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Craft Chat Chronicles
Craft Chat Chronicles
Mastering Substack: Effortless Content Creation and Monetization for Writers
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Exclusive access to premium content!Imagine a world where you can effortlessly publish, manage, and monetize your writing without getting tangled in the usual web of distractions. On this episode of Craft Chat Chronicles, Anthony and I, Nicola, take you on an enlightening journey through Substack, a powerhouse platform that's redefining the writing landscape. We'll share our personal stories and insights, demonstrating how Substack offers an ad-free, distraction-free environment that prioritizes writers, and supports various media formats, from podcasts to videos.
Ever wondered how top authors like Salman Rushdie and others have successfully monetized their content on Substack? We've got you covered. Explore the dynamics of creating and sending posts, managing both free and paid subscriptions, and navigating the 10% subscription fee. Anthony will also give a practical demonstration of Substack's backend functionalities, showcasing user metrics, traffic analysis, and engagement statistics. This episode is packed with real-world examples and valuable tips to help you make the most of Substack's user-friendly interface and built-in monetization features.
We’ll also dive into the nitty-gritty of marketing your Substack newsletter. Discover how to leverage the platform's powerful analytics tools to understand your audience and boost your outreach efforts. Learn about the importance of previewing drafts, organizing content with tags, and the ease of importing existing contacts. By comparing Substack with other newsletter services like Mailchimp and WordPress, we'll reveal why Substack stands out as a go-to tool for writers. Whether you're an established author or just starting out, this episode will provide you with the insights you need to elevate your writing journey with Substack. Tune in and transform your approach to content creation and monetization!
Welcome to Craft Chat Chronicles, the go-to podcast for tips on crafting best-selling fiction. Here at Craft Chat Chronicles, we bring you expert interviews, insights and tips on writing, publishing and marketing. Join the conversation and embark on a new chapter in your writing journey. For workshops, show notes and more information, visit jdmyallcom. That's jdmyallcom.
Speaker 2:So we are the communications committee, me and Anthony. I'm Nicola, I'm from the graduating class of 2023, and I write speculative fiction and work as a copywriter Awesome.
Speaker 3:And I'm in graduating class of 21, and I teach at Drexel and I also do marketing strategy. Yay.
Speaker 2:So we are going to talk about Substack. So you know, substack is used by quite a few people. You know, paper Dragon now uses it. Some notable authors use it. One of my favorite authors, rf Kuang, she uses it and I love her Substack because she sends like, just like really kind of they feel really personal whenever I get her emails. So that's actually what turned me on to Substack. And then now we use it.
Speaker 2:So what is it and why do we use it? Let's start with so what is it? So Substack is basically just a writing platform. Right, that's the basic of it. But it enables writers to build your platform. Share your work that's the basic of it. But it enables writers to build your platform. Share your work, you know, earn some income if your payments are on.
Speaker 2:There's some more fun things about that later, but I just it's super simple. It keeps everything on the Substack website and there's actually a Substack app, but ultimately it sends posts by email. So it's like really easy for people to kind of sign up, get engaged on that and then just get that in their mailbox. And it's like really easy for people to kind of sign up, get engaged on that and then just get that in their mailbox, and it's like they don't actually have to touch the app or the website. So that's kind of cool. And then, since it is on Substack, it lets everything kind of like has a history going through the website. So it's kind of like cool, because you get new readers and they can just go to Substack and like they'll be able to read whatever they want, if they want to read anything. So I think that's pretty neat feature, but especially because, like, the main thing is that it's like for newsletters and stuff. So, anyway, it has features to publish other media, so you can do like podcasts and videos through Substack, which is I cool, um, if you're interested in that kind of thing anyway, um, and I think a lot of people are these days, so I think that's extra interesting.
Speaker 2:Um, ultimately, though, it's more of a tool than a social media. So like social media, you'll be able to like get more people, whereas like Substack is more of like you're going to have to use your own marketing experience to get people to get there, and then we'll talk a little bit more about that later. But also it's free, so that's always a plus. So how can this enhance your writing in your platform. Well, first of all, subsects main priority is the writers. Sub stack's main priority is the writers. So they make their money through the writers because they get 10 off of however much money your subscribers are like paying you. So I mean honestly, relative, like that's pretty low considering how great the tool really is. But it's teach their own right.
Speaker 2:Um, that's, but that's good because, like, for instance, social media, a lot of times they use a lot of ads and like that's how they make a lot of their money, whereas, like Substack is not.
