Substack is Self-Publishing—Do The Same Rules Apply?
Some thoughts on gatekeeping, book reviews, and the new literary slush pile.
The other day, I had what I thought was an interesting exchange in the comments section of one of my posts. The post itself was about my plans to start a book review supplement for my newsletter. I mentioned that I had started looking through publishers’ catalogues for the coming year, and a writer who had self-published a novel wanted to know if I planned to review self-published work. The short answer was that no, I probably wouldn’t be doing that, but I wanted to be clear about why.
It’s not that self-published books are bad. I mean some of them are, perhaps even most of them, I don’t know, although “bad” is a subjective term. Many traditionally published books are not to my liking either. They might run counter to my taste or make bad arguments. They could contain boring plots or subjects, irritating sentence structure, and—increasingly, my own books included, because no one is safe—typos. But on the whole, traditionally published books are, at the very least, professional. It was someone’s salaried job to decide whether that book had a potential readership, even if that readership was never going to include me. It was someone else’s job to shape the narrative, a copyeditor to make sure the grammar was correct (or at least consistent with the book’s voice), a typesetter to design the book’s interior, a cover artist who knows what “kerning” means, and a whole bevy of other people who were paid by someone other than the author to ensure that the book got the best possible return on the publisher’s investment.
By contrast, the vast majority of self-published books are unprofessional and it shows. Due to the incredible ease with which literally anyone can publish a digital or print-on-demand book with Amazon, the floodgates have opened to release a tsunami of bad writing, bad grammar, bad formatting, sloppy covers, and boring or incoherent plots. All of this is before we factor in the Biblical deluge of useless AI slop that is now inundating the marketplace and miring the gears of publishing apparatuses everywhere, from Kindle Unlimited to lit mag slush piles—but I’ll get to that in a minute.
Serious and ambitious self-published authors, I know what you’re thinking: Hey lady, who do you think you are? This might be true of some self-published books, but not my book!
Maybe not. Plenty of self-published authors invest tremendous amounts of time, energy, and personal capital to ensure that their books look and read like a professional product. They pay editors, copyeditors, and cover artists. They spend years researching, writing, and re-writing. They use beta readers, developmental editors, writing coaches, freelance marketing consultants, and any number of other people who promise to help their book succeed and sell. The one person they can’t hire is the gatekeeper, the person who decides whether this book is really good enough for its intended audience in the first place, but even so, plenty of good and even famous books started out as self-published volumes. These range from the prestigious to the absurd.
Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was originally self-published under Twain’s own imprint, Charles L. Webster and Company. Beatrix Potter originally self-published The Tale of Peter Rabbit. Jane Austen paid to have her novels published “on commission,” which has been likened to a kind of self-publishing.
While reading archival San Francisco Chronicle reviews from the 1990s as part of my research for the book supplement, I came across a few positive reviews of books that were clearly self-published, even though this fact was never mentioned in the review. To self-publish, these ‘90s authors had to establish their own small presses, often run out of their garages or living rooms, in order to create a professional-looking physical object. Even if the actual printing of the book was outsourced, they had to start their own side business to do it. Once the digital era arrived, all you needed was access to a computer.
Computer scientist Any Weir originally self-published his sci fi novel The Martian serially on his personal blog before it was later scooped up by Crown Publishing Group, became a New York Times bestseller, and was turned into a Ridley Scott film starring Matt Damon that was nominated for seven Oscars. This of course resulted in Weir selling even more books.
Erika Mitchell self-published a BDSM billionaire erotica fan fiction trilogy based off of Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight, called Master of the Universe, under the pen name “Snowqueens Icedragon” on fan fiction websites. She later “shaved off the serial numbers,”1 moved it to her personal website, and self-published it as a $0.99 Kindle edition. It was picked up by Penguin Random House, renamed Fifty Shades of Gray (under the pen name E.L. James), and sold over 100 million copies. A lucrative if much-derided series of films soon followed.
Even the prolific, pseudonymous self-publishing legend Chuck Tingle, known for such classic titles as Space Raptor Butt Invasion, Pounded In The Butt By My Handsome Sentient Library Card Who Seems Otherworldly But In Reality Is Just A Natural Part Of The Priceless Resources Our Library System Provides, My Ass Is Haunted By The Gay Unicorn Colonel, and Pounded in the Butt by My Own Butt, was signed to a multi-book deal by Tor, which published the slightly less satirically deranged though no less bonkers bestsellers Bury Your Gays, Lucky Day, Camp Damascus, Straight, and the forthcoming Fabulous Bodies. As Tingle himself says “love is real.”
Less infamous, though still successful, are titles like Torre DeRoche’s Love with a Chance of Drowning, which started out as a self-published memoir about sailing around the world with her partner, called Swept, which then caught the eye of a literary agent. It was sold to Grand Central Publishing and reissued a few years later. I’ve read it. It was good.
