Strongly recommend reviewing the details of a standard, boilerplate, publishing contract; be it traditional, magazine, or newspaper.
It's worth understanding where there are differences and where there aren't.
Substack has no slush pile. This is what writing looks like without any editorial quality control or budget constraints.
I commend anyone trying to make a living writing. As I would anyone trying to do the same via visual arts, music, sports, or dance. Bravo and best wishes.
In the absence of an editorial gate, the modern overhead and barrier to writing is essentially nil in comparison to many of the aforementioned: a pencil, some paper, an old laptop, a library computer, some time, is all you need.
I'll repeat here what I told B.J.
Substack is Emily Dickinson's closet. The difference is anyone can stumble upon it, and read what they find inside.
Write because you love to, or are compelled to, and because you believe you have something to say. Write it down, and re-write; put it in a box, or journal, or online, or send it to an agent, or publisher, or burn it.
Treasure your dreams and inspirations; enjoy the subline suffering of your art; let go of your expectations.
I feel like Substack hooked us, then changed the algorithm, and said good luck to all the lesser known writers. It’s really frustrating seeing all the celebrities they market in their weekly Substack Post rather than showing up for people who work really hard on writing but I’m not too surprised.
With that said, I’ve always found this place a good social medium for writers. Other places are dumpster fires - haven’t used FB since 2017, I just deleted IG off my phone because I can’t stand it there, but here, the quality of people and what they share based on who I follow is stimulating. For that I stick around. For the people (like you Josh!).
The simplest explanation is the usual enshittification cycle, when the VC runs out and shareholders want to see profits. Based on the flailing we’ve seen (creating Notes as yet another social media platform, shifting to video, then to TV, recruiting celebrities who draw large paying subscriber bases but hardly ever post anything), I don’t think there’s a durable strategy. Community is lovely, and I wholeheartedly agree, but that wasn’t the value proposition initially. And most who emphasize it now are taking a consolation prize. I’ve found it to be a reasonably good place to share pithy thought pieces. If I go back to writing longform essays, I’ll need a different plan for those.
All good points. When I have a good piece, I’m always debating if I should put it on Substack or try to submit somewhere but the ease in which we publish around here is such a draw.
Well this is all a little complicated, because there’s a relationship between curation and craft. Running the gauntlet to get published at a lit mag once carried a certain prestige. That changed when a lot of places started charging submission fees. And many writers celebrate the lack of curation here, seeing it as more free. The main thing is devotion to the craft — my point here is more about how algorithms control reach, which is itself a form of ownership.
I see where you’re coming from although what you describe has not really been my experience. (I joined at a similar time to you.) I have a much bigger audience now than I did at the start but I don’t really feel that I have muted or altered my style for the sake of readers here. Like you I have several books’ worth of pieces now and I look forward to putting them together in various sets in due course.
Sure, but you and I have the following we do because organic growth was supported (even driven internally) at the start. It’s still worth inquiring about the reasons for last year’s plateau. I’m not opposed to change or to adapting as necessary, but I do like to understand the arrangement clearly. Much here remains opaque.
Regarding those stagnant subscribe numbers... as a Substack reader, I felt I had no choice but to cancel free subscriptions and instead merely bookmark the pages because the number of e-mails was too high, especially when Substacks trying to be more like regular periodicals are constantly sending out minor notes, videos, audio versions of articles, Q-and-A's--that is, seemingly everything but the primary essays that I signed up for.
As for the broader issue, as with Bandcamp there is a hope that this platform remains relatively benign. But neither are substitutes for physical items, individually purchased by the consumer. There is no "sustainable" model for the arts being distributed mostly by digital, online means. It's a big delusion. Subscribe to print magazines, buy books. I'll telling you this as someone who has written as a amateur, only "publishing" online since 2005. The web is for amateurs like me. Look at the studies being done about the effect of reading on screens vs. paper. One can only hope there is some dramatic movement against screens, presumably incited by all the furor over "AI," currently brewing somewhere out there...
I only read essays in the app now, which often means I only keep up with a fraction of people I subscribe to, so I agree about email fatigue. I had hoped that Substack might build an in-house tool like KDP that would make self-made books easy, especially since even traditional presses are using print-on-demand. Perhaps there’s hope for that yet, but I suspect publishing will continue to be driven more by money than by craft. Perhaps the pendulum will swing back around eventually. That was Alfred Knopf’s original vision: taking a chance on writers he saw as visionary.
Yes, "ownership" comes with a broad license attached, and you are right to point out this is true of virtually every platform (Substack included), not a unique feature.
