The point of publishing is that there’s more than one form, more than one audience, more than one voice inside you — and all of those things are colliding at once inside a single publication.

The point of publishing is to know how to ground yourself in what you’re here to do with your writing — month by month, year over year.

The best way I know to use Substack is to bring what is most true and alive in your particular obsession — the thing that just can’t leave you alone — and organize it well enough that people can come along for the ride.

✵

The point of publishing is also to learn, over time, what degree of availability you actually have — to an audience, to a community, to the conversation.

There are newsletters I subscribe to where the comment section is almost silent, and the essays are so rich that silence is exactly right. There are newsletters where the whole point is joining other people to co-alchemize something that’s alive inside all of us.

That’s the direction The Publishing Spectrum is heading.

A place where the essays are enough — but the people are why you stay. The people are the reason you come into the chat thread. The people are the reason you learn to build your own editorial judgment, because they’re learning to build theirs too.

✵

The job inside traditional publishing — if editors were being honest with you — is to manage a confounding mix of market pressure and creative storytelling, and to meet an audience you get to know better month by month.

That’s a lot to hold.

Not everyone who writes on Substack will create a publication people will pay for. But a lot of you will write, and bring your life’s work into a space like this, and discover the writer you were always meant to be. You may find a literary agent here. You may find a circle of women who help you tell the story that becomes a book in four to six years.

✵

The point — the point I think publishing on Substack is ultimately here to make — is this:

It creates an opportunity for you to evolve as a writer inside your writing, and inside your capital-W Work in this life. And then to discover how it’s supposed to get back to others, if at all.

The point isn’t always monetization — gobs of fame and piles of money (though wouldn’t that be lovely?).

Sometimes the point is to continue becoming who you already are — and seeing it in different contexts. And deciding that even if no one ever listens or reads or shows up, that you are the most worthy recipient of your own writing magic.

✵ What I think sustainable publishing actually looks like on Substack ✵

In a few hours, rates are going up at The Publishing Spectrum.

What started as a free-range writing season for a first-time mom in the mountains in 2022 has evolved into a publication, a team of creative contributors and community giving one another its own shape.

We’re making space for building your skills and your editorial judgment — and for the lived experience of actually publishing on Substack.

It’s one of the most common frustrations I hear from Substack writers — and I don’t think the answer is simply better copy or a more frequent publishing queue.

The reality is that most of us don’t actually know who our followers are … yet.

Although it’s easy to assume they’re “failed” subscribers, there’s a more generous interpretation waiting for us:

Followers are people who are in an earlier part of the reading journey — watching, orbiting, deciding whether you are who you claim to be and whether your publication is worth their inbox.

And you can’t earn someone’s inbox if you don’t know at least a little bit about them.

I think Substack’s new polls feature inside Notes (I wrote about them here yesterday) just gave us one of the easiest ways to learn more about who’s in the mix.

But before asking broad questions like, “What should I write next?” I want to invite you to learn about your followers intentionally. Because “What should I write next” doesn’t actually give us substance to build a publication from. Rather, it usually just results in topic requests spread out in 100 different directions.

A well-craft, data-informed poll can tell you something more useful:

• What are my followers circling?

• What are they trying to unlearn?

• What are they opening but not saying out loud?

• What assumptions am I making about who’s here?

• What conversation are they already trying to start?

The week in the paid subscriber chat we’ll be talking about how to write better poll questions through a 5-Day Follower Listening Tour, where the format is incredibly simple:

Post one poll a day for five days in a row, each one built from a real reader data point, not a random question.

When we move away from the generic and toward the specific and exact, we stop asking questions that give our readers more work. And we start uncovering publishing intelligence that can actually help our publications grow.

The format for the 5-Day Follower Listening Tour is designed to help us discover what our followers recognize, resist, want, misunderstand or quietly follow from the sidelines.

By the end of the five days, we should have a better sense of which questions inspire people to vote/engage, which ones nudge them to comment and what kinds of experiences or topics our followers may need to inspire them to sign up to read.

The main goal here isn’t to just get people having a party in our Notes feed (though, truly, how lovely would that be?) …

The goal is to gather a better layer of reader intelligence.

I’ll be sharing the full five-day structure with paid subscribers in the Publishing Spectrum Chat today, including how to build each poll from the data your readers are already giving you.

If that’s the kind of experiment you want to build alongside us, upgrade today and come find us in the Publishing Spectrum Chat this week.

Join the Conversation Here

As with most updates to a platform, not every new feature is worth your attention, and not every shiny thing actually improves the value of what you’re offering your readers.

Today I want to talk about the features that stand out to me in a big way.

These are the Substack updates I’ve been watching closely — the ones I think matter for you as a publisher who’s serious about your craft and growing your readership. Today' we’re going to cover:

• Text formatting upgrades — highlighting, subscripts and center justification, and why they change your reader’s experience more than you’d expect

• Polls in Notes (new as of ~ 48 hours ago) — how to use them strategically, and how they’re different from the polls inside your newsletter

• A new subscriber Perks page (new last week) — currently in beta, and the feature I’m most excited about right now

That last one is worth the whole read. I have early access to this benefit, and I’m going to tell you exactly what it does — and how to start preparing for it before it rolls out to everyone.

The Formatting Upgrades You May Have Missed

These aren’t the headline features, but they’re worth knowing because they change the texture of your reader’s experience in small, real ways.

Substack now supports text highlighting in any color you choose — useful for callouts, emphasis or visual rhythm inside a long piece. You can also add subscripts, which matters more than it sounds if you write anything technical, footnote-heavy, or academically inflected. And perhaps most quietly significant: center justification is now available.

That last one might seem minor, but formatting shapes how readers feel a piece of writing before they’ve consciously processed a word. Center-aligned text carries its own tone — more lyrical, more intentional, more like something meant to be read rather than scanned. Having that option changes what’s possible aesthetically on the platform.

None of these new features are reasons to rebuild your newsletter from scratch. But if you’ve been wishing Substack felt less like a word processor and more like a publishing tool, these are signs that gap is closing.

Polls in Notes: Your Smallest, Sharpest Audience Research Tool

You can now embed polls directly inside Substack Notes — and if you’ve been sleeping on Notes as a format, this is your wake-up call. I started playing with them yesterday. Please vote inside my first real poll today, which asks “What are you most ready to stop organizing your Substack publication around?”:

Notes are public. They’re discoverable. They’re the closest thing Substack has to a social feed. And now they’re interactive.

Here’s why that combination matters:

It’s audience research without the friction. A poll inside a Note takes your followers seconds to answer, but gives you real signal about what they care about, how they think and what language they use. That’s data you can bring back into your editorial planning.

It’s engagement that doesn’t require a full strategy. Not everyone who follows you will open every issue. But they might tap a poll while scrolling. That tap is a relationship touchpoint — and it counts.

It’s a low-stakes way to demonstrate your expertise. The questions you ask reveal as much about your perspective as the answers do. A well-crafted poll is a form of trust building.

