Is Substack a smart marketing tool for indie authors? In this episode, Orna Ross explores the platform's strengths for marketing fiction, poetry, and nonfiction books—including reader community, discoverability, and subscription options—alongside weaknesses like limited e-commerce, conflicting priorities, and the risks of building on a venture-backed platform whose goals may shift over time. She concludes that Substack offers a powerful combination of features for authors who want to balance creativity with visibility, but is not a substitute for a solid book-selling strategy.
Listen to the Podcast: Substack as a Marketing Tool for Indie Authors
Show Notes
- Orna Ross on Substack (Embers & Ink: Learnings from Literature)
- Sarah Fay on Substack (Substack Writers at Work)
Further Reading
Sponsor
Our Creative Self-Publishing stream is brought to you by Orna Ross's Go Creative! program—helping authors harness the power of creative flow in writing and publishing.
About the Host
Orna Ross launched the Alliance of Independent Authors at the London Book Fair in 2012. Her work for ALLi has seen her named as one of The Bookseller’s “100 top people in publishing”. She also publishes poetry, fiction, and nonfiction and is greatly excited by the democratizing, empowering potential of author-publishing. For more information about Orna, visit her website.
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Read the Transcript
Orna Ross: Hello and welcome to the Self-Publishing with ALLi podcast. I'm Orna Ross, and today I'd like to talk to you about Substack — specifically Substack as a marketing tool for indie authors. I joined the platform about three months ago, just before Christmas, and I've settled in there. I hadn't a clue what I was doing at first, and that would be my first tip: if you are planning on going over to Substack, you can have a quite successful launch and build on it if you do some proper preparation. Having said that, I went across very much as an experiment. I wasn't at all sure whether it was right for me, and I was happy to go there, check it out, see if it was as promising as it seemed, and get a sense of myself there. I'm happy to grow slowly over time.
Short answer is: yes, it has been everything so far that I hoped it would be, and I'm really enjoying my time there. I'm definitely seeing new readers coming, and I see it as a very useful discovery platform. In this podcast I'd like to tease out whether it's right for you, what the advantages and disadvantages are, a little bit about where it's going — because things are certainly changing there — and specifically whether it is a good marketing tool for indie authors.
Why Substack? What the Platform Does Well
The reason I was attracted to it is that it brings together a lot of things that indie authors need and care about. The real advantage of the platform is that it brings email together with a subscription model, together with community, conversation tools, discoverability — and they are building more and more around their app and helping authors and writers on the platform to reach more people. It has what it calls a recommendations feature, and with its app these drive about 50% of new platform growth and a quarter of all new paid subscriptions on the platform. It definitely can bring new readers to you.
We're trying to do two things at once as indie authors: make the work and build a connection between the work and its readers, and that's one of the things I'm finding most useful there. I'm serializing my next novel on the platform — I'm at about episode nine now — and I'm definitely beginning to see people coming who didn't know anything about me or the work, and they are engaging. This is where it is most useful for me and what I love most about it. I've got a publishing schedule there and I meet it, and so it's drawing the work from me, helping me to finish, giving me a sense of finishing as I do each episode and put it out there. There's a real buzz you get from publication — you don't have to wait for the end. I'll do a separate podcast specifically on serializing fiction when I've finished this book, but today I'm just talking about Substack as a marketing tool.
Discovery, Engagement, and Paid Subscription Options
The first thing to say is that Substack is mainly a discovery tool and a communication tool — for discovery and engagement. A reader can come, subscribe for free, read your work, reply to your posts, comment, and share. Then over time, maybe they decide they want to pay for deeper access — special offers, member club kinds of benefits. What I have is early access: people can pay and they get discounts on the cost of books once published, they can become part of the ARC reader team, and I do a monthly salon where I get together with paid subscribers and they can ask me anything. My moniker over there is Lessons from Literature, so anything that falls under that very wide umbrella we discuss at the monthly creative salon.
But you can also, if you don't want to get involved with any of that, simply turn on paid subscriptions while still making all your posts free to everybody — just as a blog would be on another platform. Those who want to support you can treat it more as patronage than a paywall, which is also very much something you can do. That hybrid structure is one of Substack's big strengths. It's really lovely and it allows authors to combine reach and revenue. It's a way of giving your super fans, your most committed readers, a way to support your work more deeply, and it makes it really easy to do that.
Readers can reply to your posts and comment in all the usual ways you'd expect of a blog. It reminds me a little of blogging back in the day when it was new and people actually did comment on posts. That's largely fallen away on WordPress and other sites — commentary on mainstream blogs has largely died away, even on author and writer blogs. But on Substack, it seems like the conversationalists have gone across in large numbers, because you definitely get a lot more reader response on Substack than on other platforms. That's my experience, having been on them all over the years. It was a great joy to be able to reengage with something resembling social media, which I had dropped.
