Writing for Substack

Launch your Substack and grow your readership in this inspiring, practical five-week course.

Substack is an amazing platform for writers because it requires no design skills, it keeps you motivated to write, and it helps you grow your audience organically over time. Whether you want to share personal stories, share your expertise, serialize a novel, or simply provide a glimpse into the things you love, Substack can help you find readers and create community around your passion. If you want to earn money for your writing, Substack provides tools to do that too.

Note: (If you are a published author, choose Substack for Authors, which is designed specifically for published authors and which focuses on using Substack as part of an author platform).

In this course, you will:

• choose a subject for your substack
• Come up with a title and URL
• create your profile and logline
• determine your intended audience and theme
• set a writing and publishing schedule
• write one to two posts per week
• learn how to make the Substack growth engine work for you

At the end of the course, you will have a professional-looking Substack with several completed posts, and you will be on your way to building an engaged audience.

What you get: More than 3 hours of video lessons, 20 written lessons, and ongoing discussion forums so that you can connect with the instructor. New lessons will unlock each week. You have access to the course for six months, so you can complete the lessons at your own pace.

Feedback (optional). To get feedback on your posts from the instructor, please choose Writing for Substack Plus at checkout.

There are no live sessions, so you can engage with the lessons and complete your assignments on your own schedule.

This course is for you if:

• You are a regular Substack reader and have been meaning to start your own or
• You started a Substack but rarely post or
• You are a blogger who hasn't yet used Substack or
• You created a newsletter elsewhere and want to migrate to Substack and
• You want to create audience and community around your expertise or your passion.

Here are a few Substacks created in the first iteration this course in February, 2023:

• Dear Fiction by Brooke Lea Foster
• Alma Genetrix by Alexander Lowe McAdams
• The Vinyl Room by Andres Celati

And the live-session Litcamp version of this course resulted in a San-Francisco centric Substack about Golden Gate Park, a newsletter about movies, and a delightfully illustrated newsletter about "medical mishaps"

• 1,017 Acres: Life in the Park by Susan Freinkel:
• Colleenie Watches Movies by Colleen Gonzalez
• Oops My Brain by Natalie Mead

Why I'm teaching this course:

I've been writing The Caffeinated Writer newsletter for a decade, in addition to my author newsletter. I also publish work by new and established writers through Fiction Attic Press. For years, I paid over a thousand dollars per year to send out my newsletters on Mailchimp. At the end of 2022, I realized the pricing model just didn't make sense, and I migrated all of my newsletters to Substack. I also created a new publication, The Wandering Writer, to share stories about writing and travel. I have been surprised and delighted by the motivation the Substack system provides, and by the way my audience grows organically without the use of time-consuming "lead magnets" and "marketing funnels." With Substack, it's all about the writing.

Among my audience, I notice a lot of subscribers have a "coming soon" page but haven't yet started their newsletter. I created this course to inspire you to start writing and hit the publish button.