More or less on the same page here. What makes Substack the same as the others is that they, too, have to play by the dopamine rules. (I suspect they might also shadow-ban writers; it would be an easy "solution" to the "Nazi problem" from earlier) That ghost in the machine that needs you to feel validation from likes still dwells in there. I can't stand it. For that reason I no longer look at any of the metrics, except the ones in my inbox about each post.
I sure don't miss the submission process. While I did build up a nice little resume of published poems, I don't feel it brought me any closer to making anyone interested in a poetry collection. And while many journals were nice in terms of artistic setup, it's true that very little actually spoke to me. Of the big ones, only Tin House felt like it had different voices. But even then, many were simply the best-known creative writing program automatons. (Who, as you can imagine, are exactly the kind of people who would celebrate writing as something that employed you)
Unloading the backlog of unpublished writings are the best part. A writer needs to keep the pipes flowing.
Cheers to all that. I should check out Tin House! In general, some part of me dies any time I open up a literary magazine. It's interesting why that's the case. And, yes, to clearing out backlogs! Even very successful writers tend to have backlogs of work that never come out. Always a bit sad to think about that.
This was great piece for me to read, helped me to expand my ideas on what Substack is about in several contexts. Love your unflinching summary of how modern publishing works, ('ve been around a while: when it started being "the publishing industry" rather than just "publishing" I perceived we were in trouble). Justifies my decision to be a non-participant. Appreciate the work you've put in on this just-the-right-length essay (i.e. has the number of words you needed for the treatment you wanted to give your subject).
Thank you Pauline! I guess if there's one thing in the world that I'm genuinely unhappy about (that could be different than it is) it's how everything became an 'industry.' I think this is a fairly recent phenomenon actually, but it's just become the air everyone breathes. Art and culture are understood to be a career first and foremost and just that very fact alone is so deeply inimical to genuine expression. - Sam
Absolutely. I first noted the "industrialisation" of artistic practice reflected in public commentary during the '80's. We got the arts industry being talked about and then the aged care industry, the child-care industry, the beauty industry, etc. The 'commodification' of humans and human endeavours. So conceptualisation of artistic practice has been transformed, not a person giving expression to inspiration in artistic form but a specialised operative attempting to produce economic value ("the arts industry is worth $10 bn annually"). Horrible, isn't it?
Haha. Your stats are more generous than my stats! But I think genuine freedom in writing is vastly more important than 'quality.' (Although, interestingly, relatively few writers on Substack - even with absolutely no external hindrances whatsoever - allow themselves to be genuinely free. Maybe it's because genuine freedom is impossible for humans?) At this stage I would much rather browse through Substack than some lit or political mag even if I know that the lit mag is more carefully 'curated.'
Absolute freedom begets anarchy. Beauty, Truth, Love, can only be born of limits. Having pronounced that, yes I agree, browsing through Substack is a much rather type of thing.
Congrats! I had no idea that writing was such a brutal endeavor. I guess all creative industries are like that. When I lived in Berkeley my boss quipped “for the amount of time we spent in the water, we might as well live in Kansas”. I’ve long felt that for the amount of time I spend designing (as an architect) I “might as well live in Kansas”. Seems similar in your world.
And agreed, if one has the luxury of not needing to monetize, this is an amazing platform! But even then, the temptation to game is delectable, Such is the siren song of all “platforms”…but at least this place lets use carve out our own eddies, only tangentially tied to the popular currents of the day.
Agreed to all that. And yes I find it to be brutal! I think at bottom writing is basically an ego-dissolving activity, like some sort of extreme meditation or psychedelic trip. You try to state the 'truth' of yourself and it turns out to be, like, impossible. But it's also, fundamentally, better than anything else except maybe music or acting.
