How to comp subscribers from your previous newsletter to your Substack publication

On April 28th, 2023, I comped 25,000 subscribers from my previous mailing list to The Author Stack. Since then many people have asked me how I did it.

Hi friends,

This is how I got 25,000+ paid subscribers to my Substack in under two weeks. The secret? I comped my whole email list with a free 3-month trial. On April 28th, 2023, I comped 25,000 subscribers from my previous mailing list to The Author Stack.

I know that’s a sneaky trick to get you to read this far, but I also know there are people writers there with big email lists and have never even thought about bringing them over. So, this is how I did it and why.

I have 20,000 people on my fiction email list, and close to 5,000 on our Writer MBA list. Both those mailing lists had become hyper-focused on promotions and launches, without offering that much value-based content. I wanted to change that and make more posts like these.

Except I was making them…I was just making them here on Substack. On top of that, I was writing specifically for the exact kind of people who were already on our mailing lists. Our best stuff is behind a paywall in our membership, but the next best is made r…