Dear Sam, Thanks for this very thoughtful essay. I too have pondered the questions of Substack. I like to think, or dream, that it could foster a new publishing industry and be the one place where writers or creators -- photographers, painters, musicians -- could actually make a good living by attracting 1000+ supporters paying $5 a month or $60 a year, from a supportive online community. I too have been impressed in recent months by Substack Notes and by the way it helps me grow my Substack by several new subscribers or followers per day. And yet it is still slow-going in terms of the amount of time and work I have put into it -- if one thinks of writing as work -- and the financial return. I -- we -- have not been "discovered" by mass media. Viral posts or multiple hits and exposure in legacy media are still necessary to grow it.
PS -- I have a colleague who has written a very fine memoir and recently got a publishing contract. But given the realities of modern publishing, unless her book miraculously rockets to a bestseller list, she is far more likely to make money from 1,000 true fans on Substack than from her book.
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.
I don't see any conflict among the various "choices."
The existential choice, however, is monetization, because Substack needs revenues, probably rapidly increasing revenues, to thrive, if not to continue to exist. That choice, that priority, has to come first.
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.
Well put; I choose option C but can completely sympathize with your preferred option D—although I see it as a correction rather than a revolution, a return to a way of doing things that worked just fine until we all got distracted by the social-media-centered mode of being a writer. The money question is indeed troubling but I'm happy to just enjoy the cruise for as long as the ship can keep sailing.
Thank you, Sam, for this excellent post and for the shout-out. My answer is (E) All of the Above. As you note, Substack needs (A) the entrepreneurs, and I am grateful for them keeping the doors open for everyone. This has many differences from multi-level marketing. It's more like an ecosystem because not only do folks (B) (C) and (D) benefit from the hustle of (A) to keep the place open to everyone, but at the same time, the (A) people benefit from the artsy vibe and independence of (B) (C) and (D) - not just from the potential client pool. The Substack brand and image benefits from the coexistence of all of these purposes. I hope Notes will always welcome and celebrate all of this.
The better comparison than MLM for folks who sell services to fellow writers on Substack is the huge, lucrative, and necessary business-to-business (b2b) segment of the economy. Levi Strauss made good money selling tough denim jeans to miners in the California Gold Rush. Wells Fargo did well providing a safe place for Levi Strauss and other b2b entrepreneurs to stash their earnings. Famously, most miners made "grub wages" or not. Gold Rush wealth concentrated in B2B services. I'm no economist, but it's my understanding that the B2B economic segment is usually more profitable than direct-to-consumer business. This is what we see on Substack, not MLM (where an upper tier gets commissions from the lower tier and no product or service is actually for sale). Now, if the real objection is to concentration of wealth for any reason, that's another essay. :-)
Thank you for spelling out so engagingly what many of us are thinking about as we plot our own vision and mission. It's much better when we don't invent our goals in isolation from each other.
More than anything else, your article gave me permission to be what I organically am: an idealist. Thanks for that. It can be hard to maintain that sense of possibility in a world that's constantly calling for us to be "realists" (read: pessimists).
I think that a point you made in passing bears more emphasis in the conversation on the platform, that Substack is one piece of a larger puzzle. Many similar platforms have come before it: Blogger, Tumblr, Medium, etc. I was drawn to this one because of the quality of company (the Big Names you mentioned, George Saunders specifically) and stayed because that company kept getting better as I connected with you and other, lesser known writers. And because I enjoyed the aesthetic and function of the site. But I'm not ready to hang all my hopes on it yet. The "start-up" element keeps me trepidatious.
Thanks for this essay categorizing the different sorts of users. I'm firmly in the Weird-Stack camp, but as a free (and non-charging) user, I acknowledge someone has to keep the lights on. So I don't begrudge the more professional users (either direct to readers or helping other writers)...though I've been careful in trying to indulge in the meta-conversation too much. I spent a chunk of Sunday crafting my subscriptions and Notes feed to focus on the eclectic wonderful around us, almost like a personal literary/arts magazine.
But as a moth to the flame, I can't avoid a good article trying to dissect this little moment in time. It's a lot of fun right now and I hope it lasts for a long while!
YES to everything you've said here! I have nothing to add. Now I'm going off to think about it. When I surface I hope I'll have the answer to your question.
All well and good, Sam, but let me put in a subscriber’s word. “(C) is king” because we only have so much money and time and that scarcity will become yours. While my substack payouts now eclipse my MSM dues, I can still only handle so much, especially when I really want to ignore the whole f*ckfest every second day or so.
Thanks for the shoutout. Well-written thoughts on the platform. I think you're right that we're all still figuring out exactly what Substack is. And of course to some degree it'll always be different things for different people, depending on your background, experience, goals, etc. I think you're largely correct about gaining followers: It's mostly the people who come to SS with thousands, if not tens of thousands, in their email list already. Or they're already famous (Junot Diaz, Sherman Alexie, Sheryl Strayed, etc.) That said I am building up a nice, steady little following. (As you are, too.) Think about where we could be in 5, 10 years. I see the long, slow build.
Nineties coffee house? Maybe. But the best and brightest will stand up above the fray.
Long live the Revolution!
