Growing on Substack, pt. 1: Substaxonomy
Don't be the modern Kafka
A couple of times, I saw Substack notes along the lines of “There are Substacks with 2 subscribers with essays better than those produced by writers with tens of thousands of subscribers”. I’ve seen and read a couple of underrated Substack writers myself, and I think it’s a shame that such writers don’t or can’t promote their writing.
If a writer honestly believes that their writing is really good, I think it’s socially and morally good to for him/her promote and distribute it around. For every piece of writing, there is a finite number of readers scattered around the world who might enjoy it or benefit from reading it otherwise. Arguably, it’s somewhat of a duty for the writer to put in some effort in finding and reaching them - in an utilitarian way, this increases the amount of good in the world.
Franz Kafka, one of the great 20th century writers, suffered from severe imposter syndrome and burned an estimated 90% of his works. He instructed his friend Max Brod to destroy what remained from his writing after his death. Thankfully, he didn’t comply, and because of that, the world can enjoy Kafka’s finest novels to this day.
A modern equivalent of Kafka would be being one of the great 21th century writers, who publishes only on his Substack with 2 subscribers.
In less than a year, I managed to gather almost 500 subscribers with no international social media presence, by writing and promoting my work here on Substack only.
I realize that this is probably not the world record in Substack subscriber growth rate. Yet, I think that along the way I got some insights about what works and what doesn’t. If, by any chance, you’re a great writer with 2 subscribers, this might be useful for you.
The draft of this post grew bigger and bigger, so I decided to split it in two parts:
In this first part, I described the network effects and the taxonomy of Substack writers that will help us understand who may or may not help an aspiring writer with finding an audience.
In the second part, I will provide some tips on how to engage with other writers and and overview of how this approach helped me so far.
The Prerequisite
The prerequisite for all of this is that you need to be sure that you’re a good writer. I am not going to offer any writing advice here - there is already a plenty of it out there.
However, I can offer two tips on how to estimate the objective quality of your writing.
The first one is to leverage two common cognitive biases:
The subjectivity bias - Positive: “If I like something, it must be objectively good.“
The imposter syndrome - Negative: “I obviously suck, but I can’t let them find out.“
You can estimate the objective quality of your writing using an average of positively and negatively biased judgements like the two above.
The second one is imagining that what you’ve just written is a post by one of the other writers that both you and many other people like. “Could <a really good writer you like> possibly written this essay him/herself?” If the answer is yes, maybe it’s actually good.
Once you assure that you have some good writing, it’s time to share it around.
The Network Effects
A great description of the social mechanics of the internet can be found in this post by
:
Karlsson described a process in which his blog posts spread around the network: first, as the post gets traction online, it gets shared by progressively larger influencer accounts. Then, its cascades down the hierarchy from each of the big accounts. As the post reaches a wide audience, some of it includes people who are really passionate about the topic, who are able to connect with the writer directly to discuss and share their thoughts. Eventually, the writer is able to find his digital tribe.
As I started my own Substack, I imagined that this sort of thing will eventually happen to me as well. But then I realized that as much as it may work for seasoned writers like Karlsson, it’s hard to pull it off if you’re just starting.
Yet, it’s still possible to leverage this system as a novice writer. What you can do is to become the “fascinating people that route interesting stuff to their inbox” - some of the “interesting stuff” that you route towards established writers like Karlsson might be your Substack posts.
All you have to do is engage with the right kind of writers who could possibly be interested in reading and sharing your writing in a proper way. For that, you need to understand the different types of Substack writers out there.
The Substaxonomy
The writers I most often see and read seem to be clustered in 5 tiers, representing typical writer personas and corresponding typical ranges of subscriber count. Obviously there are many exceptions, but still, I think that what I put below is accurate most of the time:
D tier - low-tier hobbyists
Typical number of subscribers: 0 - 1,000
D tier accounts are typically amateur writers who don’t have many subscribers due to one (or more) of reasons below:
They have just started.
Their writing is not very good.
They didn’t care about growing their subscriber base and promoting their writing
They did care about growing their subscriber base and promoting their writing, but didn’t know how to do it effectively.
C tier - high-tier hobbyists
Typical number of subscribers: 2,000 - 3,000
This tier mostly consists of successful amateur writers, who managed to gather a larger following by writing as a hobby, alongside their full-time job (unrelated to their writing) and social life.
Most of the popular hot take & politically incorrect anonymous accounts belong in this tier.
B tier - low-tier professionals
Typical number of subscribers: 5,000 - 10,000
Most writers in this range I see are professionals whose full-time job (writer, researcher, scholar etc.) somehow overlaps with their Substack writing. They see their newsletter as a fun extra activity and an opportunity to reach audiences different from their academic publishing or legacy media outlet writing. They can also use it as a proving ground for testing new hypotheses and theories before elaborating on them and publishing as part of their main job.
A tier - high-tier professionals
Typical number of subscribers: 20,000 - 80,000
This tier mostly consists of authors in the zone IV of the arc of the public intellectual: “substackademics”, or academic entrepreneurs that managed to quit their day job and work independently, building and maintaining their personal brand. They may occasionally publish books or pieces in legacy media outlets, but their Substack newsletter is their primary focus and, sometimes, source of income.
S tier - superstars
Typical number of subscribers: 100,000+
In the top tier you will find celebrities, both the literal and the academic/public intellectual kind. They usually have massive social media following resulting from their lifelong creative achievements, having published bestselling books or writing for top legacy media outlets. This category also includes long time bloggers who have slowly built their following for years, even before Substack’s existence (some of them moved their blogs/newsletters along with their subscriber lists to Substack after being offered a lucrative deal by the Substack leadership). Some accounts in this range include writing from many authors and thus have become independent media outlets on their own.
