Although this article is mostly of interest to Substack writers, I’m sharing it to all of my readers so you’ll know the background for some small changes you’ll see.

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Note: I am not a lawyer and this article is not legal advice. If you have concerns about the risks discussed in this article, or other legal aspects of running a newsletter, consult a lawyer who is competent in your jurisdiction.

What’s The Problem?

caught my attention in February with her notes and articles pointing out an important gap: Substack’s “Terms of Service” do not protect us writers — they only protect Substack.

Me Time

How to Protect your Substack Business

Building something on Substack, like a bona-fide digital business, takes a lot of time and effort. We want to make sure we build on a solid foundation…

Read more

a year ago · 1 like · 2 comments

Why Does This Matter?

First reason: Being transparent with our readers about expectations, what we offer, and use of their data.

One sentiment I’ve heard repeatedly in my 50+ “AI, Software, & Wetware” interviews is that people want transparency from companies and people they interact with, especially about their data and how it will be used. Some folks also want transparency in whether AI was or is used in creating what we’re presenting for them to consume or use. (Long-time readers know I advocate that we all should write & share our AI usage policy; here’s mine.)

As publishers, we should write down what readers can expect from us (what we do & don’t do), and what we expect from them on our newsletter site — and we should make that information available to readers and subscribers.

I’ve been surprised a few times when a newsletter I subscribed to here was quietly migrated to a different email platform (like beehiiv or ghost). That means the email address I used to subscribe on Substack is now stored in another platform’s system. If you as a newsletter publisher are going to use subscribers’ addresses elsewhere, your custom Privacy policy ought to let people know that their email address will be used outside of Substack. People should be able to make informed decisions about whether they want those sites to have & host their information.

Second reason: Running a newsletter can be awesome but can also bring some potential headaches for newsletter publishers. Here are three.

1. Being sued by someone claiming they relied on your written advice on the site and were harmed by it. Noemi calls out this risk in her article “Protect your Substack, build on a solid foundation”.

2. A small percentage of people have maliciously started paid subscriptions with activists, just so they can then contest the charge through Stripe or their credit card issuer. Fraud allegations cost the writer valuable time to fight back - AND a penalty fee. As one example, Black writer was recently attacked by a coordinated activity exploiting this loophole to try to shut her down; see this article. But any of us could be unfairly penalized if someone made a mistake, or changes their mind, and they don’t bother or know how to unsubscribe or request cancellation properly. The root cause of this harm to writers clearly needs to be addressed. In parallel, though, we need to empower writers to better defend themselves from this kind of bad behavior. Most writers don’t make buckets of money or have excess time, and undeserved penalties bite.

3. Other writers have reported dealing with problems common to social media sites, such as people who are rude or inappropriate in comments on articles or Notes, or in subscriber chats. Substack’s policies on ‘free speech’ don’t preclude this. Many writers want their newsletters, notes, and chats to be safe places for ‘their people’ to engage. Most people in our communities behave well and are supportive, but some aren’t. We shouldn’t have to say in custom TOS that people need to be decent humans, yet here we are. Many writers have resorted to limiting comments and chats to subscribers only. Others are even regretfully paywalling their comments and chats, limiting them to paid subscribers only, to gain more control over troll volumes.

What Can We Do?

Substack’s policies don’t protect us from these (and likely other) problems. That’s understandable; their job is to protect the company. We need to protect ourselves. And it’s on us to meet our subscribers’ interests in transparency on the policies we control. So there are (at least) two parts to a solution.

Part One: DEFINING Custom Policies

As Noemi recommends, writers can define their own Terms of Service to mitigate these risks. Setting clear expectations for readers in our Publisher TOS may deter some bad behavior and will support writers in enforcing violations.

In the interests of transparency, I recommend also writing your own Privacy Policy (really a Privacy ‘Notice’).

If you’re interested in writing your own AI usage policy as well, feel free to take inspiration from mine and riff on it to reflect what you do & don’t choose to do.

Substack directly provides a mechanism in Settings for showing a Publisher’s custom TOS and Privacy policy to readers. They don’t provide a mechanism for additional policies like AI usage, but we can always put links to these additional policies in our custom TOS.

Part Two: SHOWING Custom Policies

Writing policies (‘notices’, really) is necessary, but not sufficient. We should also make sure people have a fair chance to see our Terms of Service before they subscribe or engage.

Custom Publisher policies are currently only shown in a few places in Substack, like in the tiny print footer of an article.

• Someone who subscribes, but can’t be proven to have read or seen an article, could claim they never saw the custom Terms of Service that spell out the Publisher’s terms, which may include their refund (or ‘no refund’) policy.

• Someone who comments, even in subscriber-only areas of the newsletter site, may claim they’re unaware of a Publisher’s custom policy barring abusive or inappropriate behavior in comments or chats.

Recent studies have proven that the vast majority of people, over 90%, never read websites terms and conditions. In some younger age brackets, the rate is over 94%. So yes, most people may not actually read our custom Publisher policies.

But logically, if not legally [I am not a lawyer], a writer’s position in the face of these kinds of challenges should be stronger when the publication’s policies have been written and presented. Whether people read our Publisher policies, or Substack’s, remains up to them and shouldn’t weaken our defensive position.

What Substack Offers

Substack provides some guidance on defining custom policies for newsletters (how, not what). That support article calls out two key limitations to be aware of:

1. If you publish your articles under your profile, and not from an official newsletter publication, you don’t currently have the option to define custom TOS for them. The URLs are your.substack.com/privacy and your.substack.com/tos. Those don’t work with a profile-based ‘newsletter’.

2. The article says that custom policies are only supported on the web at present - not in the Substack app. To address this, it recommends linking custom policies to your About page to display them in the app. I’ve checked in the app for the About pages for some newsletters I subscribe to. The article is correct that there are no policy links in footers - not even Substack’s. On the web, as of today, the About page already has both custom policy links in the footer, e.g.

   

Hopefully Substack will address these additional gaps soon.

How To Do Part One: Defining Custom Policies

Again, I am not a lawyer, but we shouldn't need to be one to protect ourselves. Thankfully, didn’t just point out the problem; she shared some helpful tips. Look in the Privacy section of your newsletter Settings for these ‘Customize’ buttons:

and follow Noemi’s tips on defining your Custom Terms of Service: “Protect your Substack, build on a solid foundation”.

Me Time

Protect your Substack, build on a solid foundation.

Building something on Substack, like a bona-fide digital business, takes a lot of time and effort. We want to make sure we build on a solid foundation…

Read more

a year ago · 18 likes · 5 comments · Noemi Apetri 🇩🇰

Noemi is also now piloting a tool she created to help writers define their own custom Terms of Service. (I’m one of the lucky pilot users - looking forward to trying it out!)

How To Do Part Two: Showing Custom Policies

While creating my own TOS and testing where my Publisher policy links show up, I noticed 3 related gaps in the Substack UI.

1. Post Footers

Substack links the custom Publisher TOS at the bottom of posts (see example below). But they do not link custom privacy policies. Here’s an example post footer:

2. Welcome Page and Subscribe ‘Embed’

Below is what the Substack-provided ‘embed’ shows on the welcome page for my AI6P newsletter. (We can also put this embed on our own websites if we wish.)

Only the Substack TOS and privacy policy are included. My TOS and privacy policy are not. Check the welcome pages on your publications (your.substack.com/welcome) … you’ll likely see the same thing. (If you do see your custom policy links, let me know!)

WE don’t control the links in the subscribe embed. Substack fully controls the format and content of the embed and the welcome page. The embed incorporates only a few Settings we can control (an image, visibility of a few texts defined elsewhere in Settings, and custom ‘skip’ text). For the welcome page, Substack also uses a Setting for whether to show recommendation blurbs.

I opened a support ticket on March 6 through Substack’s support bot to ask Substack to include links to our custom TOS and custom Privacy Policy in the embeds.1

I’ll post an update here if I hear back from the support team about this concern.

3. Other Subscribe Buttons and Pages

On further investigation after making the support request, I realized that the Subscribe button we can insert in articles also has no policy links, e.g.:

This would be ok if the policy links are shown on the page the ‘Subscribe now’ buttons take you to. They aren’t. This Subscribe button, and the one at the top right of the UI for an article page, brings up the your.substack.com/subscribe page. That page also doesn’t have the policy links; it just prompts you to choose a plan. If you choose Free, you’re done - no policy links.

When choosing a paid subscription, the page prompts for a credit card and has a Subscribe button - again, no policy links. I’m not sure if that’s the end of the flow at present? (If you’ve done this recently and know, or can test it, please share!)

But Wait, There’s More!

The next day, I realized that there are also no links to Publisher TOS or Privacy Policy (or Substack policies, for that matter!) in these 2 additional places:

4. Comment dialogs

This is where readers add comments, at the end of posts or podcast episodes. (The “Leave a comment” button we can add to an article brings up a similar page view.) Here’s a screen shot showing what is visible on the article page (example) or its comment page (example), at the point of adding to discussion on an article:

The policies are only in small font in the post footer, well below this dialog. On posts with a lot of existing comments below the dialog, there’s a good chance a new commenter won’t notice those policy links. And on the main article page, Substack includes links to other recent articles by the author, which pushes the footer farther below the commenting point.

