This Is Water: The Myth of the Substack Bestseller

Gaspard Félix Tournachon, Félix Nadar in Gondola of Balloon, 1863

Google how do I become a Substack bestseller and your search results will be crowded with YouTube videos and Substack posts and Medium posts with titles like

• How I became a Substack Bestseller in Under a Month

• OMG! I Became a Substack Bestseller (and you can too)

• Want the Bestseller Badge on Substack? Do These 5 Things

• How I Became a Substack Bestseller in 3 Months

Many of these people came from Medium or already had a following and platform—but they don’t tell you that.

They offer you “proven strategies” or a “bestseller blueprint” or a “bestseller checklist” or a “bestseller path” to get the white, orange, or purple checkmark/badge.

• White badge (I tend to call it a checkmark) = over 100 paid subscribers

• Orange = over 1000 paid subscribers

• Purple = over 10,000 paid subscribers

They tell you to “offer value” (what does that even mean?), build trust (we can’t control other humans—some have trust issues), format posts in x or y way (even though format depends on your content), and “build reader relationships” (an empty phrase).

The advice they give disempowers you and misses the point of even being on Substack as it changes and becomes more crowded.

Ask ChatGPT, and you’ll get similar nonsense—with misinformation and idiotic emojis and incorrectly formatted em dashes to boot: offer a free trial (no—I write about why here), publish lots of free content and extra “premium” posts for paid subscribers (I’ll be telling you why this is a terrible idea next month), and (my favorite) choose a niche.

If the road to being a Substack bestseller were this generic and the journey this uniform, everyone would be one and do it.

Buying a Bestseller badge

In some of these YouTube videos and Substack and Medium posts, they tell you to manipulate the numbers to get the badge, i.e., offer extreme (or ridiculous) discounts (90 percent off!), annual subscriptions for 99 cents (yes, people do this).

This isn’t to shame anyone who discounts in the extreme. Like any reporter, I asked Substack Bestsellers if they knew about this and if it’s okay with them, and they declined to comment. So if Substack is tacitly fine with it, then it seems it’s fine to do.

Wanting the badge is primal

I understand the allure. Substack started gamifying paid subscribers in 2022. As soon as I saw the badge (a badge!), I wanted one. It triggered something primal in me.

Like the naïve Substack writer I was, I actually emailed and asked Substack for one. (This was back in the days when Substack was so small, you could just email them.) They kindly and supportively informed me that I actually had to earn it.

Earn it.

What if it’s not supposed to be easy?

Ignore all the I-became-a-Substack-bestseller-just-by-thinking-about-it messaging.

What if it should take months or even years and a lot of the best kind of hard work to get the white or orange or purple checkmark?

What if it taking a long time to get the badge—or maybe even losing the badge—was the way you’d find your readers and (yes) eventually earn an income in a way you hadn’t considered because you figured out who you are, what you actually want to do and write, what the core of your Substack is (what I call your Substack DNA), and how to communicate it to others?

On my author Substack, where I write essays, it took me years to get the white checkmark.

It seemed torturous and made me doubt myself and feel inferior to all and sundry.

But it forced me to see that I was writing for actual people and that what I wrote had to be really, really good—i.e., totally me, no performance, no writerly tics, no AI because it wasn’t taken seriously then.

So yes, please go about getting the bestseller badge in whatever way feels right to you, but not if it makes you feel like you have to endlessly game the platform.

Because once you get the white badge, you want the orange, get the orange and you want the purple.

And there’s a Bermuda triangle when you reach 99 or 999 or 9999 paid subscribers—up and down, up and down, badge, no badge, badge, no badge.

And once you have the badge, you don’t want to lose the badge, etc. etc.¹

And not if it causes you to focus on “strategies” without knowing what your Substack is and what you offer (your Substack DNA).

There’s no bestseller path or blueprint or system.

But there are mistakes to avoid:

1. Don’t struggle to “find your niche”

• We aren’t selling vacuums or cars. But you do need to know your Substack DNA.

  • Helping a client discover the core of their Substack, what it’s made of, is a strange gift that I have (never wanted it but so glad I have it).

    • It entails looking at what you could write and think about endlessly, what obsesses you, and never get bored—plus what makes your perspective on it and the world wholly your own.

2. Avoid offering too much

• Do less and do it better. I go into detail on how to do this here.

3. Keep your publishing calendar simple

• Don’t fall into the trap of creating an overly complex publishing calendar you can’t keep up with. I show you how to do that here.

4. Don’t discount too much or to everyone (or at all)

• I’m not a fan of sales, especially extreme sales (50 percent off? We’re not the Gap with seasonal items.)

• Sales “work” but what kind of paid subscriber do they bring in and for how long?

  • A 2017 study found that sales of 35 percent or more lead to “low-quality” subscribers who don’t stay.

  • I also think it devalues your work.

• I want you to target active free subscribers, not just run a sale to everyone. A 2020 study of The Boston Globe found that indiscriminate discounting led to higher churn but targeted discounts can strengthen retention.

  • Do this by creating a special offer:

    • Settings > Special Offers

      Opt for it only to apply to the annual (just my suggestion) and only people with the link.

  • Segment your email list by type and activity level:

    • Type [free] + Activity >= [four stars].

• Yes, one marketing approach says that if you get someone to pay you a dollar, they’ll pay you a hundred or a thousand. This claim has never been studied or proven, so who knows.

4. People don’t just give us money

• It’s unfortunate, but we actually do have to ask people to pay us with a CTA (call to action) or paywall in the post or email.

The gamefication of life

The gamefication of life is almost irresistible. And the checkmark seems to legitimize a person. After all, badges on other platforms supposedly “verify” you.

But the only real verification is you making Substack your own, which comes from knowing the core of your Substack and how to express it to others and finding your people and bringing your work to the world.

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1. The pursuit of the Substack Bestseller badge makes me think of David Foster Wallace’s “This Is Water” (yes, he’s a problematic figure, but his Kenyon speech is stunning and I’ve listened to it about 100 times):

“If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you.

“Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they’re evil or sinful, it’s that they’re unconscious. They are default settings.

“They’re the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that’s what you’re doing.”