Substack management

How not to drown in notifications

Hello folks —

A quick housekeeping note.

Substack is changing pretty dramatically, and moving from a place where some of us used to write blog-like newsletters and send them out to you, to more of a social media space where people can connect in Notes (kind of like Twitter) and Chat (conversations among subscribers on a topic).

This means there’s suddenly going to be more newsletters from me, and from everyone else, than there have been in the past. My goal is to be a little more professional about building an audience here, so I can, with luck, transition out of my day job in a year or two and into a sort of not-totally-retirement where I can concentrate on writing. This means there will be more newsletters, more notes, and probably at some point, some chats. I’d like to get enough subscribers, and to produce enough content on a regular basis to eventually open up paid subscriptions.

If this is All Too Much for those of you who signed up for this because you’re my friends, or were ancient blog subscribers, or whatever — here’s how to turn off notifications and limit the stuff coming your way.

Notificaton management:

• Unsubscribe: from this or any other newsletter using the Unsubscribe link at the bottom of the email (my feelings won’t be hurt, I promise)

• Filter: I filter Substacks into the Social tab on my Gmail, but you can use whatever email filtering you’re used to.

• App/web site: If you don’t want stuff coming in at you, you can unsubscribe and just bookmark the website and check in periodically. If you subscribe to a number of Substacks from different folks, I HIGHLY recommend using Substack Reader — either the app version or the web version. You’ll get a list of all the Substacks you subscribe to, like an RSS reader from the old days. I find it much easier to deal with than emails coming in all the time, which I find overwhelming.

• Smart Notifications: If you’re on the App or the Website, you can click your profile picture/avatar, and navigate to settings > notifications. The Smart Notifications will help you whittle down the notifications any way you like — I have it set to send all notifications to the app. (Then on my phone, I turned off all the sound notifications, because I hate them).

I just wanted to give folks a heads up about the changes on this platform, because most of my readers don’t seem to be people who are Very Online, and as Twitter cracks into pieces, Substack is becoming a place where a lot of writers are converging. There are some interesting conversations happening over here I’m looking forward to joining, and hoping to bring you all along with me.

However, since some of my favorite writers over here have been horrified by these developments, and the resulting jump in the noise, I also wanted to give you all a little notice.

And a big thanks to all of you for being my tiny band of Dedicated Readers — knowing you’re out there has been a solace during some years when I’ve felt like I was out in the literary wilderness … so here goes.