How To Make Money on Substack — The Collaborative Strategy

With the talented Debdutta Pal, of course. Who else?

I have been co-writing stories with the talented Debdutta for two months because it’s fun. But as many writers know, fun doesn’t pay the bills, and when you can ruin something by trying to monetize it, you should always say “sure, let’s.”

In this article, I will share our collaborative strategy and discuss the opportunities (and threats) linked to it.

You’re welcome to copycat us for free (or for money if you insist).

Our creative process

On Substack, there’s a functionality called Notes that is more or less (rather less) the equivalent of X (Twitter) or Mastodon (but nobody uses that one).

We write stories in increments of 50 words there (for a total of 500 words usually). We first write in Notes because writing in public is scary and (therefore?) fun. It’s also a different creative process where we can surprise each other by giving the story unexpected turns.

You could say it’s improv writing.

Technically, we restack (retweet) each other’s notes so that people can click through the whole story if they want to.

How we monetize

Once we finish the story — from a few days to a few weeks, depending on our motivation and availability, we regroup all the 50-word snapshots in one piece and publish it.

• So far, we were only republishing on Medium. (Monetization Strategy #1).
• But now, we also republish on Substack. (That would be Monetization Strategy #2).
• Monetization Strategy #3 is writing about what we do and posting it on Medium. It’s meta, but it’s also interesting for like-minded writers.

Why republish the full stories on Substack?

Because birds of a feather flock together, or, in social media words, users of an app stay on the app and don’t click on external links.

With a dedicated substack publication, we give people who like our snapshots a chance to read more of our stories or to catch up on previous collaborative pieces they missed.

We publish the stories for free, but we have turned on subscriptions should people want to support our efforts.

It’s also an additional way to drive readers to our other Substacks (cleverly called the Top Hat Seminar and Gumusservi).

Logistics and financial issues

We don’t have any paid subscribers, but hopefully, we will soon have this “problem.”

Substack doesn’t offer a possibility to share the revenues from a newsletter. It means only one can be the owner and receive the payments (if any). The other doesn’t have access to the statistics and can only trust the owner is honest and will share accordingly.

On Medium, we mitigate the risk by taking turns publishing co-written stories. We also have an informal agreement to share the revenues of a story if it (magically) went above a certain threshold ($20 in our case).

But on Substack, it wouldn’t be convenient to have two different publications for our co-written stories, and we have to rely on trust. Lucky for us, I’m a certified liar and, therefore, highly trustable.

Idea for Substack

Implement a revenue-sharing system so that multiple authors can join forces and offer a paid combined subscription to all their Substacks.

It would be like creating a small-scale “Medium” for people who know this place where good ideas find you.

Money sharing would be based on views or a fixed % depending on the agreement between writers.

Conclusion

We created a new publication on Substack called Collaborative Fiction. Follow us there to read the same stories we publish on Medium.

Kidding, don’t follow us there! Stay on Medium with us and save this list instead to be notified each time we publish a new story on Medium (we have written six so far).