The long and short of it

After journalists, it’s celebrated fiction writers who are joining newsletter platforms like Substack. Entrants weigh in on discovering a new community, benefits over traditional publishing and planned serialisation of longer work

Through a Substack e-newsletter called Salman’s Sea of Stories, author Salman Rushdie will be releasing sections of his new novella, The Seventh Wave approximately once a week over the course of a year. He says the newsletter will also feature short stories, literary gossip and writing on books and film. His entry into the platform along with those of other fiction writers like Patti Smith has sparked discussions around a return to serialisation of novels—the way works by Charles Dickens were originally published for instance, replete with cliffhanger endings—albeit in a new digital context. “I think that new technology always makes possible new art forms, and I think literature has not found its new form in this digital age,” Rushdie told The Guardian, while reflecting on a recently-felt need to try new things, and whether readers’ feedback to the periodically-published sections would accordingly influence his writing. “People have been talking about the death of the novel, almost since the birth of the novel… but the actual, old fashioned thing, the hardcopy book, is incredibly, mutinously alive. And here I am having another go, I guess, at killing it.”

The American platform, founded in 2017 by Chris Best, Jairaj Sethi and Hamish McKenzie and headquartered in San Francisco, allows writers to sign up for free and publish writing which readers can then subscribe to, and has been attracting a steady stream of journalists and bloggers. Kathmandu-based Travel writer and climate change journalist Neelima Vallangi started a newsletter called Climate Matters on Substack to directly reach out to her audience. She had been looking for avenues to explore topics which perhaps were not newsworthy enough to be published in a mainstream publication, but nonetheless important and missing from discussions in the public sphere. “I was already writing about climate change and its effects on Instagram, but there, with just 2,200 characters in the caption, you are constrained by space. Even if I fill it up completely, it’s not like people will always read the entire thing,” she says. While applauding the platform’s easy integration with social media platforms like Twitter and the presence of a webpage, both of which allow the seamless sharing of posts with one’s network, she admits that it is difficult to build an audience on Substack as it is not a social media platform as such. “If someone wants to grow their Substack subscriber base, they need to have a follower base somewhere else which they can convert to Substack subscribers,” shares Vallangi while pointing out that having email addresses of readers is beneficial because of unpredictability of social media. “You don’t know which platform might suddenly go bust.”

Rohini Chowdhury, Sonya Dutta Choudhury and Neelima Vallangi

IIM Calcutta alumnus, author and journalist Sonya Dutta Choudhury started a book subscription service called Sonya’s Book Box and monthly newsletter Sonya’s Read to Lead on Substack during the pandemic to build a book community and nudge readers to return to a reading habit. As a journalist hemmed in by structure,  angle and word count, she says, she has long envied the more freer, conversational tone and language at the disposal of bloggers. There is a need to stay invisible within this hardened format of traditional journalism, while more and more people were interested to know the person behind the writing. A newsletter enabling creative freedom and quirky, anecdotal writing, she says, “felt very liberating because suddenly I didn’t have a house style which I had to conform to. I could just think about who my readers were, how I could talk to them, and what would be interesting for them.” The software also provides swift analytics to tell writers how many users opened their mail, clicked on links or shared it with their network, the relationship with the reader becoming more immediate. Author Rohini Chowdhury who currently writes the newsletter The Story Birds on Substack with friend and writer Shaiontoni Bose, which brings out original fiction, retold or reinterpreted myths and folktales every week with accompanying illustrations, agrees. “I love the direct reader engagement,” she says. “For me as a writer, hearing back from my readers is the greatest motivation to keep writing and writing better. On Substack, I know within hours how many subscribers have read my work, and the feedback from readers begins coming in within a day. That never happened with traditional publishing—there we have to wait till the book is done, and on the shelves, and the first statement with sales information comes in months later from the publisher. Reader interaction is also delayed till readings are organised, or a literature fest happens somewhere,” says the UK-based writer for whom geography has limited this kind of traditional interaction. “I find Substack gives me an international audience with great ease. Not so with traditional publishing, despite the fact that almost all my books are on Amazon.”

The newsletter has also helped Dutta Choudhury connect to a vibrant and talented newsletter creator community. “As soon as you sign up, you are pulled into this world where you are directed to little packages, areas, conversations and other newsletters where you can look, learn and have a cross-fertilisation of ideas.”

For Rohini Chowdhury who had been looking to break out of “the tyranny of traditional publishing,” Substack offered a no-strings-attached model. “My work remains mine as do all rights. So I am free to present my writing the way I want it—I can turn it into audio or video if I want, I can upload it or take it down, I can charge for a story or not—the freedom is amazing. That is completely missing with traditional publishing, where the publisher, since it holds publishing rights, calls all the shots.” Moreover, as Substack does not charge till the writer starts earning, there is space for experimentation, allowing her to slowly build readership.

“Most writers usually have a body of work which traditional publishers do not want or cannot publish—they may be limited by their list, or a piece of writing just doesn’t sit well with the editor looking at it. There are no such constraints on Substack, and it is the reader who decides whether a piece of writing is good or not. And while this self-publishing often lets substandard work get ‘out there’, it also holds a writer accountable for what they write,” says Chowdhury, while admitting that the views of an experienced editor is the one thing she misses about this new format. Chowdhury also plans to compile The Story Birds’ published stories into a book in the future along with serialising a novel on Substack.

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