social media platform that also includes long-form content. And you can do a lot of different things on Substack, even going into multimedia like video, audio, podcasting, live streaming.

Sinem Günel [00:02:15]:
But the way I like to look at it, especially for authors, is it can be a fantastic way to reach new readers, to have a home base where you basically bring together a lot of the content that you might already have, a lot of the content you might have produced over the years. And it's a new way for you to reach readers that you might not reach on other channels.

Susan Friedmann [00:02:43]:
Yes. And I love the fact that they're expanding it now to really encompass all the different media possibilities. How would you even get started with this?

Sinem Günel [00:02:56]:
When you get started on Substack, you basically start with a profile. So it's very similar to a typical social media platform. You create your profile, you have your name, a profile picture, a simple bio. What's different to social media is you can build a publication on Substack, and this is not mandatory, but it's highly recommended because your publication then is like your home on Substack and your publication is essentially a brand on its own. So typically, if you have a brand name, like in our case, it's Write, Build, Scale, that's what our publication is called. And once you have a publication, you are really able to kind of build your own little home on the platform. And you can start with either short-form writing, you can start to publish longer-form blog posts. That's totally up to you.

Sinem Günel [00:03:51]:
If you are brand new to creating online, we usually recommend starting with some short-form snippets. We call them notes on Substack. If you're an author who has already published, you might already want to explore the longer form publishing tools as well. Those would be posts. And you can just take some of your existing work, just play around with the editor, get a feeling for the platform, and see if you can already get in touch with a few readers and authors.

Susan Friedmann [00:04:24]:
Do one of the components of Substack is really building subscribers? Talk to us about How do you even go about building subscribers?

Sinem Günel [00:04:34]:
Exactly. Subscribers are actually the reason Substack is booming right now. So on most channels, you are building a following. On Substack, you have the opportunity to build a subscriber list. And if you've heard anything about online marketing, you know that an email list is essentially priceless, right? You can lose your followers on any platform anytime. This doesn't apply to your email list and to people who became your email subscribers. On Substack, people subscribe to your publication, not to you as your profile, not to the writer, because a writer can have multiple publications, but they become subscribers for your publication, which essentially means they want to get notified via email when you publish any of your articles, any of your posts. And that's how you build a subscriber list directly on Substack.

Sinem Günel [00:05:32]:
The beautiful thing is this can coexist even if you have an existing email list. That's what's been the case for us. For example, I didn't start to build my subscriber list on Substack. I had a list that I've been running on Kit for several years, but it's an addition and it's for us, we look at it as a growth tool. Basically, Substack helps us grow our list faster. But if you don't have an email list altogether, then it can be your first starting point as well.

Susan Friedmann [00:06:01]:
You're building two lists here, if I understand you correctly. You've got your original list and then you've got your subscribers through Substack. Is there a way then to take those subscribers and introduce them to your personal email list, which obviously, as you said, is like gold dust? I mean, it's so important to have your own list.

Sinem Günel [00:06:24]:
There are multiple ways to do it, but how exactly you would do it depends on your ecosystem and how you have set up your business. The way we look at it on Substack, we send out our content 3 times per week. Our subscribers receive our long-form content, which is on Mondays, it's a podcast episode. On Wednesdays, it's a free post. And on Fridays, it's usually a paid posting, which most of the time is a workshop. So it's a video workshop, usually an hour long. And on Kit, what we do is we run our automations, we run our product launches, our marketing campaigns. So the two tools in our ecosystem serve very different purposes.

Sinem Günel [00:07:13]:
And depending on how you decide to use them, you would make certain decisions that basically make sure that they don't collide, but they actually build a meaningful flywheel for your business.

Susan Friedmann [00:07:26]:
Many nonfiction authors write a book first and then they try to build an audience. However, on Substack, it seems to be the opposite that's happening. Why, in your opinion, do you feel that maybe audience first is a good model to follow?

Sinem Günel [00:07:45]:
I would say most importantly because it gives you accountability and an audience to test ideas with, because I know firsthand how hard it can be to show your work and to get feedback from people who are not afraid of hurting your feelings and who will just tell you the truth if something is off. But also, it depends on the goals with the book. But I mean, most people, if they publish a book, they do want to achieve certain goals with the book launch itself, right? So the first time you launch your book, that's kind of a big event. And the bigger your audience is in that initial launch phase, the more momentum you can build. It's very hard to put out a book to a non-existing audience and then promote it, because even if you look at traditional publishing, right, people want to see that there's an interest for you, for your topic, for the book that you're creating. And on Substack in particular, It's really easy to take your audience on the journey with you, especially because you have all these multimedia features, but also because right now Substack is still relatively intimate and very personal. So we're still in the very early stages of the platform, which means people are building real connections and having real conversations. Obviously, we don't know how long this is going to last, but right now that's why people love Substack.

