Growing on Substack, pt. 2: Viewsmaxxing

How to have other writers like and share your stuff

In the first part of this series, 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:

Growing on Substack, pt. 1: Substaxonomy

In this 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.

Previously, we concluded that a D tier writer can grow his/her audience by engaging with C and A tier writers, per the 5-tier hierarchy of Substack writers described in the first part. I will continue to refer to this hierarchy in this part - if you haven’t read the first part yet, please read it before proceeding with this one.

How to engage

We can use the pickup artist terms of direct and indirect approaches¹. The third option is what I call engagement windows - various unique engagement opportunities sometimes offered by high-tier writers.

Direct approach

The direct approach is basically DMing another writer and sending them your stuff.

This approach works better C tier writers - higher tier writers have a lot more going on and are more likely to reject your DM request, ignore your DMs or have the DM option restricted for paid subscribers, founding members or disabled altogether.

Like in pickup artistry, direct approach will work if you’re confident and attractive enough. The difference is that in pickup artistry, you can theoretically direct approach infinite females, but the number of C+ tier Substack writers you can DM is very limited. You have to be sure it will work the first time.

Like in the pickup scenario, you need to both be attractive, and look for indicators of interest on the other side. These correspond to having good writing, and being confident that the particular writer will be interested in your specific piece of writing.

DMing other more established writers and sending them your stuff might seem something like Machiavellic way of using other people to get ahead. But it doesn’t have to be. You just need to be absolutely sure that if the other writer decides to read your piece, they will enjoy it or benefit from it otherwise.

If you want to come out modest, you can ask for feedback or an opinion, but it’s also OK to write something along the lines of “Hey, I thought you might like this”.

Note that your initial DM becomes a DM request. The recipient can either accept or reject it. Substack doesn’t allow sending links in your DM requests, so you can either start with small talk or send something like “Hey, I have something you might like <more details here>, please accept my DM request so I can send it you”.

Like in seduction, it’s far more likely to be ghosted than directly rejected, so prepare for that. If this happens, don’t be needy or pushy, just move on.

Also, with most if not all of my accepted DM requests, the recipient also followed me (the Substack UI highlights the default “Accept and follow” option when replying to a DM request). If the direct approach doesn’t work, getting followed by the higher tier writer may improve your odds of the indirect approach later on.

Indirect approach

With this approach, you focus on creating a mutual parasocial relationship between you and other writers.

As you follow and read posts from writers you have subscribed to, a typical, one-directional parasocial relationship forms between the two of you. You can make it mutual by engaging with their writing - liking, commenting, sharing and restacking their posts and notes. The Substack algorithm is very good at picking up at these mutual parasocial relationships. As a result, the other writer might start seeing more of your content in their notes feed.

Again, this is not a Machiavellic thing either. It’s just one way of the Substack algorithm rewarding you for creating traffic and engagement on the platform.

Everyone has a fixed amount of time they can spend on for Substacking, on either reading, research/writing or engaging with other content. For some, liking and commenting other content may seem like a waste of time. But for those willing to grow their audience, it’s not - the Substack algorithm makes sure of that.

Some A+ tier writers who manage to get a lot of interesting responses under their posts may address them in a new comment response type post. This way you can have your comment (possibly along with a link your profile and/or Substack) and the author’s response sent over to his entire distribution list.

With engagement, timing is critical². Reading and commenting a new post right after it’s published makes it more likely for your comment to be liked and displayed at or near the top of the comment section (important for posts from A+ tier writers which typically get lots of comments). Also, it seems like higher tier writers care to respond to comments for like a day or so from publishing their post. Later, they either no longer care or just move their attention elsewhere.

(Pro tip: If the comment section is paywalled, restack with a note. This allows you to somehow comment on the post, and possibly get the attention of the author who might engage with your note.)

Another great way method of indirect engagement is using the Mentions Substack feature when quoting or referring to other Substack posts. When you publish your post that mentions someone, a notification is sent to the mentionee (?), possibly making them eager to check out your post. Some high tier writers don’t want such notifications and disable the mention option for their account.

In a best case scenario, a high tier writer might like your engagement so much that they may offer a paid subscription for free, to provide you with more opportunities to engage with their posts (this has actually happened to me just recently).

Engagement windows

A tier writers are typically hard to reach using either direct or indirect approach. However, some of them create unique opportunities that might allow you to have your writing read and shared by them.

The first type are “Share your writing” / “Subscriber links roundup” events, where subscribers can send in their writing and have it shared with other subscribers. The second are writing contests - here, only the best posts from the bigger pool that is sent over are recognized and shared.

In both cases, your big chance is the opportunity to have the A tier writer read and respond to your post if they like them - even in case of “Share your writing” events, they need to make sure the stuff people send in is not completely crazy before they share the link with their entire subscribers list.

Here, timing is also critical, as the engagement windows may occur on a yearly or monthly basis. Sometimes they are also restricted for paid subscribers only - you may consider getting at least a monthly subscription just to be able to use an engagement window.

