Several of Substack's most prominent publications are written by people who were already published authors before their newsletter existed. What is more useful than their popularity is how differently each of them approached the same platform. None of them copied a template. Each built something that only worked because of a specific, deliberate choice about format.

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Heather Cox Richardson: Consistency as the Whole Strategy

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Heather Cox Richardson, a Boston College history professor and author of seven books, writes Letters from an American. The Boston Globe reported that, according to a dashboard compiled by politics and media writer Kyle Tharp, it is the most-read politics newsletter on Substack, with an estimated 2.9 million readers on the platform, nearly double the next-largest political publication the Globe named for comparison. Substack does not publish official readership rankings, so this figure should be read as a credible third-party estimate rather than a confirmed platform statistic. She began writing weekly in 2016 and moved to a nightly dispatch near the end of Trump's first term. By her own account in the Globe profile, she has written nightly ever since, though she has also described the pace as unsustainable and something that comes at a real personal cost.

What makes her approach distinct is not the politics. It is the format: at least a thousand words, filed late at night, connecting that day's news to specific historical parallels, often citing the exact primary sources she is drawing on. Readers do not open her newsletter for breaking news they could get anywhere. They open it for the specific thing only she reliably provides: sourced historical context delivered on a predictable nightly schedule. That reliability, more than any single essay, is what built the audience.

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George Saunders: Turning a Newsletter Into a Classroom

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George Saunders, the Booker Prize-winning author of Lincoln in the Bardo and a longtime creative writing professor at Syracuse, took a completely different approach with Story Club. Rather than publishing personal essays or commentary, Saunders built the newsletter around close reading of a single short story at a time, describing it as an attempt at "simulating a version of the MFA through Substack" for readers who would never otherwise have access to his actual graduate writing program at Syracuse, which admits only a handful of students a year.

The differentiator here is structural. Saunders is not writing more often or more personally than other author newsletters. He is offering something specific: an educational format built around a small, recurring craft question, with readers positioned as students rather than an audience. That framing gives Story Club a clear reason to exist that a general personal newsletter would not have.

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Roxane Gay: Building a Newsletter Around Participation, Not Just Publishing

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Roxane Gay's newsletter The Audacity, which her own About page states launched on January 11, 2021, takes a third approach entirely. Alongside her own writing, back issues of the newsletter show an ongoing book club, a short story contest, and an open submission process for an emerging writer series, with a project manager and contributing writers credited on the publication's About page. Individual issues reviewed for this piece included community discussion threads and reader-submitted work published alongside Gay's own.

Where Richardson's differentiator is cadence and Saunders' is structure, Gay's is participation. The newsletter is not a one-way broadcast from author to reader. It functions closer to a small literary magazine with an editor at the center, giving subscribers a reason to stay engaged between issues rather than just waiting for the next one to arrive.

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What These Three Approaches Have in Common

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None of these newsletters succeed because of raw frequency or a large existing following alone, though all three authors had real platforms before Substack. Each one picked a single, specific reason for a reader to open the email that a generic personal update could not replicate: reliable historical context on a nightly schedule, a recurring craft lesson, or ongoing participation in a shared project. Our post on how Substack works for authors covers the mechanics of the platform these three examples are built on, including what the platform's discovery network can and cannot do for a newsletter that does not yet have this kind of built-in draw.

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Building Your Own Differentiator, Not a Copy

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The lesson is not to run a nightly newsletter, start a book club, or build a teaching format just because it worked for someone else. It is to identify the one thing your newsletter can offer that a reader cannot easily get elsewhere, then build the format around that specific thing consistently. Our post on author newsletter examples worth stealing from breaks down a different set of formats worth studying for the same reason. Want your version of this to sound like you rather than an imitation of someone else's approach? Creating Authentic Content in the Age of AI shows you how to build a consistent, genuine voice around whatever format you choose.

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Where Podcast Guesting Fits In

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A newsletter with a clear differentiator also gives you something specific to talk about when you are a podcast guest, rather than a generic pitch to "check out my newsletter." If podcast guesting is part of your marketing, download the free Mic to Money ebook to learn how to turn appearances into a repeatable pipeline of subscribers. For the fuller picture of how a newsletter fits into a complete marketing plan, our book marketing ideas guide covers the rest.

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FAQ

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Do I need to already be a bestselling author for a newsletter format like this to work? No. These three had existing platforms before their newsletters, which helped them start faster, but the underlying lesson, a specific differentiator over generic updates, applies at any audience size.

Should I pick a format based on what is currently popular on Substack? No. The three examples above succeed because each fits the specific author's expertise and voice. Copying a trending format without that fit rarely holds up over time.

Is a participatory format like Roxane Gay's harder to run than a solo newsletter? Generally yes, since it requires ongoing moderation and coordination. It is worth considering only if genuine reader participation fits your goals and you can sustain the extra work.

Can a fiction writer use an educational format like George Saunders' Story Club? Yes, if there is a genuine teaching angle to offer. The format works because it gives readers something specific and recurring, not because it is exclusive to any one genre.

Ready to find the one thing your newsletter can offer that nothing else does? Look at what you already do that a reader cannot easily replicate anywhere else, and build the format around exactly that.

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