One important distinction: polls in Notes behave differently from polls inside your newsletter. Notes polls are public-facing and discovery-oriented — they’re for reaching and learning about your broader audience. Newsletter polls go to your subscriber list and tend to generate deeper, more segmented insight. They serve different purposes, and the best publishers will use both intentionally. I wrote a series of posts about how to write polls for your readers and this one gets to the point quickly.

Subscriber Perks Pages (Beta): Finally, a Way to Protect the Value You’ve Built

Here’s the beta feature I want you to pay attention to.

Substack is rolling out a Perks page that lets you assign specific benefits to paid subscribers, annual subscribers, and founding members — separately, in one structured place. Here are what mine look like for The Publishing Spectrum and my sister publication, The Co-Writing Studio.

If you’ve been publishing for a while, you already know the problem this solves. Someone signs up for $9 a month and gets access to $500 worth of value — a course, a resource library, a private community, a coaching session. And historically, Substack has had no reliable native way to protect that. You’ve been duct-taping it together: a pinned post here, a private link in a welcome email there, a universal code you hope doesn’t get shared around.

The Perks page changes the architecture of that problem.

Here’s what it actually allows right now: you can link to a universal page (kept private and accessible only to the right tier), distribute a universal code or upload group codes that generate a unique link per click — meaning each subscriber gets their own access without you having to manage it manually.

That last option is significant. It means your most valuable offerings — the ones that justify the price of an annual or founding subscription — can finally live somewhere permanent, protected, and consistent. You have a place to send people. They have a place to return to.

I’m already using this at the Co-Writing Studio, where I’m experimenting with distinct benefits at the annual versus founding member level. I’ll share more about what I’m learning in our paid subscriber Chat threads as the beta develops — but if you’re building any kind of tiered community, this is the feature to watch.

Note: Right now there is no way to attach a PDF to the perk itself. You still have to link out to a URL for the resource.

The Bigger Picture: Substack Is Betting on Personalization

From a software/platform standpoint, these updates are being released in fairly rapid succession. Something makes me think that either Substack has finally filled all those open software engineering roles (I follow them on LinkedIn to forecast changes to come) or they’ve figured out how to deploy AI in ways that make sophisticated customization more buildable, and they’re using that momentum to give serious publishers the infrastructure they’ve been missing. Either way, bravo. More customization for Substack publishers is a good thing.

What’s interesting to note is: the tools they’re releasing aren’t make-headlines flashy. They’re exactly the right kind of infrastructure for writers who are thinking intentionally about community, retention and revenue.

Which brings me to the thing I always come back to: none of these tools matter until you know your audience.

Polls, perks, tiers, formatting choices — they’re multipliers. They amplify what you’re already doing well. If you already know who you’re writing for, what they value and what motivates them to stay, these features will feel like gifts. If you don’t know those things yet, now is a good time to start finding out.

Your best posts are your best welcome mats.

Every post you publish on Substack has two lives.

The first is relatively short. It lands in the inboxes of subscribers who already chose to hear from you. They know who you are. They likely opened your email because it was from you. This is a good thing.

The second life of a post is longer and quieter. Over time, certain pieces of writing get shared, surfaced and found more than others — and the people who find your work this way are, effectively, strangers. They arrive completely fresh to your work, your writing and life, and then they are deciding in the first few lines whether you’re worth their inbox.

Most of us write for the first life of a post and never tend the second.

But your most-read posts are the ones living that second life hardest. Engagement is part of what helps Substack surface your work to the readers most likely to want it — so your top posts are the ones meeting the most strangers. This is why I find it’s helpful to think of them as the welcome mats of your publication. They’re what people are likely going to wipe their feet on before deciding to come in (aka subscribe to you).

This is where your SubSight data can help you because you don’t need to polish and improve every post — but it’s worth some time this week to identify which posts are already doing the quiet work of inviting readers in. And giving them a more intentional welcome.

Here’s how I’d recommend doing that this week.

First, open SubSight and look at your Post Performance Insights. It’ll look something like this:

That data helps us narrow things down quickly. Your top 5 posts are already calculated based on the last 90 days of interaction in your publication.

This week, let’s edit the five posts identified in your own SubSight data, adding in more specific, inspiring or creative calls to action (CTAs) to subscribe or upgrade.

Here are a few places inside the posts where you might add in some “welcome mat” CTAs:

At the top — this is where a stranger needs the most help, because they have the least context. Write a line or two on who you are and what they’ve walked into, then include a way to subscribe.

In the middle — a quieter nudge, placed right after the part that lands hardest.

At the bottom — your clearest ask, because they finished, and they’re warm.

The suggestions I’ve described above shouldn’t be used as a template you drop onto your top five posts. (There are endless options and ideas for how, when and where to place a CTA!)

The real question I want you sitting with for your Substack publication is this:

When someone meets my work for the first time, how do I want to welcome them in?

Writing a CTA that answers that question — warmly, in your own voice — is its own craft. So today I’m opening a chat thread for paid subscribers to work through it together.

Paid subscribers: Come think out loud with us. The thread’s open all week to share what you’re noticing in your top five posts, your questions and your first drafts. I’d love to see your relationship-building thinking in motion.

Join the thread here. 🧵

Not subscribed yet? Here’s your welcome mat.

Subscribe now

She had over 600 subscribers. She had 78 people she recognized by name — people who showed up in her comments the way neighbors show up at a fire pit in the backyard. She had years of writing, a full-time job, a memoir in progress and a creeping awareness that some of her posts were lighting something up inside her and some were draining her, and she wasn’t sure yet what the difference was.

She also had ADD, a grant-writing career that had trained her to explain things and a very honest relationship with the fact that explaining things was not actually what her readers came for.

What unfolded in this live session was less a tutorial and more a writer figuring out what she actually values — and then building the language to protect it.

What Jen did (and what she gave herself permission to stop doing)

When Jen first uploaded her subscriber data into SubSight, she started with what she called “baseline questions” — just orienting herself, seeing how the tool responded. Then she started asking the editorial questions:

• What are the themes that connect my top performing posts?

• What connects my lower performing posts?

• What should I consider letting go of?

• Can you suggest a four to five week publishing schedule that includes topic ideas and type of post?

What came back surprised her — not because the insights were foreign, but because they named things she already sensed.

The tool identified something it called an “observer-participant voice.”

It flagged “high narrative specificity” as a pattern in her strongest work.

And it kept pointing her away from what she described as “preachy, teachy, explainer” posts — the ones that asked her to wrap a personal story in a lesson, to end with the Saturday-morning-TV moral.

That pattern had a name in her professional life too: grant writing. Explaining programs. Making the case. It’s a voice she’s good at, and it was quietly colonizing her newsletter in a way the data could finally confirm.

The shift the tool helped her name: moving from an instructive lens to a utility lens.

Instead of here is the lesson I have for you, the question became here is what’s working for me — want to look at it together?

That’s a different offer.

And it turned out to be a more generative one, both for her readers and for her own creative energy.

She also did something worth noting: she pushed back. When SubSight suggested she try braiding her themes faster than she was ready to, she said no. She told it to slow down. She’s the boss. That’s not a small thing to model.

The frameworks she built (in her own words)

Over time — and this happened through conversation, not overnight — Jen developed two tools inside SubSight that she now runs every draft through.

