Grow Your Readership with the Slept-on Social Media Site that Every Writer SHOULD be Using

Writer’s Guide — how to build a meaningful presence on Reddit that is valuable for both you, and your readers

Food Truck Fiasco

A once popular Taco Truck almost went out of business because its owner jealously guarded a great location from his competitors.

Mo was one of a dozen operators who regularly set up around the old fountain in a small city park, surrounded by office buildings. Lunch hour was always packed. Business boomed.

Time passed, other food trucks changed hands or moved on, and Mo found himself sharing the park with fewer competitors.

New operators came to him often for advice, asking him where the best places were to set up. He decided to keep his spot in the park a secret, enjoying the lion’s share of customers.

But it didn’t last.

Not everyone wanted Tacos. Mo couldn’t serve everyone, and hungry shoppers started looking elsewhere on their lunch breaks.

Foot traffic plummeted.

Mo was left scrambling to find new customers—almost losing his family business in the process.

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This entirely fictitious example I created to make my point, illustrates the current state of Reddit.

There’s a growing demand vacuum for quality stories, left behind by an egress of whale writers. Readers are hungry for content, but increasingly leave unsatiated.

My goal in writing this piece is three pronged:

• Help my fellow writers by enabling them to effectively grow their audience through Reddit

• Help my readers by bringing a greater variety of good stories into our community

• Help myself by propping up the communities where I find new readers

This post is ultimately a guide written for my fellow writers. So if you’re a non-writing reader, you’ll probably be bored by this information.

To the writers: Reddit is absolutely worth your time. The unique mechanics of the site make it possible to spread your work far and wide without any followers to start with.

Basics

I’m assuming you know nothing about Reddit, and will first go over the core mechanics you need to understand to succeed.

• Structure

• Algorithm

• Da Rules (Self-promo, vote rigging)

If you understand these things already, skip to the next section—“Setting Up.”

The Structure

Reddit is broken into smaller communities, usually built off of interests, hobbies, or places. These are called subreddits, and there are tons of them dedicated to sharing different genres of fiction stories. Each have different rules surrounding self promotion.

Different communities have different account age, and Karma requirements to post.

Karma is a kind of currency you gain from making popular posts and comments, and lose from unpopular ones.

The Algorithm

Reddit works off upvotes and engagement, designed to move fresh meat to the front of the counter. The actual specifics are proprietary, but based on my observations, these are the key factors:

• Recency — fresh meat goes toward the front of the counter

• Upvotes — absolutely crucial in snowballing. As time passes, you will need an exponentially increasing number of upvotes to hold the top spot. An hour old +10 post will easily overtake a 24 hour old +50 post. But something that’s +1k at the day-old mark will probably remain king of the hill. More on this under “muster.”

• Shares — if a lot of people who upvote your post, also send it to other people, I’ve noticed the site will assume it has broader interest beyond the community you’ve chosen to share it in. More on this later.

Da Rules

Reddit has a few overarching rules you should familiarize yourself with. Vote manipulation¹ for example, is a big no-no.

Each community then has its own code of conduct, usually available in a side-bar if you’re viewing it on desktop. Pay close attention to what kind of content is allowed, and whether self promotion is permitted.

Horror sub ShortScaryStories, for example, allows you to promote your own subreddit (more on this in the “muster” section,) or social media as a comment beneath the post — no off-site links.

Conversely, NoSleep allows authors to use “discrete links” to promote outside sites, so long as the page readers land on doesn’t solicit payment or ask for personal information. Comments must be “in character,” where you pretend the story is a real experience that happened to you.

Mix up your rules, your stuff will be taken down.

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Setting Up

The Golden Rule is that your posts should never feel extractionary; you shouldn’t be flying by these communities and bombarding them with post links. You need to provide native, on-platform value to these people. All other things stem from this.

Here’s what we’re going over:

• Your account

• Your community

• Finding Your Place

Notice we’re getting you established before we start promoting or posting. It’s critical to set up your subscriber pipeline first, lest ye risk losing out on readers.

Your Account

Make a new profile. This will be completely devoted to your work as a writer. Reddit makes it very easy to track your post history across communities. If you’re politically active — or into some weird shit — it’s very easy to alienate or repulse potential readers.

Write a catchy bio. You can add links to your Substack, and active socials. Here’s mine.

Notice the follower counter. Similar idea to X or Instagram. If someone follows you, they’ll start seeing all your posts in their feed. That’s why it’s good to use a dedicated brand account.

Your Community

Make a subreddit. I recommend doing this on desktop so that you can access the full suite of customization features.

Here’s mine.