Substack's Notes feature is a social media platform that accompanies the app. It puts me back in touch with readers and lets me talk about things that aren't particularly about the books — make a joke, share something about my day or something I find interesting — provided it falls under that umbrella of Lessons from Literature.
Dashboard Tools and Platform Growth
Their dashboard tools are now better at showing where growth is coming from — Notes, recommendations, links with Google Analytics and Google search and other external sources. All of this is giving authors really useful marketing intelligence, given in a way that authors like me, who are not very good at reading analytics, can actually absorb and understand easily. I think this is one of the reasons Substack has grown so quickly and attracted so many creators. At first it was very much journalists and nonfiction writers, but fiction writers are finding their way to the platform now in big numbers, as are poets — there's a really lively poetry scene on Substack.
We're talking about still a very young platform in tech and media terms, but last year they raised another hundred million and were valued at $1.1 billion. They had approximately five million paid subscriptions on the platform, up from four million in a relatively short period from the previous November 2024. That's pretty serious growth. So while it is new, there's plenty of time to join and get involved. Substack is no longer a niche corner of the internet for journalists and nonfiction writers. It's now become a significant part of the creator and media ecosystem, and I think pretty much everyone agrees on that.
Advantages for Indie Authors
What does Substack do well for indie authors? Already mentioned: the direct relationship with readers. Its model began being built around email. While they are now leaning more into the app and the Notes social media side, email still really matters on Substack — and email still really matters to authors. Email is still one of the few channels where you can reliably reach your readers without depending on a social algorithm. And the great thing about Substack is that you own that list. That is unique among the platforms. I wouldn't be there if that were not the case, and I wouldn't be encouraging any indie author to go there if it were not. It's such a huge difference from platforms where no matter how large you are, you're algorithmically controlled and you're just renting the space. You don't know who your readers are — the platform owns that. On Substack, that's different.
Secondly, their recommendations tool very cleverly allows readers on the platform to move from one trusted writer to another by recommendation. We all know word of mouth is the best way to sell anything, and Substack has built word of mouth into what they do and how they do it. You can find your comparable authors there, endorse one another, and help to build each other's readership. All of that is very easy.
Another big factor in why I like it so much and have decided I'm definitely staying is how much it does all in one place: email list, blog, paid membership if you want it, comments, social media through Notes, podcasts, live video, and an archive where readers can delve into everything you do. For those trying to keep marketing manageable — and I include myself in that, because I've got a day job at ALLi and lots of other interests and I'm a multi-passionate creator — being able to keep everything in one place makes life very easy.
Eyes Wide Open: The Caveats
Having said all of that, I do want to slow down and say that while all of that is true, it's also important to keep your eyes wide open and recognize that Substack is a privately held, venture-backed company. Nothing unusual in that, but the venture capitalists think they can come out with 20 times their investment, so they're going to be looking for growth and scale and return, and that's just how it works. This is partly where the increasing emphasis on the app is coming from. They are also piloting a sponsorship program to help creators earn more revenue — in other words, the business model is very much evolving. That might be good for some authors; it might not. We can't be sure where it's going, but we do know that it's changing the feel of the place over time.
The author mindset, the publisher mindset, and the tech mindset are not the same thing. The author is asking, does this deepen the work? The publisher is asking, does this serve the reader? The tech mindset is very much, how do we grow, scale, increase retention and revenue and enterprise value? Substack's definition of success and our definition of success are not the same thing.
There are also issues around their moderation policies. Substack says they don't allow harassment, threats, doxing, hate, plagiarism, anything illegal, sexually exploitative content, or hate content of any kind — that's the formal position. But the platform has been repeatedly criticized about extremist content and how it has handled it. As recently as 2025, some users received a Nazi push notification. That's not just a technical issue — it reflects the way in which Substack is set up. No matter whether you're coming from the extreme right, the extreme left, or anywhere in between, creators from every single mindset and approach to life are on the platform. That is the nature of a big open platform. Each author needs to decide whether this particular platform's moderation stance and culture is something they can live with. That's a question for each individual author.
What Substack Is Not So Good At
Back to practical things Substack is not so good at. Design and control. It now offers more customized homepage tags, navigation tools, colors, and some expression of brand, but it's still very intentionally simple. I like the simplicity — I find it freeing. But I do recognize that for some authors it can be frustrating. It very much depends on what kind of publisher you are. If you want a highly shaped reader journey, elaborate landing pages, reader magnets, tailored funnels, and fine control over the reader experience, Substack is probably not the platform for you.
The analytics have improved — you can see more clearly where your growth is coming from. But while some writers find it enough, others may feel they're peering through a keyhole rather than a fully developed email and commerce system.