The Relational Resonance Checklist is a six-point check on her own voice and tone. It grew out of the patterns the tool kept identifying in her strongest work: the observer-participant voice, the utility lens, the willingness to say the quiet thing out loud. She didn’t copy a template. She asked the tool to reflect her own data back to her, named the patterns she recognized, and then said: let’s make these the checklist. Now when she uploads a draft, it scores each point — pass, strong, excellent, needs work — and explains why, pointing back to specific engagement patterns in her subscriber history.

The Neighborhood Map is a framework for thinking about who a given post is for. Jen is a community builder offline — she has a front yard garden where neighbors stop to talk, a porch where longer conversations happen, and a fire pit in the back where the same 78 or so people show up every week. She mapped her newsletter audience onto that:

• Sidewalk — headline surfers, people just passing through

• Front yard — casual readers who stop occasionally

• Porch — people who’ve been around, who engage sometimes

• Fire pit — the 78 core readers who show up every week

Now when she finishes a draft, she asks: who is this for, and does the way I’ve written it invite them in or assume they’re already here?

Some essays are for the sidewalk — a strong headline, an accessible opening.

Some are for the fire pit. Each has a job.

She said something during the call that I haven’t stopped thinking about: “Everyone’s welcome at the fire pit, but not everyone’s ready for it.”

One thing she said that belongs in a larger conversation

Before I handed it back to Jen, I said something out loud that I've believed for a long time but don't always name directly:

The insights come after the risk, not instead of it. Jen's experience bears that out — and she said it more precisely than I did.

That’s the part that doesn’t live in a checklist. It’s the part that asks something harder from us than any framework can provide — the willingness to publish into uncertainty, to take the risk first, and then let the data tell you what it saw.

That’s actually what I’ve been building toward in The Publishing Spectrum for a while now. Strategy without inner work only gets you so far. And I’ve been quiet about the fact that I’ve spent the last several years accumulating tools for exactly that inner work — from my time in the mountains, from years of studying contemplative practice, from almost two decades of editing other people’s manuscripts.

Starting in June, I’m opening co-writing sessions over at The Co-Writing Studio. Once a month we’ll meet live for 90 minutes. I’ll bring a prompt and a few variations. We’ll write together, privately but in community. The first theme is storytelling heritage — where story first gets planted, and where it gets stuck.

It’s not a workshop. It’s not a critique group. It’s a room where you write toward the hard questions in safety, with support from me if you get stuck somatically or emotionally in the process. I’ll be specific about all of this over there — but I wanted to mention it here because what Jen shared today is exactly the kind of creative courage we are tending to over in The Co-Writing Studio.

For those of you with SubSight: a starting place

If you want to try what Jen described, here are the questions she said she’d suggest starting with:

1. What are the themes that connect my top five posts?

2. What connects my lower performing posts?

3. What should I consider letting go of?

Don’t ask it to evaluate whether your writing is good. Ask it to help you see what’s already there.

And if you’re not sure what your neighborhood map looks like yet — that’s a good place to start too. Who are the people around your fire pit right now? You don’t need 78. You might have six. But they’re there, and they have names, and they’re worth writing toward.

One question for the comments:

Jen described her top-performing work as “nostalgic, humorous and slightly self-deprecating personal essays.” If you had to describe your strongest work in three words — not aspirationally, but honestly, based on what readers have actually responded to — what would they be?

Leave a comment

How an hour spent in the forest can plant something in you that lasts for a year.

How spending an hour wandering through the flower district in New York can transport you away from honking cars and into a botanical oasis.

How an hour in the company of a trusted friend can right the wrongs of a truly terrible week.

✵

I’ve also been thinking about how often we carry things for an awfully long time.

Sometimes we’re carrying them because the weight itself is good medicine.

Sometimes the extraness of life is trying to show us something about where we’re headed next.

And sometimes we’re carrying them because we haven’t yet found someone to tell us, “Here, let me show you how to lay this burden down.”

One of the things I’ve noticed lately in my advising calls is that we rarely arrive with the real question.

We arrive with the question we know how to ask.

Then we start talking.

We talk about the publication or a book. Writing and readership dreams. Sometimes we touch on routines, secret ambitions and frustrations.

And somewhere along the way, the real question emerges.

A pastor once booked a call because she wanted more reader engagement.

But as we talked, I had the distinct feeling that engagement wasn’t the issue at all.

Her publication felt like a beautiful jungle behind glass.

Readers could already see the richness of what she was offering, but they weren’t quite sure how to step inside. What she needed wasn’t more content. She needed a different doorway into conversation.

✵

I once worked with a breathwork teacher who came to me wondering whether she should push harder on Substack monetization.

But as we unpacked the different projects in her life, something else dropped into both of our laps.

This wasn’t a monetization problem.

She was tangled in questions about identity, energy, audience, and business all at the same time.

Life can be terrifically complicated like that.

Things don’t change in neat succession. They blossom and bloom and fall away all at once.

By the end of the hour, her question had shifted from:

How do I make this earn more money?

to:

What kind of creative life am I actually trying to build?

✵

Another writer came looking for help converting more readers into paid subscribers.

Instead of talking about pricing or funnels, we ended up talking about the moments in a person’s life that make them finally pay attention.

The conversation moved away from conversion tactics and toward a deeper question:

What emotional threshold causes someone to seek support in the first place?

✵

And then there was the bestselling novelist who came to a call focused on growth.

After spending time with her publication, I told her something that surprised us both:

“I don’t know why I’m here.”

Not because the writing wasn’t good.

Because the publication wasn’t telling readers why this particular corner of the internet was different from every other writing newsletter they could subscribe to.

We shifted away from growth tactics and toward editorial identity.

What makes her distinct.

What makes her storytelling gripping.

What experience could only she offer?

It’s one of the things I love most about stepping into the mystery of voice, writing and publishing online.

The editorial door often opens into a world that feels a bit like Narnia.

Very rarely is the answer tucked neatly away inside a tidy coat closet — nor a productivity system, a growth tactic or a perfectly optimized strategy.

More often, it’s already whispering in the work that’s unfolding.

My job, I’ve learned, is often to look, listen and then ask if your eyes and ears notice these things too.

Sometimes what changes in an hour is the strategy, structure, audience or an offer.

But often I find, it’s simply that someone can feel the door to their voice open in a fuller, deeper way — and at the end of the hour, they know how to grab their pen and keep on writing.

✵

New here? Amanda Bray is a longtime editor and publishing advisor who’s known for uncovering the missing question, the place a voice gets stuck and what readers are quietly asking for next in a publication. She writes The Publishing Spectrum, home of bespoke resources for your Substack publication, including the editorial incubator — a twice-weekly Chat thread co-curated by a group of Creative Contributors.

She also works on bringing voice into the world (hers included) inside The Co-Writing Studio. Each month she hosts Co-Writing Sessions that help writers work productively with writing blocks and creative friction — inside a safe, supportive 90-minute virtual space.

If you’d like to get a one-hour read on your writing, voice or online publication, check Amanda’s calendar to book an editorial advising call here.

It was the kind of conversation that doesn’t really end when the session wraps up — and I know several of you are still turning things over.

