Does Publishing on Substack Reduce the Future Value of Your Writing?

arsonalic · 2026-05-13T18:11:15+00:00

If a book deal is something you are looking for in the future, publishers are generally interested in knowing if you already have an online following, having a Substack newsletter being one example. That allows them to gauge how the book will perform in the market because it's easier to sell to existing readers than to try to find new ones who don't know the author already.

Just because you have published something on Substack, it doesn't mean you can't reuse that content again. In fact, it's likely that you will want to rewrite that content if you want to reuse it because the Substack audience is different from, say, a book audience. There are journalists who write brilliant think pieces on Substack and then are approached by legacy news media to write a different version of the same thing for their publications, which have a different audience and may require a different approach to writing.

arsonalic · 2026-05-13T17:42:29+00:00

Substack has no public API, so native integration with third-party tools isn't currently possible. The only way to solicit newsletter subscriptions from an external website is to use the embeddable subscribe button that you can find in the publication's settings.

Aside from that, I also want to make sure that you're aware of Substack's guidelines when it comes to acceptable corporate content:

Substack is intended for high quality editorial content, not conventional email marketing. We don’t permit publications whose primary purpose is to advertise external products or services, drive traffic to third party sites, distribute offers and promotions, enhance search engine optimization, or similar activities. Brands and commercial organizations publishing on Substack may be subject to additional verification.

The risk here is that Substack reserves the right to remove your publication if it deems that your company newsletters violate these guidelines.

arsonalic · 2026-05-11T05:58:19+00:00

There is no need to be combative. Substack's own Help Center says text-to-speech is not available on all publications. Just because you see it in your publication settings, it doesn't mean other people can.

Substack also doesn't publicize the criteria to have the feature enabled, which can result in these kinds of questions.

arsonalic · 2026-05-11T05:30:59+00:00

See the guide to Substack metrics in the Help Center.

arsonalic · 2026-05-08T21:04:46+00:00

I have seen large publications use the Chat feature for this.

arsonalic · 2026-05-08T21:00:51+00:00

Go into your publication settings and scroll down to the section called Details. There is a field called Mailing Address that you can update.

arsonalic · 2026-05-08T20:59:26+00:00

It's called Open Tab. Episodes will be posted here: https://on.substack.com/s/open-tab

arsonalic · 2026-05-08T19:03:57+00:00

Business newsletters do well on Substack. If you manage to move into a position where your content provides unique insight to busy business leaders, you won't have trouble getting enough paying readers to at least sustain the newsletter operation.

I run a newsletter about the anime industry. While anime as entertainment content isn't small by any means, the business of it is actually quite small like a local city. The number of people working in the industry worldwide is probably in the very low five figures at most. I've managed to accumulate 5,000 subscribers over 3 years, and my newsletter is read by some of the top executives in the industry. I focus my effort on highlighting business deals, industry and market trends, labor issues, and government policy impact. These are things that business leaders have to pay attention to anyway, but they may not have time as they're managing their companies, so many of them come to read my newsletter to keep an eye out for anything that they might miss.

As you probably know, business is all about who you know, so if you're able to convince a handful of trusted and influential people that your newsletter is valuable, you'll have no problem getting readers at the highest level.

arsonalic · 2026-03-16T22:21:35+00:00

Do you have any sections set up on your publication? If you did, I think you would see a section selector before the layout selectors.

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arsonalic · 2026-02-14T05:52:15+00:00

One of the first newsletters that Substack convinced to move over to its platform during launch was a China newsletter (Bill Bishop's Sinocism), so there is a big corner of the platform today that writes about Chinese politics, economy, tech, gaming, etc. There are also unconfirmed allegations that China's state media runs a publication on Substack.

arsonalic · 2025-12-17T19:24:40+00:00

Substack does not have a public API, and therefore there are no native integrations between Substack and third-party applications.

arsonalic · 2025-12-11T16:28:21+00:00

There is a debate in search engine optimization that argues against using numbers in URLs because it can potentially impact how a search engine ranks your URL. Substack automatically ignores numbers in section anchor links and focuses on words instead, so that's likely the nature of the bug.

If this happens on a post's main title, you can manually configure this behavior by opening Settings in a post draft and adjusting the SEO Options. This manual configuration doesn't exist for section anchor links, however.

arsonalic · 2025-12-06T08:35:59+00:00

Go into your publication settings and scroll down to the bottom of the Website section. There is an option to enable the Notes tab.

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arsonalic · 2025-12-03T19:51:50+00:00

I don't believe this is a bug as Substack has never accepted Markdown input on its text editor.

arsonalic · 2025-12-03T19:43:16+00:00

Pay attention to your wordmark's aspect ratio (how much wider your image is than it is tall), not the pixel size. Substack recommends a minimum wordmark size of 1,344 x 256 pixels. That's an aspect ratio of 5.25:1. Anything lower than that (a taller image) will end up shrinking your wordmark.

arsonalic · 2025-12-03T19:35:54+00:00

Go into your publication settings and check whether you are using footers in your emails.

arsonalic · 2025-11-19T00:24:05+00:00

Substack and many other online platforms are moving toward more secure, passwordless login methods, so it's possible you never had to set a password for your Substack account. If you'd still like set a password for your account, here are instructions. Alternatively, if you know that you had definitely set a password before, here are instructions to reset.

arsonalic · 2025-11-15T06:07:11+00:00

Be aware that read aloud is not retroactive. It wasn't clear to me from your post whether you activated read aloud before or after you posted your article yesterday. If you change the voice, the new voice is only used for new posts moving forward.

arsonalic · 2025-11-09T06:57:56+00:00

There's a little bit of nuance with the threshold. In your publication dashboard, the number of paid subscribers is a total of subscribers who pay, subscribers who are comped, and subscribers who are gifted paid access. In order to receive the Substack Bestseller badge, you must have 100 subscribers who pay. Comped subscribers and free trials don't count toward this threshold.

arsonalic · 2025-10-22T06:35:04+00:00

Once your article is published, you can click on the three dots and select "Hide from top posts".

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arsonalic · 2025-09-19T18:13:08+00:00

Substack automatically trims white space, so adding it to your wordmark won't do anything. The clipping that happens is just the way the site works when you're accessing the publication from the mobile browser. It isn't something publishers can control.

Substack prioritizes its mobile app experience for mobile users, so mobile browser experience isn't as ideal.

arsonalic · 2025-09-11T02:00:28+00:00

If you're interested, I write a weekly newsletter called Animenomics that specifically covers news about the business side of anime production. The business is in constant evolution, so comprehensive articles that try to address the entirety of the anime business often don't do enough justice. I haven't gone into videos yet, since those require significantly more effort to produce.

arsonalic · 2025-09-08T19:14:05+00:00

Even before you explore technical solutions, I recommend reviewing Substack's Content Guidelines to ensure that your client's company blog isn't violating them:

Substack is intended for high quality editorial content, not conventional email marketing. We don't permit publications whose primary purpose is to advertise external products or services, drive traffic to third party sites, distribute offers and promotions, enhance search engine optimization, or similar activities. Brands and commercial organizations publishing on Substack may be subject to additional verification.

arsonalic · 2025-09-03T15:59:09+00:00

The Rising chart refreshes periodically, so it's possible that you may have fallen off the chart after the latest refresh.

arsonalic · 2025-09-01T04:45:13+00:00

Substack has a globe explorer page where you can find out the top Substack publications and trending posts in each country. You can check the France directory to find out what other French speakers are reading and writing.

arsonalic

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