How to make a living on Substack

A guide for desperate writers

Photo by Wilhelm Gunkel on Unsplash

Substack is the first technological innovation in the 21st century that has actually benefitted writers. We are so unused to any change being a change for the better, it is taking us a while to get used to it.

The history of the past 25 years has been a story of the unrelenting loss of opportunities for paid work.

In the early 2000s, the web took newspapers’ classified advertising, and began the destruction of news reporting. It turned out that all those investigative journalists – all those great claims that the fourth estate held the powerful to account – depended on the revenue generated by classified ads for lonely hearts and job vacancies.

Whether liberal democracy can survive the blow remains an open question.

Meanwhile YouTube and streamers took away advertising and audience share from TV news.

And now – oh joy! –we have AI. There was grim delight among journalists last week when the Chicago Sun-Times, whose owners had just announced they were cutting 20% of jobs, produced an AI-generated summer reading list.

It included recommendations for what sounded like an urgent new work by Isabel Allende: Tidewater Dreams — “Allende’s first climate fiction novel.”

There was a slight problem: the HAL-like intelligence that will apparently be running our future was recommending novels that had never been written.

Media managers had so hacked back the Chicago operation that there was no one left on the editorial floor to check the copy.

The jubilation was short lived. No one doubts that AI will be providing ever more content and not just on news sites.

Meanwhile fears that studios would use AI to produce scripts drove the last writers’ strike in Hollywood. Advertising copywriters can already see their work vanishing – Coca-Cola ran its first AI-generated Christmas ad last year. As for fiction, one can guess with a shudder that AI will soon be able to produce a novel about climate change in the style of Isabel Allende.

And then there is Substack, which is the antithesis of AI. It offers direct engagement between writers and readers – and its reach is exploding.

In the US, journalists are developing new newspapers on the site.

When Jeff Bezos showed that all the money in the world cannot buy courage and grovelled before Trump, its columnist Jennifer Rubin declared that she refused “to enable the Elon-Trump presidency”, and set up her own Substack site, the Contrarian. It now has hundreds of thousands of subscribers. After the Guardian gave away the Observer, there’s talk in the UK of building a progressive newspaper on Substack here as well.

Perhaps Substack will do for the written word what YouTube has done for video. But with a crucial difference.

To make a living from your work on YouTube you need a huge audience. Substack is different. In an interview with the political philosopher Yascha Mounk, Hamish McKenzie, one of Substack’s founnders, pointed out that, if a writer could find 1000 paying subscribers, they could make a decent income.

I am not saying that hitting targets like that is easy – but then it was never easy to make a career in publishing or journalism. But given talent, hard work and luck, it was possible in the past, and Substack may make it possible again.

Sensing the possibilities, people ask me how to start out on Substack every week.

I tell them that there are no rules – this is a platform that allows an infinite variety of responses. I can only offer suggestions based on my experience that go beyond the technical details about setting up a site.

Building an audience

Demanding money from the moment they start writing is the biggest mistake I see new recruits to Substack making. It’s a terrible strategy.