How (not) to Pick the Perfect Substack Name

A Guide from the Perplexed

Mar 15, 2024

Choosing a fabulous title is simple. You deliberate for months, consult widely, change your mind a dozen times, purchase a dozen domains you’ll never use, and then settle on a name that makes no difference to anyone but you.

This is my experience, and inevitably so, because I’m an idiot. I’ve always been an idiot, you see. I’ve spent the bulk of my life, nearly three decades worth now, writing elaborate novels that have yet to see the hopefully-not-brief light of publication. Now, I believe they are respectable works, goddam enduring works, but if I keel over tomorrow afternoon due to an excess of microplastics in my blood vessels or suffocate in my sleep in an episode of mouth-taping gone wrong, they may as well be sand mandalas. Intricate creations painstakingly made, only to be expeditiously swept up and emptied into the dustbins of history. And mandalas, at least, have their 15 minutes in the Tibetan sun first.

I’ve yet to cash in on the many tens of thousands of hours I’ve spent on these novels. I’m Hodling my literary bags, vying for a big payday in future decades, in future generations. I’m still early, to stay with the crypto speak. Or so goes the coping fantasy.

But the reality about the allegorical beefcakes that are my novels is that the odds are heavily stacked against them. It’s hard to know how many people, in any meaningful classical sense of the word, even read anymore. Many skim. Most scroll. (see

Ted Gioia

’s We’re Living in a Scroll-and Swipe Doom Loop Culture or How to Break Free from Dopamine Culture. And at least read the damn pieces before you heart them.)

I’ve focused on my fixation with novel writing here only to emphasize my opening point: I am a supreme and overqualified idiot. And as a long-term resident of professional quicksand, I’m in a strong position to give you authoritative advice on what NOT to do.

Welcome to A Guide from the Perplexed

The medieval philosopher Maimonides wrote A Guide for the Perplexed in the twelfth century to assist those bewildered by the conflict between Old Testament religion and the Aristotelian science of his day. In this guide, I’m replacing “for” with “from” because it is I who have proven perplexed. It is I who have failed time and again to reconcile my literary devotion with the realities of my day. And while, to paraphrase Kafka, there is hope but not for me, mostly because I’m as mulish as a wild Cypriot ass, you may still have a chance. I hope—even pray, in the spirit of Maimonides—that highlighting my missteps dodges you some sand traps.

A donkey standing in the middle of the road facing down a car — Wild Cypriot ass. Told you. Photo by author.

A Misspent Summer

Over the summer of 2023, I contemplated various names for this Substack. I’ll wager that among past or present Substackers, I’m in the elite 0.01% of knuckleheads who’ve frittered away the most time choosing a title. I deliberated for months. I sprang focus group sessions on friend gatherings. I wearied everyone around me with options, variations, taglines. I was so committed that I bought and registered a slew of available domains (again, idiotic, but more on this shortly).

Here are some of the titles I chewed over and eventually spat out:

The Ides of Mark

Allusion: The Ides of March, the 15^th of March, the day in 44 B.C. when Julius Caesar was assassinated. Hence Shakespeare’s “Beware the Ides of March.”
Taglines: “Assassinating false idols and sacred cows of our politics and culture through storytelling” or just “Be aware.”
Scheduling: The 15^th of every month would be a major literary event. The 15^th of March would be a huge one. Instead (check today’s date) you got stuck with this post.
Why Ides of Mark? My last name is Markides. Precious, I know.

Confiction

Allusions: Conviction, Confection, Convection, Conflict Fiction, With (with) Fiction, Against (contra) Fiction, Constantine’s Fiction [*eyeroll*]
Taglines: “The alchemy of turning news into myth.” “The transfer of heat through storytelling.” “The unwavering belief in one’s delusions.”

Two Steps Back

A reference to One step forward, two steps back. Not a utopian title. But you also step back for a wider perspective. A positive spin on failure, which is existentially handy for me.

Fire and Chains

A nod to Prometheus, who was chained to a rock for giving us fire. Too bad it more suggests GoT fan fiction or amateur erotica.

Fire N’ Chainz

Secretly my fave.

In Second Person

Endures as a section of my Substack. (Yes, YOU have indeed figured out the theme.) But to never again write here from the perspective of me, myself, and I would be intolerable to me. I mean to you.

Mythery

Endures as a Call to Subscribe, as in:

The Golden Pear

Not to be confused with the Golden Banana.

These and many more choices were floated, to and from friends. But you get the idea: instead of trekking out into the wilderness, I drank tea in the cabin and mused over the color of my hiking gear.

Here are two successful Substackers who, in contrast to me, didn’t fuss with names:

John J. Mearsheimer
His “John’s Substack” got over 21,000 subscribers in nine months. Granted, he’s John Maersheimer, but even so… He didn’t even bother changing the title to his recognizable surname.
Paul Wittenberger
He started last summer in Substack obscurity but after several months began cultivating a sizeable fanbase and commentariat for his daily poems. He achieved all this as “Paul’s Substack.”

Instead of just kicking off last summer with them, I dwelled in puns. That said, unless you’re a namesake of both an Epistles author and one of the Beatles, you should probably pick a title. Just don’t spend months on it.

And you don’t need a custom domain name. Take it from me, who has been buying and ditching domain names since 2005 (I just checked and I own 19). Just go with [your name].substack.com. If it works for

Heather Cox Richardson

, whose “Letters from an American” has some 1.4 million subscribers, it’ll probably work for you.

To Sum Up

Don’t fret over the name. You can, and likely will, change it.

Case in point: when I thought up this post last weekend, my intention was to announce a name change from Mostly Myth to Fourth Night, the blog I launched in 2005, where I posted longform essays on the fourth night of each month. Since writing once a month wouldn’t get me anywhere, I thought I’d amp up the pace by posting every four nights.

This conviction (confiction?) to change to Fourth Night lasted, fittingly enough, about four days. I don’t regularly write haiku, so this pledge to post every fourth night would cannibalize me over time.

Not to mention that Fortnite exploded out of the gate in 2017 and took a giant piss in my backyard. I don’t want the first thought that readers have of me to be, Ohhh, what fun, a gamer!

So I’m sticking with Mostly Myth. But take it from me, it mostly doesn’t matter.