Elle I just saw this (a year late) and applaud the effort you made to visualise your ideas. And these are good suggestions. You have influence here, so it would be great if you hammered away on these initiatives.
This is a fantastic idea! I’d also like the option to send an entire collection to my Kindle (I hate reading longform on my phone or computer. I already send a lot of articles and fiction to my kindle to read it there.)
I absolutely love this idea! I also love the mockups, which help us visualize exactly what this experience would look and feel like in Substack. Very well done!
I already offer mini-courses behind a Substack paywall. The same could be done for books. I post the summaries of the mini-courses on my Wordpress blog. https://jimbuie.wordpress.com/category/mini-courses/ Readers can access the full mini-courses for $5 a month or $60 a year. (We have to give paying readers value.) I use the images generated by Substack posts to make the mini-courses more visually appealing. I have yet to incorporate the design elements into my Substack newsletter though. Substack could help with that. https://jimbuie.substack.com/t/mini-courses I would fully expect to make more money from Substack than from printed books once I've fully built a paying audience on Substack.
Fascinating take! Something for substack potentially build
What are your thoughts on how Substack hosting books would affect authorship? Do you think being an author would become less of a living and there'd be more fluidity?
As in someone could be first a newsletter writer then a author of a book?
I think so! I'd much rather have my work be read than to lock it up in a book that can't be readily shared, and in which I only get 15% of the earnings!
I would love to see this idea in Substack. The collection post as a playlist could be a great idea, sometimes lots of posts on the archive are gold. And playlist will be the solution for this.
Thanks for writing this Elle – and your Canva skills are pretty good!
However, there's no point in waiting for Substack to make this happen. I don't think they care about what writers really need. I still host my newsletter here on Substack: https://newsletters.databeats.community
But what you describe is the reason I built out a "learning hub" using Webflow and it looks like this: https://databeats.community/
I also built other features like post recommendations (not personalized for the user) and in-line buttons. It's taken almost a year's worth of effort to get here and I'm constantly thinking of ways to make existing content easy to discover. You will see a bunch of filters that help.
I also wrote a book that I might distribute as a series via the website – not sure if I should though.
If anyone is interested in replicating the databeats Learning Hub, I've been considering creating a paid Webflow template with all these features. If a few of you are interested, I will make it happen.
Thank you so much for sharing all of this! I created a similar workflow when I published my novel here, but the experience was very piecemeal. I would love it to feel more built in! (And am bullish about that happening on Substack just because I think there's too much friction to get people to join a custom built solution. That said, I could see how that could work for a learning hub! Most of those are very much independent!
Oh yeah, if Substack offered a little more customization and the ability to add basic filters, I wouldn't have spent thousands of dollars building the learning hub on Webflow. But the problem I see is that when you're only on Substack, people perceive your publication just as a blog or a newsletter or a "Substack" rather than a place to go learn about something specific. I really liked when Substack experimented with custom frontends like with The Free Press (https://www.thefp.com) because it enables you to inject your own style rather than make your publication look templated.
You and I want a similar future but unfortunately, I don't see the Substack team aligned with this. They're now creating a social platform and the dynamics of those are completely different from the dynamics of a company that builds tools for creators.
Elle I just saw this (a year late) and applaud the effort you made to visualise your ideas. And these are good suggestions. You have influence here, so it would be great if you hammered away on these initiatives.
Still doing what I can!
Yes, great idea.
Substack marketplace, created by Elle Griffin
I don’t like the idea of notes interspersed with carousels of books, but the rest sounds great.
This is a fantastic idea! I’d also like the option to send an entire collection to my Kindle (I hate reading longform on my phone or computer. I already send a lot of articles and fiction to my kindle to read it there.)
Yes! This! All of this! Please
Love this idea so much!
Brilliant 🤩 idea. 🙏
Would also add the ability for readers to create a playlist of the best posts they’ve read/saved.
This would be like ‘Rap Caviar’ style curation and replication
You inspired me to take the plunge!
I absolutely love this idea! I also love the mockups, which help us visualize exactly what this experience would look and feel like in Substack. Very well done!
Yay! Thank you!
I already offer mini-courses behind a Substack paywall. The same could be done for books. I post the summaries of the mini-courses on my Wordpress blog. https://jimbuie.wordpress.com/category/mini-courses/ Readers can access the full mini-courses for $5 a month or $60 a year. (We have to give paying readers value.) I use the images generated by Substack posts to make the mini-courses more visually appealing. I have yet to incorporate the design elements into my Substack newsletter though. Substack could help with that. https://jimbuie.substack.com/t/mini-courses I would fully expect to make more money from Substack than from printed books once I've fully built a paying audience on Substack.
Insightful thought experiment - nice to see real writers expand on ecosystem possibilities. A lot of great ideas in here.
Such a no-brainer. If done right you’d have every writer rushing to build a Substack.
Fascinating take! Something for substack potentially build
What are your thoughts on how Substack hosting books would affect authorship? Do you think being an author would become less of a living and there'd be more fluidity?
As in someone could be first a newsletter writer then a author of a book?
I think so! I'd much rather have my work be read than to lock it up in a book that can't be readily shared, and in which I only get 15% of the earnings!
I would love to see this idea in Substack. The collection post as a playlist could be a great idea, sometimes lots of posts on the archive are gold. And playlist will be the solution for this.
Thanks for writing this Elle – and your Canva skills are pretty good!
However, there's no point in waiting for Substack to make this happen. I don't think they care about what writers really need. I still host my newsletter here on Substack: https://newsletters.databeats.community
But what you describe is the reason I built out a "learning hub" using Webflow and it looks like this: https://databeats.community/
A series looks like this: https://databeats.community/series/understanding-first-party-data
A collection (which I was referring to as a playlist because databeats is all about musical puns) looks like this: https://databeats.community/t/culture-and-collaboration
I also built other features like post recommendations (not personalized for the user) and in-line buttons. It's taken almost a year's worth of effort to get here and I'm constantly thinking of ways to make existing content easy to discover. You will see a bunch of filters that help.
I also wrote a book that I might distribute as a series via the website – not sure if I should though.
If anyone is interested in replicating the databeats Learning Hub, I've been considering creating a paid Webflow template with all these features. If a few of you are interested, I will make it happen.
Thank you so much for sharing all of this! I created a similar workflow when I published my novel here, but the experience was very piecemeal. I would love it to feel more built in! (And am bullish about that happening on Substack just because I think there's too much friction to get people to join a custom built solution. That said, I could see how that could work for a learning hub! Most of those are very much independent!
Oh yeah, if Substack offered a little more customization and the ability to add basic filters, I wouldn't have spent thousands of dollars building the learning hub on Webflow. But the problem I see is that when you're only on Substack, people perceive your publication just as a blog or a newsletter or a "Substack" rather than a place to go learn about something specific. I really liked when Substack experimented with custom frontends like with The Free Press (https://www.thefp.com) because it enables you to inject your own style rather than make your publication look templated.
You and I want a similar future but unfortunately, I don't see the Substack team aligned with this. They're now creating a social platform and the dynamics of those are completely different from the dynamics of a company that builds tools for creators.
I think this is a brilliant proposal that would benefit readers & writers alike.
Hey, Hamish & Co., are you listening?