Substack Anniversary

Writing Life

I recently had my two-year Substack anniversary, which means — needless to say — one of these saccharine, meta-Substack posts that, some have complained, ruin the platform.

But what can I do? Starting a Substack is, I’m almost positive, one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. It’s given me — as if out of nowhere — a genuine writing community, it’s released the terrible load of unpublished writing in my laptop, and it’s (shockingly to me) made me really optimistic about both the internet and the future of writing.

With homage to Mastercard, the experience of Substack could be summed up something like this:

• Number of subscribers: A couple thousand

• Number of paids: A couple dozen

• Ability to write with complete freedom whenever and on whatever you want: Priceless

These posts singing the glories of Substack can get tedious, but, look, part of what’s being built here is an actual community, and that takes work. It takes a certain amount of checking in and thinking through the values of the community, ideally before it hits some utterly massive scale. I actually think that the ‘Substack Nazi Controversy’ (RIP) was a good thing — and that’s why I posted on it so much — since it forced the community to deal with the vexing question of content moderation, which has basically ruined many other tech platforms. The truth is that most online communities peter out — either go out of business or become an instrument of ‘technofeudalism.’ That really hasn’t happened with Substack. Most of the credit goes to some line-drawing decisions by corporate, but a lot of it is up to the community as well — to keep exchanges civil, to actually read people’s stuff, to not give in to the sort of boilerplate, baby-viral posts that make a place like Medium so turgid.

I get the feeling that most writers and readers, most Substackers included, don’t quite get how immense the need is for a platform like Substack, which is to say that they don’t get how backwards, exploitative, and fundamentally anti-writer the traditional publishing industry is (it also took me awhile to catch on). If you want to publish in a literary magazine, for instance, the process goes something like this. You work your heart out on a story and get it word-perfect. You check in on the deadlines for literary magazines, which are usually a few weeks or months out of the year. You pay a fee for the privilege of submitting. You are always generally expected not to submit your story anywhere else while you wait on a response — which can come anywhere from six months to two years later. The acceptance rate for the more competitive magazines seems to be somewhere around 0.5%. The process is completely non-transparent — the readers for initial rounds often seem to be very young, with somewhat less-than-clear qualifications. Almost nobody has heard of the magazines themselves. They do not register in any wider national discourse and have no discernible circulation. But it is apparently important for writer résumé-building to place stories in at least a couple of them. The acceptance rate would suggest that these are a treasure-trove of great stories — wheat culled from endless chaff — but such, unfortunately, is not the case. The truth is that editing is more of a political than aesthetic process, and the kinds of committees that comprise the magazines have inscrutable mandates that have to do with the ‘mission’ of the magazine, as well as political/social winds, as well as whatever happens to be the trendy writing style at the moment. I do try to read through the literary journals from time to time and almost always give up in disgust.

Newspaper/magazine publishing is somewhat better. Newspapers actually go to press and pay their writers. They are responsive to readers and hungry for content. But what goes surprisingly unnoticed is that newspapers have a uniform style. You cannot write as yourself. (The only people who can are columnists, who usually have paid their dues through decades of stylelessness.) This bothers fewer people than it might, but it does bother me. When I look at a piece of writing, any writing, what I am looking for, first and last, is style, originality, a distinctive point of view — all of which are rigorously, ruthlessly discouraged in newspaper writing. Any newspaper or magazine has its slant, and pitching to a newspaper is a bit like trying to score an invitation to a dinner party where the seating list is already full: you are expected to comport yourself exactly the same way that all the other members of the party do, even as you have your interesting perspective that chimes in perfectly with the general conversation.

If pitching to a newspaper always makes you feel like some sort of slimy courtier, submitting to a publishing house is like taking a ticket for a bread line. The word is ’slush’ and you are treated as slush — you find yourself becoming deeply grateful for personalized notes of rejection. The truth is that there simply isn’t bread to go out. The publishing companies have enough people clamoring to get in. They have no particular desire to take a ‘risk’ on someone from slush, however interesting their writing might be. In any case, just the fact of coming through slush marks you as a sucker. You’re of course supposed to come through the back door — and the process of entering through the back door is a career-long minuet, of going to programs, making connections, getting in with the right people who, eventually, treat you as one of them without caring all that much about the quality of what you write.

What animates this whole system are the stories of the stars — people who make it and then get to give talks for the rest of their lives — but they are a bit like the handbills in Grapes of Wrath promising picking work in California. The industry lives off of praising them and promoting them and encouraging others to be like them. But all, again, is not as it seems. Published writers get dumped very quickly. The revenue system is the ‘waterfall’ where the published writers are paid last, which usually means not at all. Being published does have its rewards, but it turns out to be things like giving talks, judging contests, teaching courses — anything, in other words, other than writing. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the most exciting, most lauded writers of the time I was growing up (let’s say Rachel Kushner, Joshua Ferris, Jonathan Safran Foer, Chad Harbach, Adelle Waldman, etc) seem to have had about one book in them and then more or less pitched their tents. I remember when a friend got a publishing contract and immediately changed her Facebook status to “Employed by [the name of the publisher].” She was so proud of that and that struck me as so symptomatic and so backwards to how it should be. Why in the world would any writer want to feel that they were an employee of some megalithic publishing company, as opposed to feeling like they were a proud independent artist and that the publishing company was a partner generously putting out their work? But my friend was much savvier than I was and that was, simply, the way of it — how you were supposed to think about writing and publishing.

