How to avoid getting lost in the flurry of new Substacks flooding the site...

This is an article that is meant to combat the overwhelmingly negative sentiment of new and established voices joining the platform. I personally love that they are here, but I know there are real, tangible problems related to it. This article tries to address them and give some ways to rise to the next level. If you’re new here, I wrote a free 50,000-word guide about building a world-class substack from scratch and growing it into a success.

If you are a paid member, I recommend reading How to fall in love with book marketing, How to survive as a writer in a capitalist dystopia, How to get 5,000-20,000 new readers for your Substack publication every month, and How to supercharge your Substack growth by putting together a world-class virtual conference... and have fun doing it to help round out this article.

If you are not a paid member, you can read everything with a 7-day free trial, or give us a one-time tip.

There has been a lot of talk from newer writers on Substack about being drowned out by the recent flood of well-known authors like , , and many more that seem to have joined the platform in droves recently.

(all of whom I adore and subscribe to so this is no shade on them on the minuscule chance they are reading this.)

Luckily, I’ve got a lot of experience with this topic, specifically from my experiences on Kickstarter. During the pandemic, publishers like Boom Studios and Top Cow started using the platform while bookstores were closed and even joined with actors like Keanu Reeves to make seven figures on the platform.

Creators were not happy that they were taking focus away from them in the only place online they had where they could reasonably make money from their comics.

The influx of fiction authors like Brandon Sanderson created a new wave of this conversation on Kickstarter. However, it’s a conversation that goes back to the dawn of publishing. Every time a celebrity gets a book deal, authors talk about the same type of thing.

And yet, writers survive in all this turmoil and new authors do break through, even almost 600 years since the invention of the printing press and over 5,000 years since the earliest known uses of the written word.

One of the hardest parts of struggling against being drowned out by new, often more successful, voices is to accept that it will absolutely happen, and repeatedly, throughout your career.

It will happen at every level of your career.

No matter how often you rise to the top, you will be drowned out by more successful voices that have bigger, more established audiences.

I used to have an indie comics platform, which was relatively small compared to the indie publishing platform I have now.

However, my current platform is relatively small in the publishing community as a whole, and the publishing community is relatively small compared to other creative industries, which are relatively small to overall entrepreneurship, which is relatively small compared to the entire working world, which is only a fractional share of the things people think about in their overall life on a daily basis.

Even the President of the United States spends an inordinate amount of time finding ways to rise above the noise and avoid being drowned out.

If we can come to terms with the fact that most of our career will involve the risk, and certainty, of being drowned out, then the best we can do is find how to swim with the current and gather buoys to help us float until we find an island.

Once we have an island, then we can fortify it against flooding, and build structures that protect us as best as possible.

These include the audience we build, the work we make, and how we cultivate them in a nurturing way.

The things we can’t control are how and when the floodwaters will rise.

What we can do is make sure we aren’t building on a swamp or riverbed and then find ways to build structures that can survive the rough waters.

If we are really smart, then we will build a boat that can rise with the tides and bring us along for the ride.

I know many people see marketing as a dirty word.

However, the way you get through these tough waters is to build an audience through marketing and attract the right people to you through your brand who want to support your work.

Marketing is really not a dirty word. Yes, it’s sometimes a chore, but it’s also how you gather fans who will lift you up in the darkness. It is how we find purchase in the turbulent waters of creative entrepreneurship.

All of the fears you’re feeling right now about falling further behind are imminently solvable, to some degree at least, but you have to learn how to swim out of your depths.

Marketing can teach you to swim. Sales can build a better boat so you never have to feel that way again and can live in stillness. Let’s talk about a few ways you can use marketing and community to build a boat in the storm.

*** Please note that if you are reading this via email, Substack only sent out a partial version and the article will eventually stop without notice. If you want to read the whole 6,000-word article, then go to this website.***

If you are good about building your brand, then I’m not sure it matters if big names come onto a platform and disrupt things.

In many ways, if you are easily findable, it can be a great boon, because they will bring their readers, and you can be caught up in the wave as they search for new publications to read.

In general, the top end of the market thrives with the introduction of big-name authors.

However, with those big authors comes increased visibility on the platform, which brings new authors who start writing on it.

For a mid-list or entry-level author, this can be devastating, because a whole slew of new publications are vying for attention from a relatively stagnant reader base.