For those of you who weren’t able to join this cohort (there will be more!), I want you to know that what we talked about isn’t locked away. The thinking that underpins this work — the frameworks, questions, editorial instincts that been developing inside the Substack space for the last four years — lives right here in The Publishing Spectrum archive.

Using these resources, you can work through your first impressions on your own time.

Because, honestly, sometimes this work does need a quieter, more spacious place to unfold.

If that’s where you are right now, I want to make sure you have what you need.

If you’re a paid subscriber, start here with these resources:

• Don’t Just List Ingredients In Your About Page — Give Your Readers Something to Savor

• What Do Readers See? Upgrade Your First Impressions on Substack

• What to Say in Your First Email That Makes New Readers Stay

• Live replay: Why These 5 Substack Elements Determine Whether New Visitors Subscribe

• Editorial Branding Checklist: 21 Places Your Words Really Matter on Substack (Updated April 2026)

Not a paid subscriber yet? You can upgrade here or click below to learn more about what’s included in a paid subscription.

Paid subscription benefits

What should I focus on first? Do I really have to polish all of these things before I even get to the writing?

And the answer I give consistently is:

Nope, you sure don’t.

Because a lot of people come to Substack because they need a creative incubator — a place to discover what they don’t yet know about themselves creatively.

If that’s where you are, please pursue that.

Free-range writing seasons are real and they matter, and I’d encourage you to forget every rule about how to be “successful” on Substack until you’ve had a chance to find out what you actually have to say.

However — and this is a big however — if you are ready for readers to find your work, there are a few specific things worth getting right. And those are your first impressions — the five places inside your Substack where readers consistently make their three-second “yes or no” decision:

• Personal bio

• Publication description

• About page

• Home page

• Welcome email

These are worth your while. They’re remarkably stable inside the Substack structure, which means time you spend on them now is unlikely to need revisiting with every platform shift.

These first impressions on Substack are exactly where readers are most likely to decide, quietly and quickly, whether your work is for them.

It’s also worth noting that there is a split-second decision that every reader makes before they sign up to read a new writer on Substack. And it is not made rationally.

Readers sign up for your work because of a feeling — whether your words create a flicker of recognition, a sense of Oh, this person gets it. Which is exactly why first impressions can't be filled in like a form or treated like a checklist.

First impressions are also notoriously personal. After four years of tweaking mine through every ebb and flow of my creative life, here’s what I know: if they feel incomplete, it’s because they usually are. It’s OK if they feel incomplete. But they should feel whole. And they should sound like you.

The best first impressions come from the inside out — from spending time with your own creative interior as the most honest source you have, and using a few frameworks to stay organized along the way.

Come write your first impressions with me

If your Substack first impressions are on your to-do list — first drafts or long-overdue revisions — I’m spending the next two weeks with the folks over on Midstack, a space for midlife female writers on Substack.

Inside the “Substack Foundations Spring Cohort,” I’ll be kicking off tomorrow with a first-ever First Impressions live workshop. We’re starting not with a checklist but with some best practices and afew questions — the kind that get into the heart of what you’re actually doing inside your writing right now.

It’s $47 for two weeks of working on your first impressions inside a small group cohort. You’ll be matched with people who can give you real feedback, and I’ll be in the mix with live sessions and encouragement along the way.

Hope to see you there!

Register Here Today + Introduce Yourself

If you’d like to learn more first, read this post from here.

Or more precisely, engagement isn’t working the way they assumed it would.

The most common assumption I run into is that open rates are what matter — that once someone opens the email, the rest is out of your hands. I understand why it might feel that way. After everything that goes into writing a post, formatting it and scheduling it, the open rate feels like the finish line. Readers saw it, they (hopefully) read and clicked something — what else can you control?

The reality is that the open is just the beginning of the reader relationship.

There are a lot of ways to measure what moves a reader to action, and if you go deep into traditional content marketing you can get some pretty wonky, extractive suggestions pretty fast. Many writers resist the art of nurturing their audiences precisely because they do not want to come across as extractive or pushy.

But in the last few years, I’ve come to see that Substack writers need to find a middle ground to what it means to grow a readership. Because the data bears this out in all my work:

At a baseline, humans tend to behave in remarkably homogenous ways inside their inboxes.

This means that even though your publication is trying to create a different experience inside a person’s inbox, they’re still relating to you through some established norms.

It’s to your benefit to understand what those are and to define for yourself how you want to nurture your readership over time.

So, if your Substack publication is landing in someone’s inbox — which it is — understanding how people actually move through that inbox experience is one of the most important things you can do for growing a thriving readership.

Let’s set aside open rates for a moment.

The better question I want you asking is this:

What did readers do after they opened?

That’s where the real picture of your readership lives — and it’s also where the opportunity to nurture and grow is secretly hiding. Because re-engaging inactive subscribers isn’t really about getting them to open. It’s about understanding what’s happening in that gap between the open and everything else … and then giving them a reason to come a little closer.

One more thing before we dive into a few ideas on how to wake up your subscribers …

Substack now has a segmenting feature that lets you define and save an audience based on particular criteria and email them directly. So the first suggestion below is more actionable than ever and will help you start playing inside a new feature.

Here are 5 ways to start waking up your readership.

1. Build a re-entry ramp, not a guilt trip.

Substack doesn’t have true email automation yet, but it does now have segmenting — which means you can define your inactive audience, save them as a segment and email them directly on a manual loop. The filter I’d choose to work with: free readers with fewer than two post views in the last 30 days. Create that segment, save it and work through the sequence below at whatever cadence makes sense for your publication.

You’ll click Subscribers > filter and then choose any combination, but these are where I’d start:

Then spend some considered time thinking through a “wake up” email sequence. Here’s what it might look like:

Read more

What’s rarer, I find, is guidance that trusts your devotion to your writing in the first place.

I’ve watched a lot of writers — people deeply committed to their craft — lose momentum on Substack because the guidance they found assumed they needed to become like a content machine or a growth hacker. And instead of being a writer who is alchemizing life and creating, they start optimizing for a life they didn’t want in the first place.

Your writing authority doesn’t need to answer to a one-size-fits-all calendar. It needs readers who actually want what you’re making, at the pace and voice that feels sustainable to you.

The next 10 days of May are about giving you a glimpse into what that kind of writing life and publishing experience on Substack actually looks like.

✵

Start here if you haven’t yet: Writing to Publishing, Session 1 Replay

Nearly 300 people registered for this and about 70 folks showed up live for the workshop. The replay of Session 1 is ready and free to watch. We explored the difference between writing and publishing — not as a technical distinction, but as a felt one.

Watch the Replay Here

✵

1 p.m. CT · May 27 · Substack Live: Magical Containers — Writing That Works for Neurodivergent Creators

Most writing advice assumes ideal conditions. This conversation will do the exact opposite.

I’m meeting with and exploring what actually makes a writing container work — structurally, relationally and for your nervous system. (I’ll be reading a fresh, raw, unedited piece of writing that came pouring out inside ’s 1,000 Words of Summer last year!) If you’ve ever felt like the problem with writing was you instead of the conditions around you, this conversation is going to feel like relief.

