How to succeed on Substack by Ozy Brennan

And why people who are motivated by impact (like you!) should post more often

[At 80,000 Hours, we’ve been considering how we should use our own Substack to help people find impactful careers. We asked Ozy and found their advice so valuable that we asked if they’d publish it here for our readers. In the future, we might experiment with other guest posts or more direct, actionable advice like this, so let us know what you think!]

---

Broadly speaking, there are two approaches to Substack: you can make a serious attempt at a career as a Substacker, or you can write intermittently whenever you have something to say. I think very few people should make a serious attempt at Substacking as a career, and a lot of people should consider writing intermittently.

Intermittent Substacking

If you notice yourself explaining something over and over again, you should write a blog post. People interested in high-impact careers likely have a lot of thoughts about the world’s most important issues, ranging from the broad and philosophical (cause prioritisation) to the extremely specialised (flaws in specific studies everyone keeps citing). If you post them publicly, people you don’t know can also benefit from your knowledge and experience. It also saves you time because now you can just send someone a link. Good public writing can also be a source of career capital: people stumble across your post and conclude you know what you’re talking about. (Of course, by the same token, bad public writing can harm you.)

Substack is designed for news, not for posts people will be reading in five years. Reading a Substack’s archive is a pain, and most Substacks are poorly indexed by Google. Therefore, if you take the intermittent-posting approach, I recommend posting to both a Substack and a separate stand-alone website (for inspiration, consider Andy Masley or dynomight’s pages). Your Substack allows people who are interested in your thoughts to subscribe and be automatically notified when you have something new to say, while the stand-alone website serves as a canonical reference.

In the rest of the post, I’ll assume you’ve decided to try to Substack professionally.

Why Substack professionally?

Communicating important ideas can make the world better. But why would you choose Substack over a more conventional path, like journalism or working for a think tank? The primary advantage of Substacking is that it allows you to directly reach your readers, without gatekeepers.

First, Substacking allows you to cheaply test your fit for writing as a career. Starting a new Substack takes only a few minutes. As soon as you finish a post, you can post it and see what people think. You don’t have to arduously search for a journalism job or pitch a freelance article to dozens of publications. You can quickly figure out whether you dislike writing or have a hard time keeping to a posting schedule. You can also discover whether there’s an audience for what you have to say.

Second, if you start a Substack, you can immediately begin covering the topics that you think are most important to the world. Even today, in mainstream journalism, people often have to spend a lot of time covering boilerplate politics or crime stories before they can work their way up to covering the world’s most pressing issues. On your Substack, you can decide to cover what matters most.

Third, many conventional media companies are unwilling to cover niche stories that don’t have broad appeal. On a Substack, you can specialise in articles that have a small but influential audience — for example, articles about risks from biotechnology or advanced AI. You can also aim your posts at a more specific audience: for example, you can write about AI in a way that involves a lot of technical detail that would bore mainstream audiences (and that doesn’t feature pictures of the Terminator).

Who succeeds on Substack?

Always Be Blogging

Substacker Nate Silver says the #1 secret to Substacking is “Always Be Blogging.” I think he’s right.

If you look at the leaderboard of bestselling Substacks, you’ll discover they all have something in common: they put out a lot of posts. Five to seven posts a week isn’t uncommon. Substacker Max Read writes:

But the key lesson, the thing I would impart to any aspiring bloggers, content creators, or newsletter proprietors, is that the cornerstone of internet success is not intelligence or novelty or outrageousness or even speed, but regularity. There are all kinds of things you can do to develop and retain an audience -- break news, loudly talk about your own independence, make your Twitter avatar a photo of a cute girl -- but the single most important thing you can do is post regularly and never stop.

To be sure, successful Substackers are good writers. But writing a bestselling Substack requires much less writing skill than writing for a prestigious mainstream publication such as The New Yorker. The primary skill you need is the ability to write a lot.

Of course, publishing seven posts a week is very difficult to do if you have a day job. And writing a lot of quick takes can trade off against the longer, more thoughtful posts that actually make change in the world. Nate Silver recommends aiming for two blog posts a week and not dropping below one; I think this is a reasonable goal for new Substackers.

How do you write that much?

At least at first, you should try to write every day. Not all prolific writers write every day, but trying to write every day is the easiest way to learn if you have it in you to be prolific. At first, don’t aim for any particular standard of quality (as long as the post is coherent). Write about whatever topic is easiest for you to write about and that someone besides you and your mom might conceivably be interested in. If you’re cut out for Substacking, within a few weeks, you’ll discover that writing is easier than not writing. You’ll feel restless and itchy when you miss a day, and you’ll yearn to get back to your keyboard.

