Add subscribers who receive every issue of your newsletter

Publish on a steady schedule, write a welcome post that states what readers will get, and share each issue in Notes and wherever your readers gather. To fill the early list, send community members to your publication through upvote.club, and keep issues coming for whoever signs up.

A subscriber receives your posts by email or in the app and follows you automatically. A follower sees your notes and some reading activity in the Home feed but gets no issue emails. For a newsletter, subscribers are the main relationship, and the follow page covers the lighter one.

Many readers start as one and become the other.

It does when it is set up properly, which is exactly what upvote.club is for. New subscribers receive your issues like any other reader, and a fuller list makes your publication look established. Content decides whether they stay, so keep each issue worth opening.

Expect it to take several issues.

A larger list for your publication. People subscribe from their own accounts and receive your issues, which gives you more readers for every post you send and for any paid plan you add later. The writing remains your part, and the list gives it somewhere to land.

Open the publisher dashboard from your profile and go to Subscribers. The list shows each person with details such as activity and the source of their free subscription. The Home view of the dashboard shows total subscribers, and each post lists how many people subscribed after reading it.

Export the list from there when you want a backup copy.

The subscriber dashboard tags a free subscriber with how they arrived, such as the Substack app or Google. In the Stats area, the Sources view shows where readers come from. Compare these after each issue to learn which channels bring in people who stay.

Keep a short note of the results.

Yes. Substack lets readers subscribe to a profile, and if that writer later starts a publication, those people begin receiving the issues as free subscribers. Anyone who has a publication should send readers to the publication address, where the Subscribe button is front and center.

Either route ends in your inbox list.

Keep it short. Say who you are, what the newsletter covers, how often it arrives and what a reader gets from the first issue. Link to your best two posts. A welcome that sets expectations lowers early unsubscribes and gives new readers a reason to open the next issue.

Send it the day someone joins, so your name is fresh. Add one line about where to reply.

Some may, once you offer paid subscriptions or pledges, but the free list comes first. Treat it as a pool of people who already like your writing. Then publish the kind of work that makes a few of them want exclusive posts, notes or chat threads.

Patience matters here, because paid readers come from issues they value.

You begin at no cost with a Google or Apple login. Paid plans exist for anyone who wants more, and subscribing to other newsletters is not required in return. Try it on a publication with a few issues live and watch the dashboard.

Your publication address has to open for anyone, since members subscribe from their own accounts. A standard publication does this by default. Check the Subscribe button in a signed-out window before you paste the address, and use the publication address and not a single post.

Yes. Through the API and MCP connectors, scripts and AI assistants can request subscribers without the website. Setup notes are on the API page, so your tools can handle the whole routine, from publishing an issue to checking how the list grew afterwards.

For every subscriber, the dashboard lists the subscription type, an activity rating based on email opens and web views in the last month, the number of emails opened in recent weeks and months, the paid upgrade date if any, and a source tag for free subscribers, such as the app or Google. Use the source tag after a push from upvote.club to see which new readers arrived through Substack's own surfaces. The activity rating helps you spot who is reading. A subscriber who opens often is the one to write to personally.

An open is recorded when a subscriber loads the images in the email, or views the post in the Substack app. Each subscriber counts once, even if they open the email five times or in both places. Opens within seconds of delivery are ignored, because security scanners usually cause them, and a click without a view is not an open. Readers in France and Italy are left out of open rate altogether because of privacy rules. Keep this in mind when you watch the numbers after upvote.club adds subscribers, since the first opens arrive over the following issues.