How to use Substack sections to strengthen your backlist and give subscribers even more value

This article was requested by multiple people in Notes. It deals with how to use sections in Substack to partition your previous work and segment your writing to deliver a personalized experience for readers. If you are a paid subscriber, I recommend reading How to find more readers for your books and get stacked with subs on Substack and How to go paid on Substack without selling your soul to give context to 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.

I have 18 different Substack sections. Actually, now that I added one for this article it’s 19, and I hate an odd number so it will probably be 20 before too long. This is my life now.

Some might say I have a hoarding problem, but there’s a very, very good reason for me to have so many. It’s because I’m a hoarder.

No, the real reason is because I learned recently that when somebody clicks a link to unsubscribe from your Substack, they are brought to a page where, in addition to completely unsubscribing, they can simply slide on and off the sections that interest them.

This is what happens when you click on the one for this publication.

Look at all these choices! This is a huge opportunity for writers. Every time somebody goes to unsubscribe, you have a chance to show them all the cool options inside your publication that they probably don’t even know about yet and allow them to tailor their perfect experience.

It’s marketing gold and you don’t even have to do anything except set up and populate the sections.

Segmenting and personalization are very important to me. I’ve had a newsletter for years, and while I don’t have different sections inside of it, I allow people to choose how often they get emails from me. It has significantly reduced the number of unsubscribes I get to any email and improved the overall user experience.

This is even better.

I have been trying to find a way to make subscriptions work in my business for a long time.

I’ve even gone so far as to license my own app…to disastrous results. I don’t think I made 10% of the costs back on it after a year. It was brutal, but I persist because I believe having a membership is part of the future of publishing.

The problem with subscription platforms like Patreon up until now is that the only way to legitimately offer books to people was to upload PDFs or ebooks, and I am adamantly against that idea. It encourages people to subscribe for one month, download everything, and unsubscribe. I am not about that life. 

I have my books available for purchase on my website, but if people subscribe I’m not comfortable giving them downloads if I can’t restrict their access when they unsubscribe.

With Substack sections, I saw the perfect opportunity to upload my back catalog as a bonus for paid subscribers and serialize stories to find new readers. Meanwhile, I can deliver to everyone exactly what they want.

Functionally, how this works is that somebody goes to my main page and clicks on bonus stories:

They choose a newsletter: 

Pick the chapter:

And start reading:

When they’re ready for the next chapter, they just click and keep reading:

I have this book set up as a bonus for paid subscribers only, but I am also serializing one of my longer novel series every week, and new chapters are free for everyone.

You might ask….”but Russell, you have a non-fiction publication. Why would you mix the two audiences together?”

The truth is that it’s because…well, I just don’t think it matters much, especially if readers can personalize what they hear about from me.

I believe that every person contains multitudes, and some percentage of people who read about building an author business want to read cool books. At the same time, some fiction readers often want to hear about how authors think about their business. The methodology for segmenting your writer lives from each other is algorithmic, anyway.

On retailers, you don’t get a chance to segment your audience. They do it for you. Retailers are search engines. People looking for one book are likely going to check out other similar books, so keeping every pen name narrowly focused makes sense…but Substack doesn’t work like that.

Substack is a much more intimate experience where people are much more likely to jump between a lot of your stuff. For instance, I recently launched a non-fiction book on Kickstarter, and even though my fiction email list is filled with readers, not authors, 13,000 of 20,000 people on my email list opened at least one email about it during the campaign.

That’s right. 65% of my fiction mailing list opened an email about non-fiction because it was me talking about the process of creating books.

Now, they didn’t all buy, not even close, but there’s way more cross-pollination than most industry experts would have you believe. Not to mention, even if they don’t care about what I’m showing them…they can unsubscribe from just that section.

Okay, if I haven’t convinced you this might be a good idea by now, I never will. For those of you that want to learn more, I’m going to show you exactly how to do this for your own author business.