Free at attend | Subscribe to The Publishing Spectrum to catch it live on May 27

Subscribe now

✵

May 26 · Substack First Impressions Cohort with of Midstack

If you’ve ever wondered what a reader actually experiences when they land on your Substack publication for the first time — before they subscribe, before they decide — this is a place to explore exactly that dynamic.

Jessica and I are running a small, hands-on cohort focused entirely on how readers meet you. Real feedback on your bio, about page, publication description and more. Small accountability groups. Live sessions. And fresh ways to see yourself clearly so readers know when they’ve found their next favorite newsletter

$47. → Register & join us here

✵

Looking to grow your writing, publishing skills or get inspired right now?

Check this month’s workshops + conversations page here

✵

Past Workshops + Conversations

Meditation teacher and New York Times bestselling author on finding your medium, letting the mask come off slowly and why your true self is messier — and more powerful — than any polished version of it. → Watch the conversation | November 2025

TW: Pregnancy loss. A conversation about burnout, neurodivergence and what it costs us to be at war with our own identity — and how writing, nature and connection begin to heal it. → Listen to the conversation | Jan. 2025

Buddhist teacher and New York Times bestselling author on containment as the first rule of magic, the cross-section of “nothing to do with me” and “couldn’t happen without me” — and why the luminous emptiness is the only thing doing the writing. → Watch the conversation | May 2024

Amanda [Bray] pulls back the editorial veil on what it actually means to care for a reader through the layers of editing — and why nurturing a writer’s voice is the editor’s real job. → Watch the conversation | June 2024

✵

If you’re interested in inviting me to speak or host a workshop on writing or publishing best practices, feel free to introduce yourself by sending me a DM on Substack.

They assume data is here to box you in.

And, truly, I do understand.

Data is a very serious thing in a very serious world. It’s been used to contort editorial output when big dollars are on the line, and by people making loud, obnoxious claims — one metric spikes and suddenly someone’s selling a universal formula for success.

But with a more productive lens on it, data can become one of the most empowering and creatively expansive ways to think through your writing and your Substack publication.

Because what matters in data when we use it editorially isn’t one-off gimmicks.

It’s the patterns that emerge over time inside your writing, your voice, your readership — and how people return again and again.

Once you start looking at publication data through a pattern-based, creative lens, something really interesting happens:

Data loses its power to give you a judgment card and starts behaving more like a creative editorial partner.

✵

That’s the idea behind SubSight — a tool I built to help Substack writers do exactly that. This week I’ve been developing some new prompts inside it, and a few of them got a little playful.

Some are goofier than others. But the range is intentional: whether you're thinking about your next post, your next series or your next book, the prompts are built to meet you where your publishing instincts actually live.

SubSight isn’t structured to replace your writing creativity. It’s designed to play inside what data has already tracked about your creative work in the world — surfacing patterns, possibilities and directions that are often hard to see from inside the work itself.

So give it a try and let me know what you discover.

Let her.

Nov. 25, 2025
By Amanda Bray

Let her lift the blankets off her shoulders. 
Let her put her feet on the floor. 
Let her walk outside and may the pine needles and the granite rock pierce the soles of her feet. 
And let them tell her which way to run. 

Let her fly, let her land. 
Let her listen.
Let the deer show her steadiness, the bear show her rage. 
Let the trees show her what it’s like to stand undeterred in the face of a storm. 

Let her pierce her nose and put ink in her veins. 
Let her claim her true mother and bury her babes. 
Let her fly to the shore. 

Let her rest when she’s weary. 
Let her laugh. 

Let her pack up her life. 

Let her swim in the ocean. 

Let her know the touch of love. 

Let her words land. Let her song rise. 

Let her know that she was alive all along.

thought her readers wanted the explainer.

Her Substack data revealed something else entirely:

They were responding to her work in when she leaned into her innate relational storyteller.

For 15 years, Jen has helped brands find their voice. She’s a strong writer, a natural storyteller and a community-builder.

She began publishing on Substack in 2022 (Pretend You’re Good At It) and built a loyal readership along the way. But as she started working on a parenting memoir, she wanted to understand something more deeply:

What actually creates connection with readers?

Using her subscriber and post data through a tool called SubSight, Jen began identifying patterns in her publishing — and what she discovered changed how she thinks about audience-building.

Her readers weren’t most engaged with the explainer Jen. They were drawn to the relational Jen.

From there, she started building what she now calls an “editorial brain” for her Substack publication — including a Relational Resonance Checklist and even a Neighborhood Map for understanding how readers move closer to her work.

As Jen puts it:

“This is my strategy for moving readers from the sidewalk to the backyard fire pit.”

Come watch how she built it.

I’m opening up a Special Access Office Hours to all readers subscribed to The Publishing Spectrum.

(These live calls are usually reserved for members of The Publishing Mentorship | $399/year.)

⏰ 11 a.m. CT | 📅 Monday, May 11

It’s free to attend, but you do need to be subscribed to The Publishing Spectrum as your RSVP: once you’re in, you’ll receive the special access link in your inbox on Sunday.

Subscribe now

Already subscribed? You’re all set.

→ Reshare this post with your answer:

Are your readers connecting more with your expertise… or your perspective?

Share

These days, I’ve been feeling invisible.

Invisible in layered, uncomfortable ways.

I’ve been hearing from a lot of people that they feel invisible, too.

It would be easy for me to write a post about being invisible to your readers on Substack and how data can help you with this and that and the other.

But invisibility needs an honest word, first.

For the last year my daughter and I have been rebuilding our lives in a new part of the DFW metroplex. A fresh start like this in a town where my parents have lived for 20+ years is a curious kind of invisible. You’re back, but you’re not. You’re here, but you’re not rooted yet.

I’m not going to put a perky spin on this last season of my life. It has been painful. It has made me reckon with invisibility in a way that I can’t put into words. And yet, at the same time, I keep discovering how inherently workable it can be.

Maybe that’s my contemplative side coming out. When the student is ready, the teacher will appear. If that’s true, the last 12 months of my life have been a revolving door of life’s most persistent professors.

So today, I’d like to tell you about what I’m learning about invisibility. And to tell you that invisibility, like all things, over time, can become workable, even in the most challenging of seasons.

🧄

I am an autistic woman. I have edited that in and out of my Substack bio more times than I can count. My About page has nodded to it. I think I landed on “neurodivergent” as a quiet wink in other Substack spaces. Notably, while trying to relaunch my career, I mention it nowhere on my updated LinkedIn profile.

I know it isn’t kosher to write about the writing of an essay, but I need to tell you that the sheer act of trying to describe invisibility created goblins in my writer’s mind.

As I tried to write this essay, each draft kept bouncing out of my hands.

I kept trying to write the respectable, “niche-friendly” version and collapsing at my desk, on my bed at home … draft after draft came through until I finally surrendered and looked the theme square in the eye.

OK, let’s talk about it, I said.

Being invisible is so inextricably tied to being autistic that I can’t avoid it anymore. Invisibility ripples like an ache in my bones. I have worked so hard to befriend it, to sit with it, to let it teach me. And today I am ready to invite you into the layers of invisibility.