Speaker 2:There's no advertisements, there's no ads anywhere, right? So it's like it's kind of cool because they're not trying to make money from a bunch of people like trying to sell you like Tide or something. So that's kind of nice. Like it's keep everything just like simple and people can just really look at what they want to look at and read what they want to read without like many distractions. So, and then also because you're the priority, any updates they make, you're like the number one thing on their mind is the writer. So it's like that usually means that you end up benefiting from any updates to Substack, so that's pretty cool. Also great for authors because it's simple, so you don't have to like it's not like a huge amount of work, like you can probably get. There's a lot of settings in there so you can get more advanced with it if you're interested in that. But honestly, it's like really pretty easy to just write a post and then send it Right. So it's like pretty easy to just write a post and then send it right.
Speaker 5:So it's like it's not super where some places can be um sorry I wasn't ready, but yeah yeah, sorry it's going crazy, I'm just gonna say, um, you can also have paid in free content.
Speaker 2:So that's actually pretty normal for people to do, is they have like most of their content free and then they have like a certain portion of it is goes to paid subscribers, which I think is a really neat thing. Um, because, like, subsec wants most of your stuff to be free, just because then it's like I mean, nobody's gonna read you if they've never read you and they're, they're trying to, but there's no way to like. I think that, um, inkcom, for instance, like their website, it's like I read the article all the time but I think I only get like three free ones a month or something, just like not because I don't pay for it or whatever, and like I always think that their stuff's really high quality. So it's like every time I'm reading it, I'm like, and then every time I get paywalled, I'm just like, man, I really want to read this thing, but I don't want to pay for it, so, anyway, so I think that's kind of a cool thing about Substack, and apparently it's not out of the ordinary to make money on Substack, and apparently you'll be surprised by how many people want to pay you money to read your newsletter, which I think is pretty interesting, um, or not even newsletter, because another reason why it's really great for authors too is like if you're interested in writing like serialized short stories, so like, let's say, you have this like long standing like world, that you're just constantly writing stories in um, and then you just have those going, I don't know once a week or something. It's like if you wanted to start like being like all all right, well, that that's free, but I'm going to start writing like either longer ones or I'm going to write like more involved stories, and then you could put like sort of like that people have to pay for that, so you can kind of like choose what content goes to, like the people who don't pay you and then the people who do pay you. So that's pretty cool.
Speaker 2:And then some authors put their novels on Substack. So, for instance, like Salmon Rushdie Is it Salmon or Salmon Rushdie? I don't really actually know how to say his name, but Salmon Rushdie I don't know, but he's an example. There's a few other people I didn't know, but apparently some people do that and they can make money that way and some in Rushdie's novels ended up published. So I'm not really sure how that all worked out. I don't know the details, but I imagine it's probably similar to how some fanfic writers end up published with their stuff. That was like previously on a website, but he's a well-known.
Speaker 6:He's a well-known writer because he got a. He got a uh jihad against him back in the 80s he got what um, the um. The extremists over in the middle east put a price on his head oh, interesting.
Speaker 2:Okay, I was wondering why.
Speaker 6:Because of a book that he wrote that um, that put down muhammad, interesting yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 2:So there's some pros and cons to Substack. So you know it's free to set one up and then there's like a minimal amount of tools needed because it's like, for instance, if you're interested in setting up, you know a blog and then a newsletter and then serialized short story lists, and then also you wanted to set up a podcast and you're also doing videos. If you did all those things you could do it on substack, which I think is kind of cool. I feel like a lot of technology tends to like make things harder sometimes, so it's nice that this one's like pretty simple for all that. But on top of that it's like there is a benefit. The negative side, where it's like subtech does take 10% of subscription costs, but I mean, I don't know, they have to make money somehow. And then some other pros is it's not social media. So that's kind of a pro and a con. Good for you, mostly, because it's like there's no algorithm. So if you're writing content, you have a subscription list, you your stuff will always go to the people that have subscribed to you. So I think that's pretty cool. Apparently it's better than what pad and kendall bella for serialization of short stories and stuff, because you own your connection to the reader so you can actually see your entire list of subscribers, and so if you've like made this huge list of people that are now like subscribed to what you send out, you can take that list. You can see every single email on that list. Because you own all your data. You can take all that and you can leave. You can take it somewhere else, you can like all right, I want to do MailChimp. Now Let me just go ahead and take all this and put it there. You know it's like so it's kind of cool because it's like you just kind of pick up and go whenever and apparently it's pretty easy. So anyway, and then there's no ads. I already said that I think that's a pretty cool thing. I might be biased Monetization's baked in so you don't have to figure out how to make money by doing something else.
