So You Want to Launch A Substack: An Interview with Leigh Stein, Creator of “Attention Economy”

“Personal obsession is your key to niche”

Leigh Stein’s Substack made me want to launch a Substack. This is proof she knows what she’s doing: her newsletter “Attention Economy” is, in her own words, "where creative writers can find honest advice about making a career on the internet." I don’t think of myself as a creative writer, and I don’t particularly want to “make a career on the internet,” but I knew the internet was where I’d find an audience for my future book and the semi-solicited advice I love to give anyone who will semi-listen.¹ Leigh made launching a Substack seem doable and worthwhile. You are here and so am I thanks to her (and to this post in particular).

What I like about Leigh’s way of giving advice is it’s always clear and practicable yet never presented as a to-do list. She grounds it instead in her own specific experiences and those of well-qualified peers, allowing you to take it and run with it and make it your own.

About running with it: I’m not saying you need to launch a Substack or become a TikTok star or be great on social media to have a successful career as a writer. I want to underline that none of these things are a requirement for a book deal. However, if you are interested in starting your own Substack, Leigh offers some excellent advice on how to do so. Read on if you are interested in:

• Starting your own newsletter

• Building or strengthening your online platform as a writer

• Finding a home for your writing without having to pitch media outlets and editors

• Thinking about establishing your reputation as a writer in new ways

Quick programming note: for the sake of my sanity, we (meaning mostly me)² will be switching this newsletter to once every other week.

Quick upcoming event note: want to meet me + my beloved agent and colleague Meredith Kaffel Simonoff in real life? Coming to Literary Agent 101 at McNally Jackson’s South Street Seaport Location on Thursday, March 20th at 6:30 p.m.

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Let’s start with your origin story as a newsletter writer. I know it didn't start on Substack, so can you talk a little bit about that?

My origin story is that I've been making friends on the internet since I was a teenage girl in the late ‘90s. It started with an email listserv fan club for Francesca Lia Block, a YA novelist. That was my very first online community. AOL chat rooms were my social life

I’ve been posting on the internet for more than half my life so I’m very comfortable being online, being in relationships online, creating content for an online audience. For a lot of writers, that's an uncomfortable jump to make. But for me, I'm the most comfortable online.

I started my newsletter in 2017 when I began my book coaching business. It was on MailChimp, but I never promoted it, because if you hit a certain threshold on MailChimp, you have to start paying to use their service. In the fall of 2023, I took that newsletter to Substack.

You migrated to Substack with about 2000 subscribers. And as of today, you have about 11,000 Before you made that transition - when you first thought "hey, I want to start a newsletter," what was your thought process? What was the incentive for you to be on MailChimp?

I remember that in the first issue I sent out, I said something like "The most interesting conversations I've been having with writers lately are not 'what are you working on,’ but 'how are you working on it.’" There was this tension between having a creative project while being so distracted on the internet, having all your other various jobs. How are we actually creating work?

I'm sure I also thought of it as a marketing tool for my business as a coach. It's a funnel, to try to create valuable content so that my audience trusts me and thinks of me when they're going to take a class or hire a coach. That's why I have this newsletter.

You seem to have a gift for knowing which ones are worth exploring. Could you give us a little insight into how your brain works when you're thinking about trying a new platform and how you get accustomed to it, for those of us who are a little more reluctant but might want to jump in?

Writers are generally verbal, not visual. Any verbal-based platform should be an easy yes, and that's why Twitter took off with the media class. Substack is reminiscent of early 2000s blogging. You don't have to do your hair and makeup or wear a nice outfit to blog. Writers should naturally gravitate toward text-based social media platforms. To me, that's a no-brainer. That would be Twitter, Substack, Blue Sky, Threads—those are all text-based.

It took me a while to get on TikTok. A lot of writers are reluctant to get on TikTok, and I get it because I was also reluctant. It's not that it immediately comes naturally to me, it's just that I learned it. But I wasn't going to dance on TikTok—it wasn't until I saw content that was not dancing that I could figure out what to do.

So tell me, now that you've transitioned to Substack and your audience has grown quite a lot, what do you think was most helpful in growing your audience?

No matter if you're trying to sell books or grow your Substack audience, nothing is more powerful than organic word of mouth. You want people to say "You have to follow Leigh. Are you following Leigh? You should trust Leigh." I get client referrals all the time, and when I ask who referred them, they’ll tell me the name of someone I don’t even know.

You need a brand, and if writers are afraid of that word, you can substitute the word "reputation." What do you have a reputation for writing about? What are you known for? That's your brand. If it's "Follow Leigh, she's the one that will explain TikTok to you," that's become part of my brand, or my reputation..

I think of “platform” as, “where are you known for that brand?” That could be a newsletter, that could be Instagram, that could be a regular talk you do at your library on your “thing.” Where are you known for that thing? How do you grow your audience? I think you carve out this niche.

I should mention that I have multiple audiences...

So your Substack looks different from your Instagram because it's a different audience. Can you say a bit more about that?

My Substack is my audience of writers who are going to pay for my Substack, pay for a class from me, or pay me as their coach. I'm marketing certain services to that audience. But they may not be the audience for my novels.

But I also have to cultivate an audience for my novels, which is what I'm trying to do on Instagram and TikTok. This is a complicated dance that I'm doing. I tell writers they shouldn't be marketing to other writers, but I look like a hypocrite because I'm marketing to other writers. But I'm doing it for a very specific reason. Because I run a business, I have these multiple revenue streams, so I'm growing my audience for my business by building a reputation and becoming known as the person who gives writers advice about the internet.

