Founded in 2017, Substack is an email newsletter platform that has become one of the most buzzed-about startups this year. Its stated purpose: to allow writers and creative people to generate income directly from their readers and “on their own terms.” Some of the most well-known names in media, including Zeynep Tufekci, Andrew Sullivan, Anne Helen Petersen, and Casey Newton, have started publishing freemium or premium newsletters using Substack.

The attraction of Substack—which is free to use—is partly its simplicity and how easy it is to establish a newsletter without any special technical skills. It doesn’t require the writer to have their own website, figure out ecommerce functionality, or cobble together multiple tools (as, for example, Hot Sheet does). It’s easy for the writer to determine which issues will be free or stay behind a paywall. It offers audio posting (podcasting-like) features. And the interface is straightforward and writing focused. In exchange for all this, Substack takes 10 percent of all subscription fees generated, plus another 3 percent for payment processing. For free newsletters, Substack charges nothing.

The growing attraction of Substack in the last year has been its increased support of writers on the platform. It offers paid fellowships, a mentorship program that matches emerging writers with established ones, and legal services. Patreon and Medium increasingly see it as a competitor, and Substack even has a guide for Patreon users who want to switch over.

So far, Substack has been most popular among journalists and people deep inside their communities or industries who frequently issue written commentary and opinion. For example, Alex Danco, who works at Shopify, writes a newsletter focused on the “innovation economy.”

In book publishing, the most well-known users so far are agents, editors, and others who offer advice and resources for writers. Here is a small sampling:

When we went looking for authors who are using Substack in more creative ways, such as fiction writers and poets serializing their work or entertaining readers between book releases, we struggled to identify any free or paid efforts as you’d find on Patreon. So we contacted Substack’s staff to inquire, and they pointed us to five such users. One of them is Rick Paulas, who published a series of short stories, Tales from the Palmer Hotel, in October.

Paulas said he was inspired to start the project because of the pandemic. He lives in Brooklyn, and the serial became a way to keep his mind occupied—and also to finish an old project he had started years prior. As a journalist, Paulas had a Substack account already, with people still subscribed to his newsletter. In addition to sending his stories out to that base, he posted about the series on social media and hoped for word of mouth. While Paulas didn’t charge for the stories, he did have a tip jar, and some people donated. “In my head, [my reader] was a person getting an email a night and opening it up and reading it,” he said. Each story is about 2,000 words and complemented by original artwork that a friend contributed. The experience, he says, “got the creative juices flowing.”

A longtime user of Substack we’ve observed in the literary community is Ann Kjellberg, who was on the editorial staff of the New York Review of Books from 1988 to 2017. Since spring 2018, she’s been publishing Book Post, a book review newsletter, using Substack. It costs $45 per year or $6 per month. When she first started Book Post, she already had a mailing list she’d been working on for a number of years, plus a modest following on social media, so that’s where her first subscribers came from. Today, she says, people usually learn about it through Twitter or when it’s mentioned by someone in a newsletter or article.

Kjellberg says her audience skews older, and it’s been harder to get subscribers over time. “The game is to get followers who become unpaid subscribers and convince them to pay,” she tells us. “It’s still not clear to me the extent to which people pay in a Patreon spirit—I support you and your project—as opposed to regular readers/consumers.” She also adds, “I think there is a natural paid-newsletter audience that sort of follows the Lenny model—you feel a connection to this person and you want to be part of an inner circle around them, and paying for a subscription expresses that; the other version is the super-insider industry news variant. Since I am an edited newsletter with multiple writers, it’s harder for me to create that feeling. I think for the single writer developing that sense of intimate connection is key.”

Unfortunately, at the moment, Kjellberg doesn’t believe that Book Post is sustainable. She says she needs an infusion of funds and know-how to figure out ways to reach new audiences. “But this is really my whole project: I am trying to figure out how to use digital media to develop the serious reading audience. I feel like what I’m in now is a holding pattern, and I am still trying to crack the problem while at the same time editing something worthwhile.”

One barrier, she says, is that Substack mandates a minimum subscription rate of $5 per month. That could be limiting its audience to elite, highly motivated readers. “I would really like Book Post to be something inexpensive that is part of regular people’s media diet. But for that I would need a much bigger subscriber pool anyway to break even, regardless of Substack policy.” She says if she reached a point where she could contemplate a really low fee and there were a good platform for that, she might leave Substack.

Some have suggested that there’s more work that could be done by Substack or similar service providers in aggregating or bundling newsletters together, where subscribers have the ability to pay one fee to access or sample a variety of publications. “I don’t see how, long term, the gig system can work for writing without some more structural innovations,” Kjellberg says.

Bottom line: Those who have succeeded thus far at Substack usually come to it with a large public presence or access to a large pool of potential subscribers. However, Kjellberg tells us, “The numbers indicate that you can make a go of it with a more modest audience, but only if you do not have costs. I am paying my writers.” Novelists, poets, and other creative writers who currently use Patreon to share work with their fans—and offer monthly pledge rates under $5—aren’t likely to see much reason to switch to Substack, given that it takes a higher cut of proceeds.