Here’s what Amazon actually requires. Read on.

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Spotlight:

Chosen: Sacred Journeys with a Faithful God

is one of ten voices behind Chosen: Sacred Journeys with a Faithful God, a collection of more than twenty testimonies from people who walked through their own “curve ball” seasons — stories of devastating loss, unexpected challenges, doubt, and breakthrough, told honestly rather than wrapped in a neat bow.

The Reply That Kills a Review

Picture your launch team. You send the message asking for honest reviews once everyone’s had a few days with the manuscript. Half the replies come back the same way: “I’d love to, but I never actually bought a copy — won’t Amazon just take it down?” So they sit it out. Multiply that by every author running a launch this month, and you’ve got a stack of real, willing readers who never post a word, all because of a rule that was never actually the rule.

That’s the Assumption Tax. It’s what you pay every time you build a decision on a rumor instead of a source — and in this case, the tax comes straight out of your star count.

The Assumption Tax, Part One: What Everyone Assumes

The claim going around is simple: no purchase, no review. It sounds official. It sounds like the sort of thing a platform would obviously require. It’s also completely wrong, and it’s costing authors reviews they were always eligible to collect.

The Assumption Tax, Part Two: What’s Actually True

Amazon’s real requirement has nothing to do with buying your specific book. It has to do with the reviewer’s account. To leave a review, a customer needs to have spent at least $50 on Amazon.com in the trailing twelve months using a valid credit or debit card. That’s it. That’s the bar.

Notice what that means. Your reader doesn’t need a receipt for your book. They need an active Amazon account with real spending history behind it — groceries, diapers, a toaster, doesn’t matter. If they’ve crossed that $50 threshold in the last year, they are eligible to review your book whether they bought it, borrowed it, or you handed them a free copy yourself.

Giving a reader a free advance copy in exchange for an honest review is allowed — it’s how ARC programs work, and it’s compliant with both Amazon’s terms and FTC disclosure guidelines. What isn’t allowed is requiring a review as a condition of getting the book.

The Assumption Tax, Part Three: Why the Myth Keeps Winning

So why does the wrong version keep spreading? Volume beats accuracy, almost every time. Enough authors repeat “you have to buy it” with enough confidence, and it starts sounding like policy instead of guesswork. Nobody checks the source. They just pass along what sounded official the last time they heard it.

That’s the whole job of this article. To hand you the accurate version so you can stop losing reviews to a rule that was never real.

The Assumption Tax, Part Four: The Clock Nobody Tells You About

Here’s the other myth costing you, and it’s a timing one. Most authors treat reviews as something that trickles in over months, no rush. But Amazon’s New Release window and early momentum signals reward books that build review velocity fast — the first week or two after launch carries far more algorithmic weight than the same number of reviews spread across a year. Ten reviews in your first seven days moves you differently than ten reviews earned over six months. Amazon is watching how recently and how quickly a book gathers reviews, not just how many it eventually collects.

Don’t let your launch team’s reviews trickle in whenever they get around to it. Coordinate the ask so most of them land in that first week, while the door is still open.

’s The Heart and Soul of God’s Kingdom: A Devotional Study of the Sermon on the Mount is proof of what a coordinated launch team can do. We ran his ARC and launch campaign and it earned him a Top New Release badge on Amazon. This only happens when reviews land close together in that opening window instead of trickling in over months.

You’ll see this same window open twice more this week. Chris Wright’s () The Atheist Conversion Manual releases July 20th, walking readers through the evidence for God, the reliability of Scripture, and the case for Christ as the answer to the questions skeptics actually ask. ’s Christ in You follows on July 21st, an unpacking of Paul’s phrase “Christ in you, the hope of glory” into what union with Christ actually looks like in daily life. Both launches land inside the same seven-day window this newsletter is built around.

What To Do With This

1. If you have a launch team, message them directly. Tell them plainly: you do not need to have purchased the book to review it. You need an Amazon account with at least $50 in purchases over the last twelve months.

2. Stop apologizing for asking non-buyers to review. You were never breaking a rule. You were following one you’d never actually been told.

3. If you’re running an ARC program, keep the ask clean. Give the free copy freely. Ask for an honest review as a separate, unconditional request — never “leave a review to keep the book.”

4. Encourage a few verified purchases early. Amazon weighs non-verified reviews less and may limit them for authors with thin sales history, so a handful of genuine purchases alongside your ARC reviews strengthens your whole profile.