Speaker 2:Like if I was just doing like mailchimp or something for newsletters, it's like I mean, how would I make money from those? I don't know, I haven't tried to figure that out, but subsex, like you can just turn payments on pretty easily. So like that's pretty neat, I think. Um, it's also low risk because you can take your stuff and go all your content, all your subscribers, um, some other cons does require marketing skills. So if you can't sell yourself anyway, um, I don't know how many people are really going to be signing up for your sub stack emails. I don't know that's. I feel like that's always a crapshoot anyway.
Speaker 2:And then also, it's separate from your website, so it is like another thing that somebody else has to go to if they want to get stuff from you.
Speaker 2:You can add like a button to your website, like I think a lot of people do that anyway, but it is separate. So it's not great for, uh, search engine optimization or seo, um, but I think most of the time when we're trying to do newsletters and if we wanted to do serialized short stories, seo doesn't really matter for those things. So I think seo would be more important if your, like main gig was trying to be somebody who was found through, just like people searching, which would be like, for instance, like if you have a blog and it's dedicated to like employment and unemployment, like you're specifically talking about, like workforce stuff, it's like that's kind of stuff you'd want your blog post to work well in a search engine optimization situation, right? So it's like you want people to be able to find those articles, whereas like subsec, like that's not really the vibe it can be, I guess, but it would be. It would definitely work against you if that was your goal. Another thing is it's not well known. I mean, we're literally having to talk about this right, like we didn't talk about subsec during our degree you know we didn't
Speaker 2:really talk about much during our degree about anything that was like technology, but in general, you know it's like not really well known, and then there's also no email marketing. So Substack really specifically wants people to be creating these like really great newsletters for people and they don't really want them to be like all paintwalled, because, like that's how people find out about Substack, right, it's like they sign up for their favorite author's like newsletter or whatever and they sign up and then they're in it and they're like, oh, this is kind of nice. But if that was paywalled, I mean like the amount of times I would sign up for an author's newsletter would be zero. To be honest, I avoid it myself. I know that not everybody does, but I don't like falling into the gaps of let me just put money here and here and here and then forget about it, like I, I don't like doing that, so I'm not the person that would do that, but there are people that do do that, so that's kind of interesting, but anyway, so that could be bad I guess, since there's no email marketing like if you're trying to promote your book, you can do a little bit, but they don't want it to be like every email that you're sending is promotional.
Speaker 2:I don't think that I was reading about it and it was like they're like I'm not really sure how much that's policed, but it is a thing in their kind of like rules almost, where they're just like we don't want this to be what's happening, because it's like meant to pull in people and like that would just put people off. Um, not always, I mean, depends how aggressively you're trying to promote yourself and you know what your energy is. If you're just putting like a little thing at the bottom, like I don't, nobody's going to notice. So it's not all bad. But okay, I feel like I just talked really fast, but, um, if anybody has questions, write them down, because we're going to move to the demo that Anthony is going to lead and then at the end we'll do questions.
Speaker 3:So, all right, yeah, so I figured you know I could talk about it, but might as well show kind of what it looks like on the back end. So this is what you'd see. This is the sub stack for the Alumni Association for the newsletter. If you just go to the URL, you see the landing page and all the content and everything that's listed here. So it looks like there's a decent amount of work that goes into it. Obviously, there's menus and there's different posts and images and everything. So I just want to walk through how relatively easy it is to set this up so from our end. So I just want to kind of walk through how relatively easy it is to set this up so from our end. When we click through to the backside, the dashboard, we have quite a few things that we can kind of walk through. We get immediate data to see how many people are on our list, how many people have been added recently, how much traffic, how many people have actually visited any of these posts over the last month, how many people have actually visited any of these posts over the last month, how many people open it when we send it out. So there's a nice high-level amount of information to work with. I have a marketing background so I always geek out about the numbers. But even at a basic level it's just nice to know we're trending in a good direction. Or nearly two-thirds of people open everything which is generally considered pretty good. Lot, you know, nearly two-thirds of people open everything which is generally considered pretty good. Um, if you want to create a new post, we get a fairly easy to use editing tool. Uh, so the it tells you where we want to put the title. So the newsletter for december tells us where to enter the subtitle um mfa newsletter and and then content just flows from there.
