Why we share what we write
5 types of publication - Do you worry about being heard?
Intro (Skippable)
A conversation with another creator who is really focused on growing her publication and teaching people to optimize for growth (getting more eyes on your work) inspired this post, because I understand the other point of view, but I also feel very frustrated with all the growth-focused content that has come over to substack.
It really made me think about why we write for the public, and so this is my investigation to why we share what we write and how this sharing changes our writing.
This post is not for people who just want to use Substack for their sales funnel.
Why we do, what we do
There are 5 ways that people approach Substack depending on what they want from it, because all of what we do, comes from what we want.
Disclaimer: You could want to build up a community around your business too, and there is some cross links between the goals & the publication type.
These are the primary long-term goals of being on Substack and how it changes the publication that you create, in terms of what you want from it in the short run, and the general mood of this.
I focus more on the general mood as a reader of these publications instead of differentiating by what exactly they do and who owns them, because this is more useful.
Income Focused
1. Business advertisement focused publications (Spammy Annoying, sometimes Professional)
Example: Company Blogs (Notion Blog)
These can be done pretty well where they share behind the scenes of design choices that they make for their product to users who are interested in following along.
I would also put any publications that are very focused on spamming you with sales content, like what courses they have available, and if most of their posts are behind paywalls. If you cannot really evaluate the worth of a publication without subscribing to it, I would just put it here. Usually their paid subscription with lots of digital products that bring you into a community, and keep you there to get more products. It can be worth it, if you have that specific need that they are solving well.
I do have some issues with these publications because I get too much spam in every part of my life (PS: Anyone else has stopped using pinterest due to ad overload?), and so I created an email filter just to sort out any particularly spammy emails.
These publications also tend to focus a lot on growth and there are so many, whose main topic is talking about how they grow on Substack. As a new writer, I also share my insights on this, because behind-the-scenes content is something I love to read but when you look at an entire publication and that's the only thing they talk about, it is posting in an over-saturated niche.
Additionally as a reader, I get the mood that they are just looking at the numbers (grow your audience so that they have a bigger sales funnel), and wanting to promote their digital products, in every email they sent over. So unsubscribed.
2. Writer focused publications (Journalism)
Example: Magazine-Style Publications focused on a specific target audience The Dopamine Dispatch and Wonder Tools
I really love these publications. Arguably I am a bit biased (my publication is a mix of being focused on a certain topic, note-taking, and partly of a way to document my life + creator behind the scenes. So mine is very much not as niche-focused as these.) but I feel like this is the kind of writing that substack is about: supporting independent writers to have their own publication as if they were a magazine, and removing the traditional gate-keeping of these editorial magazines and publishing houses.
The reality of writing is that we need a way to make a sustainable income. So these writers often have paid posts that are paywalled because their writing is the product they are selling as the main focus, and they might sell some digital products on the site to help pad income. The products are usually related to the topic that they're writing about, such as having a physical book or course.
I feel like the key to doing this well, is to have a huge library of free posts that people can look at in order to understand if they want to subscribe to you, and because the community also brings more value than just the money that they can give you. This is how engagement spreads your publication across the world.
The idea of providing a lot of value before you ever ask for money.
Fascinating Facets of Non-Monetary Goals
I really appreciate Substack as a reader because there are these other writers who don't really focus as much on earning money, even if they do sometimes want to be 'Writer focused publications', some of us write to motivate ourselves to think, and live better.
When you write to optimize for greater discussion, or to record your investigations into a niche topic, it feels distinctly different from when you write to promote your personal brand. Some may disagree and say you can do both 😅 and sure, you can, but look at the notes that these authors post. When too niche, it sounds like a bot is going wild with the scheduler.
Community - Discussion
Think of this as the forums of the old, sort of like Socrates and his disciples, and book clubs. The entire point of writing is usually to record something that happened in the community, to discuss with the community, and update those that missed the discussion. So the published articles aren't really the focus of the community. It is usually something to supplement the activities of the group. Worksheets, Round-ups.