Many successful self-published books get scouted, cleaned up, and republished by traditional publishers. But this is the exception, not the norm. The problem with trying to put self-published books on my reviewing radar is that I have no idea how to find the good ones in an expedient manner. This concern is not new. Doing so would take far too much time. The world of self-published books is, essentially, one enormous slush pile—perhaps the world’s largest and slushiest—and I don’t have interns who can take the time to look for those inevitable, rare gems—nor do I think it economical to do so.
Book people know that there are diamonds to be found in them thar slush piles, including self-published ones, and some actively go looking for them, especially agents and publishers, who have the most to gain. The resources required to mine for these jewels are simply beyond the scope of this humble newsletter.
But I was going to talk about my own self-publishing experience, which you are reading now, at this very moment: my newsletter. This newsletter is self-published, as is every Substack newsletter, with the exception of publications like Oldster Magazine that use the same setup traditional magazines have always used: an editor commissions or accepts a piece, then edits and publishes it, for a publication that the author doesn’t control.
But isn’t it a little hypocritical to shy away from reviewing self-published work, when I myself am engaging in a form of self-publishing?
Yes and no. I have heretofore mostly thought of my own newsletter as more of a blog or a zine than anything else. I do actually do it professionally, and try not to make too much of an ass of myself, since I do write for a living, and have since 2008 (I don’t have another day job), but the vibe is certainly less formal. It is a place to experiment with ideas and form, share work in progress, host writing workshops, and have conversations. I do share essays or essay-like things, and sometimes I’m quite proud of them, or at least like them a lot, and those things (at least for now) are self-published.
I remember seeing a piece in The Millions some years back (the distant past of 2011 to be exact) that detailed the reasons why its author did not plan to self-publish her debut novel-in-progress. One of the main reasons, she said, was that she was writing literary fiction, which tended to do less well than straight genre fiction when it came to self-publishing. (She also went to the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, which means she was unlikely to have to resort to self-publishing by necessity, but that is another issue.)
“Until the likes of Jeffrey Eugenides and Alice Munro begin publishing their work via CreateSpace, I don’t see the landscape for literary fiction changing anytime soon,” she said.
Two things. First, the author of that piece in The Millions was none other than Edan Lepucki, and the debut book in question was California, which went on to become a New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and San Francisco Chronicle bestseller, after Stephen Colbert held up a copy of it on his show The Colbert Report and told viewers to buy it.2 Second, the likes of Jeffrey Eugenides and Alice Munro are publishing their work on CreateSpace now, or they kind of are, sort of, except that it’s not CreateSpace, it’s Substack.
I mean, just take a look at who is on here. There is, in no particular order, Margaret Atwood, George Saunders, Elif Batuman, Chuck Palahniuk, Etgar Keret, Cheryl Strayed, jeanette winterson, Alexander Chee, Garth Greenwell, Catherine Lacey, Katherine May, David Whyte, Maggie Smith, Elif Shafak, Rebecca Makkai, Brandon Taylor, Sherman Alexie, Junot Díaz, Patti Smith, Mary Gaitskill, Ross Gay, samantha irby, Miranda July, Laura Lippman, Ottessa Moshfegh, Elizabeth Gilbert, and Salman Rushdie—or at least he was, until he stopped posting in the summer of 2022 after being stabbed fifteen times while on stage to give a talk about the U.S. as a safe haven for exiled writers (his assailant, a young New Jersey man, was sentenced to twenty-five years in prison3)—you know, just to name a few.
A New Yorker article published last year asked if “the next great American novel [was] being published on Substack.” But it was not necessarily referring to works by the many great and celebrated authors listed above. Rather, he was talking about relatively lesser known names, specifically Naomi Kanakia, whose Substack-published novella, Money Matters, had felt to him like “a conversation that started in the shallows of small talk [and[ at some point drifted into the deep waters of meaning.” That is quite a blurb to get for a 15,000 word Substack post, and from The New Yorker no less!
Many of the institutions that we have come to know and rely on as writers are crumbling. This is scary, but as Lincoln Michel wrote in a recent and surprisingly optimistic column, one way to see it is that “the future is punk rock.” It is DIY and unconventional, underground and handmaid. Importantly, it is human-made. The revolution may not be televised, but it very well may be self-published.
I’ve heard Substack described multiple times as a “lifeboat” for writers fleeing the institutions of a sinking industry (iceberg, thy name be Jeff), but in the deluge of cultural dissolution and soul-drowning waves of AI slop, we must build not just a lifeboat but an ark.
That said, even in the company of great writers, and even with a rebellious and plucky punk rock mindset, self-publishing has its downsides. One of those, which some prominent Substack writers were surprised to discover, is that self-published work is not eligible for most literary awards and compilations, like the PEN America Literary Awards or the Best American Essay series. This is certainly due to the same reason that I myself wasn’t specifically planning on reviewing self-published work: there is simply too much unfiltered material to wade through.
