As of 2024, there is no richer place for writing and publishing commentary than Substack, and I expect that will be the case for years to come. Currently I follow more than 100 Substack newsletters—across multiple topics and categories, not just publishing—and I find the information there just as indispensable as the handful of mainstream outlets I follow. That doesn’t mean the platform (or its contributors) are without flaws or problems, or that everything published there deserves attention. It all deserves a critical eye. But it has dramatically changed how many informed experts make their knowledge available.
For this special issue, I invited some of the leading Substack commentators in the writing and publishing community to join me for a private panel discussion. We met in August 2024 via Zoom, and below you’ll find the edited and condensed transcript. We focus on some of the biggest concerns of writers today: the challenges faced by memoirists and children’s middle-grade writers, the decline of nonfiction sales, the rise of TikTok and Substack (should you be using either?), and the constant battle against misinformation. I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did.
The panelists
- Amran Gowani is a former organic chemist and financial analyst who finally figured out what he wanted to be when he grew up: an author. His debut novel, Leverage, will be published in summer 2025 by Atria.
Substack: agowani.substack.com - In 2022, Cassie Mannes Murray launched Pine State Publicity, a full-service publicity firm that works for independent books and small press authors. She’s also been a literary agent, book designer, literary journal editor, and more.
Substack: pinestatepublicity.substack.com - Kate McKean is vice president of Howard Morhaim Literary Agency and has been with the agency since 2006. Her book, Write through It, based on her newsletter, is due out in 2025 by Simon Acumen.
Substack: katemckean.substack.com - Ann Kjellberg is the founding editor of Book Post, a newsletter-based book review. She was on the editorial staff of the New York Review of Books from 1988 to 2017.
Substack: books.substack.com - Children’s book author and indie publisher Darcy Pattison has written over seventy award-winning fiction and nonfiction books for children. Find her books at MimsHouseBooks.com.
Substack: IndieKidsBooks.com - Anna Sproul-Latimer is founding partner and president of Neon Literary. She represents all types of adult nonfiction and literary fiction and is based in Washington, DC.
Substack: neonliterary.substack.com - Carly Watters is a senior literary agent at P.S. Literary and the sitting vice president of PACLA, the Professional Association of Canadian Literary Agents.
Substack: theshitaboutwriting.substack.com
The Hot Sheet: Let’s start with memoir. It does feel like more memoirists than ever are writing and pitching today, and they wonder if it’s possible to get a traditional book deal any longer—mainly because they won’t have a sufficient platform, and self-publishing does seem the most likely outcome. Which raises the question: How does one market and promote a memoir if you don’t have a platform and you don’t have a publisher?
A writer recently told me after a marketing and promotion class that—despite all the excellent information—things just feel different when you’re trying to sell a memoir, that the same rules don’t apply. Do you think that’s true? If it is, how should writers approach this?
Cassie Mannes Murray: Publishing now looks at memoir differently. It has to be “memoir plus” because personal history is not enough. It has to be a place-based history, or something that you’re doing aside from your personal journey. The Yellow House by Sarah Broom is a good example of personal history plus history of place, or Jen Chaplin’s My Autobiography of Carson McCullers, which is the personal history, plus the history of this literary figure.
People come to a novel for a host of reasons—entertainment, education, reading about taboos, reading about a life that’s similar to yours or not, voice and style—memoir is moving that direction. So the framing is changing, and I think publicity and marketing is catching up to that and marketing it more to niche audiences. I’m thinking about Susan Kiyo Ito’s memoir I Would Meet You Anywhere, which was really successful last fall. It was because she brought that mystery aspect to memoir. She was telling about this secret relationship about her adopted mother who didn’t claim her, so she was a secret in her own family, and that mystery was important to the marketing of that book, or publicity to readers who like a little bit of secret or intrigue, rather than “This is her life story of being an adoptee.”
I think people think of platform as “Who am I? What am I the expert in?” Instead, think “Who can I bring into my audience?” Platform is less like “I’m on this stage talking” and more like “Who are the people listening to me, and where can I find them?”