However you have overreached a bit — the LinkedIn comparison implies rough equivalence, but LinkedIn's license is actually broader. LinkedIn's grant is "transferable and sublicensable" and needs "no further consent... or compensation to you or others" — meaning LinkedIn could hand your content to third parties without asking again. Substack's clause has no transferable/sublicensable language; it's scoped to "enable us to provide, improve, and notify you about new features within Substack" and to display/distribute "as permitted by the functionality of Substack." Substack's is more tightly bound to operating its own platform. So the "these are basically the same" framing slightly flattens a real difference in scope, even though the underlying point (both undercut a pure ownership claim) isn't wrong.
The bigger leap is conceptual: your post moves from "Substack has a license to modify/display/distribute your posts" to "your content is a tool for the platform, not for you" and "how much of your audience relationship do you really own." That's really an argument about algorithmic reach and discoverability control, not about the IP license itself. The TOS clause we read governs content licensing — it says nothing about the algorithm, feed ranking, or subscriber-list portability (which Substack does actually let you export, unlike some platforms). Folding those together makes the rhetorical case land harder, but it's conflating two separate issues: who technically owns the words, and who controls whether anyone sees them. The license clause only speaks to the first.
I agree but frankly at the moment my modest list here (circa 2.3k) is still the best option I have. I had a phone call with an agent about my second novel earlier this year and they didn’t even reply to the package in the end. What's the alternative? It still seems the best option of a bad bunch for the independent writer.
The lack of an alternative is an increasingly poor rationale, IMO. I felt the same before the growth plateau last year when the algorithm changed. Anyone starting at zero now faces a much steeper climb.
Oh please. I’ve little patience for this kvetching. As the author of over 40 books I promise you that commercial publishing has its problems too. But the long and short of it is that we write because we must, not because we have fantasies of getting rich.
Definitely agree with a lot of the issues pointed out here! but I do think that something Substack has done is get my work in front of a dedicated audience while allowing me to experiment and practice my craft consistently, and for that I will always be grateful.
Sadly I have to say that I agree with this. I am a novelist and short story writer. I have been published commercially, but since the early part of this century I've had to self-publish my books. It's not that my books changed so much, but Big Publishing did, mainly in what they chose to publish and champion. (I've been pretty vocal about that, so I won't go into it here.)
So, self-publishing, for me, was a godsend. You could write and publish just about anything. Amazon Kindle did that. I was a part of the ebook surge from the very beginning. Actually, in the beginning of the Kindle phenomena I did very well, big fish little pond. I had a half dozen novels 'out-of-print'-ed by two publishers. I requested my rights back, then digitized the pages, edited them, and republished them on Kindle.
At that time no major publishing house would submit their files to Amazon, so Amazon was desperate for 'product.' I sold a lot of ebooks at that time, and it was good.
But after a while more and more writers like me came to Amazon Kindle, as did, one after another, the bug publishing houses. And soon fish like me weren't so big.
Still, self-publishing is wonderful. Anybody, anywhere the planet, even in the skies above, the International Space Station, people could find my book on Amazon and download it without getting up from the couch. All good. But with one big problem. Getting word out about your book. Without a publishing house to push your work, telling people about it was almost impossible.
Social media came to the rescue. Sort of. You now had a place to flog your work. But so did a growing number of others. And then, the blabber crowd came in, filling the scroll with anything and everything. Your heartfelt plea about your latest book became just another leaf falling onto the rippling surface of the Amazon, sinking slowly to the bottom to become sludge, waste.
Substack was supposed to change that, a place dedicated to the discussion of fiction, literature, and the people past and present who write it, not scolds, cranks, paranoids and other crazies. So I jumped aboard. But in order to tell others about my novels, stories, I had to pump out something once a week. (I never charged because this would put more pressure on me to 'keep 'em coming' so as not to disappoint my followers.) So, it was having the opposite effect to what I wanted. After all, I write novels and short stories, not articles. But I adapted. Who knows? Maybe if I hung in there for a year or two, I could start to get a decent following.
Then Substack introduced the Notes. Now and I don't mean to be elitist, but an image comes to mind about what happened next. Picture the last scene in the wonderful mob movie, Casino. When the doors of the palatial gambling house are opened, in walks not the sophisticated, well-heeled, well-dressed customers of old, but a new crowd, pedestrian, unread, more like the Walmart folks on Black Friday.
Strongly recommend reviewing the details of a standard, boilerplate, publishing contract; be it traditional, magazine, or newspaper.
It's worth understanding where there are differences and where there aren't.
Substack has no slush pile. This is what writing looks like without any editorial quality control or budget constraints.
I commend anyone trying to make a living writing. As I would anyone trying to do the same via visual arts, music, sports, or dance. Bravo and best wishes.