5. Coordinate the timing, not just the ask. Have your launch team ready to post the moment the book goes live, and follow up once within the first week. Reviews clustered in that early window carry more weight than the same reviews trickling in over months.

6. Pass this along. Every author on your team who believes either myth is one message away from having it corrected. Be the correction.

Call to Action Share this article with your launch team before your next release. And if you’re building your author platform and want reviews, visibility, and a vetted readership that actually reads before it rates, that’s exactly what Christian Book Finder was built for.

-Thomas M. Hamilton

Stories.

Substack built stories. Except instead of a fifteen-second video of someone’s lunch, the dot means a writer you follow has published something new. Tap it, and you’re reading their latest piece.

What does this mean? This is Substack telling you, plainly, what it wants to become. And if you write on this platform, you need to understand what changed and how to work with it instead of around it.

Let me walk you through it.

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Related Article

The Feed Is Now the Front Door

The old Substack model was simple: you wrote, hit publish, and an email landed in inboxes. The inbox was the whole game.

Not anymore.

That row of profiles at the top of the app works exactly like Facebook stories. Follow a writer, and when they publish something new, their profile lights up with an orange dot at the top of your feed. Your readers don’t have to dig through their inbox or remember your name. You’re sitting right there, first thing they see, every time you’ve got something fresh.

What this means practically: consistency now has a visibility reward it never had before. Every time you publish, you reclaim that top-of-feed real estate. Go quiet for two weeks, and you disappear from the shelf while everyone else’s dots keep glowing.

The writers who treat Substack like a blog with an email list attached are going to fall behind the writers who treat it like what it now is — a social platform where the content happens to be worth reading.

You Can Now Choose Your Main Publication (And Switch Between Them)

This one matters for anybody running more than one publication, and a lot of us are.

Substack now lets you choose which of your publications is your main one, the one on display when somebody lands on your profile. If you run two publications, you’re no longer stuck with whichever one the platform decided to feature. You pick.

And it’s not a one-time decision. You can switch between publications, and — here’s the part that matters for your list — you can send emails out to whichever audience you choose. Two publications, two audiences, one dashboard, and you decide which hat you’re wearing when you hit send.

One more detail that saves a real headache: Substack preserves your handle if you switch over. Anybody who’s ever rebranded anything online knows the dread of losing the name people already know you by. That friction is gone. Your handle follows you.

If you’ve been hesitating to spin up a second publication because managing two felt like running two separate businesses — that excuse just got a lot thinner.

The Three-Title Trick Almost Nobody Uses

Now for the part most writers don’t know. I’d wager the majority of people publishing on Substack right now have no idea this exists.

Every article you publish can carry three different titles. Not should, can. And the writers who use all three are outperforming the ones who don’t.

Here’s how it breaks down:

Title #1: The editor title (this is your Notes title). The main title and subtitle you write in the editor stay exactly as you wrote them — and that’s what carries over to Substack Notes and the feed. This is the title your dot-tappers and scrollers see. Write it for people browsing.

Title #2: The email title. Go into your post settings before you publish, and you can write a different title for the email version. Here’s the kicker — Substack will send out different ones, and whichever title gets the most clicks wins. The platform is running a split test on your behalf. Most writers never touch this setting, which means most writers are leaving opens on the table. An email subject line and a feed headline are two different animals. The feed title can be bold and declarative. The email title needs to earn a click in a crowded inbox. Now you can write each one for its job.

Title #3: The SEO title. Also in your post settings, under SEO options, you can change the title that Google picks up. Your feed title might be punchy and personal — great for your readers, useless for search. Your SEO title can be the plain-spoken, keyword-honest version that someone actually types into Google at 11pm. Same article, now findable by strangers.

One article. Three titles. Three audiences. Your followers, your inbox, and the open internet — each one served on its own terms.

It takes maybe ninety extra seconds per post. Do it anyway. Worth the time.

What to Do With All This

If you take nothing else from this piece, take these three moves:

1. Publish on a rhythm. The orange dot is free advertising, but only if it keeps lighting up.

2. Set your main publication deliberately. Don’t let the default decide what new readers see first.

3. Write all three titles, every time. Editor title for the feed and Notes. Email title in post settings, and let the split test do its work. SEO title for Google.

