Dear Friends,
I’m sharing a sort of intramural post on the ‘meaning’ of Substack. At the partner site, Inner Life , Mary Tabor "Only connect ..." writes on Elie Wiesel and Tara Penry on the meaning of literature.
Best,
Sam
WHAT IS SUBSTACK FOR?": A MULTIPLE CHOICE
On Notes (which, by the way, is getting very good), the existential question keeps coming up: What is Substack? (Or what is Substack for?)
These are the possibilities as I see them:
A) Substack is a way to monetize writing. I’ve gotten into a couple of minor fights with Sarah Fay and James F. Richardsonover this point, but, of course, they’re not exactly wrong. What they’re arguing is the following syllogism: that since writing is labor, writers need to be paid for their labor, and there need to be sites that successfully monetize that transaction, with writers being savvy enough to make their writing marketable. That mindset is highly cognizant of Substack’s overhead cost in building its platform — the venture capital funding, the functionality tools, the advances paid out to big-name writers — and Substack’s need (if it is to stay alive) to earn it back through having enough writers with viable subscription plans. Those taking that position argue that — for the good of everybody! — writers need above all to think like entrepreneurs. They need to be aware of their target audience, to write pithily, to work the paywalls, and to treat themselves in some sense as a mini-ambassador of the Substack “brand”. In practice, what that seems to mean is hot tips for other writers, with the best tips hidden behind paywalls, and that’s led to consternation on Notes that Substack amounts to multi-level marketing.
B) That counter-argument, among the Notes faithful, is that the push to monetize, and to make easily-digestible content, weakens what is really special about Substack — the sense of community, the idea that Substack is a nice place to be weird and different and for a thousand flowers to bloom. In that view, the money is slightly beside the point. Substack, simply, is a great place to be a writer and to find other writers. Growth is, as Michael Mohr puts it, pretty much all just about putting out good content, being friendly within the community, and maybe doing the occasional spot of self-promotion. The vibe of this point of view is something of the ‘90s coffee house. There’s open mic night, everybody gets applauded and appreciated no matter what they do, and there’s opportunity to savor the gems. It’s hard to argue with any of that, except that money should show up sooner or later, and many of the people writing on Substack are professional (and/or are broke and need a paycheck) and coffeehouse goodwill only takes you so far. The particular concern with this way of thinking is that, with the tendency of the internet in its current incarnation to silo into separate platforms, Substack becomes another silo, and writers do their work here without wider reach.
C) The way to counteract that, another line of thinking goes, is to treat Substack as a base. It’s all good and well to work to build up subscribers and then to flip those subscribers paid, but the reality is that the vast majority of people with large Substack subscriberships already had a significant audience before coming to Substack, and it’s not sustainable to think that all of one’s growth can come within the platform. The model — and this applies most to the hustling freelancer — is to have different modes of distribution: to treat Substack as a ‘home game’ with a friendly crowd, with a built-in ability to experiment and to really write in one’s own voice; and then to also play ‘away games’ with editors and ‘house styles’ at different publications, but also paychecks. That sort of practical (although logorrheic) approach is far from a betrayal of the Substack model. It helps to legitimize Substack in the wider publishing world and creates a pleasantly dual sensibility: on the one hand, there’s old-style publishing with all-powerful editors, high barriers for entry, etc, and, on the other hand, there’s Substack, exemplar of the Web 2.0, and the two of them can exist harmoniously side by side.