Sinem Günel [00:09:14]:
And for authors, that's just so valuable because you get to talk about your work to people who will actually pay attention.

Susan Friedmann [00:09:23]:
That's so enticing just to even hear you say that because all the other platforms that I know are so noisy. Obviously LinkedIn is for business and it's still good for that. However, it's still very noisy now. More so than it's ever been, and of course Facebook and Instagram. And I've noticed that, I mean, that's your social media platform, Substack, is that correct?

Sinem Günel [00:09:51]:
Yes, exactly. I've actually never used LinkedIn, Instagram, or Twitter for business purposes, and right now with Substack, through all those different options and opportunities we have, we are basically able to create all the different types of content that we want to create and use it all on one platform.

Susan Friedmann [00:10:13]:
How would people actually discover a Substack newsletter? Is there a way other than through your own list and obviously building your own audience? But is there a way that somebody might discover me if I was to be there on the— for the first time?

Sinem Günel [00:10:32]:
That's such a good question because that's what most people actually get wrong about Substack. They think if they come to Substack, they will need to bring people to Substack. But the biggest advantage right now is to use the built-in discovery tools and to benefit from the growing audience that is on the platform right now. There are multiple ways to do that, and it depends on which of those options feel best for you and which make most sense with your current goals. One of the ways you can reach an audience on Substack directly is notes. That's the short form content feed of the platform. Usually when you open Substack on the app or you just go to the web version, that's the first thing you see. You see the notes feed, which looks similar to, you know, what the feed on Twitter, X, or even on LinkedIn looks like.

Sinem Günel [00:11:26]:
You have short-form writing, but it can also include images, videos. When you show up on notes and you build momentum there, it's easy to reach an audience that might be interested in your work based on their behavior on the platform, but who is not connected to you yet. That's one of the ways that we recommend new creators on the platform to really use simply because it's so easy. And especially for authors, it's a fantastic way because you already have content, right? You don't lack ideas in that sense. So you can easily use what you already have. The second most powerful way we recommend to build the audience directly on the platform is to connect with others, especially with other creators and writers in your space, because collaborations can take you incredibly far on Substack. There's a recommendation feature, for example, so that your work gets recommended to an audience that's actively reading other publications that are in your field, in your niche, so to say. And you also have a lot of other collaboration opportunities like guest posting, like doing live interviews, like doing podcasts or collaborating on articles.

Sinem Günel [00:12:42]:
So there's a real wide range of opportunities you have to just get in front of an audience that already exists and that people have already built on the platform. And again, as authors, you have the advantage of having content and having assets that you bring to the table. So you're not starting from zero, which just makes it a lot easier to explore those different opportunities.

Susan Friedmann [00:13:09]:
I love hearing you say that. It seems as if I went in backwards. I started posting and then started to find the community. It's like, okay, that wasn't quite the way maybe I should have done it, but, uh, it seems to work. And I love the platform, as you know. How about the posts? What kinds of posts do you find maybe perform better than others?

Sinem Günel [00:13:35]:
That really depends on your target audience. When it comes to posts, typically we expect more depth on Substack, so we do want some nuance. We want you to go deeper. And I think for authors, that's actually great news because on most channels you are kind of forced to make your point very quickly, right? You don't have a lot of room to expand. You do have that on Substack. There is really no perfect length for a post or a perfect format, so to say, or a template. It can look very different. Some of your long-form posts can be longer.

Sinem Günel [00:14:11]:
Some of them can be shorter. The point is to know your audience and know what they are signing up for. As long as you're clear on that and as long as you have a clear reader avatar and a persona in mind, and you are serving them with everything you do, you will be fine because the platform gives you the opportunity to show up in exactly the way that you want to show up. There's no limitation on where you can go with your post. So what truly matters is staying in close touch with your audience, making sure you know what they want, and just doing your best to deliver that.

Susan Friedmann [00:14:49]:
Which is very similar to everything else. I mean, it starts with knowing your audience. Yes, I love the fact that you emphasize that because it's no different, as you say, on Substack. Let's talk about the feature of having a free versus a paid version of Substack, and that is for your subscribers. Talk to us more about that.