The rise of Amazon led to the demise of the midlist author as they were drowned out by indie books. Eventually, they all either moved indie where they could get more traction, or they drowned.

As much as I like Substack, there is no doubt that their publications are growing much faster than their readership.

This floods the market with new writers and drowns out smaller publications that are trying to find readers from a stagnant pool of readers that isn’t growing fast enough to support them.

I have seen this happen a lot during my career, especially with Kickstarter. The flood of new campaigns after authors like Brandon Sanderson and Sherilyn Kenyon were a boon for the already successful authors.

However, the mid-list or smaller authors got killed if they couldn’t find ways to stand out above the rising tide.

The worst part is that successful authors don’t see it.

They don’t often talk to entry-level authors or dig deep into their businesses to see what’s happening. Authors generally talk to other authors at the same level, and everyone at their level is having a great time. So, they see these influxes as nothing but a boon.

Even as the younger authors drown, successful authors tell them there’s nothing wrong, and they are imagining it.

But it is happening. It’s just not happening to them.

On top of that, those newer authors look for advice on how to use platforms, so those already successful authors get a second boon by getting an influx of new readers from authors as well, trying to find purchase somewhere.

I won’t lie, the influx of new authors to the platform has been great for my publication, which is all about growing your author business.

I am one of the more successful publications of its kind, and so I get a good stream of new subscribers.

Even then, the flood of new publications has bumped me from 11th in my category to 20th, even as I’ve more than doubled my paid subscription base. That’s a huge drop in just a couple of months.

I will tell you this…smaller authors getting drowned out does happen. It is happening.

You are not crazy. I have seen it happen before enough times to notice the signs.

The good news is that these new publications mostly burn bright and then burn out. Something like 90% of publications don’t make it past 10 articles.

Most of the new publications I subscribe to never post another article.

However, it feels gross to revel in that kind of thing. I want us all to win, and I think we can all win. It just takes more than it took before.

Things that worked in 2018, 2020, or even 2022, often don’t work now.

A lot of those publications that succeeded got a boost from the first mover advantage and looking at them for what works now is a serious case of survivorship bias.

If you are a newer publication, it is flat-out harder for you than it was even six months ago, especially right around the launch of Notes.

That time was a gold mine around here. People who joined before then got huge boosts that you probably won’t get.

If you want to succeed here, then it becomes about standing out from the crowd. How do you do that?

• Associate with other authors in your genre doing good work - Yes, this seems counterintuitive to what I just said, but curation is king in a flooded market. If you can associate with people doing good work, then you can all amplify each other. That is the reason salons historically worked so well.

• Become a fulcrum for your niche - If you are interested in getting even further ahead, you can create a salon of authors doing good work. You just have to be very choosy and make sure you all amplify each other, and sharing each other’s work is a boon to all of you.

• Make a world-class publication - Yes, you can make any publication, but if you want to be shared, you must be shareable. The 50,000-word free pinned guide on my Substack is all about this concept. There is an exponential growth curve if you can get to the top of your niche.

• Leverage your work to do more with less - The best part about marketing is that it allows you to do more with less. If you have a great publication, and you can get interviews on other blogs, then you are able to leverage that more because more people will go to your publication.

• Be in the top 10 of your topic - When you think about your niche, you need to be named in the top 10 of your topic. My old manager used to say “If you’re not in the top 10, then you might as well not be on that list”. If you can’t be in the top 10, make a new topic that you can dominate, and become a fulcrum. I think you should aim for the top 3, not 10, but let’s get to the top 10 first and go from there.

• Share other articles you think your audience will like - The minute your audience can associate you with other publications, they will start putting you in the conversation with those writers. You don’t have to do a roundup like me, but you should be sharing and curating your feed so people know your point of view.

• Have a strong point of view - Substack is mostly about following a specific writer, and people follow others who have interesting points of view on the world. You can write about just about anything, but your point of view is everything.

• Collective action will save you - If you can build something with other people on the same journey, then you will all be able to amplify each other. People will be more likely to follow other people you recommend, and it will amplify your work. Just make sure they are people that cast you in a good light.

• Understand you are building something with your readers and other publications in your niche - While I talked about competing for eyeballs with every other publication, you are also part of a tradition. Together, you and other writers, along with readers, are building an ecosystem. People in your genre want to find other people who do the thing they do well and can help them build a stronger category.

