The Comic Lab: Getting Started on Substack
Brad Guigar (@GUIGAR) and Dave Kellett are an absolute hoot as they educate cartoonists on best practices. Here's their edited take on Substack - taken from notes of two recent podcasts
I’ve been listening to Comic Lab’s podcast for months now. It never fails to bring a smile as I listen to Brad Guigar (@GUIGAR) and his buddy Dave Kellett while they bring up new lessons on how to write and draw comics for a living. Now the OG’s of comics, they bring their passion to life with practical approaches they’ve learned through decades of work.
I was stuck on a couple of episodes about Substack from their podcast - which are available on various podcast services as well as their Patreon site (https://www.patreon.com/comiclab) - and pulled the the key points from those transcriptions. (See their 2024-06-22 and 2024-07-20 shows.)
Since I found these so vital, I had to share them as a post - interrupting my other works-in-progress.
While I’ve been drawing and doing caricatures all my life, well before I started listening to my writing muses, it’s refreshing to find the basics of story and entertainment in comics are still the same as “more serious” novels and short stories - even non-fiction articles.
Yes, check out their Patreon site - today.
What follows is primarily Brad’s talking, but includes Dave’s input seamlessly as well:
Substack Replaces Mailchimp
Primarily I use Substack as a replacement for MailChimp. In other words, I approach this primarily as an email newsletter outreach platform.
This became a no-brainer because over over the entirety of 2023, I had gained five new subscribers through MailChimp, which was costing me somewhere around 30 bucks a month to utilize. I moved all my MailChimp people over to Substack after I experimented with Substack for a few months.
What are some strategies for Substack? Are they unique and different from other different social media platforms?
The headline is: everything that you did - especially if you had a MailChimp account - everything that you did to get signups on MailChimp or any other newsletter, is exactly what you're going to do to get signups for Substack.
This is still the same truth for Substack because it's a little bit of "what's old is new again, just another platform". It's a good reminder that there's no such thing as wasted time. So here’s my list of things to set yourself up on Substack:
First Off…
I'm going to tell you is that it's got an embeddable signup widget, just like MailChimp did.
Now, Substack has their settings pages set up as a dashboard. This is where you make all your chances. At the very top of the Settings page is a search function. I don't know that I've seen this in any other platform. I couldn't remember what little subcategory it was. So I just put “signups” in the search.
Boom.
It put me right to this information I'm going to give you next, which is, it's under settings under import. And then there's a little thing there that says “embed signup form on other websites”. And then - boom - you've got a little iframe bit of code that you slap into your website, and then you've got a workable signup widget that you put right up on your website.
All of the settings are right there. If you're not sure where to find it, you can do a search.
So that's my first thing on my list. Get that signup widget, put it on your website.
Number Two
Substack has a built in landing page. It's your main Substack page. Now, take a little bit of time with this. There's a few things I want you to think about. Right off, they've got a few preset designs that you can use, and you can choose one of those and then think about how you're going to implement them. But also, Substack enables you to pin a certain number of posts so that they appear on that landing page.
Of course the default is the most recent thing you post is going to appear on the landing page, but you can pin certain posts on your landing page. Now, this is how you're going to fine tune that landing page and make it do what you want it to do.
If you remember, not too long ago, my advice for anybody starting any kind of a new platform was to spend the first three or four weeks just observing, just watching. And so that's what I did on Substack for quite a while. And what I heard people mention over and over was about a “Hero Post”. It's your explainer. It's like, “this is my statement to the world”, “This is what my outreach is”.
Some people use it with their sort of Best Of posts. Some people use it with some sort of statement or version of a Bio of what I'm about, what I do, what you'll see here. I took my own advice from the show because I've said so often that you need a good About page for your website. It is like an introduction to a new reader.
I've got my Hero Post, which is basically an introduction. Then I've got a couple other things that are posted there. Like, for example, when I did a post about my 24th Anniversary of cartooning. That had a lot of Best Of stuff that's there, like an interview where I talked about my first job as a newspaper cartoonist doing comics and stuff at newspapers. That interview is there. Then the next two things that you'll see is whatever the most recent things that I posted, that's all your landing page.
Put a little bit of thought into what you're pinning there, what you're posting there. Just don't let it go to random, because when you send somebody to your Substack page, the first thing they're going to see is a sign where it says, "Hey, would you like to sign up to subscribe? It's, you can sign up for free if you'd like."
By the way, this is a good thing. You want to keep this active. There is a setting, that you can use to turn it off. I don't recommend that at all. Okay. I want you to keep that on, because the whole reason you're on Substack is to get people to sign up for that email. So you want that - and at the bottom there's a little link that says, "No thanks." And if the person doesn't wanna sign up, they click to "No thanks." And they go right to your landing page.
So put some thought into that landing page. Don't turn the automatic signup form off. You want that to be the first thing that they see. Because again, that's the whole point of Substack. That's why you're sending 'em there. It's very easy enough to bypass it and get to the landing page. I've said in the past where I, I kind of hate when a website, you're on the website for eight seconds and then that thing pops up.
Number Three
Once you've gone through the signup widget and getting your landing page all set up the number three thing I want to talk about is incentives. And what I do is I also say that when you sign up, not if, but when you sign up to my newsletter, I actually have two free E-comics, the two most recent storylines, or those two most recent chapters of Evil Ink. I'll send them both of those to help you catch up. That's FOMO, "Because you've been missing out."