5. Newsletter chats

There are no Substack or Publisher links at the top or in the drop-down menu: the only options are Copy link, Pin, and Leave.

What Substack Needs To Do

Substack needs to add these “missing links” in the UI (browser and app). Substack and Publisher terms of use / service and privacy links should be included:

• in post footers (Publisher TOS is there; Publisher Privacy policy is not),

• in the Subscribe widgets, Welcome page, and About page (app or browser)

• with Subscribe buttons and on Subscribe pages (however one gets there),

• right under the “Discussion about this episode” caption on a post, and

• at the top of a Subscriber chat window and/or under the “…” dropdown menu.

In short, anywhere that people can subscribe or engage with our newsletters, they ought to be shown our custom TOS and privacy links.

Not presenting our custom Terms of Service at signup or at engagement points makes it harder for readers to know what they’re agreeing to, and harder for writers to protect or defend themselves against these risks.

In the Meantime, What Can We Do?

I recommend writing custom policies and I’m working on mine. And here are 5 specific steps I’m taking to make them more visible for my own newsletters.

• Add my custom policy links in the custom TOS and in my newsletter email footers. [This is done; so if you’re an email subscriber, you’ll see the links in the footer of this article’s email.]

  • Go to your.substack.com/publish/settings/preamble to define your headers and footers

• Add my custom policy links to the “homepage links” that are shown on my newsletter home pages. [I already link my AI policies here, so TOS and privacy seem like natural additions.]

  • Go to https://your.substack.com/publish/settings/homepage_links to edit the list of links

    

• Create a special thread with links to my Publisher TOS and Privacy Policy, and pin it at the top of my Subscriber Chat. (Will do after this article goes out.)

• Add my custom policy links to my publication About pages. (Needed for visibility in the app, at least for now.)

  • Go to your.substack.com/about to edit the page (1, 2)

• On my new author website, add my policy links under Subscribe buttons and Substack’s ‘embed’ widgets. I’ll also include links to Substack’s policies. This will help to ensure people are presented with the links before they sign up. (Site will be going live soon, hopefully this month.)

For #5, I’m taking the opportunity to highlight on my website other policies I’ve created for my newsletters, i.e. on AI images, AI usage, and Donations. Here’s a mockup from my website test page with two potential “missing link” formats:

Your Thoughts?

Those are my ideas on protecting ourselves and handling the “missing links”. What do you think of them, or what advice do you have?

Leave a comment

The problem: Substack Search sucks.

I’m loving many things about Substack. Their site search is NOT one of them. Examples:

❌ Search can’t find posts even when I know the exact title or URL.

❌ Search can’t look across just two newsletters with one search query.

❌ Search often can’t find posts I know are in a specific newsletter.

❌ Search often can’t find people, even when I know the exact spelling of their name in their profile. I’ve typed in names and gotten search results with different spellings and name variants before it shows me people with the actual name I entered (if it ever does).

I can tell that the Substack team has been working on Search. It’s gotten better at finding people I’m already subscribed to. But I want all of this to be easier. And I want it to be easier for my current and potential followers and subscribers to find my stuff, regardless of which of my publications it’s in.

So I’ve been experimenting with workarounds. I’ve found a search solution that works for me and may help y’all too. And:

• Setting it up doesn’t require using any AI.

• You don’t even have to write code to build it.

To learn what I did & why, read on! All of the ‘how’ is in the End Notes. If you just want to try playing with the search solution I found, jump to here.

Subscribe now

What’s Wrong With Substack Search?

I usually read LinkedIn on my mobile phone. I often find out about new-to-me Substack writers through their LinkedIn posts.

• An article URL can’t be pasted into the Substack mobile app.

• Clicking the link in the LinkedIn post won’t open that URL in the Substack app. The LinkedIn app always opens the App Store to Substack, and the URL gets lost.

The logical way, then, to find the writer and read, follow, or subscribe on my phone is to open the Substack app and search for them. But searching in Substack, for the name of the writer or the title of the post, almost always fails.

And the search options are weak in general. Here’s what I got tonight when I tried to search in Substack for my two newsletters … nothing relevant in either case. “OR” simply doesn’t work as logic.

A Workaround

In brief: Anyone can define a custom Google search engine that searches only the sites they specify. And it works. It finds stuff that Substack’s native search doesn’t.

I could achieve the same objective by bringing up Google search myself and specifying (search terms) + site:site1.substack.com OR +site:site2.substack.com + … every time I want to find something.

But that’s a pain, right?

Once a PSE is set up, which isn’t hard at all, this approach is way easier and more mistake-proof. And it’s shareable with anyone.

Bonus: I’m currently building a new author website (external to Substack). My custom PSE will combine search results from my new author site AND my two Substack newsletters. It will be a simple and seamless way to give my readers an integrated view of my writing across the two platforms!

The Maybe Slightly-Bad News

A few caveats I noticed while building my own PSE:

• To create custom Programmable Search Engines, you have to use a Google account that isn’t administratively restricted. A garden-variety Gmail account worked for me. A Google Workspace account associated with an enterprise didn’t (which makes sense).

• In order to embed the widgets for this custom search into a website you control, you have to verify your ownership through the Google Search Console page. Five verification methods are supported. The best way, if it works, is injecting a verification TEXT or CNAME entry into the DNS configuration managed by your domain provider. Not everyone may be able to do this, though.

• If you have more than 10 newsletters (sites) that you want to search across, you might run into some problems. Google warns about this. Search might just be slow, not broken. (Most folks have at most 1 or 2 newsletters, though. Even and only have 5 each ;)

• Unless you pay them, Google says they will include ads in your search results.

The Good News

Good news 1: Link to it and run it from anywhere

These custom search engines can run in a separate Google-hosted page. Just share a link to the “Public URL” for your custom search engine, anywhere you like. So even if you can’t complete the DNS verification for your own website, or you don’t have one, you and others can still USE your custom search engine!

If you have your own website, just embed your Public URL in a search hyperlink on any webpage you can edit. If Google can verify your ownership, you can embed the PSE widgets into one of your pages (more on this below).

No external website? No problem. Here are 3 ways you can link the custom search page to your Substack newsletter, via the Settings:

1. Add the Public URL as a Search link to the “Homepage links” in your right sidebar. See steps and screen shots in 1 below.

2. Add the Public URL as a Search link in the top “Navigation bar”. See steps and screen shots in 2 below. This option is probably most convenient for our online readers.

3. Add the Public URL as a Search link to the email header or footer that goes to your email subscribers. See steps and screen shots in 3 below. This seems best for people who mostly read email and don’t use the browser or app.

Good news 2: Branding

You CAN reuse your Substack theme colors and wordmark to configure the Google-hosted search results page. The design’s not fully controllable, but the Settings cover the basics (colors & logo image). See 4 for steps and screen shots.

If you have more than one newsletter with different branding (as I do), just pick one or improvise a new image that combines them.

Good news 3: Search Power

Best of all, the search actually works. It finds stuff, and it’s pretty fast. And you can use all of the powerful standard Google search options to refine your query.

What I Did

Here’s what I did and how you can do it, too. (If you just want to try playing with the custom search engines I set up, jump to here.)

First: Simple PSE for 2 newsletters

I went to programmablesearchengine.google.com, logged into my Google account, and configured a new PSE for my two Substack publications by following these instructions.

I started with a built-in Google theme (‘Greensky’), then I set my own colors. Initially, I reused my Substack brand wordmark image from as the logo on the Results page. Fair warning: This ‘Look and Feel’ settings part of the UI is kind of clunky. And the different ‘Layout’ options are a bit confusing (and perhaps irrelevant when not embedding widgets into your own site). But it worked.

Here’s an example results page, from searching for ‘diversity’ with my custom search engine. (Note: colors in the search results section are customizable, too; I just hadn’t messed with that part of the configuration yet.)

And here’s an example results page from searching for ‘music ethics’ with the same custom search engine:

Second: customization and testing

Experimenting showed that the Google search results include the “sitemap” pages Substack automatically generates for each year (example). I want my search results to take people directly to articles in one click. So I added PSE exclusions for the sitemap URLs.

I haven’t decided yet whether to exclude some or all newsletter section pages (e.g. the home page for the Substacking section this article is in).

Next, I created a simple combined ‘wordmark’-sized image that included logo style elements from both of my newsletters and a search icon from Flaticon 5. I reconfigured my PSE to use it as the logo, instead of my 6P wordmark image (in the screen shots above).

Finally, I tested the engine with more queries. I tweaked it a bit to turn off one of the default web autocomplete options 6. While I was typing my search text, it was showing me too many choices that I knew weren’t relevant; I found it distracting to use. I may experiment with this more.

Since I’m using a free Google Search account, I was a bit concerned about Google’s ads potentially being intrusive. So far, they haven’t been. Most of my web results pages seem to have no ads. I’ve seen only a few ads on the image results pages. (I’m not sure how useful the image results are, anyway; keeping it enabled for now).

Bottom line: This PSE solves 3 of the 4 problems I listed above (❌).

Third: Finding people on Substack

To try to solve the 4th problem, I created a second custom search engine for scanning all of Substack, to help me find people. I enabled the Safe Search option and then tested it by searching on my own name and other people’s names. At first, I didn’t configure the colors at all; I just used the default Shiny theme and added my own square logo image which combined that Flaticon search icon and the Substack icon.