Finding that niche—and for me, it's book publishing and the internet—and developing a reputation as the go-to expert in that niche subject. That's how word of mouth marketing will spread, being consistent in creating content and creating the content that your audience finds valuable.

I want to play a little bit of "What Color is Your Parachute?" Let's say you are a less-experienced writer, a writer who is less self-aware than Leigh Stein, and you've written a bunch of different things, and you're doing the freelance scramble. How might you find your niche? Or what questions might you ask yourself to figure out what your niche might be if you want to launch a Substack?

There's a line in the Annie Dillard essay "Write Till You Drop" that's something like, "There's something you find interesting for reasons that are hard to explain." I think personal obsession is a key to a niche.

My personal assistant has recently become obsessed with Formula One racing, because Formula One racing is a sub-genre of sports romance novels. I don't know anything about this, but her obsession with it made me interested in it.

You might not be able to sell fifteen articles about Formula One racing, but when you are in charge of the platform, you create it to be whatever you want, and you send out the bat signal to find the other people who are obsessed with it. Instead of seeing social media as this extra job a writer has to do in addition to writing, you could think of it as "There's this other fun way I could write that doesn't have the same barriers to entry as pitching a Modern Love column?"

Right. Another way to think of Substack specifically is like the golden era of magazines in the ‘90s. Think of the pleasure in the ‘90s of going to the pool and sitting in your chair and having your magazine to flip through. We had teenage girl magazines, women's magazines, lifestyle magazines, intellectual magazines like the New Yorker. It's thinking about which one of those do you want your Substack to be like?

And if you're like, "I've written these 15 different pieces, I don't know what my brand is, I don't know what my niche is." Well, which one got the most page views? Which one got the most comments? Because that can turn into additional pieces.

Can you talk a bit about how Substack can help one if one wants to break into or be part of traditional media and/or publish a book?

Substack is where you can demonstrate you have audience engagement. When I speak at conferences or talk to emerging writers, something I hear a lot is "I know there's an audience for my book." The writer really believes, if someone would just publish my book, I'm certain there's an audience for this topic.

And I would say to them, "Prove it. Prove it on Substack.” You can actually prove to an agent--I know there's an audience for my book because I have this newsletter, and you can see in the comments section how engaged the audience is. So you can actually market test an idea even before it's a book.

It's also a way to build clips ( If it’s a post with good engagement metrics. It couldn't just be a post that no one liked or no one commented on). You could demonstrate "Here's where I've written about this before, and I'd like to write a piece for your publication that's similar, but different in this way."

I also look at someone like Jessica DeFino, who writes The Unpublishable. She also has a column at the Guardian, and she will tease that column in the Substack. There's a symbiotic relationship between her published writing and her Substack, which I think is really smart.

Anne Helen Petersen does that well too, where one part of her empire is promoting the other. A piece that you publish can drive people to your Substack if you mention it in your byline. And you can make more money that way, if you have paid Substack subscribers. It doesn't have to be either/or. How is it for you? What are you thinking about in terms of what you want to publish?

I don't pitch anymore. At this point in my career, I get commissioned. So like, once a year, someone will ask me to write something, and I will, but I don't spend any time pitching. It's not the best use of my time to knock on all these doors when I have an audience that I can just open a window in my browser and start speaking to them.

That's going to be so inspiring for writers to hear.

Actually, I recently had to fill out my author questionnaire for my novel, which comes out in August from Penguin Random House. A publicity section asked about pitching pieces around pub date. "What ideas do you have? What could you pitch?" And I got stuck on that section, and I wrote something like, "I'm honestly not even sure if I want to do this. Why would I when I have my own audience?"³ So, I'm very ambivalent about those pub date essays.

How do you measure success for your own Substack, and how might that help other writers think about what having success means? Writers often want me to say "this many subscribers means you get a book deal," or "this many followers on Instagram means you could write a cookbook." And I don't think it ever works that way. So what are some other ways to think about success?

I don't compare my numbers to other people's numbers, and I don't know why. I understand the impulse to do that, but it's almost like yoga to me, where you're like, "Stay on your own mat and just compete with yourself."

I track my numbers over time. That's how I knew I could recite to you what my numbers were in 2023 and what they are today. I'm just watching my own growth, and I can do that across platforms. I know that I did this big Instagram stunt last year, and I got 2,000 new Instagram followers because of that stunt I did. So I'm like, "Oh, interesting data."

I see it as, I'm running experiments and collecting data and seeing what gets engagement and seeing what doesn't. I thought I had this good idea for a Severance meme last week. I posted this Instagram Severance meme, and I think it was too complicated, because it got no engagement—I mean, nothing. And I was like, "Well, that failed." I just took it down. It's just, I'm running experiments all the time, and it's not embarrassing. It's just like, "Well, that one didn't work, and I'll try something else tomorrow."

1. A few summers ago, I was in a jewelry store in Sicily and overheard two siblings trying to decide between a few gifts for their mom. The choice was obvious, and it was not the seagull pendant. You are welcome, Signora Rosso.

2. In keeping with the meta theme of this week’s post, I’ll share a bit about how “Delivery & Acceptance” is created. First, I conduct an hour-long interview over Zoom, which I record. The recording is made into a transcript via an AI service called Otterai. The thing about text-based AI, and why I think it’s not coming for my job just yet, is it’s a B minus at best. These transcriptions come back messy and sometimes nonsensical in their misreadings. (Have some fun thinking about the interview for my book where we got lost in a tangent talking about “Dickens.”) I then pay my trusty research assistant to clean up the Otterai transcript. I edit down the transcript, which is around 5,000 words, to under 2,500 words. I write my intro, put it all in Substack’s template, and send it to you.

3. Do not attempt this ninja move unless you already have a very popular Substack!