How to go paid on Substack without selling your soul

The Author Stack sits at the intersection of craft and commerce, helping writers build more sustainable businesses that allow them to thrive while creating work that lights them up inside. We strive to give authors agency in a world that too often seems intent on stripping it away from them.

We have hundreds of articles in our archive, along with fiction and non-fiction books for paid members.

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 are two main hurdles that writers will face in building their creative careers. The first is developing the ability to craft exceptional work with a distinct voice that is uniquely their own and the second is building a sustainable business that lights them up inside.

Most scholarship is devoted to the craft part of the writing business and abandons creative people to deal with the business part of their writing largely by themselves.

Since creative people are left on their own for this part, they have to rely on the sales and marketing activities that work for other businesses driven more by maximizing revenue than artistic fulfillment.

So, it comes as no surprise that so many writers have issues with “going paid” on Substack because it underlies an important tenet that has been drilled into our heads from a young age; commodifying art taints the pursuit of truth and devalues the work...

…or some such nonsense to that effect.

If you have no interest in getting paid for your work, that’s your choice, but the idea that making money on your art devalues it is utter poppycock. Exchanging goods and services has been a bedrock of civilization since the dawn of humanity.

When I dig down into it with creators, their core aversion to sales and marketing is not tied to the money itself, but the commodification of their writing into just another widget in the capitalist infrastructure.

That belief is not nonsense. In fact, commodifying art can absolutely destroy the value proposition of the artist, which is often built on uniqueness and innovation.

Substack works because it is built on the belief that your voice is unique and people will find you specifically because you are specifically not a commodity.

However, writing does not have to be a commodity to make money. In fact, the discommodification of your work can be the exact reason that people line up to buy it.

If we can get over that mental hurdle, then there are several ways to sell a paid Substack that aligns with artistic values like providing value to your community, creating unique experiences for your fans, and facilitating joy in people’s lives.

So, if you have ever felt icky about going paid, here are some of my best mindset shifts to get you into the right headspace to joyously provide more for your audience than they ever thought possible.

Before I get started, thank you to for giving the prompt for this idea and to for writing the post that led to the prompt.

Not everyone will join you behind the paywall and that’s okay

Only a fractional share of people (2%-10%) who follow you will even consider going paid, so any effort should be focused not on alienating them but on creating an environment where people who want to join are overwhelmed with awesome.

There is a chapter in This is NOT a Book all about how guilt can’t scale, but the general idea is that using guilt as a cudgel alienates your audience and turns them away from you. Guilt can work to influence buyers in the short term, but it feels terrible and does not create the type of long-term customers who will gladly pay for your work far into the future.

Instead, flip this on its head and turn your paid Substack into an unmissable party for your biggest fans. Shower those people behind your paywall with love and make them feel like they are part of the in-crowd for joining you.

Because most won’t, and that’s okay.

I have been sending newsletters for close to a decade and no matter what I write some small segment of people will unsubscribe from my list. I could give them a code to download a $100 Amazon gift card, and some people will still unsubscribe.

I have sent every type of email in the universe from “I’m in the hospital” to “Buy my book” and they all get roughly the same number of unsubscribes from people who are done listening to me.

That’s okay, because I don’t write for them. I write for the people who want to hear my message. The more you can focus your attention on those people, the better you will be mentally.

That said, focusing exclusively on paid members misses a big bit of human psychology. Namely, a lot of people just want to see what you’re up to even if they don’t buy your stuff.

We undervalue lurkers and looky-loos, but the truth is that most people won’t buy from you. They might come to your party, but they won’t pay for a ticket.

Many members of your immediate family won’t even buy from you, and that’s okay. I’m sure you don’t frequent their businesses, either, or use their services, but you still like to be around them.

Most people you know won’t buy from you, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t interested in your stuff. It doesn’t mean they won’t read your posts, see your emails, and just kind of get a nice feeling that you exist.

I have had a bunch of people in my life who something like “I don’t read your emails but I like that they show up so I know you still exist. It gives me a good feeling inside.”