I’m going to break this into a few parts. In PART 1, I will show you how to create a section. In PART 2, I will show you how to set up a template. In PART 3, I will show you how to build each chapter.

Then, I added two bonus sections. In the first, I talk about how I got 25,000+ paid subscribers in less than 2 weeks. In the second, I walk through how to optimize your publication for searchability and subscriber growth.

***This is a long post that will be truncated in emails. I highly recommend you go to this page to read the whole 7,500-word post without interruption.***

PART 1:

Let’s talk about setting up your new section.

Before you do this, you should decide how to categorize each new section. I chose to categorize first by series, then by recurring segments of my newsletter (like my weekly wellness thread). 

So, I have a 12-book series called The Godsverse Chronicles, and I chose to make that one section instead of 12 different books. I might have made a different choice if I wasn’t going to serialize it for the next several years, but that is a choice you need to make, too.

STEP 1: Go into your dashboard and click on the settings:

STEP 2: Either scroll or click on SECTIONS in the left-hand menu.

STEP 3: Click on + ADD SECTION.

STEP 4: From here you have some options. Fill out the title of your section. If you are uploading a complete book/story/section that won’t be updated then I recommend adding [COMPLETE] at the end so people can denote it easily. If you are going to keep updating it, then you can add [ONGOING].

Then, add your description. I like adding the tagline from my novel to that description field. You don’t get a lot of space on the newsletter page, so I want to make it short and sweet.

For The Vessel, the tagline is: A million years ago the world ended. Since then a group of five have kept the City running. Now, one of them has died.

You will also want to upload a square image for the header. For The Vessel, I used a piece of the cover, but you can also use Depositphotos to find a cool image. like I did with My Father Didn’t Kill Himself. 

You’ll also need a 16x9 image of the same, or similar, photo to use in the updates. We’ll use this for the chapter images. You can use different imagery for each chapter, but that just seemed to complicate an already tedious process so I chose one image for everything to ensure brand consistency.

STEP 5: You’ll have to make three final decisions on this page: Whether to hide posts from your homepage, whether to automatically add people to your new section, and whether to copy your current email list into the new section.

Because I do want to make my main Substack non-fiction specific, I chose to hide posts for my fiction from it, so all of my other newsletters are mostly hidden from my main page to keep it clean. These are bonuses after all.

Additionally, I have a weekly wellness thread that I chose to keep hidden as well, as I don’t think it adds much to the aesthetic of the page. These tutorials, though, I won’t hide from the page. This is what I meant above by categorizing by recurring segments. I didn’t add [ONGOING] to these recurring segments since they aren’t stories or books.

While I don’t add new subscribers to completed stories, I do automatically add them to the weekly wellness thread, these tutorials, and my ongoing stories.

Copying your current subscribers is also a really important question because you can’t change your mind. There is currently no functionality inside Substack to add subscribers to a section after you have imported them.

This actually happened to me. I created a section and didn’t copy over my list, only to regret it later. I had to create a brand new section that did copy everyone over, and then change the section on every post manually. It took a while, but it did work out in the end. I’ll show you how to do that below.

Just like with automatically adding people, I chose not to copy people to completed stories, but I did decide to copy them to ongoing sections, both in fiction and non-fiction.

STEP 6: Click CREATE SECTION and you’re ready to go.

Please note that Substack automatically creates a new top menu item for your new section, so if you’re going to do a bunch of sections you probably want to hide it by either scrolling up to the WEBSITE section (or clicking it on the left menu) and clicking the eye on the right side of the navigation to hide it.

STEP 7 (optional): While in the WEBSITE section of the menu, HIDE the /newsletters link and CREATE A NEW LINK to /newsletters with a fun name like BONUS STORIES by clicking + NEW LINK at the bottom of the list.

NOTE: You can’t change the name of the original newsletters link, but you can create a new one with a different name and link it to the same place.

STEP 8 (optional): If you want to go the extra mile, then instead of creating a link to your /newsletters page, then you can create a brand new page on your publication to showcase all your sections, like I have done for both fiction and nonfiction.

