On Becoming a Substack Writer
First impressions of using Substack and thoughts about the future as a content creator
Writing on Medium has been a life-changing experience for me. I have been writing about every possible topic on various blogs for over 20 years, but never thought I had what it took to earn a living as a writer. My Medium adventure began mostly as an experiment. Then a couple of stories hit it big:
The M1 story was a huge hit or me and gave me plenty of new followers, income, and perspective on what it means to write. So, I am extremely grateful for the opportunities the Medium platform has given me, but now I have starts exploring the world outside Medium. You may ask why?
- My New Substack Newsletter: Erik Explores
All is not well in the Kingdom of Medium. I have not been thrilled by the various redesigns done over the last year. It also seems you cannot make as much revenue from getting new people to read your articles unless they become Medium subscribers. I guess that is fair enough. I don’t blame Medium for that.
Rather, what has caught my attention is how negative the Medium perception is on a number of News sites such as Hacker News. That is definitely a concern to me, since I built a lot of my initial following from readers finding me through Hacker News. Recently with the change of leadership at Medium I got to read a longer discussion at Hacker News about how people viewed that changed. The general opinion looked quite negative towards Medium and very positive towards Substack, which I until recently had only occasionally looked at.
What many complained about was the Medium paywall, which I frankly think is an unfair complaint. Perhaps I misunderstand the complaint, but it sounds like people want all content free. How is that fair? Writers have to put in a lot of time researching, writing and even illustrating. I often create graphics for my posts to illustrate different concepts.
I can only speculate that what people dislike is that Medium throws up a paywall right in your face if you have exceeded their free article limit. Places like Substack allows you to place the Paywall further down the article. It would actually be interesting to hear the view of readers on this one. In particular, I am curious about:
- How do you feel about the Medium paywall, especially compared to the approach Substack takes for getting paid subscribers?
- Organization of material. Medium mixes articles from many different authors while Substack creates separate spaces dedicated to each author. What do you see as pros and cons of either approach?
Let me talk a bit about what I like and dislike about Substack relative to Medium from first impressions before getting into what opportunities I see for Substack which, I think, can benefit you as a reader.
What I like and Dislike about Substack
I am still familiarizing myself with the world of Substack, but I have made several observations about things I like about the platform relative to Medium:
- I love that I can make a personal space focused on my content. Medium has traditionally made it hard to inform people about your other work.
- More flexibility in how I interact with readers. Substack lets me place subscribe buttons, like and share wherever I want and in different styles. More choices in offers to potential readers.
- Podcasts, videos, and discussions give more ways for me to interact with readers.
- Much better interface for me as an author in terms of managing my content. Medium has become a mess.
- Decide exactly where to place the paywall.
The last part is a big one to me. I often write long articles, and with flexibility in where I place the paywall I can let non-paying readers read a fair amount before hitting a paywall. It gives me a nicer balance between shutting out and annoying new readers and being able to actually earn a living as a writer.
I want to be able to share an article and offer enough material to read that both paying and non-paying readers have something sensible to discuss and give feedback on.
The ability to add podcasts and videos is also a very fascinating twist, which gives me more ways of interacting with readers. I have long wanted to do more with videos and podcasts, but not quite decided on any technology platform. Getting everything in one place looks like a good idea.
Not everything is perfect with Substack. With Medium people join a large site with many authors they can read. The question is if people will be willing to subscribe to only my writing and content. I suspect Substack will do less to pull in readers than Medium does. Although to be honest, getting featured by Medium has in my experience not made a big difference.
Another point which I really would love to hear people’s views is the concept of Newsletters sent to your email. I personally really dislike Newsletters because I have a strong aversion towards anything that fills up my email inbox. Fighting again, email overload seems like a constant struggled and I don’t want to add to it.
Although here I accept that I am probably different from many people. Substack could not have the success it has if people did not like Newsletters.
New Directions for Content Creation on Substack
One big problem with my Medium writing is that I write about every conceivable thing, from why sugar can be used as rocket fuel to computers running on air and economic history of Norway. Not all of your readers are interested in the same kind of content, and the great variety of such a large number of articles make it hard to find what you might be interested in.
That is something I want to change with Substack. My plan is to divide my writing up into 2–3 different Newsletters with a slightly more narrow focus on each:
- Erik Explores — Technology and programming focused Newsletter, where I will continue to write about Julia, Go, Swift and Zig programming. In addition I will cover microprocessors such as RISC-V, Arm, Apple’s M1 and so on.
- Nordic Perspective — At the thought stage but my idea is to have my stories related to history, economics and society here. A lot of my writing on economic and social issues aims to take a Norwegian/Nordic perspective as I don’t see that angle much on these kinds of issues. It can be on anything from urban planning to the role of government in the economy.
- Technology & Science — Not sure what to call this, but I want a place to write about things like space exploration, rocket engines, colonizing Mars, Cybertruck, green tech, nuclear power and popularizing things in science such as how does a gyroscope work.
Hope I can hear some of your thoughts.
— Erik Engheim
