3 Substack Frustrations I Endured This Week (and 2 excellent moments!)
I hope my learnings will help you
Hey guys,
I hope you’ve had a great week. In today’s email, I share three frustrating things I learned about Substack this week, and two excellent things. I hope you can learn from them too.
My frustrations relate to kind-of advanced Substack stuff: subscription management for paying subscribers, podcast distribution and Stripe connections. It’s quite technical so if that’s not where you are in your journey, stay tuned, I’ll do the good bits (non-technical) first.
Two Good Things
Transparency and joyful earning
The first good Substack-y thing that happened to me this week was reading Dianne Jacob’s interview with a Substack publication owner who makes $15K per post. Yes, you read that correctly. Her total earnings are “considerably more than” $650,000 per year.
What I loved about this interview is that both Dianne and the creator, Caroline Chambers, seemed comfortable talking about actual numbers when they were discussing subscriber statistics and revenue.
Even better, Caroline laid out her exact growth strategy, explained her laser-focused paid offer, and described her weekly Substack-creation schedule in the interview.
This sort of transparency is so valuable to other creators like us. It helps us to see what we could replicate, and understand the criteria that we might struggle to match. I’m super grateful for her candor.
Read Dianne’s interview by clicking the preview below. Highly recommended.
Vanity trip
The second good thing for me this week is so silly I can’t believe I’m even going to share it. Oh okay, here goes. Tim Denning, the famous Aussie Medium blogger, liked a bunch of my Substack posts this week.
Told ya it was silly 😀 .... you probably haven’t even heard of him! Anyway, he has pretty large audiences on both Medium and Substack and makes lots of money from his writing, including by selling oodles of enrolments to his ‘make money from writing’ courses, which I’m told are very good.
Needless to say, I was tickled pink to get a notification that Tim liked my work.
Three frustrating things
Reader warning: I’m about to nerd out on some of the intricacies of the Substack platform, including payment systems and podcasts. If you’re new to Substack and not ready for that, skip to the end and I’ll catch ya next week.
1. An accident with a subscription wasted everyone’s time
This week I felt like I was kicking dust and getting nowhere trying to help a subscriber who had accidentally locked herself out of my paid publication.
It began when the subscriber wrote to me saying she had tried to pause her annual subscription so she could change credit card details before her next renewal. Somehow, she ended up canceling her annual subscription with 9 months left in the billing period.
No problem, I thought, subscribers retain access to paid content until their billing period expires.
Except, it turns out they don’t. I checked her name on my dashboard. It listed her as a free subscriber: no access to paywalled content. More concerningly, when I checked my Stripe account, a refund hadn’t been processed for the remainder of her year’s fees. Had she really been locked out of nine months of content she had paid for, with no redress? Yup.
Substack’s support team was upbeat. No worries, they said, everything’s, fine, subscribers retain access for the remainder of their billing period. “We’re glad we could help, have a great day”.
No no no, I responded. She doesn’t have access. What went wrong?
It’s fine, said the Substack support team member, nothing went wrong because she canceled her subscription via the Settings page and when subscribers cancel that way they lose access immediately.
Wait, what? That’s the exact opposite of the first explanation I had received.
Turns out that annual subscribers can’t change their credit card details or turn off auto-renew during their billing period, except by writing to support. Which is shocking, if it’s true. A later email from the same support team member included a series of screenshots of - apparently - the correct ‘flow’ a subscriber needs to navigate after the end of their billing period to ensure they don’t get charged again. I don’t even know if that contradicts the earlier information I was sent, because the entire conversation with support was so confusing.
Where does that leave us?
My subscriber is fine, because I immediately ‘comped’ her until her original expiry date (insert pause while support person replies “the problem is fixed”, as if they had fixed it themselves)
Me, I wasted way too long trying to navigate the contradictory information I got from support and am now feeling quite uncomfortable with Substack’s subscription auto-renew policies. 😥
2. Podcast distribution: arp!
This week I launched a (public) podcast for my paid newsletter. Exciting! I have been doing paywalled audio episodes for paying subscribers for more than a year, but starting this week, new episodes will be accessible to everyone.
