What I Learned From Editing Substack Reads
Tips, Market Research, Reflections
Dear Friends,
There a number of new people this week. Welcome! I had a really nice Substack week — in addition to Substack Reads I was a guest on Alexandru Constantin’s “Deceneus Journal” for a wide-ranging conversation on writing, Substack, AI, etc.
Best,
Sam
WHAT I LEARNED FROM EDITING SUBSTACK READS
I had the privilege of guest editing Substack Reads this week. This was something of an overwhelming experience actually and made me really reflect on Substack and on writing in general.
Most people who are reading this will be interested, above all, in knowing how they might get featured on Substack Reads, and it is a little different from how I might have thought of it going in. The main point to understand is that there is just an ocean of content on Substack — it’s all kinds of people writing about all kinds of things. There’s no possible way to sort through it all really, and so the triage that I found happening in my mind was to read less in the way that I normally would — what am I most interested in? what do I think is the best writing out there? — and instead to treat Substack Reads more as a communicative tool. It’s about engaging with a huge number of people who all have very different tastes but who have somewhat limited attention spans and are looking for something that hits them fairly directly. What I noticed pretty quickly — and this is after spending a couple of years wondering why my pieces were never selected for Substack Reads — is that I almost certainly wouldn’t have selected any of my pieces either: they tend to be long, idiosyncratic, and don’t deliver a clean punch. That doesn’t mean that I have any intention of writing my pieces any differently, but I do think it’s worth realizing that writing to reach a large, already-established audience is just a different form from the normal work we do of writing to reach a single solitary reader whom we usually envision as being somewhat similar to ourselves. In scrolling for material that I found to be a good fit for Substack Reads (often from sections of Substack that I wouldn’t normally visit), I kind of found myself hovering over a formula, which I’ve come to think of as “something for me, something for you.” The narrator tells the story of why they came to this piece — the more personal and honest the story, the better — and then the narrator offers a clear reason why the reader would benefit from the piece. A cooking piece I selected —
’s recipe for a Frangipane Crostata — is this formula at sort of its most clear-cut. Domenica tells her story, which couldn’t possibly matter to anybody cooking her crostata — it’s about her grandfather who was an Italian fiddle player — but it seems to be important for Domenica, and she tells is crisply and clearly, and then that makes us interested in the part of the piece, which is for us, i.e. the recipe. Just fyi, I found myself moving past a lot of the self-help, which was often wise but tended to get repetitive; and I found myself caring much less about literary style than I normally would and much more about clarity of presentation.My brief moment behind the looking glass was also an opportunity to do some unsolicited market research. Here are a few things I’ve noticed that I wouldn’t normally have thought about:
-I found that the best way to navigate around Substack is this page, which isn’t my normal starting point. My usual starting point is the app and then the newsletters delivered to my inbox, and since the people I read tend to comment and restack each other I ended up with this very parochial belief that I knew what was out there on Substack. But it turns out that I really didn’t, even in my own ‘categories.’ And my experience of doing Substack Reads sort of felt like Pac-Man or something, where I’d have a moment of tranquility in which I thought I’d kind of covered the options in a particular category only to then have some totally-wonderful post from some Substacker with like 20,000 subscribers suddenly come mashing across my screen — and not quite understanding how I’d missed them before. I do have the sense that Substack could benefit from having more of a ‘Substack Central’ — and the ‘Explore’ page seems like the best-available orientation point for that.
-Substack seems to skew older more than I had expected. Don’t get me wrong, this is great — I really appreciated having people who actually know something giving advice and reflecting on their lives — but it did make me wonder why there aren’t more young writers trying to launch their careers on Substack, which would seem like a natural use for the platform. The depressing hypothesis here is that there are just aren’t that many young writers trying to launch their careers — and, instead, they’re all creating dance videos on TikTok. But I suspect it’s more that the penny just hasn’t dropped for younger people about Substack. Maybe it’s that Substack is coded as heterodox or whatever and that’s off-putting for GenZers, maybe it’s that something about the recruitment tends to prioritize older, established writers with big names. What I do think Substack can do is really push its success stories. That may mean more badges and accolades for people as they pass different growth milestones; that may mean more of an organized structure of interviews for people as they hit milestones. It’s also possible that that promotion just has to come from the community. By the way, I liked doing Substack Reads so much that I’m going to try to do a regular version — just try to do a weekly or biweekly compilation on Notes of my favorite literary/cultural-type pieces of the preceding week. I could imagine people doing that sort of curation across all the categories — and a tremendous number of people seem to have gotten the same idea recently.