In order to set this up, go to DASHBOARD>SETTINGS>WEBSITE>+ NEW PAGE

STEP 9 (optional): Once you have your new page, you can set it up just like any other article. I recommend a title like [X TYPE OF BOOK] AVAILABLE ON [YOUR PUBLICATION]

STEP 10 (optional): Once you are done, I would add a divider to separate the header from the different sections. Then, I should separate by genre (like fantasy), and add an image, the title, the subgenre whether it’s ongoing, and if it’s free or paid. I recommend looking at The Link Library for a good format.

STEP 11 (optional): Once you’ve done that, put your blurb, a link to the section, and then a link to buy the book (if you have one).

Continue doing this for every section to keep a running tally of all your sections in one convenient place for readers.

If you think this option is nonsense busywork, then you are in the right mindset for this whole exercise.

Yay! You’ve created your section. Now, let’s populate it.

PART 2:

Let’s talk about setting up a template inside your section. This is not the only way to set it up, but after studying a bunch of fiction and non-fiction Substacks, this is what I found worked for me.

STEP 1: Click on NEW POST.

STEP 2: Choose your SECTION. This will likely be the biggest change for you. Once you have more than one section this menu dropdown will appear in the top left side of your editor. NOTE: If you delete your section, then everything will revert to the main publication section.

STEP 3: Choose your author. If you have more than one author, you will have to choose this every time you duplicate a post, which you will be doing a lot in this part.

STEP 4: Add your title. For ongoings, I add the name of the books, like Magic - Chapter 8. For complete stories, I just say Chapter 1, Episode 1, or Issue 1. Since everything is in its own section and nobody is going to get an email it shouldn’t be confusing. The only difference is for things like My Father Didn’t Kill Himself, which is epistolary so I chose to add the blog post title in the headline, and for non-fiction books, which I broke up into relevant sections like MAKING GREAT CONTENT so readers can find the exact they need. 

STEP 5: Add your subtitle. For the first chapter, I use the tagline I used for the description. For each subsequent chapter, I use the first non-spoiler line from the chapter I can find.

So, for The Vessel, the subtitle for Chapter 1 is A million years ago the world ended. Since then a group of five have kept the City running. Now, one of them has died, just like the newsletter description. However, the subtitle for Chapter 2 is I shouldn’t have said anything. I should have left like a thief in the night, but I couldn’t do it. I needed them to know I was going.

STEP 6: Now we’re going to create the template for your section. That way, all you have to do is duplicate into draft and save a ton of time.

So, the first thing I do when making a template is take that big, beautiful SQUARE image we made for the section, and put it at the top of the page so the first thing readers see is the image.

Make sure you have the right to do this from your cover designer, or have them do it for you.

STEP 7: Now, go to MORE in the toolbar and drop in a divider. This is going to denote your header section from the chapter text. I also like to format my headers in bold to separate them from the rest of the post.

This is my header for The Vessel.

The Vessel is a dystopian science fiction in style of Hunger Games, Divergent, or Maze Runner. You can find more of my work on my website.

A million years ago the world ended. Since then a group of five have kept the City running. Now, one of them has died.

Every generation, the five most powerful people in the City transfer their consciousnesses into nubile, teenage hosts. This allows them to continue their important work of keeping the city functioning and protected from the nuclear wasteland beyond its borders.

When one of the Five dies, though, the others decide that their bodies are too fragile and decide to find new hosts earlier than usual. This triggers a competition, where children from across the City travel to its center to compete for a chance to earn a place as a Vessel for one of the Five.

If chosen, their families will be taken care of for the rest of eternity. There is great prestige in being a Vessel, along with enormous wealth for the families of the chosen, which means every participant has their own motivations for competing.

Althea is one of those competitors. She is from a poor farming family on the outskirts of the City, and with the money she receives from her sacrifice, her family would never have to work again. She is willing to risk her life for them.

