Over the past year, I’ve used Substack extensively to serialize my novel The Tale of Rin. I’d like to offer some thoughts about what Substack is and what it isn’t. I think there is a lot of confusion about this.

Let me begin by saying that I like Substack. A lot. I can say that about very few online services, and for good reason. In fact, it is quite possible that Substack is the only “social-media” type of service I actually find tolerable. Yes, my personal website is hosted on WordPress.com — but it would be accurate to say I barely tolerate WordPress. It is the least inconvenient of the alternatives, and I’ve tried many. Though WordPress barely does what I want — and overcharges for it — at least it meets that low bar.

This is not how I feel about Substack. They meet a rather high bar, and I actively like the service. In particular, I like their approach that leaves power in the hands of authors. This is not just some marketing line they tout (like Google’s “don’t be evil”). It permeates every aspect of their service. For starters, you have full control of your subscriber list. That is not true of almost any other social media service.

It is quite possible (perhaps even likely) that Substack one day will shed the character which appeals to me. This does seem to be the lifecycle of dot-coms, especially social-media ones. But right now it is in the honeymoon, the penetration marketing phase that is ideal for users and costly for investors. I have no idea where it will go after that. However, I am pleased with how they operate now. Pleased enough to even invest a small amount of money when they gave users the opportunity to. I don’t invest in Silicon Valley startups. Ever. This was done as a show of support, and I fully expect the money to evaporate.

Let me illustrate why I like them. When I began serializing The Tale of Rin, I knew very little about either Substack or Kindle Vella. So I decided to try both simultaneously. This threw them into stark contrast. Good heavens what a horror-show Kindle Vella is. Aside from the fact that 99.999% of the books on it were “billionaire werewolf superagent falls for middle-aged housewife” type schlock, Amazon itself was thoroughly unpleasant about posting and removing chapters. Each post had to be vetted, which entailed a multi-day delay. There was no subscription list because everything was done by “chapters read” using a token system, and if I made a mistake or needed to edit something there was a whole complicated process. The default assumption seemed to be that authors were out to scam their readers. Judging from the sort of authors the site attracted, I’m guessing this wasn’t far off.

By contrast, on Substack I was able to post all 79 chapters of The Tale of Rin (Book 1: Protege) without issue. I spent my time writing, not wrangling their technology or bureaucracy. It was quick and easy to post things, and (almost) everything operated as expected.

Also important, Substack doesn’t throw up a bunch of obstacles. You don’t need to personally communicate with their reps to get simple things done (though you do for certain major changes, like dispensing with paid subscriptions altogether). The author has plenty of control.

This said, Substack often is depicted as more than it is. So what is Substack? It is a relatively benign site for managing an online newsletter. In return for its benefits, you trade a portion of any paid subscription fees and a lot of web-design flexibility (though you still can do quite a bit with the freedom they give you). This is not WordPress or Squarespace, and it doesn’t pretend to be. Substack is a newsletter service, and that is where it shines.

You cede zero flexibility in the actual management of the newsletter itself, and the tools they provide actually are pretty useful. Their subscription model is flexible as well. Unlike Amazon (or anywhere else I’ve encountered), you can give away paid subscriptions without any hassle. You also can refund subscriptions or adjust them in various ways. Instead of assuming you’re out to scam people, Substack seems to understand you may occasionally need the flexibility to accommodate certain subscribers.

One of my favorite features is the ability to schedule posts far in advance. You can specify a precise date and time to release each post to your paid subscribers — and a separate date and time to release it to your free subscribers. This allows me to fire-and-forget several episodes of my novel in advance.

That doesn’t mean there isn’t room for improvement. One beef I have is that the minimum they allow you to charge paid subscribers still is quite high (when last I looked, it was $5 monthly or $30 annually). For a high-volume newsletter, those numbers may make sense — but for a slowly-serialized novel (mine was originally 4 episodes per month) or a low-volume newsletter they do not. Though it is quite possible that these minimums make sense in the context of the transaction fees charged by the financial system, they nonetheless were a source of frustration to me. I felt I was forced to overcharge (or not charge at all) for what my subscribers got. I’ve since dispensed with paid subscriptions altogether, so this no longer is an issue for me. However, it is something to be aware of.

I also have some minor quibbles concerning their online post-editor. This is what you use to actually type (or in my case, copy and paste) your post. It has some unintuitive and downright frustrating aspects, but the same is true of every other web-browser text-entry box I’ve ever seen. Substack’s certainly is no worse than WordPress’s (though it has many fewer features, of course). For me, the text-entry box wasn’t a major obstacle. I type everything in my own preferred text editor, and then copy and paste it into theirs. Thankfully, their editor appears to recognize markdown (which is what I use for formatting), and that saves me the headache of having to manually implement italics, bold-face, each time.

I highly recommend Substack for both newsletters and novel serialization. However, there are a number of misconceptions which seem to exist concerning it. Some of these can be a huge source of misplaced expectations and frustration. Before deciding whether to use it, you should be aware of them.

• Substack won’t promote your blog. You will acquire almost no new subscribers on Substack itself, at least until you’re already successful. That is not their purpose. Yes, there is some discovery on Substack. For example, new newsletters appear to be briefly promoted. I’m not entirely sure what the criteria are, but my own visibility quickly diminished. I don’t begrudge them that. If I was famous and new subscribers kept pouring in, maybe they would have kept promoting me. I’m not sure. The point is that if you go into this relying on Substack to promote you or imagining that a steady stream of subscribers magically will materialize, you’ll be disappointed. There are cross-fertilization tools for newsletters to promote one another — but you’re unlikely to avail yourself of these until you become successful in your own right. In this (and only this) regard, it is best to think of Substack as similar to WordPress. You wouldn’t expect your blog to become famous just because it’s hosted on WordPress. Substack is very much BYOB. They supply the venue and the tools, you supply the writing and the readers. What recommends them is that their venue is pleasant and their tools work and they very much stay out of your way.