I agree with absolutely all the points you have outlined here. If you are writing on Substack to simply practice the craft of writing, letting go of perfectionism and connect to an inspiring writing community, Substack is a wonderful place to be. I have also long believed that writers/ artists should be supportive of each other’s work, and this is so easy to do here with a comment, share, restack or subscription. I personally love longer reads with some depth (which is why I’m not on twitter or instagram). I rather read a piece that has something to say than short, cute pieces that feel like “junk food” to me. I love high quality literature and there is a lot of it here. And you are right about the publishing world as well. It’s brutal. I have published poems on Substack that had been rejected by literary magazines and received the warmest of responses. So this really helps the fragile writer’s ego :)
Lovely post Imola! Yeah, if you go through enough rejections to outlets, you end up feeling like the absolute lowest form of life. Substack really helps you to see that it's 'not you it's them.' There's just a galaxy of good, interesting, sincere work out there that for no very clear reason doesn't fit into the rubrics of the lit mags or publishing industry. Also because the lit mags are so narrow, everybody gets into this cutthroat mindset, and it's envy/resentment that, deep down, drives so much of the industry. It doesn't actually have to be like that! And it does take some eye-rubbing to realize that it's possible, on a platform like this, to see good work that gets just genuinely appreciated as a part of a wide-rangingly supportive community. Cheers! - Sam
Enjoyed this, Sam. Too many good lines to quote, but this one lands: "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." The fact that you and many other writers I admire have the same revulsion for much of what sees print in lauded lit mags is helpful (as I write about today, I've wondered if I might be turning into a curmudgeon too soon). That definitely was not true when I was starting out in 2003, 2004. But when you have gatekeepers, there is always a change of the guard, and I am not in step with the current guard. When I've had a lucky break, such as with The Missouri Review two years ago, it's always with an editor on the verge of retirement. Oh well.
Your point about the back channel is totally true about agents. Cold queries just don't work unless you're writing mass market stuff. It's the same as what people are saying about the job market now on LinkedIn -- a referral increases your odds of an interview 7X. I think referrals are almost the only way to find an agent now for writers with our sensibilities.
The main challenge I have is that there can be a feeling of stagnation on Substack. I can keep experimenting, doing my thing, satisfying my own curiosity. But I don't want to just play in my little Substack sandbox, even if it's much bigger than the lit mag sandbox I used to frequent. So I'll feel like Substack has actually achieved a revolution when what I write here opens up more of those external possibilities -- or when I learn how to better leverage it for that purpose.
Josh, yeah you and I definitely have a long-running optimist/pessimist debate. I agree with you that Substack seems to have run into some structural limits. The big one is that it just hasn't really opened up to ordinary readers - who can't quite themselves oriented on the platform and who seem to prefer reading like a half-dozen or dozen well-reviewed books a year. Without a sea of readers like that, it's very difficult for the money to show up - and certainly not beyond the absolute top-tier of Substack publications.
I'm also becoming probably a bit more curmudgeonly than I should. There's still lots of great stuff that finds its way into traditional publication, and the literary magazines may not be quite as bad as I'm making them out. But it's a pretty dark scene out there! I think the "high-brow" gatekeepers have an aesthetic that has nothing to do, certainly, with my own. And I've been on a real losing streak recently in the commercial reading that I've been doing - just one stinker of a novel after another, all of them, needless to say, lavishly praised and promoted. I'm absolutely convinced that Substack represents a better way, both for creatives and for the quality of work. But it's still early days for what all this can turn into.
You covered a lot of topics! The one I think about most is that of "success" in traditional terms vs. other benchmarks of success. Traditional benchmarks of success are also those that are most easily measured. The datafication of our culture means we value what we measure more than what we can't. It's a mental and spiritual shortcut that also leads to the enshittification of everything that it touches.
The quantifiable, and, therefore, the only thing that most people care about: number of subscribers, number of reads, number of shares, number of paid subscribers, number of non-paying subscribers.
The non-quantifiable, but also, the most important: The joy and relief the author felt at creating something unconstrained by gatekeepers or people in the middle who add nothing, the spiritual practice of channeling creativity and working hard at something because it matters, the interpersonal value of making a real friend in a community of people who share their work together, the connection of writer and reader that meaningful changes both of their lives, the freedom of shrugging off the tyranny of the afore-mentioned benchmarkes and writing without worrying about results, the sense, for those inclined, that some work is a form of secular or religious prayer and devotion.
