Hi Karen, thanks for sharing the guide! I'm going to update it by next week's office hours, to reflect the new format where they split the conversations by topic. It was a much better approach, although the busier discussions do still have the jumpiness issues.
Hi Karen, I heard about the Office Hours. I bet it's a great resource. I think it's smart to collect all those questions from people and create a Substack Success Book!
Subscribing to lots of different substacks is how I got here on your list! I've also really been enjoying taking the time to comment often just to see where conversations go. How did you find your intensive group? Can you say more about how that works?
Hi Rick, thanks for being here. The Substack intensive was a six week series of online meetings where Substack walked us through strategies for growing paid subscriptions.
There were a few hundred writers present, and we 'met' in breakout rooms during the sessions and in a discord set up independently by one of the writers.
I was invited to apply for the intensive by Substack, for my other publication (https://therottenapple.substack.com/, which I publish under a different account). At the time it had >1000 subscribers and a few thousand dollars in revenue after only a couple of months of paid subscriptions.
I'm not sure if they are still running 'Grow' intensives.
* One is this publication, where I help other writers by sharing what I have learned.
* The Rotten Apple is my main focus and I keep it entirely separate, even using a pseudonym, out of respect for my food safety audience.
* The fourth is a sister publication of The Rotten Apple which I use to send reminder emails about my live events to interested subscribers. I could use a 'Section' of my main newsletter for this but I don't want to ask new subscribers to unsubscribe from specific sections to avoid the reminders - the sections features are a bit clunky in Substack - so a separate opt-in publication works better for me.
This is really cool. I'm glad I asked! I've been experimenting with the use of sections myself and ran into this "clunkiness." To subscribe/unsubscribe to a section requires quite a journey for the user. I never thought of banding together a separate pub to do the job. With all of these individual instances of substack it sounds like a full time job. Is it producing full time income for you?
I spend a less than two days per week on my main Substack and it grosses USD9K per annum at the moment. So hour for hour it's not a great work rate for someone who lives in an expensive city (Sydney, Australia).
However it is infinitely scalable and that is the power of a newsletter: you don't have to work more hours to earn more money.
Hi Karen, thanks for sharing the guide! I'm going to update it by next week's office hours, to reflect the new format where they split the conversations by topic. It was a much better approach, although the busier discussions do still have the jumpiness issues.
Hi Karen, I heard about the Office Hours. I bet it's a great resource. I think it's smart to collect all those questions from people and create a Substack Success Book!
Subscribing to lots of different substacks is how I got here on your list! I've also really been enjoying taking the time to comment often just to see where conversations go. How did you find your intensive group? Can you say more about how that works?
Hi Rick, thanks for being here. The Substack intensive was a six week series of online meetings where Substack walked us through strategies for growing paid subscriptions.
There were a few hundred writers present, and we 'met' in breakout rooms during the sessions and in a discord set up independently by one of the writers.
I was invited to apply for the intensive by Substack, for my other publication (https://therottenapple.substack.com/, which I publish under a different account). At the time it had >1000 subscribers and a few thousand dollars in revenue after only a couple of months of paid subscriptions.
I'm not sure if they are still running 'Grow' intensives.
Really love the branding on The Rotten Apple by the way. Very catchy in visual and in vision.
Ah, I see. That's awesome, and congrats on that growth by the way. How many pubs are you running on Substack? Just the two?
Hi Rick, technically I have four publications, would you believe!
* One is purely for experimentation, and I used it extensively for testing out my subscribers' paid experience before going paid (you can read about those experiments here: https://karen-cherry.medium.com/what-really-happens-when-you-turn-on-substack-payments-1dcd0ea319c1 )
* One is this publication, where I help other writers by sharing what I have learned.
* The Rotten Apple is my main focus and I keep it entirely separate, even using a pseudonym, out of respect for my food safety audience.
* The fourth is a sister publication of The Rotten Apple which I use to send reminder emails about my live events to interested subscribers. I could use a 'Section' of my main newsletter for this but I don't want to ask new subscribers to unsubscribe from specific sections to avoid the reminders - the sections features are a bit clunky in Substack - so a separate opt-in publication works better for me.
This is really cool. I'm glad I asked! I've been experimenting with the use of sections myself and ran into this "clunkiness." To subscribe/unsubscribe to a section requires quite a journey for the user. I never thought of banding together a separate pub to do the job. With all of these individual instances of substack it sounds like a full time job. Is it producing full time income for you?
I spend a less than two days per week on my main Substack and it grosses USD9K per annum at the moment. So hour for hour it's not a great work rate for someone who lives in an expensive city (Sydney, Australia).
However it is infinitely scalable and that is the power of a newsletter: you don't have to work more hours to earn more money.
Thank you. Very generous of you to reply, share these details, and explain the strategy of the future scaling.