As Silver’s post makes clear, “Always Be Blogging” isn’t just about posting a lot: it’s a lifestyle. When you’re in the shower or doing the dishes, you’re thinking about your writing. When you’re talking to your friends, you’re seeing which lines get a laugh and which ideas they can poke holes in. When you’re reading a book, you’re taking notes (at least internally) to see if you want to write about it. Having enough content for three to five posts a week requires absolute obsession.

Depending on your personality, you read that paragraph and said either “you want me to WHAT?” or “wait, all that fun stuff counts as work?” If you’re in the second category, you’re cut out for Substack.

Find your voice

Some forms of journalism reward being normal and interchangeable: regardless of whose byline is on the story, The New York Times front-page articles are written in the voice of The New York Times. But successful Substackers are idiosyncratic. You’d never mistake a Heather Cox Richardson post for a Matt Yglesias post, and neither of them read like Scott Alexander.

People read Substacks because they form a parasocial relationship with the writer: readers feel like they know Scott Alexander or Matt Yglesias the same way they know their coworkers or their mom. The best Substacks feel like getting a personal email from your friend who lives in the computer.

Embrace your weirdness. If there’s a topic you can’t stop thinking about, write about it. If you have an unusual perspective or worldview, apply it. If you have an odd sense of humour, make jokes; if you live an interesting life, tell anecdotes; if you keep going down research rabbitholes, fill your blog with statistics and charts. Try to write something that only you can write.

So, how do you do this?

First, the simplest strategy is what Stephen King recommends in his book On Writing: read a lot, write a lot. Once you’ve written a few tens of thousands of words, you’ll have a much better sense of what ‘you’ sound like.

Second, you should also try to acquire something unique to say. Become curious about and interested in the world. Learn about things that intrigue you. Notice when you don’t understand something, and ask questions. Read books and studies. Observe the world around you. Cold-email people you find interesting and ask to pick their brains.

Third, you probably need to work on your anxiety. The most common cause of stilted writing is fear.

Some people write in a way they think will prove people should take them seriously: they use jargon and long words, write in a very formal register, and never tell jokes. Other people write defensively, with so many caveats and disclaimers and hedges that it’s nearly impossible to figure out what they think, much less get angry at them about it. Still others can manage a clear sentence but flinch away from anything that feels too personal or too revealing: they don’t want to admit to not knowing things, making mistakes, having cringe interests, or struggling with normal human problems. Because they don’t want to get too personal, their articles feel like anyone could write them.

Ultimately, any communications career requires believing and acting like you have something important to say and people should listen to you. It’s normal to feel scared of making people think you’re claiming you’re better than you really are. But if you really think you have nothing worth saying, you should pick a different career. If you think you have something to say, you should say it plainly without desperately trying to make yourself look like someone worth listening to. The awkward intermediate state serves no one.

No one is holding your readers at gunpoint and forcing them to read your blog; if they subscribe, they want to hear from you. Give them what they want.

A shortcut that often helps is pretending you’re writing casually to a friend, not as if you’re sending out an article to an audience of strangers. You can even pick out a specific person you’re writing to.

Fourth, you can do deliberate practice to improve your writing. Carefully study George Orwell’s Politics and the English Language, the best essay ever written about how to write nonfiction that clarifies people’s thinking. I also highly recommend Steven Pinker’s The Sense of Style, which teaches you how to write ‘classic style’: a standard, clear nonfiction style from which you can develop your own voice.

Deliberately imitate the style of writers you admire. This gives you a better sense of what tools they use, so you can decide whether to adopt them yourself. You can even try transcribing other people’s blog posts or reading them out loud, while paying attention to their word choice, essay structure, and construction of sentences and paragraphs.

You should also try reading your writing out loud. Make any tweaks you notice. If you stumble over a sentence, it probably needs to be rewritten.

Should you ask a friend to be your editor or beta reader? It depends. A good beta reader is invaluable. But many beta readers have bad taste. Others suggest edits that they would make but that don’t suit your own voice; if you pay attention to them, you wind up being an inferior imitation of someone else. It’s worth being picky and trying to find someone who really gets what you’re trying to do.