Anna Sproul-Latimer: There are exceptions to everything, but I rarely call things memoirs either. I completely agree with Cassie on that. Readers expect a book that is about some kind of transformational, bone-deep spiritual principle or a life-shifting or life-changing thing, and a subtitle like A Memoir doesn’t really get us there. I’m marketing [these books] to publishers as something else, where publishers decide how to position it in the marketplace from there. I generally trust their judgment, but I know that on submission, my opinion on how to maximize the probability of interest is to pitch something as a transformational point of some kind.
I have a client named Alan Townsend who recently published This Ordinary Stardust, which is a grief memoir, if I’m being honest with you, and I think he would say the same thing. It’s about this extremely trying time in his life, just this astronomically unlikely event when both his wife and his four-year-old daughter were separately diagnosed with extremely rare forms of brain cancer, not the same cancer. One was fatal, the other was not, but the book is about that time. Of course, we and the publisher pitched it as a scientist’s journey from grief to wonder. It’s about how he, despite being an atheist, found this profound spiritual solace in scientific truth and the pursuit of scientific truth. So the bigger point of the book is not “Alan Townsend tells the story of an idiosyncratic family tragedy.” It’s this shifting spiritual point—life shifting and transformational.
Kate McKean: TikTok and Instagram and all that stuff has something to do with the changing of memoir, because we have access to everybody’s life and all their weird stories. So a weird thing that happened to you is not a big enough deal to write a book about. Nobody cares, and you have to give the reader something else to care about, which is science and grief, science and atheism, science and all this stuff, not just “Oh my gosh, all this stuff happened to me.” I always say that a memoir is a mirror. The reader is looking for themselves in it. They don’t care about you.
Let’s talk about other types of nonfiction. Ann, you wrote recently about whether nonfiction will be there for us when we need it, commenting that the model for producing researched nonfiction seems sidelined because big book deals now go to public figures, celebrities, online personalities. It seems like you don’t expect independent or small presses to make up for this if the Big Five publishers abandon most serious nonfiction. Or that authors won’t be willing to do books with small presses for lack of money?
Ann Kjellberg: First of all, I’m a huge enthusiast of small presses. If I myself ever managed to write a book, I would just go straight to a small press rather than go through the trauma of trying to get a Big Five contract. The sense of partnership and investment is so valuable, and they make a huge contribution to the culture.
When I’m writing these pieces, a lot of the time—not that big forces are listening to me—but I’m trying to make a point to big forces about the incentives that are disappearing in this environment. So I still do think that it’s true. I talked to a friend of mine who is an employee at the Washington Post and was recently trying to market a nonfiction book. For a lot of people, as a practical matter, they can only get a book deal if they can support a year of their life without working. And it is still kind of the case that if you’re a journalist with an established reputation, you can get an advance from a Big Five publisher that will cover a year of work or cover enough time for you to take a book leave from your employer.
I have also spoken to editors who used to work for Big Five publishers, maybe who are bought out, like Houghton Mifflin, where all these titles that used to be written by historians and by journalists, where they’d be getting six-figure advances, they are just kind of dropping off the map, and it’s very difficult to sell them, and it’s very difficult to market them.
So I’m just mostly worried about having an information-rich environment for the reader, like, what are the sets of incentives and possibilities that are going to produce researched work in the future that people can rely on and be fully informed? And you know, it’s the advance—that’s beyond the kind of token or pleasant amount of money—that makes it possible for some people to devote two years to being in an archive, or two years to going around the country, interviewing people. And there are other kind of background factors. It used to be that the New Yorker or the Atlantic would put up a big sum of money for people to do a very big nonfiction project that could subsequently become a book. And that resource is kind of disappearing too. Those secure jobs in journalism that would give you a book leave, where you had health insurance, are disappearing.
Also, there’s a kind of crisis in the humanities where people don’t have those secure positions where they can get a sabbatical and work on a book or they can be doing research on a book with research assistants provided by their employer. So there’s just much less opportunity to have institutional support to be doing work that takes up all your time for a year or a number of years.
