Writing for Substack

Can you make a living?

Photo by Steve Johnson on Unsplash

This is a post for people who are thinking of starting to write on this site. I am sorry if parts are only of interest to writers, but I thought it worth passing on what I have learned.

I don’t believe you can tell people how to write. Writing is too personal an endeavour for self-help guides to be any help at all.

But you can at least offer points for others to think about. I have been writing as a print journalist and author all my adult life. I was sceptical when people at Substack suggested writing here. I had no idea how to make the site work and, being English and middle class, I found the prospect of asking readers for money mortifying.

I began work a year ago, and have grown in confidence since. Here is what I tell people when they ask whether they should start a newsletter of their own.

As I said, it is not an instruction manual or a way to find riches, more questions you should ask yourself.

You write well when you have something to say

The best advice I received starting out was from a friend who said do not give people what they can read elsewhere. He pointed to Westminster journalists who had newsletters on Substack. They offered the standard political reporting you could read in that morning’s newspapers or watch on television. There was nothing wrong with it, but why would anyone want to read it again on Substack?

Among the writers I follow here are artists who are guaranteed a readership.  I and other admirers will read whatever Maragaret Attwood or Howard Jacobson write. I’d read their shopping lists if they ran them.

Those of us who are not renowned novelists or public intellectuals, however, must offer a unique selling point.  

In non-fiction, that mean specialist knowledge on finance, or economics, or the climate catastrophe, or fashion, or relationships, or literature, or politics, or, well, pick any subject you want.

If like the worst writers in the comment sections, all you can do is give your two pennies' worth on the issue of the day, I suspect you will not build much of an audience. In particular, you won’t build much of a paying audience.

How to build a paying audience

The reason why this is not a self-help post and I won’t adopt a boosterish can-do style is that it is very hard to make money from writing, and it would be wholly dishonest to sell this piece as some kind of get-rich-quick scheme or even a get-moderately-comfortable scheme.

A survey by the University of Glasgow found that professional authors in the UK had a median annual income of just £7,000 a year – down by almost half since the early 2000s.

In the US, the combined income (book income plus other writing-related income) of full-time, established authors was $23,329 (circa £18,500) on average – more than in the UK but again scarcely a fortune.

And these are professional writers. The statistics don’t count the people who try to get published and fail, and then self-publish.

On the one hand, technology has given them more opportunities. The web revolution has democratised communication: everyone can self-publish and be a novelist, journalist, poet or commentator. On the other, the Web killed the notion of a market place of ideas where talent will find an audience.

The market is too vast now. It potentially covers everyone on the planet with a Wi-Fi connection. Genuine talents are lost in the cacophony of shrieking voices.

In my area, I know people on Substack, who produce superior commentary to much of what appears in the mainstream press. They tell me hardly anyone is reading them. If you do not have an established name and social media profile, building an audience may take a long time, and may never happen at all.

Or as one said, “It seems to me that to make a success of Substack you have to be either a one-off, or fucking brilliant, or a known commodity.”

There is a temptation to cynically target a market. Perhaps I am being romantic, but I do not believe that works.

Over the years I have got to know successful novelists including one who became world famous. Not one of them set out with a plan to make money. They had stories they wanted to tell not financial targets they wanted to meet. None as far I can see sits down now and thinks about the best tricks to pull to maximise their earnings.  They would not produce original work if they did.  

When their books became bestsellers, cynics ripped off their ideas. But they never enjoyed comparable success. Their bad faith and mediocrity were there for all to see.

I don’t want to be too starry eyed. I have seen left-wing people pretend to be conservatives to get ahead on right-wing newspapers. I have seen old-fashioned liberals bite their tongues and go along with of woke authoritarianism to keep their jobs and their salaries.  And what else is the PR industry if not institutionalised cynicism?

For all that, I still think that playing to the gallery is not only immoral but foolish, and that if you run too fast after the money, you may fall flat on your face.

So along with talent and knowledge, you need integrity and a fair helping of luck. With this faintly forbidding list in mind let us move on to….

The practicalities

Before you think about asking people to pay for your writing, you must build a base of readers.  

When you start on Substack every piece you write should be free to read. You can give readers the option of making a donation because they admire your work. And if you are lucky kind people may do so.  But nothing should be behind a paywall until you have an audience.

