meta-blogging

Substack is a Greenhouse

a colour photo of a large greenhouse with glass panels and rows of plants and bushes — Easton Greenhouse in the Uk, Creative Commons Source: Wikimedia Commons under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 license.

Since 2017, the blogging platform Substack has been running the playbook “borrow lots of money, and spend it to pay people to post on your site, causing it to grow and your site to seem big and important.” The web boom of the 2000s was funded by Google which needed to give people reasons to make Google searches, see Google ads, and be surveilled by Google Analytics. In 2021 Substack spent $3 in advances to bloggers for every $1 they earned from those blogs. In the past this has always ended in tears, and the people who run and fund the site have shady ideas and ugly politics. You can find many people talking about specific Substack bloggers, their ideas, and whether Substack should host them.¹ Not as many people talk about how the site as a whole is weird in a way which feels normal to wealthy and influential people in New York City and Southern California.

a manicured green lawn with a low staircase leading to a Victorian stone mansion with a peaked tile roof; people are sitting on the grass on blankets and in folding chairs and someone at the base of the stairs is speaking — Well, on Canada Day I was attending “As You Like It” at Craigdarroch Castle but lets not be too literal!

The blessing and curse of being a writer in the 21st century is that there are endless places to publish things. Whereas in the 20th century you needed to petition the few businesses which owned the kinds of presses that could make a few hundred thousand copies of a paperback to get your writing in stores, today everyone has a printing press in their pocket. This has been catastrophic for the ability to get paid for writing, but rather nice for the ability to get paid for a comic strip. There are so many options, each with advantages and disadvantages, that Jane Friedman felt it necessary to write an essay on the major paths to book publishing.