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

PETERMBALL Writing Advice - Business & the Writing Life

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.

Recently Jude Doyle, a trans critic and novelist, has abandoned the platform. They note the irony of how profits generated by the often marginalised or subcultural writers who built paid subscriber bases in the early days of Substack are now being used to fund the much more lucrative deals offered to high-profile right-wing writers, who have in some cases exploited Substack’s weak moderation policy to spread anti-trans rhetoric and encourage harassment.

It could be argued Substack Pro is evolving into an inversion of the traditional (if somewhat idealised) publishing model, where a small number of profitable authors would subsidise the emergence of new writers. Instead, on Substack, profits generated from the work of large numbers of side-hustling writers are used to draw more established voices to the platform.

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.

STEAL THIS IDEA: Zombie Mode Task List!

PETERMBALL Adventures in Lifestyle Hacking, Writing Advice - Craft & Process

I’m a big fan of running playbooks to take decision making off the table, especially on low energy days when I don’t have the spoons for self-management. There’s a larger piece in the works on this—part of a series that’s been going through my newsletter of late—but it remains a work-in-progress because there’s a bunch of moving pieces I’m trying to lay out and it’s hard to fit it into self-contained, 1,000 word chunks.

Imagine my jealousy when a Software Engineer named Lisa wrote about their “Zombie Mode” list over on the Bullet Journal blog.

“Zombie Mode” is what I call the state of being when I do not want to think and just want to be told what to do next. I have two collections to use when I am in this state — one for workdays and one for non-workdays. They both contain lists of tasks to be completed for the day, in order, until I snap out of Zombie Mode or the day ends.

Before, when I was in Zombie Mode, I would just waste all that time playing on my phone or trying to motivate myself to choose something to work on. Once I gave myself a list of things I could focus my attention on without having to make any decisions, my time in Zombie Mode went from completely wasted to productive. Even though I am only getting routine and brainless tasks done during that time, it is a vast improvement over getting nothing done at all.

My interest in playbooks started with something similar to this. I have a serious sleep disorder, so there’s a lot of days when I start off brain-fried and over-tired. Writing is damn near impossible on those mornings, and deep concentration is a mountain I often can’t climb, so I laid out a series of step-by-step activities I could follow that would steer me away from common, not-terribly-useful coping mechanism (computer games, binge-watching TV) and towards tasks I could actually do (layout and design; updating websites).

Over time, they’ve developed a little—my core playbooks are less “zombie mode” and more a trilogy that covers being overtired, over-anxious, or working-around-short-term-stressors—but I’m gradually building more and refining those that exist.

For example, over the weekend I added “straighten desk” to my three core lists, bedding in a habit of making the primary work space more pleasant to be around rather than defaulting to the couch. Another recent addition: play something from the “banger start to the morning” playlist, after a recent run of starting my mornings with the Kaiser Chiefs’ I Predict A Riot sent me into the workday with more enthusiasm than normal.

Do You Know The Origins of Frequently Quoted Advice?

PETERMBALL Writing Advice - Craft & Process

Trace the origins of the “ten thousand steps a day” health advice, and you’ll find a marketing campaign. A Japanese company built a step counter and invented a reason to use it, with the brand name—Manpo-Kei—translating into 10,000 steps.

Trace the origins of the oft-repeated writing advice to show, rather than tell, and you’ll find the silent film industry, and writers making decisions between conveying information via dialogue card, or putting it into action. Also popular in turn-of-the-century theatre scene of the early 1900s, where “showing” gave actors to display the emotional responses to scenes in ways the writer could not convey.

Neither origin makes for terrible advice—ten thousand steps a day is good for your health, and show, don’t tell can be solid advice for a prose writer—but it also gives you wiggle room to escape the tyranny of the ideals presented.

Any activity is better than none, and the health benefits kick in long before you hit a ten thousand step a day goal.

Showing is a worthy goal for a scene, but there’s a time in place to just tell the reader something. Not everything needs to be dramatised, and access to the narrator’s interiority is a trick that prose can deliver that theatre can’t. The advice wrote for a reason: sometimes a title card is the right choice for conveying information.

Context matters. Goals matter. And oft-quoted advice isn’t always the best solution, merely the version we’ve inherited as a culture because it’s pays off more often than not.