Carly Watters: We know that nonfiction has been on a bit of a decline, and that makes it very hard for us to do our jobs in terms of the nonfiction projects that we want to pursue. I think the hard thing from my perspective is how do I approach somebody and say, “Hey, I think I can maybe get you a book deal. You’re an expert on this topic; I want you to take this much time out of your professional life to work on this book project,” when they could turn that concept into a course and make money kind of immediately. Or monetize a Substack on that topic … and be well known in that category.
And then we get to the position of “Why do I need a book? Why do I need a book deal? If I’m monetizing this concept—this zeitgeist concept—as an expert, why does it have to be a book?” And that’s the thing that I find very tricky as an agent when there’s so much information on the internet about every topic.
Cassie Mannes Murray: Carly, do you think publishing timelines are also a factor in this? That publishing isn’t keeping up with pop cultural movements?
Carly Watters: I definitely do think that’s a problem. The other thing is that our life has changed so much in the past five years, and we don’t even know what the next two years are going to look like. So how are we supposed to put out nonfiction books that could be dispelled by somebody writing an Atlantic article by the time this book could come out? You know what I mean? It’s like we’re just aging ourselves really fast. And as I said, as somebody who’s advising authors, creatives, and experts on the best thing to do with their career, writing a book isn’t always the best thing for them right now.
Anna Sproul-Latimer: I sell mostly nonfiction, and I have noticed a little more conservatism from publishers, particularly financially. But I have two notes of optimism: One, I see the more prestigious academic presses really stepping in and being competitive in auctions with the Big Five publishers for the first time in my career, which I love to see. They’re offering industry-competitive royalties for the first time, upper five- and six-figure advances. Wonderful to see they’re being bullish where other publishers aren’t. And secondly, I do think everyone in publishing realizes that this is not a permanent development. This is just fluctuations of the marketplace based on individual books that have come out within the year and consumer behavior. I do think there’s always going to be, especially now, an appetite for books sort of at the intersection of wholesome, unhinged, and aware. I call it “the muppet dancing on the edge of the abyss book”: It’s funny, it’s a little weird, but it acknowledges the depth of grief of reality. It’s not in denial. I do think there’s always ample appetite for that kind of book, no matter where we are.
Ann Kjellberg: Do you think it’s possible, as AI takes over search more and more—and as traditional media becomes harder and harder to maintain—nonfiction books will rise a bit as a more trusted source, that publishers have attached institutional reputations to them? Books are not going to change overnight online.
Kate McKean: During this discussion, I’ve realized that I have not done a lot of nonfiction in a while and that most of the nonfiction I gravitated to was practical—craft, sewing, knitting, all that stuff. And then YouTube came along and really destroyed that market, and it’s coming back a little bit. It never was at a point where any of my clients could quit their job and write a book. Advances were incredibly small for knitting and sewing books, unless you had a huge, huge blog, when we had blogs. But with Etsy also changing in a way that creators really don’t like, and YouTube being flooded with crap, people are going back to books a little bit, like, “Oh, wait. I just want no ads and this thing to tell me how to crochet.” And with AI search being horrible and people being like: Can you just tell me the answer to my question?
Let’s discuss another area where we’re seeing some declines—and maybe it’s market fluctuation: in children’s middle-grade fiction. It’s been trending downward for about a year and a half. Barnes & Noble sometimes gets partly blamed for this because they pulled back on hardcovers. I don’t know if that’s really fair. There was a study, Decline by Nine, about the drop-off in reading for fun around third to fourth grade. Many culprits come up here—screens, school testing, challenges with discoverability at that age, and so on. Darcy, what do you see happening?
Darcy Pattison: The audience right now is Gen Alpha, the second-generation digital natives. There are stories of 12- to 14-month-old kids grabbing a phone, unlocking it, opening the photo app, and taking a picture. They know how to do all of this stuff. I just looked up the statistics today for the second quarter of 2024, and there were 32 million daily users of Roblox, ages 13 and under. In other words, five- and six-year-old kids are on Roblox or Minecraft. It’s normal, because these kids just know technology. So you have to really think about all of that.
