Author: PeterMBall

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,

’m sufficiently old that I feel like the window for talking about We Are Lady Parts is over, what with the series coming out in May of 2021 and our engagement with it taking place in early September. I’m old because I’m trapped in a cultural paradigm where immediacy is a primary virtue when recommending narratives—the same paradigm where books have a shelf-life of three to four weeks, television shows get consumed in scheduled blocks and paid for by advertising, and films exist to be shown on the big screen or pulled off the limited shelf-space of your local blockbuster. Talk about a film, a book, or a television show four months down the line in that kind of environment, and the moment is already over. You wait for re-runs or the DVD release that might never happen, scour second-hand bookstores or badger your library to order in a copy. But this is the streaming age; the binge watch age;