Why You Suck At Substack

Nine weird tricks to grow discovered by a mom

1. You’re unironically asking guys to read your shit, which makes you their English teacher at best and more often just another irksome beggar, semiotically coding your work as garbage before their eyeballs even touch the page. The move is to groom niggas into reading by e.g. citing folx a little bigger than yourself in an argumentative way that demands a response, or reply-guying in their comments insightfully / non-needily until they’re interested in seeing what your deal is, after which they’ll frequently take you on as a sort of literary vassal and promote you organically of their own volition. But you need to treat it like dating / interviewing and remain a bit unbothered and aloof about it so as to avoid emitting signals of desperation to their precognitive amygdalic status detectors.

2. You’re straightforwardly ranting too much—especially as a man. Nobody cares about your problems unless they’re your mom or want to have sex with you, and so unless you’re a chickie posting thirst traps you’ll need to mediate your kvetching with oblique rhetorical stratagems like comedy or nested irony or pointing out problems in a braggadocious haughty way that doesn’t give empty-bellied loser.

3. You don’t have a distinctive voice or any unique / novel perspectives and are just saying the exact same shit as everyone else—especially people who look like you. In a saturated but undifferentiated market your primary selling point is an ability to genuinely surprise people, and it’s usually most effective to brand yourself as intellectually unpredictable and willing to beat up on your own side (without becoming a tedious Black Republican type) or offer counterintuitive big brained hot takes—see Pro-Lifers are Murdering Babies, The Pro-White Case For Reparations, and White-Nationalism Is Anti-White.

4. You aren’t building a parasocial relationship with your readers or any community among them that makes your publication feel larger-than-life and ontologically significant. Fact is if you want to make decent money on here / have people care about your opinions / have girl readers send lewds you really do need to act like a bit of a cult leader at times as opposed to just some fag with a blog.

5. You’re not mobilizing controversy. Last year half my subs came from two pieces—Why I’m No Longer a White Nationalist and Stop Being Mean to Slutty Women—that overtly antagonized the chuddier parts of the Dissident Right and in doing so got a bunch of asspained wignats to send my engagement into the stratosphere while also building credibility with audiences outside my core demos. Now this obv isn’t something you should do once your platform is big enough to expand peacefully, but if you want to explode into relevance from nothing it’s for sure the way to go.

6. Your titles are lame and shitty. It doesn’t matter one iota how splendid your prose is if nobody clicks in the first place, so sometimes it helps to lead with something a bit sensationalist only to let the adults back in the room once they’re engaged—basically my tack with How To Castrate The Left and Just Get Rid of the Palestinians.

7. You’re being self-indulgent—which isn’t necessarily a sin, but you do need to assess your priorities and be realistic about them bc if you want to really explode on here you’ll have to approach the venture sort of like Pete Buttigieg. During the first half of last year I was pretty well-behaved / Straussian and as a consequence grew like hotcakes, but around July I started being myself more and also saying bad words like “Nigger” while talking about my fetishes all the time and that for sure caused growth to level off a bit. Which don’t get me wrong, new subs are still coming in quite rapidly, but I also tend to lose them just as fast these days—per Substack analytics I’ve had exactly 12725 readers follow me in total of whom 3500 are still subscribed and my actuarial days are donezo so you do the math.

8. You aren’t playing the Notes game at all—which you shouldn’t be on account of it being a frivolous dopamine trap that degrades the platform and functionally turns everything into the pretentious bastard child of Twitter and Onlyfans, but idk if you just post all your rando shower thoughts there it’s a pretty dece growth vector.

9. You haven’t yet joined the Medelink Cartel—an understandable decision given it’s largely been operating sub rosa this year with basically zero involvement from Uncle Walt, but we’re also about to unroll an ingenious little app developed by the Tortuga Society’s tech lead Tom Swift that should make our engagement hacking quite a lot less laborious, so if you want in DM me.

Au revoir, lads.

— WB