[JV] My Published Short Stories on Substack + Your Non-Bot Traffic

[StarkContrast]

Over the past year, I have published almost 400 DAILY short stories on Substack.

I write, edit and publish these myself. I will engage with my readers daily.

You merely drive traffic to the substack newsletter.

The stories are in English, clean, short (200-700 words), and often have a twist at the end, but they're lacking people to read them.

Substack is a newsletter service. Usually you sign up to receive someone's newsletter for free.

Their stats say that 10% of those who sign up for the "newsletter" are turned into paid subscribers. The fee is set by the newsletter owner. Typical is $8/month, $60/year, or $250/year (often for the same newsletter).

Expenses are 10% to Substack, plus credit card charges of approximately 3% per transaction.

You drive traffic, people sign up, and with good traffic 10% become paid subscribers.

At the end of every month, I will show you what substack paid me (after they've taken their cut and CC fees), and we split it 50/50.

I am in this for the long haul of 10 years of writing and publishing these stories, so this could be a very long term JV. I am beginning year 2.

 

[ArmpitFunk]

How do you get people to follow you on Substack?

 

[StarkContrast]

Good question. That's the point of the whole JV, the point being to drive people to the substack.

 

[GringoMonkey]

I have worked as a publisher and author with success in the past, so may be able to help.

Can i ask how many subscribers do you have currently?

Do you publish these / similar stories on other platforms?

 

[StarkContrast]

Thanks for your interest.

I have a little over 90 subscribers right now. Not a lot, but not nothing either.

I haven't pushed for paid subscribers yet. I just opened it up last week to paid. I have one so far, but that was even before I tried to get people to pay.

These are not published elsewhere. I may link to them elsewhere but they are published solely on substack. I'm still publishing one each day.

It's a puzzle I'm trying to solve with no luck yet.

 

[GringoMonkey]

Unfortunately as you are already getting subscribers / sales, you cannot really work with a publisher to sort the sales amd marketing. So, it will have to be a puzzle you try and solve yourself

 

[Setox]

If you've got stories you didn't publish yet or you plan to write more, i might be interested, as i'm looking for someone to write short stories for a KDP Business.

 

[StarkContrast]

If you've got stories you didn't publish yet or you plan to write more, i might be interested, as i'm looking for someone to write short stories for a KDP Business.

I'm writing stories everyday so, sure, I have stories. DM me about what you're thinking on this please.

 

[Cryptopunk]

twitter is a good traffic source for substack, wriing threads on twitter works

 

[Cryptopunk]

twitter is a good traffic source for substack, wriing threads on twitter works

 

[Marco69]

also substack is not a good traffic osurce for your website?
Then medium will be better...syndicate your content with canonical tag to them or create medium publication (this will be stay longer on google I guess)

twitter, instagram ,maybe facebook when you post your fb page link in your comments on target groups where you are a member.

How cheap is Bing ads today say you have a video webinar 5 da^ys (5 videos for 8-10 minutes) promote this on Bing ads? Must be much cheaper than google.

Then the masterpiece way to get hordes of traffic would be get into google news, but I be not sure if you can have links in the footer to your main site on a google news site or you can adding affiliate banner/textads ?

 

[Exxtra]

Substack just looks like a shitty blog website to me. How is it any different than turdpress or that one from the early 2000s that was popular for a while...hmm... forget the name but it wasn't tumblr...but yeah, aside from them providing a subscription management thing what is the benefit of using substack over promoting your own website and using your own payment processing for subscriptions?

 

[StarkContrast]

Substack just looks like a shitty blog website to me. How is it any different than turdpress or that one from the early 2000s that was popular for a while...hmm... forget the name but it wasn't tumblr...but yeah, aside from them providing a subscription management thing what is the benefit of using substack over promoting your own website and using your own payment processing for subscriptions?

You make an interesting point.
Yes, it solves the subscription management problem, but the point still remains of the need to drive traffic to a short story site for an author without name recognition.

 

[Exxtra]

You make an interesting point.
Yes, it solves the subscription management problem, but the point still remains of the need to drive traffic to a short story site for an author without name recognition.

What would make you want to read what someone else wrote? Where would you look if you wanted to read stuff written by authors will little or no reknown? My suggestions:

- There are many forums, both independent as well as sections on 4chn and reddit, where you can post your stories. So post one and say "if you want to read more, go here..." or if links aren't allowed then "search for ___your pen name____ to read more on ___ substack___" or whatever you are publishing to.

- Write a book OR a book that is a collection of short stories and publish it using amazon kindle, then sign up for amazon affiliates and make a simple website showcasing your book(s) and linking to them via the aff link to Amazon. The benefit here is that the amazon cookie will give you credit for any purchase made even if it is not your book that sells, which means that if you can get people to click the link you are practically guaranteed something.

- Write themed stories and email them to the youtube channels that read stories. Creepypasta is a popular kind of story for this, as generally the stories that have some kind of supernatural component tend to reel in listeners.