Writing and art are a business in that they can both be commodified. But that's not why many of us create art or write. We do it for other reasons that defy benchmarks. The intersection of art and business has always created tension, and this platform is pulling things in a better direction that both favors creators and diminishes the status of legacy bencharks like publishing houses, reviews, and other older forms of distribution that became their own tier of measures, independent of both categories I listed above.
Thank you Sean! I really share with you the sense that this is basically a religious activity and that nobody can ever quantify religious sentiment (although the Catholic Church has, at different points in its history, come very close to doing so!). The problem with capitalism, neoliberalism, dataism, the monoculture - whatever you want to call it - is that it has a way of swallowing up all possible free space. Why this is is a bit mysterious to me. I like to think that it's all a trick of the mind and it's possible just to do undo that trick. That may be fundamentally very naive of me, but I still prefer to think that. I really don't want to live in a monoculture that insists on swallowing up all genuine expression. - Sam
Really nice post, Sam. I've been hesistant to fully buy into the Substack-changes-everything paradigm mostly because it feels too good to be true, and maybe also because I worry about jinxing it or something, but it's certainly been all upside for me so far.
I still have a few traditional magazines on my bucket list that I'd write for mostly for the sake of writing for them -- New Yorker, New York Review of Books, New York Times Magazine -- but otherwise it's getting harder and harder to justify to myself going through the editorial process when I can just hit publish on Substack and it's out in the world.
Even on the money side, it's feeling like Substack is the better investment than writing for most magazines. I'm with you in the "dozens of paid subscribers" bucket, but the trend line is going in the right direction on that front, and I can foresee a not too distant future where I'm making, say, $10k a year on Substack, which isn't remotely a living but is more than I've ever made as a freelancer anyway.
I continue to be an advocate for having a day job and doing one's own writing on the side, so that the economics of it all aren't so anxiety (and often conformity) producing. One tricky thing about that plan, though, is that I think it's very very hard for most people to write enough over a long enough period of time to attain the skill and confidence to where they can plausibly build an audience on a platform like substack. It's only self-sustaining in the long run if you're good enough to build that audience and get the feedback. None of us is truly an island.
I had the good fortune to have a few years writing professionally when I was in my early 20s, so that when I switched to doing it on the side I already had an identity as a writer, and the practice of writing regularly, and the chance to hone my skills, and a book contract. I think the jury is out whether Substack can be a viable ecosystem in which a young but rough talent can get the support and feedback and validation and prestige he or she needs to mature over time, or whether the literary journal/magazine/newspaper ecosystem is, for all its flaws, a better incubator of talent.
Thank you Daniel! Yeah, I think that's right - it would be a bad idea to quit one's day job to write for Substack (unless, famously, you're Bari Weiss).
Substack really should be better in the building-careers front. There's a whole space that Substack hasn't gotten into and probably should. That's setting up some sort of exchange so that people offering services in lit world - whether that's proofreading manuscripts or book doctoring or leading workshops or organizing book clubs - can connect with people who want those services. Different people do it in their own, but I suspect that Substack is leaving a lot of money on the table by not moving into that space. Somewhere in there, I suspect, would also be competitions and prizes and ways to help incubate the careers of writers. I'm enough of a purist that part of me is glad Substack hasn't moved into any of that, but the tradeoff is that, for most of us, Substack remains a place where we post for fun and then our income has to come from somewhere else. I can imagine a scenario where Substack becomes a self-contained ecosystem - much the way the publishing world is now but more transparent and more digital.
@Ted Gioia said to me at one point that one key thing that Substack needs to have in order to legitimize itself in the eyes of the professional journalism and publishing world are prizes. Ideally prizes with some real money behind them, as well as a good publicity campaign.
I've been thinking about that. I really detest prizes so would be loath to see Substack adopt them, but, certainly, if "The Substacks" came out annually, that would be a big deal in the literary world and even more so going forward.
Publicity is a challenge. I'm confident that I haven't seen a single piece of positive press for Substack in any "mainstream" publication, which is insane. It's thousands and thousands of writers, including some of the biggest writers in the world, and if you read The New York Times let alone The Atlantic you would have no idea.
