How I engineer Substack titles that pull 84+ subscribers (in under 20 minutes)
The mathematics behind all great Substack titles (why no one reads your articles)
“I’ve been writing Substack articles for over six months and I haven’t had a single viral hit. I’ve only grown by about a hundred subscribers. I’m starting to wonder, what’s the point.“
It hurt to hear this from my client, because he’s genuinely brilliant. His story is moving. His ideas are the kind I wish I’d come up with myself. An abrasive, distinct voice with real X factor. The kind of anti-slop I personally enjoy reading.
If you’ve been writing for a while and still have few people reading your work, you know exactly what he’s feeling.
It’s not only frustration. It’s the slow corrosion of “is this even worth it anymore?” You watch other people grow. Your own posts barely get read. You’re unsure if the problem is your ideas, your writing, your strategy. Or worse. You, as a writer (dun duun duhhhhhh).
I don’t even need to read your writing to tell you what the problem most likely is. It’s the same as my client’s:
Your writing is good enough. But your titles aren’t bringing in the attention it deserves.
We spent the rest of that call walking through what good titles actually look like, how to predictably write them, and why most writers (including me, for years) write them completely backwards.
By the end of the call, here’s what he said to me:
“I’m beating myself up for not already knowing this. How come I don’t know this? What’s wrong with me? I should have figured this out by now.”
That’s the thing about writing titles this way. Once you see it, you can’t unsee it. And once you learn it, you realize it’s the way you wish you’d been writing from day one.
This guide is the rest of that call. It breaks down how to write titles that get seen, attract new readers, and get you out of beginner hell. Including the three pieces of digital real estate most writers don’t even know they’re working with, and the hidden variable that decides whether their titles will attract the right readers.
Why do we all write titles backwards?
The newsletter I’m most proud of writing is called The Quiet Violence of Assigned Beliefs. It’s about a lesson I learned when my grandfather passed away suddenly. A piece I put my everything into. Arguably the best work I’ve ever published.
But it only got 32 likes, 16 comments, 9 shares. 0 new subscribers.
Compare that to my other newsletters:
[Free course] How to grow on Substack by 500+ subscribers per month. 5,746 likes, 638 comments, 526 shares, thousands of new subs.
My tiny writing biz did $315,000 last year (feel free to copy how I did it). 1,816 likes, 174 comments, 135 shares, thousands of new subs.
I’m not disciplined. But here’s how I made a lazy $20K last month: 173 likes, 102 comments, 29 shares. Hundreds of new subs.
Why most Substack newsletters suck (and how to not suck). 151 likes, 32 comments, 17 shares. The newsletter I get the most DMs about to this day.
you write well (that’s the problem). 86 likes, 29 comments, 5 shares.
Quick call out: my top performers are about how to grow on Substack and how to make moola. Obviously they’ll do better. But here’s what you don’t know: I wrote those titles before writing the piece. With the newsletter about my grandpa, I wrote the piece and then tried to title it.
That’s part of why no one cared to click. The idea was strong. The title didn’t convey it.
I was writing titles backwards.
At first I thought it was just me. Until I got an email from a coaching client that read: “Hey, here’s this week’s newsletter. I’m really fucking proud of it. I think this one can do really well. What should we do for the title?”
My stomach ate itself.
I read the email twice. Hoping I’d misread the question.
I hadn’t.
Then I thought: Shit. I have a hard enough time coming up with titles for my own newsletters, let alone somebody else’s.
So I asked four of my other clients how they write titles. All four said the same thing: “I just write the newsletter, and then I do the title at the end.”
The blood drained from my face.
Most of us have been doing this fucking backwards.
(Okay, I’m being a little dramatic. But still.)
By the time you’re asking what the title should be, the piece is already locked in. You’ve written it three times front to back, committed to the angle, bled on the page. Your creative juices have run as dry as a bag of wine at a bachelorette party. The title is now just a label you’re slapping on top of finished work. One you don’t have energy left for, one you’re shoehorning into a piece that’s already done.
And that label, the thing you spent five minutes on after spending five hours writing, is the difference between ten people reading it and a few thousand.
The work-to-reward ratio of a title is the most asymmetric in all of writing. And almost no one treats it that way.
That frustration got so real in me that I started asking myself: Fuck. If I’m already this frustrated, how am I gonna feel after another six months of this? Another twelve? Another two years?
Every piece written with the title done last is another week we don’t attract new readers. Another week our confidence erodes.
When you consider we only write one or two newsletters a week (that’s 52 a year, at minimum), we don’t have very many shots at bat.
I don’t know how good your ideas are. I don’t know how good your writing is. For all I know, it’s a complete mess.
But what I do know for sure: you will benefit from prioritizing the title first instead of shoehorning it in at the end when you’ve got nothing creative left to give.
Until you fix that order, it’s going to be much harder to consistently attract new readership. And once you fix it, the rest of what I’m about to walk you through can take a title from twenty minutes of guessing to twenty minutes of engineering.
Titles are anti-creative
If you want to consistently write titles that attract new readers, you cannot skip what’s in this section.
For anyone who’s been struggling to grow on Substack, this is the fundamental mechanism everything else stacks on top of. You have to get good at this. Or your titles will keep failing, and you’ll keep wondering why.
