What Substack is and isn't

On not treating the platform as your friend.

I’ve been on Substack longer than most people — nearly six years now — and I’ve watched it evolve a lot over this time. What’s depressing is that much of the recent migration to the platform has been driven by the collapse of text-based digital news and media outlets, in part because short-form video now dominates our lives.

I constantly see writers and journalists arrive here sheepishly a few months after being laid off, posting an announcement that they’ve “decided” to go freelance and are now giving Substack a go. And some really do give it a go — I take my hat off to them. But most will post intermittently, only to fade into the background. I suspect the novelty soon wears off, and they have to confront the slog that is growing an engaged audience on a new platform, one that they hope will eventually pay them.

That said, many small publications and writers have made Substack work over the past few years, growing niche newsletters and independent magazines and making decent money in the process. I think the people who succeed here tend to understand what Substack actually is: a space to experiment and a tool for growing an audience and monetising creative work.

Increasingly, though, I’m seeing a lot more complaints about Substack from Substack writers themselves. That the algorithm is being populated by celebrities. That the writing going viral isn’t of quality. That people’s paid subscribers are going down while their free subscribers are growing. I guess these complaints frustrate me because they seem to ignore that Substack is a for-profit social media company, just like any other. And it will function like one too. I need us to kill the collective fantasy that Substack is throwing writers a lifeline as news media burns in the background. The reality is that the platform’s growth is being fuelled by this collapse.

On occasion, I’ll even see successful writers on here almost guilt-tripping their free subscribers into paying for a paid subscription by saying they have “bills to pay.” Well… so does everyone else. The people who want to support our work will do so in any way they can, and that isn’t always with cash. Whether you like it or not, if you’re writing for money, you have to create something people want to pay for. And maybe you can only do that by putting up paywalls. If people don’t want to or can’t pay you for your writing, then that’s just the reality of the situation.

A more generous person than me might read such posts as a cry for help, but what bothers me is the fundamental misdiagnosis of the problem. The issue, clearly, is the implosion of an ecosystem that once paid writers without requiring them to beg their audience for money — not readers being stingy.

Not all of us will be able to make a living on Substack, and pretending otherwise is dishonest. Rather than moralising at our audiences about why they should pay us, it might be a better use of our time as writers to think seriously about what financial sustainability and decent working conditions look like for us today. How might we use our experiences of back-to-back redundancies and having fewer clients to work for as fuel to fight for and build a society that genuinely supports and values our labour?

Back to Substack. It’s not our friend. It was never designed to be. Like any platform, it rewards existing cultural capital, which is why celebrities and already-established voices rise fastest. Going viral is the quickest way to build a readership, just as it is anywhere else. Of course, there’s a growing amount of ChatGPT-written copy, and there’s also the well-documented problem with hosting extremist content. But if we lower our expectations of it being a miracle platform and approach it strategically and without illusions, I think some of us might just be able to utilise it well.

My advice, as someone who built a decent following on Twitter/X before a lunatic bought it and rendered it useless, is this: remember that social media platforms are temporary. They will have their golden ages, until everything inevitably turns to slop. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket. Make work that outlasts the platform it’s hosted on, and get the most out of these platforms while you can, because they’re certainly getting the most out of you!

What I’ve been reading (and watching):

• I’m finally doing The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron — a 12-week course that guides you through exercises that help you tap into your creativity — and so far the results have been very good! I can share more on this later, when I’ve finished the course.

• I enjoyed listening to Ramla Ali’s autobiography Not Without A Fight: Ten Steps to Becoming Your Own Champion. I found her story of becoming an Olympic boxer very inspirational.

• I’ve been loving The Traitors this season, the most dramatic one yet!

• I’m obsessed with a YouTube channel at the moment called Townsends, which is dedicated to exploring 18th-century history in America. I watch an episode before bed each night to get sleepy.