Small Stacks Deserve to Shine

an interview with Nan Tepper

Nan Tepper, a SmallStack community member and a really great friend of ours, recently offered her expertise to improve and redesign our wordmark and logo here on Substack. Have you noticed how fancy we look lately? That was all Nan!!

You might know Nan from her bestseller The Next Write Thing , but she also writes Style Your Stack, a true small stack still in its early growing stages.

In recognition of Nan’s hard work and community generosity, we asked her a few questions that we’re sharing with everyone today. That’s the spirit of SmallStack anyway, right? Uplifting small stacks! Please give Nan Tepper a very warm welcome.

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Tell us a little about yourself!

I’m a writer, first and foremost, but I’m also a web + graphic designer with more than a decade of experience. My favorite people to work with are writers. It’s my specialty.

I design logos, brands, and websites, and I’m good at it. Besides having tech and design skills, I spend a lot of time asking questions when I meet with potential clients. I dig deeper to learn about you and what your priorities are for your stack. My aim is to demystify the process of publishing on Substack, and to help you utilize the tools available to you. These tools allow you to do the thing you’re here to do: WRITE!

What inspired you to start writing on Substack?

I’ve been on the platform since mid-January 2024. When I was a kid, my dream was to become a writer. But I never really got started. My fear of failing was so immense that I opted out almost completely. I’ve lived a long life and have plenty of stories to share. I was in a relationship with a woman who is a published writer. She’d seen recordings of some of my story slam work, and said to me, “Nan, you’re a writer. You have to write.” We wrote together every morning for an hour for 2-3 months before I decided to try Substack.

A client/friend approached me and told me she wanted to start writing on Substack but didn’t want to set up her publication. She wanted me to do it for her and then teach her how to post. I told her I’d set up my stack first to learn the backend and see what tools were available. My intention was to learn so that when I was ready to build hers it wouldn’t cost her a fortune. Even with my background in tech and design it took me almost 2 days to figure out how things work on the platform. It’s not intuitive! Substack is really improving its offerings every day. It’s much better than when I came in 14 months ago. Love it.

You started The Next Write Thing with 25 subscribers. A year later, you’re a Substack bestseller. Tell us about that journey.

I came in with few subscribers, friends and family, mostly. I just hit 1600 subscribers on The Next Write Thing, and I have more than 140 paid subscribers. I started writing in the first place to share my recovery process in 12-Step work, and I wanted to share my “experience, strength, and hope” with people.

In 12-Step there’s an expression we use when we’re overwhelmed with life and the need to make choices. We do the next right thing. I found out recently that Carl Jung is the person who originated the phrase. He was an early proponent of 12-Step work (AA). The title came to me in a meeting one day, and I knew I had to do it. TNWT soon morphed into writing general memoir, about recovery from disordered eating and thinking, to sharing about mental health challenges throughout my life, my queer life, my dysfunctional family, and anything else I feel like exploring.

Coming from a place of generosity is how I grow my stack. I got involved in this community as soon as I joined Substack. I use Notes, read other people’s work, restack widely. I consistently cheer others on, share their work and sing their praises.

There is so much support in this little world we all play in. There’s a spirit of giving here that I’ve not witnessed anywhere else. We as writers do cheer each other on. I wrote a post about generosity to celebrate my one-year anniversary on Substack, with all my takeaways on what being generous means to me and how I’ve experienced other people’s kindnesses here. It’s truly been the best year of my life.

You have to participate to grow on this platform. I’ve watch SmallStack become a wonderful network for so many. Building community is what grows success and visibility. I don’t think there are tricks. Part of the reason I became a bestseller, I think, is because I love offering subscriptions at a discount throughout the year. Over the holidays I had a Pink Friday sale (after Thanksgiving, replacing Black Friday, because pink is my brand color). I did Small Substack Saturday, and so on. Being playful helps and knowing that growing here is a long game. I’m also okay knowing that I’m not going to get rich here. That’s never been my goal. I’m here to write. I don’t paywall anything. I trust that the paid subscribers will come. I ask for that support in every post and I also ask for donations.

