Why I’m Publishing My Seventh Book Serially on Substack (and saving money on my email newsletter)

By Kathryn P. Haydon

Books We Love, Deep Souls

Last year, I identified the Substack platform as a powerful writing tool: for email newsletter delivery, as a publication method for my regular articles, and as a publishing mechanism in serial format for my new nonfiction book. In the following article, I have laid out the details of my journey with Substack so that other writers can learn more about the possibilities that might be available for their own work.

Rarely am I ever an early adopter of technology. In fact, I tend to resist it. But there was something about Substack that caught my eye early on. It was the quality of the writers who were using the platform. Some of my favorite authors, poets, and fresh voices published their work on Substack. I discovered this accidentally as I signed up for their emails and received their communications via Substack.

As I was exploring Substack, I learned through my friend Jenny Blake’s Substack-based email that people were using it to publish their books serially. Quickly I signed up to receive Ted Gioia’s The Honest Broker publication, through which he was releasing his nonfiction book about music. I also signed up to receive another author’s nonfiction memoir. Though I am focused on non-fiction, notable fiction authors who are also publishing serially include George Saunders, Salman Rushdie, and Chuck Palahniuk.

No Longer Paying to Send a Free Email Newsletter

For at least 17 years I have been sending emails with articles, insights, book recommendations, event announcements, poetry, and inspiration to my list of subscribers. I have enjoyed sending these free emails monthly, twice monthly, or less frequently, depending on the circumstances. I love communicating with my readers, both to share with them and to respond when they write back.

With every passing year, these free emails became more and more expensive to send. My email management platform swelled into a significant expense, especially given the growth of my list. Costs rose to cover ever-expanding features that I did not use. I needed a new solution. I needed a way to email my subscribers without a hefty fee. I did my research and Substack seemed to be simple enough for me to use—and it held the possibility to build community with my readers and even earn money from my writing. This was compelling.

Setting Up a Substack Publication

In order to use Substack as an email delivery tool, you first have to set up your own Substack “publication.” A Substack publication should be thought of as a tailored website. The name of my publication is Deep Soul Strengths and you can find all of my articles linked from its homepage, just like any other website. Substack writers and creators retain their copyright when they post. Essentially the agreement grants Substack a license to “publish” your content, which you can revoke by leaving the platform. It’s one click to back up and export your entire publication. Since you own your content, you can publish it wherever you want in addition to Substack.

The basic system includes typical pages like “Home,” “About,” and “Archives.” You can add other pages as you wish. I have added a page called “A Love Letter to Deep Souls” which houses all of my book chapters as they are released. (More on serial book publishing later in this article!)  I have also added an “Events” page to provide opportunities for readers to connect with me and our community online or in person.

It took time to develop my publication’s look and feel, to get branding visuals made, to choose genuine art to feature and get permission from the artists, and to write copy for all of the pages. There are many customization options and it is quite user-friendly, but it does take time to choose and tailor each aspect. Usually I do not enjoy learning new technology, but honestly, Substack makes it quite easy. Even for me it wasn’t frustrating and was somewhat enjoyable!

In April 2024, I began writing articles for my publication. I scheduled them to be published and emailed to me, the one subscriber, on July 1 thinking that I could pause the schedule before then. But I forgot, and on July 1, 2024, my Substack publication, Deep Soul Strengths, went live.

Moving the Email List to Substack

Now that it was real, I kept going and published several additional articles. I started prepping my readers to alert them that they would soon be receiving emails through a different system that had more functionality and possibility.

I also enabled the “paid” function. You have the option of simply using the platform to send out emails for free or you can offer tiered subscription options wherein readers sign up as paid subscribers and pay monthly or yearly for different features that you offer. For example, I promise my free subscribers that they will receive “occasional public posts.” Monthly or yearly paid subscribers can access my full archive, real-time chats, comments, and my book. Founding Members, the highest tier, receive all of that plus pop-up opportunities and the option to be featured to get their own work in front of the eyes of our thousands of readers.

Substack handles all payments on the back end through the payment system Stripe, taking a cut of 10 % for each transactions. In addition, Stripe charges 2.9 % plus 30 cents per transaction plus a 0.7 % billing fee for recurring subscriptions. Every time they collect payment from one of your subscribers, Substack transfers money via Stripe into your account.

