CWW Chair Meg Maker shares her experiences on Substack and talks to other wine writers migrating to the online platform.
Five months ago I migrated my wine publication, Maker’s Table, from WordPress to Substack. I was sick of the infrastructure demands and expense of WordPress and eager to take advantage of tools baked into the Substack platform. Those include text and video posts, newsletter emailing, subscription tiers (free and paid), and a social media channel that lets authors and readers interact.
The migration took about a week, and the hardest part was figuring out what to move and what to cut. In the end I ported about 150 feature stories dating back to 2008 while jettisoning about 1,200 wine reviews. I also left behind my mailing list because I had let it go stale, which meant starting from scratch to earn subscribers. But after a month I had 100, and now, thanks in part to a press mention, over 300, with a surprising number of paid readers.
That growth has been helped by the fact that many fellow wine professionals — writers, sommeliers, retailers, producers, and pundits — have also made the leap to Substack. Everyone on the platform has a profile regardless of whether they host a newsletter. The social platform acts a lot like Bluesky or X, supporting sharing and discovery. So I was able to ease into conversation with many people I already knew while discovering new commentators to follow and read.
My experience so far is positive. I publish weekly to keep subscribers engaged, and that commitment is a good kick in the pants to this writer. I enjoy interacting with the broader community, not only wine commentators but also nonfiction writers and essayists, artists and illustrators—other like-mindeds. The interface is simple to use and, unlike WordPress, doesn’t get in my way. The stats are good, and the monetary payouts have been seamless.
There have been a few destabilizing realizations. It’s certainly possible to use Substack like WordPress, managing it like a magazine. It’s even possible to create multi-department, multi-author publications (Narratively does this well). But the baked-in fact of periodic emails means authors can alternatively treat it as, simply, a newsletter, more like a conversation, sharing what’s top of mind, getting feedback, and building a story over time. I’m still wrapping my head around that paradigm shift and what it’ll mean to me as a publisher.
Unsurprisingly, a number of Circle members are also active on Substack, and I reached out to a few to get their impressions. I wanted to know how it’s been working as a tool in their writerly quiver.
Lyn Archer launched her Substack, Tête de Bulle, as a companion to her main author site (hosted on WordPress). Her newsletter shares insights on “traditional method sparkling wines from untraditional places,” and offers a bonus paid tier with interviews of industry leaders. She likes Substack’s “immediacy, authenticity, and community,” and adds that “writers get to share their authentic voices… without editors, SEO, or algorithmic dilutions.” Success, she says, comes from being intentional, consistent, and respectful of readers: “The more you put into it, the more you get out of it.”
Randy Caparoso publishes three different Substacks (unusual but not unheard of), about the wine industry, wine in restaurants, and photography. Randy doesn’t view Substack as his main platform, and doesn’t expect to make much money from any of his efforts. There is some overlap in subscribers to his three publications, he says, and praises Substack’s “efficient, built-in mechanics for expanding readership” so that “you feel like your writing has a little more impact” than on other platforms.
Simon Woolf has earned over 4,000 subscribers to his publication, The Morning Claret, in less than two years. He migrated from WordPress, in January 2024, to take advantage of what he views as “a platform that normalises the idea that you pay for independent writing.” He did import his “dormant” subscriber list, which gave him an initial boost of 1,400 free subscribers, and earned 100 paying subs within his first month. It’s now his main platform and the “the biggest slice of my income,” he says; “it is real money and provides the motivation to write that was almost completely gone. I couldn’t be more thankful to my subscribers.”
Niels van Laatum posted his first story just a week ago. He took advantage of a feature of Substack that lets anyone with an account publish an article on their profile without launching a formal newsletter. Niels has a separate website and blog but hadn’t been posting much, so he joined Substack “looking for a (new) way to publish articles and maybe grow into a paid subscription account.” As for advice, he says he’s “in tryout mode” and “still learning what’s possible.”
If you have a Substack, I’d love to hear from you. Email me at [email protected] or just find me there and say hello.