Substack Writers at Work: Zero New Subscribers for 2 Years, Then 2,000 in 6 Months — Selling How to Teach Substack, at $200,000+ a Year

Note: figures are approximate values converted at ¥150 to the dollar.

“I stopped making my work pay my rent” — Sarah Fay’s own words. She’s been writing professionally for 25 years. Her HarperCollins memoir, “Pathological,” became a national bestseller, and she landed a six-figure book deal. Even so, her writing income long hovered in a range of $4,000 to $25,000 (about ¥600,000 to ¥3.75 million) a year, she says. She also says she kept an adjunct position at Northwestern University just to secure health insurance.

Today she earns over $200,000 (about ¥30 million) a year. And she’s not selling her own work. She’s selling “how to use Substack.”

The numbers behind the story

Simon Owens’s media newsletter covered this case as “a writer earning over $200,000/year teaching other creators how to use Substack.” The 36,000-subscriber figure is self-disclosed on her own About page. The display on her subscription page shows over 37,000.

The product is “the road she walked herself”

Substack Writers at Work bills itself as offering expert guidance to “build a platform, get real engagement, 2x, 3x, 10x your subscribers, and earn the income you deserve.” What’s offered is split into 3 subscription tiers: paid subscribers get a weekly behind-the-scenes report, a Substack starter pack, and 24-hour chat support. On top of that, there’s limited-slot one-on-one consulting. The methodology is described as being based on “1,000+ case studies.”

Her career as a writer is also part of the product. She has contributing credits at The New York Times, The Atlantic, and The Paris Review, and has taught writing for 20 years, including at Northwestern and the Iowa MFA program. The teaching skill was there from the start. What she lacked was only the know-how of the platform itself.

The turning point was one phone call

The turning point of this case is clear. From 2 years of zero new subscribers, one phone call with Sophia Efthimiatiou, who leads writer support inside Substack, was followed by 2,000 new subscribers over the next 6 months. The gap between zero and 2,000, before and after, points to where the cause lay.

The reason things had been stalled wasn’t lack of writing ability. Given that a national bestselling author had gone two years at zero, a content-quality hypothesis doesn’t hold up. What was missing was extremely personal, undisclosed operational knowledge, how to behave on that particular platform in order to reach readers. It wasn’t the kind of information you could search for and find. It only circulated through conversation with someone inside the company.

And this exact structure became the substance of her later business. She turned what had been handed to her into a product. The product isn’t “how to write” so much as “how to earn this platform’s currency,” and the proof of its effectiveness was her own subscriber growth curve.

Why the teacher made more than the doer

The phenomenon of teaching material outselling the work itself isn’t rare. What’s worth examining in this case is that this structure holds under three specific conditions.

One condition: the point of sale and the prospective customers completely coincide. Only people who want to grow their Substack subscribers gather on Substack, so her subscriber list of 36,000 doubles directly as a prospect list. No need to bring people in through ads.

Another: the product’s track record and her own track record are identical. Because the subscriber count of someone claiming to “10x your subscribers” is itself public, there’s no need to write out a results guarantee in words. The path from zero to 36,000 itself functions as the cheapest and most powerful piece of marketing collateral.

The last condition is durability: because the subject keeps changing, the content she teaches doesn’t go stale. The platform’s features and recommendation algorithm change every year. The reason it could become a 3-tier subscription rather than a one-time purchase course is this nature of “knowledge that needs constant updating.” Book royalties are a one-time payment. Putting the same knowledge onto recurring billing is the direct reason her income jumped by an order of magnitude.

Numbers not disclosed

Since this outlet reads with a data-driven, verification-focused lens, the limits need to be stated too. The price of each of the 3 tiers, the number of paying subscribers, and the breakdown of the $200,000+ (subscriptions/consulting/courses) aren’t disclosed. The detailed part of the original article sits behind a paywall, and what this piece could confirm is only the headline and lead paragraph, along with self-disclosure on her own site. While the $200,000 total figure can be confirmed, what percentage of her 36,000 subscribers actually pay isn’t known.

The structural risk is also not small. Revenue depends entirely on a single platform, if Substack’s recommendation feature or terms of service change, both customer acquisition and product value would shake simultaneously. On top of that, the market for “teaching how to teach Substack” has a low barrier to entry, and similar courses keep multiplying. The inventory of being a first mover (a 36,000-name list and 4 years of track record) is her defense, but it’s also exactly the kind of asset a latecomer can’t imitate.

The conditions under which this model works

The reproducible part lies in how the methodology is carved out. Convert operational knowledge you gained through trial and error into a procedure others can follow via the shortest path, and choose a domain that requires ongoing updates to put it on a subscription. This procedure itself requires no special capital.

What’s hard to reproduce is the premise. The authority of being a HarperCollins bestselling author who has taught at a university for 20 years, and the tellable story of “a two-year reversal from zero,” can’t be arranged after the fact. And the turning point coming from a conversation with an internal contact carries an element of luck. What can be generalized from this case is that “the bottleneck you just recently got past is what sells highest”, not that publishing a bestseller lets anyone flip to teaching.

Related reading

• Living off royalties alone from 24 Kindle books — another model that turns writing work from one-off orders into stock income.
• Hitode’s blog operation — a Japanese case tracking, in numbers, the process of turning one’s own operating track record into a product.