The above hierarchy somewhat corresponds to the hierarchy of Substack orange checks awarded for paid subscriber count milestones:
No check - none or less than 100 paid subscribers
Hollow orange check -”Hundreds of paid subscribers” - >100 paid subscribers
Full orange check -”Thousands of paid subscribers” - >1000 paid subscribers
The minimum Substack monthly subscription fee is $5, and Substack’s commission is 10%. Therefore, the hollow orange check writers have a non-negligible monthly income of >$450 from Substack. The full orange check monthly income is >$4,500, which allows at least some of such writers to quit their day job and rely on Substack as their primary source of income.
There is a visible shift in quality and depth of analysis between D-C and B-S tiers.
D-C tier content usually includes the stories and analysis of personal experiences, commentary on other Substack posts, hot takes on the Current Thing, rebuttals of a stupid social media posts or trends from Twitter/Tiktok/Instagram (i.e. another analysis of the Wifejak meme) and various types of armchair scholarship.
Everyone has a fixed amount of time they can spend alone, staring at screens or pages with letters - the more you write, the less you read, and vice versa. And for amateur writers with a full time jobs unrelated to their writing subject, there is just not enough time for an in-depth analysis of every single topic they would like to present their hot take on.
(There is an interesting exception for the above rule - Stay at Home Moms and other NEETs who can spend more time on reading, researching and writing. Despite not being professionals, they can sometimes reach the quality and depth of analysis of the B+ tier writers).
B tier writers can leverage the findings from their research done as part of their full time job, while A-S tier are full time writers who can fully commit to the reading and research needed for their writing. B-S tier writers can also leverage their real social connections to others working in their field. Hence, B-S tier writing includes deeper analyses, insider knowledge, proofs of real social connections with relevant figures in the field and references to actual books and research papers.
Relatedly, most anonymous writers seem to be within the two lowest tiers. Writing anonymously makes it more comfortable to publish extra hot takes and generally politically incorrect content, such as the manosphere stuff.
On the other hand, writing under your own name is simply putting your money where your mouth is. This alone provides extra credibility. I agree with
that free speech should be a masculine virtue:Sometimes I’ve heard academics or businessmen say they like my work but can’t admit it. At the same time, I see people who seem similarly situated but are interacting with my tweets openly and under their own names. The difference here is one of personal character, and norms should encourage more rather than less personal bravery.
For B+ tier writers, writing under their own name creates a mutual credibility link between their name and their writing: their real name links their Substack to their non-Substack writing and other career achievements which provides credibility, and their Substack becomes another channel they use to promote their non-Substack activity such as writing books and publishing in legacy media outlets.
There seems to be some kind of a glass ceiling that prevents anonymous writers from growing beyond C tier. If you’re serious about becoming a big Substack writer but you’re writing from an anonymous account, you may want to reconsider that decision before you manage to grow to C tier and the sunk cost fallacy kicks in.
Who can help
When identifying people who might help you promote your writing, you need to consider following dimensions:
Reach - This corresponds to the number of followers, which is correlated to number of subscribers and the tier in the hierarchy above.
Engagement - The measure of how much writers engage with other writers’ posts by liking, commenting, restacking, cross-posting or featuring in their links roundup post. From my experience, the relationship between subscriber number / tier and engagement is an unusual M-shaped bimodal function:
D tier is very varied: a silent majority of low/no engagement lurkers, and a smaller group of highly engaged Substack nerds.
C tier is typically highly engaged: they already see that their Substack is getting somewhere, possibly providing them some non-negligible income (hollow orange check), so they spend a lot of time on Substack, both writing and engaging with others.
B tier writers are typically less engaged and mostly focused on their main research day job. Their Substack is just a fun activity on the side - a fire-and-forget kind of thing - and they neither have the will, need or time to promote it and engage with other content.
A tier writers are mid-to-highly engaged - their Substack is their main focus and often a source of income (full orange check), so they prioritize both writing and engagement to drive up their reach, personal brand and both free & paid subscriber count.
S tier has low or no engagement. As celebrities and high status public intellectuals, they believe that they’re like the big banks during a financial crisis: too big to fail. And they might actually be right - it seems like it’s very hard for an established writer to fail (I believe the only way is to get cancelled for writing something very stupid or politically incorrect). Hence, they have neither time or need to engage with other content, busy with their own writing work and, probably, their celebrity/high status social life.
Availability - While engagement is about the general likelihood of a writer to engage with other writer’s content, availability is about whether the writer is likely to specifically engage with lower tier content (read: your content). It’s also related to the possibility of directly messaging the writer.
Availability is inversely proportional to the tier hierarchy.
So, in order to promote your writing, you have to engage with writers who have lots of followers & subscribers, actively engage with content from other Substack writers and are available for you to contact them or at least get their attention. It won’t be no good to rely on small accounts, lurkers who do anything with the post they enjoyed reading, and the biggest fish who might barely notice your online presence.
Hence, the most engaged tiers - C and A tier writers - are the ones most likely to help you promote your writing.
C tier accounts are more available, but their reach and impact is limited, while A tier accounts can be less available, so it might be tricky to contact them or get their attention. They are also more selective, which means that it might be tougher to pass their higher bar.
In the second part, I will provide some tips on how to engage with other writers and and overview of how this approach helped me so far.
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Thanks for this, it's a good time of year for it. I feel like the Venn diagram between "what you write about" and "what you do for work" overlaps more and more as you go up your tier list. I feel this dissonance now as my career (love it and it pays the bills) has nothing to do with what I want to write about. Staying tuned for part 2!
This is super helpful:
"The second one is imagining that what you’ve just written is a post by one of the other writers that both you and many other people like. “Could <a really good writer you like> possibly written this essay him/herself?” If the answer is yes, maybe it’s actually good."