The saying goes that a reader is always right that something isn’t working and almost never right about why. Often, the most useful beta reading or editing is someone reporting honestly on their reading experience. When did they get confused? Bored? Find themselves zoning out? Start laughing? What did they find particularly interesting? What did they understand the main idea to be?

Some people obsessively edit their pieces to try to make them as good as they can be. Sometimes, this is a way of coping with anxiety; if the piece is perfect, they think, no one could possibly be angry at them about it. (False.) Editing also allows you to indefinitely put off the terrifying moment of hitting ’publish.’ If that sounds like you, you probably shouldn’t seek an editor or beta reader. You might even try publishing a piece without editing it first.

Editing a post a lot can make it better. But if you want to succeed on Substack, it’s better to have more, imperfect posts than fewer posts, each of which is a shining gem of writerly excellence. You’ll need to figure out your own balance between seeking feedback that makes your work better and churning out work quickly.

Use large language models with care

I would urge new Substackers to use large language models only for research and brainstorming and never for composition.

Most of the time, if you use an LLM to compose a blog post, it will sound like an LLM. If someone wants to hear from an LLM, they can go to Claude or ChatGPT themselves and have an interactive conversation customised to their specific needs. They don’t need to go to Substack for it. Your Substack readers want to hear from you.

Some experienced, successful Substackers use large language models to compose blog posts. (Fewer than you’d think — successful Substackers are very selected for finding it easy to write a lot.) But they have already developed their voices. They can throw 50,000 words of their writing into a Claude Project so Claude knows how to sound like them. They know how to tweak an AI-generated paragraph so that it sounds just right.

When you’re a new writer, you haven’t found your voice yet. And the slow process of writing — mulling over word choice, restructuring sentences, rephrasing clauses, reordering paragraphs, alternately putting in and taking out commas — is how you find your voice. Early in your writing career, building writing skills is more important than anything specific you say.

Have a thick skin, but consider good faith criticisms

If you have a popular Substack, it’s possible that strangers on the Internet will hate you. Their criticism might have nothing to do with you — they might not even see you as a person with real feelings that can be hurt. Still, if enough people read your writing, you may find the ones who say breathtakingly awful things to you that they never would face-to-face.

Criticism is a vocational hazard of online writing, but there are ways to manage it. To some extent, this is a matter of personal fit. Successful Substackers are usually disagreeable people who like arguing. That doesn’t mean they like being mobbed online — no one does — but if you’ve always enjoyed a heated debate, you’re far more likely to be able to learn how to handle online hatred.

Practice also helps. The first time a mob of people tells you how awful you are, it really hurts; the hundredth time, you sigh and say “well, I guess that’s enough X for today.” Social media is valuable for promoting your writing, but it can also expose you to a constant torrent of vitriol. Many successful Substackers post on social media but never look at their mentions. As always, be sure to prioritise your mental health.

You can also try thinking about criticism in a more helpful way. Substacking is one of the few careers in which being widely hated is good for you. People who are neutral about you and people who hate you buy the same number of paid subscriptions, i.e. zero. People who hate you won’t shut up about you, and so are acting as your unpaid marketing department. The more often you’re mentioned — positively or negatively — the more readers will check you out, and some of them will be pleasantly surprised by what they see. While being the target of hatred is painful, it’s good for your readership. If you remember this fact, you’ll have an easier time emotionally handling criticism.

In addition to making you miserable, being unable to cope with the hatred of strangers makes your writing worse. As I said above, fear is the #1 cause of stilted writing. And you risk audience capture: becoming so afraid of angering the people who like you that you say only what they want to hear, even if it’s not true. So you should practice building a thick skin whenever possible.

However, you shouldn’t completely ignore all criticism. When you’re criticised online, it sometimes is your fault: you said something false, did something morally wrong, or wrote in such an unclear way that everyone misunderstood your point. As a Substacker, you don’t have an editor: criticism from your audience is your only source of feedback. It’s tempting, in the face of an enormous horde of people who will hate you no matter what you do, to tune out any feedback. Instead, you have to figure out how to preserve your sanity while also gracefully accepting good-faith, accurate critique from people you respect.

One way to balance this is to never accept criticism from anyone you wouldn’t accept advice from. Some people are irrational, have poor character, or simply have no idea what they’re talking about. These people are far more likely than rational, informed people with good character to be mad online. If someone you respect gives you a piece of criticism, you should take it seriously. But random strangers with no particular expertise on a topic rarely have insight you should listen to.