All my writing was Substack writing.

I did that because Substack gives us everything we need in one place, and I’m comfortable here. The unhealthy side of it is that I came here as a renewed effort to get my writing before an audience—after locking myself away for a few years, writing for an audience of me—and if audience means a paid audience, as a community, we really haven’t figured that one out yet. We have our paid subscribers—God bless them—but you know what I mean: it’s a long way to Substack providing a significant part of our salary.

How do we get there? I don’t have those answers. But I have a few kernels of truth to sustain us along our quest.

• Know why you’re here beyond the hope for money and more subscribers.

• Build relationships. Interact with people. Don’t make this little more than a marketing space.

• Let go of the negativity and the idea of hating all the things people do to earn a buck. We don’t have to be like them, but we need to be ready to learn from anyone.

• Look for ways to make Substack support your passion, not take you away from it.

• Don’t burn yourself out.

“Support your passion / Don’t burn yourself out.”

I threw that last one in there for me, and I have a confession. As I began work on a book based on my collection of essays and knew I would be writing less often about prose techniques and prose theory, I had a bit of a crisis. That series transformed how Substack saw me, and with it slowing down—who am I?

Call it my Substack midlife crisis. I brainstormed everything, and then scheduled myself to do everything as soon as I was back from vacation.

I’m not going to talk about all of that here. Wednesday’s edition of the Literary Salon Magazine will have more information about everything that’s going on, but there is one project that could help with that all-important goal of Substack supporting your passion.

It has me focused on mine, and there are a few of us gathering in the forum to talk about our projects. It’s been really healthy. I call it MmmFA, and it’s about us holding ourselves accountable to write that novel. You don’t have to be a paid subscriber. Just click on the forum link and follow the instructions.

The first thing that Substack needs to be is healthy. Protect your passions. Protect your real life and the chance to live it.

—Thaddeus Thomas

I made this a complete thought you could stop here if you want to, but this post continues after the break.

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This article is part of Literary Salon #3.

My Paid-Subscriber Philosophy

Basic:

1) Turn on paid subscriptions.

2) Don't offer anything extra.

Advanced:

3) All posts start free.

4) Posts that make good introductions to your work should remain free.

5) More niche, difficult posts-- posts more likely to scare off new-comers-- should fall under a paywall after an initial free run.

Expert:

6) Exclusive, paid content can begin when you have a paid reading audience sizable enough. If your posts have no readers, you'll get frustrated and stop writing.

7) The focus on exclusive posts is FOMO material. Your paid readers don't see any difference between paid and free material. They don't care. The writing needs to be good. That's what matters. That's all that matters. Exclusive material WILL matter to free subscribers, and that's a danger. Don't annoy your free readers. Do entice them with subjects they don't want to miss.

Bonus:

8) Offer a founding-level subscription. Those who get the most value from your work will want to support you on a higher level. They're not asking for additional value. They already get it and want to reward you.

Mistakes That Hold You Back

Help people find you:

Your Substack @, your newsletter address, and your Substack name: two of those need to be intuitively linked.

Help people find your chapters:

Serial posts need links to a table of contents. Don’t make people hunt.

Help your serial find readers:

If you’re new, a serial won’t help you find subscribers. Serials are tough. Build up an audience first. Begin with articles and short stories.

Help people pay you:

Enable in-app payments, and for the pricing options, select to have the subscriber pay the Apple / Google fee. We may hate that the companies charge as much as they do, but if that’s what a subscriber chooses, don’t stand in their way.

Speaking of which! Turn on your paid subscriptions! Let people pay if they want to.

I keep seeing the choice being presented as paywalls or “Buy Me a Coffee,” and it’s not true. You don’t have to have paywalls at all if you don’t want to. $30 is the minimum subscriber price you can set, but you can discount it from there if you want.

I’m not suggesting you follow my pricing strategy, but my base subscription can currently be had for 10 USD.

—Thaddeus Thomas

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Want to get Goal:10k in your mail box? Toggle the section on your account.