Examples: Roam Book Club 4 - YouTube, Obsidian Book Club - YouTube You may have noticed that these examples aren't specifically on Substack, and that's because my personal experience with book clubs have been video calls and doing activities peripheral to any sort of publication. We're doing activities along with the rest of the group, (it is a bit like doing a course, but it is free). Usually we have some book we are discussing but the topic often goes off into tangents and we are just discussing.
There is a list of Substack Book Groups that I would like to join but have not managed to arrange yet. I have a few specific non-fiction books / courses I am reading and re-reading (Tiny Experiments, Oversubscribed, Editing by Design and Systems For Writing + Dr. K's Healthy Gamer GG course + Dan Koe's Writer's Bootcamp course + Harvard's Justice lectures) and I would like to do more activities based on these, so I am in search for a small book club of people with this highly specific interest, part discussion part accountability.
Other publications that I would put in this list would be 'writing to a very specific community, with timed updates' such as the Obsidian Roundup, which served as a rallying point for the community to make sense of the many plugins + themes + content updates for some time.
I think Substack serves as a good place to do these updates, but Reddit is better for discussions (there is much Reddit hatred over the new API pricing issues, but there is still a ton of people chatting there and it's interface is definitely far better designed for discussions). The problem with Reddit is that it forgets everything very quickly (post scrolling gone) and Substack has more permanence, but arguably due to Substack's lack of an algorithm, you are the one bumping up the old posts with restacks while Reddit has the vote system to help bring top posts up.
My main problem with Reddit is that it isn't really a stable community that one person can arrange for because Reddit has a lot of issues with moderators and the entire subreddit going down because the last moderator decided to do something spiteful. But unmoderated subreddits devolve to toxic spam. Over-moderated subs are dead zones because no one can post without getting it taken down due to highly specific rule traps.
Another option that people use is Discord, but this one is also not designed for proper discussions, and a lot of information gets lost (even if you pin, it is hard to filter through. But the Starboard is a decent way to keep good info). You can see on the Obsidian members group that people are constantly being reminded of where they should be taking their discussions (specific channels) and sometimes you come across the default reply people, who probably have a snippet to tell you of the proper procedure to test for bugs. This is already a super helpful excellent discord community.
I still struggle with finding good community social media sites where you can organize content and still have good discussion. I feel like substack can be part of this community organization. It is a bit like a notion dashboard, but with more personal flavour.
Life Documentation
The focus here is writing as a way to document your life and share your insights with others, to hopefully generate discussion (Some of the best recommendations for books / videos to watch, I have received, come from talking with other people with similar interests at a similar stage in life).
My personal experience with VLOG substack is that I find it very motivating. I really only discovered social media as a place to post when I got into writing online (yes, I am very introverted, and private. So I never used instagram / twitter till I wanted to become a Youtuber in 2022).
Introverted Social Media Newbie Realization: When I'm documenting my life, I tend to do more interesting things. It is a positive feedback loop, and I can look back to see what I was doing at different points in my life through my writing. Especially if I include visuals <3.
An example of this is my recent first tiny experiment to take A Zettel A Day (For a Week). One of those days, I posted a record breaking number of substack notes, with a picture for each post, because I went to the library and wanted to log that day down. It is the equivalent of going on vacation for me, and taking a lot of pictures and properly labeling them in the scrapbook. I really enjoy looking back at these records of how I lived on certain days.
So I would say that life documentation writing is more for you to remember your own life and You are treating your publication as a digital journal. The content is personal reflections, life updates, and sometimes a way to motivate yourself to properly reflect on your life and in the process you learn more about yourself because you are trying to document clearly.
Doing a VLOG (sharing your life in public) is also distinctly different from just writing a diary or interstitial journaling because of how you keep the audience in mind.
Effects:
You will polish up your writing, to the point that your writing can stand on it's own. (This is why the Zettelkasten philosophy often espouses: "Write for others" since this makes you clarify, and add on extra context that you have in your head now, but you won't remember this context in the future, the same way another would not understand your point without this context.)
