How to use Substack
Lots of newcomers following me: here's a primer
Last week I announced that I was leaving Instagram, What’s App and Facebook for two reasons. I’m not happy they’ve become mainly advertising platforms, and I don’t want any of my money going to Donald Trump via Mark Zuckerberg; if you’re on these platforms in any way, passively or actively, that’s what’s happening. MZ owes DT some $26 million and these three drive his income.
I have scores of new subscribers here as a result—my thanks to all of you for staying with me. Since several people are new to Substack, which is how I publish this newsletter, here is some basic information about how it works and how I use it.
Why I moved to Substack
I moved here to simplify blog publishing, which is why many people moved here; I no longer have to maintain the technical side of my blog or use a separate service like Mail Chimp to send out the newsletter. Many if not most people use Substack more like Facebook, as a forum for discussions, but that isn’t my goal, nor do I want to create a community so much as I want to provide you with an information service and a place that brightens your day with new ideas and takes you down new paths. I welcome “likes”, comments and discussions because they help me know what you enjoy and find interesting.
I send out this newsletter by email a couple of times a month, not more because I think we’re all overwhelmed by emails. Anyone with the Substack app receives it there as well. I’ve just started using Substack Chat to share just photos with captions twice a week, to replace my popular (1000+ followers) Instagram photo feed.
You have three options if you want to read things on Substack (without necessarily posting things yourself): you can be a follower, a free subscriber or a paid subscriber. Please read the explanations and then follow the instructions to make sure you’re receiving all of—and only!—what you want.
Three levels for reading
follower: I won’t see your email and you will see only my Notes (I rarely post these) and not my photo Chats or the newsletter. What you see from me arrives only in your Substack feed, with notes from anyone you follow. This works for certain types of Substacks, for example if you’re following a political commentator who publishes daily Notes. If you want to read my work, I don’t recommend this. Please subscribe.
subscriber: anyone can subscribe for free to receive a writer’s “posts” by email. These are then also visible on the Substack app. If that writer uses Chat, as I do, subscribers also have access to the Chat “threads”, but they are sent by email only if you elect to be notified. I publish under the name of Ellen’s Wine World where I have four types of posts, Ellen’s World newsletter which I send by email, Ellen’s World long reads only some of which I send by email and Ellen’s World wine hiking only some of which I send by email. When I don’t send them by email I include a link in the next newsletter. The fourth post: the archives from my old blog, slowly being transferred here and never sent by email.
paid subscriber: I very rarely offer an incentive in the form of material not available to others, so paid subscribers are being rewarded only with my appreciation at this point. And it is greatly appreciated—like many other writers on Substack, I put my (wine and journalism) expertise to work here and I spend time producing this material, without earning a cent from it other than paid subscriptions. In the good old days, which were always an illusion, everyone made noise about how online publicity is good for marketing one’s work. Nonsense. If you read this regularly and you feel you can afford it, please do contribute, as it helps defray my work costs, and there are some. That said, I, too, am solicited over and over, and we all have to choose what to support; I’m happy to have free subscribers.
Instructions for getting what you want
The key here is managing “notifications” for each subscription—if you subscribe to five writers, you need to go to your settings for each one and select only the posts you want to receive.
To do this, first find your subscriptions. Go to your home page on substack.com by selecting the top left icon, an orange and white bookmark. On the home page, select the orange ball at the bottom left of the screen. This gives you a menu; select “settings”. In settings scroll down to “subscriptions” and this will give you a list of all your subscriptions. For Ellen’s Wine World, you should see the four posts (Ellen’s World newsletter, Ellen’s World long reads, Ellen’s World wine hiking, archives from my old blog) and the Chat thread. Select the ones you want to receive by email/on the app. You can change these at any time. Do the same for all of your subscriptions. For me, if you want to see only photos, select only the Chat threads. Just the newsletter? Select only that one. Here’s my corresponding home page with the top menu showing these.
A sample for another writer
Here’s what my Notifications look like for Aimee Liu, an author and writing teacher I subscribe to—she’s an excellent helper to writers. Note that all are for posts except the last one, which is for her Chat threads. Compare this to the menu on her home page.
Notes and chats, my move away from social media
Substack isn’t always intuitive, I find, and it took me a while to learn that “Notes” are discussions open to anyone who goes to Substack, while a “Chat” is a closed group discussion or in my case, set of photos posted, available only to subscribers. You might not care one way or the other!
What have I done to move away from what I consider too-toxic social media? I rarely used Facebook in recent years, so I won’t miss it, won’t try to replace it. If I wanted to, I would use BlueSky for that, but I would have to encourage my friends to join me there. Notes on Substack work like FB for many people. Instagram? Flashes, a very new beta part of BlueSky (bsky.social.com), is not bad, but it’s still too limited, thus my choice of sharing photos with subscribers on Substack. I’ll occasionally also put these in Substack Notes, open to the world. WhatsApp: I’ve just moved to Signal and I’m very happy with it, more secure and less junky, and it’s easy to invite friends. In a few cases it won’t work—some friends say it is too small in their country, others that they are happy just with phone texting, and why not. Check them out.
If I were still a small business, as I once was, I’d simply set up a simply Substack blog, bring over old blog subscribers if there is a blog or web site, and invite social media followers to a happier place.
X? Forget it. I do wish politicians would invest more time in good governance and less in social blather on X and similar places. I guess I won’t be running for office any time soon.