Speaker 3:There's a lot of tools up here that make it easy to drop things in. We can make our headings and our texts in the body of the paragraph and just change how it looks relatively easily, like you would in Microsoft Word or Google Documents. It doesn't require you to know any coding or any of the back-end stuff that goes into making it look good. They take care of the fonts and the typography. Dropping images in is very easy as well. They have a nice easy image drop button add an image. You can add audio clips. Video clips you can upload directly. You can even record from the back end if you just want to have a very quick conversation with your audience and just record it through the web browser and drop it in there. It doesn't take very long to put this together and I have a lot of experience working with like other content management systems like WordPress is very popular and it takes longer to do these things because it's it's not designed for authors and everyday users who just want to quickly share what they have to think.
Speaker 3:But the thing that makes it so powerful, I think, is in in email. We're kind of limited in how much we can do with this unless you have a separate tool. So if you send an email to like you have a list of people and you send it through like Gmail, you can only do so much. You can drop an image and you can kind of change the text a little bit, but without going to a separate place and you know designing it separately. It's kind of difficult to do, whereas in here you can very quickly and easily create these headings, change the text, add an image, add an image gallery. You can upload up to nine images and drop them in as well. So it makes it very simple.
Speaker 3:They have these pre-built buttons as well, so you can drop in subscribe buttons If you want to. You know, if you're sending this out to, you know people who maybe are not paying you money and you're trying to get other people to subscribe and pay you money, you can drop in a subscribe now button. But there's also custom buttons. There's buttons that you've already created share buttons, referral buttons so lots of different ways. Like Nicolette said, we need to be marketers when we use a tool. But they do give us a lot of tools and say here are some ways you can be a marketer, kind of prompt you a little bit instead of kind of throwing you to the wolves completely. So that's like the basic end of things.
Speaker 3:The one other thing here that you'll notice when I click on the more button is you can paywall content within the post itself, and so we talked a little bit about paywalling and like what things, um, you can make free versus what you know. You can make. Things cost money and there's a lot of different ways to do that. I'm not going to go through all of them them, but they do make it as easy as possible without having to go in and set up extra stuff. So, like on an individual post. You could just say paywall here, everything below this line, somebody needs to be subscribed. Right, and that's a very common strategy is the first half of the post might be free. You want to keep reading. You need to be a paid subscriber to read the rest.
Speaker 3:Uh, instead of having to, like, create two separate posts and link into them and do all this the crazy stuff you'd have to do in other tools, um, so that's one of the nice things here is they. They try to give you the tools and walk you through it as much as possible without it having to be like this big, burdensome thing, and it's clean and there's not a million things going on Menus themselves. So, like when this back-end menu here that we can see, if I click on posts, it'll show us all the posts that we've published we can also create drafts that we can work on for the future. So there's the one I was just playing with newsletter for December, which will not be our newsletter for December, but that's where it would live. You can schedule posts for the future. So and this is very simple again, like when you go to publish it. So if I went through to publish this thing, um, I can choose when I want it to publish. So under scheduling, just schedule a time to email and publish for the future, right. So again, like it removes a lot of the barriers that kind of go in with kind of scheduling stuff and other things, um, up here you'll see, like when you publish something as well, this is for either everybody, which you know well I had the paywall example. Let me remove that. Um, it can be for everybody, um, which is what we do with the newsletter or if you have paid content turned on, you can decide that it's only for paid subscribers. So you can do that at the individual post levels as well.
Speaker 3:You can turn on and off comments. You can add tags to it to help organize things. So you can see we've created a few tags for ours here Book club, craft chat, critique groups, newsletter writing, meetups. This helps with navigation and helping people find things later. So one thing I do recommend if you create one of these is try to think how you want to organize it, and that can evolve with time. But if everything kind of goes into the same bucket once you have a bunch of posts, you want to make it easy for people to find things. Same bucket.
Speaker 3:Once you have like a bunch of posts, you want to make it easy for people to find things the podcast menu, which we're not currently using, but everything I've seen is that it's fairly straightforward and easy to use. I actually do publish a couple of podcasts separately with with a friend, and the tools that we've used historically have been cumbersome and time consuming to use and expensive. So the fact that they have this tool in here and it's free to use is astounding to me, because there are no free podcasting posting tools. Really. There's a couple that are not very good. So it's as simple as if you want to share audio notes, if you want to read your stories to people, um, or if you just want to produce an actual podcast, like, you can just record audio and share it either free or through paywall on the back end here, um, and the interface is fairly straightforward. The subscribers menu shows you everybody who is currently signed up for your newsletter, uh, so you get a nice little chart of like who's's been added, so you can see here. When I imported everybody that was an upload, but you can also look through and see who's more active, so you can sort through and see like these are the people who open things the most or read things the most Versus, you know, maybe people who don't read things as much, and that can help with things.