Here’s what I got when I searched for my own name.

1. Top hit was my profile page.

2. Second hit was my self-named newsletter.

3. Third hit was the Business section of this newsletter.

4. Fourth hit was a recent Note I wrote.

Oddly, the default colors of the Refinement buttons above the results summary were not readable. Other than that, these results looked good.

Next, I tried a partial name search for , leaving out her middle name. The top results seem on point:

1. Amanda’s profile,

2. My interview with her,

3. Amanda’s newsletter , and

4. her post about her book becoming an international best seller.

Then I tried searching on someone who uses only her first name on Substack. The person I wanted to find, the who writes on , was the third hit. Unless you’re searching for someone you already follow or subscribe to, this search result has been impossible to get in the native Substack search (I’ve tried).

Bottom line: This custom search engine solves the fourth problem (❌). It not only finds the person’s Substack profile and newsletters, it surfaces articles by or about them in other newsletters.

Bonus: Any Substack writer could use this search URL to find anything on Substack associated with their own name. I plan to keep my all-of-Substack search engine available publicly as long as web traffic (for loading the logo image) doesn’t overrun my ISP bandwidth cap. [edit: I found a way to avoid this risk; I’m pointing the search engines to the image files in this post, now that it’s published.] It’s easy to make your own PSE and focus it to your own newsletter(s), though, as I hope this post shows.

Caveat: Stating what I hope is obvious … unless you’re a wealthy philanthropist, if you pay Google per search query (e.g. to remove ads), don’t create a similar search engine configured for a site that’s not yours, and freely give away the search engine link. You’d be stuck paying the Google bill for everyone’s searches of sites and content that won’t benefit you or your business. However, if your Google account has administrator rights at a nonprofit, school, or government agency, you might be able to remove ads for free:

Fourth: Embedding the widgets in my own site

For testing purposes, I created a third PSE for my new author website.

To succeed at embedding my new custom PSE in my website, I had to verify my ownership of the domain. I did the TEXT and CNAME verification steps in the Google Search Console. Even after allowing more than a day for DNS sync, it still didn’t verify successfully. So I used 2 other verification methods, and got it working almost immediately. See (7) for how I verified my author website domain. The ownership rights you get when using these other methods are supposedly more restricted. But my site is simple, and I haven’t yet run into any limits.

When I’m ready to take my author site live, in a few months, I’ll add its URL to the PSE for my newsletters. Voila: readers will be able to easily find topics no matter where I post them!

Try Them Out!

Here’s a link to my custom newsletter search engine. It’s configured to search my posts for “ethical AI”; try searching for whatever interests you!

And for fun, here’s the second custom search engine I created for scanning all of Substack. The link is configured to search for my name; try it with your own, or whatever you want to find!

What’s Next?

Google’s Programmable Search Engine has lots of features I haven’t explored yet which could make this even more useful. There are settings for Refinements, Promotions, Query Enhancements, Autocomplete, Page Restricts, and more. For instance, it allows adding your own synonyms, categories, and filters. So I could add categories for:

• “AISW” to let people search for “AI, Software, & Wetware” interviews, or

• “music” to find only my posts on ethical AI for music, or

• “diversity” to surface posts relating to inclusion, ageism, and supporting women in STEM.

Refining my PSEs is on the “to do” list. For now, I’m thrilled that it works. (And it gives real search results - not questionable generative AI overviews.)

I would love to try creating a custom search engine for a specific set of people, such as all of the women and nonbinary folks writing about AI on Substack. That list is well over 100 people now, though, and Google warns about performance when using this tool for more than 10 site URLs. So it might not work. I may give it a try later.

What do you think of these custom search engines for Substack?

• Would you use one of these search engines on someone else’s newsletter?

• Might you create one for your own newsletter(s)? (If you do, please share it in a comment or restack!)

• Do you know of a better solution for searching Substack newsletters?

Leave a comment

Thanks for reading Agile Analytics and Beyond! I’d love to hear if you found this article useful. (Shares, hearts, comments, & restacks are awesome 😊, and one-time tips or voluntary donations via paid subscription are welcome & appreciated!)

For more Substack-specific tips like this, subscribe (FREE) to the “Substacking” section of this newsletter. (Most of my initial subscribers in 2024 were email-only, so I don’t opt new subscribers into this section by default.) You can manage section subscriptions here.

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The remainder of this article is all about HOW to create and use your own custom Programmable Search Engine, step by step. (If you’re reading in your email client, this article may be truncated; click here to read the rest in a browser.)

End Notes - How To’s

1

How to add a custom search engine link to your newsletter layout

In Settings, go to the Website section and click Edit to the right of Homepage links.

After you click Edit and add your search link, the Settings will look like:

Browse to your publication home page and find your Homepage Links (the page doesn’t show that title above them). Depending on your layout, people may need to scroll down to see this section, but it’s there. With my 6 ‘P’s in AI Pods layout, it’s in the right sidebar near the bottom. The sidebar will look something like this:

2

How to add the custom search engine to the top navigation bar of your newsletter

Go to your newsletter Settings. In the Website section, click the Add button next to “Navigation bar links”. The new link will be added to the bottom of the reorderable section of your navigation bar links.

I moved the new link to the top of the reorderable part of the list. It showed up right after Notes & Chat:

I repeated these same steps on this newsletter.

Now any curious person or current/potential newsletter subscriber or follower can easily search for posts across both newsletters, from either of my newsletter sites!

3

How to add the custom Search link to your newsletter email header or footer

In Settings, go to the ‘Email header & footer’ section and click Edit.

Click the Edit button on the right side of ‘Header for free subscribers …’.

With the Substack editor, add a hyperlink (use the chain link icon in the toolbar) for Search. Example:

Click Save at the bottom when done. Copy or repeat in the ‘Header for paid subscribers’. Your Email headers settings will now show something like:

I repeated this for the email headers of my second newsletter (this one):

Now my email subscribers will have the Search link at the top of each emailed article. (In fact, if you’re a free or paid subscriber with email enabled, you’ll see it in the email you get with this article.)

4

How to configure the custom search engine’s colors and logo

Go to the Programmable Search Engine console, open your search engine’s settings, and click “All Look and Feel settings”:

Choose from six default Themes, or customize:

To reuse your Substack theme, put in the hex color codes under Customize. (Click the down-arrows to expand each section and edit the colors or font).

Regardless of whether you use a built-in theme or customize your colors, you can add your own logo to the Google-hosted search page. (Default is no image.)

6

How to turn off an Autocomplete setting that’s more annoying than useful

7

How to get verified as owner of a website, for embedding custom search widgets in its pages

Example error page from Google Search Console

I tried domain verification first, and got this error right after adding the DNS TXT entry (before it propagated).

I waited 24 hours and tried again - no luck. Then I tried adding a CNAME entry to the DNS. It still didn’t work. So I tried two different verification methods. Both worked for me right away:

• uploading a special Google-provided HTML file to my site’s home directory, and

• including a special META tag inside the site home page HTML file.

After completing these two verifications, my Google Search Console showed:

Within a few minutes after these two verifications finished, the custom Google search widgets I had embedded on my author site test page worked. (Unsurprisingly, the search widgets don’t work when testing the page locally, before uploading it to the site I verified.)

---

Thanks for reading Agile Analytics and Beyond! I’d love to hear if you found this tutorial useful. (Shares, hearts, comments, & restacks are awesome 😊, and one-time tips or voluntary donations via paid subscription are welcome & appreciated!)

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For more Substack-specific tips like this, subscribe (FREE) to the “Substacking” section of this newsletter. (Most of my initial subscribers in 2024 were email-only, so I don’t opt new subscribers into this section by default.) You can manage section subscriptions here.

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Background

kindly helped me on Tuesday with some quick and valuable tips on how to be more efficient in post-processing my “AI, Software, & Wetware” audio interviews. Her advice included:

• how best to set up my Zoom free account and my Audacity DAW,

• benefits of recording separate tracks for each person,

• when to take advantage of audio cleanup tools, and

• how to use split and join in Audacity while editing clips, to make the whole process smoother.

(Look for an episode from Steph soon with the tips she shared with me!)

In preparing for my call with Steph, I found this helpful “Podcast Editing Secrets” article from her earlier GPE newsletter. This got me curious about audio cleanup tools.

Global Podcast Editors

Podcast Editing Secrets: Music, Tools, and How to Edit Smarter

Check out the growing Coffeelike Shop, where we’re offering self paced resources for podcast audience growth https://coffeelike.gumroad.com/, many of which are FREE…

Read more

a year ago · 1 like

Steph’s post features 3 podcast editors as guests. The guests mention the tools they use and what they like about them. Adobe tools don’t fit in my budget, but the tools from Auphonic and iZotope caught my attention.

I checked out the full iZotope product suite. It’s extensive - and expensive ($719.40 for the advanced version of RX 11).

Their RX Elements tool is the most affordable (normal price $99), and it could handle some basic podcasting needs.

Three pieces of good news

(1) Auphonic offers a ‘free forever’ plan that gives 2 hours/month of audio cleanup time. No credit card required, only email address. Paid monthly plans start at $13 for 9 hours of editing time; 20% discount or $11/month with a yearly plan.