It's very strange. I'm sure you, like me, have a fair number of mainstream writers and editors among your subscribers. Everybody knows that it's a dynamic space, but there's a resistance to legitimizing it.
Yes to all your points. One more: Substack inspires me to become a better writer through sustained connection with readers who appreciate voice, word craft and storytelling. A skilled writer can toss off a Facebook post and make an impression with people who weren’t expecting such a rarity on that platform. On Substack readers have higher expectations. Once they get to know what you do, they want you to bring your best work. This is how your best keeps getting better.
That's right! I remember when Facebook was such a wasteland that any halfway-interesting post had a real chance of going viral. Here it's like this so much stuff is coming out all the time that virality is less of a phenomenon since people are just ready to move on to the next thing. I agree with you that that's for the best! It's also changed the way I think about writing. It's NOT about trying to write this one thing that's like the best thing anybody has ever said ever - which is implicitly what publishing is all about - but about just being yourself and having a steady exchange with readers, whom you support as well. It's a much healthier mindset, all in all.
Great article, Sam, and Congratulations on your second Substack anniversary. My first will be this coming August, and it’s been a pleasure writing my own stuff and reading the extraordinary work of so many other talented writers.
I've joined Substack because I long for long (or at least, longer) reads. I'm so tired of short blips on other platforms that don't satisfy. So here I am.
Cheers to that Helen! The era of Facebook/Twitter/Instagram was such an insult to all of our intelligences. It's so nice to see that people are so much more than that. The internet is such a natural home for creativity and idiosyncrasy. It was really terrible to see everybody forget about that in the era of Web 2.0.
More or less on the same page here. What makes Substack the same as the others is that they, too, have to play by the dopamine rules. (I suspect they might also shadow-ban writers; it would be an easy "solution" to the "Nazi problem" from earlier) That ghost in the machine that needs you to feel validation from likes still dwells in there. I can't stand it. For that reason I no longer look at any of the metrics, except the ones in my inbox about each post.
I sure don't miss the submission process. While I did build up a nice little resume of published poems, I don't feel it brought me any closer to making anyone interested in a poetry collection. And while many journals were nice in terms of artistic setup, it's true that very little actually spoke to me. Of the big ones, only Tin House felt like it had different voices. But even then, many were simply the best-known creative writing program automatons. (Who, as you can imagine, are exactly the kind of people who would celebrate writing as something that employed you)
Unloading the backlog of unpublished writings are the best part. A writer needs to keep the pipes flowing.
Definitely need to blow through my backlog. Gotta get back on equilibrium after starting my new job but totally feel you there.
Cheers Justus. And congratulations on the new job!
Thanks! Three weeks in and so far so good!
Cheers to all that. I should check out Tin House! In general, some part of me dies any time I open up a literary magazine. It's interesting why that's the case. And, yes, to clearing out backlogs! Even very successful writers tend to have backlogs of work that never come out. Always a bit sad to think about that.
This was great piece for me to read, helped me to expand my ideas on what Substack is about in several contexts. Love your unflinching summary of how modern publishing works, ('ve been around a while: when it started being "the publishing industry" rather than just "publishing" I perceived we were in trouble). Justifies my decision to be a non-participant. Appreciate the work you've put in on this just-the-right-length essay (i.e. has the number of words you needed for the treatment you wanted to give your subject).
Thank you Pauline! I guess if there's one thing in the world that I'm genuinely unhappy about (that could be different than it is) it's how everything became an 'industry.' I think this is a fairly recent phenomenon actually, but it's just become the air everyone breathes. Art and culture are understood to be a career first and foremost and just that very fact alone is so deeply inimical to genuine expression. - Sam
Absolutely. I first noted the "industrialisation" of artistic practice reflected in public commentary during the '80's. We got the arts industry being talked about and then the aged care industry, the child-care industry, the beauty industry, etc. The 'commodification' of humans and human endeavours. So conceptualisation of artistic practice has been transformed, not a person giving expression to inspiration in artistic form but a specialised operative attempting to produce economic value ("the arts industry is worth $10 bn annually"). Horrible, isn't it?
