What actually made this Substack post take off

My shortest post in 90 days outperformed everything. The data is helping me understand why.

A warm welcome to everyone who’s joined The Publishing Spectrum this week — especially the sidebar enthusiasts. My editor’s heart is beaming a little.

If you’re new here, introduce yourself in the comments. I’d love to know what you’re working on.

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The pattern I almost missed

Last week, a short post about sidebars quietly became one of my top performers.

📊 The Data Inside This Week’s Viral Post

Substack just gave you a sidebar...

• 168 likes

• 29 comments

• 30 restacks

• 512 words (my shortest post in 90 days)

• Published right as Substack rolled out the sidebar feature

• Written for a free audience

Note: Data synthesized inside SubSight.

On the surface, that all makes sense.

But there’s one part that really stood out to me:

This post generated nearly 3x the likes of a recent 1,300-word piece — with less than half the words.

And that’s a pattern I am looking at seriously.

Engagement per word was dramatically higher.

If you’re like most Substack creators and trying to understand what actually moves your writing forward, that ratio is far more useful than raw views or even static open rates.

The question that always follows

If you’ve been publishing for any amount of time, you’ve felt this moment:

A piece goes somewhere you didn’t expect. And the question shows up almost immediately:

Why did this work when other pieces didn’t?

It’s a deceptively hard question. It’s almost an unfair question, if I’m being honest.

Because in the moment — when something is resonating — it’s very easy to misread your own instincts. You start telling yourself a story about why it worked, and that story isn’t always accurate.

So instead of only working through my instincts (which I do invite into my creative processes!), I turned to the data.

What the data helped me see about my writing (that I didn’t want to admit)

When I ran this through my Top Performers and the Post CSV analysis, one insight surfaced almost immediately:

I’ve been leaning more philosophical than practical lately.

I already know this about myself.

My writing tends to move between two modes:

• contemplative, reflective, idea-driven

• practical, editorial, grounded in craft and experience

But being in your own writing life makes it hard to see when you’ve drifted too far in one direction.

This is where data becomes incredibly clarifying. Because without it, I might have walked away from this moment thinking:

People really liked that idea.

Instead of the more useful truth:

People responded to a clear takeaway, being concise and how I apply publishing tools.

That’s very different editorial feedback.

A simple way to see this in your own work

You don’t need any special tools to start noticing this pattern.

Try this:

✦ Find Your Resonance Score ✦

Inside Substack:

Settings → Posts → Filter

1. Sort by Comments

2. Then look at Free subscriptions driven

You’re not looking for your “most read” posts.

You’re looking for the overlap:

The pieces that made people respond and brought in someone new.

Find 2 – 3 of those.

Then ask:

• What do these posts have in common?

• How long are they?

• How quickly do they get to the point?

• What kind of response do they invite?

Most Substack creators never look here, which is often why they keep optimizing for the wrong elements in their writing.

Where this gets difficult (without help)

You can do this analysis manually.

But it gets harder when:

• You’re looking across dozens of posts

• Patterns are subtle, not obvious

• Your own preferences start biasing what you see

That’s the real challenge:

You’re in a relationship with your own writing — so you’re not a neutral observer.

And that’s exactly where I’ve found the most value in using SubSight.

What SubSight is actually doing

SubSight isn’t just looking at your metrics.

It’s synthesizing patterns across your writing so you can see:

• What consistently drives engagement

• What actually converts readers

• Where your editorial drift is happening

In this case, it helped me see something simple but easy to miss:

My audience responds more when I balance insight with application — and keep it as succinct as possible.

That’s the kind of feedback I can use before I publish my next piece.

Before you publish your next post

Most writers look at performance after something works.

But the real advantage comes from seeing your patterns before you hit publish again.

• Before you default to your usual length

• Before you lean too far into one mode

• Before you miss what your audience is actually responding to

If you want a clearer view of what’s working in your own writing, SubSight maps your top patterns across the last 90 days — including your Resonance Score.

Upgrade to start using SubSight to see what’s actually going on inside your Substack publication.