The publishing world is changing, but writers can change too—maybe even for the better
I followed for a while someone who was publishing their novel on Substack as a way to make money. She got an astonishing number of paid subscribers — people are willing to pay much more than I’d expect considering serialization makes a story take much longer to read, making for a worse reading experience, and costs much more, being a monthly subscription rather than one-time cost. I have a suspicion a nonfiction book would be better suited to online publishing than fiction.
He makes an interesting point about an accelerating platform. It does feel like the place to be, despite my mixed feelings about Substack. (Alas, I didn’t experience any measure of success with my Substack project Sense Memory, getting fewer than twenty subscribers, most of whom didn’t open the emails, over the nine months of the project 😉) This author, though, has seen incredible success in gaining followers — gaining 1000 readers a week?! It’s a self-feeding process, the more subscribers you get, the easier it is to get more.