Maybe 30% crap. 60% in need of editing to various degrees, and 10% solid gold. I like those odds. It's a good place to be.
Haha. Your stats are more generous than my stats! But I think genuine freedom in writing is vastly more important than 'quality.' (Although, interestingly, relatively few writers on Substack - even with absolutely no external hindrances whatsoever - allow themselves to be genuinely free. Maybe it's because genuine freedom is impossible for humans?) At this stage I would much rather browse through Substack than some lit or political mag even if I know that the lit mag is more carefully 'curated.'
Absolute freedom begets anarchy. Beauty, Truth, Love, can only be born of limits. Having pronounced that, yes I agree, browsing through Substack is a much rather type of thing.
Congrats! I had no idea that writing was such a brutal endeavor. I guess all creative industries are like that. When I lived in Berkeley my boss quipped “for the amount of time we spent in the water, we might as well live in Kansas”. I’ve long felt that for the amount of time I spend designing (as an architect) I “might as well live in Kansas”. Seems similar in your world.
And agreed, if one has the luxury of not needing to monetize, this is an amazing platform! But even then, the temptation to game is delectable, Such is the siren song of all “platforms”…but at least this place lets use carve out our own eddies, only tangentially tied to the popular currents of the day.
Agreed to all that. And yes I find it to be brutal! I think at bottom writing is basically an ego-dissolving activity, like some sort of extreme meditation or psychedelic trip. You try to state the 'truth' of yourself and it turns out to be, like, impossible. But it's also, fundamentally, better than anything else except maybe music or acting.
In today’s world, freedom to write on an engaging platform come what may looks like a pot of gold to me. Great work, Sam.
Thanks Adrian!
Congrats Sam!
Thank you Ben!
I agree with absolutely all the points you have outlined here. If you are writing on Substack to simply practice the craft of writing, letting go of perfectionism and connect to an inspiring writing community, Substack is a wonderful place to be. I have also long believed that writers/ artists should be supportive of each other’s work, and this is so easy to do here with a comment, share, restack or subscription. I personally love longer reads with some depth (which is why I’m not on twitter or instagram). I rather read a piece that has something to say than short, cute pieces that feel like “junk food” to me. I love high quality literature and there is a lot of it here. And you are right about the publishing world as well. It’s brutal. I have published poems on Substack that had been rejected by literary magazines and received the warmest of responses. So this really helps the fragile writer’s ego :)
Lovely post Imola! Yeah, if you go through enough rejections to outlets, you end up feeling like the absolute lowest form of life. Substack really helps you to see that it's 'not you it's them.' There's just a galaxy of good, interesting, sincere work out there that for no very clear reason doesn't fit into the rubrics of the lit mags or publishing industry. Also because the lit mags are so narrow, everybody gets into this cutthroat mindset, and it's envy/resentment that, deep down, drives so much of the industry. It doesn't actually have to be like that! And it does take some eye-rubbing to realize that it's possible, on a platform like this, to see good work that gets just genuinely appreciated as a part of a wide-rangingly supportive community. Cheers! - Sam
Well done, totally agree, and good job for not letting the fact that you have a paid tier turn you into a huckster for it.
Thank you Tom!
Enjoyed this, Sam. Too many good lines to quote, but this one lands: "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." The fact that you and many other writers I admire have the same revulsion for much of what sees print in lauded lit mags is helpful (as I write about today, I've wondered if I might be turning into a curmudgeon too soon). That definitely was not true when I was starting out in 2003, 2004. But when you have gatekeepers, there is always a change of the guard, and I am not in step with the current guard. When I've had a lucky break, such as with The Missouri Review two years ago, it's always with an editor on the verge of retirement. Oh well.
Your point about the back channel is totally true about agents. Cold queries just don't work unless you're writing mass market stuff. It's the same as what people are saying about the job market now on LinkedIn -- a referral increases your odds of an interview 7X. I think referrals are almost the only way to find an agent now for writers with our sensibilities.