• Keep doing it. If you keep doing it well, you will outlast most other people and eventually be noticed, as long as you keep doing interesting work and serving your audience.

How you win is really by creating an environment of great publications, and fostering it with readers and writers who are good stewards of it.

It’s not easy. None of this is easy. And if you don’t want to do it, that’s fine. You don’t have to do it, but you can do it if you want to do it. You can actually become one of the people who gets buoyed, instead of the ones who are drowning.

People ask me often why they can’t get other people to share their articles or work with them.

By people, they mean successful people, of course, and the first thing I tell them is that I bet there are hundreds of people at your level of success who would love to share your work.

Those are the people you should be networking with anyway because they are the ones most likely to pull you up when they rise, and vice versa.

Since I know that won’t satiate you, I will let you know what I have observed, both building my own success and talking to others who are successful.

Do you want to know why? I’ll tell you.

People ask a lot of successful people, they offer nothing in return, and they treat people with audiences as commodities.

This year has been eye-opening for me because at some point along the way I went from a human being to a commodity as I reached a certain level of success.

I’m not sure what triggered it, but a few months ago I started to find much more negative sentiment around me in general, and that general sentiment treated me as if I wasn’t an actual person.

It acted as if I was a printer, or a dishwasher, or a large corporation instead of a human. I looked around and saw that a lot of my friends were treated the same way.

At some point, the general sentiment became “Russell is no longer a human, but a public figure that we can treat like any old ruddy thing.”

And that’s fine, I guess, people can people…then, the speaking opportunities came with greater frequency.

I tried to say yes to everything, but I just couldn’t. Then, I started to realize that even the things I said yes to became transactional.

Last year, when I spoke, people always reached out afterward with a thank you. Now, people were treating me like my participation was expected. I never get thanked anymore for my work. People just expect it from me.

Still, whatever. That’s the price of success. I guess the expectation that I will always deliver is a good thing, and it is nice to be asked. Energetically, though, I only have so much to give.

It’s less nice when you politely decline and they snipe at you, which also happens a lot. I feel pressured to say yes because otherwise, people think I’m a diva.

More so, they often want to charge people to listen to me speak, and then don’t want to pay me. The number of times I’ve said yes to an opportunity to speak, only to find out later that they are charging and not paying me, is staggering.

Everyone seems out to screw you, and those are the good-natured ones.

Then, the bad actors started to come out, trying to get me to endorse something or participate in one thing or another. They use that guilt of saying no to pressure you to do things for them.

Most of them are easy to spot, but some are well hidden, and it would take a lot to suss them out beforehand. While I would love to accept every possible opportunity that comes my way, unfortunately sometimes bad actors come along and spoil it for everyone.

While I do love the attention, this isn’t really about me, but about how you act around and with successful people.

If you want to break through the wall they have up, it’s actually pretty easy.

Treat them like a human and not a commodity. Do it repeatedly for a long time, long past the time when it would be financially beneficial to do so, and if you reach out to work with them, offer to pay a fair rate.

I remember when I started doing my roundup. I got a few responses, but most people I put into the newsletter, especially the super successful ones, didn’t say anything.

Why would they? I was a new person clearly trying to bank on their name.

But I didn’t stop doing it. I kept putting them in my roundups (when they wrote a worthy article), and I didn’t ask them for anything.

Slowly, but surely, more of them started to come around, and now many of them comment on the roundup or share it.

I think it’s because I’ve been doing it for months and I haven’t asked for anything. The orange checkmark by my name helps a bit now, too.

I don’t want anything except for them to keep writing. The roundup isn’t for them, or even for me. It’s for the readers.

I try to make my roundup a meritocracy. You are just as likely to get in with your first article as your 1,000th.

I’ve been doing this a long time, and every time I meet successful people they have their guard up initially, unless they either knew of my work before or I was introduced through somebody else.

It took proving I wasn’t going anywhere, that I didn’t want anything from them, and that I was interesting enough to be around before they dropped their guard.

It took showing them I didn’t want to exploit them like most other people they met and trust me successful people are exploited constantly.

Over time it’s become easier and easier to get people to drop their guard as I’ve gotten more successful and been around longer. Once they saw me as a good steward of the industry, most of them came around.