LiterarySalon.ThaddeusThomas.com/account

As much as I’ve said don’t cull your subscribers, and I’m still saying it—mostly—but as much as I’m saying it, I did it again. The reasons against it are sound. With privacy actions taken by Apple and others, in many cases we don’t know if people are opening their emails. We could be cutting readers.

The main reason people cull subscriber lists with other providers is that you pay per email address. That’s not true here. So why do it?

Well, another member of the community has had publishing privileges temporarily disabled due to concerns with the mailing list. We hope it proves to only be temporary. The last instance proved to be a false accusation and took nearly two weeks to resolve, without Substack providing any communication along the way.

This had me looking at dropped emails, but you can’t just cut people because of dropped emails either.

Substack has updated their tools, and it’s a vast improvement in our ability to research a subscriber’s activity. Click on any email, and you’ll be given an overview along with trend details, a list of their comments, and “Events” which are the opens, reads, and dumped emails that we could research previously.

That list tells you a great deal. The person with lots of dumps may have been sending you to spam for months, but then there’s another subscription event… Hold on. I know it doesn’t make sense, but this isn’t hypothetical. A bunch of dumps. A subscription. And then they’ve been receiving emails ever since, even opening them on occasion.

If it looks like they’re sending everything to spam instead of canceling, that’s worth being culled. The percentage of our emails that end up in spam is important. That can impact our deliverability, and it may play a roll in our mailing lists being investigated by Substack.

Side note: I think it’s worth saying that the individual currently in Substack jail had recently culled a large percentage of his subscribers—for other reasons.

The Island of Misfit Sections

In the process of investigating email dumps, I came across something disturbing, and I’ll have to find a way to address this in upcoming posts. Subscribers would be receiving emails, but everything in a given series was being dumped. When I first noticed it, it was the Champion series, and my thought was I needed to review the series to see if I was using too many links or tags.

Then I noticed the pattern repeated with another subscriber, only this time the serial was being dumped and not the essays. That tells me that they’re sending to spam the series they don’t want and keeping the Inbox for the ones they do. Which is really aggravating. I’ve set up an entire system alerting subscribers how you can:

Manage Your Subscription

Every Section has a toggle. Toggle on the ones you want to receive and toggle off the ones you don't.

This is the Goal:10k series.

To choose which series come to your inbox, go to:
https://literarysalon.thaddeusthomas.com/account

To subscribe to the series, click on the link above and toggle Goal: 10k.

To catch up on any installments you miss you can visit the Goal:10k page: https://literarysalon.thaddeusthomas.com/s/goal-10k

Book Funnel’s Role

One concern with these inquiries into our mailing lists are our imports from Book Funnel. It really hit home when one of our own was suspended, and he was giving up hope of ever coming back. It seems logical to assume that even though our uploads are being inspected now, they place us under increased scrutiny.

This concern came at a precarious time for me. In the coming months, I’ll have to decide if I want to upgrade my account to allow for more spots. It’s a 3k investment, and I can’t afford to spend that money, only to have Substack undermine the model.

In reality, though, fiction writers use Book Funnel. It’s how we grow our mailing lists, and before Substack, it was pretty much the only way. Even with all the advancements Substack has made, for those who use Book Funnel, the majority of our subscribers come to us that way. As long as they cater to the fiction community, this is the reality.

The review process has sped up, and I’d be interested to hear if anyone is having any issue with uploads being denied. It would be good news that the denials seem to have stopped, except that we’re seeing more people put in jail.

I for one plan to continue to use Book Funnel, and I’m leaning toward expanding my services.

Grab a Free Book and Support our Promotional Efforts

Books Spring Eternal

Generic Answers Worthy of Note

I looked up the standard advice for staying out of the Spam folder, and this is what the Internet tells us:

• Use a Trusted Email Address: Make sure your sender email is recognized by your subscribers. Encourage them to add your email to their contacts.

• Avoid Spam Triggers: Stay away from excessive links, misleading subject lines, and words commonly flagged by spam filters (like “free” or “limited-time offer”).

• Engage Your Audience: If your emails aren’t being opened, email providers might start marking them as unimportant. Keep your content valuable and interactive.

• Encourage Subscribers to Mark Emails as ‘Not Spam’: If your emails do land in spam, ask your subscribers to manually mark them as safe.

