For Authors and Publishers

Writers use their Substacks to explore ideas, discuss their books, share their creative process and behind-the-scenes information with their readers, and even workshop with them ideas for future books.

Similar to social media, Substack provides a live, organic space where a writer can gather their most committed readers and continue the conversation about their books, long after the spotlight moves away from them after publication date. Comments and community tools encourage a sense of community amongst supporters.

Unlike social media, however, on Substack writers have a direct relationship with readers. Algorithms don’t decide who sees your work—posts are delivered directly via email. This means that while the average Instagram account sees an engagement rate of 1% to 5%, on Substack we see open rates in the 30% to 70% range, depending on the size of the mailing list. Book links in posts of Substack writers get click rates ranging from 5% to 15%, compared with the typical 0.08% to 0.1% on social media. After running an experiment with a bookseller, one Substack writer found that 26% of the readers clicking on her book link actually bought the book—another record-breaking number compared with book reviews from magazines and other outlets.

You will always own your content and your relationships with your subscribers and your intellectual property. We make it easy to import and export your archive, email list, and payments information to and from other platforms.

On Substack, writers can get paid instead of paying for an email newsletter. Substack is free to get started. We don’t make money unless you do. If you turn on paid subscriptions, Substack will keep a 10% cut of revenues for operating costs like tech development and customer support. When you turn on paid, Substack’s platform fee is 10%, and the credit-card payment processor, Stripe, also takes a fee, of 2.9% plus 30 cents per transaction.