Substack

New on Substack: Publication design settings, recipe embeds, and live video scheduling on Android and desktop Today, we’re rolling out a set of updates designed to give publishers more control over how their work appears and reaches their subscribers, from new formatting options for publications and recipes to scheduling livestreams on Android and desktop. Publication design settings We’ve made a number of updates to the theme editor that make it easier than ever to shape the experience subscribers have when they land on your publication’s homepage. A Tiny Apt. adjusting the size of their wordmark Here’s what’s new: Custom header and footer: Resize your wordmark and adjust its placement. Faster homepage editing: Click any section in the homepage preview to adjust its settings directly. You can also drag and drop sidebar modules to reorder them. Welcome page colors: Set a background color for your welcome page independent of your main homepage. Undo after saving: Made a change you didn’t mean to? Undo appears right after you save. You’ll find these settings in the same place as before: Settings → Website → Theme . Learn more about customizing your publication in our Help Center . , the author of DrawTogether , used these updates to create a homepage that’s both beautiful and easy to navigate. Drop Site News uses the custom layouts to add social links and highlight work from their contributors. For more ideas, take a look at Sub Club ’s distinctive logo placement and The Preamble ’s expert use of the footer. Recipe embeds (beta) Recipe embeds are now available in beta on Substack, offering a clean, structured way to publish recipes inside a post. If you’ve ever shared a recipe as plain text, you know it’s not ideal: ingredients and steps can get buried, readers have to scroll back and forth while cooking, and recipes aren’t always surfaced well by search engines. Recipe embeds solve these issues by giving recipes a dedicated format that’s easy to follow, save for later, and built for discovery. To add a recipe embed to an upcoming post, open the post editor and choose More → ...

Substack is your corner of the internet Now on iOS, tapping into a Substack at the top of your feed brings you into that publication’s world, with its custom colors, logos, and branding. TL;DR: Custom themes are finally coming to the apps! Starting today on iOS, you’ll see this when you tap on Substacks you subscribe to from a new row atop the feed that makes it easy to keep up with your favorites. Soon, themed views will be everywhere in the apps, and this is just the beginning of a major effort to make Substacks richer and more customizable. For years, anyone writing or creating online has faced a choice: Build your own website or app, reflecting your taste and featuring your aesthetics and branding, and apply your rules for commenters and community members, but watch it fail to get much attention or traffic, especially over time, without costly marketing efforts on other platforms. 1 Share your work directly on those other platforms to meet audiences where they are, but compromise on style and branding, cede some or all ownership of the relationships you build, and accept the rules of the platform owners, which can change dramatically and upend your livelihood overnight. It’s a little like owning your own small shop versus operating in a mall. Your unique store might be laid out and managed exactly as you—and your customers—want, but if you cannot attract enough people, if too many customers prefer the convenience and centrality of a mall, you’ll struggle to remain afloat. The mall’s scale advantage often wins with audiences, even when they admit that your unique vision on its own is superior, even when it’s common to hear people lament: “I hate the mall.” Online, audiences flock to massive social media or content platforms, ignoring even the most beautiful and well-run individual sites and apps. Writers, journalists, artists, musicians, chefs, critics, and creators of all kinds need to reach people at scale in order to earn sustainable livings, and so they wind up going where the audiences are, abando...

Introducing the Substack TV app, now in beta Today we’re launching the Substack TV app for Apple TV and Google TV. Substack is the home for the best longform—work creators put real care into and subscribers choose to spend time with. Now these thought-provoking videos and livestreams have a natural home on the TV, where subscribers can settle in for the extended viewing that great video deserves. That might mean watching reflect on her showbiz journey , read from his book , or interview leading figures in news and culture. , the author of and a frequent on-air contributor, put it simply: “Video doesn’t have to live in any one place. It needs to be wherever someone chooses to consume it. The Substack TV app does just that for me and my work.” What you can do with the TV app today Creators who already publish video don’t need to do anything new—your videos will automatically be available for subscribers who are signed in to the TV app. This initial version of the TV app is focused on reliable, high-quality viewing, and we’ll be adding more features over time. We’re starting with the essentials and will keep improving it based on how people actually use it. At launch, subscribers can: Watch video posts and livestreams from the creators and publications they’re subscribed to Browse a “For You” row that highlights videos from their subscriptions, plus recommended videos Open a dedicated page for each subscription to explore more videos from a specific publication Both free and paid subscribers can sign in to the TV app and begin using it today, with viewing access matched to their current subscription level. While paid content previews for free subscribers aren’t supported yet, we plan to add them in a future update. “I’m excited to report the Substack revolution will be televised,” said veteran journalist and former CNN anchor , who uses Substack’s live video feature to host a daily news show. “This is a game-changing moment for the rise of independent media. Substack has proven that legacy media consumers are not...