Day: September 29, 2021

My favourite headline doing the rounds right now:  Is Salman Rushdie’s decision to publish on Substack the death of the novel? It seems to originate from Julian Novitz’s article over on The Conversation, taking a quick dive into Rushdie’s decision to publish his new novella through Substack on a Pro deal (where Substack pays creators with a certain profile to use the platform and build up the service’s profile, rather than paying based on how many paid subscribers a writer brings to the platform). The answer to the question, of course, is “No,” but the original article is worth reading because Novitz is primarily interested in using Rushdie’s decision to publish there as a lens through which to examine the current state of the Substack platform and business model. The interesting thing about the question posed in the headline is how familiar it is. People have been looking towards digital reading platforms and considering it for about two decades now,