D) I think, though, that Substack is more than that and Substack represents, really, a Revolution. Fundamentally, there’s a huge change happening in the world, which is what Martin Gurri calls the “Fifth Wave.” Gurri’s idea is that, for about six hundred years, since the invention of the printing press, we have been in a system where power in discourse belongs to those who are able to make copies and then distribute those copies. This results in the I-talk-you-listen model of discourse, and our artistic life involves a Hunger Games-ish dive to the mosh pit of whomever controls any of those means of amplification, with a successful artistic career being an ever-greater consolidation of one’s brand across all possible “airwaves” or modes of distribution. This whole mindset is so baked into us that it’s hard to remember how cruel and narcissistic it is as well as how contingent on currently-existing distributive technologies. Real artists seem always to exist in another mode, which is to have a “studio” — to be constantly making without necessarily even paying all that much attention to whether or not their work was distributed. (Brancusi would often casually toss away a sculpture that he had spent the day making. Klee apparently once made a thousand pictures in a year — far more than any art dealer, however industrious, could ever hope to sell.) That mindset was always seen to be peculiar, unworldly, but maybe it just was out of keeping with existing modes of distribution. With the internet — where there is no limit to the number of “copies” that can be made of a work, where two-way communication is possible, and the sense of artificial scarcity promoted by the communicative industries outmoded — it becomes possible for a person to be, as Deleuze put it, “a continuous producer of energy” and to do so not in isolation but as part of a robust, mutually-sustaining community. That’s putting recent developments — the blogosphere, the Web 2.0, Substack — rather grandly, but the point is that there is an opportunity to have a field for creative discourse that is in line with how artists (and intellectuals, etc) have always liked to operate but that has almost never exactly been available given the dominance of communicative industries. It’s a fairly narrow window and it’s very easy to fall back on old habits — the social media platforms circa 2015 all collectively seemed to forget that they were there just to provide web tools for their community and decided to move back into the role of an (extremely heavy-handed) publisher. What distinguishes Substack, far more than its business model, is what I take to be the very genuine idealism of its founders: no ads, no censorship, no arbitrary character limits, just a community by writers for readers. This creates possibilities for a very free exchange that is remiscent of writing in periods when the communicative industries were least dominant (the feuilleton culture of the Enlightenment era; the small press culture of modernism) and when literary styles and modes of thought were least restrained. That revolution, which I really believe in, goes well beyond Substack, although Substack is a very important, very interesting piece of the puzzle. In Notes, amidst all the positivity, all the cheerful community-building, there are hints of concern: the are-we-a-MML question, the are-we-just-a-‘90s-coffee-shop question, and I get all that and wrestle with it (and wrestle, too, with the fact that Substack is a start-up and that the monetization question can never be ignored), but what I would like to see more of is the Substack hardcore position, that Substack represents something really special and really revolutionary (the same impulses as the 2000s blogosphere but in a more consolidated form), which is the ability for writers to truly be themselves in their writing, to write continuously without depending on editors or publishers, and to do so always as part of a flourishing, self-sustaining community.
Thanks for consolidating these points of view. Maybe the observation that's given me pause here is the obligation to support the founders (and investors) who are making this forum possible. There will be enormous pressure at some point to monetize the investment. Things always change. Substack will change, too, and it may end up as a shadow of what it is now. Very early on in Facebook's life, there was a time when comments flourished. Long comments. Funny ones. Thoughtful ones. It was magical to me. I had been hungry for it, and then there it was. These were the days when no one was sure if Facebook could survive. These were also the days when what you saw in your feed was driven by your network of relationships, not an algorithm that needed to pay the bills. We should be mindful of the needs of the founders that this is a two-way street. Thanks for raising that or at least acknowledging the point of view there.
Ditto for the historical observation on the, let's call it tongue-in-cheek, publishers owning the 'means for production.' This is fascinating. The level of talent in the tiny writer's community that makes up the majority of what I read is so elevated, it astonishes me. This is one tiny constellation of stars in a vast sky. It's astounding. And beautiful. That my own work would sparkle there (and be seen and pointed to) is equally beautiful. I have spent years in the shadowy world of the unpublished, the nearly published, the maybe-someday-if world. That has changed here.
It has also revealed the Wizard of Ozian lie about publishing through its platform of bookstores and logos and editorial gatekeeping roundtables. The cognoscenti aren't capturing but a sliver of the cake that is out there. This is so easy to see now. That needs to be torn down, although it's collapsing already. A writer with a "platform" will be published in a heartbeat. I've had work submitted by agents and I'm convinced the manuscripts weren't even read in their entirety. It's not a crime, of course. It's a business, but it's a monopoly and Substack is a far greater threat right now to the world of publishing than the collapse of neighborhood bookstores (not to mention reading itself.) I'm quite sure that others feel differently, but I no longer give a shit about being published. It isn't actually what I'm up to. I have a near Zen indifference to it now. They're wrong. They don't see it. It's the Ballad of a Thin Man. The irony of all of this (and relevant to your piece) is that the platforms for some writers will grow to scales that getting published will be a no-brainer. The publishers really won't need to read the book. (Again, there is the nagging anxiety that Substack's investors won't benefit either.)
Substack needs to seriously, seriously, seriously look at how they can provide actual book publishing to writers so that they can sell directly through their pages. My personal best hope for monetization is not turning on a paywall, but selling a book through the site. I may at some point almost as a medium to provide content in a different form for digestion (not because there is anything intrinsically 'better' about merchandising a book).
I think there's an "E" to your list, though. The "E" is essentially a spiritual one. Substack is enabling beauty. It is a vast garden whose boundaries it is not possible to explore except through the web of recommendations and enthusiasm. My work sat in my desk for years. Years. I had fewer people read what I'd written than open my work within five minutes of publishing it here. I am heard. When, and if, I write something beautiful the world opens up a bit between myself and a reader. I am known. My reader is known. This is a beautifully open forum for which I'm grateful in a profound way.