And this leads to this question “Do kids have fun when they read?” Scholastic has done a report every other year for a while called the Kids & Family Reading Report, and they ask, “Do you read for fun?” Well, that’s complicated. What is the kid thinking? It only counts if I read a print book? My 10-year-old grandson right now loves audiobooks. Does that count as reading for fun? Because he is reading for fun. Sometimes the questions get too complicated, and we’re not taking into account the formats that are there. I think kids still read for fun, it’s just more nuanced, more rich in some ways.
Paperbacks are 80 to 90 percent of what I sell, unless you go over to the reading apps. And on a reading app [Epic], I have one series that has 5 million reads. In 2020, the Epic reading app had 1 billion reads. So that’s where kids are reading too. When you ask kids “Do you read for fun?” are surveys taking into account reading on Epic?
On the other hand, there is something to this decline. I’ve read other reports that say that about that age—9, 10, 11 years old—kids become genre readers. So they decide about that time, “I’m going to read only history. That’s what I really like.” And whatever they decide at that age, it tends to be what they do for their lifetime. So we aren’t taking those sorts of things into account. My grandson has decided he likes audiobooks. He will for the rest of his life probably do audiobooks. So there is something that happens at about that age.
One thing we need to do is teach kids to choose their own books, because kids say they want to read, it’s just that they can’t find a book they think they will like. So if you can help them discover those books and give them choices, they’re 95 percent more likely to like a book they chose themselves, 90 percent more likely to finish a book they chose themselves. So those things are all important. [Editor’s note: Publishers Weekly recently published an article in which industry insiders discuss how to make reading fun and competitive in the “tough attention economy.”]
Kate McKean: I’m having an incredibly hard time selling middle grade, period. I’m having more luck selling picture books, which is surprising to me, because I feel like that market has always been hard and will continue to be hard because it’s flooded—and many other reasons. I haven’t tried to sell a YA book in years, and I am in a YA book club run by David Levithan and have been for 20 years, and we read widely middle grade and YA, and I haven’t liked any of the YA we’ve read in years and years. I think it’s partly I am out of the age group by many decades. … The slang has completely eclipsed me. But I have a seven-year-old, almost eight-year-old, and it is harder to get them to read. And I’m not pushing it, because the more you push it, the more they won’t do it. They will pick up a book, mostly graphic novels or the hybrid illustrated prose books, and they will read on Libby and things like that. They’re in a graphic novel reading club after school that they love. The market has really pointed itself to graphic novels and the hybrids, which I’m very much in favor of, but it has left the prose in the dust, and I don’t know what will fix it.
Darcy Pattison: So if you look at the Scholastic report again and look at the question, “What do you like to read?” the number-one thing kids say is humor. Then you look at a list of the hyped middle-grade books of the season, and they are issue driven. No humor. Certainly those are valid books, but will kids choose that first? Not likely. They want humor. That’s why Dog Man and Wimpy Kid are still at the top of the charts. We don’t publish what kids want.
Kate McKean: I think that’s very prevalent in YA. We just read Holly Jackson’s A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder, and it was fantastic. And it was a murder mystery. I enjoyed every single page of it, and I haven’t read anything like that that’s been published in the last five years in ages and ages. And I think the same thing goes for middle grade.
Carly, you had an interesting post lately about trying to help writers sort through online misinformation about the publishing industry—which, I salute you, because it’s a Sisyphean task to address all the bad advice that goes around. It feels worse than ever to me and, I don’t know, is that just the inevitable nature of social media? I do see this problem in other areas, like health and finance, so I’m wondering what this might mean for author-experts trying to establish themselves in an environment where I’m not sure experts even command the respect they once did.
Carly Watters: I think the energy you sensed from that post was a crossroads for me, about literally 15 years of being online as a literary agent and talking about this job. I have to think about how I want to show up online, what I think my responsibility as a literary agent is to the online community.