• Optimize Your Subject Lines: Make them clear, relevant, and enticing—without sounding like clickbait.

Need an editor?

Allow me to recommend Emil Ottoman.

My Solution

I showed you my solution early on, and perhaps by doing this, I have fewer people discarding unwanted solutions into the spam folder.

As many sections as there are, it could be worse, though. For my various essay series, I broke them into two major categories—Re:Read and Re:Write—depending on whether the intended audience is reader or writers. My guess is I’m the only one who cares if an essay is in the Prose Techniques series or the Fiction Theory series, but a reader might not want either one.

For my serials, however, I have not simplified things. “Serials” could be a tag instead of a Section, I suppose. Each individual serial is also its own thing, so you can shut off one without losing every serial to come, ever.

But by showing my audience how to access an maintain their account, maybe I’m reducing the amount of unwanted mail.

We want readers to look forward to our mailings, and that’s the other thing that struck home while researching my subscribers. There are some who visit every or nearly every post I write. Most subscribers rarely visit.

After a moment’s reflection, I had to admit that’s only natural. Some of my favorite writers here, I don’t read everything they post. They’re important to me because I really loved a few short stories, and I’ll be back. I just don’t have the time to always be there.

I’m not a very good true fan.

Goal:10k

The true fan is our ideal. The idea comes from Kevin Kelly, the founding executive editor of Wired magazine. He introduced this concept in a 2008 essay titled 1,000 True Fans where he argued that the true fan is someone willing to pay $100 a year to buy anything we create. That’s 2008 money, which is close to $150 today.

Most of our readers will only interact with a sampling of our work. Others will devour everything and be hungry for more.

Goal:10k isn’t about a quick and easy way to riches and success. If I knew the way, I’d be there. Instead, it’s realistic approaches to move ahead at a realistic pace.

Researching your subscribers reading habits will reveal when you have potential true fans. Like most milestones, I believe a true fan is something to prepare for and then get blindsided by when they arrive. The goal is less about obtaining the true fan than being able to keep them when they arrive and having in place the mechanisms to sell when they’re ready to buy.

• Turn on paid subscribers, even if you’re at a stage where you wouldn’t buy from yourself.

• Don’t worry about paid-only materials too soon. But if you need my thoughts on paid-only materials, I share my current philosophy in The Mystery of Readers on Substack. It will change, everything changes, but for my size and needs, it makes sense now.

• Have a founding level, even if it’s just to give people room to be generous.

• When people begin to pay for subscriptions: let them. I couldn’t do that in the beginning. I refunded everyone and gave them free subscriptions.

• When the paid subscribers come and you’re comfortable that what you have to offer warrants a subscription, ask for paid subscribers. Speak up, and people will respond.

• Sell your books.

Visit the new Literary Salon Bookstore

The Book Salon

Once again, I feel like a hypocrite with that last one because I’ve pulled away access to my direct-sales book store, and I’ve been slow to build another one. I have however, finally started a Literary Salon book store where I offer books from all my paid Literary Salon and Bookmotion members. If you’re not on it, holler at me. It’s brand new. You haven’t missed anything.

It’s not direct sales. Instead, it’s a Book Funnel sales page, linked to a bookstore where your book is offered.

A Climactic Ending

The latest prisoner of Substack jail has been released and has passed along important information.

First of all, he’d grown very big, very quickly—like 30k subscribers big—but his open rate had plummeted to 10%. His ability to publish was temporarily paused yesterday, but it was reinstated today on certain conditions.

First, his issue was resolved in a day while the first case took nearly two weeks. Why? I have no evidence for this, but if I had to guess, I’d say it’s because our first prisoner had no paying subscribers, while prisoner number two has added ten just this week. They were motivated to resolve the situation before paying subscribers were lost.

Second, the condition Substack insisted on was that they would perform a pruning of his free subscriber list, but if he agreed to this pruning, his publishing abilities would be turned back on. He agreed, and Substack sent his free subscribers an email, giving them he option to choose to stay subscribed. Should they fail to do so, their emails will be pruned from his list.

He’s happy with this result.

How much is Literary Salon worth to you?

