Substack Continues to be Digital Publishing’s Most Intriguing Dumpster Fire

PETERMBALL GenrePunk Ninja

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 e 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.

MORNING PERSON

PETERMBALL Adventures in Lifestyle Hacking

I never intended to become a morning person, but health issues pushed me into it. Evenings were a time of exhaustion, diminishing resolve, and brain fog, and so the first four hours after waking became the time of day when I brought my best self to a project.

For the first year, I fought against that. Loathed the early starts, focused on all the pop science write-ups about the research into larks and night owls, embraced the snooze button and the long sleep in. I was nostalgic for the kind of writer—the kind of person—I’d been before evenings became a nightmare. I convinced myself the problems with evenings were a temporary aberration, soon to be conquered. One day, I my creativity would fire up around 10 PM and I’d spend the next eight hours writing into the wee hours. One day, I would set my routine to the rhythms of a night owl and all the work would get done.  This person I was will soon be who I am again.

It didn’t work out that way. Chronic health conditions get that name for a reason, and you manage rather than cure. Evenings were lost to me.

Things got better when I leaned into mornings: rolling out of bed as soon as I wake up, picking a wake-up song to energise my day, setting the tone of the next twenty-four hours by picking a focus—writing, reading, housework, or clearing publishing tasks—and did a short half-hour sprint on that project before making coffee and eating breakfast.

Somewhere along the way, I became a morning person. Focused on nailing that wake-up routine and transition into work. Full of beans in the first four hours of the day, itching to get started.

Socially, we’re conditioned to take a dim view of working against our natural inclinations. The heroes of our cultural narratives buck the system and break free of constraints, embrace their true paths and defy conventions. “Be true to yourself,” we’re told, “and the world is your goddamned oyster.”

But there are two things that inform our self-perception: our natural inclinations, and what we do on a given day. One is informed by who we are in the past, the other by who we hope to be in the future.

When shit hits the fan, the biggest challenge is letting go of the older vision of who you used to be and the vision of the future you’d been chasing. But cleaving to that is nostalgia, and one important aspect of nostalgia is that the past is irrecoverable.

Take a breath. Let that version of yourself go. See yourself for where you are right now, and the version of yourself that can still be. Then take the next step towards that person, day by day, hour by hour.

Even if it means becoming a morning person.

RECENT READING THAT INFORMED THIS POST

Narrative Assumptions in the Binge-Watch Era

PETERMBALL Writing Advice - Craft & Process
Avengers: Endgame is a thoroughly unsatisfying movie as a stand-alone piece of cinema, but full of heart-in-your-throat payoffs if you’ve invested in the 22 Marvel movies released over the eleven years prior to its release.
 
The Witcher on Netflix never really grabbed me on an episode-by-episode level, but it became remarkable when I we finished the season and pulled all the disparate narrative strands and timelines together.
 
Trying to engage with either of these works as a stand-alone is to read against the grain. The creators are playing by a fresh set of narrative expectations, once that started with home-video and repeated viewings. They’re film and TV of the binge-watch era, with narrative payoffs no longer confined to a singular arc or instalment. Their ambition is far-reaching and long-term.
 
And now, with Spiderman: No Way Home in 2021, the ambitions are more audacious. Marvel lays claim to two prior iterations of the character, bringing in actors and characters from movies stretching back to the Sam Raimi trilogy that saw its first instalment released in 2001. Laying claim to earlier, stand-alone works and making them part of the continuity.
 
You have seen these films, they whisper. You remember this version from 20 years ago. Get excited that they’re coming back.
 
Better yet, go back and watch it again. Binge watch every Spiderman movie ever made, because they’re connected now. They’re relevant.
 
But when you re-watch, consider this: the 2001 Spiderman deployed the same narrative that lay at the heart of every Superhero film of the era. Give your protagonist powers, introduce a life-changing conflict, and trace their transformative arc all the way through the conclusion. A story designed to be one-and-done, no prior knowledge necessary.
 
A legacy of a bygone age, made by people who never really understand what made comic books great.
It’s no surprise that Marvel embraces the possibilities of the binge-watch era, because print comics have spent decades exploring the pleasures of ongoing continuity and call-backs. The version of Spiderman you read about in comics today is the same character who debuted in 1962, with sixty years of legacy characters and stories to play off, each new tale iterating a core concept out rather than changing his life forever.
 
A thing fiction writers and publishers haven’t seemed to realise yet: we can pull these tricks off too. Not just the best-sellers of yesteryear, but everyone with the ambition and patience to build a readership.
 
It’s not easy. Like TV, like film, there’s a convention of the stand-alone story that’s ingrained in the way we approach storytelling, but it’s just that—a convention. A legacy of an era where we all fought for shelf space, and there were costs associated with keeping backlist titles available that prohibited relying upon them as a source of potential revenue.
 
But those days are gone. Ebooks and print-on-demand technology make back lists readily available, and the binge-read is a tool that changes narrative assumptions just as surely as the binge-watch, if you care to use it.
 
Like TV and film, the people who have realised the power of that are typically coming from outside the industry. Storytellers familiar with other forms, applying the lessons to prose and breaking all the rules along the way. People who don’t have to unlearn narrative conventions in order to take advantage of the new forms.