Substack Formatting
By: Casey Botticello
Tags: Advice, Design, Business, Entrepreneurship, Writing

Bold | Italics | Code | Hyperlink | Image | Divider Line

Bold

Pressing the letter “B” icon will create bold text:

Italics

Pressing the letter “I” icon will create italicized text:

Toggle The Code

Pressing the “<>” icon will toggle the text, rendering it in code format:

Hyperlink

Pressing the “🔗” icon will toggle the

Image

Pressing the insert image icon will allow you to upload an image. This will also work for inserting GIFs, although like many publishing platforms, Substack can be slow when it comes to uploading GIFS (or it may take a few attempts to render the image properly).

Horizontal Dividing Line

Pressing the “horizontal dividing rule” button will insert a subtle, yet effective, horizontal line that acts as a page divider or separator.

Here is an example of the Divider Line used in an article:

Buttons

One of the most distinctive features of the Substack editor, is its buttons feature. If you click on the buttons icon, a drop down menu will appear, with the following options:

Subscribe Now — Inserts plain button labeled Subscribe Now. This button will take readers to the landing page of your publication where they can view the free vs. paid options.

Sample Button:

Landing Page:

Special Offer — Inserts a button which promotes a discount or promotion. You must create a special offer before creating this button.

To create a special offer, click the settings button, located in the upper right hand corner of your Substack account. Then scroll down to section and click the manage button next to the Special offers section.

Once you have created a special offer, you can click on the special offer button, select your special offer (you can have more than one):

This will produce a custom button, as seen below:

Give a gift subscription — This allows publishers to insert button, allowing readers to gift a subscription to your publication.

Sample Button:

View comments — If you are writing an article that may attract many comments, and you want to direct readers to the comments section (which is normally discretely displayed at the bottom of an article), the view comments button is useful. When you insert this button into your article, readers who click it will be able to view a full page layout comments section, making the comments easier to read.

Sample Button:

Full Page Comments Section:

Share this post — Inserting the share this post button, will produce a button that, when clicked, will offer readers easy optionsto share a newsletter post on social media.

Sample Button:

Pop-Up Window When Share Button is Clicked:

Share Medium Blogging Guide’s Newsletter — This button creates a similar button to the one above. The only difference is this promotes the entire newsletter as opposed to a single article.

Custom Button —The custom button is a button where you can easily customize the button text and customize the hyperlink where the button will send readers, when they click it. This can be useful for directing readers to crucial resources, featured articles, or your external websites.

Style

The style button in the Substack editor controls the different levels of HTML headings you can create in your articles. HTML defines six levels of headings. A heading element implies all the font changes, paragraph breaks before and after, and any white space necessary to render the heading. The heading elements are H1, H2, H3, H4, H5, and H6 with H1 being the highest (or most important) level and H6 the least. For example:

Search engines use the headings to index the structure and content of your web pages. More importantly in the context of newsletters, users often skim a page by its headings. It is important to use headings to show the document structure.

As an example, here is an article with multiple heading elements:

Custom Lists

Substack allows for the creation of two types of auto-formatted lists — bulleted and numbered.

Bulleted List

To create a bulleted list, click on the bullet list icon in the Substack editor:

Numbered List

To create a numbered list, click on the bullet list icon in the Substack editor:

Block Quotes

A block quotation is a direct quotation that is not placed inside quotation marks but instead is set off from the rest of the text by starting it on a new line and indenting it from the left margin. Block quotations may be used to feature long blocks of text containing quotes or as a tool to feature certain content.

Examples:

Creating block quotes with Substack’s editor is easy. All you need to do is click on the quotation icon (far right of the editor), labeled “wrap in a block quote” as seen below: