Here comes the Substack book

Authors are spending more time on here. Is it shaping their published works?

I read Emma Gannon’s new book A Year of Nothing in one sitting earlier this year.

This was no great feat. It is a very short book. As the title suggests, it consists of a brief reflection on how the author struggled with burnout and had to embrace a year of doing “nothing”.

It was enjoyable enough. As an entry into the “do nothing” micro-genre of memoir-slash-self-help books, it falls more on the memoir side. Like all good life-writing, its best bits are specific moments – a feeling of distance from old friends on a trip together, a grandparent’s declining health – that yield something true and resonant with common experience. It also helped me to understand more about burnout and how it differs from stress or depression.

But I was left feeling unsure if the book was quite honest.

The first reason for this was that it contained no real reckoning with Gannon’s past works (the Gannon canon?), in particular with her book The Multi-Hyphen Method.

For millennial media women like me, The Multi-Hyphen Method was one of those books you had to have. It may as well have arrived as part of a starter pack in an Oliver Bonas box along with The Roasting Tin and Everything I Know About Love.

It was about how to manage a portfolio career, resisting pressure to stay in one’s lane, and redefining what success meant beyond a traditional career ladder. Side hustles, in particular, were celebrated as a way to find fulfilment.

This was shaped by growing hyper-connectivity. As the book’s description reads: “The internet and our phones mean we can work wherever, whenever and allows us to design our own working lives. Forget the outdated stigma of being a jack of all trades, because having many strings to your bow is essential to get ahead in the modern working world.”

Another way to look at having many strings to your bow, though, is that you might have too many plates spinning.

This was what I found surprising about A Year of Nothing. She repeatedly describes how feeling split into too many selves contributes to her burnout. Yet this is the same author who celebrated being a “slashie”, juggling multiple roles and projects. There is not much introspection about how much that approach may have contributed to her own slump, nor any questioning of whether this means she has been championing an unsustainable way of working to her readers.

This connects to the other reason I felt like the book was avoiding something. And that something is Substack.

Substack state of mind

As best as I can work out, throughout the year of “nothing”, Gannon continued to post regularly on her newsletter The Hyphen. She was even Substacking about her burnout.

In fairness, she took a few weeks off entirely when the worst bout hit, even pausing paid subscriptions. But after that, it was back to usual service.

Yet if you just read A Year of Nothing, you might be left with the impression that her life in this period, once she has pulled herself out of an initial hole of low mood and activity, was a series of holidays, hobbies, and alternative therapies. It never fully grapples with the fact that she is still working.

I do not think the intention here is to deceive. At worst, it makes it hard to evaluate “doing nothing” as a path the reader might want to follow, just as the full picture of Henry David Thoreau’s laundry arrangements during his stay at Walden Pond makes some question the value of his message of self-reliance. It may also indicate that several ideas in the book originated as Substack posts themselves, in which case the original form would have contained this information in the fact of its own existence, but this wouldn’t be translated to the page.

What I am more interested in is how the work of maintaining a Substack affects a writer like Gannon, and what the increasing importance of this platform for professional writers means for their output – especially their books. Does it interrupt the deep writing time needed for a longer manuscript? One of the first things she does on hitting the worst period of burnout is to indefinitely delay handing in a new book. Or does it somehow change the shape of those manuscripts that do make it to print?

The Substack Book

In his recent review of Paul Kingsnorth’s new book Against the Machine, the professor Brad East identifies such a thing as the “Substack Book”.

It occurred to me while reading it that what I was holding belonged to a new genre: the Substack Book. Like the blogs of the aughts, Substack has already become its own thing: it incentivizes a certain mood, feel, and style; it has brought into being a recognizable literary form. You know it when you see it.

Kingsnorth is a Substacker, writing at least a couple of times a month for an audience of around 83,000 on his newsletter, The Abbey of Misrule.

Like Gannon, he faces a curious tension between this active online presence and the theme of his latest book. While he rages against the “Machine” of modern life, he cannot see a path to maintaining a career as a professional writer without the internet. Gannon wants to present a narrative about deep rest and empowered disconnection, while continuing to blog through it.

Authors have always elided reality, shoving their means of survival into the background so as to give over more words to other subjects. But in doing so they can sometimes accidentally give us the impression that they are floating above normal life, rather than engaging with it.

It’s ironic. In not wishing to brag about being able to write full time – in the case of Substack, serving huge audiences of readers on a regular basis and being paid by thousands of them to do so – they can make themselves much less relatable. It tidies away the truth of a writer’s working life. A reader of this newsletter once pointed me towards an interview with Tobias Wolff in The Paris Review, in which he puts his finger on this phenomenon: “This was an important idea for me – that an artist was someone who worked, not some special being exempt from the claims of ordinary life.”

Why are most author interviews disappointing?

This is one element of the Substack Book. Its chapters file off parts of the writer’s life that do not fit, and search for a neat lesson with which to tie up each thought. This is a habit inherited from what has been described as the Personal Essay Industrial Complex years of the internet.