I wasn’t diagnosed until I was 36 — and under unorthodox circumstances that really do matter. At the time I had been living in relative isolation at 7,500 feet in the mountains of Pine, Colorado, and wrestling with a sinking feeling that something on the inside of me was really, truly different — irreconcilably different. I was also running a COVID-inspired e-commerce store, while also being consumed by medical treatments for secondary infertility. I was also still catching the ripple effects of grief from two back-to-back second trimester miscarriages back in 2019.

In 2021, when I was diagnosed as autistic, it was both a relief and a catalyst. It gave me language to advocate for myself. It handed me an uncomfortable lens on my past. It created a container for my marriage that it ultimately wouldn’t survive.

But for all my efforts to understand my inner wiring, to heal, to find compassion for myself, what I’ve come to understand is that being autistic was never the root problem I needed to solve for.

The real “problem” is that I had nearly four decades of coping mechanisms that had been ingrained along the way. I feel like by now that “masking” has been pretty popularized, but just in case you haven’t heard of it: masking is any behavior or strategy that helps a neurodivergent person camouflage themselves in order to fit in inside neurotypical or public settings. Masking isn’t one thing. It is many things all combined into a unique coping template for each individual person.

Done from a young age, masking can become so second nature, so automatic, that eventually you become invisible to yourself.

Six-year-old Amanda didn’t sit quietly in the backseat of the car while her parents argued because she was happily daydreaming out the window. She swallowed until the pit of her stomach went silent and her words lodged in the middle of her throat. Until the pain of what she was listening to simply vanished into thin air. She learned early that there were social and relational repercussions to being herself. There was always a cost.

I love that Mary Oliver asks us to love what our animal body loves. But that’s easier said than done when every thing you reach for is taken away and every attempt at connection receives a scowl. You learn something quite quickly as a young undiagnosed autistic child: your animal body is the problem to solve for if you want to stay safe.

So you make it go away, as best you can. You learn to use invisibility as currency — make yourself small enough, just legible enough, so exactly neurotypical, that you can fake a sense of ordinariness. These operating conditions saw me through a lot in my life. They helped me get through college and leave with a journalism degree. They helped launch me out into the world. And for a while, how I masked as an adult “worked.” Until the price became so high I couldn’t look away anymore.

🧄

I remember one time, when I was 11 or so, my grandmother came for a visit. She and my grandpa lived in Louisiana, we in a suburb of Dallas, so visiting was easy enough that neither traveling party arrived too cranky. I’ll never forget the time she walked into the kitchen where I had been experimenting with a new recipe and she scolded me for using too much garlic.

She said it would “soak into the fabric of the sofa.”

Invisible Amanda performed as she ought to: I quietly acknowledged her and remained respectful. I took her chiding in stride. But inside, I had a moment of rebellion. I looked down at the cutting board and the head of leftover garlic cloves and felt my nerves building. Less garlic? No way. I just knew she was wrong. I knew my recipe needed that much garlic. And besides, the couch was old and grimy anyway — the garlic might have improved it, for all we knew. I resolved to secretly always use as much garlic as I wanted.

This and other little acts of rebellion stayed hidden for most of my life. I learned to plan my life like a narrator outside myself. I learned to mask the places I felt most confident and most at ease in order to create baseline functionality.

Now, at 41, I know for certain that creating an Invisible You is a recipe (pun intended) in which you can abandon yourself in pieces so small … and you may not ever notice. You can actually think you’re building the life you want! Until one day you look down and there’s almost nothing recognizably you left.

The garlic story isn’t only about being autistic, being frozen, knowing better, choosing something for yourself but keeping it as hidden as possible. It’s also a story about being a writer. And it filters over into what it costs to build something in public (yes, even publishing to a small audience on Substack) when you’re still figuring out who you are allowed to be on the inside, and what you’re safe enough to tell the world about.

🧄

In the last two decades of working with writers, I’ve learned that we have our own particular flavors of language-based masking. It’s not always masking in the neurological sense — though many of us are neurodivergent, and that overlap is worth its own essay — but in the craft sense.

You can be an acclaimed human factors engineer and still have blind spots in your own manuscript. You can be a deeply earnest theologian and struggle to connect real life to the theological framework you’ve been carrying for years. This isn’t because you’re a bad writer or uneducated or unqualified. It’s because you’ve learned — the same way a child learns in the backseat of a car — that there are social and relational repercussions to being fully yourself on the page. There is almost always a cost.

I know this from my own work too. A few years ago, I developed somatic flashcards — physical, tangible objects designed to help a business owner work through her relationship to anger, identity and the things she was trying to build. There was something genuinely alive in them: the weight of a card in your hand, a precisely chosen quote sitting next to a meditative prompt, the specificity of an emotion given a physical address.

And then I did what writers do when something feels too raw or too strange to hand directly to the world: I tried to make the somatic flashcards respectable. I packaged them into a second newsletter identity — The Intuitive Leader — and attempted to transport the magical contents into a business-oriented format that other people might find easier to sign up for.

Of course this didn’t stall and fizzle because I lacked a strategy or editorial plan. It resisted a form that wasn’t true enough to live in the world. The ideas had a life of their own, and I was trying to force them into a different one. That’s masking, in the writing sense. That’s taking what your animal body knows and tidying it until it escapes you on purpose.

You pour yourself onto the page and wonder if any of it reaches someone. You work in private and publish on Substack into what can feel like an empty canyon. You lose the thread of what you were even trying to say. This experience is so universal that I can’t help but hand it over to the universal principal of “workability” that’s been pushing on my life as of late. Yet for all the invisibility I see around me, I am optimistic: I don’t think any writer’s invisibility is inherently unsolvable. It just might need more patience, particular tools — ones designed for someone who wrestles craft in the margins of their life, someone who may not have a team of six to help them get their work across the finish line.

🧄

And then there’s a third thing in wrestling with invisibility. The one I’ve been most recently entrenched inside.

In March, I built an app. It’s called SubSight. It’s a publishing tool I’ve been sharing with my paid subscribers. I built it because I kept seeing a pattern of invisibility in Substack publications, and I wanted writers to be able to see their own work the way a publishing advisor like myself does. I also know from direct experience that data as it exists in the Substack dashboard wasn’t designed for what most of us actually are: solo writers/founders with complex lives trying to write something true and also keep the lights on.

Here’s what I haven’t said in the same breath: I built this app as a single mother. In weekend hours, in the margins of a co-parenting schedule, in the fragile window after my daughter falls asleep. There is a particular flavor of invisibility in that — in building something that might matter while being unsure anyone will see it, while making sure a small person is fed and loved and ready for daycare, while trying to reconstitute yourself after a marriage ends. The stakes of visibility are different when you’re doing it alone. When there is no one else to absorb the risk if you get it wrong.

I didn’t build SubSight because I aspire to be a software founder and send out “how to” manuals twice a week. I built it because I know what it means to not be able to see yourself clearly. I know what it means to have spent years performing just legible enough that no one asks too many questions. And I could see that same mechanism playing out in the way writers were looking at their own data — or avoiding it. The numbers felt like a verdict. I wanted to see if I could make them feel like a map.

