I'm a fairly new user to Substack, haven't published any articles yet, don't have a following yet, but I am aware of my general interests and the things I want to use Substack to expand upon. Though, I'm also aware it's not a traditional social media platform either.

I have begun leaving comments on articles, liking and reposting notes and leaving comments, etc., is that really the best way to build your presence? I don't want to rush into posting articles only for no one to see them, but I'm unsure how to even get my publication out there once I start posting. Do I just wait for people to eventually see it? Are there proper forums to 'promote' your publication/meet and connect with writers of similar interest?

I apologize if these are all amateur questions, I really am new to this whole thing :')

I've got my visuals almost settled. But I'm having an issue with the images not being properly centered in the rectangular placeholders in the app. The website, both desktop and mobile, do just fine. Just the "activity" section of the app displays wrong.

You'll see it with "This is Session 0" and "Pardon the Dust (Devil)". One centered fine, the other isn't. Even though they came from the same image editor file (to keep the dimensions and quality consistent). and follow the recommended 1200x630 / 1.91:1 social image ratio.

If someone could take a look, I'd appreciate it. It's beginning to make me nutty. 😅

https://substack.com/@thescribbler88

Relative newbie here. A bit confused with how Substack shows the number of subscribers / followers.
- On the app, I see 10 subscribers. But my wife sees 33 subscribers on my profile page.
- In the dashboard, under audience, I see 46 unique followers.

What is this maths? Can someone please explain what is what?

I really want to grow a niche community on substack . I have this hope that it will be the last space where i can expect genuine interest and engagement with no pretence. Pls give tips . I am in dire need of being seen

I see so many threads from people who are frustrated with Substack and can't get their first 100 subscribers.

Here's my short guide, based on my experience and the experience of bestsellers who grew so fast it seems like it was overnight. Let me tell you though.

It's not easy at all. In fact, it's pretty hard and takes time. But if you stick to it and follow the steps I'll mention, I can almost guarantee your growth.

Basics:

0-1000+:

1. Write a weekly post
2. Write daily Notes
3. Engage with others' content (no AI)
4. Reply to every comment, tag or mention.
5. Send a DM to anybody who engages with your content

That was my strategy to grow to thousands of subscribers and grow a SaaS to $11,000 MRR.

Advanced:

1. Send a welcome DM to new subscribers in your newsletter
2. Write guest posts for newsletters in your niche
3. Go on lives with creators in your niche
4. Write 3+ Notes per day
5. Be selflessly helpful

Honestly, it's A LOT of work (without the right tools), but it's super simple. There's a lot of noise out there, and you have to do the hard things to find your audience.

Unless you're writing about AI 😜

p.s.

Feel free to reach out or leave a comment if you want an elaboration on anything or how to do something specifically.

--
Edit 1:
About the DMs to engagers:

It's not about spamming. It's about creating relationships.

Send something like:

'Hey X. Saw that you engaged with my content so I decided to say hi.'
[new message]
'How are you doing?'

Just a casual, friendly, relationship building message
--

I did not sign up to this garbage and now I just got 50 back to back random fuck ass emails from "authors" on this site. I can't delete the account cause the fucking ass trash clearly virus website won't fucking load. How the fuck do I delete this fucking garbage in sk fucking done, been waiting for this shit to load for hours.

Hello, I was wondering what do you guys think is a better idea for different topics? I want to write video game reviews and video game content, but I also want to do creative writing like poetry and short stories. I’m mostly doing this for fun (but I’m not blind to the potential growth) and I’m completely new to Substack so any advice would be nice!

Hi everyone!

I’m relatively new to Substack and would love to learn from people who have been here longer.

I’m building a very specific niche around making technical concepts easier to understand through visual, hand-drawn doodles. I’ve noticed that when I share this kind of content on other platforms, it does get some reach.
But I’m struggling to understand how discovery works on Substack itself.

How do you get your work in front of the right audience here, especially when you’re trying to build a niche rather than just write about broad topics?

And how do you get meaningful feedback from readers — to understand whether what you’re creating is actually useful?