Substack subscriptions tend to be pricey, I know, but right now my paid subscription is discounted to just $10 a year. Better still, you keep that price for as long as you keep your subscription.

If Literary Salon is worth $10 to you, may I recommend you buy a subscription?

Specials

And if Literary Salon is worth more than $10 to you? The Founding-level Subscription allows you to pay any amount you want.

For $50 a more, you get a story critique.

Subscribe now!

See? I’ve learned to ask.

—Thaddeus Thomas

If you ‘re interested, you’ll want to opt-in:

Manage Your Subscription

Every Section has a toggle. Toggle on the ones you want to receive and toggle off the ones you don't.

This is the Goal: 10k series.

To choose which series come to your inbox, go to:
https://literarysalon.thaddeusthomas.com/account

To subscribe to the series, click on the link above and toggle Goal: 10k.

To catch up on any installments you miss you can visit the Goal:10k page: https://literarysalon.thaddeusthomas.com/s/goal-10k

This post isn’t restricted to those who I name, but I wanted to reach out to my most active readers and those I thought would be receptive of the effort I’m recommending.

Invited guests:

Goal: 10k

There’s been rumbles lately about publishers viewing 10k subscribers as the threshold of interest. I don’t know if that has any merit, and even if it does, it might apply more to nonfiction than fiction. Our goals might not even include trad publishing. All that being said, it’s a sizable audience to whom we can market our books and a sphere of influence we can use to market ourselves to publishers or whoever needs convincing.

It can’t just be numbers, though. We need readers, not metrics, but 10k subscribers should mean that 2k (at least) are opening any given email.

They say the secret is 1000 true fans—1000 people who will want anything you produce. 10k subscribers is a good step in that direction. I don’t believe that 10% of our subscribers are true fans. My current, unscientific guess is 0.66%, but if that were somehow accurate, 10k subscribers should net us about 66 true fans. It’s a start.

One Year on Substack

April 17th marks my one year anniversary on Substack. I celebrated by hitting #8 on Rising in Fiction on April 5th!

Efforts to Boost Fiction

Present efforts of note, off the top of my head:

• I’m going to mess up the attribution, I’m sure, but I think , , and are spearheading the effort to get authors on the Rising in Fiction board.

• Book Funnel continues to be a strong way to bring in outside readers. When I have spots available, I offer discounted spots that I manage. If interested, you can subscribe for free to news.bookmotion.pro. Don’t buy a paid subscription without talking to me first. Spots are not always available.

• I run the Champion series where authors lift up other authors here on Substack.

• hosts the rap fiction battles, a competition where writers face off to write a piece of flash fiction about topics chosen by the audience.

• There are Top in Fiction and the various themed days.

For those I’ve invited, none of this is new information. Neither is the probable reality that there are no short cuts, as much as I wish it were otherwise.

There are, however…

Unfair Advantages:

• Nonfiction is an easier sell than fiction.

• Meta essays on the art of writing do well with authors.

• Meta essays on Substack growth do well and raise just as much ire, usually for good reason.

• It pays to be famous.

• Coming to Substack with credentials can help, but just as often it produces people who think they’re owed a better result than they got. They might even be right.

• Being a really fine writer helps.

• Publishing frequently, but not too frequently, helps too.

Which of those help…

Sell Fiction?

Fame: Being a known figure around author Substack helps. Anything that gets you talked about in a positive light helps. It usually takes repeated exposure before someone will take a chance on you.

Skill and talent: The quality of the work has to come first.

Other than that, anything that brings people to your publication increases the exposure of your name and your work and increases the chance they’ll give it a try.

The efforts that interests me right now are the autopsies by (and the Emil is My Editor effort, spearheaded, I believe by , and—similar in spirit—the effort puts into his comments following the stories he’s read.

These efforts bring the draw of several unfair advantages and focuses them fully on the fiction. ARC ‘s efforts are maybe more fully on the reading experience, and that focus is what we need more of.

I tried this in post form with:

and…

And I’ve been wanting to write on Andy Futuro and M.P. Fitzgerald’s work.

