G.R.O.W.T.H.

Gaining Returns On Writing Thine Heart

Growth is a six-letter word, a curse with interest.

For my thoughts on the days of small beginnings, see the end of my last post, but many of our goals depend on growth. We want to be read. Maybe we want to generate an income. These things require scale.

Intimacy requires small numbers and becomes difficult as those numbers grow. If you want an intimate space, you might actively avoid growth. That’s a legitimate choice.

Some things only work when you’re dealing with small numbers. Others only work when those numbers get larger than our fears and doubts tell us is possible.

I’ve made life harder on myself by beginning Bookmotion at this particular stage of growth at Literary Salon. I have a little over a thousand followers, and the subscriber total among all three publications is over 830. Those are not big numbers, even if we were talking about just one publication, but Literary Salon currently has 364 369 subscribers. The project needs somewhere close to a hundred customers, and that means I need to pull in customers from other sources like Twitter, Reddit, and Facebook. I’ve made my life harder by a failure to wait for an appropriate moment in the growth cycle.

Growth isn’t a goal. It’s a tool that enables you to reach your goals.

Side note: You can make growth easier by joining the waiting list at Bookmotion. Once you’re brought in, there won’t be a charge for the first month, and then it’s only $5 every two months. We use a Bookfunnel-type promotion page and pooled funds to advertise on Facebook, collecting new subscribers as they choose our books.

Alice in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll

Adapting to Changes in Notes

There have been rumblings about a slow-down in growth from Notes after the introduction of the category headers. To a degree, I expect this to be temporary. People are exploring new tabs, and that’s a distraction. Soon though, they’ll find you on the tab the represents your category and subscribe. The end result should be a higher rate of conversions among readers who are most interested in your genre / category.

This will require an extra layer of thought given to what we post on Notes. We’ll have to consider our word choice more to better connect our Note to the category we desire.

Other than that, however, we can continue with Notes as usual. From my experience, I think it’s being used well with people engaging personally and positively with a healthy but not overwhelming percentage of self-marketing thrown in. Keep it up.

Posting More Often

What I’m about to say is both from personal experience and out of this current Notes moment mentioned above. Growth from Substack is currently slower, and this could change when things pick up again. Also, posts go viral. Experts writing nonfiction articles in their field have done very well with one post a week. Context matters.

That being said, my experience is that a one-post-a-week schedule sustains subscriber levels but does little to promote growth.

Outside of my outside promotions, the biggest source of growth always come to the publication where I’m posting the most.

I realize that for some, posting two or three times a week is out of the question—if we’re talking about your standard articles. We have to think of it in terms other than offering more or less of the same thing we’re already doing. You can keep to only one big article a week and balance that with another post that requires much less effort. Not all posts are equal.

Brainstorm some low time-investment posts related to your normal subject matter. Some of those could be a series, allowing you to alternate between series each week. Writing prompts fall into this category. Conversation starters do as well.

If you find that there’s one of these you want to do more often, you could move into three posts a week, but start with two and see what works for you.

Choosing Your Offerings Well

This goes back to how much harder I’m having to work to build Bookmotion from 360 subscribers as opposed to 3600. Our mailing list is the foundation on which we build, and it’s tempting to build too big a house on too small a foundation.

We see these decisions on smaller scales, too. Many of us offer serial novels, and those of us who do are familiar with the inherent challenges. Writers who are new to Substack can be eager to start their own, thinking it’s a great way to build a following. Most of us would report that you need a certain number of readers to generate any traffic to your novel, and sustaining that traffic over time can be a challenge.

If there’s a magic number for when to offer your first serial novel, I don’t know what it is, but it’ll be closer to a hundred than zero.

Maintaining readership for a serial requires some degree of scale. Other activities require much larger numbers.

A single-post article or story can work on an intimate level.

Drawing from Outside Sources

I have some Subscribers here from Twitter. It’s tempting to say they took more work to win—but it’s fair to say that I’m aware of the work it took to gain them. I was there for exactly that purpose. Subscribers gained thought Notes seems like less work because I’m there for other reasons and do the work that brings growth as a matter of habit.

I’ve gained a subscriber here or there from these outside efforts, but nothing has compared to the reader-magnet promotions. I’ve raved about Bookfunnel and told you the $100 a year is well worth it, and when I realized I needed to build and offer a product¹, I figured out how to make a version of Bookfunnel that will bring in readers from the general public and not just from other newsletters.

That’s Bookmotion.

Some days, I only gain one or two subscribers. Other days, they flood in. Reader-magnet promotions work.

In the last 30 days, I’ve gained 159 subscribers. Only 19 of those came from the Subscriber app.

Cooperating with Others

There are many ways you can work with other newsletters.

Jenna B. Neece

has been reaching out to other writers to promote one another’s newsletters. I’ve written for How to Write for a Living and been featured in the Auraist. People do lots of things to help one another be seen.

A Literary Eye

has her Substack, Connecting Readers to Writers. There are many examples of how you can help one another.

I think one of the most important is joining a community of authors that support one another, and that can look like whatever you want. Here at Literary Salon, we share our posts with one another so they don’t get overlooked. That interaction by other members helps us get seen on Notes, and that means being read more. You’re always welcome to join us, or you can form your own group.

To focus again on Bookmotion, if you’ve joined the effort you may consider promoting it. There’s the promotion page at https://payhip.com/bookmotion and the link to join at https://whop.com/bookmotion. Anything to extend the reach will help.

Learning from Others

What wisdom can you share with us?

We all have different visions of what growth means, whether its important, and how we might pursue it ethically. Someone recently suggested my mission statement could be: write with passion; grow with integrity. I like that. We can maintain that integrity if we remember that growth itself is not the goal.

But that doesn’t mean we can’t learn whenever there’s an opportunity. What insights into Newsletter growth can you provide? We’re listening.

—Thaddeus Thomas

Click the image to visit Bookmotion and select a book.

And join the Bookmotion waitinglist.

1. Literary Salon chronicles my journey exploring how to use Substack as the foundation for building an audience and generating an income. At some point, I will be offering a course that systematizes all of this information into something easier to follow. I realized that the course is part of my system and needs to be part of what I teach. However, I didn’t want to be in a position where I’m teaching you to offer products, and the only product I’ve made is the course that’s teaching you how to offer them. I needed to create something else, first. That’s when I decided to build Bookmotion.