And that’s cool, too. It doesn’t even matter if they talk you up. This isn’t a marketing thing, it’s just nice as a human to be able to elicit that reaction from people whether they buy from you or not.

I am all about getting paid for your work, but not at the expense of people who just want to hang out. You don’t have to snub the people who just want to hang out to cater a great experience for your paid members. It’s okay to shower love on everybody in different ways.

Additionally, just because somebody says “no” doesn’t mean “no” forever. It just means “no” right now. There are all sorts of reasons people choose not to join you this minute, and many times those people will eventually join you if you stay in your truth and don’t try to guilt them into it.

Limit your ask to certain times a year, like a PBS pledge drive

Even though you can donate to PBS throughout the year, they push hard during certain times of the year with telethons, special bonuses, and an intense focus on showing the value they provide.

Similarly, even though you should offer your paid membership throughout the year, consider designing a “pledge drive” when you first go paid (with a sweet yearly discount for paid subscribers) in order to build the critical mass necessary to devote time to your membership. Offer special pins, prints, or other bonuses for people who join during this special time, and try to get other creators with similar audiences to create a fun experience with you. The hardest part of running a membership for paid subscribers is that whether there is one person or a thousand people behind a paywall, you have to do the work.

Once you have the initial drive complete, plan regular events to gather new members and convert free subscribers to paid ones. This has the added benefit of reminding your paid members why they subscribed in the first place to lower churn.

One of the biggest problems creators have with going paid is that they feel like they have to always be on, but if you confine your ask to certain times of the year, then you can concentrate on the work of creating most of the year.

In fact, you can fold up a membership around a product launch, like a book. In our newest Kickstarter campaign, I am offering a yearly subscription to this publication for $75, which includes a copy of the book and a VIP call with me.

There is also a masterclass available for $150, which provides a two-hour live course on top of the other bonuses. We have offered this very successfully in the past as well. 

Map out the value for subscribers

The easiest way to convince yourself that paid subscribers are getting value from their membership is to take out a piece of paper and create a value stack where your paid subscribers get at least a 10x return for their investment.

Most Substacks that I see have a $5/mo or $50/year membership tier. I think we can all agree that if somebody will get $500 in value from a $50 investment, then that’s a pretty amazing deal.

If you plan on a $50/yr membership, then you need to find a way to provide $500/yr of value to somebody who joins.

This might sound like an insurmountable amount, but when you break it down, value is everywhere.

For instance, let’s say you have a blog about making awesome salads, and your value is providing easy-to-prepare healthy salads that taste great. I will literally share every salad post I find with my wife because we are always looking for good salads. Even in Los Angeles, we have a heck of a time finding great ones.

If you have this kind of blog, then how many hours are you saving the average person who now doesn’t have to scour the internet looking for healthy alternatives every week? Colloquially, I would say that we spend at least one hour a week looking at recipes.

The median salary for a worker in the USA is $54,132, which is an hourly rate of around $27/hr. So, if your stated goal was to save paid subscribers at least 1 hour a week, that’s a value of $1,404 right there over a year. Even if you take the federal minimum wage of $7.25, that’s still a $377 value.

Then, can you provide a checklist, cheat sheets, a short audio/video/email course with best practices, compilation books of your best posts, or something you can create once and give people at launch? Or could you provide a meal planning guide to save even more time?

When people go paid on my Substack, they get access to several courses relevant to my audience’s interests, including How to Build an Audience from Scratch, Write a Great Novel, 10x your Productivity, and the archives from my long-running podcast The Complete Creative, which I pulled down from everywhere in 2020, even if you only sign up for a 7-day free trial.

Depending on how you value those things, it could be $500 worth of value by itself.

Office hours, chats, and other experiences that are only available to paid subscribers are also a big value. For example, if you provide access to yourself for an hour a month, and you bill out at $200/hr, that’s over $2,000 in value right there.

When you stack this value up, it’s easy to provide a lot of benefits to a subscriber.

