🎧 What You Really Need to Know About Your Substack
Spoiler: The medium is the message
🎧 Listen to the podcast version here:
I love this photo of him. The black turtleneck. The determined expression. The eight rotary phones along the wall behind him. The pen in his hand. The two books open in front of him, one with an image of a knight from the Middle Ages.
If you don’t know who this is, it’s the iconic communications theorist Marshall McLuhan.
McLuhan is perhaps best known for declaring, “The medium is the message.” He meant it on an existential and global level, arguing that human nature and society are changed by each technological innovation.
But it also occurs individually. How our writing reaches our readers—via a physical newspaper, a TV, or a social media platform on a smartphone—creates a symbiotic relationship with what we write and influences the reader’s experience of it.
The medium is the message
If the medium through which our writing reaches our readers creates a symbiotic relationship with what we write and influences the reader’s experience of it, we should be paying pretty close attention to it.
We should approach writing a novel for traditional publishing differently than an article for The New Yorker’s online blog. As an extreme example of a writer who kept his medium in mind, when I interviewed the great Spanish novelist Javier Marías for The Paris Review, he revealed that he wrote on a typewriter with the book’s—not the manuscript’s—pages in mind, intentionally placing specific words to start and end each page.
It’s true on Substack too. We interact differently with a piece of writing if we read it online or in an app. Emails have an effect on us all their own. The medium—whether we’re read via email, on the website, or on the app—should influence what and how we write.
If you check your stats, you’ll discover how people are reading you.
How to check your stats
We now have excellent stats by which to better understand how our readers encounter our work. Thanks,
and everyone working hard on the backend of !Click on the three dots next to any post and click View stats > Reach.
Look at Traffic. Your traffic sources tell you how to communicate with your subscribers. Most of us will be a mix of email and the app. Some of us are almost pure email.
It will vary post to post, but knowing this will give you a sense of how you’re speaking to your subscribers.
Below is more information for paid subscribers on exactly what to consider depending on where you’re read: via email, the app, or both.
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