Category: SubstackCategory: Substack

Be careful if you’re sending important information in the custom header or footer of your Substack newsletters. If you’re sending Zoom information or Luma invites or other special links to paid subscribers and they’re reading your newsletter in the Substack App, they won’t see it.

This is troubling, as Substack just recently said this:

We’re doubling down on the Substack app, which is designed to help audiences reclaim their attention and connect with the creators they care about.

Get everyone to subscribe to multiple publications, then users have messy inboxes. The cure? Just use the Substack App!

Then, when a publisher leaves Substack and sends a newsletter via a new service, the email will show up a users inbox again – this can be jarring!

“Wait, I thought I was getting all my newsletters in the Substack app?!?!”

So now it’s almost like people won’t be subscribed to a newsletter, they’ll be subscribed to a Substack.

This seems like a slippery slope.

A question I got via my Email Guidance offering:

Q. I saw you’ve been posting casual stuff (on Substack Notes) and I’m curious how you… justify that against an anti-social media ethos? That sounds like an argumentative question but I mean it in earnest!

A. If I post on other social media platforms, I need to get people from those services over to Substack in order to subscribe to my newsletter. With the casual energy I expend on Substack Notes, I get maximum value in return – as in, it’s just one or two clicks from gaining an email subscribers.

Substack is a tool that I use for now. Someday that will change. But for now, today, I can swap my time and energy “engaging” there because I know I can replenish that energy by building my email list.

Am I playing the game? Absolutely. But I am guarding my energy. I don’t rely on Substack Notes to “get the word out.” I am writing the answer to this question on my own website first, before I put it on Substack Notes (if I even do at all).

I am playing the game on my terms.

“(Substack) is still another platform hosted elsewhere. It simplifies the process for writers, podcasters, video creators, and others to publish their work for money. But their stuff is still made available at the mercy of software they do not control — and I bet there will be a time when Substack decides to make a controversial platform-wide change some publishers will want to back away from. The pressure is already there.”

Substack was a great place to grow an audience, but I believe those days are coming to an end, and I think that’s okay. We don’t want to rely on any single platform or source to grow and build upon. We should use the tools available to us, yes, but when brands such as Substack become a bigger and bigger story, yes, like Nick Heer says above, the pressure is building and someday it will pop.

Technically I am violating Substack’s Publisher Agreement because my recurring membership system is done via Memberful.

You may not circumvent your payment obligations to us by soliciting payment from a Reader outside of Substack or by using any alternative method to collect subscription payments. This includes receiving payments for your publication through links to PayPal or a separate Patreon page.

This is why I’m exporting my email list every day.

When I signed up back in 2021 I knew (more or less) what I was signing up for: I’d be able to offer a “paid newsletter” via Substack, and that made total sense.

But I’ve realized I don’t really write a paid newsletter at all! I offer my community via weekly Escape Pod Zoom calls, and using Substack to manage that doesn’t work very well.

While places like Twitter and Instagram may “hide” your posts when you include a link to your Substack, Substack doesn’t just frown upon links to PayPal, Patreon, etc – they might shut down your account because of it.

Substack was great for growth (for a bit), but frowns upon you outgrowing their offering. Then they technically make it difficult to extract yourself from their system.

If we find yourself trying to fit your square membership into Substack’s round hole, tough luck – that’s what we signed up for, I guess. And it seems now that the safest best for Social Media Escape Club is to move my email list elsewhere at some point.

Using comfortable tools is important if we want to make the work we’re destined to make.

Note I didn’t say the “right tools.”

There’s lots of opinions and made up rules about the right tools to use, especially in the marketing of our creative work. The Social Media Escape Club is based upon dismissing the idea that social media is the right way to get our work out into the world.

For many, social media is uncomfortable. Dashboard metrics are uncomfortable. The idea of “creating content” to talk about work is uncomfortable. Using certain software tools, or computer programs – they’re uncomfortable.

We’re allowed to not use social media platforms, or perform at noisy bars.

We’re allowed to turn down opportunities that don’t align with our values.

We’re allowed comfort and ease in how we work, and how we make our art.

Says Kening Zhu in “the joy of missing out on platforms:”

“The more I’m nourished by my work, the more that others have the possibility of being nourished by it too.”

This is why I moved my paid members from Substack to Memberful. I don’t like what I’m seeing on that platform, and right now I wanted to ensure I could protect my member and data by moving somewhere else.

Was their discomfort in the move? Of course. But that’s what platforms do – they make it easy to stay. Untangling ourselves from these platforms is difficult work, but if there is comfort on the other side of that, then it’s worth it.