Anyone have a Substack?

[slapdashsal]

Just discovered Substack, I must be late to the party. It looks good but I'm a bit overwhelmed with the amount of writers and topics on there. I guess it's just a blogging platform in a different format to what I'm used to but I like the idea of subscribers and regular newsletters etc.

Does anyone have one? If so what do you write about?

No mainly because I had my own website for 13 years which was mainly for my work as a private tutor and supply teacher (I was a software engineer for 20+ years before working (near death experience!?) in education) - but it also hosted a private poetry/writing site - it was a repository for me to share a few things with trusted friends mainly. I mistakenly thought substack charged to publish (I'm probably mixing it up with Medium) but I just checked and it doesn't seem to, unless you, as a writer/publisher, offer a paid subscription to your readers. I wonder if there is a limit to the amount of days you can store on the site and what would happen if you had thousands of regular readers (unlikely) - I'm guessing their business model is that they generate revenue for themselves through adverts that appear on your pages - hosting costs money so they must generate an income - I don't know if the 10% charge on your subscribers covers it. I haven't looked at anything on substack for a long time - I did report some potentially slanderous comments made by one writer about Simon Armitage - substack never replied so I emailed Simon's business contact who did reply.

There are a lot of sites to publish on - I saw commaful mentioned the other day - yet another site I've never heard of. Publishing is easy enough but there doen't seem to be much point unless you are going to put as much effort into promoting your writing as you are into your writing itself - I think this is where most people who dream of writing fall down. Personally, I am content to write and to continue to focus on improving the quality of my writing - anyone can publish on line, electronically or on paper - I think far too many aspiring writers think too much about publishing.

Having an audience is useful, otherwise one is writing in a vacuum.