You will reflect a lot more because the process of looking through what has happened and trying to make sense of it is how you write about things. This is dedicating time to look through your life and find inspiration from them to write. It is also because you will have better documentation of what has happened so you can reflect a lot more accurately. (I treat my weekly newsletter as a weekly reflection time, and I find that as I write, it really does change how I feel about what has happened.)
You will have a much better documented log of your life that you can direct people to. Visuals and clearly written out accounts, are a first step. The second step is writing about your realizations, insights, personal philosophy and principles. I feel like it is good to think out my arguments when I have quiet to really look through Other sources, and I'm not emotionally invested in the argument, so I can think more clearly. Then I can send The article that I've written to the person that I was talking to.
Problems: You may filter out your true struggles and only present a highlights reel, because we often don't want to share things that are too personal. I do consider this when I speak about things that are specific to being a woman, like having a menstrual cycle that affects my emotions very strongly. But my stance on this is that you shouldn't filter out. Social media is already too polished and it doesn't matter if other people find it squick. Those immature toxic people can leave.
Expertise
Expertise publications are very much a 'Writer focused publication' but even more niche and focused. I think of them as a way to investigate a topic very thoroughly in many aspects (See Essay Architecture) and get feedback on this. The main goal here is not to discuss with the community, but to Write about a subject that you are investigating, or you already are an expert on, and there's a more dominating one-directional flow of thoughts from the author to the reader.
Mood = crowd-funded / personal passion project research.
This can still lead to selling subscriptions, digital products but the main focus of the publication is deep research into this topic itself. Here, you have succeeded if you have a place you can refer people to when this topic comes up in conversation.
I have research posts like this, which I direct friends to (E.g. the best time to publish when I'm chatting with my creator friends who are also into writing online, and how to write a hook for advice that beginners always need).
Another type of post that can be in this category are opinion posts, for example, I think about how introverts can make friends without burning out from extrovert style friendship and the importance of owning your notes. You write about what you feel strongly on, and you are likely to keep holding that same opinion because you have pested this opinion in your own thinking, and against other people, to the point that you are certain, this is the stance you want to hold.
Expertise publications can be rambly, and go into examples you have never heard of, because they often reflect how the writer thinks. They can also be incredibly well researched, data-driven pieces that sometimes include the author's own experiments to verify research.
My favourite expertise publications are:
Bread Science (Novita Listyani) focuses on details of how to make bread, and goes through the rigorous science around it, to make this human readable. This is an Science Paper + DIY experiment translated for beginner to make optimal bread.
Construction Physics is very focused on buildings & infrastructure. It is incredibly niche, but I love the data visualizations (graphs), the depth of answer to the question posed and the thorough research behind each post. E.g. What Makes Housing So Expensive? - It is less understandable & not as implementable compared to the bread science videos. I feel like this is so niche that it is more 'expertise' post than pure 'Writer focused publications' that usually have more general appeal. This reads like their research log.
Essay Architecture focuses on developing a patterns framework to break down writing. It's like taking a dive into someone else's rambly odd thoughts that goes deep into good classic essay writing. It is the most niche out of all of these expertise publications, and it focuses more on this one specific concept, interpreted through the writer's personal flavour of thinking.
People do make expertise posts without being a full expertise publication (My best example of my own Writing Isn't Magic, It's Design: A Creator's Guide to the 27 Patterns Framework which tries to make sense of Essay architecture's 27 point framework that has yet to be fully published.)
What differentiates expertise posts from regular posts is the sheer amount of research and time spent on it. You are going very deep and you are writing in a way that is meant to be evergreen. This is going to be a permanent article on your publication, and it's meant to showcase your writing style, the value that you can provide, and a resource that you can direct people to in the future.
I feel like these publications should be a lot more curated than other publications because the key here is not to just casually share progress updates, but instead you want to build up this publication in the way that you would create a book. You would curate, you would cut out things that don't fit with the message, and you would update existing articles so that they fit within this book that you're trying to create.
