Customize all the buttons!

An easy process for creating variations of all the standard Substack buttons

If you’ve read posts in Substack newsletters, you’ve likely seen buttons like this:

If you’ve written Substack newsletter posts, you’ve likely used the “Buttons” dropdown in the text editor. It has several options, the last of which is “Custom button.” This option allows you to customize both the text and the URL link of the button.

Those with a background in Unicode or JavaScript can imagine many possibilities with such customization. I plan to examine those possibilities in future posts.

For now, I’ll focus on one customization: changing the text of the standard buttons.

Suppose you have a Substack about the Boston Red Sox. You might want to change “Subscribe now” to “Subscribe now if you’re a Sox fan!” (I anticipate upset comments from Yankees fans about this example.)

You can’t change the “Subscribe now” button itself. If you’ve chosen “Subscribe now” in the dropdown, the button will always say “Subscribe now.”

However, you can insert the URL for “Subscribe now” in a custom button that says “Subscribe now if you’re a Sox fan!” And likewise you can customize buttons with other useful URLs (for example, to share the post). Here’s how:

1. Compose a draft with a standard button whose URL you want.

2. At the bottom of the draft, click “Settings” and find the “Secret draft link.”

3. Visit the secret draft link and copy the URL for the button. (I presume you’re familiar with how to copy the URL for a link — in this case, a link button — on whichever operating system and browser you’re using. For example, on Chrome in Windows, you can copy the URL by right-clicking the button and choosing “Copy link address.”)

4. In your actual draft, click to the left or right of the standard button so that the button is highlighted; choose “Custom button” (which will replace the standard button in the draft) from the dropdown in the editor; enter the text you want; paste the URL that you copied in Step 3; and click “OK.”

For a “special offer” button, you could instead copy the URL of the original button — with no need to find and visit the secret draft link. As for both the “gift subscription” and “share your publication” buttons, the URL will always be the same; you could note that URL somewhere rather than copy it each time from the secret draft. But maybe it’s just easier to go to the secret link to obtain the URL for any and all buttons.

In my case, after following these steps, the customized subscription button is:

I hope this tutorial is helpful to you. I’ll return with more ideas for custom buttons soon.