10 Things I wish I knew Before Starting Substack

Advice and Tools for Beginning and Advanced Authors Alike

Only the top 1% of writers know:

Growth on substack is all about the tags. You must painstakingly put every single word of your piece into the tags section one at a time. Then, one tag at a time, haul out the thesaurus and put in all their synonyms, too. If you want to bump your gross income up from 60k to 120k in your first year like I did, you’ll put in all the common typos for these tags as their own separate tags, too.

I interviewed the authors of 100 viral posts and they taught me this one neat trick:

Challenge a widely-held belief in your post’s headline. Start the body of the post with a background story that goes all the way back to your childhood to earn authenticity. Use “You” and “They” a lot; this builds trust in your audience. Showcase the fallibility of cultural norms and make a subtle commentary on the current injustice, and future promise, of LLMs run by AI without taking a stance for or against them. Conclude your argument without ever addressing the content of the headline - by this point your readers have forgotten what it said (you want to attract attention by seeming controversial without offending anyone). Being well-read will inform your posts, but never write anything longer than 220 words.

99% of writers don’t understand this simple fact:

You can pay an editor, or you can save a lot of $ by becoming your own. After finishing a piece, ask your parent, spouse, sibling, or child to run you over with the family car. The limited edition version of my book, Blinding Light for the Uninitiated, includes a handy reference chart so you can safely adjust the speed of the collision based on your vehicle’s weight and your body size. If you’re living alone or don’t own a car you can improvise by jumping head-first into the dozer blade of a construction vehicle at a nearby worksite. You may now look at your finished work with a fresh perspective and say: “Wow, who wrote this?” This technique comes with a bonus - you have new lived trauma you can discuss passionately in your piece.

What analyzing 1,000 articles told me about exponential growth on substack:

Many authors neglect world building. Every serial should start with at least 10 pages of world building, and shorts should be at least 50% world-building. Even non-fiction requires some world-building, but Fantasy and Sci-fi works need this up front. Imagine serving the cheese before the wine? I need not say more. Writers who take my writing class get a free one-month discount for my world-building calculator subscription service.

Shakespearian dialect. This strengthens world-building. Your characters should sound sophisticated and use a lot of made-up words. Most of them should end in “-éd.” This makes your characters - and you - sound intelligent, especially if they use three adverbs in every sentence. My book, Blinding Light for the Uninitiated, contains a list of trending -éd words, as well as some guaranteed-fresh and never-before-seen -éd words I’ve preserved exclusively for the success of my students, as well as a worksheet sample that aids in the creation of new -éd words.

Diversity. Once students read my book and take my class one ore two times, this becomes the obvious continuation of the Shakespearian dialect rule. Not all of your characters should sound Shakespearian - some should instead have a Shaka-Zulian dialect. Never call it this in the text. Include the dialect subtly and never tell anyone I told you this. Shaka put a curse on my ancestor which I inherited and am not permitted to explain. Let’s just say I’m treading lightly here - never speak ill of our ancestors, especially not your mom, and extra-specially not a Zulu’s mom.

The hard truth about substack:

Success on substack takes hard work and time. Success might take a year, or even two. This just makes it that much more important to learn the 21 proven growth strategies in my new book: Blinding Light for the Uninitiated. Get it now, not later - I’m only selling a few more copies (I can’t have everyone on earth knowing these secrets). Your child’s college tuition - and mine - depend on your success, so buy it now!

Enroll in my class (enjoy a limited time offer!):

I closed my writing class three months ago. But for a limited time I’ve reopened it! Aspiring authors who want to learn four of my more advanced strategies can enroll for $500 $89.95 and get access to my monthly seminar that go into greater detail explaining how to get from 0 to 60 in your first forty days on substack (individual results vary). Once you’ve enrolled in the course you’ll automatically earn a free discount on my substack website customization service, a highly technical endeavor that should only be trusted to experts in web design.

I’m also on LinkDim

Check out my profile on LinkDim.com for my exclusive insights into resume design and job interview protocols. See testimony from my students how their requests for interview increased by more than 150%, with most landing great stay-at-home jobs earning up to 200k a year.

---

---