Sinem Günel [00:15:14]:
Yeah, this is basically how Substack has started. Initially, in the early days, Substack was a very basic newsletter platform, so to say, where you could have free content and you could have your locked content behind a paywall and people could subscribe to your publication. You can think of it as having a paid newsletter essentially. And a lot of people obviously see a lot of value in offering that simply because it promises recurring revenue. It allows you to lean into the work that you truly love, which is creating and writing. Most writers face a challenge when it comes to actually converting their readers because they think if the pricing of the subscription is low, it's going to be easy to sell the subscription. But usually they find out very soon that that's not true. Even if your subscription price is set to $5 a month, you will have to actively sell it and you will have to make an argument as to why should people pay to receive your emails, right? Because essentially that's what they're doing.

Sinem Günel [00:16:26]:
And if we are honest, nobody wants to receive more emails, let alone pay to receive more emails. So we need to be very clear in articulating What is the value in our paid tier and why would someone want to pay to receive more content, more of the stuff that they might be able to find for free? And usually the answer is in the packaging and in delivering resources or additional tools, prompts, materials that are very different from the content you publish for free. And this can look very differently depending on what type of writing you do and what you write about. And I would say the most valuable resource for that is Substack itself. If you look into some of the leaderboards, you will see that there are publications on pretty much any topic out there, and there are publications with thousands, tens of thousands of paid subscribers. And that's a fantastic way to do your own research and to go look at what are these people offering and Why are people paying for it?

Susan Friedmann [00:17:35]:
That's really good to know. I'm always fascinated and obviously excited when somebody wants to subscribe to my posts. And what I've taken to doing now is at the end of every paid version is that there is a download, that there's something special that I've not put out there to anybody else at this point. I don't know how much of an incentive that is just yet, but I'm still experimenting with that one. Talk to us about mistakes. You mentioned one earlier, but talk to us more about the mistakes that especially first-timers are making when it comes to starting stuff with Substack.

Sinem Günel [00:18:16]:
The biggest mistake is just publishing and staying focused on the consistency part of things and I understand why this is so intimidating because everyone tells you, you need to be consistent and it's absolutely true. But if you publish in isolation for too long and you don't have an audience yet, you are not getting any feedback, which means you are publishing, you're showing up, you're doing the hard work, but you don't know if you're moving in the right direction or if you're moving at all, right? And as I said before, The big advantage of Substack right now is that people are really excited to talk to real people, and that's your opportunity to get in touch with others who might be on a similar journey, but also others who might be looking for the type of writing that you are doing. So the biggest mistake is really trying to do it in isolation. And if you do it in isolation, what you are aiming for is basically for your content to take off, right? Because otherwise, how would you reach people? You are waiting for kind of a miracle to happen and for your writing to go viral, which can happen. And obviously it does happen. But I would say it's not a very strategic and smart approach because when you lean into having conversations, building connections and building collaborations, you are basically focusing on adding tasks to your to-do list that you can actually check off because all those things that I've just mentioned You have complete control, you have complete influence over how often you do them and how well you do them. And of course, that's all on top of your actual writing. But you don't have that much of an influence over how the algorithm reacts to a piece of content that you put out there, right? Even if we want to, to feel like we have kind of cracked the code and we understand algorithms, they change all the time.

Sinem Günel [00:20:17]:
And I'm even saying they change faster on Substack than on other channels simply because the platform is still young. Younger and less mature, which can be a good thing because it leads to more experiments and faster data. But as a writer, I wouldn't want to rely on my content taking off. I want to be the person who is leading with the actions that I take every single day. And that's what you can do by actually being a human and relying on the connections, conversations, and the community.

Susan Friedmann [00:20:51]:
Oh, I love the fact that you mentioned consistency because that is so important in whatever an author decides to do. It's that consistency that often they have a really hard time with. They try it and they say, oh, you know, I tried that 2 or 3 times and it didn't work, the consistency. But talk to us about, is there sort of an optimum number of times you should be on the platform? Is there a, like a formula maybe that you could share?

Sinem Günel [00:21:22]:
We really recommend showing up on nodes multiple times per day, and that's mostly because it gives you room to run more of those tiny experiments, right? Because with every node, you are basically testing an idea and you are spreading breadcrumbs. That's how I like to look at it. And the more often you show up, the easier it is to gather meaningful data. And notes can be really, really simple on Substack. It can literally be a one-liner. It can be an image. It can be a repurposed video snippet that you've created for another channel. It can be a quote that inspired you with a few of your own thoughts.

Sinem Günel [00:22:05]:
It can literally be a tiny thought that you just had. And an additional way to show up on notes is what we call restacking on Substack. You can think of that like retweeting on Twitter, but you can also take snippets from your long-form posts and restack them. This usually looks like a little quote card. So you take a line or two from an article that you have published and you kind of republish it as a short-form piece or as a short-form note on the platform. Those are very simple ways to make sure you are showing up consistently in the feed and just gathering more data. And if possible, we really recommend being on Notes 3 times a day, if possible, more often. When it comes to your longer form content, we recommend once per week as a baseline, again, because that way you stay on top of your mind.