Speaker 3:Like you know, if you're running promotions, you're trying to get people to sign up for things, you can set up different group subscriptions For the purposes of what we do. How this is set up, all of our subscribers kind of fall into the same bucket. None of them are paid. If you were to put up paywalls, if you were to try to monetize your sub stack, this becomes a little more complex in the sense that there's different groups of people. Right, you have your free users, you have your paid users. You might have different groups for paid users based on what they're paying for, and that's something that would kind of grow organically as you build that out, but that you just would have two separate groups. Like you can see here, all subscribers paid subscribers they separate those groups. Like you can see here, all subscribers paid subscribers they separate those out. So you can kind of see how many people are converting over.
Speaker 3:If you're just running this as like a newsletter or sending emails or just free updates, like how we're using for the Alumni Association, then this is really just a list of people and you can see how active they are. The other thing you can do here is you can import subscribers, so you don't people don't have to sign up to get access to your materials. You can just add them, like if you already have in contact with them. Um, that's what I did for when we launched. It is, I just took the list that had been being sent out already and I just uploaded it into the system so that everybody who was on that distribution list just automatically got these emails. Every post is going to have a subscribe option on it anyway, so if somebody gets forwarded to somebody, they can then subscribe and sign up for it. So this is fairly easy to use.
Speaker 3:You can upload a file, but you could just also just enter people's emails directly. Depends on how many you have. I suppose emails directly Depends on how many you have. I suppose there's a nice little statistics here. Again, I geek out over this stuff, so if your eyes glaze over at numbers, this maybe is not as useful, but you can see where people come from, where they find things. So, for example, email accounts for 85% of the views on things that we publish, which makes sense because that's how we primarily send it out, and you can see how many people are viewing, like in the app. We have, you know, some referrals, like, for example, the paper dragon sub stack. We link to theirs I think they link back to ours, so you can kind of see where everything's coming from. You can also see how many people subscribe from those sources, which can be helpful if you're actively promoting yourself. So you can see we have five free subscriptions have come through the app, five from a direct you know, two just from substackcom, and so that can be helpful as well to know, like, okay, well, people are coming through the app, so I just want to make sure things look nice and clean in a mobile setting, right. Um, there's, you know, data in here on the emails that get sent out.
Speaker 3:Now, by default, it sends an email for everything that we post. You can check a box and turn that off, but would not recommend ever doing that. Like, if you're going to publish something, share it with people by email and then you can see, you know how many are delivered, how many people opened them and what the open rate was, and that's you know about as much data as strictly necessary, but it just kind of shows like how many people are engaging when you send that out. If they have a subscription or if they have the app on their phone, then they'll also get that subscription there, like they'll get the notification if they have those turned on. So there's a couple of different ways they can find it. The pledges this is gonna be again. If you enable that, if you activate and allow people to give you money for your work, you can kind of manage that from this menu. We don't have that set up so I can't show you exactly how it looks, but Substack has a tremendous amount of documentation around this, like how to set it up, best practices, good starting points like how much to charge.
Speaker 3:I think I subscribe to like two or three of these and the most common price point's like $5. That might even be the minimum um where they start you. So it's and you can choose, like make it whatever you want, but um, it's. It's typically like per month kind of a thing. So it's just like mostly almost like a tip chart type thing, like I appreciate your content, thank you. I would like to support you and read the rest um subscriber reports uh, one of the interesting things too. You can see overlap with other. Thank you, I would like to support you and read the rest.
Speaker 3:Subscriber reports. One of the interesting things too. You can see overlap with other audiences and publications. So like we have a 22% overlap with paper dragon newsletter, which makes sense, right, a lot of overlap in audience. We also have like a little bit overlap with these. Numbers are so small, probably like one person, maybe two, but like story club with george sanders, which is actually one I unsubscribed to, um or rf kwang, like these, and that can be helpful as your numbers go up as well, to see like what are other people looking at, what are we doing. That's similar. Maybe I reach out to them, maybe we try to make a connection, I try to get them to promote my content as well.