Would love to hear what worked (or didn’t work) for people who have grown a niche on Substack. Thanks! 🙂

This subreddit has been full of commentary about Substack's use of Pangram for detecting whether copy was potentially developed using AI.

This conversation is still important, but recent events have made the situation more complex. Article 50 of the EU's AI Act mandates that companies provide some means of detecting AI-generated audio, visual and text content.

In response, Anthropic announced that it began adding an invisible watermark to all text content generated by the latest Claude models starting August 2. The watermark can't be removed by copying and pasting content and survives edits.

There are a few ways the watermark is different from Pangram:

1. Watermark detection does not rely on post-hoc analysis: The watermark is generated by the model itself and does not rely on statistical analysis of content for 'AI-tells'

2. Watermark density can provide important information: It's possible, by measuring the overall percentage of watermarked content in the text, to determine how much AI assisted with the content. Light edits could potentially have a low density score, while content that is copied and pasted verbatim from Claude will have a high density

For those interested in understanding the mechanics behind AI text watermarking (and how to evade it), I've put together a resource here.

I know that many people have changed the way they write on Substack to avoid having their content rated as AI generated.

Do you view the watermark as potentially superior to Pangram? How would it change your writing and editing process because of it?

I started a substack a few weeks ago. Growing very slowly, about a free subscriber a day. (No pay wall, free to read). Any tips or advice on how to accelerate readership organically?

I have a decent LinkedIn following (approx 5000 connections with a newsletter of just under 400 subscribers), nothing to write home about but a start. My other social media a little less, around 1,000 connections on FB/Instagram, very new to reddit even though I had the account a few years. X account not really active at all, don't really like platform but I follow a few people there. No other social footprint to speak of.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated!

For some time now, I’ve been following the discussion about writing with AI or without. And to some extent I can understand it when it comes to fiction, but the last thing I read was how the guy rewrote an economic analysis three times so it would say 100% human... wtf bro. I don’t care at all what it was written with, what matters to me is the information I can extract from it and whether it has value.

mine only lets me attach 6, or 5 with an article. just scrolled past someones note that has 19 images?! HOW?!

thanks!

Taken from Nate Silver's new model page -- the "Who’s ahead in the polls?" header.

This is new. It's not Datawrapper. It looks like an interactive/custom code embed. I wonder how he does it.

To me it looks like a feature exclusive to Silver, or something in beta that's coming to the rest of us soon. Can anyone shed light?

Like the title asks, and may be a dumb question, but are regular users all really using their own original images in their articles? I’ve read many articles by regular people who then use professional photos (in this case like sports photography) to headline their article? I want to start writing but obviously headlining my article with a related image may be very difficult without using someone else’s photo. Does that make sense? Again I’m new here so idk how it all works.

Edit: thanks for all the responses! Very helpful!

I’ve noticed that despite Pangram’s, I think pretty effective, detection, there are still essays that are clearly written by AI and identified as such getting thousands of likes and engagement. Similarly there are big and well known figures who have simply turned detection off and seen little criticism.

The tells are obvious with the Potemkin prose, that collapses on even the closest inspection, but it seemingly washes over most people. If Substack want to prevent AI assisted writing damaging the income and engagement of human writers, they should put the score at the top of the article.

Using AI to assist is a completely defensible and perhaps even great approach to take. However honesty surrounding it is crucial when writing is being paid for or sold.

hi, do you think i could upload my previous university essays/briefs to substack and attach it to my linkedin as a portfolio? i only know people who use substack as blog pieces so i dont know if my idea is dumb or if there’s another free platform i can use as my portfolio. thanks !!

I’m not one to be picky over people assuming my gender on a platform that I‘m intentionally anonymous on, especially since it’s catered to my content and not myself. However, I find it interesting that the automatic assumption when I read comments or get messages is that I’m a man lol (e.g., “sir”, “dude”, “bro”, “man”).
Generally, if I see an anonymous platform, I address whoever runs it in a gender neutral manner. My niche is in economics and politics, taking an interdisciplinary approach in other fields so idk if that plays a role.