So, she decides to compete, traveling from her home in the outer rings through the inner rings and finally to the center where the competition is held.

Along the way, she discovers the City she once venerated is a more dangerous place than she ever thought possible. Every turn is fraught with peril, and the competition could be the death of her, even if she doesn't win.

Join Althea for a story of friendship, love, struggle, and perseverance in the face of enormous odds. Perfect for anybody who loved Divergent, The Hunger Games, or The Maze Runner.

Paid subscribers can access the entire archive of this series from the beginning, along with other series and every article I’ve ever written. If you aren’t a paid subscriber, you can access the archive for free with a 7-day trial.

Let’s break this down a bit more.

The first thing I want to do is tell or remind the reader what kind of story they are reading and then give them a way to find more. You might instead want to send them to your newsletters page, or somewhere else.

Next, I drop in the blurb for the book. I do this every time in case people get drawn away into some other task and need a reminder when they finally sit down again.

Finally, I pitch them on becoming a paid subscriber and give them a way to start from the beginning of the story just in case they found the wrong page.

***CRITICAL NOTE: Make sure all the links work properly before you move on. If the links don’t work, you’ll have the fix them individually, which could take hours. I know from experience. Test those links NOW!***

STEP 8: Add an easy way for them to join. I have studied a bunch of Substacks, and these three were what resonated with me.

I put it at the top of every page, including this one.

STEP 9: Now, let’s go to the footer.

The Vessel is a dystopian science fiction in style of Hunger Games, Divergent, or Maze Runner. You can find more of my work on my website.

Paid subscribers can access the entire archive of this series from the beginning, along with other series and every article I’ve ever written. If you aren’t a paid subscriber, you can access the archive for free with a 7-day trial.

You’ll see this is almost identical to the header, without the blurb since they already know the story. This duplication process is why you must check your links in the header FIRST before you move on to do anything else.

STEP 10: Now, go to the CONTINUE button in the top right corner of the page. Choose whether this will be for free or paid subscribers, and then choose UPLOAD NEW in the imagery. This is where you are going to upload that 16x9 image you made before. This is the one I made for The Vessel.

While the main image for a section is SQUARE, the imagery for each post inside a section is rectangular. It’s not quite 16x9 either, but that framing worked for me still because I don’t know the right size. Again, you can choose a different image for each chapter, but I wasn’t willing to make that kind of commitment to sourcing imagery.

Here is how it looks on the section page.

STEP 11 (optional): This is also where you can make changes to your social preview and search engine optimization text. Perhaps you want a different title for your SEO, your social preview, and your actual post. This is where you can make those changes.

The social preview is immediately editable. If you want to edit the SEO options, then you need to click the triangle pointing to the right in the SEO Options box, which will expand it.

This is also when you can change the POST URL to shorten it or make it more precise for your need.

STEP 11: Uncheck anything at the bottom that says “SEND TO…” so that it just says publish now, and then publish. This is just a shell we are using as a template, so we don’t want ANYONE to see it yet.

STEP 12: Hit publish. Now, you have a template. Let’s create a finished post now.

PART 3:

We’ll now add to this template and flush out a full post from it.

STEP 1: Go to the dashboard and right-click the three dots on the right side of your template. Then, click DUPLICATE TO DRAFTS.

Every time you need a new chapter, you can use this method. For the completed story, you should plan on creating the whole book before you start publishing it (I’ll show you why later). For ongoing stories, I recommend 10 posts before you start promoting them so that people can get hooked on your world.

STEP 2: Open your Word document and decide how long you want each “chapter” to be for each post. Maybe you’re willing to upload every chapter for every book, but I don’t have time for that.

I do think it matters that readers have a consistent post length throughout your book, but you can choose the length that works for you. My general rule for posts is five chapters or roughly 5,000 words for completed books. It’s good to have at least 10 chapters in each section, but it feels overwhelming to have 80. So, roughly five chapters ended up working out for me. If you don’t know how to check word count, you can learn how here.