It can also be a research log, but it would make sense to design the browsing experience for the introductory articles (entry points) on the main pinned posts, and to have the research logs set aside as weekly newsletters.
How Publication Type affects Posting Style
We will focus on the 3 different types of Non-Monetary publications (2,3,4) with an understanding that they can extend into (4) 'writing career'.
Let’s go into how to post, and what is posted for each.
Community - News & Discussion & Check-ins
Usage: Regular News Update / Course
Pace: Weekly Updates (+ Organized set of starting materials)
News Update
I find that a good pace for community update articles are weekly or even monthly newsletters that the readers won't be over inundated with. The goal of this publication is to make sure that you can provide some clarity in the sea of noise. That was what Obsidian Roundup did very well.
This kind of weekly round up, is also good for even personal brand publications, because people love these 'start here' pages that guide them to recent content they may want to look at. It is like giving a guide map to your writing, and also providing greater context into what inspired this. Weekly Newsletters are a digestible bit of relatable news.
Some people do treat this as a huge 'all the news' exercise, e.g. ThursdAi which ends up being used as a reference for industry people who are interested in everything that has happened, but the regular reader struggles to understand because there is too much information and not enough processing (distill away unimportant info + adding context so beginners can understand what is good / bad / what this means for them).
Course / Book Club
If you're doing it for a course, then you might actually do daily or twice weekly updates following a curriculum that students are supposed to look through during the week, and the live call is either 'lecture + accountability time to do guided exercise together (workshop style)' or 'discussion session'.
Substack is just one platform that can be used for a wiki / organization of curriculum. There are notion pages, wiki platforms and even roam research graphs for web-hosted community editted content. The goal here is to have a clear structure of what community members should be reading, where they should start from, how should they progress, and where can they find help.
You do want to onboard people who join in a bit later, and I think reddit wikis are one of the best example of how to do this. Especially for very specific sub-reddits.
This may also be where you bring in other platforms like YouTube to share weekly discussion videos or live sessions + Reddit / Discord for community updates where users can provide feedback. E.g. TheDrummer's Discord (testing finetunes of local LLM models)
I absolutely love Obsidian Members Group (Discord)'s Starboard. It works like Reddit's upvote feature. This is community filtering of 'what is important to see' and usually amazing to scroll through.
The value isn't just your writing; it's the high-quality discussion that happens in the comments.
For me, these kind of community hubs has always been a good way to get a balanced view of any topic of interest. Information set in these community hubs is usually better than a single person's narrow perspective, and you tend to get a lot of interesting tangents branching off from here because you have people discussing, and we have all read different things and recommend different materials to look at.
The value of these publications isn't simply the material that is there, because the articles and wiki pages just serves as a form of organization and on-boarding to the 'course' or introductory materials. What we're really there for is the experience of being social with other hobbyist who share similar interests to us (because it's very hard for you to find people in real life that have the same depth of interest in your very specific niche hobby compared to on the internet). I love how we focus on the topic (E.g. how to take notes in obsidian / how do I work with this LLM AI model). I appreciate that this focused interest isn't about any specific person (as compared to personal brand opinion publications).
Research Documentation - Expertise
Usage: Investigate a Topic & Write a Book
Pace: Infrequent Updates (as you write)
Your substack becomes your publications to your private research journal instead of the ones that are peer-reviewed and this is going to be very focused on your research direction the one question that you want to answer, (for example, how to bake really delicious bread), and you go into a lot of depth here. You do a lot of research to substantiate your findings / do deep thought. Bonus if you have many visualizations.
You publish deep dive essays that explore the nuances of a topic from various angles. You break things down for a reader new to the topic. You answer the main questions about this topic, becoming an authority and then you go into side tangents about different ways people have achieved whatever you want to do.
Quality is very important here and next is clarity because experts are often really bad at explaining a topic that they find interesting because they know so much of the material that they don't really explain what beginner readers need to understand, they assume too much.
This is why a research documentation publication goes very well with a learning in public style of posting where you are posting throughout your journey instead of at the end. Start when you haven't figured out everything, and the readers can learn along with you. Show your misunderstanding so they can avoid the same pitfalls.
