Zen and the art of Substack

Is Substack really as good as it sounds? How does it treat new writers? What if you have no social media and zero subscribers?

‘There is just no escape from it.’ 
And if I asked ‘From what?’ the answer might be ‘The whole thing,’ or ‘The whole organized bit,’ or even ‘The system.’ 
Sylvia once said defensively, ‘Well, you know how to cope with it,’ which puffed me up so much at the time. 
I was embarrassed to ask what “it” was and so remained somewhat  puzzled. I thought it was something more mysterious than technology, but now I see that the ‘it’ was mainly, if not entirely, technology. But that doesn’t sound right either. The ‘it’ is a kind of force that gives rise to technology, something undefined, but inhuman, mechanical, lifeless, a blind monster, a death force. Something hideous they are running away from but they can never escape.

- Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance.

I am new to this space. A writer friend of mine, let’s call her Sylvia, has for many years been posting religiously on WordPress. She recently turned to me for advice as she is wont to do in all things technical. Her WordPress blog started quite humbly, but has recently become quite unwieldy. She added too many bells and whistles to her pages and transformed her once svelte website into an obese monstrosity. Even Google complained.

So I looked around online for alternatives and ended up here. I did all the research. On the surface Substack seems like a perfect fit for Sylvia, a more minimalist option where she can just focus on the writing and trust Substack to look after the technical details. More Zen perhaps. She can even transfer her mailing list and existing posts. It ticked all the boxes. But by nature I’m quite skeptical. I can’t help it. Years of experience in the tech world leaves you quite immune to the hype surrounding new products and services. Brushing aside these doubts I gave Sylvia a provisional recommendation and told her to take a look at Substack. She’s considering it seriously. But, with my curiosity peaked, I created my own Substack to delve deeper.

I am a technologist, who likes to take systems apart and see how they tick. This is the first of a series of posts where I take a plunge into the world of Substack to see what I can discover.

One of the first things I’m interested in is understanding how Substack treats different writers. My friend Sylvia has written six successful books, and can bring along her current email list with a few thousand subscribers on it. She can also call on her a large social media following to promote her move. But what about new or unknown writers? What are the obstacles do they face? To get a taste for that, I conceived this experiment. I am going to start with nothing. No subscribers. No email list. No social media following. No audience at all. Let’s see what happens. How does Substack treat writers starting out? I don’t want you to get the wrong impression here. I do in fact know probably too many ways to get my content seen online, how to find eyeballs out there and enter the attention economy. But I want to hold back and gain some insights on the way.

If there are any quirks about Substack and its algorithms that bug you, leave a comment below and I’ll try to check it out. Come along for the ride and subscribe for free.

I am simultaneously doing an experiment on YouTube to gather similar facts. I have just posted a single video on a new channel there and am curious to see what the algorithm will do (if anything). Its not looking good after day two. ;)

it doesn’t look good at all