NOTE: I only made this choice for completed stories. For ongoing I chose to go chapter by chapter.

STEP 3: Once you have copied the length that feels right to you, paste it between the header and footer.

STEP 4 (optional): Make sure the paragraph formatting is right. You might paste your document and see that everything is indented. You can make your choice, but I chose to format my fiction books like a Substack post, so if there was an indentation, I deleted it manually. I think it makes everything look crisp and uniform.

STEP 5 (optional): Strip out all chapters and scene breaks and replace them with something pretty. I went to Depositphotos and found pretty vector imagery that acted as scene breaks for each book.

Since I was combining multiple book chapters into one Substack CHAPTER, it didn’t make sense for it to say “chapter” a bunch of times, so I simply stripped all of that out and replaced it with a pretty image.

If this sounds like a lot of tedious work, you’re right. I should have probably had a PA do it, but I don’t mind tedious work. I find it calming in a way.

STEP 6: Once you have the formatting right, you need to add READ THE NEXT CHAPTER at the end of it and add a link to the next chapter.

How do you get the link? This is why it’s a good idea to duplicate the drafts for all chapters at once.

Head back to the dashboard and go into the NEXT CHAPTER DRAFT in the drafts. For instance, if you’re currently working on Chapter 1, then open Chapter 2.

Once you are inside the draft, click the settings at the bottom right. Look for the SECRET DRAFT LINK. Copy it and open your original chapter draft. You can also expand the SEO Options and set, then copy the POST URL.

Note: Anyone who you share this link with will be able to view this draft even if it is not published. Reset the link if you'd like them to no longer have access.

Now, go back to the previous chapter. Highlight the READ NEXT CHAPTER and add the link to the NEXT CHAPTER inside your current chapter.

In the FINAL CHAPTER of a completed work, I like to add FIND SOMETHING NEW TO READ instead of READ NEXT CHAPTER with a link to my NEWSLETTERS page.

If this sounds tedious, then you’re right! Now rinse and repeat. I’ll bet you’re happy to have a template now, right?

If you don’t want to do this tediousness, you can go to DASHBOARD>SETTINGS>WEBSITE>ENABLE PREVIOUS & NEXT POST LINKS

STEP 7: Once you have all your drafts compiled, it’s time for final checks. Open them all and look for:

1. Is your section correct?

2. Is your chapter right?

3. Is your subtitle good?

4. Does your link to the next chapter redirect properly?

5. Did you make any egregious mistakes in the heading or footer?

STEP 8: If you have a completed story, publish them in reverse order. So if you have 10 different posts, start at 10 and go backward to 1. Why? So it looks right on the section page. Otherwise, 10 will show up first, instead of 1.

If you have an ongoing one, then publish them in the normal order.

STEP 9: Go into your dashboard and click the three dots on CHAPTER 1 and click PIN ON [SECTION NAME].

STEP 10: Check your homepage to make sure everything is hidden (or at least looks right).

STEP 11: Duplicate your template to drafts so you can use it as the basis for your next section and delete the template so it doesn’t show up in your section.

STEP 12 (optional): Go into your first chapter and share it with your email list.

STEP 13 (optional): This might be a good time to unhide your NEWSLETTERS tab in the website section (if you ever turned it off).

STEP 14: Starting with chapter 1, click through the whole story and make sure all the links work one last time.

STEP 15 (optional): Submit your new book to The Library and start connecting with other people in your genre for some cross-promotion.

You’ve done it! Wooot! Let’s celebrate!

BONUS SECTION #1:

If you decide to play this game, then you’re probably looking for ways to maximize eyeballs on your work for all the hours you’ll spend on it. So, as promised, this is how I got 25,000+ paid subscribers to my Substack in under two weeks.

The secret? I comped my whole email list with a free 3-month trial.

I know that’s a sneaky trick to get you to read this far, but I also know there are people writers there with big email lists and have never even thought about bringing them over. So, this is how I did it and why.

