The four Substack emails that work while you sleep

EPISODE 7 of The Author's Guide to Simple Marketing

Hi friend, and welcome back to The Author’s Guide to Simple Marketing!

Quick question before we get into it — when did you last check your Substack email settings?

If the answer is “I set them up when I joined and haven’t thought about them since” or worse, “I didn’t know there were email settings” — this episode is going to make your day. Because setting them up the way I’m going to show you is one of the highest value things you can do on Substack.

We’re talking about your automated emails.

The ones that go out automatically when someone subscribes, upgrades to paid, or when their subscription is about to renew or expire. Most writers either leave these blank entirely — which means Substack sends a generic default that’s even worse than nothing — or fill them in rather hastily and never update them to convert.

And that, my friend, is a missed opportunity of the highest order.

Because here’s the thing about automated emails: you write them once, and they work forever. Every single new subscriber gets them. Every person who upgrades to paid gets them. Every renewal, every expiry — covered, handled, done.
That’s marketing running in the background of your life while you’re doing literally anything else. Writing, sleeping, spending time with your family, staring blankly into your coffee.

BUT the results depend on how you write the emails.

So that’s exactly what we’re doing today. We’re setting up your emails so you can sell more books now and in the future. And to make it simple — since that’s my whole thing — I’m sharing what each email needs to do, the entire setup from start to finish, and even giving you specific lines you can adapt in a jiff.

If you fall into the category that hasn’t set these emails up or hasn’t optimized them yet, no worries. There is no shame or blame here, life happens, and we learn as we go along. Even I just got around to doing it recently, and I know better than to skip it.

It’s never too late to set it up, so let’s get you started ASAP!

If you are currently using an external email platform, you can find inspiration for what to write in your emails, but this is primarily for Substack emails. There will be a full episode showing you how to set up your automated emails as well, so stick around.