I said I’d be back with one of these. And here I am.
If you know me long enough, or well, exactly a month ago, you know I’ve been documenting my book journey. The things I learn as I write my book, my progress on Substack, and any other thing I’d like to toss into the void.
So, this is my second month on Substack wrapped. I’m bringing you my graphs, numbers, and probably more data than most people asked for. But if you’re here, you either like this kind of thing or you’re just humoring me. Either way, welcome!
Here are my numbers for July, 2026.
Table of contents
Author’s note ✍
As I write more and more on Substack, I’ve come across a wide range of writers. I’ve learned a lot from them, I’ve laughed at their comments, and I’m often surprised at their eccentricity.
Whenever I ask a question, people here are more willing to help rather than belittle, which is the kind of community I want to be part of.
My goal when I started Substack was to create community. The less important one, but a good metric, was to make it to 100 subscribers by the end of the year.
And while I didn’t achieve the last one by the end of July, the most important one is starting to take shape.
Thanks for being here .
Hope this article helps you on your journey in some way or is a nice read if you’re just curious.
Haven’t read the first month’s wrapped article?
No worries. I summarized it below like the considerate over-sharer I am. But if you want the full, graph-heavy, slightly unhinged version, it’s right here.
A recap from the first month (June, 2026)
Before we get into July data, let’s talk about June. I like to do these before and after because I can see the changes more clearly.
At the end of June, I was lucky enough that 41 amazing people were interested in what I had to write and in getting that straight to their emails.
The numbers were:
Subscribers: 41
Views: 889
Open rate: 42.86%
During that time I posted two articles:
Point of view in writing: the questions writers actually ask (and nobody seems to answer clearly)
How a strong narrative voice lets you get away with almost everything
And a number of 49 notes.
My goal was to post a note daily, so 30 of those notes were scheduled. The rest were things that I found interesting or wanted to share.
The plan for July 2026 from past month learnings:
Many experts recommend that you post three notes daily and articles twice weekly to grow quickly on Substack.
But that was just too much for me.
So, in July I decided I was going to do:
Two notes daily
One article weekly
All of this as a little experiment. Well, let’s see the results for July.
The numbers for month two (July, 2026)
At first sight you may think that I completed my goal of getting 100 subscribers by the end of July. But if you look at the highlight, I actually made it to 94 by July 31, 2026.
And while at this time of writing I achieved that less important goal, I wanted to be exact.
Here are my numbers by the end of July 2026.
Subscribers: 94 (up 129.3%)
Views: 1.44k (up 61.3%)
Open rate: 29.75% (down from last month)
I’m very happy with these numbers. Both my subscribers and views increased. And while my open rate went down from 42.86% to 29.75%, I’m not surprised.
As the number of subscribers in a newsletter increases the open rate will decrease. This is why my goal will always remain to have a community. Even if I make it to an unbelievable amount of 60k subscribers, I’ll be happy if even just the 1% enjoys reading my articles. Because that’s 600 people rooting for me.
The journey or “strategy” that I followed
During this month, I posted four articles and around 67 notes, which looking back at it feels like a lot. But it wasn’t as grueling as I thought it was going to be.
I just sat down every weekend and planned 14 notes of things that had been on my mind.
From those 67 notes, I planned 62. Two for each day of July and others were probably random thoughts or me restacking friends posts with a note.
I’m going to be honest though. What was grueling was creating one article weekly, writing my book, writing the short story for the Cozy Quill Fantasy Writing Contest (hosted by Tamsin G., check it out for future editions!), and dealing with life in general. So, unfortunately my book progress stalled in July.
But here’s what I did DO.
I posted my four articles for July weekly about things that I discovered as I wrote my book:
Plotter vs pantser: why I think they’re not exactly different (my hot take)
What “show, don’t tell” actually means and what writers get wrong about it
What makes a character likable and where does your story land on my likability matrix
Each one of these bad boys was out mostly on Saturdays at 6 am PT. And there was one that I had to post on Sunday because of time constraints.
For my notes, I started to post more about things that were… just true for me.
Post with nice pictures that I took while I was out.
Confessions.
Unpopular opinions.
And as nerve-wrecking as it was to post these unpopular opinions, people were very kind. Oh, there were disagreements. But no arguing, just people sharing their own opinions.
This all made me realize that people respond well to you just being yourself. To authenticity.
I know, I know. Not a groundbreaking discovery, but something I thought was important to highlight in this article.