Substack handed writers a social platform, a multi-publication switchboard, and a built-in headline-testing machine — and most people are still using it like it’s 2022.

You don’t have to be most people.

For the man building something that has to last:

Built to Last — Maury Wood

Six weeks through Ephesians. Written by a dad of four who builds things and has learned the hard way that foundations are everything. Not about being perfect. About what holds when life doesn’t cooperate.

→ [Pre-order on Amazon]

For the man paying attention to what’s happening in the world and needing it to mean something:

The Signs in Heaven Series — Ender E. Law

An engineer with an MBA spent 30 years in high-tech before turning that same analytical mind on Scripture. What he found in the celestial alignments, the 2017 and 2024 eclipses, the Four Horsemen of Revelation — it’s the kind of thing you can’t unfind once you’ve seen it.

This is Scripture, astronomy, and ancient history pulled into focus.

→ [See the full series on Amazon]

For the man grinding through the week and feeling the gap between who he is on Sunday and who he has to be on Monday:

Thank God It’s Monday(?) — Tom Petersen

Honest and practical. Funnier than it has any right to be. Written by someone who did the wrong thing at work, repeatedly, and found Scripture had something to say about every single situation.

25 reviews. 5 stars. Enough said.

→ [Get it on Amazon]

For the man asking what any of this is actually for:

The Return of Heaven — Steve Martin

40 authors. 3 languages. 1,500 years of writing. One story underneath all of it. For the man who feels the weight of the world but can’t name why — this book names it. Then shows him where it ends.

→ [Get it on Amazon]

For the man who wants to go deeper into what Jesus actually said:

The Heart and Soul of God’s Kingdom — Trip Kimball

A devotional study through the Sermon on the Mount that doesn’t sand the edges down. The Kingdom isn’t a future event to wait for. Jesus made that clear on a hillside. This book makes it clear again.

→ [Get it on Amazon]

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The rumor goes like this: you can’t optimize for Google on Substack, so don’t bother.

I’ve heard it from established writers and even seen it parroted in every “tips for new Substackers” thread that gets resurfaced every other Tuesday.

It’s wrong. And it’s bleeding traffic, subscribers, and authority out of Substacks that should be ranking by now.

And no — I’m not blowing smoke. A live button you can click below to see my sitemap indexed at my domain — not Substack’s. No “trust me, bro.” Just the file Google is actually reading.

☝ That was from an article I just posted over the weekend!

View Google Sitemap Links

Now let me show you why this matters more than almost anything else you’ll read about Substack this year.

The Catch Nobody Tells You

Sign up for Substack and you get an address that looks like this:

yourname.substack.com

But here’s the thing. It’s not really a website. It’s tenancy.

Substack owns the building. You rent a unit. Every word you publish, every backlink someone gives you, and every share that goes viral on X — Google looks at all of it and quietly logs the authority under substack.com. Not yours. Theirs.

Read that again.

You can write the most extraordinary newsletter in your niche. Get featured. Get recommended. Get restacked into oblivion. And when someone Googles a topic you’ve covered better than anyone, your post might still be invisible, buried under thousands of other something.substack.com subdomains all competing as basically interchangeable to the algorithm.

This is what nobody is telling you. And it’s the entire reason your search traffic looks the way it does.

What Changes the Moment You Buy a Custom Domain

Substack lets you connect your own domain for a one-time fee of $50.

That’s the price. No monthly fees or hidden tiers. Just a one time payment.

Buy a domain at Cloudflare or Namecheap. Point it at Substack via DNS. Substack handles the SSL. Your publication now lives at your address.

And here’s what flips the moment that happens:

1. Google sees a real site. Not a tenant. A site. Authority compounds to you now — every backlink, every share, every minute of dwell time builds equity in your domain instead of someone else’s. This is the foundation of every SEO strategy that has ever worked. You stop subsidizing Substack and start building your own balance sheet.

2. You can verify in Google Search Console. This is the upgrade. Submit your sitemap (Substack generates it for you — yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml) and the lights come on. You see which posts get impressions. Which keywords you’re ranking for. Which posts are climbing. You go from flying blind to flying with instruments. Most Substackers will never know what their search performance actually looks like. You will.

3. Your links stop screaming “I’m a hobbyist.” When you share yourname.com/p/article-title in an email, on LinkedIn, in a guest post — it reads like a publication. People click more. Other writers link more. Backlinks compound. The URL itself does work for you.