The issue that I keep coming up against is that I need to work with authors who are prepared for the outcome of the business, so this is why I have spent so much time and energy trying to debunk, trying to help authors, because I do think agents are in an incredible position to help authors see through so much of what’s going on. But it’s a huge responsibility, and hours of my day can get sucked into that.
But to your question, is it getting worse? Yes, and the reason is, it used to be that everybody would go to one place to get their information, which was Twitter, and all the agents would be on Twitter, all the information would be on Twitter. And now, there’s always new writers coming into the business, of course, but they might go to Reddit, or they might go to Threads, or they might go to Bluesky, and they might go to Substack, wherever they go. And whose responsibility is it to put the good information out there, you know? Where are they going to find that information? It’s a lot of water cooler conversation, authors giving each other advice, which can be completely fine and innocuous, but who is going to be the expert, right?
I do think it’s an internet trend, and all of us do this, right? We’re all in our little silos. In the past week or so, I was looking for a new shampoo. Where do I go to find the information? I’m not going to a magazine, because they’re sponsored by big hair. … So I’m going to go to my social media followers and ask them: “If your hair is like mine, where should I get my shampoo?”
So where are we all going to get our information from? Who do we trust? Why should we trust the people we trust? We want human opinions on things, and this is why influencers have become big. Readers don’t care what publishing has to say about the books they should buy. They want to know what their peers are reading and what they think they should buy from that perspective.
The influencer culture shows absolutely no signs of stopping. The amount of money, the billions of dollars that are being pumped into influencer culture across the board, is just going to keep growing. But if we’re talking about peer-to-peer advice, it just adds fuel to the fire of misinformation, and that’s why I do think it’s a Sisyphean task for us all to continue to do this. But we all do it, and we’re all on this panel because we’re people who want to share advice. And we do it from the goodness of our hearts. I feel like, morally, I can’t not try to steer people in the right direction.
I think this ties in really well with what Kate wrote recently about whether or not she should be on TikTok, because you have a book coming out in spring 2025. So you’re having this debate with yourself. I’ve had this debate with myself. Should I be there? It’s obviously important for book publishing and all the reasons we know about. You have a lot of comments on that post. Have you come to any conclusions?
Kate McKean: The most surprising thing I learned from those comments was that I don’t have to be as good at it as I thought I did. I could pretty much half-ass it and probably get whatever I wanted out of it. My expectations of that would be reasonably low—I don’t want it to take over my life. I don’t expect it to help me sell a million copies of a book. But if it helped a little, and I put some amount of energy into it, I would feel like that was worth it.
I thought I would have to do videos that would be more highly produced, but I could do really crappy ones and they probably would do as well. Hopefully that will be what will happen. Maybe I’ll just go outside in Prospect Park in Brooklyn and tape myself walking around and saying, “It doesn’t matter if you make a typo in a query letter, we’re not going to reject you. Stop worrying about this.” I feel like that’s all I want to do. I’m not on TikTok as a consumer of media, because I will never get out. And so I just watch really, really bad [Instagram] Reels for hours a day. I’m nervous about it, but I might do it, and I will probably have to start now if I want anything for the book when the book comes out.
Amran Gowani: I come from a non-traditional writing and publishing background, so I didn’t have any social media when I started my author journey. Earlier this year, I was figuring out which tools I should be using, and I thought about TikTok pretty hard. Based on my understanding of the platform, people go to TikTok to be entertained at the end of the day, and I’m a reasonably entertaining guy at times, but I didn’t imagine myself as someone that could create the kind of really engaging, fun, highly produced videos that people would want to watch. I figured that I might do more harm to myself than good. The pertinent person who may or may not move my book when it comes out is a TikTok book influencer, not me. If anything, I’m just going to end up looking really desperate and thirsty. It’s much more powerful for someone who’s a well-established influencer to say, “Hey, man, that guy’s book changed my life. It’s the best thing that I’ve ever read.” If it does happen, that’s going to have way more impact on sales and the long trajectory of my book than anything I could do.
