Publishing Privately, Maybe

First of all, I want to say I really love the substack community. It’s such an interesting home that I found on here. The weirdly mostly non-toxic social element of substack mixed with a way of exploring writing, thoughts exploration is such a nice change from say substack.

Though at some point when you’re spending enough of your free time persuing a hobby that is impacting your life and taking away your attention in order to make sure you get that chapter our and write to be sure to hit a deadline you self-imposed on yourself, it is VERY nice to be able to have a way to make some money. I have no delusions of making this a career but if I make $100-200 a month on this I want to at least ensure that I provide my audience what they expect.

Now, if you want to publish on self stack without charging for any of your work. This is easy. Signup, start writing and you’re basically done. Create as many publications as you like, categories etc. Enjoy the community, post notes, interact with your users.

If, like me you are trying to make some money it’s a bit harder to get a clear idea on what is public and what isn’t. I honestly was very confused based on the documentation.

My first article while searching for this was: https://support.substack.com/hc/en-us/articles/4406018394260-Can-I-write-anonymously-on-Substack which isn’t exactly clear, or I was too dense to really parse it.

“Stripe does require business and personal details to comply with regulations.” particularly didn’t convey exactly what was being shared. Does that mean that Stripe shares personal information with the subscribers? Or just needs the info for tax reasons at the end of the year?

So, continuing down the rabbit hole, I article post here walks a user on how to get Strip setup.

Okay, now we have this little tidbit:

On Stripe, you can hide the public support phone number from appearing on receipts and invoices but you can set up a Google Voice number for extra privacy as the phone number may appear on payment statements such as credit card statements.

So, does that mean your phone number is leaked to customers? I honestly held off on charging on substack for a long time because while I do want to get paid I do write some pretty sexually explicit content and I really don’t need my fullname and address being shared with everyone of my readers as a way to contact “customer support” regarding my order.

I did create an alter ego and went through the process. I ended up getting an EIN number in case I wanted to get an LLC or DBA (Doing Business As..) entity, but from my brief experiments it seems like it’s perfectly doable to collect payment without revealing your identity.

Now, some minor notes to the

Substack

community. It would be nice if it was made a bit more clear or having an official guide on how to write anonymously. I’m sure I’m not the only one that is concerned about this topic.

In a way, I like how Etsy and Patreon have done this, it feels like my interaction is more directly with those entities and then the customer has a relationship with them as well. So both Etsy and Patreon are a middle man that while they do take a bigger cut I trust rely on them to collect money and I don’t have to deal with all the various nuance. I’ve seen multiple conversations on reddit’s /r/substack regarding establishing LLC such as this one.

Now, could Stripe change their policies and release your PII? Sure at any time. Would it probably protect you to setup a DBA/Sole Prop? Probably not the worst of ideas. LLC seems over kill but registering a DBA would let you get a bank account using that name, and I think you would only have to provide the DBA to Stripe not your full name.

I’m still debating the ideal models I should use to get both support and pursue my writing hobby turned career maybe? Though I wanted to share this post in case it’s useful to anyone else struggling with the same problems.

Have a wonderful blessed day! <3