2 hours per month won’t cover the typical length of my monthly AISW interviews. But 2 hours should be enough to let me compare results between the Auphonic and iZotope tool(s), and see if the ‘S’ paid plan might be worthwhile.

(2) iZotope’s VEA (Voice Enhancement Assistant) tool is $29 (regular price).

(3) iZotope RX Elements is on sale for $29 (one-time fee) through Dec. 6.

One caveat

Audacity isn’t listed as an officially supported DAW for RX Elements or VEA. However, I found articles where users referred to working with the RX Elements plugin for Audacity, so it may be worth the $29 gamble to find out.

If you’re curious to learn more about these tools, here are some links:

• This Reddit post lists pros and cons of Auphonic and iZotope RX Elements and RX Standard.

• This March 2024 article from riverside.fm lists the “7 Best Auphonic Alternatives for Seamless Audio Editing”. They briefly summarize features of Riverside (their own tool), Audacity, Cleanvoice, Adobe Audition, Podcastle, Alitu, and Izotope Rx. The only tool that’s free, though, is Audacity.

I’ll add more links here as I come across them.

A note on ethics

These tools obviously use AI (machine learning). They are not using generative AI. That doesn’t mean that ethics concerns aren’t relevant; they are. However, using tools that know how to get rid of noise and ‘ums’ seems far less likely than most genAI tools to harm to any folks whose spoken audio content may have been scraped or stolen, and used for creating these tools.

Most AI tool companies aren’t transparent about where their data comes from, but I’ll see what I can find out about how these tools were trained, and post a follow-up if I find anything interesting.

What’s next?

I’m going to:

• Set up a free account with Auphonic, then try out the 2 hours of free usage this month.

• Spring for the $29 iZotope RX Elements before the sale expires in 2 days, then see if it works with Audacity & how well.

• Since VEA isn’t on sale, I’m not going to rush to buy it just yet. I’ll wait until I see how well RX Elements works with Audacity.

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Highlights

☕ I read the most in the afternoon

💌 I subscribed to 166 new Substacks

🎧 I listened to 152 minutes of podcasts

❤️ I liked 435 posts

💬 I left 135 comments on posts

📜 I scrolled 934 meters in Notes

🕵️ I discovered 458 new posts via Notes

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Stella Fosse by Stella Fosse

Author, workshop leader, advocate for older women's empowerment. Her new book is "Write & Sell a Well-Seasoned Romance."

Top post this summer: The Legs are the Last to Go

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Authentic words for everyone trying to figure out the best way to be human.

Top post this summer: Christians, Get the Hell Out of Unloving Churches

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Stories for people who can't resist a challenge; from the busy intersections of an unconventional life.

Top post this summer: A Frightening Unveiling and the Humanity of a Beautiful Friend

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Audio voiceover is a great option for writers to be able to offer our subscribers. Many people have more listening time than reading time, and people with reading impairments may find audio more accessible.

Getting audio into a Substack article is straightforward. Steps are below.

Getting it into the Podcast tab and into external podcast apps is not as smooth as I had hoped, though. Here’s what I learned while configuring it for my two newsletters.

Note: This Substack help article says “Note: Even if you don’t plan to distribute to any podcast apps, you must go through the podcast creation flow to publish audio posts of any kind.” But it’s 5 years old, and this part of the advice seems to be outdated. Voiceover audio can be added without doing any podcast setup.

If all you want is to add audio voiceover to your post, and don’t care about the recording show up in a podcast (Substack or external), see the steps below under “How to add audio to a Post”.

Contents:

1. How to add audio to a Post

2. How to configure your Post audio for external podcast apps

3. How to get your Post audio onto the Substack podcast tab of your newsletter

1. How to add audio to a Post

If you’ve started a Post and you want to add audio voiceover - before publishing or after - here are step-by-step instructions on how to do it. (I’m writing it down to remind myself of the steps, as a checklist; maybe it will help someone else too.)

1. Start the new article as a Post and write it. :)

2. When done writing, DO NOT send it via email or app yet. (Otherwise, email subscribers will never see that you added voiceover. Any hoped-for accessibility benefits will be lost to them.)

   1. If you want to be able to hyperlink section titles in Table of Contents (like I have above in this post), DO ‘publish’ it so you can get the correct hyperlinks, but DO NOT allow Substack to send it via web or app. That box is checked by default, so you need to uncheck it. You’ll get a warning that almost no one will read the post. That’s fine; you’re not ready for people to read it yet. After you add the audio voiceover and publish, the box will again be checked by default. People will get the post then, with the hyperlinks and the audio. Just know that doing this might inject a time lag into your post views “since it was first published”.

   2. Alternately, you can hack the hyperlink section titles by looking at the pattern used in hyperlinks on other posts, and save yourself the intermediate publishing step. 😏

3. Start a recording app (I use Audacity). Use a good-quality microphone if possible, vs. a laptop or phone’s built-in mic (it’s definitely noticeable).

   1. Speak the title and the subtitle, with about 1-second pause after each, then speak the post. Leave pauses of about 1 second before and after section titles in the post.

   2. Edit the post text when you say things that don’t sound smooth. (Most efficient: Use the pause button in Audacity right away, and cut & re-record the rough part right then.)

   3. Save the recording as MP3 with standard quality.

4. For podcast distribution, use Audacity to insert a standard pre-recorded intro for the publication in front of the post voiceover.

   1. Keep the intro short (mine are 5 and 6 seconds).

   2. Be sure to trim extra dead air at the start of the intro.

   3. Leave about 1 1-1.5 sec gap between the last audible word of the intro and the start of the post voiceover (trim dead air at the start of that one, too).

   4. Save the combined recording as MP3 with standard quality.

I haven’t decided yet whether an outro at the end is useful or important. I probably should add an outro, too. I’d love to hear what others think!

5. Go into edit mode for the post. Attach the audio voiceover MP3 using the headset icon in the toolbar and the microphone icon in the popdown menu:

6. An “Add voiceover” sidebar will open on the right. Click Select file, browse to the MP3 recording file (with the intro prepended, for podcast use), and select it for uploading. Click Done at bottom right to close the sidebar.

7. You’ll see this “Processing media…” dialog after the file is uploaded:

8. When it’s done, “Processing media” will be replaced by a widget for playing the recording, and the sidebar will look like this, showing a Play button and the recording duration:

9. Check the duration, play the recording a bit to make sure you uploaded the right file, then click Done to close the sidebar.

Now just publish your post as usual!

2. How to configure your Post audio for external podcast apps

If you do want to include your audio in an external podcast, some setup is needed in Settings for enabling Podcasts and synchronizing with the external apps. That isn’t covered here. If the standard Substack help articles 1 and support chatbot don’t get you going, comment or DM me and I’ll try to help.

Follow steps above for “How to add audio to a Post”.

1. Go to the post Settings (button with gear at lower right of the post writing window). Click the radio button which now appears just above “Social preview” to “Add voiceover to podcast RSS feed”. If the button is not there, it means your adding the audio to the Post was not successful; go back.

   

2. When the button is checked, a new section will open beneath it for Episode Notes. The notes will default to the text of your entire post (or as much as will fit, if it’s long). Click the theme-colored Save button below the Episode Notes, or your checkbox will be discarded.

   

3. If you want to change the Episode Notes, click the Edit word link at far right. I usually condense the text to a few introductory sentences, plus maybe a TOC if it’s a long post. If a post has a legal disclaimer, I include that in the episode notes too.

4. I often add the caption text from my Subscribe button at the bottom of the episode notes. Words in the caption text can be hyperlinked in the episode notes editor (publication URL plus “/subscribe”). I’ve discovered that this isn’t necessary, though. The syncs with external podcast apps seem to automatically add a line giving the Substack publication URL, so you don’t have to add that. (There are some variances in what they add. Details below 2.)

5. Be sure to click the Substack-orange Save button right below the edits,

   

   and then click the theme-colored Save button below the Episode Notes, if you didn’t already.
   If you go to another section of Settings to edit without first clicking both Save buttons, your edits (and your choice to add voiceover to RSS) will be lost.

6. If you end up re-recording or editing the audio before you publish, you can simply repeat step 5 of How to add audio to a Post to open the right sidebar, delete the old voiceover file, and repeat step 6 to upload a new one. Episode Notes and settings seem to persist unless you delete the audio file without uploading a new one before closing the sidebar.

7. When you click Continue at upper right to publish your post, you’ll have a chance to review these again.

Result: The emails that are sent to subscribers should include the voiceover link at top, and the audio will be synched to external podcast apps. My experience is that Spotify and Apple Podcasts will pick up a new post in an hour or few, while Overcast and Pocket Casts tend to pick them up the next day.

3. How to get your Post audio onto the Substack podcast tab of your newsletter

Short answer: YOU CAN’T.

• If you follow the first set of steps above, the audio will be playable in the post.

• If you follow the second set of steps, the audio will also go to the external podcast apps.

• But there is no setting in Substack that will put that Post audio voiceover onto the Substack publication’s Podcast page.

If you want your post’s audio voiceover to show up in the Podcast tab of your Substack publication, you have to choose post type “Audio” from the very beginning. There is no way to convert an Audio episode to a Post, or vice versa, once you start writing. This locks a writer into deciding before starting to write whether they’re going to add Substack podcast audio to a post being written on Substack.

