Should you "write short"?
Ever since I joined Substack, the best practice I have heard was to “write short”. It started as shorter than 1,500 words, and then it reduced to 800-1,100 words. Is that good advice, though?
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Ever since I joined Substack, the best practice I have heard was to “write short”. It started as shorter than 1,500 words, and then it reduced to 800-1,100 words. Probably in a year it will be a tweet, but I tend to write long. When I first came to Substack every post I wrote was 5,000+ words. Since then, I’ve been interspersing long posts with shorter ones, and I finally get it.
I see now that “write short” means “shorter posts get better engagement”. Engagement generally means more likes, comments, and restacks. I would also include simply more opens or reads into that mix.
Recently I’ve been testing writing short (approximately 1,500 words or below), and they easily get read more and shared more than my longer posts.
The thing with short articles is that they are usually focused on one point and one point is easier to share than a manifesto. I can share a singular concept in an article like this and it can catch on with people very fast.
Generally, these types of articles are more emotion/relationship focused, so people more easily see themselves inside of those posts, meaning they offer a high level of connection, which leads to a high level of engagement.
Additionally, they are usually more “current”. They can be written in a fervor that it harder to accomplish with longer articles.
Long articles are usually meant to fully encircle a topic. They require either a lot of thought, a lot of research, or usually both. I think of longer articles like the investigative journalism pieces that take months to put together.
Long, evergreen articles are meant to last forever, so they are less relational. They are less about meeting you where you are now than to bring you forward somewhere you don’t even understand yet. I think of something like The 1619 Project, which took months and months to put together and dozens of contributors. The sheer scope of it is mindboggling, but it spurred a lot of content that is still paying off now.
Compare that to your standard column in a newspaper or even a regular article which is meant to inform and then dispose of after reading it. That’s not to say that shorter articles are disposal, but they are generally more ephemeral than the longer posts, which makes them evergreen instead of topical.
Topical content is meant to deal with things that are relevant right now while evergreen content is meant to be consumed forever. There’s nothing wrong with either, but if you’re making one or the other, lean into that intention.
My longer articles don’t get read or shared or commented on nearly as much as shorter ones, but short post don’t have as much staying power. They capture an instant in time and then people move on, whereas my meatier articles still get comments months beyond when I wrote them.
There are articles I wrote years ago that I still reference constantly, and they are always the longer, more in-depth articles.
Back in the OG blog days, we used to call those longer posts cornerstone content. These are the most important articles on your site, roughtly 3,000-5,000 words that are meant to rank with search engines and drive organic traffic. The best practice used to be that you should build your site with 3-5 pieces of cornerstone content, and then place to make ten in the first year of your blog.
This is a super Grassland strategy, but the way I think about cornerstone content is “What does somebody fresh to my topic need to know in order to get a good base of understanding so we can have a good conversation”. I tend to think of the questions I am asked all the time or the ones I see pop up over and over.
A more curmudgeonly way to think about this is “Leave me alone” content. The idea behind this is that you want to be be left alone to write, but you keep being dragged away from your work to answer questions, and if you write these articles then you can just reference them and get back to doing the work you like to do.
My first two non-fiction books, How to Build Your Creative Career and How to Become a Successful Author, were build around the concept of “Leave me alone” content. People would come to my table at shows and pepper me with questions while I was trying to sell, so I wrote them to be comprehensive enough they would leave me alone so I could get back to paying my mortgage.
BTW, you can read both of those books for free if you are a paid member.
Even though I am much less curmudgeonly now, I often think about how I could write an article so comprehensive nobody would have to ask me a question about it ever again. I think that’s the antithesis of social media, though, so I resist the urge.
Meanwhile, articles like this one are more about imparting a single concept or answering a single thought. I think maybe it’s that a shorter piece has one single aha moment. They are more set up to be like “Here is something you need to know. Now discuss.”
Then, long posts still have that, but then make a big, long case to prove out their point. So, you’re turning that engagement into more reading, instead of turning that potential energy into action like sharing.
What’s interesting is that sometimes I’ll write a long piece and then one small piece of it gets referenced all the time, so then I pull that out into it’s own post in case I need to answer that one question. This is a good example of a shorter article that came from a longer, evergreen article because I got so many questions about it.
There’s a whole methodology for writing a high engagement posts, but it generally boils down to “When people seen or are given context to something they know but don’t have language for, they will engage.”
The other bit of this is that long posts are overwhelming. I used to give a presentation called Fund Your Kickstarter, which outlined literally everything you needed to run a Kickstarter, and when I finished with it people’s heads looked like they were going to explode.
Once Monica and I started working together, she designed a presentation called The 5 Places You Make Money During a Kickstarter Campaign, which was meant to explain the opportunity of Kickstarter and get people excited, and then channel that excitement into action.
I’ve given a lot of Kickstarter presentations since then, and I almost never give the Fund Your Kickstarter one because it’s too much. When I give organizations the choice, 100% of them have chosen the punchier presentation, even though there is more information in the other one.
If you’re a paid member, then you can access our Fund Your Kickstarter course for free and see just how dense it is, plus you can read our Get Your Book Selling on Kickstarter book for free, too.
If you overwhelm people it often leads to inaction, whereas if you give them just enough to get them excited, they are hopping on the balls of their feet to do the next thing.
A final way to think about this is that short does a lot of work for you today, but long does work forever. Every time I move blogs, I bring the cornerstone content with me, because it’s always relevent, while I leave most of the shorter articles behind because they are no longer relevant, or I covered it better in one of my cornerstone content pieces.
Often, I’ll write shorter pieces as I’m trying to figure out a topic, or what I think, so there’s a lot of repetition and then when I’m ready to dig in and present a thesis, I’ll do it in a piece of cornerstone content that can live forever.
Those pieces tend to be a bit drier than the shorter pieces because they’re meant to be read for the next 10 years and keep doing work for me. I wrote a lot of words when I first started The Author Stack specifically because I was building a thesis and needed to anchor it in longer pieces.
More recently, though, I find that I don’t have much to say in the long form, cornerstone world because I already covered it all. Now, it’s mostly about showing punchier examples of concepts I’ve already covered to give people an “ah ha” moment that makes them want to dig deeper.
Both have their purposes and I think you should do what will strategically work out for you. Often I’ll find that after writing on a topic for a while, I have a book, or at least a longer post, that can be compiled from my shorter posts. In 2023, I basically wrote three non-fiction books on my Substack about various topics that will be coming out.
How to Build a World Class Substack (with
)The Author Ecosystems (with
) - Coming out in SeptemberHow to Thrive as a Writer in a Capitalist Dystopia - Coming in January
I didn’t quite know they were books when I started them, but in retrospect they were all thematically consistent bits that fit into a compelling narrative. For paid members, I show you how to do the same for yourself in this post.
So what do you think?
Do you write short or long?
Does this spur you to try one or the other more?
Have you ever compiled your blog into a book before?
Let us know in the comments.
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I'd say people read plenty of long pieces ... just not boring ones. So back to the classic Strunk & White advice: Make every word count. ⚡️
It's important to always consider things from the reader's POV. If I see a 3,000-5,000 piece, my first thought is, "Will this be worth the time?" So everything about the piece has to grab me. If the intro is rambling or self-indulgent, or if it takes too long to get to the point, I will give up on it fairly quickly.
Use the amount of space you need, but no more. But realize if you are going to write at length, the reader will be expecting more from the piece, and it's easier to lose them at any point.
I rarely see pieces on substack that I wish were longer. But I often see pieces I think are too long.