Devlogs are a great example of this.
So the two variants are:
Expert: You publish well-researched deep-dive essays that explore a topic from different angles. You are building a knowledge hub that serves as evergreen content. Your goal is to become a trusted authority in this field. It is usually niche but sometimes it is a certain style of thinking applied to a range of topics (E.g. Gwern (on Information Theory in Death Note) I really love the depth of thinking in this digital garden)
Behind-the-scenes + Learning in Public: You show the work that goes into your conclusions about this topic. You can still explore the topic from different angles, but usually you're trying to achieve a certain solution. Sometimes this can just be showing the experiments that go into the book you are trying to write or whatever you're trying to create. For example, these are very short experiment demonstration posts that very clearly communicate why one approach is better than the other. (E.g. Game Devlog Short, Cooking Baking Temperature Comparison)
The value to the readers here, is that they get educated on a subject without doing all the research themselves. Sometimes they are interested in the question, but readers are rarely as focused on a specific niche as the writers. The point of niching down deep is that you are specializing and capable of being an authority in this field because you have invested that much time and effort into learning about it. It helps to be an expert in this field by education, for example, voice actors teaching you how to speak better or showcasing styles they use in professional work. It is giving readers a peek into to your career / world.
Readers are usually fulfilling curiousity, but they may also follow because they want to accomplish something technical (E.g. fancy preferment breads, I highly recommend milk kefir bread). Usually it's more for the visuals and because it is exciting to see how an expert problem solves their way into making really fancy things (E.g. Table Making / Design + build super fancy speaker without factory).
I would also put channels that go to document the process of how various modern items are built in factories in this category because it is a niche of expert work that we cannot usually see (E.g. Factory Boot-making and individual crafter pottery making.)
Life Documentation - VLOG
Usage: Document Your Life in Digital Journey & Motivate Self to Do Things
Pace: Infrequent Updates (as you self-experiment) / Weekly Newsletter
You treat writing as a digital journal or a personal log. You write for yourself first, and the audience comes second.
What you do: You share personal insights, life updates, and reflections on your experiences. The goal is to create a searchable record of your life (not sure how great substack is for this) and to motivate yourself to do more interesting things (I absolutely do recommend writing online for motivating yourself into living better, in so many ways).
The schedule is can be flexible, where you post when life happens, but the commitment of a weekly / monthly newsletter can move you to do more interesting things and reflect regularly. The main value of writing a digital journal is that it pushes you to polish your work more and so the thinking happens as you write for other people to understand your life.
What the readers get: A relatable, ongoing story. escapism from their own life and a look into another person's personal struggles and insights that gives life lessons that helps them feel like their life is is not the only one that is a struggle. people read for the feeling of connection and because after reading about your life, they feel a sense of familiarity and they want to know what is going to happen next, like watching a TV series. I also like to see other people's recommendations for books they're reading. and it's like all the reviews that you would give on other websites consolidated in one place.
The appeal of this publication is that it is multifaceted. you see many different aspects of this person's life. This is my current publication type. The problem here is that it might really be too scattered for most of the audience to resonate with everything that you write. And so if the algorithm recommends content to them that they don't really appreciate, they don't engage with it and you are less likely to be promoted by the algorithm.
A Note on Personal Branding
Usage: Connect to Audience with Emails
Pace: Weekly Newsletter + Promo
Vlogs and topic focused writers often lead to 'personal branding' where your goal moves towards building an audience (getting more people to watch your content and the benefits of monetization, sponsorships, referrals + influencer path e.g. course, book, plushies).
This use of online writing is usually more common for creators who already have a following for their opinions on a certain topic, for their expertise that they are sharing with the community on YouTube, a podcast, or Instagram. On substack, they just want to use online writing as an extra channel to connect more strongly to their audience and reap the good ole email lists.
Goal: Growth + Digital Product Promotion
Usage: Substack as a convenient email collector and a place for weekly updates
The content is often a curated roundup of your recent work, thoughts, and recommendations.