The views on these pieces were 684 and 624 respectively, which is in line with other articles I posted at the time. What I think is important about these efforts is that they’re nonfiction meta articles about reading. The weakness in my efforts is that I focus too much on exploring the stories as a writer. We need to provoke our readers to read.

Reviewstack:

My proposal is we post more reviews and critiques of stories on Substack, written with the reader in mind. We look for those stories that move us and write about them.

I suggest we consider using a common title word, something brief to allow room for the actual title—something like: Reviewstack.

If an author thinks it would be more beneficial to publish the review on Literary Salon, I’m open to that, but that’s not the push here. Publish reviews on your own Substacks. Use that social proof to guide readers into your favorite stories.

Neither the Champion series nor this is a one-and-done deal. Write about your favorite stories, no matter how many people have already done the same for the same story. There’s strength in numbers.

Write a killer story and others should do the same for you.

Keep in mind: this is different from the Champion series as that one lifts up an author and their body of work. This focuses on one story and not its author, beyond what would be normal in a review.

—EDIT: There’s been some confusion. This email is opt-in only because it’s growth related. The reviews shouldn’t be opt-in only. Your readers should appreciate getting a review of a good story to read.

Poop butterflies!

Thaddeus Thomas

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Are there readers on Substack?

Yes, but it’s too early in the lifecycle of your newsletter for them to have found you yet.

Thank you and good night.

What?— You were expecting something more? Okay, fine. Let’s get to it.

Where are the Substack readers? The case is afoot.

But let’s take care of some business first—in 3parts:

1. Easily Manage Your Subscription

Every Section has a toggles. Toggle on the ones you want to receive and toggle off the ones you don't.

go to: https://literarysalon.thaddeusthomas.com/account

That’s https://literarysalon.thaddeusthomas.com/account

2. A New Private Newsletter for Bookmotion Members

I’ve opened a private newsletter to help simplify communication. Bookmotion members, please visit news.bookmotion.pro and subscribe.

3. Not yet subscribed to Literary Salon?

Some of my essays are for paid subscribers only.

Specials

Now let’s talk about writing better right now

The early days on Substack are hard. Initial growth is slow. Everywhere you look you see other writers, and it can be discouraging. We can’t resolve all those issues in one reading, but we can talk about being found by readers. We can put that one fear at ease.

Before we do that, however, this is important. If right now, your audience is only other writers, embrace that fact. Help one another. Encourage one another. Read each other’s stories and comment and share. If you need help finding a group that will do that with you, check out the chat at Literary Salon. Yes, it’s open to paid subscribers only due to spam issues, but a paid subscription is currently $10 a year.

We share posts in the chat, and we read and interact with the posts.

However you do it, show off your work. Build a reputation. It doesn’t matter if those initial readers are all writers, too.

You do this long enough, you’ll know—any reader is a miracle.

But, having said that, you still want to know about those “pure” readers, don’t you?

The Mystery of Readers on Substack

By the way, if this isn’t your first post with me, you might have noticed a new trend. My posts have taken on a pattern. I have an introduction to the topic, but that’s interrupted by “business in 4 easy steps.” I then say let’s get into the topic, and I begin by approaching it from one direction which leads to the title of the piece, like only now it’s just begun. I continue with the topic from the core angle of the piece, but at some point I come to a natural break in the essay. That’s when there’s an interlude suggesting you check out my essay table of contents, although I don’t call it that. The essay continues, usually with its final point, and when it concludes, I then offer to introduce you to other authors on Substack.

Does it work? I honestly don’t know yet. Here are the clicks from a recent essay that’s had 636 views in the last three days. 10% clicked like, and only 6% clicked a link—but some of these obviously clicked more than one.

11 visited my book promotion. 4 visited the newsletter for my Bookmotion clients. 2 checked out other authors on Substack. 1 managed their account, and 2 visited my essay table of contents.

Popular knowledge tells us to limit calls to action because people get confused. Have I overcome that or would responses be higher if I didn’t present so many options? Compared to an earlier essay, I get more engagement per view but convert fewer readers to subscribers.

It’s something I’ll need to take into consideration. Maybe instead of the table of contents CYA:

I’ll show you the advanced prose techniques you need to take your writing to the next level:

Maybe what I need is to isolate the subscribe CYA.