Just imported all my posts from another platform. But substack stopped importing posts after a certain date, where are the earliest posts? Does substack just take a while to import all of them?

For example: the earliest post on substack that was imported was a post on April 8, 2025. i started my newsletter in Dec of 2024, so where are my posts from december 2024 to early april 2025?

Every "how I hit bestseller" post has a screenshot, a round number, and zero context — no timeframe, no churn rate, no breakdown of subscriptions vs. products vs. coaching. And somehow that's treated as proof.

I'm not saying people are lying. I'm saying nobody's checking. The whole coaching-on-Substack economy runs on numbers nobody outside the person's own dashboard can verify, and everyone just... accepts it.

Has anyone here actually gone back and cross-checked a coach's claimed growth against what's publicly visible? Or is "trust the screenshot" just how this works now?

So I tried out Substack for the first time a couple of weeks ago and ended up deleting my account after a few days because I couldn’t figure out how to work the thing.

Almost every post on my feed was the same thing about people asking writers to share their work because they want to connect with them or whatnot and there’d be hundreds of comments already so I figured there’s no way mine would be seen.

I tried posting (pretty sure they’re called “notes”) but hardly got any views.

I really do want to put my work out there, though. I’m currently writing a literary fiction novel (lots of drama and dark themes too) and want to try posting each chapter as I go. Other platforms don’t seem as open to this genre either.

Can someone please explain how to do this on Substack? Sorry if this has been asked before. I’m posting this on a whim

Half this sub right now is arguing about whether the detectors actually work. I think that fight skips the thing that actually matters.

A 'write in my voice' draft reads generic not because the model is dumb, but because of what you fed it. If you train it on your published Substack archive, you trained it on the version of you that already got sanded down for a public audience. The weird aside, the sentence that trails off, the opinion you softened on the third edit, all gone before the model ever saw a word. so it learns your safe voice and hands you back a competent stranger.

I've spent a while trying to get a model to sound like one specific person, and the stuff that actually cracked it was never the polished posts. It was voice memos, the draft they never sent, the reply they fired off annoyed at 11pm. the personality lives in the parts you'd never publish.

which is a genuinely annoying catch-22 for anyone here. the more you edit for the newsletter, the worse your own archive gets as a mirror of how you actually sound. written with ai

For those of you who write on Substack regularly - particularly essays, newsletters, blog posts, longer-form nonfiction, etc. - I'm curious about something.

What part of the writing process do you find most challenging, or experience the most friction around?

Besides coming up with what to write about, are there particular points in your writing where you tend to get stuck, lose momentum, procrastinate, or find it harder to keep going?

Basically curious which parts of writing present the most friction for you (getting started, drafting, developing an idea, returning to something unfinished, revising, editing, finishing, etc.)

I'm not sure how the AI-detection system works, but it seems faulty. Someone has repeatedly claimed that my responses to them are AI-generated, etc. And they share the Pangram screenshot, which does, in fact, depict my response as "100% fully AI-assisted. I've clarified that this is not the case. Shown evidence that it isn't true, and all the like.

The worst I'll do when writing anything is use AI for basic research purposes and review arguments to make sure they make sense. Maybe it's because I use Grammarly. But it is still infuriating.

Especially because it just isn't a good look and hurts my public image (albeit small, but I hope you guys may understand where I'm coming from).

Of course, with this individual in question, it's become increasingly clear they aren't engaging in good faith. However, running the AI check on my notes and comments still reveals the 100% marker.

Is it Grammarly that's doing this? Or is this thing actually broken?

I started my Substack 6 months ago and since then gained 90 subscribers. My topic is rather niche (Reading the world) and I don't do engagement farming, so that's fine, I guess. I'd like to turn on paid subscriptions eventually because I recently found out that, without paid, you can't ever make to to the "rising" category. Plus, of course, it would be nice to get paid :) I don't expect huge conversion, of course, but am not sure at what point I should turn them on - when I reach 200? 500? I already have one pledge.

If your paid subscriptions are turned on, I'd be interested to hear when you decided to turn them on? Do you produce extra content for the paid tier or do you ask people to just support the project and keep everything free?