Seed Pods, Featured Posts, and Launch News, oh my!
Updates from your friendly neighborhood SmallStack
Are you feeling a little lost in the overwhelming big of Substack? Welcome to SmallStack, where smaller publications rock! SmallStack is like a trip to your local farmer’s market. We cultivate great content from folks you might not find elsewhere. Substack creators with fewer than 1,000 subscribers are eligible to be listed in the SmallStack Library. Those with fewer than 500 subscribers are given priority in this space.
A Wonderful Partnership
We really enjoyed hosting Claire Venus and Russell Nohelty for our mid-August SmallTalk discussion. Our community got to ask important questions, and Russell and Claire gave some insightful responses. If you didn’t have the opportunity to participate, you can read through the SmallTalk thread at the link below, or you can see the highlights gathered neatly in our recent post!
Claire recently interviewed Robin Taylor for some personal insight into our origins and shared that with her community so that they could learn about SmallStack, how it began, and what these first few months of growth have felt like. We’ll be reposting that interview with the SmallStack audience later this week. You can head over to Sparkle on Substack to get a jump start.
T minus four weeks until Launch Week!
With only four weeks left until our big launch of the SmallStack Library, papers are flying, data is loading, and our Editing Team is furiously dotting i’s and crossing t’s. We are gearing up to show you all the cool ways you can use our Library. If you’d like to support this kind of work, subscribe! Free subscribers help expand our amazing community and spread the word about SmallStack’s mission to uplift smaller voices. Paid subscribers kick it up a notch and provide valuable dollars to support the technical features that make our Team function.
Seed Pods 🫛
Earlier this month, we announced Seed Pods as part of our plan to promote the SmallStack Library. Refresher: a Seed Pod is a group of people who agree to publish articles around a common theme and lift each other up through cross-promotion. Our original plan was to limit our first Seed Pod to SmallStack volunteers, but then we thought: wouldn’t it be way more fun if we opened it up to everyone?
Yes, yes it would. Does joining our Seed Pod sound as exciting to you as it does to us? Here’s everything you need to know:
The first Seed Pod will officially run Sept 2–22. We’ll announce via Notes when it opens (subscribers will also get an email).
The Seed Pod theme is libraries. If you have something fun to write, make, draw, or create that’s even tangentially library-related, we want you in the pod!
The Seed Pod will have a dedicated thread here on SmallStack that will stay open for the duration of the pod. You will use this thread to link to your post about libraries and find other pod members’ posts to like, comment, and restack. We’ll lift each other up together!
There will be a badge — and a blurb! — that you can add to your post to indicate that you’re part of the Seed Pod. We’ll share both when we open the Seed Pod thread, along with instructions on how to use them and some general participation guidelines.
The Seed Pod is open to everyone. To join, all you have to do is follow the Seed Pod thread when it opens on Sept 2, share your and others’ posts, and add the aforementioned blurb and badge to your Seed Pod post.
Featured Posts
During Launch Week, September 23 through 29, we will unveil Featured Posts!
At the very beginning, SmallStack was created with the vision of a Library of listings and a regular series of Featured Posts from that Library to showcase the creativity, wisdom, ingenuity, sincerity, and humor that we can find on its shelves. Our Library hosts publications covering nearly every imaginable subject, but the challenge of being small is that it’s tough for readers to find our great work.
We asked ourselves how this problem is solved in places like cool bookstores and independent shops, and it wasn’t hard to visualize those helpful hand-written tags under mysterious wine and whiskey bottles or tucked into stacks of new books. Staff picks are a great way to learn more about something while you’re perusing the shelves. And virtual shelves can be really tough to navigate! And while we’re at it, a little taste often helps the palette warm up to new ideas!
Featured Posts are our version of staff picks with a lovely tasting to bring it all together. One of our Team members will introduce you to a publication you might not have seen, tell you why they think that publication is interesting, and then include a great post by that creator. You’ll have the option to read more from that publication and even subscribe directly from our site.
SmallStack will be hosting weekly Featured Posts, and one of the posts we pick could be yours! You might have already written something we’ve fallen in love with. When one of our Team members selects your post, you’ll be notified by email that we’re interested in publishing your work. You retain authorship and get to byline here on SmallStack, which also means you’ll see how the community engages and interacts with your post. To celebrate, we’ll also give Featured Post creators an exclusive SmallStack Featured Post badge1 to proudly display on their site.
Launch Week will showcase seven unique Featured Posts, one for each day of the week! After that we’ll pick up our weekly schedule for Featured Posts.
ab exiguis initiis proficisci
"to start from small beginnings"
The Robins et al.
We’ll be revealing this in the coming weeks!!
I love what you're doing. I'm immediately thinking of a story I can set in a library for the seed pod!
Ooo, this all sounds great! Love the idea of featured posts working as “staff picks” especially. To have a surprise email by you guys telling us we’d been chosen to be highlighted would be so fun!