How to build an audience for comics on Substack

Cartoonists using the platform have some unique challenges — and advantages

Out of all the social media newcomers, Substack has shown the most promise. It's an email newsletter delivery system with social media and subscription features. But like every platform, it has its own norms, quirks, and community expectations. So, let's discuss Substack's best practices.

Why Substack?

Substack delivers excels in...

• Newsletter delivery

• Discovery

• Reader outreach

• Revenue generation

• Networking opportunities

...and it's free to use.

The closest competitor, MailChimp, costs $13 per month after you have more than 500 contacts. (You'll need to bump up to $20 for decent analytics.) And it's a pale comparison in all of those features listed above.

I used Mailchimp to send a newsletter to readers of my comic, Evil Inc, for ten years. During that time, I had amassed a little over 500 subscribers. This was a result of prominent links on my website and weekly mentions on several different social media platforms. Mailchimp cost me about $30 per month.

I had gained a grand total of five new subscribers in 2023.

I started Substack last year on December 9th. In a little over a month, I had 20 subscribers — one of whom was a paying member.

At the end of eight weeks, I had 497 subscribers. If you subtract the 461 I imported from Mailchimp, that’s only 36. But the number of paid supporters had grown to 6. As of this writing, I have 673 subscribers, eight of which are paid supporters. That’s a growth of over 200 people from the Mailchimp newsletter that had stagnated for over a year.

Not unimportantly, I went from paying thirty bucks a month to earning money.

Switching was a no-brainer. And we haven’t even discussed…

• The sophisticated promotional aids

• The ability to spread messaging through Notes, Restacking and Recommendations

• The jaw-dropping analytics (pay attention, Patreon!)

Understanding Substack

Substack tends to be a bit opaque to many newcomers. That's because the platform actually has two main outreach tools — Posts and Notes — and they work very differently.