If you scroll, you’ll notice I have a custom icon, masthead, and “flair” to clearly mark my posts as one of the following:

• Stories — links to my work.

• Announcements — community updates about upcoming projects, and CTAs encouraging people to upgrade to paid subscriptions.

• Narrations — videos of officially endorsed narrations of my work. I’ll talk more about narrations, narrators, and collaborators in a bit.

I also sometimes share random stuff: concept sketches, poetry, etc.. I want readers to feel like there’s a real reason to join. Ultimately, it’s a community, not a click farm. You’ll be surprised by how many people actually engage and hang out there.

Set up yours in a way that suits your style. Just don’t forget these two make-or-break steps:

1. Modify settings to let users comment, but not post.

2. Enable, and write a compelling welcome message². You can do that via mod tools > settings on desktop. This message is a great opportunity to make a quick sales pitch to incoming members. Mine includes links to a strong sample story, my story archive, and the paid upgrade page — all on Substack.

If I have a particularly positive interaction with a reader on one of my stories, I invite them to join “The Noble.” Only after they’ve said yes, do they get the follow-up message.

The whole system is designed to make sure readers don’t feel like you’re a cold-call salesman. You’re an authentic author, building relationships with your audience.

Finding Your Place

With your onboarding system in place, it’s time to start looking for communities that will let you share your work.

Start with the r/Writing subreddit. This thread here is a good jumping off point.

Research time.

1. Pick your community that you think suits your genre

2. Go to that community and tap on “feed options.” Switch to “Top,” then “All time.” These are the best of the best. Read a few of these, and pay attention to what works, and what doesn’t. That goes for titles as much as content!

   

3. Switch from “all time” to “month.” This will give you posts that have done well recently. Sometimes community rules, styles, and tastes change. Returning to the NoSleep example: some of its top-rated stories ever wouldn’t even be allowed under current guidelines.

4. After reading some of these stories, try to find a prolific author whose name you see more than once.

5. If you click on their profile, then post history, you should be able to see more of their work, and the communities they post it in. This lets us quickly develop a robust list of places to share.

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Sharing is Caring

By this point I’m assuming you’ve done your homework, identifying a few good communities. Boil that list down to 3. Familiarize yourself with the rules, styles, and active times. When you’re first starting out, you’ll need to depend on a few little tricks while your fans find you:

• Timing

• Teasing

• Trust-building

Drop it Like it’s Hot (Timing)

Subs let you see how many users are online in a community at any given moment (see below.)

There’s some conflicting wisdom on the best time too share. Sometimes a ton of readers are online—but they may already be engaged with an extremely popular post.

As a general rule, I try to share when there isn’t a powerhouse post already on the board, but there are still lots of users online.

On the right size subreddit, this should be enough to land you on the “hot” page, where a well-crafted post title becomes tough to ignore.

Get More Readers with this One Weird Trick (Teasing)

You need BATSs, or bomb ass titles to sell your stories. The very first sentence should also be a banger. Here’s the top ranking Odd_Directions story of all time, written by yours truely.

1.6k upvotes. 1.1k shares. 300,000 views, in a community that — at the time — had 8,000 members, with 5–10 online at its busiest.

Some of my readers might recognize this one by its literary title: “Settlement Offer.”

This bleeds into my next bullet point:

Setup/Payoff (Trust-Building)

Literary titles are for readers who already trust your ability to deliver a complete, compelling story. Without trust, your title is the only thing separating your work from thousands of other yahoos slinging stories online; many of whom may not even know how to string together a coherent sentence.

BATs is a silly acronym I came up with, because I don’t want you confusing a good hook with clickbait.

Clickbait is deceptive.

BATs are not. You should be delivering on the promise of your headline. In the example above, I tell the story of an adulterous man who literally loses years of his life to his ex wife in the divorce settlement. His debts are paid a few hours at a time, every night at 3AM.

Check it out here, if you’re curious:

Settlement Offer

Reader trust is built through this endless dance of setup/payoff. Titles play a big role here.

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Muster

As you start to amass an on-platform following and reputation, your fans will organically flock to your work, and help bring you closer to the extremely important milestone of 10 upvotes in the first hour.

Your job is making it easy for them to know when you’ve got a new story.

For this reason, I care less about how many users are active in the group I’m posting to, and more about how many of my own followers are online.³

10–15 viewers is what I look for, before sharing. Once you post in your desired community, you can share it to your own followers by clicking share > crosspost, then selecting your subreddit.

This will start slotting your story in your followers’ home page feeds.

Good, but not great.

Calm Down, Turing

When I say “bot,” you probably think of spammers crowding out the comment sections. On Reddit, they’re an important part of the culture. Some exist as silly community in-jokes.

