How to Build a Substack Empire (Of Like 6,000 People)

How I Turned Rambling About Shrimp Into Big Shrimp Donations

1 Introduction

One of my favorite blogs is

Cartoons Hate Her

(presumably not her real name). Although we blog about very different subjects (I would never stoop to writing my being more fuckable than you, preferring to stick to the real issues like shrimp welfare and the self-indication assumption) and we have diametrically opposed attitudes towards shrimp hating con-artist Lyman Stone, I think our writing styles are similarish. We both have been diagnosed with ADHD and churn out articles at a frenetic pace—almost daily—full of lots of dumb jokes, recurrent bits, and Trump impressions. Many such cases. My girlfriend described CHH as “very [me] coded.”

Anyway, I recently read quite a good article from she who has a very low approval rating among cartoons (in contrast, I get along very well with cartoons). It was titled How I Made Writing my Full Time Job As a Failed Author and Employee and as you might be able to guess from the title, it was about how CHH made writing her full time job as a failed author and employee.

Now, unlike CHH, because I’ve been treated unfairly, probably worse than anyone ever, I do not yet make enough money to survive off substack. Substack is my primary source of revenue—I make about $20,000 a year from it—though because I’m still in school, I have the luxury of not needing a full time job. But while writing is not my full-time job, given that I have a decent number of readers, I thought it might be fruitful to write about how I made substack my part time job. Especially because when I wrote about how I write a lot, you all paid me thousands of dollars! You can see the incentives you people give me! Writing—especially for blogs—is something I’m unusually good at and a skill that lots of people seem to want to cultivate, so it seemed like it would be worth writing about.

Thus, here’s a lengthy explanation of the history of my substack and general advice about how to write—and especially blog—really well.