The Life Cycle of a Substack

Beginning, middle, end

Hi there, newsletter writer!

Lately, I have been thinking about how you would ‘end’ a Substack. I need to get my head around this for the Substack ‘How To’ book I’m writing, and specifically the chapter called “You’re Not Going to Do This Forever…”.

Here are the two questions I have been grappling with:

• What does a graceful ending look like for a Substack newsletter? And

• How do you exit gracefully when you have paying subscribers?

There are some genuine technical challenges with shutting down a paid publication, and I’m learning the nuts and bolts of these challenges as I write the chapter. There are also mindset challenges with knowing when to stop publishing, or what to do if you experience a decline in your readership.

With these questions top-of-mind, I was excited to stumble across a post by

Scoot

about the Substack Product Life Cycle yesterday. Scoot describes the different phases of a Substack publication and includes great advice about how to stave off decline, among other things.

You can read Scoot’s post here:

Substack & The Product Life Cycle

Hope you find it helpful!

Have a fabulous week.

Karen

P.S. By the way, I found Scoot’s post while trawling last week’s Writer Office Hours at On.Substack.com. If you haven’t experienced Office Hours yet, they are a discussion thread hosted by the Substack team most Thursdays (America time). And they are brilliant! I learn something new from them every week and they are a great way to start interacting with other writers. Subscribe to On.Substack to get a weekly invitation.