Not wanting to be perceived as a software founder might be its own form of masking, honestly. My animal body still flinches a little at the label.

🧄

So how do you work with all of this? With invisibility being both a way of surviving the world and a pain that’s no longer worth hiding?

I’m afraid I have some terrible news: the only way is through.

The way through, for me, has involved:

sinking into the quiet places of the heart and spending real time there.

paying attention to and trusting when my curiosity lights up, when my fingers feel numb and electric simultaneously.

noticing that my toes start tapping in unison with an author’s voice I find irresistible.

holding onto the people in my life who feel like a peaceful river.

learning to set invisibility aside long enough to say I’m here, and I want to give this to you.

And discovering, in real time, that I can survive “This is terrible” and “This is exactly what I needed” arriving in the same ten-minute window of my inbox.

Practically, this has looked like staying with this particular season of The Publishing Spectrum — conversations around data — when it would be tidier to have a niche. It’s also meant letting myself play on Instagram and document my latest attempts to place the right bird feeder on a tree outside our bedroom window. It’s meant creating a recipe reel on Instagram, not because I am now a recipe maker, but for no reason except that I’ve been making recipes since before my grandmother tried to correct me. And I wanted to share a spring-timey marinade with the world without it having to become the only thing you know about me.

🧄

That impulse — to be seen in pieces, on your own terms, without collapsing into a single legible identity — is what I was trying to address inside SubSight. It’s what I’m trying to model inside The Publishing Spectrum. Because I think the same thing that makes it hard to post a recipe without a brand strategy is what makes it hard to write honestly. It’s what makes it hard look at your own publication data as a story trying to smile back at you.

When you can look at your writing as something traceable and responsive, you tend to find the spark again.

You feel less invisible because you can finally see what’s true and workable.

And from the ground of workability, you can begin again as many times as you need.

The app, the newsletter, the kitchen experiments, the birds on the crape myrtle.

It’s all garlic.

And, just for good measure, I think I’ll toss in another clove or two.

🧄

Leave a comment

Resources mentioned in the live stream

📖 Read the Publishing Archetype overviews: Wayfinder, Architect and Free Range Writer.

📊 Try SubSight (paid subscribers)

👩🏻‍💻 Read the Full List of Substack Reader Survey Results

🤝 Substack Editorial Advisory (for building a subscriber nurturing system)

This week I shared the results of the Publishing Architect Quiz in a Substack live stream.

→ You can watch the full replay above. If you'd rather read the highlights and get to the good stuff, I've organized the moments that stuck with me most.

Here’s what 400 writers told me when I asked them the uncomfortable questions:

71% admitted their deepest fear: If I actually gave this my full effort, it still wouldn’t go anywhere.

This one felt really tender when it came in, y'all. Because I think that fear echoes out from a lot of different directions when you’re a person who cares about language. And I don't think that fear gets resolved just because you become a bestseller or get accollades. I don't think it gets resolved when you see your name on a bookshelf. There's something universal here that I think is worth sitting with.

41% aren’t asking “what should I write?” They’re asking “do I have the right angle?”

I thought that was really curious. Because it’s actually quite a sophisticated signal. This kind of thoughtful person is the kind of creator Substack tends to attract — someone who already knows what they want to say, they just haven’t figured out how to say it yet. If I could take those people and put them in a room, we could have a really fun conference.

53% said they need to trust that the right people will find their work — even if the path is slow.

This one actually kind of boosted my spirits. Because that’s how I feel. I know my own limits. I know my creative bandwidth. And seeing 53% of people say yeah, me too — that made me feel like there’s a middle way for publishing on Substack.

And, finally, 40% said: I want that kind of successful momentum in my publication, but I’m not sure someone else’s approach will work for me.

That’s the sentence I keep coming back to. And it’s the reason the Publishing Archetype Quiz is moving out of a standard Typeform online quiz format and into something that actually shows you your archetype inside your own writing.

The three publishing archetypes — Architect, Wayfinder, Free Range Writer — aren’t personality types for fun. They describe how you actually get your work into the world: how you decide what to write, how you respond when a post lands quietly, how your creative season shifts without you realizing it.

Knowing yours changes what tools you reach for, what “consistency” actually means for you and why someone else’s strategy isn’t working even when you follow it exactly. But reading about your archetype and seeing it reflected in your actual publishing data — that’s a different thing altogether.

SubSight is what came next.

It’s a tool I built with my editorial brain — trained on the patterns I’ve tracked across real Substack publications. It learns your archetype, works with your actual post and subscriber data and then talks to you about your writing in light of both.

It’s not generating generic feedback or large-scale trends. It notices when you’re moving through writing phases inside your publication. It helps you see yourself more clearly and know what to write next.

It’s $10/month, still in beta, and available to paid subscribers now. A few folks who’ve tried it said it gave useful analysis with as few as nine posts.

If you’re ready to stop guessing and start seeing the patterns in what you’ve already built — come on in.

Upgrade today and put your data into SubSight.

Subscribe now

Maybe this just isn’t for me.

Often we don’t say these things because they only feel half true: we still love writing, we love connecting with readers. But if you’re anything like me, the standard Substack advice often arrives in a register that feels a little like being handed a manual for a car you’ve been driving for years. Full of terms you don’t fully use, optimizations you don’t have bandwidth for and frameworks that feel designed for someone with a slightly different life than yours.

After spending years working inside Substack publication data and watching really good writers quietly conclude that they were behind, I want to state something plainly:

Maybe you’re just being measured by the wrong ruler.

And today I want to give you three resources to help you figure that out for yourself.

I’m unlocking three pieces from behind the paywall. There’s no promotion or sale. The topics aren’t old.

Together, these 3 essays tell a story that are hard to see when they’re locked — and because the people who need them most are probably the people who haven’t paid to read my newsletter yet.

Here’s what’s in them, and why I think they might matter to you.

If you’ve been wondering whether slow growth means something is wrong with you:

Last fall I wrote about what I’m calling platform privilege — the thing nobody names when a notable writer announces they’re leaving Substack to build their own thing.

The piece started with a question I kept getting asked by people after seeing their data for the first time: Should I leave Substack?

And my answer is complicated. Because sometimes the data really does point toward leaving Substack. But more often, what I see is someone watching someone else make a decision that their particular resources and runway make possible — and then wondering why they can’t just do the same.

Established authors can leave Substack. They often have publisher support, name recognition and an audience that’s so deeply invested they’ll follow them anywhere. Most of us are still building toward that kind of relationship. And there’s nothing wrong with that. But there’s a real risk in pretending the playing field is level when it isn’t.

What I argue in that piece — and what I still believe — is that the antidote to feeling crowded out isn’t to leave. It’s to go deeper and build the kind of relational ground with your readers that can’t be replicated by someone who learned your framework last month.

That’s the essay. Read it here.

If you’ve been torn between what you want to write and what you “should” write for the Substack algorithm:

A few weeks after the platform privilege piece above, I published something I almost didn’t write because I was afraid it would sound like I was bragging about an algorithm hack.

It isn’t that. But it took me a minute to figure out how to say what it actually is.