Some still hate me, though. Can’t do anything about that. It’s very hard to love somebody’s work and have them not want anything to do with you, but that is just the way of things at every level.

I say all that to say this…the thing you say, complaining that somebody or another won’t share your work, is treating them like a commodity, not a human.

That way of thinking is the exact reason why they won’t do it, and won’t ever do it until you change the way you think.

Successful writers are not commodities. They are not corporations. They are humans who like being treated like humans.

I know you want those people to share your work to validate you, or so they can transfer some of that success onto you, but success is not all it’s cracked up to be in that respect.

I talk to a lot of unsuccessful authors, and the caution I give them is that success won’t fix the hole inside of you, and it won’t fix what you think is broken about you. It will just amplify it. Fast growth often brings more problems than solutions.

So, yes, success is good, but also I find almost everyone wants fast success for bad reasons that won’t actually satisfy them. Slow growth and networking with writers at your level are usually more helpful than getting somebody successful to share your work.

More importantly, it’s the way that is most likely to lead to the kind of success that will give you some stability in this very chaotic career path you’ve chosen.

One of the best ways to build your success and help craft a boat is to become a great content curator.

I looked for a good summary of why you should become a content curator, but all I found were listicles, so this is the first time I’m actually quoting ChatGPT because it took those summaries and gave me something usable for an article.

People ask me a lot how they can increase their output if they are a slow writer, and I always tell them they should start to curate content for an audience. It takes 1-2 hours a week (as long as you are reading broadly in your field of study) and it’s a great way to give back to the community.

Writers think they can only do this for non-fiction, but I built my fiction business curating books and other content for fiction readers.

Once somebody knows you have good taste, they are more likely to follow you and buy your books. If you can show them you like the same books they do, and you grok the same stuff, you will be well on your way to building a lifelong reader.

The key to curation is care; an almost single-minded dedication to surfacing what your audience needs to hear and what will enhance their lives.

You can push them out of their comfort zone if you find something they need to hear, but you have to know your audience well enough and be doggedly committed to enriching their experience.

I see a lot of people who do roundups b/c it’s the thing to do, but they don’t understand that curation has very little about what you like (though that is part of it).

It has everything to do with what will enrich your reader’s experience inside your publication.

Like everything else, it’s all about them. There are hundreds of articles I read a week that I enjoy, but I won’t put in a roundup.

The perfect articles are the overlap between what you love and what you think your audience will love. That said, I’ve added articles that I don’t love, but speak to something my audience needs to hear. It happens less often, but it does happen as long as it’s a well-written article.

I can tell the difference between objectively good and subjectively my jam, which is an important skill in any curation.

Ideally, they are a mix of articles they’ve seen a bunch online and haven’t had a chance to read and ones they have never seen but want to amplify.

Curation is an art. It’s one of the best ways to show to somebody you have good taste and bring them deeper into your ecosystem, but if you don’t have that level of faithfulness to your audience, it can easily backfire.

If somebody thinks you have their best interests at heart in all things, then they will be more comfortable going all-in on you, until you break that trust, of course.

However, if you are haphazard with your curation it can easily go the other way, and turn people off.

My father taught me from a very young age all about countercyclical living.

The main idea is that if there’s a crowd there, go somewhere else.

We would always park a little further from the store, for instance, because it was easier to find a spot.

Or, instead of standing in line for hours to see a new movie (back before you could get tickets online), we would see a movie a few weeks old.

My father didn’t understand why anyone would go where the crowd was when it was so much more pleasant to go the other way.

I’ll be honest, it was infuriating when I was younger, but the older I get the more I see the wisdom in it.

This presents in business as the Blue Ocean Strategy. 

What does this have to do with not getting drowned out by the crowds? Well, it’s pretty simple. If a bunch of people are drowning, you should probably not go that way.

Instead, you should go another way and find shallower water. If everyone is talking about one thing, then you find another axis to talk to the same people about something different.

Yes, there is a benefit to going into the red ocean where everyone is feeding because that’s where the action is, but plenty of people are completely turned off by that, and you can get by really well doing the opposite thing.

It might take a little bit longer, but the sea is calm and you can go at a leisurely pace because nobody is there yet.

Then, when people figure it out and start a frenzy, either you jump to the next thing, like a Desert, or you’ve spent so much time there that you’re now the first to feed, like a Grassland.

