Spotlight Your Substack - An Exciting Announcement!

More opportunities to share your writing and more great things to read!

A Scholar in his Study — Thomas Wyck (c. 1660s)

Greetings, my fellow Bookworms!

I’m relinquishing this week’s discussion thread in favour of an exciting announcement — four new ways to get your writing in front of more readers!

As you know, we’ve seen rather tremendous growth in the five weeks since we launched The Books That Made Us.

No one is more surprised at this takeoff than me — in fact, I almost chickened out and didn’t launch this Substack at all, so worried was I that there would be no interest in reading or writing for it! I shouldn’t have doubted — the community of Substack Writers has shown time and again that it’s an incredibly supportive bunch, happy to celebrate and promote each other’s work.

So far we have featured four brilliant guest posts, the latest of which was Carrie Kaufman’s excellent look at Galbraith’s A Tenured Professor — if you missed it I urge you to go back and have a read.

We’ve also received dozens and dozens of pitches and almost as many completed submissions are finished and ready for publication. While this is a better start than I could ever have hoped for, it does mean that our Thursday guest posts are booked up for several months.

One of the heartening things about starting this project has been its potential to cast a light on the really good writing of indie Substacks. Particularly those writers early in their Substack journey and just starting to build out their audience.

Now that we have enough submissions to last us many a week, I began to wonder how we could provide more opportunities for writers to showcase their work in front of a large audience.

Every guest poster featured so far has reported a boost in new subscribers, but I’d like to see if we can provide more regular opportunities for writers than a singular guest post. Not to mention of course, a chance to offer our readers even more great things to read too!

So today, I’m launching four new features with exactly this in mind.

Let’s go through them one by one.

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1. Monthly Subscriber Writing Roundup

On the first Monday of every month, we will feature a collection of links to great writing from our subscribers. Subscribers will be able to submit one link to an article they posted on their own Substack in the previous month to be featured in our roundup.

You’ll be able to do this each and every month, so it will provide a more regular opportunity to get your writing in front of our audience. It will also give us all even more great pieces to read!

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2. BTMU Fiction Corner

The Books That Made Us is all about celebrating fiction, so with that in mind paying subscribers have the opportunity to share their short stories with the BTMU audience. We host a different guest short story once a week.

For rules and how to submit, please see here.

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3. Recommendations Rotation

Similar to what Substack Reads does each week, The Books That Made Us will use Substack’s “Recommendations” feature to recommend some of the great Substacks written by our subscribers, on a rotating basis.

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4. BTMU Community Discord

Community is everything here on Substack, and I’d really like to create a little space where we can talk to each other in real time more easily. This will be a space for us to share our writing, growth tips, and reading recommendations with one another.

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Launching Paid

Since The Books That Made Us has exploded over the last few weeks, I’ve found myself needing to dedicate more and more time to the project. It’s an absolute pleasure to be doing it, but adding these new features will only increase the time commitment. (Some of you have already remarked on how much time I seem to spend on here 😅 — and this only seems to be going up!)

With that in mind, I hope you won’t begrudge me launching paid subscriptions for access to these new features.

To be clear, the opportunity to guest post will always remain open to anyone, regardless of whether you’re a free subscriber, paid subscriber, or not even a subscriber at all! Quality of writing is our only criteria for a guest post on BTMU.

Likewise, the guest posts themselves will always and forever be free to read. There shall be no paywalls here!

Instead, it’s only these four new features that will be for paying subscribers only. I’ve kept it very cheap — £3.33 a month (~$4USD), or less than a £1 for each of the four new features. You’ll be able to pay in your native currency too, to make things easier.

So, if you’d like your writing to feature in our Monthly Subscriber Writing Roundup, share your fiction with our audience, to be Recommended by The Books That Made Us , or to join our Community Discord, then I invite you to become a paying subscriber today.¹

See you on Thursday for our next guest post!

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1. Obviously, these new features are primarily relevant to the members of the community who have their own Substacks. But if you’re just here to read, then that’s great too! As I said above, all the posts will remain free to read, forever and always.