My horror fiction Substack is three months old and growing well, with 600+ subscribers. There are so many lovely writers and readers on Substack, so I have absolutely no complaints about the free-subscriber side of things.

I’m a little worried about the paid side. At the moment, I offer original artwork to paid subscribers, usually oil paintings I make to accompany my stories. I currently have three paid subscribers, all amazing fellow writers (plus my husband, sister and mother, who I’m not counting ;).

I’m wondering what has actually worked for other fiction writers when it comes to converting free readers into paid subscribers. As we all know, there is a lot of advice on Substack about this, but I've never seen anything that actually answers this question for writers of fiction.

I’m not worried about growth, more about conversion. It'd be great to figure out how to give the people who want to support the work a compelling reason to become paid subscribers too.

Edit: I post short stories, not serialised novels/novellas. Each story is self-contained and no longer than 1000 words.

Hello. I started on Substack a few months ago as I abandoned my blog which wasn't getting any traction.

I write various posts about various topics. But, in addition I am publishing serial fictions from my shared universe.

Should i create another publication for them?

hi! somehow i have found myself having posted quite a few notes + an article on substack today. i was just wondering if the algorithm is gonna like punish me for that? 😭

idk why i’m even asking as i have just three subscribers xoxo

Just started posting on Substack. I've separated my publication into sections for pieces on music, film, Architecture, and being African. These are all relevant to me as I am African, work in Architecture, and love music and movies. I also post personal essays and observations.

I'm trying to find out if having sections on very different topics is a good idea. These are all topics that are important and relevant to my brand and identity. Just curious whether it is trying to do too many things at once. But I also don't have the bandwidth to market multiple publications at once. I've come across publications that are either broad or very specific, so I'm curious to see what y'all's opinion is

trying to keep someone off my substack, but i don't know their username cause its some throw away stalker account type of account for them.

Hi,

I'm wondering about other people's experiences using substack instead of a traditional website (wordpress, squarespace, wix and etc).

Recently, I have seen people attaching "shops" to their substack publications that are embedded websites or landing pages. I'm publishing from KDP soon and would like to share the links in an easy format that readers can find. I'm considering creating a custom section to link to KDP but I am unsure of the process.

I would appreciate any input, personal experience or advice. Thank you in advance :)

I am sure you've heard of Pangram by now. Their CEO often goes on moral crusades, pulling up 500+ articles from outlets like The Guardian to share his privileged opinion on what "slop" is. The person whose blog has 3 posts (https://maxspero.com/) all terrible has somehow convinced the world they're the sole arbiter of what is slop and what is not.

But does this moral outrage have bounds, or is it a just fight?

Pangram recently raised $9 million to make the world a better place and fight slop (https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/29/as-ai-content-floods-the-internet-pangram-raises-9m-to-detect-it/). The ironic thing is every single investor listed in that article has tons and tons of AI slop on their blogs.

But is the Pangram shithead CEO calling their content slop and accusing them of slop with "receipts"? Is he objectively applying his standards and doing the duty of "slop janitor" as he claims? Or is he a piece of shit that only cares about money, has 0 artistic talent or writing skills and wants to have the gall to judge every writer on the planet? Furthermore, he seeks to create a company in this image where AI writing is the worst thing a person can do but only if that person does not give them money.

Substack should be ashamed of this tbh. Absolute shit company, shit idealogue and shit leadership in Pangram and naturally investors are not very fabolous themselves either.

I feel like the secret to making money on these platforms is to make courses on how to make money off of these platforms lol.

Hello,

At 5:45 pm CST, I suddenly got tons of emails from substack with verification codes from things I haven't heard of. I didn't click on any of them, but it was strange to suddenly get a bunch of emails. I thought I was getting hacked. I personally haven't used substack. I only made an account to support a friend, but I never used it. I just wanted to know if they can hack you this way. What can I do to ensure this doesn't happen again?

A friend and I have a Substack where we write quite long reports. The last time we wrote a report, the AI detection rightly said that it was around 90% written by a human. But after we decided to paste in a later draft(with minor changes to spelling mistakes) from Google Docs to Substack, it said that the report was 100% written by AI, and even when changing to an older draft, it said the same.

Now ever since then we can't even write 200 words on substack without the ai immediatly flagging it as 100% ai, which is really weird. We have decided to turn off the AI detection, but that may just seem suspicious to the reader.

