234 Comments

I don’t like the idea of notes interspersed with carousels of books, but the rest sounds great.

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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.)

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Yes! This! All of this! Please

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Love this idea so much!

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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

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You inspired me to take the plunge!

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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!

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Yay! Thank you!

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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.

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Insightful thought experiment - nice to see real writers expand on ecosystem possibilities. A lot of great ideas in here.

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Such a no-brainer. If done right you’d have every writer rushing to build a Substack.

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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?

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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!

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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.

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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.

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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!

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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.

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I think this is a brilliant proposal that would benefit readers & writers alike.

Hey, Hamish & Co., are you listening?

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This is such a brilliant idea!

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I agree, and I am starting a one-day-at-a-time publication very soon.

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