Another drawback is that many literary magazines have previously stated that they will not re-publish work that has originally appeared on a blog or in a Substack post, since they have a policy of not accepting “previously published work.” But this policy is becoming more flexible. I myself have rewritten and repurposed parts of work originally created for Substack as essays in LitHub (“God of Teenage Appetites”), Joyland (“Berthe Morisot’s Last Letter”), and Aeon/Psyche (“The Vibrating Beingness of Seurat’s Pointillist Paintings”). I plan to publish yet another version of this last essay in my newsletter this month.4
(An idea for the Substack people: maybe we should have our own awards? A best-of-Substack annual essay collection? Something? )
To the self-published author who asked in the comments if I planned to review self-published books, I answered, honestly, that there were really only two scenarios in which I could consider doing so: 1) if I was already familiar with the author’s writing, and 2) if someone whose taste I trusted brought it to my attention and vouched for it. It’s not a guarantee that I’d like it, but it would encourage me to take a look.
If anyone ever came up with a reputable “best self-published books of the month” list or similar, I would certainly be happy to add it to my roster of “catalogues” to consult for potential reviews. If anyone could manage to do this, they’d be doing self-published authors a tremendous service, perhaps akin to Miriam Gershow’s much-hailed annual “100 Notable Small Press Books” list. But even this, which draws from a much smaller pool of potential volumes that have already been vetted by editors, still requires “dozens of volunteer reviewers.” These I do not have.
In the meantime, back to Substack. How does one succeed on Substack? As I wrote in my only truly viral post to date, Substack is self-publishing, but do the same or similar principles for success apply?
When it comes to self-publishing, platform is everything.
People with built-in or pre-existing audiences have a leg up, and are more likely to see success right out of the gate. This should be obvious. A self-published work, be it a book or a newsletter, is more likely to reach a larger audience if the author has already been published by someone else first. People who are professional writers can begin at a professional level, and may arrive with a retinue of readers already familiar with their work. These writers don’t have to spend as much time scraping a readership together. That readership, or a version of it, is already present. They have been legitimized, and this builds trust.
But just because you didn’t arrive with a built-in platform, doesn’t mean that you can’t build one here, as others have done on YouTube, Instagram, or the late Twitter prior to joining Substack. Erika Mitchell, a.k.a. E.L. James, found a built-in readership for what would become Fifty Shades of Grey through online fan communities. Torre DeRoche got her initially self-published sailing memoir featured on a website for female boating enthusiasts. It’s no surprise that some of the most successful Substacks in the literature category are about how to succeed in writing literature for Substack, rather than producing or discussing literature on Substack. Because Substack can be like the equivalent of a fan fiction forum for newsletters; a tailored readership for “how-to-succeed-on-Substack” Substacks is baked into the platform.
If Substack isn’t working for you in terms of discovery, you can brainstorm outside sources that might work better. Look for podcasts, forums, websites, clubs. Find your tribe. Be part of a community.
As far as I can tell, Naomi Kanakia didn’t start out on Substack as a big name, but she did have a prolific blogging habit that goes back at least nine years. She has since been lauded by The New Yorker, and just signed a contract to publish her Substack novella Money Matters with Penguin Random House.
If you don’t have a platform, you can always build one, but be patient, and be authentic. Be nice. Don’t be a jerk. To be interesting, you must first be interested—in your subjects, and in other people. Don’t spam strangers with requests or demands for attention. Do not behave in an entitled manner, as some self-published authors have acquired the reputation of doing. A readership must be earned, and slowly, in most cases. Every famous writer started from a readership of zero. Just know that it usually takes time.
In the meantime, I am open to reviewing self-published titles in the forthcoming book supplement if a good one crosses my path. It’s just that I, like most reviewers and assignment editors, simply don’t have the resources to take on the slush.
What do you think? How does publishing on Substack differ from self-publishing a book? Does it, and if so, how? Let me know your thoughts in the comments.
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A term used in the fan fiction community wherein an author changes names and other details to remove a work’s obvious connection to its original fan source material.
Colbert was in the middle of a fight with Amazon, who at the time was throttling titles by Hachette, his own publisher’s parent company, in a bid to force them to accept unfavorable new contract terms. Colbert had fellow Hachette author Sherman Alexie, a National Book Award winner, choose a title by a debut author for them to promote, and that title was California by Edan Lepucki (source).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stabbing_of_Salman_Rushdie
Interestingly, as I have noted before, the book publishing industry, unlike literary magazines, does not exclude previously published work, and in fact often seeks it out.
TL;DR I have no problem with self-publishing as a reader and as a writer. As an unpaid book review assignment editor, there simply isn't an expedient means of reliable discovery (that I am aware of).
Another interesting thread of this discussion, which I wasn't able to get to here, is that the use of GenAI LLMs in the literary industry and outside it will not be any kind of equalizer, as some proponents of the tech seem to claim. If anything, it makes already-stretched people and institutions forced to rely ever more on gatekeepers just to battle the deluge of what is essentially constant, useless spam. As Michel also said in a Note, the far more likely outcome is "even more emphasis on connections and prestige signals, since the other measurements become untrustworthy[...]e.g. elite schools ensure some kind of safeguards, like small classes and oral exams, while average colleges drown in slop and online classes with 100 students and the degree becomes meaningless."
https://substack.com/@thelincoln/note/c-219108087