Listen to this post:
I have bad news, good news, and very good news.
The bad news: Most of your readers don’t finish your lengthy posts and a view doesn’t necessarily mean someone read what you wrote.
The good news: The data on our subscribers’ reading habits could be demoralizing, but I invite us to see it as an opportunity to become more skilled, versatile, deep-thinking writers.
The truth: We don’t write in a vacuum. A Substack newsletter is a medium and a genre. Like books, magazines, newspapers, fiction, nonfiction, and journalism, it has demands and constraints—and readers with preferences.
If you’re bristling, know that I love and write long-form, too. I teach long-form creative nonfiction and literary journalism at Northwestern. One of my long-form essays, “On Solitude (and Isolation and Loneliness [and Brackets]),” appeared on Longreads and was a Best American Essays notable mention.
However, there’s a time and a place for it.
The point here isn’t to encourage the spewing of shallow, short posts but the distillation of long drafts into short posts that give our readers depth, dimension, and emotion in under eight hundred or a thousand words.1
The very good news: Once we have our readers’ trust and they know we aren’t sending our every thought and respect that they’re busy, we can send the occasional long-form post—but only if the topic warrants it.2
Some of you are telling yourselves that your readers love your long posts; no, they don’t. Most will comment, like, and share without reading (!).
The data
Online
Most of your subscribers stop reading after about 118 words (i.e., right now).
Most skim/scan, taking in the first sentence and then “word spotting” in an F or Z pattern.
Mobile
0 to 1 percent read 1000 words.3 If you have a hundred “views,” somewhere between no one and one person makes it to 1000 words.
Inboxes
Over 80 percent of your readers scan your entire post.
Nearly all are dealing with a stress-inducing number of emails, and many crave the coveted zero inbox and desperately want to delete your newsletter.
Either way
Because they’re reading on screen, they’ll have a surface-level reading experience that will prevent them from remembering, analyzing, drawing comparisons about, or feeling empathy as a result of your post.
Reading a lot on screen or being Gen Z doesn’t change that.4
The good news
All this should come as a relief. The idea that long posts are better than short posts simply isn’t true:
A long post doesn’t signal you worked hard but that you didn’t work hard enough. You didn’t take the time to edit or master the medium and give readers what they want. “I would have written a shorter letter, but I didn’t have time.” ~Blaise Pascal, 16575
Length doesn’t equal greater creativity or artistry. Two words: Lydia Davis.
More words don’t create complexity or depth. Great writing (narrative or non-narrative) comes from the three s’s: synthesis, selection, and subtext.
There’s no word count. English class is over.
(Somewhere between 65 to 90 percent of you stopped reading before I got to the very good news and even though I’ve employed tactics like hyperlinked words that give me credibility, no pull quotes or subscribe buttons with a caption in the middle of the text that stop you from reading, and lots of bullets and headings to keep you interested.)
The very good news
Substack has set up ideal conditions for our subscribers—i.e., reader view. No amount of branding, GIFs (ugh), or photos will make people read more; quite the opposite—the more visual noise on a page, the likelier we are to skim. Thanks,
, , !Substack also provides an internal network to drive people to our posts rather than links from social media which lead to lesser engagement. (Yet another reason not to spend time on social.)
How people read depends on their purpose: information or pleasure.6 Those who read for pleasure/interest may read word-for-word, whereas “information foragers” dart around.
People will spend more time on long-form articles but at most four minutes, i.e., 800 to 1000 words.
8 ways to write short, skillful posts
(This one’s more of a publishing tip.) Include one long-form piece every fourth post, make sure the topic demands it, and let your readers know why it requires so many words so they trust you.
Email a preview of your posts to yourself. Do you want to read all of it?
Write your 3000- or 5000-word post and drill it down to 1000 words. Doing so will force you to think more deeply about the topic.
Start on a Word document and select only what’s necessary when you copy and paste it to Substack.
No more revving up. Non-narrative writing: After you finish drafting, move your final paragraph and make it your first, and revise again. Narrative writing: Cut the first three paragraphs and the last three; we start too early and end too late.
One idea per paragraph and topic sentences are king.
Don’t read your work out loud to revise. We tend to fall in love with the sound of our own voice and polish what’s unnecessary instead of cutting it.
(Another publishing tip.) Regularly give your subscribers a nugget.
This post is 909 words. For those still with me, I honor you. Make your presence known:
Check out
’s excellent post “The Clarifying Cut,” which discusses the benefits of revising fiction for word counts.
People spend years flailing around on Substack, feeling frustrated or overwhelmed, not understanding the platform, following bad advice, and not seeing real growth.
These meetings are the quickest, most effective way to attract subscribers, generate income, create loyal readers, and produce your best writing.
Plus, discover your Substack’s nugget and more.
There was a time when long-form was over 5000 words.
If you’re about to counter this by saying the most successful Substack newsletters run long, the most successful Substack,
, only averages about 1100 words.The Pew study categorized engagement with an article as clicking, tapping, or scrolling, which doesn’t necessarily mean reading.
The brain mimics the medium we read on, taking on the solidity and clarity of print and the ephemerality and chaos of digital interfaces. Digital reading prevents us from deep reading the way we do on paper and e-ink readers.
Also wrongly and rightly attributed to Cicero, John Locke, Mark Twain, et al.
It also depends on what you write—news reports on crime hold the number 1 spot in terms of time spent reading and those of us in the “other” category come in dead last.
I skimmed and scanned, breathed a sigh of relief, and am opening it in its own tab to read in full later. A challenge and peace of mind in one post. Whew. Thank you!
Great idea - someone to stop cracking the whip!