The main challenge I have is that there can be a feeling of stagnation on Substack. I can keep experimenting, doing my thing, satisfying my own curiosity. But I don't want to just play in my little Substack sandbox, even if it's much bigger than the lit mag sandbox I used to frequent. So I'll feel like Substack has actually achieved a revolution when what I write here opens up more of those external possibilities -- or when I learn how to better leverage it for that purpose.
Josh, yeah you and I definitely have a long-running optimist/pessimist debate. I agree with you that Substack seems to have run into some structural limits. The big one is that it just hasn't really opened up to ordinary readers - who can't quite themselves oriented on the platform and who seem to prefer reading like a half-dozen or dozen well-reviewed books a year. Without a sea of readers like that, it's very difficult for the money to show up - and certainly not beyond the absolute top-tier of Substack publications.
I'm also becoming probably a bit more curmudgeonly than I should. There's still lots of great stuff that finds its way into traditional publication, and the literary magazines may not be quite as bad as I'm making them out. But it's a pretty dark scene out there! I think the "high-brow" gatekeepers have an aesthetic that has nothing to do, certainly, with my own. And I've been on a real losing streak recently in the commercial reading that I've been doing - just one stinker of a novel after another, all of them, needless to say, lavishly praised and promoted. I'm absolutely convinced that Substack represents a better way, both for creatives and for the quality of work. But it's still early days for what all this can turn into.
Brevity is the soul of wit. Never forget.
Lol!
You covered a lot of topics! The one I think about most is that of "success" in traditional terms vs. other benchmarks of success. Traditional benchmarks of success are also those that are most easily measured. The datafication of our culture means we value what we measure more than what we can't. It's a mental and spiritual shortcut that also leads to the enshittification of everything that it touches.
The quantifiable, and, therefore, the only thing that most people care about: number of subscribers, number of reads, number of shares, number of paid subscribers, number of non-paying subscribers.
The non-quantifiable, but also, the most important: The joy and relief the author felt at creating something unconstrained by gatekeepers or people in the middle who add nothing, the spiritual practice of channeling creativity and working hard at something because it matters, the interpersonal value of making a real friend in a community of people who share their work together, the connection of writer and reader that meaningful changes both of their lives, the freedom of shrugging off the tyranny of the afore-mentioned benchmarkes and writing without worrying about results, the sense, for those inclined, that some work is a form of secular or religious prayer and devotion.
Writing and art are a business in that they can both be commodified. But that's not why many of us create art or write. We do it for other reasons that defy benchmarks. The intersection of art and business has always created tension, and this platform is pulling things in a better direction that both favors creators and diminishes the status of legacy bencharks like publishing houses, reviews, and other older forms of distribution that became their own tier of measures, independent of both categories I listed above.
Thank you Sean! I really share with you the sense that this is basically a religious activity and that nobody can ever quantify religious sentiment (although the Catholic Church has, at different points in its history, come very close to doing so!). The problem with capitalism, neoliberalism, dataism, the monoculture - whatever you want to call it - is that it has a way of swallowing up all possible free space. Why this is is a bit mysterious to me. I like to think that it's all a trick of the mind and it's possible just to do undo that trick. That may be fundamentally very naive of me, but I still prefer to think that. I really don't want to live in a monoculture that insists on swallowing up all genuine expression. - Sam
Really nice post, Sam. I've been hesistant to fully buy into the Substack-changes-everything paradigm mostly because it feels too good to be true, and maybe also because I worry about jinxing it or something, but it's certainly been all upside for me so far.
I still have a few traditional magazines on my bucket list that I'd write for mostly for the sake of writing for them -- New Yorker, New York Review of Books, New York Times Magazine -- but otherwise it's getting harder and harder to justify to myself going through the editorial process when I can just hit publish on Substack and it's out in the world.
Even on the money side, it's feeling like Substack is the better investment than writing for most magazines. I'm with you in the "dozens of paid subscribers" bucket, but the trend line is going in the right direction on that front, and I can foresee a not too distant future where I'm making, say, $10k a year on Substack, which isn't remotely a living but is more than I've ever made as a freelancer anyway.