Readers flock in because this gives them another connection to a creator they already follow and admire. They tend to appreciate the curated summary of the creator's work and thoughts delivered straight to their inbox. They are usually true fans, and this helps to strengthens their loyalty and makes them feel more connected to the creator's world.
Examples: Dan Koe or Ali Abdaal
I find that these writers often have a very developed distinctive writing style that their audience really vibes with.
When you hear, "Hey friends, don't you think of Ali Abdaal?"
If you see a very aggressively worded post with a black & white minimalistic art, you think of Dan Koe.
TLDR
Purpose (Why)
When you are trying to figure out what you want to write online about, you should figure out which is your 'Why?'.
Are you doing this for a group? (Community)
Are you doing this for yourself? (VLOG)
Do you have a topic that you are obsessed with? (Topic Expertise)
It will take a lot of experiment and trying with different posts (or even publications) until you hit on something that works for you. What we think we want to write about often isn't what feels the most comfortable once we have tried it out. I am still in this process of trying to find this out, and my next step is starting different publications in parallel just to see which suits me more.
Publishing Model (How)
Once you have figured out what is your purpose, you should consider the conventional publishing models that other publications of the same type use. This is the practical rhythm that dictates how you work and it should adapt to your circumstances, whether or not you have enough time to do the kind of posts that you like to do. and does it fit your working style? Because I found that trying to do a very long post is going to take exponentially more time than trying to make multiple short posts I can publish in parts.
The two types of models in summary:
The Scheduled Dispatch: The classic weekly newsletter. It creates a reliable habit for both you and your readers.
The Evergreen Essayist: You publish long, in-depth articles whenever they are ready. The focus is on quality and permanence, not a schedule. This model builds a valuable archive over time. It could depend on your research on this topic.
The Curated Wiki You have a plan of what you want this publication to look like. you have short articles articles and long articles, but there is a certain sequence that you want your readers to read in.
The questions here are:
When do I post? Frequency?
What do I post? Length + Topic.
Do I like to plan out content in sequence, for months, or focus on recent news / my curiosity.
Format: Weekly newsletters tend to follow a certain format of what sections they have, and this consistency is actually very good for your readers who know what they can expect. You also need to consider your audience if they happen to really love long articles versus short actionable notes, but this is debatable because you might be writing for yourself instead of an audience, even if you write to share with the public, you might not actually care how many people are reading.
My Philosophy on Online Writing
There isn't a specific goal to writing online. It doesn't have to be your your main career. and even though I would like writing to be a sustainable career for me, I don't really want to do this through paid subscriptions because I personally dislike subscriptions (and I feel like the subscription pricing model is taking over the world, to the point of madness where even printers are subscription locked).
For writing on substack, I feel like there is this terrible foghorn of people insisting that you must grow your your audience as if that is the only reason we write online.
Sometimes just sharing to a small group of people who are interested in your life is better than performing for a whole stadium worth of people who might just want to read about a topic and then go off. I feel like the over-investment in being heard is taking away from the experience of of what writing can do for you without requiring other people to help bolster you up.
You can want more eyes on your work, but it is very valid to simply want to write about whatever we feel interests us. The benefit of the modern world is that we have a voice that we don't have to suppress for there isn't really anyone gatekeeping publishing now.
Historically writing was costly, it had to appeal to royals and the nobles who could fund a book. It had to be political, and perhaps higher quality but definitely 'the right narrative'. Even when we had the printing press, and it moved to publishing houses, someone had to approve of your work and you had to convince people to print copies.
Now, we have an explosion of posting about whatever we want and some of it is trolling, trash + spammy clickbait. It is hard to be viral-popular because the algorithm can filter you out. people might not be interested it but we can write and the value of writing on its own is already good enough to justify writing even if we are not heard.
Damn! I’m only halfway through this insightful, comprehensive piece. But I’m fascinated by your analysis and how you think. I’ll keep reading. I’m learning a lot. Thank you!