I have 20,000 people on my fiction email list, and close to 5,000 on our Writer MBA list. Both those mailing lists had become hyper-focused on promotions and launches, without offering that much value-based content. I wanted to change that and make more posts like these.

Except I was making them…I was just making them here on Substack. On top of that, I was writing specifically for the exact kind of people who were already on our mailing lists. Our best stuff is behind a paywall in our membership, but the next best is made right here.

It made complete sense to bring all of them to Substack (I can’t overstress that these were people who had already opted-in to our lists). Once we made that decision, the question became how could I shower them with love and attention so they got excited to get more emails from me. If you haven’t guessed, I’m a tundra, so excitement is my superpower.

Here were some things I considered, and how I thought through them.

1. I already had people unsubscribe from my paid Substack subscription citing lack of content, so I had to be hyperfocused on delivering tons of value. Because of our extensive network of courses, I was able to offer $50+ in free courses to new members from the beginning, but that still wasn’t enough for some paid subscribers. So, I decided to upload almost my entire back catalog of solo non-fiction and fiction books to Substack so people could see the value immediately. My audience is made up of authors and other creators, fantasy readers, and comics fans. So, I catered our bonus content to excite each segment. I uploaded multiple fantasy novels, almost my entire comic library, and my collection of solo non-fiction books. Plus, I added some mystery and science fiction novels into the mix as well. I made sure to service all of them with something meaty that I thought would pique their interest.

2. Then, I decided to strategically increase my weekly output. My posts are long and complicated. They pull on many disciplines and have dozens of links. So, I couldn’t commit to another one of those, but I could do a weekly round-up post of my favorite Substacks (I read hundreds) and serialize one of my series without much extra work. It takes me about 30 minutes to make my weekly roundup post, and maybe 30 minutes to schedule out my serializations for the month, and that already tripled my output in less than an hour a week. Both my weekly wellness post and my serialized novels are in their own sections that people can unsubscribe to individually if they don’t want to see those posts.

3. Once I had those two things in place, I needed to give subscribers a reason to check it out by paywalled content, which is why we comped everyone already on my list with a three-month paid membership. I needed them to feel like this was a big perk, not a burden, so giving them something that had tangible value made sense. I find that people get excited about getting more content from you, and less so about getting more promotions from you. Substack is all value. Now, I have three months to show them that value. Can I do it? I don’t know, but I have done everything I can to make it worthwhile for them. Maybe 10% of people will get excited to continue their membership, or maybe 10 will, but I feel confident that I’ve delivered as much value as I can to demonstrate that it’s not a waste of time. Now, I just have to prove it.

I talked before about breaking my year up into quarters and testing one thing per quarter. It took a little longer to set this up than I would have liked, but this is my second quarter test. How long did it take? About two weeks of full-time work to get everything uploaded and formatted properly. That sounds like a lot of time, but I never have to upload them again and it will (hopefully) keep delivering value for years to come. Remember, I have nineteen sections to coordinate. Your time will vary.

I should note that in my experience, three months is the minimum amount of time it takes to find significant value in my work. We don’t even offer monthly pricing for our membership for that reason.

If you’re interested in doing this with your own Substack, here’s the breakdown of how to make this happen.

STEP 1: Before you do this, make sure to send an email to your list telling them what to expect and wait at least one week to import them into Substack. Even if you do this step perfectly a few subscribers will complain, but loading them into Substack without warning will be much worse. Plus, for those few who do complain, you can always direct them back to the email you sent setting expectations.

NOTE: Don’t forget to update your Substack welcome emails with any new information your new subscribers need to know about their special bonuses.

STEP 2: Pull down a CSV from your current email service provider. Scrub out anyone who has unsubscribed before uploading to Substack. Please make sure they opted-in to your list and follow CAN-SPAM, GDPR, or whatever governs your region. Also, only even consider this if you actively update your subscribers regularly, not if you’ve had a dead list for a year. 

