Can You Use Substack For Your Email List? (Don’t Shoot the Messenger!)

Thinking about audience building (and capturing) for writers.

Photo by Chad Madden on Unsplash

Anyone who knows me at all knows that I’m all about building your audience. And that means one kind of big, hairy, scary thing: creating an email list.

Writers tend to be creative types who live inside their own heads. We have wild imaginations — it’s fun in our brains, you know? We’ve got whole worlds up there.

In our ideal situation, we just create and people show up to read. Or they don’t. Whatever. But that’s not the real world. We both know that. In the real world, if you don’t have readers, you might as well be writing in a journal. In the real world, you need your audience. And no one is going to do the work of finding that audience for you.

So. Yes, you do have to build an email list. I think we can agree on that, right?

Right.

So now there’s, oh, a million more questions.

Starting with crap — now what? It’s one thing to know you need an email list and another to know how to actually go about doing that.

So let’s start with just one thing. Your server.