Am I doing Substack “correctly”? Probably not. A few years ago someone with a ginormous number of Instagram followers told me why I wasn’t having more “success” on Instagram. “It’s because you post about too many different things,” they said. “You need to curate and streamline your account, and spend more time concentrating on getting a lot of engagement and the right times of the week.” Needless to say I totally ignored this advice, and as a result I’m still not very good at Instagram. I’m reminded of this conversation when I see lots of posts about “how to do Substack” and how to make the most money from it, many of which seem to encourage people to write more posts about how to be successful on Substack. Personally speaking, I’m not on here to streamline or curate anything. I’m on here to write about whatever takes my fancy, even if it’s entirely different to the last thing I wrote, which it invariably is. That’s what I do in my books and I was told many years ago, numerous times, that it definitely wouldn’t work there, either. Yet, to my immense surprise, somehow, I’m still here, breathing actual air, writing the stuff I really want to write, rather than the stuff I think might have the most widespread commercial appeal, and not yet living in a cardboard box under a dripping bridge in the industrial zone of my least favourite city. I’m not sure precisely what can be learned from this, and I definitely don’t intend it as advice, but what perhaps could be learned from it is “a lot of advice sucks - especially if its theme is ‘how to be successful’.”