• There aren’t very many Serialized Novels on Substack, though there should be. Actual Serialized Novels are few and far between on Substack, but I think it’s a fantastic platform for them. If you Google “substack” and “novel”, most of the results concern promoting an existing novel via a Substack newsletter. But Substack has far greater potential utility to authors than this. Serializing a novel on Substack can be very rewarding, as long as you go in with your eyes open. Here are a few things to note.

  • Working toward a regular deadline and for readers who care is highly motivating. I’ve published several novels whole, but serializing The Tale of Rin is what most consistently got me to the keyboard.

  • Most of the famous serialized novels (by Salmon Rushdie, etc) were commissioned (and paid for) by Substack itself. I.e., those authors didn’t decide that Substack is the future of novel-publishing, tell their agents to take a hike, and jump ship. They were paid to produce a specific work on the platform. By all accounts (and I haven’t read the works in question), the resulting novels not of their usual calibre. Be this as it may, I am disappointed with how Substack went about the whole thing. It probably dissuaded some authors from legitimately using the platform, and that’s a real shame. The gist is that you won’t be “in good company”, or at least in any better company than on any other platform.

  • Many of the “serialized novels” by ordinary authors never see completion. They either run out of steam or (worse) involved a bait and switch to begin with. In my case, The Tale of Rin already had been written and heavily edited (though apparently not heavily enough, since I spent a great deal of additional time tidying each episode before release). It is easy to see how somebody serializing a novel on the fly could become overwhelmed or write themselves into a corner or just lose interest. Sometimes, it’s also a bit less innocent than that. Apparently, certain authors begin serializing a novel as a trick to hook readers. There’s nothing wrong with this, if that’s what is being peddled. If the readers know they will get 10 episodes for free and then have to buy the book, no harm no foul. But some authors apparently don’t do that. Instead, they “suddenly” change their mind at some point and decide to publish an ordinary ebook instead. All the people who invested themselves in reading the first however-many chapters now have to buy that ebook. This is downright dishonest, and it sours readers to serialized novels in general. Though I also published The Tale of Rin (Book 1: Protege) as a book, I did so only after making the whole thing available for free on Substack. If you do serialize, I strongly urge you to stay the course — and certainly don’t demand money from readers who were led to expect otherwise.

• A few newsletters dominate the scene. Like every other venue for subscriptions, ebooks, or products, less than 1% of the players account for 99% of the success. These are not merely some “in-crowd” who receive favorable treatment (though I can’t say for sure there isn’t an element of that). Most of them probably arrived with an already-successful franchise or were early to the table and rode the wave just the right way. Whatever the reason, they are the established “winners” and almost certainly will stay that way. However, this shouldn’t dissuade you. Since you’re not relying on Substack promotion and it’s not a zero-sum game, your chances of success probably aren’t hurt much by theirs. It always is hard to succeed, but the success of others doesn’t stack the deck against you like elsewhere. For example, with Kindle sales, Amazon’s algorithms entrench the top sellers and make it well-nigh impossible for a latecomer to succeed. Substack just hosts the party. Whether people come is up to you. In fact, the success of others on Substack actually can buoy you — but only if you become successful enough on your own for other newsletters to take note and recommend you. Then Substack will promote you to their readers, and their readers will see your Notes, etc.

• The “Notes” feature is worthless unless you already are successful. Substack sometimes makes it sound like you can add your voice to the conversation and everyone will hear, and the interface can feed this illusion. You see a bunch of notes in your feed, many from big-name newsletters. It is tempting to think that if you post a note, they’ll see it in kind. They won’t. A user sees notes only from the newsletters they are subscribed to and those recommended by such newsletters. I.e., you get one extra layer of linkage from Notes. If you can get a big newsletter to recommend you, lots of new people will see your notes and you may get a boost in subscriptions. But this won’t happen. Big newsletters get tons of requests to recommend others, and they probably ignore them all. Nor will they reciprocate if you recommend them, because frankly they don’t care about you and your 12 subscribers (comprising your mom, your parakeet, and your ten sisters). With this in mind, you should resist the temptation to post notes or try to participate in the “conversation”. Your mic is off. Don’t waste time on Notes unless one or more big newsletters already have recommended you. Literally nobody other than your subscribers will see them.

• I strongly advise against using a paid subscription model unless you (i) already have lots of subscribers and (ii) need the money desperately. If you do go this route, it probably is best to keep a free tier as well. You can distinguish the two by delaying the free posts or posting paid-only special additional content.

• Though Substack provides seemingly detailed statistics on subscriber engagement, these need to be taken with a grain of salt. For example, they only count opened emails. They detect “opened” emails using the usual tricks, so if the reader’s software configuration doesn’t automatically download online assets (which many security-minded people prefer not to) then there’s no way to detect that the email was opened. Also, “opened” doesn’t mean “read”. Lots of people just skim their emails to clear their inbox. And finally, some subscribers prefer to read posts on the Substack site itself. Maybe they read them in batches and don’t want to dig through old emails or maybe they prefer the full-web version to reading them in their email-browser. Regardless, my guess is that their statistics aren’t particularly accurate.