If you want to grow fast using this strategy, then you can harness your inner Tundra to draw attention to the thing you figured out and start a frenzy, but you can also simply go your own pace and keep the ocean calm.

People sometimes ask me why, since I talk so much about growth, I write things that have almost no virality potential, like my post this week about taking a break.

I tell them my secret and most of them don’t get it.

Now, I’m going to tell you why I do it and maybe you will understand better than them or maybe you’ll think it’s dumb, too.

I write about things people want to hear so they read the things they need to hear.

Certain posts are tailor-made for growth, namely when I talk about Substack. If you write about Substack, you will grow faster than writing about anything else.

That’s great, but more important to me than growth is showing people how capitalism is destroying their mental health and how to live inside an oppressive system while still maintaining their artistic spark.

Those are not posts that get a lot of virality. They don’t grow fast, but they hopefully ignite a spark in the people who need to read them.

This is a two-pronged approach to growth. I call it the Switch.

1. Get people into my publication with something easy to consume.

2. Feed them articles they need to hear to build a sustainable career.

I know the posts that people need to hear will likely shrink my audience, so they must be combined with posts designed to make it grow.

It is this process that makes my publication a living organism, that breathes in and out as it grows and shrinks.

It might be a dumb strategy, but it works for me. I have found it a great strategy to get large groups to talk about difficult topics.

People who make it through those difficult articles become my best subscribers. Those are the articles that change lives, but they need to subscribe to my publication to do it.

If you follow my work, you probably found me through my growth articles, and hopefully stick around for the rest of it. Every publication I have ever paid for, including the Washington Post, had a flashpoint article where I started to pay attention, a building effect where I learned about what they were about over several different axes, and a tipping point article that convinced me to pay for a subscription.

Usually, the article that made me subscribe is very different from the one that made me pay attention and both of those are different than the one that made me fall in love with their work.

I should note that I love every type of article I write for my publication, but they have different purposes.

If you don’t want to be on social media, you can start doing paid ads and get the same effect, or hire somebody to do it for you.

If you don’t have money for paid ads or to hire somebody, you can do the work yourself and be on social media.

If you don’t want to be on social media, you can start doing paid ads and get the same effect, or hire somebody to do it for you.

If you don’t have money for paid ads or to hire somebody, you can do the work yourself and be on social media.

…This is the cyclical conversation I go through with most of my clients when we get started.

You’ll be investing either money, time, or both. You can’t get through that. No, there’s not somebody who will work on performance for a person that isn’t proven.

You either have to pay somebody to do it, pay an algorithm to do it, or do it yourself. The less you want to do, the more you have to pay.

The goal is to make enough to pay for the advertising/help, and make a profit. Meanwhile, you get to do the things you like more, and will hopefully be able to be more productive so you can make even more.

I wish the world worked differently, but you either have to pay capitalism in time or money.

This stuff is very hard to hear and even harder to implement. It’s likely that it prickled, maybe even rankled you, so I want to provide some final guidance on this topic.

1. I never claim that my advice is guaranteed to work for you. I have studied thousands of successful creators, interviewed hundreds, and experimented in my own business with what they told me. The advice I give is the best practices I found by trying to systematize what I saw and bring it to you. It is not a personal attack on you. My interest is mainly in the sociological impact of how groups of people operate successfully, focused through the lens of what worked for me.

2. Sometimes, you just have to do things better. In fact, most of this is about figuring out how to do things better over time. I have no idea where your business is, but when I dig into why people are failing, most of it is about them not doing things well enough. Their books don’t look good enough. The writing isn’t tight enough. They need to uplevel their network. They need to get better at marketing. Their website needs more work. They need to put more people into their funnel. I have written hundreds of thousands of words in defense of this throughout this publication. I have no idea why a single person is failing unless I dig into their business. However, usually, almost every time, they need to do things better. That is a very hard thing to hear, but it is also true.

3. If you want to be shared, you need to be shareable. The #1 thing that prevents me from sharing something is that it’s not ready for prime time. It’s very hard to put on your reader hat and go “Would I share this if I saw it?”I work with writers all the time who can’t see their own blind spots, but I always ask them “If you saw this out in the wild, would you share it?”They almost always tell me no. As readers, we all know when something is good. We just can’t embody that person very easily. Critique groups are essential for young writers, and I don’t see why there can’t be ones here, too.That said, at the end of the day we all have to be better at putting our reader hats on and evaluating our own work.