Sinem Günel [00:23:05]:
You are in the inbox of your reader every week. And they don't forget about you easily. If you can show up more often, that's fine. As I mentioned before, we are showing up in the inbox 3 times per week just through our Substack content, but it's absolutely not necessary, especially if you're just starting out and you want to create original, fresh content and writing for the platform.

Susan Friedmann [00:23:30]:
Yeah. So you mentioned you do one free one, then you do Was it a podcast interview? And then you do one paid one. So the paid one is only for your paid subscribers and then the free one is for everyone, correct?

Sinem Günel [00:23:46]:
Exactly. But also free subscribers get the paid post to their inboxes. It's just locked after a certain part. So usually, for example, if it's a workshop, they might be able to listen to the first 10 minutes. And then there's the paywall. So they do get a taste for what the paid content is, and then they can decide if they want to upgrade to get access to it. But everyone on the Substack publication, everyone who is subscribed, basically receives the paid post as well. They are just not able to access the full content.

Susan Friedmann [00:24:23]:
Interesting. And that's actually the way I do that with my post, even that mine's once a week. Then I do the free version, which is sort of an introduction to what they could get more in-depth in the paid version. And then they get the download, whatever I decide to give them, if it's a worksheet or— last week I did a meditation. It just came to me. It just fit the subject matter that I was talking about. And I thought, huh, maybe I could just do a little meditation. And so I did a 5-minute meditation and it worked out beautifully.

Susan Friedmann [00:24:59]:
Yeah, just little things. This is a great opportunity, Sinem, for you to share how our listeners can find out more about you, about Substack, and all the incredible things that you and your team are doing.

Sinem Günel [00:25:14]:
Yeah, join us over on the Substack publication, Write, Build, Scale. We have a ton of resources for listeners over there on all the different topics that you might want to learn about when it comes to setting up your publication, using notes, Growing your audience, collaborating. We also have a Substack starter kit for free, which is a little Notion dashboard where you have access to a variety of different resources, templates, also a few tiny videos that guide you through the very first step of getting started on Substack. Maybe we can also link to that and yeah, say hi if you are on Substack. I always love to see what writers are building, what they are using the platform for. That's always very exciting for me to see.

Susan Friedmann [00:26:01]:
Yes. And definitely let, uh, Sinem know that you heard her on Book Marketing Mentors. I'm sure she'd like to know that too. The starter kit, by the way, is invaluable and we'll definitely put the link to that and obviously to your newsletter as well. Listeners, this is definitely worthwhile checking out if you've not checked out Substack. Uh, I'm very excited about the platform. As you might have heard, and I'm so excited to have had Sinem here as a guest. And before we let you go though, Sinem, I would love you to leave our listeners with a golden nugget. What would that be?

Sinem Günel [00:26:42]:
The golden nugget, I would actually love to lean into what you said about your own paid content. That's also one of the mistakes that I see very often on Substack. When you do start a paid tier, don't think of your paid content as just more of the stuff you're doing anyway, or more of the writing you are giving away for free anyway. Think of how you can do something different. And I love the example you gave with the meditation because that's exactly the type of stuff that people want. If they become a paid member, they want something that is more special and just different than what they can get on your free tier, essentially. Again, you have the opportunity to dive into all the existing publications that are out there to see what they are already doing, how they are doing it. You can check out our paid tier.

Sinem Günel [00:27:36]:
You will see all the downloadables, the prompts, the workshops that we are offering behind our paid tier. You just really want to make sure your paid tier feels like an absolute no-brainer to someone who is already loving your free content.

Susan Friedmann [00:27:51]:
I've got so much to learn. Thank you. You just emphasized the fact that I'm just learning how to walk there. I'm excited and I appreciate having you as a guest. This was amazing. And I'm sure as the platform grows, we've gotta have you back to keep us updated as to what our listeners should be looking for and how they can make the best of it. So thank you. And by the way, listeners, if your book isn't selling the way you wanted to expect it to, let's jump on a quick call together to brainstorm ways to ramp up those sales because you've invested a whole lot of time, money, and energy, and it's time you got the return you were hoping for.
So go to bookmarketingbrainstorm.com to schedule your free call. And in the meantime, I hope this powerful interview sparks some ideas you can use to sell more books. Until next week, here's wishing you much book and author marketing success.

Here's how to connect with Sinem to download her free resources and templates

Substack Starter Kit

YouTube

Substack Mini Course Accelerator