So, what did all those notes and articles result in?
The results: more graphs on engagement, visitors, subscribers, and channels
The shape of my views graph this month is different from last month. This time I have peaks on different days of the month instead of just two.
And most of those peaks correspond to the days in which I posted an article.
My biggest peak was on July 25, which corresponds to the day I posted my article on What makes a character likable and where does your story land on my likability matrix.
I think I re-wrote that article twice, so I’m glad you all liked it!
Here are the engagement metrics on each article this month.
My “show, don’t tell” and my “what makes a character likable” articles led July at 20 likes each, even though they were the last ones I posted. They even surpassed the plotter vs pantser article in views (which was posted at the beginning of the month) in just a couple of days.
When I compare with June data, it seems like the “narrative voice” article still reigns supreme in my little corner of Substack at 29 likes and 37 comments.
The “point of view” article may have more views, but I attribute that to the fact that it’s the very first article I posted, so it has its seniority.
Some of my people found my articles from July and even went to the ones posted in June to give them some love. The pantser and plotter discussion was the least interesting article when it comes to likes, but there was some back and forth in commentary as it sits at 40 comments.
Where did visitors come from?
My visitor’s graph shows a slightly different story from views. While views are higher, past 80 or more on some peak days, my unique visitors are at around 15, 20, or the highest which is above 30 on a single day.
All of this means that my visitors checked out not one but multiple articles when they visited Narrative Baggage.
Do I feel flattered? Very
Most of my views were generated by people that kept visiting me, which is a big compliment. It may mean I gave my readers something valuable or at least interesting enough to pass the time.
The source of my visitors is very consistent with the fact that my only presence as an author is on Substack:
41.65% of my visitors still come organically through the Substack network. Either from the feed, someone restacking my work or mentioning me, or maybe you finding my articles in the wild.
32.94% come from people who already knew me and clicked on one of my links through email or went directly to my profile.
26.35% also knew me but they did the same as above through the app.
I had a few searches from Bing and Google.
And since we’re getting very nerdy, I double checked my Google Search Console to see how my articles are doing outside of Substack.
It seems like I’m ranking for a few queries in positions between 40 and 50. That’s not exactly great as we’d like to be in the top ten. But my publication is still too young, so this is good in my book.
What did my subscriber growth look like?
Last month, the highest number of subscribers I got in a day was four. In July, I’m happy to announce the best day eight people followed along in this journey.
Again this month, my community kept growing little by little instead of with dramatic spikes.
Most of my people came from Substack (90%), some others were already reading my articles or notes and decided to give me a chance, so they subscribed (11.6%), and the last one is just an unassigned bucket, I’m not sure about (3.33%).
All of this to say… It was a great month and I’m grateful for you being here. I learned a lot from this month alone and I’m excited for what’s next.
My initial thought was to make this a series until I reached the 100 subscribers mark. By the end of July I was at 94, so we still have one last article to go in August.
What’s next?
After a whole debate in which I invited the community to talk about the best days to post on Substack and some of your comments, I decided that I’m going to keep posting articles on Sunday moving forward.
This gives me a whole day to edit and refine before articles go out into your inboxes. Also, I’ll try and keep posting articles weekly (lets see where this leads me).
On Notes, some creators say it’s better to post three times a day. That still seems like a lot to me, so I’ll stick to twice a day, posting notes that are genuinely things I want to talk about and want your opinion on.
I’m also thinking about getting a Substack extension that gives me more information and data. Maybe I’ll have better graphs for you next month and more insights about notes specifically. It’s nice that I can go into each note and see their stats, as shown below.
But I’d like to have a dashboard with a summary of the notes that people most liked, instead of going into each one to see their performance.
Other than that, I’ll keep course. I’m picking back up writing my book, waiting impatiently for the results of the Cozy Quill Fantasy Contest, and looking forward to something I’ve been working on in the background that I’m hoping I can share soon.
I’ll update you with another one of these articles by then, here at Narrative Baggage.
And scene
If you made it this far, you’re probably one of those readers who 100% their book. So, thank you for bearing with me until the end :)
If you found this article helpful (either as a writer or a lurker), consider following along as I figure out how to actually write that book.
And if there’s a writing topic you’d like me to write about, drop it in the comments.
Was this post helpful? What have you learned in your writing journey and as you grow on Substack?
Take care and keep writing. ✍️
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Congratulations on gaining subscribers so quickly! This is a great monthly analysis.
This was a really cool read.