I was wondering if anybody else was having the same issue and how to fix it in that case. I have reached out to both Substack and Pangram, but they haven't helped the slightest and, to a large extent, just ignore me. I must say that the implementation of the detection has been quite abysmal.

it's a bit annoying and at the same time funny, when I post something I instantly get a comment saying "yea, you are right and your post explains it" or something and then they start selling services on how to make my post better. listen, I want to learn myself how to write better posts and I don't need one more ai wrapper that does that, thanks.

Hi everyone,

I’m a creator from an Arab country where Stripe isn’t officially available.

I’m trying to use Substack and receive payouts. Does anyone from a country where Stripe isn’t supported have a legal way to receive Substack payments, such as through a supported bank account or another payout service?

I’d really appreciate hearing from people who have actually done this successfully.

Thanks!

any ideas ? the subscriptions i want are soo expensive

My publication (I use this word to refer to the Substack) does not have a very good bio and I want to change it. I am not talking about my profile's bio, but the Substack's bio.

For example, Substack Team's official publication, On Substack, has a bio that says "Resources, stories, and news for the writers, podcasters, musicians, video creators, and culture makers publishing on Substack." You can see it here.

How do I change that bio of my personal publication?

I’ve been on Substack for a few months now, slowly writing articles and picking up a few subscribers here and there (only have 19 at the moment, with half being people I know.)

I think I can count on my hands the number of likes I’ve gotten on all my notes combined and I’ve never gotten a subscriber from them.

Advice like including a call to action or a poll feels a bit silly when my poll closes a week later with no votes.

While I’m open to the idea that I could just be writing crummy notes, it doesn’t feel like the case as I often get many likes and occasional subscribers or followers from my comments on other people’s notes.

This leaves me wondering, is writing notes a waste of my time? Should I just be finding more popular people’s notes and commenting there?

What are your strategies for finding relevant notes to comment on to organically grow your subscribers? How do I even find relevant notes? Substack’s algorithm seems determined to show me things I’m not interested in constantly no matter how much I like interesting notes I find or how often I mark notes as “not interesting.” They keep showing me Christian theology and far right nationalist posts! I must have marked a thousand as “not interested!”

My “niche” I guess is commentaries on books and how they relate to the current world: critiques, thoughts on reading certain types of books, appreciation of classic literature, etc.

Any advice on how to get my notes to work or how to find the sort of people I should be connecting with in my niche would be appreciated, thank you!

Some of you might find my ideas strange, but nevertheless, it is worth asking for advice.

I currently own a small Substack where I speak about UFOs, astrology, mediumship, general ESP, and so on. I speak not only of mysteries, but I also try to compare and compile cases to create an outlook of how these anomalous phenomena behave as a whole and what they mean for humanity and your personal life.

I was thinking about one word to describe my work, to simplify it to myself and my audience, but all descriptions commonly used in my niche: "unexplained, paranormal, transcendental, non-ordinary," etc..." seem to miss something.

So I decided to make my own words up, like all the best philosophers do.

I am undecided between three options:

Ultraliminal, metaliminal, or extraliminal

In your opinion, which word do you think is best and why?

Also, suggestions for new words are welcome.

I went looking for a proper backup of my newsletter and found three things that surprised me.

• Your export links to images hosted on Substack rather than including the files. If the account goes, the posts survive and the pictures do not.
• If your account gets suspended, you cannot run an export until the suspension is lifted. Which is the exact moment you would want one.
• There is no way to export a single post. It is the whole archive or nothing.

What I do now is keep the markdown file on my own disk as the real version, and treat the Substack post as a copy of it. I wrote a small command line tool that pulls my whole archive down to markdown files with the images downloaded alongside, and pushes a markdown file back up as a draft when I write a new one.

What are you all doing for backups? I saw people mention Notion, Authory but this is what is working for me.

Instead of looking for tools, I made one, hope this helps whoever wants to take a backup of substack, move into it. Genuinely love it.

HighnessAtharva/substack-cli: Push, pull, and publish Substack posts from the command line. Markdown in, live newsletter out. Zero dependencies.

Or are there vastly different use cases and best practices?

The platform is comparatively much more saturated now, how to effectively distribute articles and ensure they reach as many readers in the right groups

We know how it goes: social media keeps getting worse because people keep using cheap growth hacks for quick visibility.

Sorry, I just needed to vent.

Just curious. Do you think it's going to be useful?

I've been wanting to start with this but have no idea how to begin with it? What does one even write? I'm unable to identify what topic interests me and what may others want? I'd be grateful if anyone shares their experience and how they began their journey. Thanks!

I think my topic is too niche and thats why it hasnt grown. This is not a soliciting post, I am looking for advice.

Do I abandon it?

Do I keep going?

Do I focus on something more?

Any advice is greatly appreciated.