And the main thing for indie authors to take note of: selling books is not native to Substack. It's optimized for subscriptions, not for book retail. The newsletter on Substack is performing a very different function from the average author newsletter, which is generally set up around a reader magnet and then a funnel leading to a purchase. Even reading Substack's own guide on how to sell a book is very revealing — it's largely about sending good standalone emails, announcement posts, using custom buttons properly, reminders and homepage links and discounts. It's about marketing the newsletter with an associated book, rather than offering an e-commerce bookshop with proper catalog logic, comp author relationships, bundles, upsells, or the fulfillment systems we're used to as indie authors. Those are missing.
So I would strongly recommend: while you can technically have a website on Substack — they do call their newsletter a website and you can swap your domain over to it — I would strongly recommend keeping your primary author presence elsewhere under your own brand name. Keep Substack as a discoverability platform, a community platform, and a subscription platform if you want that extra revenue and if it fits the kind of work you do as an author.
Is It Right for You?
The question isn't so much whether you can grow a readership on Substack — you can, depending on your genre. Check out your comparable authors or your genre on Substack and see if it's there. You'll probably find it is, because most of them seem to be there now. The real question is whether you can grow on Substack without being pulled away from the work you most want to do. That's a question I keep asking myself, and at the beginning. I'm satisfied now that for me, for now, the answer is yes. Not because Substack is perfect — clearly it's not. But at this point in my creative life, it is the platform that most helps and hinders least.
Because I write across genre — literary historical fiction, poetry, and reflective nonfiction about creativity, publishing, and writing — I need a platform that can hold breadth and where there are readers who appreciate that kind of writing. The other thing I really needed when I came to Substack was a publishing schedule that kept me in place. Not finishing was a real challenge for me over the last while, particularly last year due to some personal stuff. Substack has given me that, and it's given me that real exchange with readers — not just broadcasting, but actually being able to talk to people. And I'm beginning to get some eyes on a book and a new series that isn't out yet — beginning already to gather in a small but very real group of readers who wouldn't otherwise have heard of the book and who are reading and responding and returning. That's very encouraging and is really helping me to stay on track.
I keep the books at the center and I'm on Substack because I want to sustain a living practice of writing fiction and poetry and putting it out there. My definition of success isn't really numerical in terms of followers, subscribers, paid subscribers — all are welcome, and of course numbers matter to a degree for someone who's a publisher as well as a writer. But it's not the most important thing for me at this stage of my writing life and publishing business. The most important question is: will this practice or platform strengthen my creative life or drain it? Does it help me write more honestly? Does it help me publish more consistently? Does it bring me into contact with potential readers? And equally important, is it fun? For me, the answer to all of that is yes, at the moment. There's a sense of beginning again, which is very energizing.
A Note for Fiction Writers
If you're an unpublished or little-known writer, you absolutely can grow on Substack — come and follow me there, that's important to say. But you'll need to answer the same old publishing question you always have to answer as the marketer of your books: what are you offering that is genuinely valuable to the reader you want to reach, and how do your own values as a writer connect to that value you're offering the reader? That question is easier for nonfiction writers and for poets. For novelists it's most challenging.
And as far as I can see so far on the platform, fiction writers who are doing best are doing something in addition to the fiction. Alongside their stories, they may be offering ideas to other writers about how to write fiction, or they're going off on some tangent related to the content or themes of the work or the setting. They're adding on something else. And of course, because fiction is word-heavy, you have to think: if I start doing that, is it taking time away from writing the fiction?
Conclusion and Recommendations
The end conclusion is the same as any marketing discussion: it's not easy, and Substack is definitely not a quick fix, a shortcut, or a pill for every ill. We can't talk about whether it's good or bad in the abstract. You have to think about whether it serves your creative goals, whether it suits your genre, whether it suits your temperament, and of course your definition of success. And as I said at the top, I would recommend you do that thinking before rather than after joining — there's lots you can only learn by doing, but there's a lot more you can do upfront than I did.
A lot of what's on Substack is very public, and there's some really good advice on their own support pages. Among the Substack experts out there, the one I would recommend is Sarah Faye. I have found her most useful. A lot of her content is behind the paywall, but there is some free content that is really useful too.
If you are going to use Substack, use it with your eyes open. Make sure you back up your archive and export your mailing list regularly as well. And keep your center of gravity in your books and in that direct relationship with your readers. It does feel right now like a useful and promising marketing tool, especially for those of you who want to bring your writing, reading, conversation, and membership together in one place.
I'd love to hear your experiences — those of you who are already there and those of you thinking of going over. Do find me on the platform and let me know how you're getting on, especially if you're writing fiction and poetry, where I think the challenges are most significant but also where the possibilities are really beginning to emerge. Thank you as always for listening. I hope that was useful, and until we talk again, I'll be writing. Happy publishing. Bye-bye.
