![]() ![]() Comic book writers, among them James Tynion IV, are also turning down lucrative deals with Marvel and DC in favor of Substack. A former Forbes media and entertainment writer, Zack O’Malley Greenburg, received an advance from Substack comparable to what a major publisher would offer, and on top of that, he is charging for his weekly newsletters. Another is that writers can publish views that would otherwise be discouraged.īut is Substack really any better than a traditional publisher? Some authors have answered that question with a resounding yes. Salman Rushie says it gives him a more "complex relationship with readers." That "complexity" is that it gives writers who have already signed up with a publisher an additional source of readers, and of revenue. They can write whatever they please without a publisher monitoring their output. The reason most writers give for signing up with Substack is artistic freedom. Someone of Rushdie's stature has absolutely no need of another platform, but his reasoning was that he wanted to reach readers with "something new." Substack contacted Rushdie through his agent and invited him to publish on their platform. One of the reasons for its impressive amount of traffic has been Substack's ability to attract big names. A few digits under a thousand may not seem significant, but consider the fact that the New Yorker is ranked at 3390, and the Paris Review, one of our most prestigious literary magazines, is ranked at 140,000. That means it's among the top thousand websites in the world, as far as traffic is concerned. Substack has an astonishing Alexa ranking of 931. Why bother with yet another publishing platform? There are already so many of them. Authors have the option of charging a fee or not charging anything at all. Readers can subscribe to anything the writer produces: short stories, essays, commentary, serialized novels, how-tos, you name it. The newest kid on the block, Substack, takes a different approach. Oyster collapsed after a scant two years, leaving Scribd and Kindle Unlimited to hold down the fort, at least for book borrows. As a consequence, there aren't many subscription services that have stood the test of time. ![]() For one thing, these services have previously been based on borrows, rather than sales, and authors tend to focus on sales. Subscription services for writers have had a spotty history. ![]()
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