Patient Growth
It's hard to be patient
When I decided to publish on substack, I subscribed to accounts quickly and some subscribed back. It felt like I was accomplishing something as I saw that subscriber number climb, rewarding me like this was some video game, but then I saw how each subscriber interacted with my material… or didn't. Several of those first subscribers have never seen a single article.
I'm reminding myself of that this morning because it's hard to be patient. Our efforts here are proving themselves to work. We are gaining more page views, but that might not immediately translate into more subscribers. Still, I think there are things we can do to improve those odds.
Substack is good about reminding us to include a subscribe button. A one sentence sales pitch to go along with it should also help. In yesterday's post, I included a share button but not one to subscribe. I'd read someone suggesting one can to action is all that's reasonable to ask, and… I may have to ignore that advice.
Our efforts here get our posts seen more, and we want to enviable those who enjoy our material to subscribe. Those will be meaningful subscriber and nor just filler.
One last point, about The Literary Salon, itself. I'm going to suggest you take the site off your recommendations. This Substack is a focused cohort sorting literary-based posts. If there's a book / fiction account that you think would be a good fit and is of similar size, feel free to invite them to join.
Thank you,
Thaddeus Thomas (Deeper Stories)
It's almost been a year since I started my Substack. I have been posting consistently since the beginning but in the first 7 months, I managed to get 9 subscribers. It was heartbreaking to be honest. I was like, seriously 9 after like 25 posts which in total was a work of at least a hundred hours. Then in December my numbers suddenly started growing. I still see people getting like 300 subs in a few months and think about the relative success of my Substack, but then to comfort myself I pull up the graph to see a line going up.
People subscribing because of some incentive like you subscribed so they're subscribing back won't be valuable. I don't show who I've subscribed to on my profile nor I subscribe to people because they have commented on my post. I subscribe to people if I'm actually gonna read their work, and I want that from my subscribers too. There's a comfort when I see the number of likes in my small Substack is higher than some which have 5k subs. Focus on making a list of people who read your work, not just the numbers.
It is very hard on any platform. The trick is to just keep working.