4. You can leave one day without losing everything. Read this one carefully. The day Substack changes the rules — and platforms always eventually change the rules — your custom domain leaves with you. Migrate to Ghost, WordPress, your own setup. Every link still works. Google ranking still resolves. The writer who stayed on theirname.substack.com for three years? Watches it all evaporate.

Why This Actually Drives More Traffic

Here’s what most writers miss. And it’s the real reason this works.

A custom domain doesn’t pull you out of Substack. It makes your website native to Substack while also functioning as its own real, standalone site on the open web.

Translation: you don’t lose anything. You add.

You keep the recommendation network, the Notes feed, the discovery engine, the email infrastructure, the subscriber tools, the restacks, the home feed — every internal channel Substack gives you stays exactly where it was. Nothing breaks or turns off. Your readers don’t notice a single difference except your URL looks more professional.

But now Google sees you as a real publication, not a tenant. So while your Substack neighbors are scratching for visibility inside the platform, you’re pulling traffic from two directions at once:

• From inside Substack — recommendations, Notes, restacks, the home feed.

• From outside Substack — Google search, backlinks, social shares that get clicked because the URL doesn’t look sketchy.

That second channel is the one almost nobody on this platform is using. And it’s the one that compounds the longest.

A Substack-only writer is fishing in one pond. A custom-domain writer is fishing in two — and the second pond doesn’t dry up at midnight when the algorithm cycles.

This is why two equally talented writers can post the same kind of content for two years and end up with wildly different traffic. One is invisible outside the platform. The other is showing up in search results months — years — after publishing.

You want to be the second one.

Now Here’s What I’m Doing for My VIPs

I just bought ChristianBookFinder.com.

Not a subdomain. A clean, keyword-rich, exact-match domain that says exactly what it is — the kind of domain Google has been rewarding for over twenty years and shows no sign of stopping.

And I’m not building it to be mine alone.

My VIPs are getting listed there. Their books and Substacks. All featured on a domain that was built from day one to get found in Christian search traffic. They get a share in the ownership of what this site becomes. As ChristianBookFinder.com grows in authority, every VIP listed on it grows with it. Their books are the post. The author is the headline. The URL is keyword-targeted (christianbookfinder.com/p/the-shepherds-call-by-jane-doe). The title, the meta description, the structure — every element is engineered to surface that book in search and keep surfacing it.

So what they receive is a permanent search asset.

VIPs on ChristianBookFinder.com get:

• A dedicated, search-optimized listing post on a clean, keyword-targeted domain — built from the ground up to get found by Christian readers searching Google.

• Keyword-rich URLs structured around the book title and author name, the way Google rewards.

• Listing in the VIP directory hub — a central indexable page that internally links to every VIP post, multiplying the SEO weight across all of them.

• A piece of something growing — not a one-time shoutout, but real shared visibility that compounds as the site builds authority.

VIP listings get the search engine working for the book.

[Subscribe / Become a VIP here]

The early VIPs get the best positioning, the most visibility, and the longest runway as the site builds authority. Latecomers will still benefit. But the ones who show up first always do best — in any directory, on any platform, in any season.

The Pushback You’ll Hear

Some folks will tell you a custom domain is unnecessary. Here’s the noise you’ll have to wade through:

“Substack’s domain has more authority than yours will ever have.”

Sure. For the first few months. Then what? Substack’s authority isn’t yours. It’s a rental. While you wait three years borrowing it, you could have spent three years building your own.

“You’ll lose internal recommendations from other Substacks.”

That was true a few years ago. It isn’t anymore. The recommendation network works perfectly fine with custom domains. You’re not trading one channel for another. You’re stacking.

“Just forward your domain to your Substack URL.”

Don’t. A 301 redirect from yourname.com to yourname.substack.com doesn’t give you the SEO benefit. Google still sees the destination as the Substack subdomain. Congratulations — you’ve spent money on a vanity license plate. Set it up properly or don’t bother.

How to Actually Do This

Here’s the simplest version. The one I’d give a friend over coffee.

1. Buy a domain. Cloudflare and Namecheap are cheap and don’t try to upsell you on twelve things you don’t need. $10–$15 a year.