In the absence of an editorial gate, the modern overhead and barrier to writing is essentially nil in comparison to many of the aforementioned: a pencil, some paper, an old laptop, a library computer, some time, is all you need.
I'll repeat here what I told B.J.
Substack is Emily Dickinson's closet. The difference is anyone can stumble upon it, and read what they find inside.
Write because you love to, or are compelled to, and because you believe you have something to say. Write it down, and re-write; put it in a box, or journal, or online, or send it to an agent, or publisher, or burn it.
Treasure your dreams and inspirations; enjoy the subline suffering of your art; let go of your expectations.
My memoir was published by a university press; I know those contracts well.
Every social media platform is the same at bottom: the product is you.
It took me a while to realize that Substack is no different. They didn't start as social media, it's worth remembering.
I feel like Substack hooked us, then changed the algorithm, and said good luck to all the lesser known writers. It’s really frustrating seeing all the celebrities they market in their weekly Substack Post rather than showing up for people who work really hard on writing but I’m not too surprised.
With that said, I’ve always found this place a good social medium for writers. Other places are dumpster fires - haven’t used FB since 2017, I just deleted IG off my phone because I can’t stand it there, but here, the quality of people and what they share based on who I follow is stimulating. For that I stick around. For the people (like you Josh!).
The simplest explanation is the usual enshittification cycle, when the VC runs out and shareholders want to see profits. Based on the flailing we’ve seen (creating Notes as yet another social media platform, shifting to video, then to TV, recruiting celebrities who draw large paying subscriber bases but hardly ever post anything), I don’t think there’s a durable strategy. Community is lovely, and I wholeheartedly agree, but that wasn’t the value proposition initially. And most who emphasize it now are taking a consolation prize. I’ve found it to be a reasonably good place to share pithy thought pieces. If I go back to writing longform essays, I’ll need a different plan for those.
All good points. When I have a good piece, I’m always debating if I should put it on Substack or try to submit somewhere but the ease in which we publish around here is such a draw.
Well this is all a little complicated, because there’s a relationship between curation and craft. Running the gauntlet to get published at a lit mag once carried a certain prestige. That changed when a lot of places started charging submission fees. And many writers celebrate the lack of curation here, seeing it as more free. The main thing is devotion to the craft — my point here is more about how algorithms control reach, which is itself a form of ownership.
Understood. What will you do Josh? Will you keep publishing here or will you diversify?
I'm staying for now, but likely shifting my strategy. Happy to talk privately!
I have a feeling we will 😉😁
I see where you’re coming from although what you describe has not really been my experience. (I joined at a similar time to you.) I have a much bigger audience now than I did at the start but I don’t really feel that I have muted or altered my style for the sake of readers here. Like you I have several books’ worth of pieces now and I look forward to putting them together in various sets in due course.
Sure, but you and I have the following we do because organic growth was supported (even driven internally) at the start. It’s still worth inquiring about the reasons for last year’s plateau. I’m not opposed to change or to adapting as necessary, but I do like to understand the arrangement clearly. Much here remains opaque.
Regarding those stagnant subscribe numbers... as a Substack reader, I felt I had no choice but to cancel free subscriptions and instead merely bookmark the pages because the number of e-mails was too high, especially when Substacks trying to be more like regular periodicals are constantly sending out minor notes, videos, audio versions of articles, Q-and-A's--that is, seemingly everything but the primary essays that I signed up for.
As for the broader issue, as with Bandcamp there is a hope that this platform remains relatively benign. But neither are substitutes for physical items, individually purchased by the consumer. There is no "sustainable" model for the arts being distributed mostly by digital, online means. It's a big delusion. Subscribe to print magazines, buy books. I'll telling you this as someone who has written as a amateur, only "publishing" online since 2005. The web is for amateurs like me. Look at the studies being done about the effect of reading on screens vs. paper. One can only hope there is some dramatic movement against screens, presumably incited by all the furor over "AI," currently brewing somewhere out there...
I only read essays in the app now, which often means I only keep up with a fraction of people I subscribe to, so I agree about email fatigue. I had hoped that Substack might build an in-house tool like KDP that would make self-made books easy, especially since even traditional presses are using print-on-demand. Perhaps there’s hope for that yet, but I suspect publishing will continue to be driven more by money than by craft. Perhaps the pendulum will swing back around eventually. That was Alfred Knopf’s original vision: taking a chance on writers he saw as visionary.
Yes, "ownership" comes with a broad license attached, and you are right to point out this is true of virtually every platform (Substack included), not a unique feature.