I continue to be an advocate for having a day job and doing one's own writing on the side, so that the economics of it all aren't so anxiety (and often conformity) producing. One tricky thing about that plan, though, is that I think it's very very hard for most people to write enough over a long enough period of time to attain the skill and confidence to where they can plausibly build an audience on a platform like substack. It's only self-sustaining in the long run if you're good enough to build that audience and get the feedback. None of us is truly an island.
I had the good fortune to have a few years writing professionally when I was in my early 20s, so that when I switched to doing it on the side I already had an identity as a writer, and the practice of writing regularly, and the chance to hone my skills, and a book contract. I think the jury is out whether Substack can be a viable ecosystem in which a young but rough talent can get the support and feedback and validation and prestige he or she needs to mature over time, or whether the literary journal/magazine/newspaper ecosystem is, for all its flaws, a better incubator of talent.
Thank you Daniel! Yeah, I think that's right - it would be a bad idea to quit one's day job to write for Substack (unless, famously, you're Bari Weiss).
Substack really should be better in the building-careers front. There's a whole space that Substack hasn't gotten into and probably should. That's setting up some sort of exchange so that people offering services in lit world - whether that's proofreading manuscripts or book doctoring or leading workshops or organizing book clubs - can connect with people who want those services. Different people do it in their own, but I suspect that Substack is leaving a lot of money on the table by not moving into that space. Somewhere in there, I suspect, would also be competitions and prizes and ways to help incubate the careers of writers. I'm enough of a purist that part of me is glad Substack hasn't moved into any of that, but the tradeoff is that, for most of us, Substack remains a place where we post for fun and then our income has to come from somewhere else. I can imagine a scenario where Substack becomes a self-contained ecosystem - much the way the publishing world is now but more transparent and more digital.
@Ted Gioia said to me at one point that one key thing that Substack needs to have in order to legitimize itself in the eyes of the professional journalism and publishing world are prizes. Ideally prizes with some real money behind them, as well as a good publicity campaign.
I've been thinking about that. I really detest prizes so would be loath to see Substack adopt them, but, certainly, if "The Substacks" came out annually, that would be a big deal in the literary world and even more so going forward.
Publicity is a challenge. I'm confident that I haven't seen a single piece of positive press for Substack in any "mainstream" publication, which is insane. It's thousands and thousands of writers, including some of the biggest writers in the world, and if you read The New York Times let alone The Atlantic you would have no idea.
It's very strange. I'm sure you, like me, have a fair number of mainstream writers and editors among your subscribers. Everybody knows that it's a dynamic space, but there's a resistance to legitimizing it.
Yes to all your points. One more: Substack inspires me to become a better writer through sustained connection with readers who appreciate voice, word craft and storytelling. A skilled writer can toss off a Facebook post and make an impression with people who weren’t expecting such a rarity on that platform. On Substack readers have higher expectations. Once they get to know what you do, they want you to bring your best work. This is how your best keeps getting better.
I agree Rona. Writing on Substack has become a great motivator to improve my writing. There's pressure as well. But it's my own pressure.
Agreed!
That's right! I remember when Facebook was such a wasteland that any halfway-interesting post had a real chance of going viral. Here it's like this so much stuff is coming out all the time that virality is less of a phenomenon since people are just ready to move on to the next thing. I agree with you that that's for the best! It's also changed the way I think about writing. It's NOT about trying to write this one thing that's like the best thing anybody has ever said ever - which is implicitly what publishing is all about - but about just being yourself and having a steady exchange with readers, whom you support as well. It's a much healthier mindset, all in all.
Great article, Sam, and Congratulations on your second Substack anniversary. My first will be this coming August, and it’s been a pleasure writing my own stuff and reading the extraordinary work of so many other talented writers.
Thank you Paul! Happy early anniversary!
I've joined Substack because I long for long (or at least, longer) reads. I'm so tired of short blips on other platforms that don't satisfy. So here I am.
Cheers to that Helen! The era of Facebook/Twitter/Instagram was such an insult to all of our intelligences. It's so nice to see that people are so much more than that. The internet is such a natural home for creativity and idiosyncrasy. It was really terrible to see everybody forget about that in the era of Web 2.0.
This was a great read—thank you.
Thank you Margaret!