Substack now lets you follow writers before subscribing to them

Substack now helps you to observe writers, providing a approach so that you can preserve tabs on what a author is doing with out having to subscribe to their e-newsletter. Whenever you observe a author, “you may keep updated with what they’re studying, liking, publishing, and subscribing to — by the Notes feed and on their profiles,” Substack says in a blog post.

Substack is probably finest often called a e-newsletter platform the place writers can generate income from getting folks to enroll in paid subscriptions. However the platform has additionally been dabbling with extra conventional social networking options such as its tweet-like Notes, and a observe button appears like Substack stepping much more toes into the social networking waters.

The corporate stresses that follows, that are free, are supposed to help writers as they construct out subscription networks. “Following helps writers develop their viewers by way of the Substack community, which is already dwelling to thousands and thousands of the world’s most beneficial readers,” Substack argues. “We constructed this function to assist maximize — and never exchange — subscriptions, which can all the time be an important sort of relationship on Substack.”

However now, Substack writers might have the added burden of occupied with methods to transform followers and non-followers into subscribers. (Substack is promising that sooner or later, it is going to “make ‘upsells’ to subscriptions simpler” by notifying followers about “trending posts and different milestones.”)

Final week, Substack’s co-founders stated that they need to make the platform a better place for readers, not just writers. The corporate has already launched a handful of options to encourage studying issues immediately on the platform, together with cell apps and the power to deliver RSS feeds to your Substack feed.

For folks searching for a brand new place to learn textual content and publish some microblogs given the final degradation of X / Twitter, the observe button could be a helpful function to see what writers are as much as with out clogging up your e-mail inbox with newsletters.