Small yet Mighty, Intimate, and Fun: A Year on Substack
Small yet Mighty, Intimate, and Fun: A Year on Substack by Sandra Gail Lambert
Last year I heard about writers who were serializing their novels on Substack which so far had mostly just hosted newsletters. Substack promoted this new venture by evoking the tradition of Dickens, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Alexandre Dumas, and Armistead Maupin and also by paying a few popular writers to serialize a novel on their platform.
I had a novel that no publisher wanted. A novel I thought was worth reading. A novel that lent itself to the serialized form. So I researched. I read of a different paradigm for success—instead of hoping for the elusive best seller, a grand success could be, for instance, a thousand fans who paid a hundred dollars a year to support your work.
I had no goals to make that sort of money, but here was a way of creating community that resonated with my beliefs. I liked the idea of publishing my own writing in my own way and especially in my own time since I'd just turned seventy. And it didn’t mean I couldn’t also keep publishing in all the “traditional” ways. If I made any money Substack took a cut, otherwise there were no fees. It was easy to set up. I decided to go with a newsletter (essays) that would be free and then a paid subscription as a way for people to support my writing and for access to the weekly installment of The Sacrifice Zone: An Environmental Thriller. I clicked a button and the project went live.
I'm not going to say I "don't care about the money," but in my planning and expectations, I didn't think about it much. For me this was a new approach to publishing that excited me and since it didn't cost me anything except time, there was no investment to worry about recouping. But when those first friends/fans/neighbors/people I didn't even know plunked $50 down for a yearly subscription, it was and still is thrilling. And supporters were reading and commenting on a novel that I had thought would live out its existence in the silence of a virtual bottom drawer. And I was writing essays in a new, energized way where the disabled, queer, dog loving, white, Florida nature nerd, tough old lesbian broad parts could come and go in my writing as they pleased.
My numbers are very, very, very small-time in the Substack newsletter world. I have one hundred and thirty-one subscribers. But thirty-one of them are paid. That's almost a fourth of you. In Substack world, that's a huge percentage. I like what this implies about intimacy and support. And you live in twenty-seven states and eight countries. (I'm missing whole continents. In this next year, I need to do outreach in South America, Asia, Africa, and Antarctica.)
Anyway, this past year on Substack has been a blast. Happy Anniversary to all of us.
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