My (bumpy) road to 500 subscribers

I started writing my Polish Substack almost 2 years ago. I shared my writing on my social media (Facebook and LinkedIn), but it didn’t get much of a momentum. The only people who adopted the resurgent blog/newsletter culture in Poland were the tech bros, and apparently they were not that interested into my sort of content.

Almost a year ago, I commented on Scott Alexander’s post about polyamory on Astral Codex Ten (A/S tier). The post received a lot of interesting comments and Scott decided to create a separate comment response post. He included a response to my comment, along with links to my profile and my Polish Substack.

My initial reaction was: “WTF I AM IN ACX!!!!”, followed by: “Damn! If I had a proper Substack with posts written in English, tens/hundreds³ of thousands of ACX subscribers would’ve now had the link in their inbox!”

When

Rob Henderson

(A tier) announced the next edition of his annual Share Your Writing engagement window, I quickly set up this Substack and posted English translations of two posts from my Polish Substack: my Trans Humanist intro post and the Dangerous Women essay, which I then submitted to Rob’s event.

Dangerous Women includes a lot of my original thought, but it’s also somewhat of a homage to some of Rob’s great writing about evolutionary psychology and female intrasexual competition. Hence, I thought that it will well resonate well with Rob’s other readers. But secretly, I also hoped that Rob will read, like and share my essay. Either way, I hoped that whatever happens will cause my Substack to somehow take off.

Eventually, I saw my post included in Rob’s Subscriber Links Roundup post - this generated around 800 views, 16 subscribers and a few likes and comments. And that was it.

At least initially, Rob didn’t react to my essay. However much later, he somehow rediscovered it, liked it and shared it in his weekly Links and Recommendations post - this generated another 2000 views and 40 more subscribers.

When the Wicked movie hit theaters in November, I restacked Dangerous Women again with a note about how Wicked is another example of a fairy tale narrative distorted in a way I described in my essay. Somehow, it attracted the attention of

Walt Bismarck

(C tier), who not only liked it, but also cross-posted it on Walt Right, restacked with a note recommending it as “One of the best essays (he) read on Substack” and mentioned it in his next post. This generated another ~1.5k views (most of Walt’s subscribers) and 40 more subscribers.

(Takeway: an ultra strong recommendation from a C tier writer can be as powerful as a regular recommendation from an A tier writer)

Notably, I’ve engaged with some of Walt’s content in that period, so most likely the Substack algorithm probably noticed and acted upon our mutual parasocial relationship.

Oddly enough, some time before, I DMed Walt and sent him the links to some of my posts, but apparently he either didn’t read or didn’t like them, so I moved on. Apparently, I was on the right track when I thought he would be interested in some of my content, but I failed to choose the right post that would resonate well with him.

(Takeway: if a direct approach fails, the indirect approach might still work later.)

My most successful posts so far was the Confessions of a Pickup Artist series. Initially, I sent the first part to

the red quest

, who liked it and retweeted it, which generated around 300 views and a few subscribers. But after some time, my engagement with some C tier writers led some of them to read and like my posts. Then, one day I saw my inbox blowing up with notifications about likes and new subscribers. I quickly realized what happened:

Richard Hanania

(A tier) liked and restacked my post. Eventually, my pickup artist posts also found their way into Rob Henderson’s Links and recommendations posts as well. The endorsement from Richard and Rob resulted in thousands of views and hundreds of new subscribers.

But the most popular piece of Substack content last year wasn’t any of my Trans Humanist newsletter posts - it was a note about the viral “Why Men Marry Mid Girls” post that got 100+ likes, 14k views and, according to the Substack dashboard, brought in 62 new subscribers:

(Takeaway: A viral note is an alternate way of getting new subscribers, which works regardless of whether it’s liked or shared by high tier accounts.)

I don’t have any tips on how to write a viral note, it sort of happens, happened to me two or three times so far. What helps me is using the “Also share to Notes” checkbox when writing comments (not available in mobile app, only in the browser) while making sure my comment still makes sense as a note for someone who hasn’t read the original post.

As a data analyst, I couldn’t help myself and plotted the major engagement events over a chart of my subscriber growth throughout last year:

It looks like most of the growth of my newsletter was indeed related to the pivotal events of engagement from A tier writers. But there was also a lot of organic growth, possibly related to engagement of C & B tier writers, some of which probably caught the attention of the A tier ones. This way, I eventually got to experience the network effects described in

Henrik Karlsson

’s essay I mentioned in the first part.

Kryptogal (Kate, if you like)

,

the red quest

,

Tove K

,

Walt Bismarck

,

James Bloodworth

,

David Pinsof

,

Justin Ross

,

ⳡⲝⲟⲇⲩⳟⲕⲁⲛ

and others - thank you for your engagement!

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I am really not a Machiavellic narcissist

Even though I put several disclaimers in both parts of this series, I feel like some of you might still think that what I did was some sort of Machiavellic scheme for tricking higher tier writers into allowing me to freeride on their hard-earned list of followers, or a cold strategy for vicious narcissistic viewsmaxxing or subscribermaxxing.

I assure you, it’s was not.