Speaker 3:Um, you can see where people are. Obviously over half of our people are in Pennsylvania, which makes sense from where we are. But occasionally you come in to something like this and you see data and you're like, wow, I have a ton of subscribers in Oregon for some reason. I wonder why you kind of dig into that Network information reader sharing. You can see, like who's shared stuff with other people. So you can see Nomi has shared the content a lot, so we've got subscriptions and visitors from that. So this is really just a great place to look at and see like what's worked, what isn't working, where's synergy, how can I build on this? What's worked, what isn't working, where's synergy, how can I build on this?
Speaker 3:Recommendations up here this is another useful tool and this is one of the things that Substack recommends from a marketing perspective. That you do early is recommend other publications, because then they will see that data, like the overlap data here, and also see like network data and reader sharing data, and it can help get reciprocation. So right now we recommend just the Paper Dragon newsletter. But if you were in a specific field, like if you're writing a certain genre, then you might recommend other authors in that genre, or you might recommend people who are reading and reviewing content in that field and just try to build that network. The same as you might do on social media, except not in a social media way. You're just making that recommendation, so you can recommend as many as you want. It'll put a certain number on the homepage that people can view, but the goal is ultimately you want people recommending you If you're publishing regularly and get other people, other authors, reading your work, then if they recommend you, that's going to help amplify your work, like that network effect.
Speaker 3:Last but not least, we have the settings menu, which I'm not going to, menu which I'm not gonna dig through because it is very long. I could see um, but it's. It also adds quite a bit of options here for how to like, customize and personalize your newsletter without it being like crazy technical, like you can just kind of go down through this list and it'll tell you what to do in each step. You know it's something you would just like take an afternoon and just like okay with the name, name and the description.
Speaker 3:What categories I want. Write some content for the about page. Set up a welcome email. Add a logo cover photo. Like I think when we set this one up, it maybe took an hour, hour or two. Like it doesn't take that long, it's just going through and kind of checking off boxes.
Speaker 3:There are a lot of things on this page that are not as relevant. So, like, don't look at this and get overwhelmed and think, oh my gosh, there's like 400 things here to do. I would say you know, like 15% of it's relevant to most people. I think maybe 15% of it was relevant to us. So, but if you like really get into it and are excited to make changes, you can customize things in the website, like the color, the layout, the fonts, like the. Everything you're seeing is the default fonts for substack, but you can change it. Um, you can set up navigation at the top of the page, like if you have categories or tags or other things that you want to share. So we've set up links. When people visit the top of the page here you can see chat meetups, craft chats, book club, critique groups, and this is where you would set that up. It's adding those items. Here's where the tags exist, which I showed you before.
Speaker 3:If you have another tool that you've used, if I have a website or I have this blog I've been running forever and I don't want to use it there. I want to do a Substack. You can do that. You can import the content through here. It is fairly straightforward, but they also have walkthroughs and documentation on how to do this. Often the hard part is getting this stuff out of the old tool before you upload it in the new one. But you can take emails and posts and import them here. Setting up payment takes like five minutes. I did it for another sub stack that hasn't really launched yet, but it doesn't take very long to set up. They just need your bank account information and that's it, and then you can turn on pledges from there and start collecting.
Speaker 3:So you can see there's a lot of different options down here. Like you can set up sections like break your newsletter into different groups. You can set up podcasts. You can add additional publication details and really start getting into the nitty gritty of what's in here. There are community features as well.
Speaker 3:So, like the chat function here, they make it look a lot like social media, but it's not really Like. It's just a way to like, connect and engage with people who have their own subsects and then people who are reading those as well. So this is a way. For example, we have our writing success thread. Here People can leave comments and tells us that you know these are publications or things that we want to share in future newsletters.
Speaker 3:So, overall, I would say you know, from start to finish, setting up one of these things, as you can see, there's a lot of options, but, like all the things you actually need to have in there to actually get it going, you know, an hour or two to get it going and then actually writing posts takes very little time. They've made it as streamlined as possible, knowing that their audience, their authors, are not people with a technical background and just they want to remove as much of that layer of stuff that gets in things like WordPress or any of the other tools that are out there and just make it as simple and straightforward as possible. All right, so I'll leave it with there, because I could dig even deeper. I think that covers all the basics.
Speaker 2:There was a couple of things I wanted to note too. Another thing about the pledges you can actually turn on pledges and make it to where people still get stuff for free, but then you could. That enables some people want to pay you and some people actually tell you hey, I actually want to send you money for this and you're like oh, I mean, I wasn't really going for that, but all right, and it just like a lets people do it period, where it's like you don't have to make it like a requirement either. It's like some people will just do it because they want to, which I think is like kind of an interesting move, um, I don't know, and just an idea to think about. But and then there was one other thing, anthony, I think would be cool to show is the posts whenever you're doing a draft and then you have like the preview mode, just because then you can see like what it looks like on an email versus the app, versus like on mobile versus the desktop.
