"Should I start a Substack?"
Notes on an increasingly common question I get from authors.
The short answer is no.
No, I don’t think you should start a Substack—not unless you meet some specific criteria I’ll get to in a moment.
First, though: can I just say how happy this question makes me? “Should I start a Substack”: I feel like I’m back at the beginning of my career, when the internet hadn’t curdled yet and all anyone asked me at writers’ conferences was “should I start a blog.” I used to be able to tell them maybe with confidence, and I liked that feeling.
Back in 2008, it wasn’t a pipe dream to think you could start a decent blog—high-quality, regularly updated, aimed at a discrete and galvanized target audience—and get yourself a decent national platform and book deal within a couple years. If you were already under contract for a book, it wasn’t unreasonable to imagine you could create an effective marketing machine that way. Ideal outcomes were unlikely, sure, but not astronomically so.
That’s how I felt about Substack four and a half years ago when I started “Glow.” Back then, I got the impression that it was not THAT difficult to go from 0 to 100 on this platform, provided you made a real commitment. I felt like you really could use it to drive book sales and make a decent (if not life-changing) income off of subscriptions.
It was unlikely, mind you, but you could.
How I feel about Substack in 2024 is closer to how I felt about blogs in 2012-2013.
By then, everyone was writing a blog or trying to. Audiences had more choice than ever. The people who had been blogging for many years were enjoying the lion’s share of the attention and ad revenue (remember ad revenue??). Newcomers were finding it harder and harder to feast.
Am I telling you it’s no longer possible to break out on Substack in 2024? To generate the kind of national platform that will get you the book deal of your dreams? To gather a street team of dedicated fans who will preorder your book by the thousands and thus render it an instant New York Times bestseller?
Of course not. It’s still possible. It’s just wildly unlikely. The easiest time to break out on Substack was 4-6 years ago, and it was never all that easy, and as the years go on and readers have more and more choice as to how to spend their limited money and attention, here and elsewhere, it’s just going to get harder and harder.