A LOOK AT SUBSTACK
Ronald Turnbull finds a new way for writers to not earn any money
Lean and hungry after long months of not quite enough to eat , you paddle your bark canoe up a backwater , clamber up the rocks beside the rapids and emerge to a high plateau where you haven ’ t been before . What forms of wildlife live up here ? And are any of them good to eat ?
A small creature scuttles through last year ’ s dead undergrowth . Sort of scaly , sort of spiny , not very big but encouragingly plump . Hunt it down , attempt to squash it with a sharpened stone ? Or stride onwards , looking for bigger and more nourishing prey ?
This is exactly how most of us are feeling right now about the new species of thing called a Substack . Small but possibly tasty , with waggling social-media type ears and a long bloggerish tail trailing behind it .
Strictly speaking , Substack is a new and slightly different sort of blog platform . Its styling tends to the tasteful and literary , tempting us towards short-essayplus-a-few-pictures sort of content . It ’ s pretty easy to set up and to post on . Like every internet platform it has aspirations as some sort of social media , so there are likes , and followers , and re-postings , and commenting on one another ’ s stuff . But its distinctive feature is this : we make money out of it .
Lots and lots of money , if you believe Substack ’ s own advertising . You can create a free one for all the world to see , but the real idea is to charge them : a minimum rate of $ 5 every month , or $ 50 a year . ( From that , Substack takes 10 % plus a transaction charge .) And even if you ’ ve only got 1,000 subscribers , that ’ s a tidy little income right there .
So will we make money ? The answer to that one is – perhaps . But also , perhaps not . Substack ’ s top 10 contributors make over $ 1m a year each ; but 90 % of Substack ’ s contributors make zilch . The most successful
Substacks seem to fall under current affairs briefings from established journalists or else from the far Right ; sports pundits ; and writers instructing other writers about writing .
As another strand , some academics offer useful or interesting information , free , for their own gratification or as a public service . One I like is Hanna Ritchie ’ s ‘ Sustainability by Numbers ’ – her day job being big data relating to climate change . The USbased ‘ Your Local Epidemiologist ’ has similar appeal . A typical post on those two receives around 100 likes , suggesting a readership around 1,000 . ‘ Lost in the Archives ’, with weekly short essays about women associated with Cambridge University , has sparked interest with 600 subscribers in its first two months ( reflected in 50 likes and 30 comments on a recent post about Virginia Woolf ).
No OWPG member is currently running paying Substacks , but a handful of us are running free ones . They can be found by googling ‘ Substack ’ + their name . If you subscribe to something you don ’ t like , it ’ s straightforward to unsubscribe again .
The Shattered Moon from Jon Sparks is a ‘ writer ’ s shed ’ type blog , roughly fortnightly , supporting his self-published science fiction series of the same name . After two months , it has a handful of subscribers ; its role is as support for his series of novels .
6 outdoor focus / spring 2024