Should You Use Substack for Your Email Newsletter? Or Something Else?

Paper airplane photo by Alex wolf mx; mailbox photo by Rinck Content Studio on Unsplash

In any business class I offer these days, the question I’m asked most often is some version of: “Should I use Substack for my email newsletter?”

This question is challenging to answer since there is no universal answer—there never is when it comes to business strategy. And that’s what this question is really asking: Should I use Substack as part of my business strategy? I have to know quite a bit about your business before I can begin to offer a helpful response. And, annoyingly to me, not only has the purpose and scope of Substack changed over time, but Substack has scrambled what people think a newsletter is for.

So every time this question is asked, I feel like I have to go back to basics. We can’t talk about Substack until we talk about your intention for your email newsletter.

What purpose does your email newsletter serve? Here’s one distinction that can help us reach an answer quickly.

• Do you want your newsletter to help you maintain a relationship or connection with an existing reader or fan base (and/or colleagues)? If so, I’d lean toward using Kit, Mailerlite, or whatever email marketing service meets your needs that’s not Substack.
• Do you want the newsletter to increase your visibility with total strangers who don’t know your work yet, to help grow your readership? Then I’d consider Substack.

There’s overlap between these, of course. But consider which one is your primary purpose. If you want to do both, that might mean you should have two distinct newsletters (and maybe one of them is a Substack effort). Or it might mean the newsletter you have right now, if it’s trying to accomplish both things at once, isn’t serving anyone well, including you.

Substack has little or nothing to do with the traditional author newsletter

The most valuable platform asset any author can have is a reliable way to directly reach readers over a long period of time, without relying on some third party (like a social media platform, publisher or retailer). A traditional author newsletter can accomplish this. What you write in such a newsletter doesn’t have to meet a high bar of being interesting to strangers, nor does it have to be discoverable, visible, viral, or all that shareable. It only has to maintain the interest of the people who already appreciate you.

Unfortunately, this purpose has become harder to argue for in the era of Substack because Substack, at every turn, invites you to think about your newsletter as a way to grow your readership and as a product to monetize. And charging for an email newsletter is one of the hardest business models to pull off unless you’re already well known or already skilled at being a creator in the so-called Creator Economy. The average author newsletter is not something you would ever charge for—that defeats its whole purpose.

However, some writers want be a content creator, and/or they use Substack to build a multi-faceted, sometimes multi-contributor publication, and/or have succeeded at earning money from it (just as some authors like to create content for TikTok or start a podcast, or be a YouTuber.) See Sari Botton at Oldster or Becky Tuch at Lit Mag News for two standout examples. In such cases, starting a Substack isn’t so different from trying to start any type of profitable publication or media venture, no matter how small. You’re treating it as part of your creative work or as your body of work that’s meant to grow a readership over time. That describes my newsletters, although they’re not on Substack (more on that later).

Did blogging ever appeal to you? Do you remember all the tips and tricks for being an online writer who gets read and shared (who goes “viral”)? All that applies to a Substack newsletter that gets read and shared. In fact, I call Substack “blogging 2.0” because, by default, every email you send also becomes an article on your Substack profile (unless you suppress it, but I find that rare in practice). Anyone can read it, search engines can index it, and people can like, comment, and share.

This is why Substack has become recommended so often to writers as a way of becoming visible and building a platform. It has community marketing and built-in discovery. Traditionally it’s been hard to share email newsletters in a way that’s seamless and pulls in new subscribers. But anyone on Substack can discover, recommend, feature, and share your work. In fact, each writer is nudged to recommend other publications.

Substack also added Notes, a social media layer on top of everything. The result is a visible community of readers and writers recommending each other and that network effect drives faster subscriber growth. If you don’t already maintain an email newsletter list somewhere else, there can be little downside to taking advantage of those network effects while they last.

Last but not least, Substack is free, and it removes the tech barrier. Substack only makes money if you charge for your newsletter, and setup is simple. It can be a great solution for writers who get overwhelmed by email marketing services that require navigating a bit of tech, and writers get the networking benefits of being on Substack.

Substack might not grow your readership by that much

The writers who succeed on Substack usually arrive with a large public presence already, or with ready access to a big pool of potential subscribers. The platform’s early stars were established names. None of that means a lesser-known writer can’t build something real, but it does mean you shouldn’t expect growth just by showing up and sharing random musings. Unknown and unpublished writers have a hard time convincing total strangers to sign up for their newsletters unless they’ve thought through their content strategy and why anyone cares what they have to say. If you are stepping into the creator role, your newsletter has to be about something.

If you start a newsletter to stay in touch with people who’ve read your work, and plan to share what you’re working on, what you’ve just published, events, behind-the-scenes notes, discussion of what you’re reading, then Substack doesn’t offer you anything special (except the fact it’s free). Children’s author Meg Medina has a traditional author newsletter like this, as do many published authors. For this kind of newsletter, you do not need Substack’s creator machinery. You need a reliable email service that automates sign-ups, stores addresses, and archives your issues. That’s it.

Sure, you can use Substack for this, but you’re not taking advantage of its strengths or what I’d consider its intended purpose.

Also, Substack works best as a nonfiction platform. If you’re trying to build an audience for fiction or plan to serialize a novel on Substack, reconsider. It’s rarely a good fit for delivering fiction, and serialization in particular tends to be met with silence unless you’re an exceptional marketer. The fiction writers who do well on Substack are almost always functioning as community leaders or dispensing writing and publishing advice, such as Lincoln Michel at Counter Craft.