The Substack support bot says that not allowing Post audio to go into the Substack Podcast is a deliberate design decision. Somebody make it make sense. How is it in writers’ or Substack’s best interests to make it harder for writers to share their audio inside Substack than outside? (Is the internal podcast play section is being killed off in favor of external standards-based integrations?)

It looks like the Substack Podcast concept is: You’ve recorded an unscripted session outside of Substack whose transcript won’t be written into post text. All you’re putting into Substack is the recording plus a short blurb saying, listen to this interview. That may work for e.g. a 30-min or 60-min interview with a guest. But isn’t writing original words the whole point of Substack?

And what’s the actual value of adding such an audio recording to a Substack-only podcast episode with no original writing texts? (Unless the goal is to pull popular creators from other sites to get them to host their podcasts here?)

After you’ve created an Audio episode, the process for adding a recording to it is pretty much the same as in 1. How to add audio to a Post. You can also enable the audio recording to be shared to external podcast apps too. The steps are roughly the same as in 2. How to configure your Post audio for external podcast apps.

Assigning episodes to a section didn’t work as I had hoped. I had already set up a podcast for my publication. When I created an Audio episode and assigned it to a section of my newsletter, the Settings prompted me to set up a new Podcast for that section.

There was no apparent way to simply use the existing top-level newsletter’s podcast for the section - other than, don’t assign the episode to a section. I tried clicking “Set up podcast”. I got a prompt to choose an audience for the podcast. Oddly, all of the sections were selectable, not just the section this Audio episode was assigned to. (Choosing a different audience list might have actually reassigned the episode to the selected section.) I couldn’t choose the main newsletter as the audience; it was grayed out. Mousing over it showed “This newsletter already has a podcast”.

At this point, the apparent value of the Substack-only podcast had fallen below the point of return on effort, and I gave up.

What’s Next?

I’ve seen some publications handle this by creating one Episode and one Post for each article. After the effort it took to figure all this out, I understand WHY they do it. But as a subscriber, it’s kind of annoying to get two emails about one article. And neither email has both the text and the voiceover link.

❌ It shouldn’t be this hard. Substack UX and Design, please fix this user experience for writers and for readers/listeners.

My bottom line:

1. Trying to get my audio voiceovers into the Substack Podcast isn’t worth the effort of creating Episodes. I am abandoning it and disabling the Podcast tab in my publications. And I manually converted my first two draft Audio episodes to Posts. There’s no way to just change the type from Audio to Post; I asked, and the support chatbot confirmed that it’s a no.

2. I am going to experiment with holding off on publishing my Posts until I’ve added the voiceover audio tracks. Unless I hear from email-only subscribers that they are happier with using the external podcast apps, or don’t care about audio, it doesn’t seem fair to them to do otherwise.

One downside with the external podcast app synch: there’s no way to see play counts. The support chatbot’s answer was “Currently, Substack does not provide specific analytics for external podcast episodes published through its platform. You would need to check the analytics provided by the external podcast player or service where your podcast is hosted to see the number of plays for your episodes.” It doesn’t sound like those external play counts would be available even if I used the Audio post type, though. The Podcast tab is still only going to show internal plays.

I have some homework to do to see how each of the external podcast apps allows (anyone?) to see stats on a show or its episodes. Maybe for next month’s retrospective. 🙂

2

What various external podcast apps add to the end of the Episode Notes:

1. Apple Podcasts adds “Get full access to <publication_name> at <publicationURL>/subscribe”. They also have an “Episode website” link which points to the Post, but does not bring up the Welcome page.

2. Spotify adds “To hear more, visit <publicationURL>”. It is a link to the newsletter, not the specific post. It brings up <publicationURL>/welcome if you have that enabled.

3. What Overcast adds depends on whether you have paid subscriptions enabled.

   1. If so, Overcast adds: “This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit <publicationURL>/subscribe”

   2. If not, Overcast adds: “Get full access to <publication_name> at <publicationURL>

4. Pocket Casts adds “Get full access to <publication_name> at <publicationURL>

5. Google YouTube Podcasts and YouTube Music Podcasts are pretty much the same thing, from a podcast publisher’s perspective. Publishing to one populates both UIs. YouTube also appends “Get full access to <publication_name> at <publicationURL>”.

• already have multiple publications and may want to combine them, or

• are thinking about having multiple publications and wondering if the decision is a “two-way door” or a “one-way door” - i.e., how much friction you’ll feel if you change your mind later!

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See the Postscript section at the end for new lessons learned after this post was first published about the friction of content migration.

Migration Steps

My plan for merging the agileTeams newsletter here has 5 steps.

1. Copying the content (posts and pages) to the (existing) agile section here.

2. Updating the publication settings. This includes changing the About and Welcome pages and disabling new comments there (community settings). I also changed the post headers and footers, and the email templates sent to new subscribers.

3. Updating links to the newsletter in pages and lists in my other newsletters and social media presences, and moving its recommendations here.

4. Notifying my subscribers - the purpose of this final post - and making any subscriber list updates needed.

5. Updating any embedded agileTeams links that are inside past AAaB posts. (This may take a while to find & do, and isn’t urgent.)

Substack experts: did I overlook anything important?

Leave a comment

Steps 1-3 have been completed. The rest of this post describes Step 1, content migration, and Step 4, subscriber migration.

Step 1. Content Migration

For anyone interested, the migration advice I got from the Substack bot is below in the End Notes 1. The agile section already existed; it holds content migrated previously from WordPress. So I didn’t need to do anything for that. (FYI, the support chatbot doesn’t mention this, but by default, current newsletter subscribers are NOT opted in to a newly created newsletter section.)

Exporting from agileTeams

I started the Export at 10:42pm on July 11. It finished within 2 minutes. The 95 kB ZIP file contained my subscriber list, a CSV file with a list of my posts (published and unpublished, including a draft announcement to my subscribers), and a folder of posts in HTML, plus CSV files counting delivery and open statistics for the new posts I’d created since February.

Importing to Agile Analytics and Beyond

On the Import part of the settings in AAaB, I put in the URL of the agileTeams publication. There was no place to point the importer to the ZIP file I had exported 🤷‍♀️.

Next, I got to choose the AAaB section to import the posts into (agile). The meaning of “Update existing posts” in the dialog below wasn’t clear (delete? cross-link?), so I asked the bot. Answer is below 2 and I’m glad I asked. It wasn’t at all what I was thinking, and wasn’t relevant at this point; there were no duplicate posts between the two newsletters.

I was a little concerned that this dialog showed “20 posts found”. The correct number was 26 (excluding the unpublished drafts). But I proceeded.

Substack prompted me to confirm that I own the publication - which seemed odd. (Wouldn’t it be safer for Substack to actually verify that I’m the owner, rather than just let me click a button?)

After I clicked Next, the page was busy for about 10 seconds, then brought me back to the Archive page. No confirmation, no error messages. But the second post in the list was my July 3 retrospective, migrated, so that looked good.

Scrolling through the list, though, it was clear that only 20 were imported. One page and 5 old posts were missing. 🙁 I realized the page might be elsewhere in the newsletter, so I checked the list of pages, but it wasn’t there either.

At this point, rather than wrestle with the importer, I decided to manually copy and paste the 6 missing items. The 5 posts were a bit tedious because the publish date and time can’t be edited until after it’s been published, and I had to be sure to uncheck the box that defaults to sending the new posts to my subscribers. (Apologies to any subscribers if I missed one; please ignore that 2009-2010 vintage content!) The publications page was easy to migrate; it was recent, I didn’t care if the date was a bit off, and pages aren’t sent to subscribers by default like posts are. This manual migration took about an hour.

Even though I didn’t use the exported ZIP file directly in the Import, I was glad to have it. It was easier to track down the 6 missing posts in the workbook than by repeatedly clicking through the site.

I’ll manually migrate the announcement to agileTeams subscribers after it’s sent.

Step 4. Subscriber Migration

In my case, this was trivial. I had already confirmed that all but one of my agileTeams subscribers were already subscribers here. I only had one person who only subscribed to agileTeams.

They are a very new subscriber who had followed me here from Facebook just last week. I’ve known them for decades and I’m confident they won’t mind the move. I sent them a special email message tonight about what I am doing and why. Then I added them to this publication as a subscriber, and sent a welcome email. I’ll confirm with them in the morning.

My announcement to the agileTeams subscribers should go out mid-day. Then Steps 1-4 of my migration are done!

What’s Next?

I’ve only posted about once a month in agileTeams, so there won’t be much of a change in newsletter frequency. For those of you who already subscribed to agileTeams, the main change will be the incoming email address 🙂. The announcement post covers this.

For anyone subscribing to this main newsletter who isn’t at all interested in agile topics, feel free to un-subscribe from the agile section. You can do this through your Account page. Instructions from the Substack chatbot are below 3. See the detailed advice on this Support page or ask the Substack chatbot if you need help!

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Postscript

• I got additional suggestions from the Substack support chatbot after this post went out. I’ve added them to the End Notes below 4. 20/20 hindsight: Removing the old Subscribe links in the posts before migrating them would have cut the editing work in half.

