How I Wrote This Post
Lesson Five of How to Become a Fiction Writer on Substack
This is the fifth lesson in the series. You can start here or…
Pick up from the beginning: Read Lesson One
If you missed the most recent lessons: Read Lesson Three and Watch the Vide of Less of Four
After introducing you to Settings, I don’t intend to walk you through the whole thing. Scroll through and explore. I will try to hit on key things that are easy to miss.
For today’s lesson, we’ll explore writing posts but exploring the steps involved in creating this one. Some of these steps are optional and not something usually employed on a first post, but it’s a good chance to explore deeper.
In the last article, I showed you that I use the Feature block to display my posts. Each of those can hold 4 posts. If you have more than 4, there’s an arrow readers can click to see all. Usually, that’s fine, but in some cases, I want all the articles on display and chronologically easy to find. To do this with the Feature block, I assign sequels to those Sections. Right Reader 1 has the first 4 articles. Right Reader 2 has the next 4. It’s just how I organize my home page, and I’m the only one I know who does this. You probably won’t do this either, but it’s a good chance to learn about sections.
In Settings I scrolled down to Sections, and you can see my list of existing Sections below. I click the button, “Add Section.”
This brings me to the New Section Page. The third field allows you to change the name under which the article is mailed to your list. By default, mine is The Literary Salon: find your readers. Maybe I want to change it to just The Literary Salon, for simplicity.
I title my Section and give a brief description. The next thing you see is important, and people ask me how to do this almost daily. If you click “Hide Posts from Homepage,” they won’t show on the front page of your website under most conditions. About once a week, though, someone complains on Notes that their post isn’t showing on their app home page. That’s because clicking that check box hides it there, too.
I don’t have a work-around to get it to show only on the app, but if you want it to appear on your website but not the app home page, give the section a block as we saw last time. The posts will appear there whether or not they’re otherwise hidden.
Moving on, next you can set a logo for the Section. You can assign a podcast to it, and then you determine the subscriber settings.
Here you can see there are two subscriber settings, and I’ve unclicked the second. New subscribers will have this section as part of their subscription, but my existing subscribers won’t. Why? Well once I’m done with this series, it won’t matter. A post can be changed but it won’t email twice, to avoid spamming. Current new subscribers may be part of the group I’m asking to join us from X or elsewhere, and they’ll get new episodes in the mail. My existing mailing list won’t.
Having set all that, I click “Create Section.”
Normally, I’m not creating a section before I write a post, but I know my plan and I’m setting it up in advance because at some point during the writing, I will need to select a section. You won’t for as long as you’ve not set up sections, but once one is set up, the system will require that every post be assigned one. There is an automatic section with the title of your publication. If your post doesn’t fit in any section you created, you just assign it that one.
I also know my plan for how I want the post displayed, so I return to the customize button and add a new block for Building from Scratch 2. Nothing will appear on the actual website until there’s a publish post to fill it.
Sections can appear as menu items at the top of the website, but I don’t want all the sequels up there. So I go to Website under Settings, scroll to Navigation, and I hide the Sections I don’t want to appear in the menu. You can also add pages or tags to navigation. Looking at this screenshot, I can see that one of the standard options, Notes, is visible. This allows people to see all the recent notes you’ve posted. My menu is in danger of becoming cluttered, so I’ll hide that. If you enable chat, it too can appear in the menu. Chat is important to the operation of this publication, so I’ll keep that link visible.
I created a section called “hidden” as part of my experimenting with the tagging protocol. I find it funny that I forgot to hide the section from the menu. I’ll take care of that now. (This meta article has proven itself to be very helpful… to me.)
You can see what the menu looks like below as reflecting my choices above. If you visit the site now, Notes and Hidden will both be gone.
I think my title for this article is a bit inaccurate, because most of this is not stuff you’ll have to do when writing an article, but now we’re ready to begin the article itself. I click on dashboard, and then posts. The button is hidden right now, but there’s a New Post button you would normally click. The same button is under the Home tab.
I’m not doing that, though. I want to take an existing post and type over it, so that I can preserve certain elements. I do this by clicking on the three dots beside that particular post and then choosing Duplicate to Post.
Some other important functions here:
When you visit this website, the welcome post is always as the top. I use the “Pin to Homepage” for that. The menu items assigned to sections will bring you to a page where all the articles for that section are listed. You can choose which appears at the top of the page by clicking “Pin to [Section Name'].” You’ll notice mine says “Pin to Building from Scratch.”
That’s because I duplicated the settings from the previous post, but I want my new section. So I will scroll to the top of the post and change it now.