I ended up going to Instagram, and I do make some pretty half-assed reels there. Something funny happens to me, I pick my phone up really quick, I make a 10-second video, I crack a joke. Maybe people like it. Maybe they won’t. Sometimes I’ll give little periodic updates about my [writing and publishing] journey. Maybe somebody becomes a fan of me, they can go back to the archive and say, Okay, this is when he signed his deal … this is when he finished his editing process, etc. I feel like that serves more as an archive for the person who becomes a true fan of my work, rather than me trying to be out there as an entertainment personality. I do have a pretty popular Substack. It’s a bit of a cult following. I do most of my outreach work there.
Right, so Substack—we have to talk about Substack! There have been some notable Substack posts in the last year or two. Elle Griffin, I think, had the one that blew up the biggest about how no one buys books. Ted Gioia just wrote one about how magazines are dead. Part of me does really bristle when these people act as if Substack is going to be the way we all earn our living in the future. It feels a little bit tribal in the same way that traditional publishing and self-publishing authors can be tribal. I can’t deny Substack plays a really important role, though, and it underlies me bringing you all together for this panel. And I certainly do enjoy it as a platform. But now I’m constantly hearing from authors who say, “I’ve been told I really need to get on Substack.” At the same time, I’m hearing people bemoan the fact there are too many Substacks and it’s pointless. So I want to step into this discourse, and I thought Anna might be best prepared to do that.
Anna Sproul-Latimer: The one thing I wrote down in advance of this, in my notebook, was you need to know for whom you’re writing and why. You need to know that honestly, and the honest answer needs to be “for other people” and not for yourself to succeed in any promotional endeavor.
I think people are talking about Substack now the way they were talking about blogs in 2008. And you know, my answer for Substack is the same as it was for blogging, although with Substack, you at least have a chance of making a little money. So that’s nice. It only works if you are really motivated, like I have an almost bodily sensation when I know I want to write something. Like just now, it occurred to me that I could write a newsletter this week on Blake Lively and there’s that week taken care of. It feels like a sort of octopus is trying to get out of my throat. That’s how I feel whenever I have something I want to share with my audience. I also have, as do we all, a sizable, very discreet, very identifiable, very motivated audience who wants the expertise that we have. Those are all really, I would say, necessary elements for a successful Substack. Maybe not the motivated audience off the bat, if you’re willing to really grow your audience slowly, but you’ve got to know what value you’re giving them, how it is distinctive from other formats. You’ve got to be committed to consistency. I’ve noticed—I try not to get obsessed with my Substack stats—but for the past couple of weeks, I’ve only been able to post a rerun and on a Friday night when not many people are reading, and I’ve lost like $2,000 of income because people, they want the consistency. They want to know exactly when something is coming, and they want valuable content every single week, and that’s what I promise. Even so, some people who subscribe cite lack of content as the reason they’re unsubscribing. This is all especially true if you want to be paid for your Substack.
So when my authors ask, “Do I need to be on Substack?” I redirect them back to my favorite thing to ask, which is, “Okay, imagine your obituary at the end of your career. Imagine the two sentences in which the obituary writer is summing up your life work at the very beginning. Answer what those are. And then let’s talk about how to orient every aspect of your career toward that.” And if you can’t figure out the separate but complementary ways in which your book work and your Substack are doing that, there’s no point. There’s no point in having a Substack. You won’t grow a platform. It’s far better to turn inward and think about what already is your platform that you might not have recognized as platform—like the alumni association from your college or professional associations—than to fake something by writing riffs on the theme of your book every week.