• On carefully reviewing the content of the migrated posts this afternoon, lots of key content elements are missing. I will report this as a bug to Substack. The older posts I originally imported from WordPress are fine, because that content never had these post features. But all of the new posts I had created in Substack this year with these features were incomplete!

  • Subtitles

  • Metadata tags configured in the post settings

  • Embedded links to my other agileTeams posts (the URLs aren’t even there; they are just missing)

  • Embedded references to other people or publications created via @. (these are insidious; they are super hard to find via proofreading because the people and publication names aren’t even there)

  • End Notes (this is a big deal for my content; I use lots of references)

  • Audio voiceovers (I only had one to migrate. I was able to go into edit mode on the original post, download the MP3 file there, and re-embed it in the new post.)

  • Standard Substack buttons like ‘Subscribe’ or ‘Comment’ still point to the original newsletter. They have to be deleted and replaced with buttons for the new newsletter.

  • Post statistics (not entirely unexpected) - view counts on the migrated posts are reset to zero and they have no history.

To my original question about whether having a section or a separate newsletter is a one-way or two-way door: the door definitely needs some WD-40 and hinge tightening. Hopefully these migration issues can be fixed quickly.

End Notes

In the chat transcripts below,

my questions and comments are in a callout like this,

and the chatbot responses are in italics.

Regular readers know I’m always on the lookout for “cheap and good” (preferably free) tools we writers can use for our newsletters. My ‘ethical shoestring’ list already had sections for “icons and images”, “image editing”, and “freehand drawing”. Logo design might benefit from more support than those tools could provide, though. So I looked into free tools for creating logos. Here’s what I found.

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Contents of this post: (will be hyperlinked after this article is published)

• Substack Brand Images Needed

• Searching for a Logo Design Tool

• Using Zarla to Create Draft Logos

• What I Did

• Importance of Layout

• What I Got (for FREE)

• What I Used

• What’s Next?

• References

NB: I will be the first to admit that I am not an artist or a graphic designer. I’ve never had any training or mentoring in art outside of required public school courses. The closest I’ve ever come to creating art is through photography.

I do have family members with graphic design expertise. At some point, I’ll tap them for advice and (when I can afford to) pay them to design branding and images that will be 100x better for my newsletters and for my future AI books. My goal for this week, on my shoestring, was to create something for my newsletters that’s better than boring plain text or my face. (How’d I do?)

Substack Brand Images Needed

I had looked briefly at Substack’s brand image requirements in March, when I experimented with reviving a themed wordcloud generator I wrote in Python 1. This post said that 4 different image sizes with 3 different aspect ratios are needed for complete Substack branding (all are optional, though):

1. 256x256 (at least) - Logos for publications, publication sections, and personal profile, with transparent background, 1:1 aspect ratio

2. 600x600 (at least) - Cover image, appears on publication welcome page (assumed to be used at 1:1 aspect ratio)

3. 420x300 (minimum), 1456 x 1048 (recommended; can be larger) - Post image for search engine optimization, at 14:10 aspect ratio

4. 1100x220 (or taller) - Email header image with a transparent background, aspect ratio 5:1 (will be less if taller)

A 5th optional image, with a different size and aspect ratio, is also possible: 1344×256 (at least) - a stylized “wordmark” for the header of the publication (minimum size, aspect ratio not to exceed 21:4).

Image 3 is per post, not for the publication, so not relevant right now.

Image 4, a new email header image, would be a nice bonus but could wait. I’ve been using a mountain scenery photograph that has been my banner image on Twitter and Facebook for years. I just annotated it last week to add my Substack URL there🙂.

In sum, my goal was to get 3 new branding image files this week (1, 2, and 5):

• a new high-resolution publication logo (preferably 1200x1200) on transparent background that would size down well to 256x256.

• a cover image for my welcome page (same file as the 1200x1200 logo image?)

• a 2688x512 wordmark image for the publication header.

Searching for a Logo Design Tool

The obvious tool choices were the big names - Canva and Adobe.

• Adobe Express logo maker is free and does not require a credit card. But I’ve been watching how they have been treating the rights of their photographer customers and other creative users this year. I’m not comfortable with their AI ethics 2 3.

• Canva offers a free logo maker. However, some concerns have also been noted this year about Canva’s AI ethics 4.

So I did some web searches (not AI-driven, if you’re wondering) to see what else was out there. I found two options which looked OK but weren’t free. They are free to experiment with, and may give you some good ideas, but payment is required to purchase a logo.

• Logology - $79-$699 to buy

• Looka Logo Maker - $20-$65 to buy just a logo (more cost insights here).

By reviewing competitor lists, I found one which is truly free for creating a logo: Zarla Logo Maker. No signup or personal info is required to start using it 👍. An email address is required before you can download, and they send you a download link, but that’s it. Their business model is based on people opting to pay to build and host a website (“with AI”!) with the logo and branding they build.

When first providing an email address and clicking Download, a user gets this page. There’s no obvious way to proceed without clicking one of those two buttons, but clicking outside the dialog got me out.

After that, each time you edit the logo and request a new download, the page prompts with the dialog shown below. Clicking “No Thanks, Just My Logo Please” works well.

Since I’m not interested in using these AI-based website building features, I’m not as concerned about the ethics of whatever LLM they are using under the hood. But if you’re considering going down that path, and AI ethics matter to you, I recommend asking the company about it. Zarla’s privacy policy isn’t clear. (I’ve inquired, but don’t yet have an answer.)

Using Zarla to Create Draft Logos

In Zarla, a logo has 5 basic elements, all selectable or configurable: icon, name, slogan, background, and layout. (The sidebar also has a colors tab, which I never used.) The Ideas tab supports searching for a new icon. The Icon tab supports configuring the one you’ve selected. Here are side-by-side screen shots of the configuration options for each.

• Size (1-10) and Margin can be set for Icon, Name, and Slogan.

• Spacing can also be set for Name and Slogan, to spread out the text.

• Color can be set on all 4 elements, with 2 colors selectable for Icon.

• Icon, Slogan, and Background can be shown or hidden.

What I Did

I created my logo in the wide layout with icon on the left of the texts, and then in the square layout. I downloaded each set after I created it. Here are the steps.

The initial prompt is for the brand name, which can be 4-40 characters. (I don’t see how a 40-char name would fit in a Zarla website layout. Maybe it fits on merchandise?)

The site immediately showed example logos (square) with different combinations of colors and icons. Slogan is optional and icons can be changed readily. I just picked one and went into “Customize icons, colors, text…”.

Background: I set the background to transparent (chose not to show background).

Colors: I initially chose the same brown that I configured into my Substack newsletter settings (“Peru”), the blue from agile Teams, and the green from 6 ‘P’s in AI pods.

Icon: you can put in keywords to search for options, and you can choose one or two colors for it. The color selections are automatically applied to the icons in the search results, which is nice. I found icons that I liked and chose 3 for generating logo sets - a magnifying glass with computer traces, a “lightbulb - pencil”, and some mountains.

Name and Slogan texts: Font choices are quite limited - about 8 choices for each. The name font choices are bold. The slogan font choices are not. Then I played with different combinations of text sizes and margins. This was a bit awkward, because changing the size or spacing of one changed how the other fit, and the name and slogan are on different tabs. But I was eventually able to get something I was ok with.

Note: there is only one download set per “logo” (URL). If you change the logo settings, you can’t go back and download the older version of the files. The only way I see around this is to “Create a new logo” as a second file set with a new unique URL. Which way is more work will depend on how many times you iterate.

One way to avoid the double work of two layouts or two logos would be to use the SVG file from the wide layout, crop out the icon (on the left), and enlarge it to use as the Substack profile picture. Since it’s SVG, the quality of the result won’t be degraded by resizing.

Importance of Layout

One quibble I have with Zarla Logo Maker is how you choose and use a layout. If you choose a new layout, the size, margin, and spacing settings you already configured will be reset 🙁. This isn’t obvious at first. Layout should really be the first thing a user is prompted to choose (select it on the ‘new logo’ page or put it at the top of the menu).

For example, here are the 3 layout options offered after I chose the ‘lightbulb pencil’ icon from the Ideas:

1. icon (initially small) on top of 2 text lines (wide),

2. large icon on top of 2 text lines (square), and

3. small icon to the left of 2 text lines (wide)

At first I thought I could generate a square logo (choice 2) for use as a profile picture, and a wide banner for my wordmark and as an email header (choice 3) within one “logo”. It doesn’t work that way.

The free social media site image sets that can be downloaded include square profile images as well as the ‘hero’ banners. However, inside the set, all images share the same wide or square layout of icon, name, and slogan.

Empty padding is applied to make the various social media image sizes. That’s a time saver if the required aspect ratios are similar to the layout. The images don’t work as well when they’re not.

Wide Layout

For instance, with wide layout 3 and icon enlarged on the left, the images are:

Here, the FB Profile Picture has very big empty margins at top and bottom, and the slogan is unreadably small. Even the icon is small within the square. Why would anyone want to use this choice 3 wide layout for their profile image?

The choice 3 wide layout works better for the FB Cover Photo. It has lots of white space on all sides. The white space at top and bottom does allow cropping to fit the flatter aspect ratio of a Substack wordmark. The space on left and right is wasted, though. I want to fill my wordmark space with larger text to make it as readable as possible.