In early August of 2024, my techie sister helped me move my list over to this platform and we sent out the first email on August 14. In just seven months we have published nearly 60 posts, hosted monthly live chats, created Substack Live videos, and interviewed our Founding Members to share with our community. This is something any writer can do to share articles or poems to a wider audience. As you know, I sought to add a  dimension to mine and publish my book serially using the platform.

Serial Book Publishing My Nonfiction Book on Substack

For ten years, I have been writing a book. Concurrently, I published five others. But this book has been simmering, moving into and out of my workflow. For this book I participated in a Shark Tank type pitch contest, consulted with agents, and began to move forward down a publishing path. But none of the options quite clicked.

When I learned about serial publishing on Substack, I immediately recognized this approach as a viable possibility for my nearly-finished book, A Love Letter to Deep Souls. This book required a community; with this publishing method, each section and chapter would be open for discussion and even feedback. Deep souls are outlier thinkers who aren’t always understood. What better way to publish a book for them than to do so while creating the very community that they have requested for years?

After publishing seven books, I have used many publishing options over the years. My first book was published by a large educational publisher.  Because of the extensive downsides of this approach, I self-published my second book with a co-author. This book continues to be a modest success, and I’m so grateful that we went in this direction. It was a wonderful experience and we repeated this with the third book, a Spanish version done in-house, and the fourth, a poetry chapbook. I was approached to write my fifth book by a medium-sized publisher who wanted to innovate publishing. I’m not sure he followed through on that vision, but the experience was more or less positive. For my sixth book, a poetry collection, I started a small press of my own with the thought that I would like to create an imprint to publish a certain type of poetry collection. And that leads us to now, where I am publishing under my press but in this innovative, serial manner.

I believe that it’s important when publishing to lay out your vision and goals for the project and to match those with the right publishing method for that particular project. For me, the main factors that drive me to some form of self-publishing are time to market, artistic freedom, and the ability to keep more of my proceeds. Publishers tend to pay royalties of between 10 % and 15 %, so for each book the author keeps a couple of bucks. If the publisher  took on the marketing and promotion of a book, that would add a lot of value and require a different calculation. But for the most part, those responsibilities have also fallen to authors. I learned this with the large educational publisher and felt that the deal was highly unfair. But that’s just the way it is in the industry right now.

My problem for A Love Letter to Deep Souls had been twofold: I was hesitant to publish a printed version as the “final word” on this topic without getting the buy-in of the deep souls community. This is a notoriously difficult type of person to categorize, and I have done it anyway to stave off the negative labels that flow into the void. But what if there were more insights that I hadn’t considered? Yes, I spent thousands of hours researching, interviewing hundreds of deep souls, conducting a study, and analyzing data, but there’s always room for more. It’s a topic I invented with their help  and I wanted continued collaboration. The Substack serial model intrigued me because it is a dynamic method that allows for this interaction.

Second, it is more difficult in my opinion to self-publish a printed prose volume than it is to create a poetry book. No longer do I have a master graphic designer co-author as I did with the second and third books.

Even so, publishing a book on Substack is not without costs. I paid a hefty sum to hire an editor and also hired a cover designer. A serial book requires more visuals and the designer created separate icons for each chapter. I know my limitations in executing my own work, so I partnered with my tech-expert sister as a collaborator in this venture. We set up a bookseller-author relationship wherein she earns 40 % of proceeds as the implementer and I earn 60 % as the longtime creator. I also spent money to purchase postcards to hand out something tangible for this digital project, and I bought additional postcards and stamps to send analog excitement designed to encourage new paid subscribers.

So far, we have released the first few vignettes or chapter sections, and it seems to be working smoothly. People have responded positively to the idea of a serial book—they too suffer the pain  of to-be-read books gathering dust on their shelves! These chapter sections have produced deep and thoughtful conversations about each section. It’s a delight to interact with readers in such an immediate way, as the chapters are released.

How’s it Going Overall?

At the time I set up Deep Soul Strengths, 80% of the people I spoke with had not heard of Substack. I had to provide a lot of education to both my email subscribers and the general public to explain what Substack actually is. There is a barrier for people who find themselves as recipients of emails via Substack to realize how to set up an account and log into the platform to take advantage of the myriad of features.