Others serve legitimate roles maintaining the infrastructure and health of communities.

Investing sub “Wall Street Bets,” for example, faced a serious problem during the famous GameStop short squeeze (Apes Hodl, Diamond Hands, etc.) There was real concern hedge fund employees would infiltrate the community with misinformation, trying to trigger sell-offs. “Visual Mod” was deployed to auto-tag every post with a kind of credential sheet on its author, making any Johnny-come-lately easy to spot.

NoSleep has a bot that reminds you when the next installment in serial stories are published.

Other communities have similar update bots, essentially acting as push notifications for your writing.

These are among the most powerful tools you can use to quickly bring readers to a post or story.

I mentioned in my footnotes: you can also put an update bot sign up link in your community’s welcome message.

This is done by drafting a message, filling out the fields like this:

…then copying the link. I personally don’t do this, because I want the focus to be on Substack, not Reddit. But you do you.

Critical Mass

Typically, if your post hits +10 relatively quick, the following starts to happen:

• Sharing — readers decide to send the post to others

• Social Proof — if more than five readers are viewing a post at the same time, Reddit puts up a ticker letting you know just how many. This acts as a bit of a subtle signal that others are enthralled by the story, and you should be too

• Sub summoning — when posts hit certain upvote milestones in a given community, followers will start to get push notifications that look like this:

  

  …pulling in more readers.

• Feed Bleed — Reddit will start pushing a sufficiently popular post outside of its original community to readers with similar browsing habits.

Once you reach that critical mass, it can sit on the front page of a sub for days.

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Suffering from Success

Many of the communities for sharing writing are set up for on-platform consumption. That means you’ll be sharing the full body of your stories on Reddit, not a link to your Substack.

This, in turn, means other “creators” will have full access to your work, opening you up to an increased risk of piracy.

One of my most popular stories of all time was stolen by a TikToker, who turned it into a viral AI-narrated short series that garnered millions of views, and hundreds of thousands of likes and comments.

The Killer Cookbook

No recourse.

By the way—there is a huge market on YouTube and TikTok for narrated short stories. There are some legitimate creators who may approach you and ask to make videos of your work. Some even offer to pay.

It’s helpful if you have a kind of policy for narrations. Feel free to copy mine:

1. Must verbally and visually credit me as author

2. Must link to my Substack library in the video description, or a pinned comment

3. No use of AI voice

4. No translations

5. No Twitch or other livestream reads

You should also ask to see a narrator’s channel before saying yes. Cross check it in r/SleeplessWatchdogs, a community that tracks content plagiarism on the platform. They have a black list of shady content thieves.

The Internet is Forever

Aside from IP theft, you should also keep in mind that some subreddits forbid you from deleting your posts. This means if you ever decide to paywall that story, it’s still going to be available for free elsewhere.

You need to think of a way to offer readers something more on Substack, otherwise they’ll only consume your free stuff on Reddit.

My strategy for this is to write dedicated spin-off shorts of my popular Substack pieces, to publish on Reddit.

• “Settlement offer” is a quick version of “Restitution.”

• “Orphaned line” expands on “The Ideal Scenario.”

• “Turtle Tunnel” is a spin-off of “Nelson Nemo’s Koi Pond Conundrum.”

This also lets me offer readers something more, if they express an interest in your story.

You should be responding and meaningfully engaging with readers who comment on your writing. If they ask for more, give it to them.

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Parting Thoughts

The number one mistake writers make is treating Reddit like their personal post dumping ground. Your goal should not be extracting resources or gaming the system.

First and foremost, you’re a citizen of these little digital communities. Act like it. Engage with other writers, too; contribute to the conversation, and give back when you can.

Thanks so much for reading!

If you found this advice helpful, please share it! These communities thrive when visitors know they can consistently expect to find good writing. Gatekeeping this information will only choke out the content ecosystem.

1. Imagine you create 10 accounts, keep all of them logged in on your phone, then immediately dogpiling upvotes onto everything you post so that your content snowballs. Big no-no. Reddit can track your IP address, ban all associated accounts, and any new ones you create

2. More advanced users can put UpdateBot links in here. This is very good for Muster, but shifts your priority a bit more toward being a Redditor with a Substack, rather than a Substack writer who also shares a little on Reddit. That may not sound like a big distinction. But I’m of a mind that you want these people to feel like they’re missing out on a little something by not subscribing via Substack. I’ll touch on bot strategy later.

3. Some writers are such whales, the traffic flow to the subreddits they frequent follows their posting schedule. A while back, one popular Nosleep writer could bring hundreds of people online with his story alerts.