SPAWN Office Hours #16
Pirate hours now! Get over here with your questions and support. Thursday 6pm-7pm BST and 7-8pm CET.
Welcome to SPAWN, Substack Pirate After Work Network. We’re here on Thursdays 6pm BST UK, 7pm CET. For those who are unable to join live, post a question out of hours and tick the box to have it on Notes so you get more chances for an answer.
If you’re here for the first time introduce yourself. Ideally, answer questions from others and engage with newcomers and veteran stackers.
This post reaches out to you on my 1 year Substack anniversary! A celebratory post to arrive in the next few days. Look out for it!
I’ll start us off with a few questions/tasks for today’s SPAWN:
1). Recommend one of your most recent posts and tell us why we should get there and read it.
2). Holiday destinations. What’s your summer plans?
3). How do you deal with the influx of emails from Substack in your inbox? What tips would you like to share especially if you subscribe to many stacks.
SPAWN is Office Hours and hang out with
and our lovely crew. We’ll talk all things Substack that we love or don’t understand. The floor is always open to your questions.Thursday 13 June
Vancouver PDT 10am -11am
Phoenix, Arizona MST 10am-11am
London BST 6pm-7pm
Paris CET 7pm-8pm
Athens EEST 8pm-10pm
New Delhi IST 10:30pm-11:30pm
Sydney AEST (14 June) 3am-4am
Fiji GMT+12 (14 June) 5am-6am
We are live for an hour and many stay for longer. Mostly, we chat about writing and Substacking; we celebrate each other’s successes and find new readers and subscribers in the process. Before we go on to this week’s SPAWN here’s what we did last week and make sure you check the comments as there are some useful resources in there:
SPAWN Office Hours #15
Time zones differ and our community is all over the world so naturally comments spill outside the live hour. You’re welcome to join pre or after hours. We have novel, short story, poetry, non-fiction and travel writers, podcasters, youtubers and journalists. Between us, we solve most questions.
I invite you over to comment about what’s been eating you on Substack and what’s been good this week. Share your questions and achievements.
This session is about sharing what you know about writing or Substack, asking questions and socialising with others. Everyone’s welcome to join the conversation. Politeness and kindness are our rules. Offer advice if you can, no guesswork and no spammers. We haven’t had anyone’s comments left unanswered so far. Our readers and SPAWN are a supportive community and many of us support one another outside this weekly event.
Tip: What gift have you got for your paid subscribers?
Subscribe so you get the updates, poems, information about courses and posts straight to your inbox. Thank you for being here. If you like a poem from April’s giveaway click here.
Since you’re here a couple of free for yearly paid subscribers: Writer Pilgrim Sounds, a poetry podcast and the writer workshop TINAWW running for 6 live sessions. (New TINAWW workshop dates announced). The latest poem on this publication is about handbags and swiss knives.
There is also a live in person 10 week Writer Pilgrim workshop for which you sign up here, starts this Friday for the Greater London crowd. (This event is now sold out).
1). Recommend one of your most recent posts and tell us why we should get there and read it.
My most recent poem is What if and as I'm checking everyone's comments, I wonder if I should change its title to the handbag poem... I've been working on creating shorter poems. I tend to write long ones, but the What if poem is a short one about the things and memories we carry and the lessons we never get.
2). Holiday destinations. What’s your summer plans?
Nothing sorted yet but dreaming of the Greek beach! Always or Cornwall!
3). How do you deal with the influx of emails from Substack in your inbox? What tips would you like to share especially if you subscribe to many stacks.
My tip is to look at subject line in the emails that come in and pick and choose like I do with headlines from a magazine or newspaper. I can't read from all my 298 stacks that I'm subscribed too. I wish, but there's only so much time.
Hi everyone!
So this week I started posting some of my Song Title Fiction on my page. I'm hoping to build up a little collection on there. These will be revised versions of ones from the Challenge, as well as new ones. People seem to be enjoying it. Which is handy. Because I've got eight more Volumes ready to go up at some point! Haha.
Here it is, if you missed it: https://chrisjfranklin.substack.com/p/run-the-titles-volume-one
I've also been noticing an interesting phenomenon on Notes. Have you seen these people who keep coming on and saying something like, "Hi. I'm new here. This is my first Note", and then put a picture of some kind and get 6000 Likes and about 500 Restacks? How is that happening?
Because surely if they're new and have no Followers, no one would see it? So how is it getting that kind of traction? It's a real mystery, because I haven't had 6000 Likes on Notes ever, on all my Posts combined. And I've put up hundreds of things. Haha. Ahh well.
What have you all been up to? 😎