Why I Joined Substack (But Won’t Be Moving My Blog There)
Image courtesy of Luke Lung via Unsplash.
At the beginning of 2025, devastated by but in recovery from severe burnout and perimenopause imbalances, I declared several intentions designed to reclaim my mental health, writing mojo, and author business, not least of which was to drastically reduce my social media presence. (There was a lot more in that post about my journey to that point and where I wanted to go from there, so if you want to read the whole long story, check out “Coming to Life Again”.)
I’m thrilled to report that this intention has stuck. Over the past year and a half, I’ve managed to mostly break my dependence on both Facebook and Instagram, my two addictions of choice. For Instagram, I check it maybe once a week, and usually only when my husband has sent me a reel to watch. For Facebook, I pop in there once a day, late in the day, to check on news from my author groups. After a few minutes (and usually only a couple of posts read), I’m very ready to go do something more productive.
(The one exception is when I’m running Facebook ads—and I might start having someone less invested pop in there to check on comments, etc., because I really don’t like what just doing that a couple of times a day does to my focus.)
In that same post, I talked about one of the keys to leaving social media—figuring out what it does for you, and finding other ways to fill those needs.
So, I have:
Participated in private group chats with friends and family, including regular video calls to catch up
Joined a couple of private, non-addictive social media groups for author networking and encouragement (which have also connected me with some amazing clients)
Shifted to watching more YouTube videos and listening to more podcasts to keep abreast of industry news
Subscribed to more newsletters and blog RSS feeds (because I wanted to dive back into long-form content)
Related to that last point, I’ve also found I’ve enjoyed using Substack more and more.
Enter Substack
If you’re not familiar with it, Substack is essentially a service that combines blogs, newsletters, and social media—it’s all three, but not quite like any one of those three, except the blog part.
Maybe it would be better to say it’s like each of those three in its most stripped-down, simplified form—and therein lies part of the appeal. Because on Substack, people are there for the writing. The community is a wonderful bonus.
Substack is designed for connecting creators of thoughtful long-form content with the readers who want to support them. Blogs (or newsletters, as they’re usually referred to there) can be free or monetized, and the service is free to creators unless you have paying supporters, when Substack only takes a percentage of revenue, which is a huge draw for those starting out. (But when they do start growing, the fees quickly surpass equivalent-sized newsletters from other providers, unfortunately.)
From the moment I first joined Substack, I’ve been attracted to the community there, which reminds me of my early days of blogging. This blog actually began on Blogger in 2006 (and it’s been Winters’ Day In from the start, if you’ve ever wondered why I chose that—it seemed clever at the time). When I imported it to Squarespace, the comments from those early days came with it. I’ve deleted many of those old posts now for privacy reasons, but it’s still so nice when I go look at something from back in the day to see names from that old community in the comments section.
Substack is like that. People comment, share, and react to other people’s pieces. They experiment with writing. They take the time to write really in-depth articles, because people care enough about their work to not only read it, but react, and often pay to read more. And the whole experience is ad-free, supported by the fees from users supporting creators.
I wanted to be part of that. I enjoyed feeling more connected to creators I read because of the discussions in the comments sections. But I had a problem: there’s no way I’m moving my twenty years of blog posts from a property I own to one I’d be kind of leasing.
(Last year, after eleven years on this domain, I finally finished the massive project of cleaning up all the links still going to my old wintersdayin.ca domain. On its own, that was reason enough not to move everything again, but I also have a strong aversion to building on “someone else’s land,” as the saying about social media goes.)
(Re)working the System
So I set about trying to replicate the advantages of Substack within my existing ecosystem. And I’ve made progress. Tomorrow morning, subscribers to my newsletter will receive this post, in full, in their inboxes. My newsletter is also set up to let people self-select content preferences by book genre, frequency (all posts vs. a biweekly digest), and whether or not they want to receive music content (which I started creating in 2025 after more than ten years’ hiatus from my songwriting dream).
But there were two things I haven’t been able to find a way to replicate: the community aspect, and the growth advantages from Substack’s algorithm suggesting blogs to people who like similar work.
This week, after doing some analysis, I realized that the extra 30 to 60 minutes I’ve been spending per post every week to create social media graphics* were yielding virtually no return. So I started wondering, not for the first time, if there were other ways to boost this blog’s signal with the kind of people who love reading the exact kind of long-form content I write.
Such as people on Substack.
Best of Both Worlds?
So. I’ve set up a Substack. It will not replace this blog. In fact, it will actually only be a place to post teasers of content I’m posting here to help new readers find this blog. And to create a space to engage in the greater community and conversation.
Like everything I do, it’s an experiment. But I’m greatly looking forward to seeing how it goes.
If you enjoy Substack and would like to follow me there (for free), check out my page.
But, by all means, please comment here instead (or reply to the email, if that’s how you’re reading this). Those interactions from my readers mean so much.
And, if you’re brand new here, please join my newsletter to get future posts in your inbox.
*Posted from a scheduler so I wouldn’t have to go on the platforms directly.