Square Layout

When I changed the layout to square (choice 2), I had to redo much of the logo design. The colors, texts, background, and icon I selected were all kept, which helped. The positioning and size adjustments for the elements are very layout-dependent and needed to be reconfigured. Making the icon as big as possible made both texts small.

Here are the counterpart FB images in the square layout. The icon size was maximized and the texts are small. In the FB profile picture, at least the icon can now be seen easily. However, the FB cover photo image wastes a lot of space on the left and right - not how many users would likely want to use the banner area. And this definitely wouldn’t work well for a flattened Substack wordmark.

What I Got (for FREE)

For the examples in this section, I used a light yellow background with tan and blue for brand colors. This solid background shows the edges of the images and how transparent backgrounds are handled.

5000x5000 PNG logo files and SVGs (scalable vector graphics) are free to download. 5000x5000 is more than enough for most online purposes. The SVGs allow scaling up even further if needed for higher resolutions.

It was a nice surprise to find that many properly-sized social media images were prebuilt and part of the free download. They include BigCommerce, Etsy, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Quickbooks, Twitter, and YouTube. (They don’t support Substack wordmark sizes or other brand image sizes - yet 😊.) This can save cropping and editing time if you use multiple social media sites.

Zarla’s download kit for PNG and SVG includes 6 color combinations.

1. Colorful logo on the chosen background (which may be transparent).

2. Black icon and text on white.

3. White icon and text on black.

4. Colorful logo on transparent background.

5. Black icon and text on transparent.

6. White icon and text on transparent.

Here’s what the download page showed under “Free Logo Files”. (When a transparent background is used, the first files in the two rows are identical.)

Here’s an example of the 6 downloadable logo files with the square layout on dark gray background, tan lightbulb pencil icon, blue name, and green slogan.

The green text didn’t show up well on the dark gray. I had to choose an even lighter green than 6P (#84B844) just to get it to show up on the dark background, and even then, I wasn’t happy with it. The text was tiny and low-contrast.

My interest, for Substack, is to have transparent background for my logo, so this wasn’t important. But this experiment reinforced in my mind that text on the square layout for a profile picture didn’t make sense for me.

For most social media sites, only logo files with your selected background can be downloaded. If you choose a solid color background, transparent versions of the properly-sized images are not available.

For a few sites, the logo is provided on both solid and transparent backgrounds.

The download set also includes business card templates (which I ignored), a compact email signature image (transparent), Android & Apple screens (solid), 2 watermark images (transparent), and a 32x32 favicon. In the browser, the favicon background was not shown, but the downloaded icon did have the solid light yellow background.

The download set thoughtfully includes a “brand guide” that captures the exact color settings and fonts used in creating these images. It isn’t a downloadable file, but it can be printed to PDF or screen-shotted.

This brand guide is useful for compatibility. It doesn’t completely capture everything one would need to reproduce the logo, though. The “brand” name in this case is my name, and that is in the title. But the text of the “slogan” (in this example, “Agile Analytics and Beyond”) is not shown in the brand guide. It also doesn’t show the many layout parameters which tweak the positions and spacings of the logo elements.

What I Used

After these experiments, I chose to use just the large icon for my Substack profile picture. (I cut out the unreadable name and slogan texts from the square layout. They can also be hidden in the Zarla Logo Maker editor.)

For now, I used the square layout as is, with the text, for the cover image on the Welcome page.

For the newsletter banner wordmark, I used a wide layout and got this.

Then I rearranged the wordmark elements a bit. I put the icon in the middle and maximized the text sizes, using Irfanview and Paint. I added these files to the settings for karensmiley.substack.com on July 9.

Overall, I’m pretty happy with the logo variations I was able to create in a few hours with Zarla Logo Maker. I wish I had more control over text sizing, positioning, and padding. And I wish the ‘lightbulb pencil’ icon was thicker and could support a second color. (Most of the icons in Zarla are much bolder, and two-color; this one’s an odd exception.) If I keep using that icon, I might try to edit it later to make the lines thicker and recolor it a bit.

Zarla had some quirks, as well as some nice features that showed thought about how people would use the tool. One quirk was that the texts for the name and slogan were sometimes converted to all caps whenever a new layout was selected. On the plus side, having distinct and descriptive default names for the downloadable files was great. (There is a minor bug in the default name for one logo file. I notified the company.) It would be a good time-saver to have an optional one-click download that generates a ZIP file. :)

UPDATE: While finishing this article, I found a ‘pencil rocket’ icon in a Zarla search. It somehow reminded me of the Buzz Lightyear slogan “to infinity and beyond”, which fits my newsletter. And it’s much easier to see in 256x256 size than the ‘lightbulb pencil’ icon. So I used it!

As I did with the ‘lightbulb pencil’ icon, I cropped texts off the square logo. Then I changed the rocket ‘flames’ to blue, and rotated the icon 45 degrees to fill the square space better. For the wordmark, I enlarged the texts and merged in the rotated ‘pencil rocket’. I added these files to my Substack branding on July 10 😊.

Bottom line: Zarla Logo Maker saved me time and gave me ideas, and I ended up with something better than I had before (in my non-artistic opinion, anyway). That counts as a success in my book for this week.

Leave a comment

What’s Next?

Could I have done this design in one of my free image editors, with a free-for-commercial-use icon? In hindsight: sure. Full control over a wide selection of fonts would be a plus, and being able to choose any icon would be good. That might be my next step. OR I might keep the logo as is until I can afford to pay a real graphic designer for my newsletter and book branding.

For now, I wanted to knock out some new and improved branding quickly and affordably, and get back to writing. Zarla Logo Maker helped me do that. It’s now on my ‘ethical shoestring’ list for logo design.

Like all of my new posts, this one is public and FREE! I invite you to share it with anyone else who may be looking for a free logo design tool:

Share

References

• I’m still operating on a shoestring as a new full-time writer. As a reader, I appreciate being able to read content for free. I’d like to return the favors.

• I know times are tough for many people (even in the AI and software space I live in and write about). People who were laid off & are job-hunting have enough financial and other stress. I don’t want to add to it by paywalling any of my content that might help them learn and land their next role.

• Since Stripe (Substack’s payment processor) doesn’t handle payments in all countries, paywalling could mean some folks worldwide would be left out.

At the same time, accepting payments would put me in a better position to improve my newsletters for you. Examples:

• paying artists for work that enhances my posts,

• buying licenses for ethical AI tools that save time or produce better work, or

• subscribing to other writers for technical insights and advice. 🙂

Some articles about “succeeding on Substack” suggest paywalling the audio voiceovers or comments. In the interests of accessibility and community, I would rather not paywall either of these features.

Other advisors suggest limiting early access to newly published posts to paid subscribers, and removing the paywalls days or weeks later. I don’t feel right about delaying free subscribers from fast-breaking news in the world of AI and technology, though.

What to do?

Solution

I’ve come up with a two-part solution that I think meets all of my requirements above.

Part 1. One-Time Donations

I’ve now set up “buy me a tea” for one-time, spontaneous donations. This link will go at the bottom of all future posts I author. Check out the page and let me know what you think! (Thanks to for the encouragement 😊)

Buy Me A Tea

2025-01-15 update: For those who use Ko-fi.com, I’ve now set up an account there as well. (BuyMeACoffee.com charges commission on donations. Ko-fi.com doesn’t. So Ko-Fi is the ideal way to maximize the value of your donation to me!)

Part 2. Voluntary Subscriptions

Following ’s inspirational example, I now accept voluntary “donations” for my newsletters via Substack subscriptions.

• All new newsletter posts authored only by me will continue to be FREE to read, the minute they are published, with no delays. (Older archives may eventually be paywalled - we’re talking months down the road, though.)

• No matter what ‘tier’ of subscription you choose (free, monthly, yearly, founding), you’ll be able to comment on all of my new articles.

• If I add voiceover, you’ll be able to listen to it without a paywall. (Read-aloud is now available in the Substack app for all posts without voiceover.)

So any monthly or yearly donations are truly voluntary. I second the 3 promises Jurgen stated so well in his announcement:

Looking Forward

I’m excited to announce this and I hope it works well for you, regardless of what options you choose now or in the future. I’ll note 3 caveats to this donation policy:

1. If the comments on my posts start getting flooded with spam or disrespectful content, I might have to restrict comments to paid subscribers only. This would be to protect your mental health and time, as well as mine.

2. I’ll have to reconsider keeping my posts open to all if I start getting harassed or stalked or doxxed. It happens to way too many women and marginalized people in tech and on social media. I’m not expecting to ever become famous enough to attract that kind of unwanted attention, though.

3. I won’t rule out possibly making some bonus resources, data files, book PDFs, or special chat threads or calls available only to ‘paid subscribers’ or ‘founding subscribers’ in future. No promises, though.

If this donation policy ever changes, I’ll offer complimentary subscriptions on request for any person who needs one, no questions asked (seems to be common Substack practice). Fair enough?

OK, let’s all get back to enjoying some good reading and writing 😊 Thank you so much for being part of this community and supporting my work!

Subscribe now to Karen Smiley

Donation Links

However, creating audio voiceovers can be challenging for writers.