Number Four
I've got one more. There's just one more thing that I have in my list here. Of course we brushed on social media, but you should be promoting this on social media too. Sending them to a landing page or, or just straight up saying, “Here - Sign Up.”
So that's level one, I would say, of being able to talk about your comic. The second one, once you find the confidence as a cartoonist to say it, there is incredible power to being able to say about your comic, "This is a good comic. You should go check it out. You should read this." And genuinely mean it - how you can use that confidence in public and how powerful it is. Because so much stuff is like milk toast. Like, “Hey, I hope you check it out." Like, "Hey, if you could possibly, maybe consider, and, you know…” Milk toast language gets milk toast results, but a confident and strident language - people will click on it.
All of those things, your social media outreach should be including this as well. Now, by the way, all of that I was doing for MailChimp, I haven't said a new thing yet.
Substack Notes
The only new thing I'm going to say for Substack specifically is to use Substack Notes. Remember, Substack is two things: it's your email newsletter - that's your posts, and it's Substack Notes - which is Substack's own internal Twitter feed, if you will.
It acts and reacts just like Twitter. So when you make an email newsletter post later on that day, you should take that post and promote it in notes. Which by the way, Substack lets you do with a push of the button, share this on notes, click, there it is. Now you're sharing it to that community on Notes. Now it's going to feel as if the only people on notes are, other authors. That's because obviously this is Substack internal social media. And I have to really caution you on perception. Your perception of who's interacting on notes is who's posting on notes. And that is mainly authors. But that's not the sum total of who's interacting. There's a lot of civilians there.
Anyway, so you're going through Notes in the morning, you're going to comment on people's Notes and you're going to restack people's Notes. You're going to do this for Machiavellian reasons. I know. And that is because it's the social part of social media.
So restacking, you can, you can, so you're going to go in and get the motor started on a new platform. I'm a little bit more active than I want to be, but I'll go through in the morning as I'm having my coffee, if I find something good, I'll restack it, which is like retweeting, right? That's in Notes.
Recommending and the Four C's
So you're going to comment and you're going to restack other people's notes. And also in Substack, you're going to go through and everybody that maybe either follows your subscribe, who stays connected to your account in one way or another, is going to pop up there. You're going to recommend them. And this is a virtuous circle because they're going to recommend you and you're going to recommend them, and then you're going to show up on, on on their substack pages and, and vice versa. This is, we're not talking about a commitment here, you know, it's just a nice thing to do.
Now - again, Notes is completely independent of your posts. The four C's of social media is where you're, you're going to get the biggest bang for your buck on notes. You're going to talk about your content. You might talk some commercial. You're going to curate there - heavy, heavy on the curate. And very, very important on Substack, you're going to comment on other people's Notes.
All those four C’s that we taught you about, you should be doing all those in Substack Notes, right? That means, restacking other people's content, commenting on it, stuff like that. Those four C's work.
For anyone who might've forgotten: it's Content. It's, that means it's your new stuff. Either write ups on your part behind the scenes or the actual comics.
That's Curation, that's restacking, that's sharing other people's thoughts both on the Substack system and from the wider world.
That's Commercial, which is advertising your upcoming signing or advertising your new Kickstarter or your new book or your new poster or a new pin.
And then the fourth one is Kindness, which is make it fun to be there. Make it an enjoyable thing - and be kind as you do all those first three C's. So the four C's, which work on every social media platform also work on Substack.
Plan out your Four C's.
For Substack, what would that mean? What would that look like? It would mean a little calendar system. I'm going to do five to fifteen content posts on Substack this month. It means I'm going to do four commercial posts this month on Substack. It means I'm going to do, let's say, 10 acknowledging or retweeting of other people's curation right on Notes. And that you're kind throughout and you're commenting throughout you daily Notes perusing.
You can plan it out. You can actually calendar it out and it will help you get to a goal by actually setting a goal and reaching it every month.
Two Takeaways
If there's anything I want you to remember when it comes to Substack, it's these two points:
Number one - everything that you did for MailChimp, everything that you did for any other email, newsletter or anything that you would think logically, this is just pointing people to email signups should be part of your normal outreach. That's what you're going to do for Substack. There's not a lot of magic. It's a lot of common sense.
The number two is to remember that Substack is two things and to use Substack for its top efficacy. You gotta use 'em both. You gotta use the Substack posts, that's your email newsletter and the Substack Notes. That's their social media. And you should be going back and forth. You should be posting posts in notes, and you should be posting some of your notes in your posts.
If you've got another blog somewhere, you can embed your Notes very easily with a little bit of HTML code. When you embed a note in your blog, that gives you extra content for your blog. And if people are interested, they click on it. Guess where they're going to get taken - zing! - right over to Substack.
An Extra Tip
Here's one, here's, here's the extra pro tip that's going to really make you appreciate Comic Lab. I told you how you could share your notes or you could share your post in notes, right? You share your email newsletter in notes.
You can also do the same thing in reverse. You can take a note and post it in your Substack post just by clicking on that note. There's little three dots there that you can click. Go to the note, click the three dots you'll see in the upper right hand corner to embed on substack. Just click copy link to embed someplace else.
So I'll post it in Notes to generate a little attention. Well, now that you got that note, go back and post it on your email newsletter at the bottom.
So it all works. It all works. The whole thing. There's no just one thing. You do it once and then you use it as many times as you can. You get the most out of it. That's how you can get this stuff done. One of my tricks with Substack and across all platforms is: Do something once. Share it multiple ways.
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