2. Pay Substack the $50 one-time fee. Settings → Domain. They walk you through it.

LOL — my fancy arrows

3. Add a CNAME record at your registrar. Substack tells you exactly what to type. Use a subdomain like www.yourname.com — Substack requires a subdomain, not the bare root. (Set up a 301 redirect from the root yourname.com to www.yourname.com in your registrar’s settings — most have a one-click option.)

4. Wait up to 36 hours. DNS takes time. Don’t panic.

5. Verify your site in Google Search Console. Submit your sitemap (yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml).

That’s it. That’s the whole “secret.” Most “buy your own” domain sites give you step by step instructions. If not, a simple Google search should suffice.

For a step-by-step guide to rank in Google using a custom domain living on Substack — CLICK HERE

Access My Digital Store-Front

The Part Where I Get Honest

Will a custom domain alone make you rank? No.

You still have to write things people actually want to read. With titles people are actually searching for. At a length Google takes seriously — research consistently shows long-form content (1,500+ words) outperforms short posts in search. You still need patience. Search rankings build over months, not days.

But none of that matters if you’re hosting on a subdomain that funnels every ounce of authority away from you.

You can write the best newsletter in your niche and still be invisible on Google because your address is essentially “Apt 4B at the Substack Building.”

Buy the domain. Set it up right. Submit the sitemap.

Then keep writing — and let the work compound for you instead of for someone else.

And if you want a head start? If you’d rather plug into something already built than start from absolute zero?

Come be a VIP. ChristianBookFinder.com is being built for writers who refuse to stay invisible.

Stay sharp.

— Thomas

[Subscribe / Become a VIP]

Christian Book Finder VIPs

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I see this all the time on Substack—many people are making this mistake. The book graphics. Yes. A lot of them look…too “normal.” They don’t stand out. Some of them look rushed, like they were thrown together in five minutes. This makes you look the same as everyone else. And if you look like that, buyers will skip right over your book.

Here is what most people miss: you’re competing with millions of other authors whose covers don’t just exist…they stand out without trying.

And whether we like it or not…people judge a book by its cover. They will not pause to analyze it. People are busy. They scroll and decide in SECONDS what they want. If it feels like everything else, they’re gone.

So here is how you can make your books stand out! And the best part? It’s completely FREE.

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The Reveal: Google Pomelli And What It Is

There is a massive advantage to “captured” imagery over “generated” imagery. This is what most people get wrong about Google Pomelli. It is NOT a graphic generator. It doesn’t build an image from nothing. It takes your flat book cover and applies the physics of a professional photoshoot. It adds realistic lighting and depth. It makes a digital file into a high-end visual.

The Non-Workflow: Simple to a Fault

Minimalism beats complexity every time. My “process” is now so simple it’s almost embarrassing. I upload the book cover. That’s it.

There is no pre-processing or “improving” the image first. No tweaking. I simply take the book cover art and upload it to Google Pomelli. Done.

Most of the time, you don’t have to touch anything. Every now and then, you might tweak something slightly—but it’s rare. Usually, it gives you multiple options to work with anyway. So if one feels off, you just skip it and move on.

Visual Evidence Gallery

This is how you move from a flat file to a scroll-stopping asset:

I’ll use one of our VIP’s book as an example.

Here is the original:

Now let’s plug it into Pomelli.

Ta Daaa!!!! Now that looks professional!

You can even have Pomelli do Amazon product images!!

Marketing is about pattern interrupts. Our brains are efficient filters. We are biologically programmed to ignore templates and ads.

This works because it doesn’t look “designed.” When people scroll through a feed of “made” graphics, they pause for things that feel real, even if they don’t know why. By removing the “designed” look, you remove the cue that tells a reader to keep scrolling.

The VIP Author Approach

Authors don’t have time to waste. When I work with VIPs, I try to move fast so they don’t have to. We do this to remove the guess work for them.

No overthinking it anymore. Just upload and move on. It’s a fantastic tool.

The Simplicity Reinforcement (What You Don’t Need)

Most creators fall into a complexity trap. They think more work equals more reward. It doesn’t.

• Think: I need better design skills, more tools, and more time.

• Reality: You need to stop interfering with the process.

It’s not a process… it’s just simpler than people think.

Inefficiency has a cost. Every hour you spend tweaking a template is an hour you aren’t writing.

You can keep doing it the hard way—tweaking layouts and fighting for scraps of engagement. Or, you can let something else do the heavy lifting.

Start sharing imagery that actually makes people stop.

Join The VIP Authors!

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