I believe that is rapidly changing as many people ditch other online platforms that have fallen out of favor. Others are following uber-popular authors, like James Patterson, to Substack. Still, many people, especially those of a certain age, need some tutelage on its usage. They are usually comfortable reading the articles/books as emails on their phones or desktops, but they don’t quite know how to sign up as paid subscribers. Once they do sign up, many also don’t know how to change their account settings to minimize notifications. This is something we are actively trying to help them learn so they don’t get overwhelmed by notifications that aren’t pointing to meaty article from Deep Soul Strengths!

Substack and Substack creators have reported a potential conversion rate of free to paid subscribers of 7.5%. Most creators believe this is closer to 2% or perhaps up to 5% for non-political publications. I can report that our conversion rate, at the time of this writing, is around 2.5% of our thousands of subscribers. To be honest, because of the historic engagement our readers have had with this topic and our high open rates on emails, I thought the conversion rate would be in the 7.5% range. That said, there have been significant obstacles to educating my list of readers about the platform and how to join.

I promised at the inception of my Substack publication to send the same number of free emails as I had been sending for years—an average of one per month. I didn’t want to short my faithful readers! This I have greatly exceeded over the seven-month life of this publication. It will be interesting to see if more people convert to a paid subscription as they realize that they can only read several sentences or paragraphs of the book. I sure hope the book makes a compelling case!

Though I don’t have as many paid subscribers as I had hoped by this point in time, I did meet my primary goal (to stop paying to send out free emails) and I am grateful for every paid subscriber that I do have. The fact that so many have jumped in over seven months demonstrates that they value the writing that I have been gifting to the world for years. The price is basically a latte a month, but I remain happy with the $6/month or $60/year price point. It’s important to me to have this threshold, both for readers to assure me that my efforts are worth taking and also because only members can make comments or join our live chats. This eliminates the chance of trolls and provides a trustworthy space for subscribers to connect and converse.

More Substack Features That Might Be Useful

The people I am writing for, deep souls, often feel like outliers in their worlds and Substack has additional features that facilitate community. We have a handful of “regulars” at our real-time live chats (just text, no video) and genuine connections have been made. A quilt of a community is stitched together over time. With the release of the book, these chats have now become “book clubs” to discuss ideas introduced in recent chapters.

Substack has recently enabled a live video feature which is like Facebook Live. Only the host and/or a panel is on screen, but others can watch and comment in real time. We are just testing it now and so far have found it to be a useful feature that can be used spontaneously. The system alerts subscribers that the creator is “live” and they can watch if it’s convenient for them. At the end of the live, Substack creates an email with an embedded video of the program that can be easily emailed to all subscribers. I have gotten an extraordinary number of views on my initial videos, directly from Substack and across social media platforms, namely on LinkedIn.

We have also lightly used a referral program that allows readers to recommend our publication to earn points. Some have taken advantage of it. We also lightly use a social media-type feature called “Notes.” You connect with other Substack users and follow them to see their posts. The posts seem to be much more thoughtful and “writerly” or artsy than on other social media platforms, but not being a major social media user I have not spent a lot of time posting there. I have noticed that as the platform becomes more populated, the quality of these notes is deteriorating and I have had to unfollow many people to keep my feed focused on literature, creativity, and the arts.

Substack has a treasure trove of resources to explain every feature. There is an AI chatbot that is quite effective at answering most questions. I have had to email customer service one time about my email import (they are very careful not to allow spammers so they put me through some hoops), and the issue was quickly resolved on the back-end without a direct reply to my email. I have found the resources page sufficient to answer most of my queries.

Overall, we have found that paid subscribers have individual goals for their participation in this community. Some simply like to have access to every full article or book chapter that I send and they read them on their phones or desktops. Others live for the live chats. Several take advantage of the referral program. Not many seem to post on Notes. As the book continues to roll out and more people join as members, comments are becoming richer and more active.

Thus far, I am happy with my Substack journey—as an email delivery tool, a publication method for my regular articles, and a publishing mechanism for my new book. Knowing my own behavior on Substack, I view it as a tortoise: slow and steady wins the race. The race, in my opinion, is not against anyone else but simply the steady, organic building of community and readership over time.

If you would like to visit my Substack publication to look around, feel free to click here.

Ted Gioia is a prolific and fascinating Substack author. Here’s his 2022 article called “Ten Reasons I’m Publishing My Next Book on Substack.” His nonfiction book on music is now fully released.