I write about things I find interesting. Then, I try to find other people who would be interested in reading and sharing that sort of content. This is not much different from a startup entrepreneur who creates something and then tries to find customers that would be interested in his product or service and investors willing to support his venture.

Initially, I engaged with other writers for just for fun. But later, I realized that this is somehow related with them reading and engaging with my content afterwards. It only occurred to me recently that this can be described and deployed as a strategy for promotion and subscriber growth.

Much of my writing is based or built upon what I read on Substack before. And I believe this is natural, especially for a D tier writer like me who (perhaps foolishly) doesn’t have time to read much beyond Substack and legacy social media - a writer interested in a topic both reads and writes about it. Hence, there is usually a lot of overlap between the writer’s work and the works of his/her favorite writers.

I don’t believe in any kind of divine “creative spark” as the driving force behind creative writing. Instead, I think that humans are a lot like Large Language Models like ChatGPT: they read and train their brains on a bunch of content and when prompted, generate text based on what they’ve learned so far.

I also think it’s a lot like genetics and evolution: the offspring inherits the genes of their ancestors, but every now and then, random mutations and copy-paste errors occur. Most of the time they make the end result worse, but very rarely, a new useful or beneficial trait emerges in this process. And this is how new phenotypes and species evolve.

As it’s natural for my writing to be similar to what I read before, I assume that at least some writers I read could be interested in what I write. And it’s OK for you to assume the same.

My entire advice can be summed up to: Be an active member of the Substack community and use the Substack features - the platform and algorithm will reward you for this handsomely.

The only arguably Machiavellic part is probably the idea that engaging with C and A tier writers is best for your Substack growth. Of course, you are free to engage with anyone on Substack you like, it’s just that engaging with C and A tier writers will get you more bang for your buck in terms of growth. Feel free to use that knowledge however your like.

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Bonus: Writing strategy

I promised to not give any writing advice. But since I have some space left here at the bottom, let me share a few thoughts about general writing strategies.

Substack writers are like music artists (or artists in general). Only the very best artists like The Beatles or Michael Jackson were able to score hits on every album, or have multiple hits from the same album. Most artists you know have probably scored a couple hits in their career, but if you dig into their discography, you will find that they have produced dozens of singles and albums, most of them known only by a small group of their die hard fans. Some become and remain one-hit wonders forever - laughable for some, but still infinitely better than being a zero-hit no-wonder loser.

With both music and Substack, you basically throw things at the wall and see what sticks.

Hence, you can improve your odds of scoring a hit by increasing quality and quantity. Obviously, there is a tradeoff between the two.

Personally, I prioritize quality over quantity. With this strategy, it’s important to make sure you maximize quantity without compromising quality. This boils down to getting things done and publishing them when they’re good enough. Try to complete a draft as quick as possible, edit and update until it’s just good enough, then publish. Don’t get stuck at analysis paralysis or imposter syndrome driven never-ending edits. I’ve seen a couple seasoned writers mention that they have dozens of unfinished drafts. Don’t do that - complete, publish, then move on to the next one.

You can increase your writing output by reclaiming some of the time lost on video games, Netflix and legacy social media brainrot. You can also employ job stacking strategies, but instead of stacking 2-3 jobs for a 2-3x income, you can find one job which only takes a couple of hours a day, then spend the rest of time reading, researching and writing.

(Pro tip: you can then tell your spouse that you’ve been working all day.)

I’ve only ever unsubscribed from Substacks if they triggered my internal spam detector: “Hmm, I’m frequently getting emails from this address, and either the title is not interesting and I never click and read it, or when I click it, most of the time the content is not interesting - Unsubscribe!”.

One great thing about the low-output writing strategy is that it allows flying below the radar of spam detection: you can get away with a string of things that didn’t stick to the wall if you don’t throw them that often.

A high output strategy makes sense for those already in a position to launch paid subscriptions. It’s hard to expect someone to pay a monthly fee without at least a couple of paid and free articles per month. Still, I believe the output rate shouldn’t be increased by compromising quality, but by reprioritizing and allocating more time.

Notably, there is a hack that allows high quality AND quantity: you can sacrifice novelty. Substack allows to simply resend old posts, but some writers also choose to write new, high quality posts about topics they’ve already covered before in a similar way. I believe this makes sense in a scenario with already stable subscriber growth rate (new subscribers won’t simply go and read all of your archives, so it makes sense to repost or rehash content for them). Obviously, rehashing content for new subscribers needs to be balanced against the risk of triggering the spam detector of older subscribers.

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That’s all, folks. If you have any other tips that might be helpful to someone, feel free to share in the comments.

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1. Alternatively, we could also different seduction terms of cold and warm approach. However, as far as I understand it, a warm approach is the normie “seduction” method of “warming up” a female friend by somehow “building attraction” before making the move such as asking her out. This is not what we’re gonna do here.

2. Be careful about how that could possibly disrupt your work or personal life. My wife really hates when I JUST HAVE TO read and comment on that new post that just came up, but according to her, I should be doing something else instead (which is, obviously, most of the time).

3. I am not sure how many subscribers does Scott/ACX have, it seems like Scott has blocked displaying this information.