[DIGEST] The four main stages of Substack growth...

Your weekly stackable roundup

May 11, 2024

Hi friends,

There are four main stages of Substack growth that I’ve identified during my time here. These are very broad categories, but pretty much every human I know has gone through them at one point, or is currently in one of them.

  1. Figure your publication out. Spend as long as you need to just write whatever, flit around, pretend, explore, get good, and futz around. Don’t even worry about a name yet. Just start and call it whatever.

  2. Rebrand. A publication almost always has to rebrand once they figure their stuff out, so don’t worry about your name at the beginning. You’ll have time to get it right once you’re ready to get it right. I had two I can remember. I started as Wannabe Press, then went to Author Ecosystem, before finally ending up with Author Stack (and am currently fiddling with another thing that might change my branding again, though not for the main publication).

  3. Lay out your case. This is the one most people miss, jumping straight from stage 2 to stage 4 and missing a big part of the growth pattern. Once you know what you want to say, you should go through a 3-6 month period where you lay out your case with long essays and other cornerstone pieces that you can drive people back to whenever they find you. These are critical pieces because people will come to your publication from random places and you need to be able to give them something to latch onto and know they are in the right place. Not every post should be this kind of content, but over time you’ll build it out until it’s lush. It should also be said that you might need several cases. I think I’ve built out 3 different cases since I’ve been on the platform: Author Ecosystems, How to Thrive as a Writer in a Capitalist Dystopia, and How to Build a World Class Substack. Each was between 50-100k.

  4. Push forward. Once you have your case built, then it’s time to just push forward and keep writing about the things you like. Who knows? Maybe you’ll need to rebrand again.

While this is ideal with an education or culture publication with a tight niche, even if you have a random, memoir, or fiction publication, the third part needs to be done so people feel like they know you or your story.

So many people just simply never do the work of grounding people in your “theory of the case”. If you can figure out your stance on life, love, and the pursuit of happiness, then it can only help you focus your voice as you move forward.

If you want to share how you are doing this week, then there are two ways to interact with this post.

1 - If you don’t want to say anything, or bristle at identifying yourself, then you can reply with this nifty poll.

2 - If you’re feeling very brave, then reply below and tell us how you are doing right now on a scale from 1-5.

I was also interviewed by of about my career.

We had descended for miles before they finally threw Aimee and me into our cells. They had already separated us from the rest of our pack, tossing Igor and the other members of the swat team, including Blezor, in cells far above us. Millions of moaning monsters and souls called out from their own prisons as we passed, begging for salvation, but we were as damned as they were.

“You’re not going to get away with this!” I screamed through the bars on my cell as our demon jailers walked away.

“What are you talking about?” Aimee asked, still glowing with fire. “They already did. We’re trapped. I can’t imagine there’s any water down here, so we’ll be dead in what, three to five days, max?”

“I didn’t even think of that.” I turned from the bars. “I mean, I’m a half angel-half demon so I don’t have to eat or drink, but yeah, you’re kind of screwed if we don’t get out of here.”

She bounced her head off the back of the cell. “And then I’ll wind up back here, getting tortured in some other horrible way.”

I shook my head. “I’m not going to let that happen.”

She shrugged. “I mean, it’s bound to happen eventually, right? Someday I’m going to die, and then I’ll be right back here, maybe in this exact pit for all I know.”

I placed my hand on her knee, hoping it might reassure her. “On the plus side, maybe the Apocalypse will start by then.”

She laughed. I didn’t expect her to, and the laugh came from deep in the depths of her belly. She went on so long that a snarling demon banged on the bars. “Quit it in there! No laughing.”

But that just made her laugh longer and harder. In Hell, laughing seemed like an act of rebellion. Keys jangled outside, and the door creaked open. The demon raised his club in the air. “We must not be torturing you hard enough!”

All chapters of The Godsverse Chronicles are now free for all subscribers. You can read the whole series from the beginning right here.

You still only get access to a bunch of free books and stories from my back catalog by becoming a paid member. You can start your membership with a 7-day free trial.

JOIN US FOR A FREE VIRTUAL CONFERENCE: Do you have FOMO from missing our Future of Publishing Mastermind? Then I have good news. You can join us virtually from May 22-24 for free and relive the experience with us.

We’ll have tons of speakers talking about how to take advantage of the future of publishing…starting now.

If you want to know where the publishing industry is going in the next 3-5 years, and how to take advantage of it NOW, then The Future of Publishing Virtual Summit is perfect for you.

This is an event curated for forward-thinking, self-starters who want to be at the leading edge of the publishing industry for years to come. Publishing is shifting faster than ever. Do you want to help chart where it's going? 

UPCOMING ARTICLE: Next week, I share my Q1 income report.

Since 2017, I’ve kept a pretty detailed income report of my expenses. It’s an almost unbroken chain reaching back to when I started making real money at Wannabe Press.

2017 was my first six-figure year, and paid members can get all of that goodness behind the paywall.

I believe in complete transparency. If you’re going to learn from me, I have a responsibility to be honest with you about how I make my money. Sometimes, I have really good news to share. Other times, wow is the news bad. I’ve never have a year that looked the same from one to the next. However, I do have enough revenue streams that things seem to even out over the course of a year.

These reports are going to be broken down into two stages. In the first, all subscribers will be able to see my general income categories, including how much of my total income comes from each.

In the second, paid members will get to see all the juicy details of that that means. They will also see an overall expenses breakdown, which I’m not offering to free subscribers. I took the general idea from Anna Codrea-Rado because I think both they, and this process, is brilliant. I want to deliver value to everyone, but if you want to see the grimy details, you have to pay for it.

ROUNDUP: Here are some of my favorite articles of the week.

I have added another category this week called “creator-ific” for everything related to creating other types of non-book thing. I’ve been trying to think of a name for ages and it finally came to me. Publishing-like was getting unwieldy.

Business-y:

Creator-ific:

Publishing-like:

Newsletter-esque:

Culture-ish:

Lifestyle-oid:

Find anything you loved enough to swoon over or hated enough to make your blood boil? Let me know.

If you like what I’m doing around here and want to check out the archives, you can do that with a 7-day free trial, or simply go straight to being a paid subscriber. You also get access to my epic fantasy graphic novel, Pixie Dust.

Akta is the greatest monster hunter in all of King Odgeir’s kingdom. She’s smart, fast…oh and she’s also a pixie, a magical race that can disappear and reappear at will using magical pixie dust.

King Odgeir is obsessed with using Akta’s pixie dust to create a race of super soldiers, but Akta refuses to give it up, so King Odgeir poisons Akta and takes it for himself.

Akta, however, vows revenge and makes a deal with Velaska, the queen of the underworld, so she can return to Earth and seek revenge on the king that killed her. The only problem is that time moves differently on Earth than in Hell, and when she returns to Earth her body has been decomposing for a week.

Now, she must kill the king before her body falls apart, or risk spending eternity in Hell.

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