The harsh truth is that businesses are hard. 90% of them fail in the first year. 99% of them fail in the first ten years. On a long enough time horizon almost every business fails, even if it’s a hundred years later.

There are almost no businesses left that started in the 1800s, or even the 1950s, or even the 1990s.

Almost every one of them, even if they were once enormous, has failed or been absorbed by another company.

This is especially true in creative businesses, like writing. There is so much competition and it’s so hard that almost everyone gets drowned out at some point. Sometimes people get drowned out for years, or decades, and then make a glorious comeback.

This does NOT mean you are not good enough. You are good enough. However, growing a business is very different. It’s not personal.

Growing a business is not really about you at all. It’s how you make other people feel about their own lives. You have to be able to project outward and imprint on other people, and most people are really bad at that.

There are ways to do it that are more likely to lead to success. They might not lead to your success. I’m just sharing things that have worked for groups of other people that have found success.

Not being good at this stuff does not mean you are not good enough or that you don’t deserve to be here.

You deserve to be here. You deserve to be here even if you never want to monetize.

You deserve to be heard. You deserve to be heard if only a few people hear you right now.

However, if you want to get to the next level, especially if you’ve been around for years or decades, and you’re still not where you want to be, you have probably been doing things wrong, maybe for a long time.

There might be some shame there, or some anger that other people have passed you, or bitterness because you trusted other people to grow your business and you feel that they led you astray.

I’m not sure, but I didn’t do that to you, and I won’t be a vessel for your anger. I will block you with impunity because I have boundaries.

You have probably been doing the same wrong stuff for years. Or maybe you’re not doing those things well enough.

There is no shame in that. Other people shoot past you because they have learned and grown and figured out ways to project outward on other people in a way that resonates with them.

Maybe you don’t want to do those things, and that’s cool too, but you have to give up that anger and stop beating yourself up for not getting there. You have to let it go because if you’re not doing the actions to get there, you’ll never get the result.

This is really hard, but it’s even harder to look around you and see if your writer friends are an anchor or a sail.

I know you love your friends, and the people that you are around, but it’s possible if you aren’t where you want to be it’s because the people you hang around don’t want to grow or they aren’t ready to grow.

You really are the average of the five people you spend the most time with, and it’s really hard to look at things like that, but if you want to get to the next level, you need to be around people all headed in the same direction and are committed to getting to the next level, and the level after that.

Some people will want to come on that journey with you, but others will not be ready or willing to make that jump.

Maybe the people you are around are vampires, sucking your energy and taking from you without giving anything back. That is sad, but unfortunately, it happens all the time. Often your network is holding you back, not pushing you forward.

This feels super tough to hear, I know, but it’s not a personal attack. It is what I have found across studying this stuff for over a decade.

I don’t want this stuff to be true. I want the world to exist in a different way, but it does not. We are all trying to change that world, but we have to also operate inside this world while we work to change it.

I tell people all the time “You can try to fix the problem and complain all you want or you can decide not to fix the problem and then you can’t complain. I don’t really care which.”

By try, I don’t mean throw anything at the wall. I mean go look at the instructions from an expert, and follow them. Even then, if I have a Samsung washing machine and I read the instructions for a KitchenAid mixer, I’m not going to complain to Samsung that it didn’t work

Nothing is a quick fix, but some things are generally true.

• Bet on people, not companies.

• Choose a group you want to serve, and then serve them long enough that they overcome the feeling that you will abandon them.

• Find ways to add value, monetarily, emotionally, mentally, and physically.

• The right people want to support you, not hold you back.

There are tons of ways to succeed, and none of them are quick, save for unplanned luck.

Quick money usually makes you feel gross. Good money comes from being a sail, not an anchor.

If you’re new here, I wrote a free 50,000-word guide about building a world-class substack from scratch and growing it into a success.

If you are a paid member, I recommend reading How to fall in love with book marketing, How to survive as a writer in a capitalist dystopia, How to get 5,000-20,000 new readers for your Substack publication every month, and How to supercharge your Substack growth by putting together a world-class virtual conference... and have fun doing it to help round out this article.

If you are not a paid member, you can read everything with a 7-day free trial, or give us a one-time tip.