Indeed, part of East’s disappointment with Against the Machine is that it is “neither a coherent book nor a collection of essays, but a hodgepodge of internet writing stitched together between two covers”.

The key part for me here is the characterisation “internet writing”. I would argue that the Substack Book is not always literally Substack posts sewn together (though that can be an element of it), but books written with the affect of Substacking: piecemeal, personal, presumptive of the audience’s pre-existing interest in the author.

A Year of Nothing is a Substack Book. The platform’s mostly hidden presence is felt in the short chapters on thought-of-the-day topics: clothes, retreats, wild swimming. There are even questions for the reader at the end of each chapter. This may be to give it more of a workbook feel, à la Julia Cameron (who writes the preface). But to my online brain they also read like calls-to-action at the end of a newsletter, encouraging readers to leave comments.

Playing to the premium crowd

Blogging and book-writing at the same time is not a new phenomenon. Social media, too, has for better or worse been part of the professional author’s toolkit for well over a decade.

Substack is different. The success of its paid subscription model gives writers two layers of audience: a core, committed base who are part-customer, part-patron, part-fan club; and the casual reader, who receives free posts, but is nonetheless somewhat familiar with the writer. Posts occasionally circulate beyond these groups, with the effect that new people are drawn into the fold.

When one writes online, one must occupy a niche. This establishes what your audience wants from you. It also sets up your writing as a conversation, one that is enhanced by paywalled comments sections, live hangouts, workshops, retreats, and all the other add-ons that can expand a successful Substack into something more like a community.

But a book is not a community. It needs to be possible for someone to like the look of the cover and buy it, without knowing anything about the author. It needs to make its own case for existing.

The Substack Book risks catering to core audience members, of even being shaped by them. “This is the ultimate trapdoor in the hall of fame; to become a prisoner of one’s own persona,” writes Gurwinder of the concept of audience capture. Even if writers don’t find this to be an issue, they may still be accustomed to the shortcuts of writing for a known quantity, and fall out of the habit of cold-courting the reader.

At the same time, the Substack Book should probably offer something new even to the most dedicated of readers – otherwise it risks disappointing reviewers like East, who find they have paid a second time for thoughts they already bought as a premium subscriber.

Some optimism

The Substack Book has possibilities, too. It could make for a more immediate publishing culture, one where writers can respond more rapidly to their cultural surroundings. Peter Leyden has argued that Substack is the new Royal Society; perhaps the printed works of those who use it can be a distillation of everything that makes this an exciting platform for those who love ideas and writing and discussion.

I wonder if there could be opportunity for an enterprising press or even a literary agency to focus efforts on the writers climbing up Substack’s “rising” charts. Compressing the publication pipeline would be essential. But so would thinking hard about how to make the resulting works stand alone, offering something new to dedicated fans and something substantial to new readers.

There are plenty of books by frequent Substackers that I’m looking forward to reading soon. Naomi Alderman’s Don’t Burn Anyone at the Stake Today. Phoebe Maltz Bovy’s The Last Straight Woman. James Marriott’s The New Dark Ages. These all draw on themes that the authors have covered both in their work on this platform and in podcasts, print and radio¹ . That doesn’t necessarily dampen my appetite for the topics.

The elephant in the room, of course, is that book publishing is no longer enough. Many writers need other income streams to make it work. Substacking, for some, makes it possible for almost all of their work to involve writing – even if it is not always done in pursuit of one’s magnum opus. This is to be celebrated.

The Substack Book is therefore the strange offspring of this era in media. A time when book publishing still carries prestige, but cannot support its talent. If anything, it underscores the continued importance of the book as a cultural artifact.

Substack co-founder Hamish McKenzie will this year publish his own book, How to Save the Media. It will likely re-examine topics he has already covered on his newsletter Disjointed. It may well even include reworkings of that content. It will almost certainly be, according to my definition above, a Substack Book.

Still, it shows even he recognises that ideas have more heft when they can live forever on a shelf, not just be scrolled past on a feed.

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Thanks for reading. If you are working on your own writing at the moment, Substack-inflected or otherwise, here are a few opportunities that have caught my eye lately.

New publication Blank Canvas Post has launched, with the aim of sharing new work from writers of every specialism on Substack. It is open to submissions and already receiving a lot of interest.

Applications for A Public Space’s writing fellowships are now open until the end of this month.

Fang & Flower seeks gothic writing on the theme of heatwaves by 1 April.

New Zealand’s Folly Journal is experimenting with publishing some standalone books this year, and is accepting manuscripts until the end of April. There is a submission fee.

March is a good time to get ready for all the novel contests with deadlines in about two months. The Bath Novel Award, Blue Pencil Agency First Novel Award, Bridport Prize and Yeovil Literary Prize all close on 31 May.

Get ready for Amsterdam Quarterly submissions to open next month on the theme of ‘Summer’.

1. It should be especially noted that Alderman didn’t start posting regularly on Substack until September last year, when I assume work on both the book and the Radio 4 series it’s based on was mostly finished.