How Often Should You Write to Grow Your Paid Subscribers?
How a small change in writing frequency creates a 10X difference
I have been thinking of my writing lately.
I am a slacker who doesn’t want to do extra work, so I have been looking for a lever, like this guy who lived more than 2,200 years ago.
If you give me a lever and a place to stand, I can move the world. — Archimedes
How can some people move the world with their stories and do it so effortlessly? They must know some magic lever that I don’t have.
That’s why I started my search for the magic lever.
’s article inspired me to research how often successful Substackers post weekly. She analyzed data from the Top 20 bestsellers.Yana knows her stuff, and this article is worth reading. She breaks down these Substack bestseller categories, how to find them, and how often they post weekly. She also examines the percentage of paywalled posts in each bestseller category and finishes with a similar analysis on Notes.
It is a fantastic article that any Substacker who wants to make money should read and learn from. This is one of the reasons I subscribed to Yana’s excellent newsletter.
As a data nerd and engineer, I wanted to dig much deeper.
Which newsletters did I analyze?
I built a pipeline to extract data from 2.3 million posts written by 13,534 Substackers.
This dataset covers the Top 30 Substack categories and contains several metrics from 13,844 newsletters.
The Substack public API that I used to extract publications data has a limit of 21 pages, with 25 publications per page. Thus, I could pull only a maximum of 525 publications from each category.
Not all Substack categories had 525 publications; you can see the count of publications (newsletters) by each category below:
The data does contain key newsletter metrics, such as
author name and handle
free subscriber count (in thousands)
author bestseller tier (0, 100, 1000, 10000)
base URL
This “author bestseller tier” metric shows the number of paying newsletter subscribers, giving you an idea of the revenue opportunity.
For example, 10,000 paying subscribers at a $50 subscription per year would generate a remarkable $500,000 in annual revenue.
Some authors in the bestseller tier 100 could have anything between 100 and 999 subscribers, making this opportunity worth $5,000 to $49,950 per year using the same $50 annual price.
Which newsletters category should I focus on?
Below is the breakdown of these categories by the count of newsletters in each bestseller tier.
Some categories have empty slots for the 10,000 bestseller tier for you to grab.
For example, in the Comics category, there are 179 newsletters in the bestseller tier 100 and only three in tier 1000. If your creator's superpower is in Comics, there is less competition for the top spots.
On the other hand, the U.S. Politics category is very crowded. The leaderboard on that page shows all the top authors with mega-followings.
Superstar with $12 million revenue per year
For example,
and her Letters from an American newsletter have 1.7 million free subscribers. She is at the bestseller tier 10,000 and makes an estimated $1 million monthly—not bad for a history professor who writes about U.S. politics from a historical perspective. In many of her letters, Heather ties the current events back to something that happened in history.There are plenty of opportunities for you to become the next Substack megastar.
But how do you get there?
Let’s look into that in the next section.
Frequency of writing
I wanted to know how many stories these authors post on average weekly, organized by the author bestseller tier metric.
Many people are telling you all kinds of numbers and justifications. In her article, Yana is touching on these claims:
Common advice I heard: it’s best to write once a week or twice per week but not more. Why? Because you don’t want to spam. —
Following her example, I don’t always listen to what others say; I look at what they do. With the data, it is easy to check the facts.
If I start from the bottom bestseller tier, 0, the data shows that writers like myself publish an average of two posts per week early on in their journey. However, I’m a slacker, so I have posted an average of only one story per week.
The histogram below shows the variance; in this dataset, the minimum is 1, and the maximum is 2.7 weekly posts. I’m using 50 buckets (or bins) to count the frequency of the weekly posts.
In the next bestseller tier, 100, the average is 2.64 weekly posts. The minimum is 1.3, and the maximum is 3.2.
In the next bestseller tier, 1000, the average is 3.45 weekly posts. The minimum is 1.36, and the maximum is 4.17.
Finally, the average number of weekly posts in the bestseller tier 10000 is 4.4. The minimum is 1.13, and the maximum is 7.
So, where does our superstar fit in this picture?
I also ran her statistics. In the graph above, her newsletter is that tiny red box in the extreme bottom right corner beyond 7.
Her numbers are awe-inspiring: From November 3, 2019, until November 19, 2024, when I ran the data extract, she had written 2.66 million words. In the last 264 weeks, she has published 2,524 posts, an average of 9.56 posts per week.
Her engagement numbers are also astonishing - 3.7 million reactions and 843K comments.
But what can you do to get there?
Let’s talk about that in the next section.
How to get a 10X difference with a small change?
Let’s overlay bestseller tiers 0 and 100 on the same graph. You can see that the distribution of these newsletter tiers is overlapping.
The difference between the $4,950 and $49,950 annual revenue opportunities (assuming a $50 annual subscription price) is, on average, just 0.6 more weekly posts.
Likewise, the difference between the $49,950 and $499,950 revenue opportunities is, on average, just 0.817 more weekly posts.
Finally, the difference between the $499,950 and $4,999,950 revenue opportunities is, on average, just 0.944 more weekly posts.
Not all of us can crank out 9.56 weekly posts like our superstar,
.But almost everybody can write that one extra post per week. As the numbers show, that is the difference between 10X outcomes.
So, what are you waiting for? Start writing that next post.
That’s an excellent analysis, Finn! It undoubtedly proves my thesis that more frequent posting is linked to more revenue. It might not be the only one factor, but there’s a clear pattern. And thank you so so much for referring to my research!! Means a lot!
These are interesting numbers, thanks for sharing! ❤
Do you really think post frequency drives revenue, or could it just as well be the other way around?