I have other work now. It pays me far more than I could ever make as a writer (which is a pittance as we all know.) I write because any day I spend writing is a day of value in my life. I regret zero days at the page. None of them. Even the shit days are valuable and honorable and good. And while I write quickly (apologies here), I also use my time well. Perhaps incorrectly, I believe everyone on this platform can have a "day job" and still contribute something profound to this community and the larger world of interested, curious, and loving readers. E.B. White somewhere wrote that writers should have a day job or something to that effect. A writer doesn't need to be compensated from their writing to change the world. Let's not accept the falsehood that it is true. It simply is not.
Lastly, a final point, and I think a critical one:
If you asked people how much they would pay for a smile from a stranger as they walked down the street, they would answer $0. If you asked them what they would pay to have no smiles ever again when walking down the street they might give their life to heal that.
As writers -- honorable, talented, not talented -- we are smiling at others as they walk down the street and whether they pay us or not is irrelevant to the spiritual difference we are making in the world. My option "E" is simply to acknowledge that almost as a prayer and then get back to our keyboards.
This is a nice digest of positions, but I hope you'll forgive a potentially obtuse question. What exactly is the difference between B and D if the point is idealism and ultimate autonomy? The idealism you describe in D is really interchangeable with the coffee house vibe, isn't it? And if the revolution you describe in D is actually more about economic self-sufficiency, aren't you actually in the A camp?
Here's a logical wet blanket. From what I can tell, it's exceedingly rare to start at zero readers and build a primary income on Substack in less than, say, 5-7 years. But Substack is not forthcoming with aggregate data, so we are perpetually guessing based on curated anecdotes. The success stories that Substack amplifies typically involve writers or celebrities with significant name recognition (if not a large base of preexisting followers) who seem to embody the revolution you describe, but are often just having their cake and eating it too. Not many of those folks are giving up their connections with power brokers in commercial publishing houses, so Substack allows them to hedge their bets. That's great for them, but it's not really a blueprint for the masses. And until people start winning Pulitzers with their serialized Substack novels, I don't think we'll see the revolution you describe. Because a Pulitzer also represents posh visiting writer gigs, lucrative speaking engagements, and other economic or social rewards that Substack can't yet rival. Forgive me for squinting at the ostensible idealism in that model?
Sarah Fay represents the more proletarian path to financial independence through Substack, but this model frequently requires sacrifices comparable to what some writers already make to commercial publishers. You can't be too weird, your posts can't be too long, you have to do what everyone already does on LinkedIn -- pick a lane, stay on message, make clear value propositions. In my case, this would mean posting less frequently, emphasizing proof of concept for my coaching practice more regularly, offering live workshops and replays (which I'm open to trying), never writing about American greats like Phillis Wheatley, and basically scrapping all of my interviews, since people typically don't pay for interviews. There's nothing terribly idealistic about that path, either, even though it may offer more flexibility than a traditional 9-5, if it succeeds at scale. And the truth is that there isn't a set playbook -- nearly every practical suggestion is qualified with caveats about everything being an experiment, what works for one person not working for another person, and so on. The result is often a frustrating mix of "be yourself" and "offer a service people will pay for" without any concrete articulation of what that Ikigai actually is (because no one knows). And what if what you're best at and who you really want to be on this platform really isn't in demand? Tough luck for you. Community is your consolation prize.
The upshot, naturally, is that everyone has to make their own decisions, draw their own boundaries about what they're willing to prioritize or omit from their newsletter, forge their own ethos. But because the origin story of Substack is so deeply grounded in this myth of revolution, it's pretty hard to ignore. Most of us keep pressing into the dark, making some modest gains, wondering if we'll ever crack the code, wondering if we want our Substacks to turn into a commercial hustle, and nursing hidden pain about not being cool enough, no matter how much we fly our freak flags.
I say all this because one of the deepest disappointments in my transition out of academe into an independent writing life is that a lot of the games I didn't really want to play as a professor (convincing students that my employer offered a superior ROI on their tuition) are precisely the games that represent success on Substack (what is my value proposition to readers?). And the things that I was told no one wanted to pay for anymore (traditional humanities content) are still not things that most people consider worth a subscription upgrade, at least not at scale. The major difference, and one I do heartily appreciate, is that much of what I write and offer for free is read by a much more diverse community than anything I wrote as an academic. I feel less alone. That's something to celebrate. But I'll believe the revolution when I see it.