I realized that I wanted to spend my days here, so I came up with the idea to pivot my design business, stop building websites and concentrate on assisting writers with branding help, and offer a design package and tech support for those who need it. And that’s the money I’m making, the living I’m earning while spending all my time in this happy place!

We’ve heard some famous Substackers say that “publication design isn’t all that important,” especially if you’re small, but you disagree. Tell us why.

Having a publication design is a visual representation of your mission as a writer, and a reflection of your personality. Things like wordmarks and logos are visual anchors—they bond a reader to a stack, even on a subconscious level. Substack is a newish platform and is pretty stripped down. It’s quite generic, and that’s nice in a way. But just as we want our words to represent us, a brand that reflects our uniqueness, our personalities, our offerings, with color, fonts, and images also conveys those qualities. If you have an opportunity to define yourself, to stand apart, wouldn’t you choose that, instead of blending in with the crowd in a more muted way? We deserve to shine. We exist in a culture that’s increasingly visual. And a culture that moves quickly. We rely on images to hold our attention and take us to the next click. It shouldn’t matter if you’re a big stack or a small one.

When I was in Sarah Fay’s cohort, she taught a section on design, but was of the opinion that you didn’t need a custom wordmark or logo. I disagreed with her, out loud in the middle of her workshop, and then she hired me to design assets for both of her stacks. One of the things I love best about Sarah is her willingness to change her mind and grow with the platform.

What, in your opinion, is the biggest design mistake people make on Substack?

For me, it’s not dealing properly with the design constraints of the wordmark. I know it’s puzzling for many. It’s unacceptable to me when I come to a stack that has a micro-wordmark because it’s been designed outside of the fixed ratio that Substack allows. It’s frustrating for sure, but because SS uses a fixed header size, we don’t have the design flexibility and freedom we’d like to design exactly what we envision.

I’m also dismayed when people use highly detailed images for what Substack refers to as a logo. What they call a logo should be called an icon, because it’s got to be as simple as possible to fill more than one role. It appears on the web as the icon on the far left of your site, and in the browser tab, and as the image that identifies your stack in the app. It would be great (and maybe someday it will happen) if Substack added the ability to add a real logo (for the app) and place to create a favicon (the icon that appears in a browser tab) and maybe another spot for a featured small headshot or other image in the left side of the header.

What other plans and goals do you have in the wings? What’s “the next write thing” for Nan Tepper, whether on or off Substack?

I launched a podcast in January, something I’ve never done before, called Real Life Stories from The Next Write Thing . Currently I’m recording my essays from the very beginning and publishing them every Saturday. I publish my weekly essay on Wednesdays, and record both old and new, but only the older essays get added to the podcast. That way, I have a whole year’s worth of back material as I move forward. I LOVE recording my stories. I’m a ham at heart (a kosher one) and I love performing my pieces. Listening to me tell it is a whole different experience than reading it. Style Your Stack keeps me very busy, and when I’m not recording and writing new essays I’m assembling and writing a memoir about my relationship with my dad. We both came out in the 1970s (at exactly the same time) and we had a very loving and sometimes terribly dysfunctional relationship. The working title is Fairy Dust.

In May I’ll be offering a 5 week masterclass on the ins and outs of creating a stack, covering the tech and the design elements and sharing my experience of what it takes to grow here. It’s mostly a Substack 101, a survey class for those starting out or for those who need support in where everything lives in the backend and how it all works together. Here’s a link for more info and to enroll. https://woodstockbookfest.com/online-workshops-from-bookfest-to-go-nan-tepper/

Thank you so much for this opportunity to share myself here!

xoNan

StyleYourStack: Less than 500 subscribers (so far):

The Next Write Thing: Just hit 1600 subscribers:

Nan Tepper Design: nantepperdesign.com

From the entire SmallStack Team, a huge THANK YOU to Nan Tepper for helping us look so darn pretty! You just never know who might be in your audience, and we feel tremendously lucky to have friends like Nan in ours.