I'm guessing if you had created a Substack for a book you were writing from scratch (as opposed to based on a widely-known franchise) you likely wouldn't have got all those subscribers out of the blue.
It's still amazing to me though that this could happen without any promo. I can only assume people searched for "Wizard of Oz" and this led them to you.
In fact, a book I’m writing from scratch is my main Substack and I only have 850 subscribers there. So, you’re right, not nearly the same results. As those subs took twice as long and required me to do some self promo.
Then again it was at a time before Substack had all the bells and whistles they have now. I will add that since then I’ve done zero promotion of my main Substack and I get about 5 new subs a day from Substack doing their thing so this year I’m fairly confident in growing my Substack to 1.5-2k. We’ll see how well their algorithm and my consistent posting hold out.
Finding readers isn’t difficult and doesn’t actually require a public domain rewrite to do it. I got my readers from writing a bunch of short stories and then writing a novel later. The trick is to share it all for free so they can sample the goods then package it after for monetary value. I’m still working on the latter.
Thanks! I will be sure to update in a couple months when I hope to have more to share on how it's going. Unfortunately, you can't rush success...or failure...you gotta let it happen at its own pace...
My hope is "this time it will work" as I've tried so many other "where are these phantom readers hiding" tactics. This one seems the one most likely to succeed because I don't feel like I'm infiltrating there space like a huge billboard saying "look at me, buy my things" and I'm just "one of them" doing all the same stuff and later on I just so happen to have this thing that I already know we are all interested in and if you want to then maybe you might consider buying it or supporting my further efforts in this thing.
I just feel less like I'm begging for in search of money and more freedom to just do what I love and hope that the rest will come in time...
I'm guessing if you had created a Substack for a book you were writing from scratch (as opposed to based on a widely-known franchise) you likely wouldn't have got all those subscribers out of the blue.
It's still amazing to me though that this could happen without any promo. I can only assume people searched for "Wizard of Oz" and this led them to you.
Fascinating experience, in any case.
In fact, a book I’m writing from scratch is my main Substack and I only have 850 subscribers there. So, you’re right, not nearly the same results. As those subs took twice as long and required me to do some self promo.
Then again it was at a time before Substack had all the bells and whistles they have now. I will add that since then I’ve done zero promotion of my main Substack and I get about 5 new subs a day from Substack doing their thing so this year I’m fairly confident in growing my Substack to 1.5-2k. We’ll see how well their algorithm and my consistent posting hold out.
Finding readers isn’t difficult and doesn’t actually require a public domain rewrite to do it. I got my readers from writing a bunch of short stories and then writing a novel later. The trick is to share it all for free so they can sample the goods then package it after for monetary value. I’m still working on the latter.
It's a really cool idea.
Thanks! I will be sure to update in a couple months when I hope to have more to share on how it's going. Unfortunately, you can't rush success...or failure...you gotta let it happen at its own pace...
My hope is "this time it will work" as I've tried so many other "where are these phantom readers hiding" tactics. This one seems the one most likely to succeed because I don't feel like I'm infiltrating there space like a huge billboard saying "look at me, buy my things" and I'm just "one of them" doing all the same stuff and later on I just so happen to have this thing that I already know we are all interested in and if you want to then maybe you might consider buying it or supporting my further efforts in this thing.
I just feel less like I'm begging for in search of money and more freedom to just do what I love and hope that the rest will come in time...