I would also strongly consider only bringing people over who have opened an email from you in the last 3-6 months. Otherwise, your open rates will likely crater. I forgot to do this for the last 9,000 emails I moved over and my open rates were cut nearly in half after I added them.

STEP 3: Delete everything but the emails from the .csv file. It does need to be a .csv in order to upload properly.

STEP 4: Go to your dashboard and click on subscribers on the top menu.

STEP 5: Click add subscribers.

STEP 6: Drag your csv into ADD EMAILS BY UPLOADING A CSV FILE and drop.

STEP 7: A pop-up will appear.

Choose the length of time you want to give subscribers a trial. I think three months is a good amount of time for readers to get settled and extract significant value from a membership. Decide whether you want to give existing free subscribers a free trial (I did), and whether you want to send a welcome email (I did).

Then, quickly explain where these emails came from, especially if it’s a big list. Then, confirm these people opted in and import.

NOTE: It is critical that you have your sections set up properly. It’s probably worth double-checking to make sure your “AUTOMATICALLY ENROLL” and “COPY SUBSCRIBERS” options are right in the section settings. If it’s not then there’s no way to fix it later, even manually.

STEP 8 (optional): Once the trial period is over, go into your SUBSCRIBERS tab and FILTER out the people who haven’t opened anything from you and chose not to continue their subscription.

The filters I recommend are:

• Subscription type IS free

• Activity IS one unshaded star.

• Emails opened (last six months) IS zero.

• Email opens (last six months) IS zero.

• Post views (last six months) IS zero.

• Link clicks IS zero.

• Shares IS zero.

Here is how it looks when you key in all the filters.

Once you’re happy, click apply.

STEP 9 (optional): I consider these dead emails, or at least emails that have no interest in what I’m doing on Substack, so I want to make sure they aren’t getting anything they don’t want. So, it’s time to cull these people. 

Once you have filtered everything, click the box above the first subscriber to check everyone, and then click on SELECT ALL [XXX].

STEP 10 (optional): Click the THREE DOTS next to EMAIL, and then REMOVE

The reason I used these filters is because (I think) it shows people who don’t have a Substack account (hence the unshaded star in the activity), and who have never engaged with any content behind our paywall. If you send emails to people who don’t engage, service providers are more likely to send your emails to the promotions tab or label it as spam. 

I want to give them enough time to engage, though, which is why I comped everyone a three-month subscription instead of a one-week subscription. If somebody can’t even be bothered to engage with one post during that time, then they will never see value in being a free subscriber.

Let me be clear. I have no problem with free subscribers. Most people will be on your list for free for years without ever buying anything from you, and that’s great. I think it’s amazing anyone would ever want to hear from me at all, so that they let me occupy a little piece of their brain space with my emails is incredible.

I tried to filter out people who actively subscribed through Substack as well because they chose to engage with my publication. However, if the people you imported aren’t going to at least engage once during their free trial period, then you should probably just let them go.

Notice that I’m not kicking people off my main email list with my other ESP. They are just being booted from Substack. If they choose the reengage later with this publication, they are welcome to resubscribe then.

Also notice, I will only kick off free subscribers. If somebody has never engaged but wants to give me money, they can stick around forever.

NOTE: When somebody unsubscribes as a COMP subscriber, they will only be downgraded to FREE when their subscription runs out. Meanwhile, they will remain on your list as a COMP subscriber until then, and as a FREE subscriber afterward. Therefore, when a COMP subscriber unsubscribes, you need to go into your SUBSCRIBER dashboard and make sure they are actually deleted from your database. I received several emails about this and it took forever to figure out what was going on.

This is a lot of work, but I currently have over 25,000 potential paid subscribers, so I am highly motivated to make them over the moon happy for the next couple of months, even if I will likely boot 10,000 of them once the trial is over for not engaging with this publication at all.

BONUS SECTION #2: Can refreshing your publication really help you get new subscribers?