Dear Sam, Thanks for this very thoughtful essay. I too have pondered the questions of Substack. I like to think, or dream, that it could foster a new publishing industry and be the one place where writers or creators -- photographers, painters, musicians -- could actually make a good living by attracting 1000+ supporters paying $5 a month or $60 a year, from a supportive online community. I too have been impressed in recent months by Substack Notes and by the way it helps me grow my Substack by several new subscribers or followers per day. And yet it is still slow-going in terms of the amount of time and work I have put into it -- if one thinks of writing as work -- and the financial return. I -- we -- have not been "discovered" by mass media. Viral posts or multiple hits and exposure in legacy media are still necessary to grow it.
PS -- I have a colleague who has written a very fine memoir and recently got a publishing contract. But given the realities of modern publishing, unless her book miraculously rockets to a bestseller list, she is far more likely to make money from 1,000 true fans on Substack than from her book.
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.
I don't see any conflict among the various "choices."
The existential choice, however, is monetization, because Substack needs revenues, probably rapidly increasing revenues, to thrive, if not to continue to exist. That choice, that priority, has to come first.
At least it's a platform that corresponds to my desires for my web presence. I haven't found too many others like it.
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.
Well put; I choose option C but can completely sympathize with your preferred option D—although I see it as a correction rather than a revolution, a return to a way of doing things that worked just fine until we all got distracted by the social-media-centered mode of being a writer. The money question is indeed troubling but I'm happy to just enjoy the cruise for as long as the ship can keep sailing.
Thank you, Sam, for this excellent post and for the shout-out. My answer is (E) All of the Above. As you note, Substack needs (A) the entrepreneurs, and I am grateful for them keeping the doors open for everyone. This has many differences from multi-level marketing. It's more like an ecosystem because not only do folks (B) (C) and (D) benefit from the hustle of (A) to keep the place open to everyone, but at the same time, the (A) people benefit from the artsy vibe and independence of (B) (C) and (D) - not just from the potential client pool. The Substack brand and image benefits from the coexistence of all of these purposes. I hope Notes will always welcome and celebrate all of this.
The better comparison than MLM for folks who sell services to fellow writers on Substack is the huge, lucrative, and necessary business-to-business (b2b) segment of the economy. Levi Strauss made good money selling tough denim jeans to miners in the California Gold Rush. Wells Fargo did well providing a safe place for Levi Strauss and other b2b entrepreneurs to stash their earnings. Famously, most miners made "grub wages" or not. Gold Rush wealth concentrated in B2B services. I'm no economist, but it's my understanding that the B2B economic segment is usually more profitable than direct-to-consumer business. This is what we see on Substack, not MLM (where an upper tier gets commissions from the lower tier and no product or service is actually for sale). Now, if the real objection is to concentration of wealth for any reason, that's another essay. :-)
Thank you for spelling out so engagingly what many of us are thinking about as we plot our own vision and mission. It's much better when we don't invent our goals in isolation from each other.
More than anything else, your article gave me permission to be what I organically am: an idealist. Thanks for that. It can be hard to maintain that sense of possibility in a world that's constantly calling for us to be "realists" (read: pessimists).
I think that a point you made in passing bears more emphasis in the conversation on the platform, that Substack is one piece of a larger puzzle. Many similar platforms have come before it: Blogger, Tumblr, Medium, etc. I was drawn to this one because of the quality of company (the Big Names you mentioned, George Saunders specifically) and stayed because that company kept getting better as I connected with you and other, lesser known writers. And because I enjoyed the aesthetic and function of the site. But I'm not ready to hang all my hopes on it yet. The "start-up" element keeps me trepidatious.
Thanks for this essay categorizing the different sorts of users. I'm firmly in the Weird-Stack camp, but as a free (and non-charging) user, I acknowledge someone has to keep the lights on. So I don't begrudge the more professional users (either direct to readers or helping other writers)...though I've been careful in trying to indulge in the meta-conversation too much. I spent a chunk of Sunday crafting my subscriptions and Notes feed to focus on the eclectic wonderful around us, almost like a personal literary/arts magazine.
But as a moth to the flame, I can't avoid a good article trying to dissect this little moment in time. It's a lot of fun right now and I hope it lasts for a long while!
YES to everything you've said here! I have nothing to add. Now I'm going off to think about it. When I surface I hope I'll have the answer to your question.
Though I doubt it...
All well and good, Sam, but let me put in a subscriber’s word. “(C) is king” because we only have so much money and time and that scarcity will become yours. While my substack payouts now eclipse my MSM dues, I can still only handle so much, especially when I really want to ignore the whole f*ckfest every second day or so.
Take the power back ❤️
Thanks for the shoutout. Well-written thoughts on the platform. I think you're right that we're all still figuring out exactly what Substack is. And of course to some degree it'll always be different things for different people, depending on your background, experience, goals, etc. I think you're largely correct about gaining followers: It's mostly the people who come to SS with thousands, if not tens of thousands, in their email list already. Or they're already famous (Junot Diaz, Sherman Alexie, Sheryl Strayed, etc.) That said I am building up a nice, steady little following. (As you are, too.) Think about where we could be in 5, 10 years. I see the long, slow build.
Nineties coffee house? Maybe. But the best and brightest will stand up above the fray.
Here's my piece referenced re the point of Substack: https://michaelmohr.substack.com/p/what-substack-readers-want
Michael Mohr
"Sincere American Writing"
https://michaelmohr.substack.com/