Speaker 2:I use that thing all the time. So it's like whenever you click preview, you can like there's a couple of ways you can look at it, and so for this one, this is actually the mobile website, right, and so that's what people would see. But you can also do mobile email, and so that'll show you in the other desktop too. Yeah, but mobile email will actually show you. Show you in the other desktop too. Yeah, but mobile email will actually show you what it looks like and people's inboxes, which is what I always tend to look at, because I know everybody's getting it that way. Um, but I think that that's a really cool feature. Um, that I just wanted to point out because it helps me whenever I'm creating stuff yeah, that's a great point.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, and if you do a paid content so you can see, like with that paywall that I showed, like it will show you this is what free people see, this is what paid people see. It's a good thing to do just in general, just to make sure, like is all the stuff I want in here actually in here for all the people that I want to see it, because I've made that mistake plenty of times so you still retain the rights to the, to whatever you put up there.
Speaker 2:I mean so if you put it some, if you post something up here and then you find out you submitted it someplace and they accept it you, there's no conflict I think the only conflict would be is if the other people that are like the other party was like so if the other party's like we don't want you to have previously published things, technically this would be constituting as published um. So even if you took it down, that would still maybe be something they could find out somehow. Some way you have to ask who has no issue if you wanted to do that. So if that makes sense, so you own everything else up stack okay.
Speaker 6:So you have to like check with whoever's accepted your work that they don't have a problem with it.
Speaker 2:Yes, and I've seen only like a handful of places that are actually cool with you just taking it down and most people all do not want you to, do not want you to send in things that you've already published, self-published or otherwise. At least, that's what I've seen most of the time but are some people that don't don't care as long as you take it down.
Speaker 6:So, yes, that would be more checking with them and it's for regular short stories as well as serialized ones, I would assume probably anything.
Speaker 2:Yeah, whatever you're publishing, even if you're like oh man, I really like this uh newsletter I wrote I want to publish it for like a creative nonfiction place. It's like it really just depends on the website.
Speaker 4:Have either of you.
Speaker 2:I'm sorry. No, I was just going to say we can go to the question slide, so that it's uh, everybody can ask questions.
Speaker 4:Have either of you used other newsletter types and, if so, how does this compare to other newsletter services?
Speaker 2:I can go first, just because I did the Paper Dragon newsletters. It was horrible. I absolutely hated it. It was so hard for like no reason. It wasn't like it was really hard. I obviously figured it out, but it was just annoying, because WordPress is annoying anyway and it was like a embedded WordPress, like plugin. So anything on WordPress is honestly more work than it really should be. But I still use it Anyway. So that was terrible. I didn't really like that that much. I don't feel like it really made it very good looking, unless you really put the effort in for it. At least that's how I felt doing it, whereas like subsec it's like so clean in my experience.
Speaker 3:But, anthony, maybe you have some more yeah, yeah, I use that same app because I also managed the newsletter for paper dragon, so I also hated that. That was terrible. Um, I've worked with mailchimp. Um, constant contact, a few others as well. Like there are standalone tools that we, but you have to pay for them, right they? They don't. They don't have built-in monetization in the way. They're like we'll take 10 of all the money you make. They just like use our tool because it's software. You're paying for the software as a service, um, which creates its own limitations, because if you want a free account, you can only send to a handful of people.
Speaker 2:I think it's the reason why people ended up with that like a smaller group you can send to.
Speaker 3:Yeah and then they put their branding all over it as well. So, like, you get the sub stack branding and everything, but it's part of kind of the experience of it in the ecosystem, whereas mailchimp's just like mailchimp logo, buyers, stuff um, this is actually still even easier, despite the fact it's free. Uh, mailchimp, you know they have templates and everything built in, but there's like four or five steps, pages, menus and things you have to go through. Setting up audiences is difficult. Setting up the way in which you get people into the system. They're very particular about adding people to the system. Like, you can upload emails into the system, but they want you to like sign all these waivers that you have permission to email those people and they measure things how many people open the emails and then it changes your deliverability and all that good stuff, cause it's primarily designed as a marketing and sales tool. This is designed for authors, so it is meant to be simple and it's meant not to have all that kind of stuff over the top of it. Like when discovering this, I was like wow, this is. This solves a lot of problems for people who don't want to use all those tools, and I've known several people who've used those and hate them. So, yeah, it's the only way.
