So You Want to Start a Substack
Some Ideas From a Grizzled Veteran
This newsletter has been around for nearly five years. When it began there was no Chat GPT, Oasis was still disbanded and Barneys had just closed. It’s wild to say Substack changed my life, but it has. I make most of my living from this newsletter. I never would have guessed that when my friend Michael Williams told me to start one. I didn’t know exactly what a newsletter was.
That was before the Substack app, before Notes, before the algorithm, before video and audio. This was before rankings (are you aware that The Contender is the top-ranked Travel Substack? That will change the moment Yolo Journal returns).
Yes, a lot has changed in five years. You can embed videos of yourself or choose the accent of a virtual reader to share your wonderful words. But some things have not changed. So pull up a chair, my child, here are some ideas to help get your newsletter where you want it to go.
-Be Good But Not Too Good. What’s this? Don’t we aspire to greatness? Well, yes. But we’re not talking about a book or a magazine story. It’s a newsletter. Which is somewhere between a blog post, an opinion column and a long email. When I started I tried to knock out these carefully wrought essays. They took forever to write and were too long. People are reading newsletters on their phone. They don’t want an elaborate 1200 words. They want 600 words that move. When you accept this you can write looser and more often.
-Be Intimate. In a newsletter it’s all you, baby. And readers are there for you. That can feel overwhelming but it’s helpful to accept that. They want to know what it’s like to know you. So you’re creating a sort of literary para-social relationship. If your friend asks you for recommendations to London pubs then what you would send to your friend should be a newsletter. Same tone, same energy, same everything. That sort of intimacy is what we’re after.
-Write Early and Often. When I started I could not stop writing newsletters. This is good. You start to figure out what you want to write about and what people want to read. And it also gets you to the next step…
-Don’t Obsess Over What it’s About. This project is going to evolve. You write about restaurants but also travel or what you did in Montreal or watching a hot dog eating competition. I never thought I would write about my sad Vikings or my beloved rice cooker but now they’re part of the whole picture. I’m sure the newsletters you like to read aren’t always about the same thing. Yours shouldn’t be either.
-Don’t Get Distracted. There are many ways a newsletter will take off. It’s easy to get carried away with external forces and links and likes and recommendations. That’s a lot to wrap your head around. The best thing you can do is make something good that reflects who you are. If you do that on a regular basis then the audience will come.