As part of the launch, I decided to distribute the podcast to other podcasting platforms like Apple podcasts and Spotify so new listeners could find me.
Arp! The process is frustrating. ….Which was to be expected, I guess.
Except one frustration was so shamefully preventable that it seemed extra cruel. There is a hole in the Substack>Spotify distribution process which Spotify knows about (and doesn’t say), and which I think Substack also knows about. Neither platform mentions it in their support documentation.
To create a Spotify podcast you have to verify the email address of your podcast, which for a Substack-hosted podcast is publicationname@substack.com. So far so good. But Spotify verification emails don’t get delivered to ‘at substack’ email addresses. Not to spam, not anywhere, not ever.
Without the emailed verification code from Spotify there is no way to finish the podcast set-up process. It’s a dead end.
After much wasted time I discovered that Spotify was aware of this problem and knew of a workaround for email addresses, which I was able to figure out. So I did get there eventually. But I really wish Substack’s podcast distribution instructions, and Spotify’s verification instructions had mentioned this known problem and provided the fix up front. Grrr.
[And don’t get me started on the joys of trying to set up an Apple podcast if you don’t own an Apple device!]
3. A perilous escape route
During the week, I found out about a nasty Substack bug affecting the newsletter Garbage Day, by Ryan Broderick.
Ryan moved Garbage Day away from Substack in January, and set up at beehiv, a Substack competitor. Last week he discovered some of his subscribers were getting charged twice for their subscriptions. Turns out that Substack was still taking subscription fees from Garbage Day subscribers even though Ryan had moved his newsletter off the platform.
A “bug” causing double charges? That’s really not the type of issue I ever want my readers to encounter.
Ryan discovered that Substack doesn’t automatically disconnect itself from your Stripe account when you leave. And Stripe doesn’t automatically stop charging your readers for their Substack subscription fees either. Whoa.
I’ve been using Stripe since 2016 and I get how that could happen on a technical level. But that doesn’t mean it is okay. I also note that back issues of Garbage Day can still be seen on the substack.com domain so Ryan’s claim that he is “no longer using [Substack] as a host” is not 100 percent accurate.
Ryan shared his pain in a recent post, even going so far as to use the word “predatory” for Substack’s behavior. He explained how to avoid the double-charge problem if you leave Substack. He said you need to write to Substack support and ask them to cancel all your subscriptions in Stripe, issue no refunds, disconnect your Substack account from your Stripe account and also to remove their access to your Stripe account so they cannot continue to take fees from your account.
This is good information to know if you ever want to take the Substack escape route.
Final thoughts
It’s been a frustrating (and sometimes great) week on Substack for me.
The cancel-subscription process is so convoluted that even the Substack support team seemed confused; podcast distribution has a major flaw that is likely to trip up almost every Substack-hosted podcaster and the process of switching platforms just got a tiny bit scarier and more complicated.
On the upside, Tim Denning liked my post. And that instantly made everything better!
That’s it for this week. Have a great weekend.
Cheers,
Karen
P.S. If you haven’t seen my playlist of posts about how to promote your publication without using social media, check that out now. And if you want to save yourself pain with podcasting, jump on a call with me and I’ll share my secrets.
Great content as ever ... and great to show the frustrations of publishing newsletters as well as the upsides ... well done for the Tim Denning likes, the content must be good!
I took your advice and didn't read the technical stuff here as still working out notes etc from your other really helpful posts. My head can explode with too much tech and it's great you recognise that there can be overwhelm.
So I just wanted to say YAY for you for getting liked by Tim Denning! I think we all need to create a "winventory" of achievements and celebrate them. It's what keeps us going. Being acknowledged by someone whom you respect is the ultimate boost. Elif Shafak restacked a comment I made on one of her brilliant posts. I was buzzing for days!