On Growing a Substack Readership

and Being On and Off Twitter

Without making a big thing of it, I have stopped posting on Twitter/X.

I downloaded my archive, so as not to lose anything.

I will likely delete the account, once the tweet with the other places I can be found has hung about for a while.

Not zapping the whole account increases the likelihood of me being drawn back in, but apart from the knitted Vincent Van Gogh viral tweet, I’ve recently felt very little reason for being on Twitter.

For those of you writing on Substack, and hoping to grow your audience, I think what I’m about to share might be useful — though it’s anecdotal.

When I look at the stats for each Writer’s Diary post, they run along at a fairly consistent level. While I was doing the Ballard series, there was a small drop-off in the number of views, but not huge.

Part of this I put down to some of my readers (understandably) being less interested in one dead male writer than in writing advice, useful and shareable teaching materials, and stuff about point of view.

Part, I attributed to the summer, the school holidays, the heat, the avoidance of email, etc. There’s usually a rise in views around the start of Autumn.

What I’d expected, though, was a big fall in engagement — because I didn’t share those Ballard posts on social media. Not Twitter, Facebook, Bluesky, Instagram, tumblr, or heaven help me Mastodon (which has really been dull).

Nothing was out there to draw new readers in. Not unless someone else (as a few did) spread the word through their own channels.

Most of all, it was not tweeting that I expected to make a difference. But it didn’t. And that’s one of the reasons I feel okay about leaving now.

I had around 7,500 followers on Twitter, whilst following around 7,000 myself. (I almost always followed back.) This had built up since December 2009.

At points, I found this following very useful. It wasn’t anywhere near Margaret Atwood level, but it was the largest social media engagement I’d ever had. When I needed to advertise some tutoring work that came up as part of the Creative Writing MFA at Birkbeck, I did a single tweet and received around 25 CVs of very high quality. The students ended up being supervised by brilliant writers — ones I wasn’t in contact with previously.

But I don’t think my Substack tweets, using the autogenerated shareable images, ever brought in that many readers.

My sense is that a whole Instagram profile that’s entirely formatted in Substack fashion actually puts people off. Plus, there’s no way of clicking through from Instagram to this site.

Although it’s worthwhile sharing what you’ve written about on Substack, I think some people are starting to find those photos with catchy/clickbaity text on as generically spammy.

What got far more reaction, on Twitter and elsewhere, were the shared quotes.

But I usually shared these quotes without a link through to Substack — and therefore the engagement was more generalised, and I didn’t expect new readers to arrive from having typed in that URL.

What does — it seems to me — make a much bigger difference in getting views is not social media but word of mouth. Some of this is recognition within Substack, by other loved and respected writers. Some of it is completely out of online earshot.

I know, from messages and emails, that the Diary has been recommended by Creative Writing tutors to their students.

I doubt this comes as a surprise to you, but, in the global village, it seems like a whisper round the table in the tavern has much greater reach and sway than someone shouting their head off in the square.

Look at me is far less effective than Hey, psst, this might be worth you paying attention to.

Slow concrete build beats illusions of suddenly going viral.

Obvious, perhaps.

But I am still reluctant to say goodbye to those 7,500 followers — although many will also be leaving X.