The Drawback of Fiction-Writers' Substack

Part Two of How to Become a Fiction Writer on Substack

A forward for my subscribers: this is the second lesson in a series I’m writing for people who I’m leading out of X (Twitter) and into Substack. As a rule, these aren’t mailed to you because you’re already on Substack and don’t need these lessons. However, I thought this overview of the drawback of Substack would be appropriate for everyone. Also, if I’m forgetting anything, you can add it in the comments.

If you missed the beginning: Read Part One

Every program has drawbacks, and Substack is no exception. We’ll deal with most of those concerns as we bring them up, so have no fear and:

If you research Substack and the options, you’ll hear the same few negatives repeated. 1) No website. This one just isn’t true, but it leads to the next one. 2) Limitations. You don’t have the same flexibility with a Substack website as you would if you were building your own. You don’t have all the tools available to you if you were paying for email marketing through Mail Chimp or mailer lite. You can podcast from Substack. I forgot to mention that before, and I’m sure there are dedicated podcast tools that offer more. We’ll get back to all this later. 3) Cost. Substack may be free but at 10% of your revenue on top of what Stripe charges, it’s very expensive.

Let’s start at point number 3. If you’ve got tens of thousands of paying subscribers and are considering your options, Substack is expensive. If you’re starting out, Substack is a steal. If you ever grow to the point that you need to give this serious thought, that’s absolute success. The only cost is the one-time $50 charge if you want to use your own custom domain, and my paid subscribers have already covered that. (Thank you!)

Point number 2. The strength of Substack is the combination of all these elements. Website, email marketing, podcast, and social media, all working together for a common goal. And it’s free.

None of those are real drawbacks unless you have a big audience and specific, sophisticated needs, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t other concerns that a Google search won’t tell you about.

Substack was designed for non-fiction. This is the most frustrating aspect for fiction writers, but take heart, the right-reader system uses that fact for our advantage. As someone new to Substack, you’ll be asking what I mean by “designed for non-fiction,” and it’s far too much to explain, except to say (as an example) individual posts are great for articles but other solutions are necessary when you get into serialized fiction.

Substack isn’t toxic like Twitter, but it’s not entirely free of bad actors. You can easily handle the few we have with mute and block, but I imagine it will only get worse with growth. None of that is a drawback. However, Substack is a means of publication for those shunned and rejected elsewhere. There are plenty of extremists newsletters. As a fiction publication hanging out with other author publications, you may never really run across that, but you don’t want your audience only to be other authors. The right-reader system will expose you to other sides of Substack; it’s necessary to find your readers.

Substack is new but not very new. Being new, we still experience some growing pains, and we are constantly talking about tools we’d love to see added. However, it’s no longer very new, and the people who came in early caught a wave that helped them grow fast in a way they can’t tell us how to replicate. We’ll have to find our own ways. (Of course, this is where I say I have my way, and I’m sharing it.)

What are we lacking? Our social media, Notes, doesn’t have a hashtag function. To alert a group that you’re posting for a themed fiction day, you have to tag everyone in the group, which is really arduous. (This last weekend, I recommended a new protocol for tagging that makes it easier, theoretically. It will take some practical use to see if adapting these protocols makes sense. — This is one of the benefits of being a fairly new platform (began in 2017). A suggestion of mine might potentially change how hundreds of people use Substack on a daily basis. That’s an amazing thought.)

X (Twitter) is feuding with Substack. Musk knows that with the addition of Notes, Substack becomes a powerful competitor. In usual Musk fashion, he responded by making it hard for any tweet mentioning Substack to ever be found. (Reports say that if you search, Substack you actually get a search for “newsletter platforms.” It’s as if you Googled “Facebook” but got results for “social media.”)

That’s all I can think of for now, and until next time,

I’m Thaddeus Thomas