Substack Writers Editing and Proofreading Services

Two thousand free readers, ninety paying. The paid posts go out weekly and the free readers see a title, three paragraphs and a wall. Most of them have never read a complete piece of the writing they are being asked to pay for, and the writer cannot work out why conversion is under five per cent.

We edit what paid newsletter writers produce — free and paid post structures, paywall placement and the text around it, subscription and upgrade pages, welcome sequences for free and paying readers, annual and founding tier descriptions, pause and cancellation messages, and the posts that ask directly for money. Our editors work on the line between free and paid.

The paywall decision is what determines whether a paid newsletter grows, and its failure is a cut made at a word count rather than at a point in the argument. A free reader who has never finished anything has no basis for paying. We work through these so the free posts are complete pieces rather than truncated ones, since a reader who has read three whole essays knows what they would be buying and a reader who has hit three walls knows only that they are being blocked; so where a post is split, the cut falls after the argument has been made rather than in the middle of it, because the free portion should be satisfying and the paid portion should be additive; so what sits behind the wall is described honestly at the cut — the specific thing, not "the rest of this post" — given that a reader deciding to pay needs to know what they are buying; so the paid tier's promise is stated as a rhythm the writer can keep rather than as a volume, as paid subscribers churn on inconsistency more than on quality; so the upgrade ask appears where a reader has just finished something good rather than where they have been stopped; so the writer's best work is not permanently locked, since the free archive is the entire acquisition mechanism; so an annual price and its saving are explained in cash rather than in percentages; and so cancelling is easy and said to be easy. Newsletters structured this way convert the readers they already have.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including subscriber numbers, revenue and unpublished drafts. We are editors rather than platform or business advisers, and we offer no view on pricing, platforms or growth. What we can do is put the line in the right place.