Events at Substack
Upcoming Events
📝 Writers’ Hour with London Writers’ Salon - Monday, June 21, 2021
The Substack team will be offering “Words of Wisdom” to kick off Writers’ Hour across four time zones on June 21. Writers’ Hour is hosted daily at 8 am UK, ET, PT, and NZST.
After the ET Writers’ Hour on June 21, the Substack community team will stick around for a half-hour meet and greet with writers.
✍️ Writer Workshop: Crafting a post - Tuesday, June 22, 2021
How you craft a post directly impacts your readers' experience. The right format will help readers know what’s most important. With time, the layout of your posts will become a style and pattern that is familiar and comfortable to the reader.
Our Writer Development team will host an overview of the style tools, buttons, headers, and footers you can use to craft your post. We’ll share examples of Substacks using formatting tools in interesting ways and allow time for peer feedback with fellow writers.
🔦 Spotlight On: Fiction - Wednesday, June 30, 2021
Nascent fiction writers are looking for new venues to publish their work, grow an audience, and get paid. Elle Griffin is one of the writers leading this exploration. Her writing about the future of fiction caused a stir in recent months. In response, she organized a community of Substack fiction writers on Discord. Today, she’s actively experimenting with making Substack the home for her next serial novel.
For this workshop, we’ll gather the greater community of fiction writers to learn from Elle’s experience and share best practices for fiction writing on Substack.
⏰ Office Hours - Weekly on Thursdays
Each week on Thursdays, we’ll gather the writer community and members of our Community, Product, and Writer Development teams together in a thread like this one to answer writer questions for an hour.
Time may vary so we can accommodate writers across time zones. Subscribe to www.library.substack.com and receive the thread in your inbox each week one hour before we go live.
Past Events
Couldn’t make it to a previous event? Don’t worry, we took notes! Find recaps, recordings, and discussions from previous events below.
🔦 Spotlight On: Local News - Wednesday, June 16, 2021
Writers like Tony Mecia of The Charlotte Ledger paved the way for independent local news on Substack. In this workshop, we learned from Tony’s experience and absorbed best practices for local news Substack publications.
Recap coming soon!
✍️ Writer Workshop: Describing your publication - Tuesday, June 8, 2021
Your “About” page and one-line publication description act as welcoming messages to prospective readers. The Substack Writer Development team hosted a collaborative workshop for writers to craft “About” pages and one-line descriptions that will attract new readers.
🔦 Spotlight On: Investing & Finance - Wednesday, June 2, 2021
Thousands of finance and investing writers are building publications on Substack. Linda Lebrun, Substack’s Partnerships lead for finance and investing writers, interviewed Mike of Nongaap Investing about his journey publishing, growing, and going paid.
👨👩👧👦 Substack Writer Get Together - Wednesday, May 19, 2021
Meet and greet with the (new!) Community team and fellow independent writers. Writers swapped best and worst advice.
🏟️ Substack On! - Friday, January 8th, 2021
We hosted our first-ever conference, a one-day event aimed at bringing writers together around what’s possible on Substack. Through a full day of talks, workshops, panels, and discussions, we hope to empower a new generation of writers.
🎥 Workshop: Building an audience from scratch - Thursday, July 9th, 2020
If you don't have an online presence already, should you start a newsletter? Of course! Abigail Koffler of This Needs Hot Sauce shared how she grew her email list without a big platform.
🎥 Workshop: Finding your niche - Wednesday, July 1st, 2020
If you're writing a newsletter, having a narrow audience can be a good thing. Jarrett Carter Sr of HBCU Digest talked about how he grew his subscriber audience, including paid subscriptions, by finding his niche.
🎥 Workshop: Making friends with your subscribers - Thursday, June 11, 2020
Who are these people that signed up for your email list, and what do they want? Erin Moon of The Swipe Up talked about getting to know your subscribers, helping them get to know each other, and building a community around your list.
🎥 Workshop: Paid launch 101 - Thursday, June 4, 2020
Thinking about launching a paid newsletter, but haven't yet pulled the trigger? Lenny Rachitsky, who writes Lenny's Newsletter, shared how he decided to launch paid subscriptions and tactics for going paid.
🎥 Workshop: Getting your first 1,000 email signups - Tuesday, May 26, 2020
Scott Hines of Action Cookbook shared how he successfully grew his newsletter’s email list on Substack in less than a year.
🎥 Panel: Writing in the current climate - Thursday, April 2, 2020
We brought four Substack writers — Polina, Henry, Judy, and Clara — together for a livestreamed conversation about writing and making money during the COVID crisis.
Polina Marinova (The Profile), who left her job last week in the midst of a pandemic to go full-time on her publication
Henry Abbott and Judy Goodwin (TrueHoop), who switched up their editorial and pricing after the NBA suspended basketball season
Clara Parkes (The Daily Respite), who recently started a paid newsletter to provide "a brief interval of relief" to our inboxes every day
👫 Writer Gathering - Thursday, February 20, 2020 (New York City)
We hosted our first official gathering of writers in New York City and asked a few Substack writers to share insights from their experiences:
Delia Cai (Deez Links) shared how she built her initial email list
Emily Atkin (Heated) shared how she launched paid subscriptions
Terrell Johnson (The Half Marathoner) showed us how he uses discussion threads to build community
Walt Hickey (Numlock News) helped us think about what’s possible on Substack, including experiments with multiple newsletters