When I added the above image, Substack warned me that this was getting close to the length limit for an email. If you surpass that limit, readers will have to click on a link to expand the email and read the whole thing. This is a function of how emails work and is not imposed by Substack. If your email is WAY TOO LONG, it can trigger email providers into marking the email as spam. I’ve only been made aware of that happening once by a user who wrote a long post and then followed it with the exact same material translated into another language.
Now, what you see above is the post I wrote before. The only different is the word [Copy]. I start editing the text, and I want the header I created to reflect the new title, so I go to Canva and edit my header image.
I want to include links to other posts in the lesson series. Substack does provide the option of Next and Previous arrow buttons, but those are chronologically based and could take you out of the lesson to something else. I get the link by opening the page and copying. Then I highlight the text I want to act as a link, click on the link icon into menu, and enter the address into the space provided.
You’ll see next to the link icon there is an image icon. This is how all the images are added. There are also icons for sound, video, and quotes.
You’ll want to add a Call to Action. The most common one is the subscription button. You have two choices, with text or without. Here’s an example:
I added this from that same menu above, but clicking on “Button” and choosing the option I wanted. For the button at the top of this page, I chose the “custom” feature. When you choose your colors under the customize feature, that will determine the color of your buttons and links.
This is what I meant earlier when I said the system was warning me my post was getting too long for an email. I have now surpassed that limit. I’m not emailing, this, though, so it’s not a concern. In cases like this, it’s the multiple images, rather than the text length, that are the issue.
I will close the post with a call to action. Usually, you only want to choose one. Here you see both the subscribe button, and the custom sign-up button. When I’m done, I’ll click the “Continue” button in the top right corner. Not the “Settings” button in the bottom right, though. This gives you some advanced options, and after ignoring it long enough, you’ll be blind to it until someone points it out.
When you enter an image and hover your cursor over it, the three-dot menu button will appear. This gives you options like setting a caption.
But now, we’re pressing that Continue Button.
As weird as it sounds, I recommend setting it up early in the process. I wasn’t expecting it when I got my first paid subscription from someone who really liked my writing and wanted to support me. I had flip-flopped, turning paid on and off again because it felt silly having it on. I only had it on at the time because I’d heard Substack reward your posts with a little nudge when paid is activated.
If you have paid subscriptions set up, you’ll choose who can see the post and who can comment on it. You can change the Section here and add tags. You can also create tags here by typing something into space provided.
As part of the preview, you can change how the Title and subtitle will appear in public spaces. If you have images in the post, it will select the first one as the associated image, but you can choose another or upload something else.
The final choices are 1) delivery, do you want this sent my email and app or published to the web only, and 2) an option to schedule if you don’t wan it to publish right away.
You make your choices, and then…
You can publish now but before I click that button, if I’m not scheduling a later publishing date, I like to X out. That brings me back to the writing / editing page. The arrow at the top left takes me out entirely.
Substack comes with a spellchecker, but I don’t trust it to catch everything until I’ve left and come back again. Because I’m not scheduling this post, I’ll find it under drafts:
You’ll see included in that list are some posts marked [UNPUBLISHED]. These are older posts that proved irrelevant when I refocused Literary Salon on sharing my marketing plan. I haven’t deleted them yet, as there might be something worth saving.
Remember what I said about that spellchecker?
Suddenly, it’s catching things it missed before. Of course, in most cases, you’ll want to do more revision than just a spellcheck. You can edit a post after publishing, but what’s been sent to someone’s email can’t be called back.
When I’m ready to publish, I’ll click that “Continue” button. The final button at the bottom of the “Publish” page will change according to what you’ve told it you want to do. I’m not emailing this article to anyone, so the button just says “Publish Now.” When I click on it, Substack ask me if I’m sure, because if you don’t send a post to the list through email and app, very few will ever see it. I click the button to say I’m sure.
If you don’t add subscription buttons, it will give you a similar warning.
Now, I’m given some easy options to share the post. If you scroll down, you have a selection of images designed for different social media. At the top, there’s a spot where you can write something and then click the “Share to Notes.” It’s easy. These link connect people to the app version of the post, and I know on writer who says he prefers how the posts look in the app. This fact used to bother me, and I’d go out of my way to copy the webpage link and use that.
Now, it doesn’t really matter to me. It’s not really about the web site, but that doesn’t mean the site is irrelevant. In some circumstances, especially with people outside of Substack, it’s crucial.
Well, that’s the end of the lesson.
Until next time,
I’m Thaddeus Thomas