This Is What It's Been Like Running Multiple Substacks For One Year
Pros, cons, observations and guidance after consistently running multiple Substacks in 2024.
This post is for anyone who’s been thinking about launching additional Substacks.
I won’t be touching on sections here; I’m referring to starting up an entirely new and different Substack.
Shout out to
who brought up questions about this topic at our last Ask Anything day.First things first…the how-to:
You can create a completely separate Substack under your existing account. Do this by clicking on your profile image in the top right corner. Then, go to Settings in the dropdown.
Once you’re in there, scroll down to “Publications” and click on “Create Another Publication.” Then you set up a whole new one just like you did with your original.
The bonus of creating multiple Substacks under your main profile is that you can easily toggle between them without ever having to log in and out of different accounts.
If you look at the screenshot above you’ll notice a little dropdown arrow on my Dashboard button. That dropdown displays your publications and you can toggle between them seamlessly.
CONS
I’ll start with the downside to multiple publications under the same account.
One catch to using the same account for all your pubs is you have to run them all under the same email address. This means that every single notification for all your stacks will come to the same email address.
This gets complicated if you’re like me and run your business and your pleasure on Substack. I didn’t start my business until long after I’d been here for fun and now, I have to manually sort and send business emails to my business Gmail account.
If you want things to stay separate…
You will have to log out of your main account and then create a new one with a new email address. This is a pain in the arse because you’ll have to login/logout every time you want to switch between the two.
A workaround….
If constantly logging in and out sounds like a never-ending papercut with lemon juice in it, you can use separate internet browsers such as Firefox and Chrome. That way, you can always stay logged into two different Stacks on two different browsers.
Nobody said it was perfect but this is the simplest workaround I can think of. If you have better solutions, by all means, let us know in the comments.
One more thing that you might consider a CON:
You’ll have to brand each pub differently so if you hated coming up with images for your first one, well…here we go again!
PROS
I have three Substacks with three distinct and unique audiences. One is for business and two are for pleasure. Hundreds of my readers are subscribed to all three but by keeping them separate, nobody has to see what they don’t want.
My audience can pick and choose any or all of them to subscribe to. Plus, I’m free to cross-promote each of my pubs within the others if I want to.
By having one profile with multiple Substacks, my subscriber count is merged on my main profile, showing the total number across all of them. Why does this matter? I guess it doesn’t but it’s a nice vanity metric. And it lets subscribers see your versatility.
You’re also able to choose which publication displays as your main one, as explained in this post:
The most difficult part of running multiple Substacks
Hands down, it’s the publishing schedule. I have pledged to publish once per week in each of my three, so that’s three posts per week I need to write and they all land on different days. It doesn’t leave much room for breaks from content writing.
However, I have learned to go easy on myself and skip a week here and there if life gets in the way. I figure nobody notices anyway because I certainly don’t notice when someone else skips a week.
Can you merge two Substacks together?
That’s a NOPE. Therefore, before you start a new one, be sure you want it for the long haul because changing your mind down the road will be a pain.
If you’ve got more than one but end up regretting your life choices and want to combine them, you’ll have to do it the manual way:
Export the content from the publication you want to get rid of.
Then import that content into the publication you want to keep.
One more thing….
It’s worth mentioning that if you have multiple Substacks under one profile, you only have to come up with notes once 😁 Notes are posted under your profile, not a specific Substack.
That’s kind of a relief, hey? Nobody seems to like coming up with more notes than they have to!
That’s all I can think of for now but I’m very interested in your feedback. If you’ve got more than one Substack or are thinking about starting another one, please leave your thoughts and questions in the comments below.
In case you missed the best roundup post EVER…..
Holy smokes, Nan. You just solved the holy grail with that adding yourself as a team member! Why did I NEVER think of that? I feel like such a doorknob right now 🤣🤣 It's so simple!
Re: 3 pubs...it is a lot. Sometimes I regret the third however, Dog Snobs is really small and just for fun so I never feel pressure to do it every week. I also do plenty of cross-posting on that one so I don't always have to think of new content. Everyone loves dogs and plenty of us write about them so I'm happy to share the love and cross post.
After realizing I can’t merge my separate publications, I have a tab for the other on each one.