Amran Gowani: As someone who used Substack before I got my breakthrough, getting my agent and my book deal, it is only very loosely related to my novel, only in the thematic things that I write about. And I call it a humor and satire newsletter, where I can just flex my muscles and show people that I am a reasonably competent writer. And then if you enjoy when I write on Substack, you will probably like my book. I did try to monetize my Substack and failed miserably, because I don’t really have much to offer other than some good one liners. That’s not really valuable to a lot of people, because there’s one liners everywhere. So I’ve reframed mine [from] a place I’m trying to monetize into “Here’s a place for me to be in the world and show what I can do.” Hopefully that will lead to downstream book sales, but you have to think about it really as just another marketing channel.
Ann Kjellberg: I pay my writers to appear on my Substack, so I am strongly motivated to get paying subscribers, and it’s extremely challenging, even though I’m somewhat well connected in the media world. We might have a little bit of an inflated sense of the possible audiences because everybody there is a writer and the thing they’re most interested in is how to get published. So if you have writers who want to write about something else, it’s an entirely different prospect. I find that so many of my followers are there because they want me to pay attention to them. This is what Substack tells you, to interact with the writer, to form these social relationships across the platform in order to increase your audience. I find that a little bit frustrating. I don’t only want to be speaking to people who are writers. I want to be speaking to a larger world. And I think Substack doesn’t think much about how to reach outside of that pool.
The other thing I’ve noticed is that since they developed Notes, they’ve been amplifying these recommendation features. A lot of writers feel as though their non-paying subscribers fluctuate wildly and grow very easily. And the reason is that when people subscribe to one thing, they’re given all these very easy prompts to subscribe to other things. So people come and go very fast. So there’s this sense that you’re discoverable, you’re getting your content out there in front of a lot of people. But it’s a bit illusory. Casey Newton calls it a vanity list, that list of your super huge non-paying subscribers. So I think that if you’re advising writers about how to have a presence on Substack who are not speaking specifically to other writers, it seems to me the people who are most successful are the ones giving practical advice about life. They’re giving travel tips or beauty tips or investing tips and stuff like that.
Amran Gowani: I would say the other problem with Substack is that the people doing really well and monetizing their newsletters were already famous. A significant percentage of them were bestselling authors, they were university professors or independent journalists, or they had some other platform. They had some other cache to bring that gives them an imprimatur of credibility. Then they can say, hey, give me five bucks and I’ll respond to your comment or whatever. That’s a more easy transition than when you’re an unknown like myself. When my book comes out next summer, will I actually get an influx of readers who are like, “Okay, I know this guy from his book, and now I’m going to go check on his Substack”?
Cassie Mannes Murray: For writers, this is the same as a TikTok question: What are you good at? If you’re good at standing in front of a video and being funny, then get on TikTok and don’t do Substack. If you’re good at these cutesy posts or like graphics, do Instagram. If gloss is your thing, that’s Instagram. If you’re a good blogger—a content writer like Leigh Stein comes to mind—like, get on Substack. Writers think they have to do all the things. No. Focus on your strengths.
Last question: Amran, you and I have exchanged notes about negativity in the author community. I don’t know how much you think this overlaps with our conversation about misinformation; I’ll let you decide. It seems like people feel a little bit dark about publishing right now, so I wanted to give you a chance to speak to that. We’ve both noticed it.
Amran Gowani: There’s a misalignment in expectations that causes a lot of negativity in general. There’s kind of a tragic irony that the misalignment of expectations is almost fundamental. On one side, to be delusional enough and narcissistic enough to think “I’m going to write a book and people are going to want to publish it and buy it and read it.” Then on the publishing and business side of the equation, you’re going to run into some really grim realities. It’s hard to marry the optimism required to say, “I’m going to be an artist in the world and try to then make a living as an artist” with “Try it out and see what happens. Maybe it’ll work. Maybe it won’t.” A lot of times it’s just pure luck.
And then all of the things that we’ve talked about during this conversation make it worse, the disinformation, the fear of AI, the “nobody buys books” articles that are just factually incorrect, the “magazines are dead” articles which are just factually incorrect, the “Substack is going to be your only way to make money as a writer” which is factually incorrect.