It was, and is, a terrible system, and Substack is one of the first vehicles to offer a way out. Everybody here writes entirely as themselves. Somewhere at the height of the content moderation controversy, somebody passed on the chilling words of a publishing professional that 90% of writing on Substack is crap. Well, yes! Maybe! But that’s sort of the point. If people write freely and as themselves, nobody is exerting quality control (although what percentage of recent published novels would we say are not crap?), and it’s as messy as some vast open mic night. But that’s what freedom is! Suddenly, the business of writing becomes not endlessly repackaging your bio for Submittable submissions but actually doing the thing and having other people read it and respond to it. Maybe a lot of what goes out there is crap but a lot of it isn’t, and actually the amount of stuff that’s good and thought-provoking and different on this platform is overwhelming — and that’s at a time when, by all accounts, writing and reading are in terminal decline!

So that’s the good. Let’s talk about the bad. Rachel Katz has a searing piece this week where she talks about gaming the Substack system — how she can’t help herself but game it and I share many of the same concerns. Basically, the challenge with writing on Substack is that it’s writing on the internet and it shares all the usual constraints of internet writing. People have short attention spans. Their eyes start to glaze over if they see things beyond a certain length. People are reading things in the now — as opposed to the sort of floating eternity of book-reading — and so they tend to respond to work that has a ‘take,’ that is somewhat timely. People have self-defined as members of a community — in this case ‘writers on Substack’ — and so they tend to be much more responsive to work that is about themselves. (I’ve noticed that it’s almost perfectly inversely proportional the amount of work I put into a piece — a longer essay or story — as opposed to the amount of traction it gets on Substack.)

My response to this to basically be accepting of it, or, more precisely, to not care. I’ve found it very, very important to have an inner Pierre, and I actually repeat it as a mantra whenever I’m running long on a post and know that the read rate will be down as a result. I get sort of angry at myself, ask myself if I can do cuts, if what I’m writing is actually important to me. The answer, almost always, is that it is, and then the voice when I press ‘publish’ is to say to myself “I don’t care” — or, when I was just starting and it was crickets in my comments, “Fuck them all.” I just had to make an internal decision about whether what I wanted to write was my truth or whether what I wanted to write was what other people would find useful or entertaining. It’s a constant inner battle — and I think everybody on this platform struggles with it as well — and I constantly push myself towards being in the camp of expressing whatever my truth is. If other people stop reading or unsubscribe, that’s great! They’re just not interested. It’s no skin off me and there’s plenty uv other fish in the sea for them to read instead.

Pierre with the lion

The other bad is the money. I suspect it’s just never really going to be there for most people on the platform and there is a bit of a pot-of-gold-at-the-end-of-the-dusty-road vision that brings a lot of people to Substack. I do think it’s important, before going the full MLM, to think through what the platform is about for you. I used to feel a bit guilty on behalf of the platform that I didn’t throw up more paywalls or put up more calls for paid subscriptions (but if you are a long-time subscriber and this is valuable to you, then pay up ya lazy ingrate!), but then I realized that Substack wasn’t particularly dependent on people like me, that the platform was doing fine and making enough from the top earners that those further down the food chain could sort of do whatever they wanted. And what I wanted was to make my Substack a ‘creative home,’ a mirror to my inner life, a sort of personal museum that I could keep indefinitely and could be proud of decades into the future. The premise was that lucre would always have to come from somewhere else. And this gets into the fundamental economic problem of Substack — which is that there are too many worthy newsletters that look just like each other, and so people tend to read only what’s free or, worse, to pay for the people whose names they recognize and who need the money least of all.

I don’t think there’s any real way around that problem actually. The way through has to do with creating a sense of ‘artificial scarcity,’ and, in a previous post, I’ve suggested leaning into ‘niches’ on this platform, but the real answer, I suspect, has more to do with channeling one’s ‘inner Pierre.’ You probably shouldn’t quit your day job to write on Substack and if you’re a professional writer you should probably keep ‘submitting’ and keep looking to place pieces outside the platform (I have to work to remind myself to do this). But if you don’t put too much pressure on yourself to earn from the platform — and don’t bend your writing to do so — then Substack is only upside. It’s already great. I think it’s only going to keep getting better. I regard it not as a successor to Twitter or Facebook or whatever. I regard it as an antidote to those platforms. The lack of word limit, as well as the control one has over one’s own feed, changes everything. It represents a once-or-twice-in-a-millennium chance to wrest back control over published written content from ‘professional publishers’ to actual writers and it represents a sort of unbelievable attempt, after two decades’ worth of quick-twitch digital content, to actually lengthen our attention spans again and to generate meaningful content. In an exchange I had recently with Anne Trubek on some of these questions, Anne said, “Fwiw I have no allegiance to Substack.” I don’t either. I regard what’s happening here to be bigger than Substack, but Substack is a vital, pioneering piece of it. It’s not just about a platform or its quality of content. It’s about really thinking through what content means to us in digital space and how we can make the internet work for us, rather than the other way around. It’s a revolution.