Here’s the short version: Substack quietly rebuilt their recommendation system to reward something called sequential modeling — which is a technical way of saying the platform now cares about whether your posts build on each other, follow a rhythm and invite readers into a connected experience. It’s less interested in whether you posted at the right time on the right day.

I didn’t discover this by reading a white paper. I discovered it by breaking my own schedule — publishing four short posts in a row during a creative window that felt alive — and then watching the data behave in a way I didn’t expect on a Saturday.

When I went back and read the technical breakdown afterward, everything clicked. I hadn’t gotten lucky. I’d been following the exact publishing framework I always advocate for. And now, for the first time, the platform was built to recognize it.

This piece is essentially a permission slip. To write the weird posts, follow your curiosity longer than feels safe. And to ultimately trust that your creative rhythms matter just as much (if not more than) optimizing for an algorithm.

If you’ve been waiting for someone to tell you that what you’re already doing is right — this might be that moment. Read it here.

If you’ve been confused about what Substack platform advice to actually trust:

This one features a guest I was genuinely lucky to have: , who spent a decade at Facebook working on political strategy — which means she’s lived through more algorithm shifts and platform pivots than most creators will ever see.

When Substack offered her a complimentary strategic audit of her publication, she didn’t approach it the way most people do. She approached it as a window into what Substack is currently optimizing for — because, as she put it, “when company reps work with creators, they push the tools and metrics they’re being measured on. That tells you their strategy.”

What they pushed. What they didn’t push. What they obsessed over and what they completely ignored. Katie read between the lines in a way that I think is genuinely rare, and she was generous enough to let me pick her brain about what she found.

The takeaway that I keep coming back to: platforms push what they’re measured on, not necessarily what’s right for you. Notes is high in public promotion. It wasn’t a significant focus of her internal audit. That gap — between what a platform markets loudly and what it actually measures quietly — is some of the most useful intelligence a creator can have.

Read it here.

Why I built SubSight — and why I’m telling you this now

There’s something that connects all three of these essays, and it’s the same thing that led me to build SubSight.

Most creators don’t have access to someone who can read platform behavior the way Katie reads it, or who can sit with their data and tell them what it’s actually saying versus what it looks like it’s saying when you’re panicking at 11 p.m.

SubSight is my attempt to close some of that gap. It looks at your Substack subscriber and post data and helps you see patterns in your audience engagement, voice and writing arc — not to give you more things to optimize, but to give you wider, clearer ground to stand on when you’re making decisions about what you write next.

If these three essays make you curious about what your own data is actually saying — not the panic version, the useful version — that’s what it’s there for.

See what SubSight can show you.

And if you’ve been quietly doing the work of publishing — following your creative momentum, going deep with your readers, resisting the urge to chase every new feature — I hope these pieces give you something solid to hold onto.

You’ve probably been ahead of the curve this whole time.

It just took the platform a minute to catch up.

Leave a comment

First: I’m stepping into someone else’s newsletter — tomorrow.

invited me to join her for a Substack live stream to talk about something I’ve been quietly figuring out for years: getting dressed as an autistic person. We’ll get into why patterns and textures that feel exciting in the store become a source of dread in the closet, why “just match it” is one of the least helpful things you can say to me and how I finally landed on an organizing logic for choosing what to wear that has nothing to do with fitting in.

If you’ve ever stood in front of a full closet and felt like nothing was available to you — this one’s for you.

📅 3 p.m. CT, Tues., April 28.

Second: a send-off for the Publishing Archetype Quiz — and what 400+ of you showed me.

I designed the Publishing Archetype Quiz because I wanted to give Substack creators a way to understand themselves (and how they publish) in the context of traditional publishing dynamics (that can quietly show up in Substack). That same intelligence is now woven into SubSight, my editorial-driven data tool for Substack creators — so the quiz is retiring, but what it revealed lives in the live broadcast below.

A solo writer with less than 1,000 readers and a media team with 200,000+.

We’re looking at different scales, different sets of resources and yet they have the same thing working in their favor:

Their work is in steady contact with their audience — and they know how to recognize and respond to that.

They also:

• have a clear sense of what “active” actually means in their publication

• make decisions based on movement, not just output

• build around real reader response, not assumptions and

• they invite people to go deeper (yes, upgrade) with a posture of invitation — not a pitch

Most creators miss the chance to connect with their audiences because they’re looking at the wrong data — or not looking at all.

I got into this, the 1,000- and 10,000-reader plateaus on Substack, how meditation factors into leading a publication (and a lot more) in a conversation that was published today:

Read on Mediabistro here

Being curious about data was treated as either a creative betrayal or a path to audience manipulation.

Of course, we treat it as neither in The Publishing Spectrum.

And in the last two years, I’ve come to see something much clearer about data, publishing and being a creative person sharing your best ideas, drawings, stories or podcasts with the world:

Most Substack creators don’t actually have a data problem.

They have a decision problem.

Seeing your open rates, your subscriber count, your growth curve (for better or worse) is fine. But none of it really helps unless you understand what to do differently when you sit down to publish.

So the data sits there — almost like a menace.

Without it helping you make better decisions, you’re left with the tools that have always made sense: creative instinct, paired with your editorial or storytelling edge.

Creative instinct is essential inside Substack.

But on its own, it’s a slow — and often incomplete — feedback loop for anyone trying to grow a publication, or for those who’ve been publishing long enough to feel a familiar plateau.

The shift is simple:

Not just “what happened,” but “what should I try next?”

Not just isolated results, but the arc of your work over time.

Here are five ways to start working with your data like that:

1. Separate what built your audience from what’s working now

Look at your last 90 days alongside your all-time best posts. If those look different, that gap matters. It tells you something has shifted — your audience, your writing or both. A thinking partner doesn’t just reflect your past; it helps you orient to your present.

2. Decide format on purpose

Before you publish, ask: should this idea be short, medium or long? Then check your data. If your audience consistently finishes and shares one format more than others, use that as a constraint — not a guess. Format stops being a habit and becomes a way of shaping how your ideas land.

3. Run small, trackable experiments

Instead of “I’m trying to write better,” make it concrete:

“This week: shorter posts, clearer hooks.”

Then check what actually changed. Over time, these cycles give you something instinct alone can’t: a visible pattern of what’s improving.

4. Look for patterns in who engages — and who leaves

A spike or dip doesn’t mean much on its own. But over time, patterns emerge. Certain readers respond to certain types of posts — and leave for specific reasons. When you can see that, you’re no longer writing into the void. You’re responding to real signals.

5. Stabilize your data so you can think with it

If you check your stats daily, everything looks noisy. Give your data a window (a month is the standard on SubSight, for example) and evaluate it consistently. A thinking partner needs stability — otherwise you’re reacting instead of reflecting.

This is the lens I’ve been building SubSight around over the past month.

Not just more analytics — but something closer to a working layer on top of your data, where you can ask:

What should I do differently next time?

— and actually get a grounded answer.

Because data, on its own, is creatively useless.

But used well, it becomes a partner in how you think — helping you see patterns, make decisions and, over time, understand the arc of your publication more clearly.

And for most writers who feel stuck, that arc is the thing that’s hardest to see from the inside.