Speaker 3:I would recommend using some other things is, if you really want to like get into the marketing end of it, like the marketing tools in, like a tool like MailChimp, are more powerful. You know, you can segment people, you can target them more carefully, you can send at different times. Um, you can send based on like location. Like I want everybody on the list to get this at 9am or go, that's where they are in the world. Um, like things like that, which are more powerful, but, uh, that you can't do in here. So, like, if you had a list and you're like I'm trying to sell books, like I want to build my list and I want to sell books and I want to, you know, sell my brand, then you might want a more powerful tool like that. If you just want to build an audience and share ideas, then Substack's pretty good for that.
Speaker 5:Okay, thank you. I had a question about I have a WordPress website and I don't like it and I feel like, because I don't update it enough, then I forget how to use it, so I go back and I have to teach myself how to use it again to add an update. Do you think Substack could take the place of a website or do you think you should, because Substack doesn't have? Like? You can go to Substack and like search me if I have an account, right, but it's not, it doesn't have its own domain.
Speaker 5:Yeah, what are your thoughts on website for Substack or both, or maybe like a website landing page and then Substack. What are your thoughts?
Speaker 2:Personally, I'm probably going to use both, cause I'm don't see myself getting rid of the work I've done on the stupid website I've made. But, um, there is actually another tool I was looking at because I was looking at stuff about substack. Um, there's something called ghost and that one is actually where you're making like a whole website and they also have they're like. They're one of the people that are listed as the most like Substack, so that might be a better option. I don't know anything about it besides what I looked at on their website, but the website was pretty cool.
Speaker 2:It looks like a basically a melding between like WordPress and Substack, where it's like still easy to use and it's, but it's like you're still customizing a site and maybe easier, just based on what I was like understanding about it. So that could be something to look into if you do want to do that. I do think that that's a different step than if you want to use Substack in addition to a website, but that's my take on it. I would look into Ghost, but I don't know. Anthony, what do you think about that?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think I'm on the same page. I also have a wordpress site. I'm also going to keep it, but I'm probably going to get rid of the blog on it and replace it with substack. Um, because I'm not super concerned about the seo side of things for that, like it's more, just like it's easier to share and it's easier to get to people and I don't have to worry about an email list.
Speaker 3:A website has a lot of benefits, like being able for people to find it and search. You know which, in the future, with publications, will be important. There is more flexibility, even if that flexibility is headache inducing with WordPress, so you can do a lot of things in the backend and install a lot of things. So, like, personally, I want to keep that flexibility. But if you're like I just want to be able to communicate with people, I don't want to do anything else, then you know, maybe Substack does enough. I think there's a way to just set it up so you can have a domain. Go directly to your Substack landing page to one of those setting options.
Speaker 3:You could install a domain name in there. On the more technical end of things, Thank you and thank you for this.
Speaker 5:You guys did a great job. It was really helpful.
Speaker 2:Thank you, I think, regina didn't you have a question?
Speaker 4:I did have a question, but I think it got answered in the meantime. But I do want to thank you. You both look wonderful and you're giving us a wonderful presentation and I really appreciate it. So well done, so thank you so much. I learned a lot. I've subscribed to some sub stacks, but I really didn't know what I was, what it was. You know what I mean.
Speaker 2:Yeah, thank you, anybody else?
Speaker 6:have any questions? No, thank you. It's a great presentation. Thank you.
Speaker 2:Thank you all for joining. I was halfway convinced it was just going to be me, anthony, and maybe the committee, or like the MFA lead, or like the alumni leads, I guess.
Speaker 4:I think everybody's been interested in this.
Speaker 5:Really the cool topic, yeah yeah, and the newsletters have been just really good. So we appreciate that the look. So it was kind of nice to see the behind the scenes. I've played around a little bit with it, so now I'm excited to do a little bit more and actually send out one For sure.
Speaker 4:Thank you so much. This is really informative. Thank you again, you guys, you did wonderful.
Speaker 7:That wraps up today's Craft Chat Chronicles with JD Mayor. Thanks for joining us. If you liked the episode, please comment, subscribe and share. For show notes, writing workshops and tips, head to jdmayorcom. That's jdmayorcom dot com. That's JDMyocom. While you're there, join JD's mailing list for updates, giveaways and more.