What Substackers need to know this week

Smarter Substack Weekly Recap | Mar 22, 2026

Smarter Substack delivers three curated Substack resources to your inbox every weekday.

This week, 900+ creators are becoming Smarter Substackers.

🏅 This Week’s Top 5

1. This Creator Became a Substack Bestseller As Fast As Possible — A behind-the-scenes look at hitting bestseller status in under 60 days with a brand-new publication. The five strategies: using Notes as a daily networking tool, building collaboration partnerships early, running sprint launches, treating the paid tier as a product, and repurposing content across formats.

2. 10 Ways To Turn Your Non-Fiction Book Into a High-Converting Substack — Most authors either give their book away as a free PDF or serialize it chapter by chapter — and both miss the real opportunity. This breakdown covers how to repackage a non-fiction book into recurring revenue, from standalone problem-solution posts to a free-to-paid content ladder.

3. How To Figure Out What Your Paid Posts Should Be — Instead of guessing what readers will pay for, use your existing data. This piece walks through how to audit your best-performing free content and use those patterns to shape a paid strategy that converts.

4. How To Create Post Templates on Substack — Substack doesn’t have a native template feature, but there’s a simple draft-and-duplicate workaround that saves hours for anyone publishing recurring formats like roundups, interviews, or weekly series.

5. How To Create Custom Landing and Sales Pages on Substack — Custom pages let you build dedicated landing pages, service showcases, or content collections — and they can live on your nav bar or stay hidden as link-only pages. A step-by-step video tutorial included.

This Week’s Top 5 is sponsored by WriteStack.
WriteStack helps you automate your Substack growth and save hours of work every week.

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🔥 Hot Growth Advice:

Substack just made Notes scheduling native — which means the biggest barrier to consistency just disappeared. The creators who show up daily on Notes are the ones getting discovered.

Now that you can save drafts and schedule Notes directly inside Substack, the only thing standing between you and daily visibility is knowing what to post.

But what if you had access to 365 ready-to-use Notes templates — one for every day of the year, which remove the guesswork so you can pick a template, add your voice, and publish in five minutes?!

👉 Get the 365 Notes Templates

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❓ One Question:

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🤔 Food For Thought:

Growth on Substack doesn’t just come from writing more. It comes from building smarter — using the tools and features that are already sitting in your dashboard.

Most creators haven’t explored custom pages, post templates, or their recommendation settings. These aren’t flashy growth hacks, but they’re the kind of small infrastructure decisions that quietly compound over time.

What’s one Substack feature you’ve been meaning to set up but haven’t gotten around to yet?