Not yet subscribed to Literary Salon?

Some of my essays are for paid subscribers only, but you can also subscribe for free:

Subscribe now

I don’t know, though. That seems a bit much with the two buttons.

We’re Supposed to Be Talking About Readers

I know, but that point is—what do you do with them once you’ve got them? When you’re small is a great time to experiment.

Substack suggests you turn on the option for paid subscribers and forget about it. Make everything free in your early months, and I agree. One day, you’ll write something that impacts people in ways you didn’t expect and they’ll take out a paid subscription. Just do it.

Of course, once that happens you’ll want to worry about giving them something that’s just for them. Don’t do it. They didn’t ask for it. Just keep doing your thing. There’s little that will kill your spirits like trying to keep up a series for three people.

Eventually, you’ll experiment with content for paying subscribers. The advice I often heard was make your best stuff free, and I didn’t understand that for a while. I’ll tell you what I’m doing right now, and seems logical but who knows?

I quit trying to make one series free and another paid. Also, I don’t simply put my entire archive under a pay wall. If essays are popular with the general public, I want them to have access. It seems that’s what will bring more subscribers. You see the logic, right?

So my most popular essays are free.

As a matter of fact, if someone is new here and doesn’t know me yet, there are essays and stories I don’t want them to read. Some of those work better with fans and friends, people who have gotten to know me and like me. They’re more willing to take on the difficult pieces without running for high ground. Those pieces should be for paid subscribers.

Logical, no? The crowd-pleasers are free. The more challenging pieces are behind a paywall.

I’m Losing Patience. What About Readers?

But I answered that already: Are there readers on Substack?

Yes, but it’s too early in the lifecycle of your newsletter for them to have found you yet.

Most of the people on Notes have a Substack publication of their own. Not everyone, but most anyone who you’ll see or who will see you. Don’t worry about it. Put it out of your mind. Work with what you’ve got and grow. As you grow, Substack will recommend you to more people. Some weeks that growth will be strong and full of people without publications. Do those people read? Yes, and I’ll tell you how to check in just a moment.

First, I’ve got another point to make about growth.

Write something. You need a book to give away. Offer it on Bookfunnel. When I have an opening, I manage Bookfunnel accounts at a discount, but you can DIY for $100 a year. You participate in promotions and give away a book in exchange for a subscription. It’s the best way for a fiction author to grow his newsletter. Even when Substack starts working for you, some weeks will be better with one tool and not the other, and suddenly that will switch. It’s great when you don’t have to rely on one source.

Anyway, when you see me talking about Bookmotion, that’s what I’m talking about.

By the way, if you want more readers for your serial, I have an effort coming up that won’t cost you anything. Make sure you’re subscribed so you can get involved when it starts.

Substack and Bookfunnel sends you readers, and yes you can check on what each one is doing but that’s no fun. It’s also impossible when you grow to any kind of size at all.

You don’t care what everyone is doing. You want to focus on your most faithful readers.

Go to your Subscribers page. Click on “Columns,” and you’ll be given all sorts of fun options. I like “Days active (last 30 days),” “Posts seen (last 30 days)”, but what works for you may be different.

I’ve cut it off at my email so that I’m not revealing things about anyone else, but it shows how many of the last 30 days a subscriber has been active posts a subscriber has seen in the last thirty days. If you click on the column heading, it will sort your list accordingly from highest to lowest. These are people you want to take care of.

[It took me far too long to realize this, but days active just means how often they’re active on Substack—not whether they’re engaging with your material.]

Sometimes, the people who interact the most have no publication. If they didn’t come from Substack, they might not even have an account. These are your “pure” readers.

Case closed.

Share

Some final thoughts.

You can remove columns as well. You’ll see I’ve taken out the one that tells me if someone is paid or free and how much money they’ve spent. I don’t want to see that here.

Also, remember that this system has limitations. Apple and other email providers block out ability to know if a reader has opened an email.

That’s all—except for a reminder to subscribe and check out other authors on Substack.

—Thaddeus Thomas

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Looking for more fiction writers on Substack?