After doing this exercise, I followed the advice of several prominent Substack experts and redesigned my publication to maximize engagement and findability.

STEP 1: I went through and fixed my about page so there’s a very easy-to-follow first paragraph with the effect I’m trying to impart to the reader (agency in a world that too often feels like you have none).

I focused on my bio before and added my universal fantasy to the bottom. However, as several people pointed out and reminded me, people won’t read until the bottom if they aren’t hooked at the top. So, I made sure to add a big splashy image, and highlighted where I wanted to draw the eye.

STEP 2: I fixed the header of every post with updated language to make it more brand consistent. You can do this at DASHBOARD>SETTINGS>PUBLICATION DETAILS>Email banner, header, and footer settings>EDIT

Once there, you can decide how to introduce yourself in every email you send. Here’s mine:

Hi, I’m USA Today bestselling fantasy author, editor, and publisher Russell Nohelty. I sit at the intersection of craft and commerce, helping writers navigate the sticky bit between writing something that lights them up inside and building an audience of superfans that adore their work.

STEP 3: I went through my archives and changed the headlines to be more SEO-able.

OLD HEADLINE: Why whisks are a harbinger of doom for the future of humanity

NEW HEADLINE: How to use technology and productivity hacks to reclaim your time for things that matter

The old headlines are great for email headlines, but they are less great for discoverability. They were fun, but nobody is going to search for those search terms. You can find Substack’s guide to SEO right here.

I plan to send emails with the same punchy headlines moving forward and then optimizing them for SEO a few days after launch moving forward.

I should also add that it is possible to have a different headline in your article than in your SEO.

In order to make that change, you would need to edit a post and go to the settings button at the bottom right (or click update in the top right). From there scroll down to social preview and change how you want it to appear on social networks. The bold text will be the title and the regular text below is the description.

Once you have this set, open up the SEO options box below it. This is how it will appear in search results.

So, I guess technically it’s possible to have three different titles and descriptions. This is also how you change the post URL, FYI. 

STEP 4: I upgraded my sections from just pointing to my newsletter sections to nonfiction and fiction pages I designed based on the format I saw at The Link Library. I showed you how to do this above so I’m not going to rehash it here.

BONUS: A very nice human told me about a bunch of free directories where you can list your newsletter. Some of these links are dead now, but I signed up for those that still worked and were relevant.

The result: After implementing these changes, I saw an immediate 50% increase in subscribers from the previous week.

I talked to somebody the other day who was writing a travel memoir on Substack. She has dozens of mystery novels and asked if she should do something like this with her work. I absolutely think that’s a resounding yes, as long as you have a long-term strategy in place and are willing to “go all in” for a couple of months to really test it.

In her case, there will be some travel fans who find her work and love reading books, and some mystery readers who love to travel. In both cases, some of her fans will probably get excited to join this new adventure. Who knows, maybe it will work so well that she’ll start serializing a travel mystery novel on Substack.

I should note that my gross annualized revenue took a hit during this time because many of my paid subscribers were on the comped list, but I am hoping that it easily rebounds in a couple of months as trials end and people see the value of becoming a paid subscriber.

Also, it’s important to have more in the pipeline than you give away at launch so that people keep seeing the value. I have two more big series ready to serialize on Substack starting next year if this test works.

Finally, make sure you don’t overcommit to more than you are able to give without burning out. I know I can deliver killer value to everyone here with just one post a week, but now people can see exponentially more value without taking much more of my energy. It took a lot to set it up, but moving forward it takes very little maintenance.

It might not be as “clean” as having multiple publications, but sometimes you have to compromise to exist harmoniously in this world, and this is the balance I’ve struck. It works for me. I hope it can work for you, too.

If you got something out of this article, I hope you’ll consider subscribing to hear more from us. All our articles are free upon release and for a few weeks afterward. If you are a paid subscriber, I recommend reading How to find more readers for your books and get stacked with subs on Substack and How to go paid on Substack without selling your soul to give context to this article.

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