How to write a successful Substack - by Noah Smith

A bunch of people have been asking me to write a tutorial about how to write a successful Substack. Noahpinion doesn’t yet have the kind of readership that the big politics Substacks enjoy (Heather Cox Richardson, Matt Yglesias, Judd Legum, Andrew Sullivan, Matt Taibbi, etc.). If you want to know how to be super successful, you should probably ask one of them! But my readership has grown to the point where I feel like it’s been moderately successful, and the trend looks good. Here’s a graph of my email list readership so far, which I’m happy to say has been accelerating in recent months: I already offered my advice on how to do the kind of writing I do, in a post last year: So today’s post will be more about things like choosing a topic, marketing, etc. I should note, by the way, that advice is probably overrated. The reason is that people don’t really know how they accomplished what they accomplished. They know the things they did, and they know the results they achieved, but because

A bunch of people have been asking me to write a tutorial about how to write a successful Substack. Noahpinion doesn’t yet have the kind of readership that the big politics Substacks enjoy (Heather Cox Richardson, Matt Yglesias, Judd Legum, Andrew Sullivan, Matt Taibbi, etc.). If you want to know how to be super successful, you should probably ask one of them! But my readership has grown to the point where I feel like it’s been moderately successful, and the trend looks good. Here’s a graph of my email list readership so far, which I’m happy to say has been accelerating in recent months: I alr