An Intriguing (and Discouraging) Take On Substack’s Business Model

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, and the answer is always no. Books are a remarkably resilient piece of technology, and with a few rare exceptions, the folks on the digital end keep reinventing the same wheels in slightly new variations.

Personal Sidenote: As someone who spent a good chunk if time vetting ‘new and innovative publishing platforms’ around 2010 to 2014, it’s astonishing how many of these innovations start with “let’s resurrect the serial format”. Back when I reviewed new concepts pitched at the Australian Writers Marketplace, every second ‘new innovation’ pitch was a distribution platform for serials (The others were usually ways of gussying up the vanity publishing business model). All of them usually started from the perspective that they would get writers involved, then the writers would bring the audience.

It’s not the most effective model. I mean, there’s a reason ebooks didn’t take off as an idea until Amazon used the kindle as a loss leader, then made ebooks attractive to writers and publishers who wanted access to a growing new audience. Substack, for all my concerns about the platform, seems to be smart enough to think about audience first, using paid authors with strong readerships as their loss leader. /End Sidenote

So whether Rushdie is killing the novel isn’t an interesting question, but Novitz’s insights into the platform are worth reading. Particularly this point, made towards the end, which presents an oddly grim picture of the platform from a writing point of view.

And, look, there’s a lot of things that I dislike about traditional publishing business models and processes, but the inversion of the “our whale authors help us take a chance on new authors” approach isn’t one of them. For all that Substack Pro feels like an incredibly smart marketing ploy on Substack’s end, that’s… well… not a dynamic I’d want to be codifying if I’ve got an eye towards long-term growth. 

Substack intrigued me for a while—less for the monetization of newsletters, and more because they’d created a newsletter system that introduces social spaces and comments, which felt an awful lot like blogging. Alas, every time I dug into the platform, I found something that gave me pause, which eventually sent me to Patreon (a more mature platform that’s already through its first round of venture-funding fueled shitfuckery) and ultimately reinvigorating my blog.

I can’t say I’m regretting that decision.