If you’re already a follower, you know that I’ve been looking into AI-based and non-AI based options for adding audio voiceovers to my posts. (My recent articles on this topic are linked in the endnotes.1)

But what if text-to-speech capabilities were automatic and free in Substack?

Thanks to a Note reply by on Friday, I discovered that Substack might already have this exact feature!

✅The Good News

I did some searching on Friday and found a link which confirmed2 that Substack does have an automatic text-to-speech (TTS) feature. 😮 And I found two posts, one dating to June 2022 and one from April 2024, which explain the supported listening features.3

❌The Bad News

Unfortunately, according to the Substack chat support app (transcript in Appendix), there are 4 key limitations on the feature:

1. TTS is supposedly enabled on “most” publications to be “automatically available” - but not for all publications.

2. Writers cannot configure or control whether automatic TTS is enabled for their publications.

3. The criteria for rollout of TTS aren’t public, and there is no timeframe for it being enabled for all.

4. Automatic TTS is an app-only feature (not available on website).

The only way to know if a publication has TTS enabled is to look for a PLAY icon on one of its posts. (Audio voiceover manually added by the writer will override automatic TTS.)

Although it’s been nearly 2 years since the rollout of the feature was announced, it looks like automatic TTS has not been enabled on any of my new publications (all created in 2024)🙁

❓ For writers here: Does YOUR publication have automated TTS enabled?

❓ For readers here: Do any publications YOU subscribe to have automated TTS enabled?

Alternatives

The chatbot politely suggested that I could manually add voiceovers to my posts. I’m already experimenting with that, and it’s certainly different than auto-TTS from a personal touch perspective.

However, not all writers have access to (or can afford) good quality recording equipment, a quiet & non-echoing room to record without interruption, etc. And it takes time, work, and practice to get a good quality voiceover recording without ums, ahs, coughs, background noises, etc.

This is one reason I’ve been looking into AI-based voice cloning tools - hoping they will minimize the effort required to generate audio recordings, at minimal cost. But none of those tools are free for reasonable volumes (minutes of recording per month).

Wouldn’t it be amazing if all of us didn’t have to shell out that money, invest that time to make audio recordings, and become or hire audio engineers (or editing tools) to achieve good-enough quality to benefit our readers & listeners?

What’s Next?

1. I found a link to a “beta signup form” for automatic TTS enablement in the June 2022 article. I’ve now submitted my publication URLs, and will let you all know what I hear. (If you sign up too, let us know if you get in!)

Leave a comment

2. In the meantime, I’m continuing my experiments with manual recordings and AI-based generation of audio voiceovers - results to be reported in future articles in .

3. I’ve shared below the links I’ve collected on podcasting and adding audio voiceovers, in case they are useful to others who are also just getting started.4

APPENDIX: Transcript of my May 10, 2024 Substack support chat on automatic TTS

Me: I saw "If text-to-speech is available on your publication, a voiceover in the post will override the TTS." on a Support page. How do I enable text-to-speech on one of my publications?

SS: Hey Karen!

Text-to-speech (TTS) is a feature that's automatically available on most Substack publications, but not all. If you don't see this option on your publication, it might be enabled at a later time as it's not something that can be manually turned on by the author.

If you're looking to add a personal touch, you can add a voiceover to your posts instead. This will override the TTS feature where available. Would you like a quick rundown on how to add a voiceover?

Me: No, I already did a few voiceovers today. I'm looking for the automatic TTS feature. Where would I see if it's enabled on mine? Why is it not available on all?

SS: Got it, Karen. If text-to-speech is available on your publication, you would typically see a play icon on your posts in the Substack app. This is where readers can tap to listen to your posts using the TTS feature.

As for why it's not available on all publications, it's a feature that's being rolled out gradually. It may become available to your publication automatically in the future, but there isn't a manual setting for it at the moment. Keep an eye out for updates, as we're always working on expanding our features.

If you need any more info or assistance, feel free to ask!

Me: is the TTS feature only available in the Substack app, not on the website?

SS: Yes, that's correct! The text-to-speech feature is currently only available in the Substack app. It's not an option on the website. So, if your readers want to listen to your posts, they'll need to use the app on their mobile devices. (read more)

Me: Is TTS planned to be added to the website?

SS: As of now, there's no specific information available about whether text-to-speech will be added to the website in the future. We're always working on improving and adding new features, so it's possible that this could change. If you'd like, I can log this as a feature request for our team to consider! Would that be helpful for you?

Me: Yes, please do

SS: Great, I've logged your request for text-to-speech functionality on the website for our team to consider. We appreciate your input as it helps us improve Substack. If there's anything else you need help with, just let me know!

Me: When will TTS be available on ALL publications and not just "most"?

SS: Currently, there isn't a specific timeline for when text-to-speech will be available on all publications. It's being rolled out gradually, and availability may increase over time. We understand that having TTS on all publications would be beneficial, and we're working towards improving the feature's reach. Keep an eye on updates from us, as we'll share news when more publications have access to TTS. If you have any other questions or need further assistance, feel free to ask!

Me: Saying "availability MAY increase over time" implies that it might not increase over time. Are there criteria for which publications get TTS, e.g. a minimum number of posts?

SS: I apologize for any confusion. The criteria for enabling text-to-speech on publications have not been explicitly detailed, so I can't provide specific requirements such as a minimum number of posts. It seems to be a feature that's rolled out at our discretion and may be influenced by various factors that aren't publicly disclosed.

If you're concerned about the availability of TTS for your publications, I can certainly pass along your interest to our team. It's feedback like yours that helps us prioritize what features to develop and expand. If there's anything else I can assist you with, just let me know!

Me: Yes, please pass along that it would be very desirable for accessibility to have TTS on all publications, not just "most", and to have it in the website as well as the app. Thank you.

SS: Absolutely, Karen. Your feedback about the importance of text-to-speech for accessibility on all publications and on the website has been noted. We truly value your input as it helps us prioritize features that enhance the experience for all users. Thank you for bringing this to our attention. If you have any more suggestions or need further assistance, just reach out!

1

6 P's in AI Pods

Say what? Adding audio voiceovers with AI, ethically

Thinking of adding audio voiceovers to your Substack posts? Me too! Wondering if generative AI tools can help you with your audio voiceovers? Me too! This article summarizes what I’ve learned in the past week about 3 AI-based voice cloning tools, my planned next steps for evaluating them, and how you can participate…

Read more

2 years ago · 1 like · 1 comment · Karen Smiley

6 P's in AI Pods

AI Ventriloquism: Send in the clones

While doing my diligence on the broad landscape of genAI-based tools for our Part 3 article, I came across a whole bunch of irresponsible voice cloning tools. Here’s a summary of what I found, with recommendations for ethical ways to meet voice cloning needs…

Read more

2 years ago · 1 like · 2 comments · Karen Smiley

Substack publication writing = desktop only

One of my few peeves so far with Substack is that the mobile apps unexpectedly don’t support writing new posts for publications. How can the mobile app for a writer-centric platform not support the actual writing?!

It’s admittedly pretty easy on Substack to restack or comment on something someone else has already published. And I’m doing that.

But I (and probably most people) read and get ideas via email or on many other platforms too, all of which I read on my mobile. It would be so natural and convenient to ‘send to Substack’ a link or some text, to create a draft post I can come back to later, to finish writing. But the app can’t do that - yet. 😕

Newsletter writing would be so much easier if the mobile app directly supported creating new posts: 

• Stuck in a waiting room, or pickup or checkout line? Use that time to write “what’s on your mind?” (Substack’s desktop writing prompt) in your app. 

• Wake up with an inspiration for a fresh new newsletter article? Grab your phone and jot the idea down in a Substack draft before the morning bustle knocks it out of your head. 

• Participating in NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month)? My cousin Sarah (a busy teacher) does, and her writing time is scarce; I’m sure she would love being able to capture ideas for her book via her phone whenever she gets a few minutes during her day.

  • Substack might even be an ideal place for NaNoWriMo participants to share drafts and get feedback = these posts and these publications indicate interest (maybe Substack should consider sponsoring NaNoWriMo …)

I’ve seen Substack writers recommend, and talk about, committing to try to write for 15 minutes every day to build their writing muscle and habit. The mobile writing feature would really reduce the friction and overhead of doing that.

A Workaround

One good list of 10 free recommended tools actually advised using MS Word for a running log of all posts. Since I want to write (drafts at least) from my mobile device, and I don’t have a corporate Office 365 subscription any more, I’ll be using Google Docs. 

On the plus side, I’m already connected on Google Docs with all of my selected book/article collaborators, so we’ll be able to collaborate on draft posts in a Gdoc before publishing them to our collaborative newsletters. 

I suppose another workaround would be to try to force my phone browser to give me the desktop site - I’m not optimistic that it will work well, but will give it a try too.

Still, if Substack’s mobile developers can at least let us create and edit draft posts in the app (if not publish them), that would be great.

In the meantime, do you know of any other workarounds you can recommend?

Reading vs Writing

Aside from this frustration with writing on Substack, I’m mostly happy with the reading UX (no embedded ads!) and I am finding good material to read, including Substacks on writing and Substacks on using Substack. The two I’ve found most valuable so far are and - check them out!

Next up: how and why I selected Substack for 2024 writing and moved off Wordpress