Substack call it “building a community”. My best estimate is that you should aim for about 2000 subscribers before putting some of your articles behind a paywall.

Normally between five and 10 percent of people who sign up become paying subscribers. The best writers hit the top end of that range or higher, and a handful in the US earn a great deal of money.

A few have gone on to make fortunes. But rather than chase illusory riches, it is better to do what so many professional authors fail to do and just try to make a living.

Suppose you build up to 2000 subscribers. You start putting articles behind a paywall. About 200 sign up to pay £50 or £60-a year. You are looking at around £12,000, and with luck you can build on that quite quickly. (These are gross figures. Substack takes 10 per cent, and there are bank fees too. If you submit freelance accounts, the tax authorities should accept the charges as legitimate business expenses.)

I began by getting readers from X (the bin fire previously known as Twitter). But among Elon Musk’s many crimes – proto-fascism, narcissism and a bovine admiration for Putin – is a of hatred of Substack, and now you cannot post proper links to your pieces on his site.

As befits a plutocrat, his prohibitions particularly hurt young writers whose voices are worth hearing. For all its faults, Twitter used to be place where journalists, academics, politicians, and authors met.

People with no great profile elsewhere could make a name for themselves. Now the site is falling apart, they have nowhere to go.

Substack, meanwhile, is growing fast, and you will find that most readers come from within its network.

Once you have built a base and decided to charge, you are then faced with the difficult question: what writing will you put out for everyone to read and what will be behind a paywall.  Substack says your best pieces should always be free to read. Its managers think good work brings in new readers and expands the audience, and I take their point.

I don’t like putting up paywalls on political pieces about matters of public interest. I want to make them available to those who cannot afford to subscribe, particularly during a cost-of living crisis. Gratifyingly I have had readers take out subscriptions to fund my writing solely so I can afford to publish free pieces. A few have even taken out what Substack calls “founding member” subscriptions, which essentially means giving the author a pile of money because they like his/her writing.

I am always bowled over when anyone does this. Equally, I am always faintly hurt when the message comes through that someone has unsubscribed.  But I console myself with the thought that, if you keep working through the lean times, new subscribers will come.

People who have paid for a subscription are entitled to exclusive work. I suggest somewhere around half of your pieces should be behind a paywall. But as always there are no rules.

I keep the comments section as a privilege for paid subscribers, so the site does not have mob pile ons. That has worked out fine. I’ve only banned one abusive guy from commenting in a year, and found that, when the nastiness goes, genuinely informed debates flourish,

I have learned is that if you asking people to pay £60 or £70 a year, you must provide a lot of content. The US sites I admire include the Bulwark, run by anti-Trump Republicans, and the newsletters of the economists Brad DeLong and Noah Smith. They post at least four-times a week. If you want to make writing a paying career, you have to treat it as a fulltime job.

I have found the experience liberating. On the Observer and the other newspapers I worked for there was no political censorship, thankfully, but there was subject censorship.

 “You can’t write about X. We have it covered elsewhere.”

“You can’t write about Y we don’t think readers will understand.”  

On Substack you can cover what you want and let readers tell you directly whether they appreciate your work.

But you lose the most important service a professional publisher offers: editors. I am hopeless at editing my own work. Indeed, old publishing wisdom holds that no one can edit themselves. If you can’t afford to pay an editor to look over your pieces, click the “read aloud” button on your word processor and listen to your words. It is the best way I know of finding mistakes.

When I started on Substack, Ed West, the UK’s most interesting conservative writer sent me his noteson how to use the site, which he has now published. Ed put it very well when he concluded,

“It will seem like an incredible slog to start with. Like looking up a mountain. I remember reading someone tweet that they had 3,000 subscribers, and it just seemed impossibly distant a prospect, but eventually you’ll find yourself looking back at that far-down point in the distance.”

This remains true. If you prepared to accept that writing for a living is hard and uncertain, then I wish you all the luck you will need to break through along with the hope that in time you will.

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Now for the hard sell. A paying sub costs £1.15 ($1.45) a week. You get access to all posts, archives and podcasts, and as I said you can join the debate in comment. Most important – to me at any rate – you allow me to carry on working!

Recent pieces for paying subscribers include how a section respectable conservative of the early 2000s paved the way for the authoritarianism of our times.

On how the West will destroy itself if it abandons Ukraine

And then there are scores more articles, indeed well over 200 articles, waiting to be read.