Realize people want to support your work

Building a 10x value stack into your paid community is as much about changing your mindset as it is about exciting your audience. Once you are comfortable with the value you provide, your audience should fall in line behind you.

If fact, many of them are probably ready to support you just because they believe in your vision and want you to keep doing your best work.

For a while, I asked everyone who joined my paid Substack what they wanted to see from me and the overwhelming response was “I just want to support your work”. It was such a unanimous response that I stopped asking people.

We forget, or have never internalized, that people who believe in our work want us to keep doing it. The more quickly we can put out our best work is as much for their benefit as it is for ours.

In fact, many people in your community probably feel guilty about having gotten so much value from you over the years and will welcome the ability to support you and your work. Fans, in general, are amazing and will surprise you in unexpected ways.

Make a list of all the things that going paid will enable you to do for your audience

Patreon used to have a nice feature that allowed a creator to set goals for their community. It’s not available anymore, and that’s a whole different platform even if it was, but we can still use it as a model to think about how extra support will make your community’s life better.

• What will an additional $1,000/mo in revenue allow you to do for your community? Can you provide an extra post for them every month? Will you be able to hire a copy editor to improve the quality of the content? Can you produce a podcast where you go more in-depth about certain subjects?

• What will that money allow you NOT to do? Will you be able to stop taking client work? Will you be able to cut back to part-time at your job? Will it allow you to hire a VA so you don’t have to handle admin work?

• How will that extra time positively impact your community? If you have an additional 5, 10, or 20 hours a week, how much more could you accomplish for your community? Maybe you want to delight your audience with extra bonuses, or maybe it will just put you in a better mental place to create your best work.

The intersection of art and commerce is really the intersection of artist and community.

Your community pays to receive what you have made and provides you the ability to create the next thing. Your receipt of their money allows you to continue delighting them with your work and create from a place of joy instead of fear.

It is a gift you are giving each other. 

At the end of the day, commerce and art are not at odds with each other. They are, instead, as intrinsically connected as the link between product and customer.

Every time I release something new, I start by saying “Look at what I made for you”.

I believe that deep in my soul. I create little presents for their enjoyment. Their patronage allows me to create even more for them. Everything I make is written with one human from my audience in mind. It is usually my wife, but it is nearly as often somebody else who I think will enjoy it.

Many artists have told me over the years that they think an adversarial relationship between art and commerce is a good thing, and I strongly disagree.

For years, I had an adversarial relationship with exercise and, because of that, I remained unhealthy. My mindset was such that I equated exercise to bad. It took changing my mindset so that I found joy in exercise before I was able to find something that worked for me.

Now, I exercise every day.

In the same way, if you have an adversarial relationship with commerce, then you will never be able to find the joy in allowing your most ardent fans to pay you properly for the work you create.

Power, authority, and systems of oppression, yes, I think art should probably be adversarial to those things in many cases, but commerce does not have to exist inside those systems.

The most utopian of communes still have some form of commerce, even if it relies exclusively on bartering.

You create your relationship with money and boundaries for yourself and your community within that relationship. It can absolutely be an adversarial or parasitic relationship, but it can be a symbiotic one too, that fills you with joy, if you create it that way.

I have been coaching writers for close to a decade and when they have an adversarial relationship with commerce they, by and large, have trouble making a sustainable career from their work. In the worst cases, they end up sabotaging themselves repeatedly to prevent their success.

If you don’t want to build a sustainable career, do whatever you want, but if you want this to be more than a hobby, then you have to find a way to make peace with commerce.

Selling your work doesn’t have to destroy your soul, but we have to set our lives up in a way to protect ourselves and our audience to prevent that from happening.

If we can do that, then there is great joy in allowing somebody to give you money for something they will treasure forever.

The Author Stack sits at the intersection of craft and commerce, helping writers build more sustainable businesses that allow them to thrive while creating work that lights them up inside. We strive to give authors agency in a world that too often seems intent on stripping it away from them.

We have hundreds of articles in our archive, along with fiction and non-fiction books for paid members.

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