Also consider: Do you read other Substack newsletters? Are you active on Notes? If you already have a Substack profile that you’re tending to, if you have colleagues and friends there, if there are authors you admire, you probably have more to gain by being on Substack. If you don’t subscribe to any Substack publications, if you don’t pay for any, if you don’t even know where to begin to find like-minded people, then I consider it far less useful and less attractive as a choice. You’ll be going in cold.

Other drawbacks to using Substack

It’s terrible for pure selling. This matters more than people expect. If some part of your email activity is marketing and promotion—new releases for a prolific self-published author, classes (like mine), merchandise, a shop—Substack is the wrong tool. It’s built to sell newsletter subscriptions, not products. For newsletters that sometimes have an e-commerce side, you may want a service like Kit or MailerLite.

Beware of the app. Substack also has an app, and some readers consume everything there and never receive your emails at all. I’ve seen Substack enthusiasts proudly announce they’ve unsubscribed from every email and now read only in the app. Think about what that means: if your readers live in the app, then an algorithm decides whether your writing reaches them. Or leaving Substack means losing access to your readers entirely. That’s the social-media bargain all over again.

The hype itself is a hazard. I’ve seen writers pile onto Substack out of FOMO, afraid of being “left behind.” Then, when they can’t gain traction—because publishing on Substack no more guarantees an audience than starting a blog, podcast, or YouTube channel does—they conclude that email newsletters are overrated, or decide that “email is dead.” They miss out on the first and most important value of the email newsletter: directly and consistently reaching repeat readers and fans.

Substack can change the rules at any time. Substack is built on venture-capital funding, which means what’s here today may not be here tomorrow. Terms, features, the algorithm, and in-house promotion methods all change—often in ways that increasingly amplify the biggest publications at the expense of smaller ones. To Substack’s credit, it lets you export your subscriber list—names, emails, even payment data—so you’re never truly trapped. But rebuilding a home base elsewhere is painful and slow, so go in knowing what you’d do if the platform changes in a way you don’t like.

What are the alternatives to Substack?

These are most commonly used among authors, but it’s not an exhaustive list.

• Kit (formerly ConvertKit) is a leading choice for hard-nosed marketers, with automation and sequencing Substack doesn’t offer. It’s what I use. They offer a free plan.
• MailerLite is popular with professional, full-time authors.
• Mailchimp is the legacy default, but be warned: since Intuit took it over, pricing has climbed steeply. Some authors have moved to Substack specifically to escape those fees.
• Ghost is worth a look if you want a website and newsletter platform all in one.

The best practice for building any healthy list, regardless of platform, is collecting voluntary sign-ups on your own website and social channels, often around the time you have new work coming out, and whenever you have a media appearance.

What I actually do and why

People find it clarifying to hear how I’ve made these choices myself, so here it is.

I run a free newsletter, Electric Speed, which now reaches about 33,000 people, and a paid newsletter, The Bottom Line, which I started in 2015 and now earns six figures a year with roughly 2,500 paid subscribers and 5,500 free subscribers after ten years of steady, slow growth. I do not use Substack for either one, and I’m not switching.

But I am active on Substack. I have a Substack profile, I use Notes (the social layer), I comment on other people’s publications the same way I’d comment on their blogs, and I subscribe to more than a hundred Substacks because it’s my job to know and report on conversations in the writing and publishing community. I even maintain a “secret” Substack newsletter that I post to maybe once or twice a year—usually something personal that doesn’t fit into other places I publish. If people find me there, good; the genuinely curious end up at my website. You can harvest Substack’s marketing and networking power without putting all your eggs in its basket.

Don’t give up your own homebase

Your own website should remain your homebase, and Substack—if you use it—should serve as a complement to that, not a replacement.

What if you have a blog? Should you move it to Substack? The right call here depends a lot on the strength of what you already have. If you’ve built a strong website/blog over years, with meaningful organic traffic, maybe customized archives or other bells and whistles, I’d be very cautious about uprooting all of it to chase Substack growth. If you’re starting from scratch, that’s different, and leaning on Substack’s discovery engine makes more sense. But even then, I’d still maintain your own author website, which remains important for many reasons.

What if you have an existing newsletter? Should you move to Substack? There isn’t a right answer for everyone. It’s going to depend on how long you’ve been running your newsletter, how much you value your existing archives and data, and what you expect to do in the future. The more value you derive from your existing newsletter, or the more important it is to your business today, the less I’d advocate for a switch. (You can still use Substack, maybe for a side project or conversation, like I do.) However, if your newsletter has been inconsistent, abandoned, or not yet demonstrated value (perhaps due to lack of commitment), and you feel it’s easy to pull the plug without pain, by all means start on Substack.

What I’d warn against is trying to have it both ways—posting or sending the same content in two places. It can create confusion about where you actually “live,” and you’re increasing the amount of work for yourself (and people may end up on both lists and get confused). That said, I know of professionals who do this. Personally, it would drive me mad.

So, Substack or not?

If you don’t currently blog or send a newsletter and the thought of a Substack lights you up—you already know what you’d write about, you’re reading Substacks that make you feel you have something to add—that enthusiasm is the single best predictor of success, because you’ll need it to sustain your effort.

If you’re shrugging, unsure what you’d even write in a Substack, maybe skip it and consider trying out Notes (the social media layer) and see if you derive value from the conversations and community. You can always start something down the road.

If you want to be a creator and grow an audience through a newsletter, Substack is the obvious choice right now, especially if you know you’ll want to monetize. If you don’t like Substack for some reason, top alternatives are Beehiiv and Ghost, although they do not have the same network effects.

Your turn

What’s your experience been? Have you moved your list to Substack? If so, do you think it was the right move? Conversely, have you left Substack and what did you lose in the process? Do you regret it? Let everyone know in the comments.