Newsletter Author Contacts

Extract Substack newsletter author contacts, emails and publication stats — keyless, HTTP-only, no login.

What does Newsletter Author Contacts do?

This actor reads Substack's public archive and About endpoints to build outreach-ready author leads. For each publication it returns the author name, contact email, subscriber count, category, recent post activity and social links. No cookies, no API key, no browser.

Output fields

Field	Type	Description
publication_name	string	Publication display name
publication_url	string	Canonical URL
subdomain	string	Substack subdomain
publication_id	integer	Substack publication ID
author_name	string	Author display name
author_email	string	Primary contact email (first match)
author_emails	array	All extracted emails (when > 1)
email_count	integer	Number of emails found
subscriber_count	integer	Subscriber count parsed from the About page
description	string	Publication description
category	string	Primary post tag
latest_post_title	string	Most recent post title
latest_post_date	string	Most recent post date (ISO)
latest_post_url	string	Most recent post URL
post_count_fetched	integer	Posts retrieved in this run
social	object	twitter, linkedin, instagram, youtube, website
contact_page_url	string	About page URL
source	string	substack
scraped_at	string	ISO timestamp

Who is it for?

• PR and media relations building journalist contact lists
• Sponsorship sales prospecting newsletter owners by category and reach
• Guest booking finding podcast-hosting newsletter authors
• CRM enrichment auto-filling author emails and subscriber counts
• Market research mapping the newsletter landscape by category
• AI agents and MCP users pulling creator contacts for outreach

Pricing

Pay per result: $1.50 per 1,000 authors.

Charged only for records actually written to the dataset.

How to use it

1. Open the actor in Apify Console.
2. Paste Substack publication URLs or subdomains into Publication URLs.
3. Optionally add category slugs to Discovery categories.
4. Toggle email enrichment on or off.
5. Click Start and export as JSON, CSV or Excel.

Output example

{
  "record_type": "newsletter_author",
  "publication_name": "The Pragmatic Engineer",
  "publication_url": "https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com",
  "subdomain": "newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com",
  "publication_id": 458709,
  "author_name": "The Pragmatic Engineer Newsletter",
  "author_email": "contact@pragmaticengineer.com",
  "email_count": 1,
  "subscriber_count": 1000000,
  "description": "The #1 software/AI engineering newsletter on Substack",
  "category": "Google",
  "latest_post_title": "The Pulse: Firebase's global outage & poor response",
  "latest_post_date": "2026-10-01T16:43:19.985Z",
  "latest_post_url": "https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/the-pulse-firebases-global-outage",
  "post_count_fetched": 5,
  "social": {
    "twitter": "https://twitter.com/GergelyOrosz",
    "linkedin": null,
    "instagram": null,
    "youtube": null,
    "website": "https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com"
  },
  "contact_page_url": "https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/about",
  "source": "substack",
  "scraped_at": "2026-10-03T12:00:00.000Z"
}

Technical details

• Stack: Node.js 24, apify SDK, native fetch, cheerio.
• Endpoints: https://{sub}.substack.com/api/v1/archive (public archive) and https://{sub}.substack.com/about (public About page). No cookies, no API key.
• Email extraction: regex scan of the About page HTML plus mailto: link extraction, with a blacklist for Substack-owned domains.
• Subscriber count: parsed from the About page prose ("over 1 million readers", "50,000+ subscribers", "10k subscribers").
• Social links: extracted from About page anchors.
• Retries: 429 and 5xx responses are retried up to three times with backoff.
• Proxy: defaults to the Apify datacenter pool.

Known limits

• Discovery is best-effort. Substack's category leaderboard pages are JS-rendered, so category-based discovery returns fewer results than URL-driven enrichment. Enrichment of known publication URLs is fully supported.
• Email extraction depends on the About page. Publications that don't publish an email in their About page produce author_email: null. The actor does not guess or pattern-generate emails.
• Subscriber counts are approximate. Parsed from prose, not from an exact API field.
• Custom-domain publications work. The actor accepts both *.substack.com subdomains and custom domains that route to Substack.
• Beehiiv and Ghost are not yet supported. This build covers Substack only.

FAQ

Do I need a Substack account? No. The archive and About endpoints are public.

Why is discovery weaker than enrichment? Substack's category leaderboard is rendered client-side. The actor can discover slugs but not reliably enumerate publications from them. Paste publication URLs for reliable results.

Can I get paid-subscriber counts? The About page prose occasionally mentions paid subscriber counts, but Substack does not expose an exact paid-tier number publicly.

What emails does the actor find? Whichever contact emails appear on the About page — typically contact@, hello@ or the author's personal address.

Support

Open an issue on the Actor's page for bugs or feature requests.

Changelog

0.1 — 2026-10-03

• Initial build. Substack-only newsletter author enrichment.
• Public archive endpoint for recent posts and publication ID.
• About page parsing for author name, description, subscriber count and social links.
• Email extraction via regex scan and mailto: link extraction.
• Category-based discovery (best-effort; leaderboard pages are JS-rendered).
• Retries on 429 and 5xx with backoff.
• No login, no cookies, no API key.