-The money is a challenge. And here just the sheer volume of offerings across Substack is bewildering and works against the monetization structure. I currently subscribe to 300 Substacks. In my week as guest editor, I must have found around 50 more that I really like. They are all totally worthy of my financial support, and there are too many of them for me to possibly pay. What tends to happen in those situations is that people pay for ‘brand familiarity’ — for the writers they know, who also happen to be the people who need the money the least. I’d imagine the way through this is to really lean into the ‘niche’ idea. There’s no way that I would pay for my 300 favorite Substacks, but it is just possible that I would find it in me to pay for my ’top ten literary Substacks,’ especially if somebody has done some conscientious work trying to curate that list and with particular emphasis on lesser-known writers.
And then the last set of takeaways from this experience is just thinking a bit more about writing and reading. What Substack is — in clearer form than anything in publishing in a couple of centuries — is a testament to what democratic expression looks like. If you believe in democracy, then you really do need to believe in Substack. It’s just wonderful what’s out there. I came across woodworkers reflecting on a lifetime of woodworking, an experienced Chief of Staff giving advice to other Chiefs of Staff (and since Chief of Staffs seem like very reasonable people, it was also a very sane, balanced Substack), a writer typing up a single page every single day, on a typewriter. I came across many people writing about their sexual assaults, an “autistic slut” doing market research on BDSM subtypes, fiction that was like nothing I’d ever seen before, original reporting from all over the world, heterodox thinking that was wilder than anything I’d encountered. And you can multiply that sense of marvel by the tens of thousands. There were no constraints on any of it — no editors, no character counts, no rapacious owners, no gun-shy advertisers. Most of the content is completely free and the dialogue on Notes, in comments, is almost universally civil and considerate. If you aren’t inspired by that, then you are inspired by nothing.
But everything has its flip side, and in the case of Substack, it’s that that outpouring of expression and quality work creates a sense of vertigo and is a blow to anybody’s individual sense of specialness. When I started on Substack, I had somewhere in my head the loose idea that Heather Cox Richardson was “the queen of Substack,” that it was a fairly small, fairly new place, and that it would be narcissistically possible to do what somebody like Richardson seemed to be doing and reach an audience across the platform. No longer! It’s kind of like thinking that you’re a settler somewhere and discovering that you’re actually in a vast, thriving civilization. I suppose what that should teach you is humility — but who the hell wants that? What the takeaway is for me instead is more of ‘finding my place’ within Substack. With thousands upon thousands of people writing, Substack virtually is its own publishing industry — with a freedom of writing, community approach, and speed of operation that are a considerable advantage over anything in traditional publishing or journalism. It’s still a new-enough form that it’s very much possible to curate the space that you want within the platform and to find your place in a dizzyingly-expanding society that is to a great extent still looking to find its internal architecture.
Very helpful context.
I experienced a similar ego check the first time I attended the AWP conference. It felt kind of typical of academia in general: a firehose of production, but very little consumption (nobody could possibly have been reading all the books I saw at those display tables). The effect was to make me (temporarily) want to stop writing altogether, because it seemed almost obscene to contribute more to that glut of content.
But Substack feels quite different. You can belong to a neighborhood and be a provincial in that way while also remaining in conversation with the big city. Your work on the small scale can be meaningful and sustaining in its own way without ever needing to be "discovered." My main challenge is to not give my creative energy ENTIRELY to Substack, because those immediate rewards can be powerful enemies to the incubation periods that books and longform work require.
I'm most interested in your recognition that there is a formula that seems to work, but that you don't plan to do anything differently. It's a good reminder that optimizing content for the platform is not why many of us brought our writing lives to Substack.