In my personal writing journey, I had my midlife crisis. I quit my job in corporate America, and I wrote a book, and it sucked and it was too long, and it was not marketplace ready. But instead of just basically saying, “Oh, the gatekeeper shut me out and the world hates me,” I said, “Okay, what did I do wrong? And what are the practical realities that I need to understand?” Then I studied those and I learned about the business. What are the rules that are kind of implicit? There are no hard-and-fast rules, generally, but there are some kind of guideposts that you can use.
When I started to study those things, I never had to once compromise on my art. I could still then go into the process more prepared. So when I took my second book out into the marketplace, I still got rejected like crazy. There’s a beautiful irony here that Kate and Neon Literary all rejected my novel, which was then acquired, and I’m not mad about it. And that’s the thing. Rather than be really negative, like “They hate me and they don’t think I’m a valuable person in the world,” no. I was asking them to be a business partner with me on this product I created, and they said “I don’t think I can be a good partner to you on that project, but keep at it.” And I did. And then I found an agent that loves the book, and he found an editor that loves the book.
You still have to be delusionally optimistic. You’re still going to run into a lot of rejection. You’re still going to run into a lot of frustration. But just understanding the business can really help writers and artists and probably any type to navigate that tension.
Kate McKean: What I don’t understand, what frustrates me about people who want to get published, is that they expect they know everything just because they learned how to write when they were five. But if you want to be a country music singer, you know you have to go to Nashville and go to every single thing and try, try, try, and get rejected 1,000 times. That’s the way it’s supposed to happen. But that’s not what happens when you write. Because you’re a special flower that wrote a perfect thing on your first try. That’s the thing that gets me.
Amran Gowani: When I started writing my book, instead of falling into the negativity death spiral when nobody wanted it, I said, “Okay, well, how do I make it better?” And then I started studying more craft. I didn’t come from the world of MFA or anything, but I said it’s incumbent upon me to learn to be a better writer, how to write fiction and not an email. They’re not the same thing. Just to your point, Kate, I think more people need to get serious. This is not a hobby, it’s a real profession, and it’s not a great profession. You’re probably not going to make a living doing it, but if you really are motivated to do it, you have to treat it like a real job.
Carly Watters: I call it gold star syndrome, because so many authors were great students, and they were told by their English teacher, the English professor, you’re so good at this, you should be a writer, and then everybody wants a gold star. Everybody thinks they deserve a gold star. And you’re now in a competitive marketplace with everybody who thinks they deserve a gold star.
Cassie Mannes Murray: Yeah, I really like what Amran said about a business partnership. It’s reciprocity. I think sometimes writers come to the table and expect, like, all this stuff from publishers. Okay, but you have to build up your side. You have to play your part, you have to collaborate, that sort of thing.
Amran Gowani: Yeah, I see the word gatekeeper tossed around like a pejorative in the author community. It implies that there’s a party that’s happening, and you’re not getting invited. Nobody invited me to anything, and we’re trying to make money here at the end of the day. I know a lot of writers balk at that, and I’m a guy who has an MBA, so I’m definitely not wired the same as your traditional English literature major, but it’s a business, and the agents can only make money if the author can sell the book, and the publishers can only make money if they can move the book. You don’t go to the store and buy toothpaste that tastes like garden soil, because no one wants to buy that. So you have to think about it from a consumer perspective, just understand the practical realities of trying to sell.
Jane Friedman has spent her entire career working in the publishing industry, with a focus on business reporting and author education. Established in 2015, her newsletter The Bottom Line provides nuanced market intelligence to thousands of authors and industry professionals; in 2023, she was named Publishing Commentator of the Year by Digital Book World.
Jane’s expertise regularly features in major media outlets such as The New York Times, The Atlantic, NPR, The Today Show, Wired, The Guardian, Fox News, and BBC. Her book, The Business of Being a Writer, Second Edition (The University of Chicago Press), is used as a classroom text by many writing and publishing degree programs. She reaches thousands through speaking engagements and workshops at diverse venues worldwide, including NYU’s Advanced Publishing Institute, Frankfurt Book Fair, and numerous MFA programs.
