At the Center of Things

Substack and the state of publication

Over the last year, I have noticed that, absent a few publications at a very particular moment, my writing on Substack will go further. I don’t measure this in terms of page views or “likes” or anything like that; my assessment is more anecdotal and, to me, truer. An essay on Substack, by virtue of being tethered to an email list of people who have signed up ahead of time, is guaranteed to generate a conversation of some kind. This conversation can vary in size and intensity but it invariably exists, whether you’ve got an email list of 30 subscribers, 300, 3,000, or something much larger. The email retains its intimacy. With virality of the written word dead on virtually every other platform—Elon Musk has throttled linked articles on Twitter/X, and the Mark Zuckerberg-owned Instagram and Threads are no friendlier to writers—Substack is the de facto choice for anyone who is not merely interested in sharing photos and memes. And it is, increasingly, a more meaningful outlet for the median writer if the goal is reaching a living, breathing audience and establishing, immediately, a place in someone else’s consciousness.

Alex Perez, the wonderfully acerbic writer and critic, declared that “outside of a handful of magazines, I don’t think writers should waste time with literary magazines. Most are either run by bureaucrat types or hobbyists with no taste. No readership. No money. Like many writers, I wasted years submitting to these hack outfits.” My light pushback would be that publication can instill in a writer a certain degree of self-worth that is hard to find otherwise, and even the smallest magazines have a readership. But I’d also extend his comment even further—many publications beyond literary magazines would fall into the category he lays out. They aren’t staffed by “hacks” necessarily and there can be money sloshing around, but you’re better off, in most instances, taking an original or inventive piece to your own email list, your own Substack—that is, if you have one. Of course, there is great value to be had in publishing throughout the periodical and digital universe, and a select number of places can pay well, much more than you might make off a newsletter. I certainly am proud of my CV and I’m not abandoning the mainstream anytime soon.

What I am saying, though, is that if you are a writer who has not yet established yourself to the degree you’d like—you haven’t landed pieces in those dream publications, the famous ones people talk about—you should stop waiting around. Perez is absolutely right about that. Pitch away, but don’t expect a meal ticket. Publications do not launch careers like they once did. The publicity machine has broken down, the old ladders have burned away, and social media, which became, in the 2010s, the mediator between reader and publication, cannot uplift the writer any longer. This is not cause for despair. It just means, as the microculture flourishes, writers must get smart about where they should be and what they should do. The operative word is do—just publish yourself. Substack, of course, is self-publishing, and I’ve noticed how the stigma around that has vanished. Many of the best novels I’ve read this year were self-published. A decade ago, it was common to hear snide remarks about self-publishing and blogging, especially from those who worked at mainstream outlets. Initially, bloggers had aroused a great deal of fascination, and a few were hired away by publications like the Atlantic and New York Magazine. This was the dream for the blogger, who wrote for free and gathered up a nascent, pre-social media digital audience. If the blogger didn’t reach the Big Leagues, he was viewed as a failure, writing screeds from Mom’s basement. It was considered embarrassing to write for yourself for too long a period of time.

This was all, obviously, very imbecilic. No one could be blamed for hoping to parlay a popular blog into a cushy sinecure at a legacy magazine, but the idea of using the internet to get your own work out into the world immediately should never have attracted scorn in the first place. Yes, editors matter, and a smart one can save a lousy writer from embarrassment. Editors, though, follow a house style and have a habit of squelching original voices—if, in fact, these editors are not visionary. This became a greater problem in the internet era because language was flattened. There was Gawkerspeak, which was fresh for a time, and then everyone wanted to sound like that and the voices began to congeal, the monoculture taking hold. It was harder and harder to find original writers and thinkers, especially as the Obama years gave way to the Trump derangement.

This is not meant to be an advertisement for Substack. I do not know what the future holds and what forces might conspire to punish writers again. What I can say is that Substack has been the only ameliorative technological innovation for authors, journalists, and essayists in my lifetime. Substack had the insight to pair blogging software to a payment processor—WordPress never figured this out—and create their own Twitter/X competitor, Notes, that has, for now, imported the advantages of the old Twitter sans most of the downsides. I find most of my interactions on there fruitful and tame. I am heartened by Substack’s network effects. The more newsletters launch and writers join, the more I am to benefit, at least in terms of growing my own email list. There is simply a greater number of people here now. There’s a raffish, spiky, and inquisitive culture taking root, and I am excited to see it grow. If there is a downside to all of this, it’s the saturation point being reached for paid subscriptions. I’ve seen my own paid growth stagnate. I’ve sensed there’s a lot of competition for dollars out there and I don’t blame anyone who doesn’t want to spend $50 or $60 on ten different Substacks. Perhaps, in the future, a bundle will be possible.

Substack will not solve the crisis in media. It cannot revive the dying regional newspapers. It cannot reverse negative polarization or make the parasitic smartphones vanish. It is what it is, and it’s the best we—the writers, readers, and monkish believers in culture—can grasp at when it comes to the internet. I love having a thought, writing it down, and sending it to you. What excitement! What power! And anyone else is in possession of that same power. The unmediated voice has a certain taboo in media and literary environs; it is a threat, and it must be refined and sanded down. Keep editing, keep revising and one day … or, you can simply publish. The last few years have validated the “just publish” ethos because the most unconventional and attractive writing now lives on Substack. My own reading diet has become novels, Substacks, and the news I have to read for work. Sometimes, it can feel like the unmediated Substackers are technicolor and everything else is black-and-white.

And sometimes, it’s only on Substack where an essay or short story can have that feeling of existence, of entering someone else’s world and mattering to them. This the power of the delivery method (a curated email list of those interested in you) and the emerging network effects. It is possible for writing of yours to live on a publication’s website for days or weeks at a time and hear nothing about it. Nothing meaning no one contacts you about it or mentions it to you if you meet them in person. No one seems aware. Before social media, this was less common because reading online meant visiting select news websites or blogs, or bookmarking your favorites to visit on a frequent basis. The rise of Twitter and Facebook meant they became the delivery mechanisms for online writing, the incubi middlemen, and all of mainstream and digital media became obsessed with how to find fast success in this new system. BuzzFeed thrived, for a moment, on gaming social media algorithms to drive web traffic to its articles and videos. The trouble, of course, was that any social media giant could overhaul its algorithm at will, and both eventually did. Facebook was first, using the maelstrom of the Trump election and complaints about misinformation on their platform as an excuse to throttle the sharing of news. Only video, images, and emotionally-charged status updates would fly there. Musk’s Twitter would do the same, except as a bid to make users pay to start writing there. Musk was also paranoid (as Zuckerberg was) that too many people were using Twitter as a springboard to find news articles or videos elsewhere. Today, the sharing of virtually any link on Twitter/X will mean very few are going to click on it. Thanks to the algorithm, they’ll probably never see it.

If all of this was unnerving at first, I now view it as liberatory. I use social media much less than I used to and I’m happier for it. By focusing on Substack, where the email list is under my control, my writing has gotten stronger and my relationship with my audience has become much more genuine. When I write, I know whatever I do isn’t lost in the maw of social media or sitting somewhere unread. I know, too, the blessing of an audience is that they will not care (unlike an editor) if your writing is timely—that dreaded adjective. News hooks are never essential on Substack, and I don’t think they ever will be. Once trust is built between writer and audience, that’s all that matters, and with that bond, there’s no need to hurry after the latest news items. Sometimes I will, but I do not have to. I can simply write and let it be. What a pleasant feeling.