However you have overreached a bit — the LinkedIn comparison implies rough equivalence, but LinkedIn's license is actually broader. LinkedIn's grant is "transferable and sublicensable" and needs "no further consent... or compensation to you or others" — meaning LinkedIn could hand your content to third parties without asking again. Substack's clause has no transferable/sublicensable language; it's scoped to "enable us to provide, improve, and notify you about new features within Substack" and to display/distribute "as permitted by the functionality of Substack." Substack's is more tightly bound to operating its own platform. So the "these are basically the same" framing slightly flattens a real difference in scope, even though the underlying point (both undercut a pure ownership claim) isn't wrong.
The bigger leap is conceptual: your post moves from "Substack has a license to modify/display/distribute your posts" to "your content is a tool for the platform, not for you" and "how much of your audience relationship do you really own." That's really an argument about algorithmic reach and discoverability control, not about the IP license itself. The TOS clause we read governs content licensing — it says nothing about the algorithm, feed ranking, or subscriber-list portability (which Substack does actually let you export, unlike some platforms). Folding those together makes the rhetorical case land harder, but it's conflating two separate issues: who technically owns the words, and who controls whether anyone sees them. The license clause only speaks to the first.
Fair points and good discourse. Thanks.
I agree but frankly at the moment my modest list here (circa 2.3k) is still the best option I have. I had a phone call with an agent about my second novel earlier this year and they didn’t even reply to the package in the end. What's the alternative? It still seems the best option of a bad bunch for the independent writer.
The lack of an alternative is an increasingly poor rationale, IMO. I felt the same before the growth plateau last year when the algorithm changed. Anyone starting at zero now faces a much steeper climb.
Sure, but bear in mind my current alternatives are:
(a) Write for a small but loyal cult audience here and for useful extra money
(b) Write for myself, selling the odd article, but without any regular audience
I certainly think being reasonable is preferable to not being.
Being read. Not being reasonable! Yuk
🤣
Oh please. I’ve little patience for this kvetching. As the author of over 40 books I promise you that commercial publishing has its problems too. But the long and short of it is that we write because we must, not because we have fantasies of getting rich.
Definitely agree with a lot of the issues pointed out here! but I do think that something Substack has done is get my work in front of a dedicated audience while allowing me to experiment and practice my craft consistently, and for that I will always be grateful.
“Here you go kid. Another void to scream into.”
Sadly I have to say that I agree with this. I am a novelist and short story writer. I have been published commercially, but since the early part of this century I've had to self-publish my books. It's not that my books changed so much, but Big Publishing did, mainly in what they chose to publish and champion. (I've been pretty vocal about that, so I won't go into it here.)
So, self-publishing, for me, was a godsend. You could write and publish just about anything. Amazon Kindle did that. I was a part of the ebook surge from the very beginning. Actually, in the beginning of the Kindle phenomena I did very well, big fish little pond. I had a half dozen novels 'out-of-print'-ed by two publishers. I requested my rights back, then digitized the pages, edited them, and republished them on Kindle.
At that time no major publishing house would submit their files to Amazon, so Amazon was desperate for 'product.' I sold a lot of ebooks at that time, and it was good.
But after a while more and more writers like me came to Amazon Kindle, as did, one after another, the bug publishing houses. And soon fish like me weren't so big.
Still, self-publishing is wonderful. Anybody, anywhere the planet, even in the skies above, the International Space Station, people could find my book on Amazon and download it without getting up from the couch. All good. But with one big problem. Getting word out about your book. Without a publishing house to push your work, telling people about it was almost impossible.
Social media came to the rescue. Sort of. You now had a place to flog your work. But so did a growing number of others. And then, the blabber crowd came in, filling the scroll with anything and everything. Your heartfelt plea about your latest book became just another leaf falling onto the rippling surface of the Amazon, sinking slowly to the bottom to become sludge, waste.
Substack was supposed to change that, a place dedicated to the discussion of fiction, literature, and the people past and present who write it, not scolds, cranks, paranoids and other crazies. So I jumped aboard. But in order to tell others about my novels, stories, I had to pump out something once a week. (I never charged because this would put more pressure on me to 'keep 'em coming' so as not to disappoint my followers.) So, it was having the opposite effect to what I wanted. After all, I write novels and short stories, not articles. But I adapted. Who knows? Maybe if I hung in there for a year or two, I could start to get a decent following.
Then Substack introduced the Notes. Now and I don't mean to be elitist, but an image comes to mind about what happened next. Picture the last scene in the wonderful mob movie, Casino. When the doors of the palatial gambling house are opened, in walks not the sophisticated, well-heeled, well-dressed customers of old, but a new crowd, pedestrian, unread, more like the Walmart folks on Black Friday.
Interesting article, guys. Thanks!