A peculiar aspect of the dawning of the digital age is that it has, in some respects, returned literary life to the 18th century. A hullabaloo of pamphleteers, the effective abolition of copyright – and a return to patronage networks and serial publication. In this context, then, the way in which literary writers are now turning to Substack – a platform that allows authors to send emails to a list of subscribers, and allows those subscribers to interact in comment forums – seems entirely natural.
Literary Substacks don’t follow a single pattern. For some, it’s a way of getting new work into the world, whether publishing a novel in serial form or hot-off-the-keyboard short stories; for others, it’s a way of interacting directly with readers (while building a handy marketing list); for still others, it’s a home for criticism, journalism, personal blowing off of steam, self-promotion, or a more direct version of the traditional writerly side hustle, teaching creative writing to aspiring authors.
Most of them offer tiers of subscription: a monthly fee (usually a fiver or so) gets you paywalled posts; there’ll be a discounted yearly fee; and a “founder member” platinum tier that, for a substantial hike in costs, offers some extra benefit such as signed copies, exclusive events or other interactions with the author. Most Substacks also let you sign up to public posts for free.
The selling points to its users are its immediacy and the freedom it gives writers to speak to the people interested in their work or their lives without corporate gatekeepers. And for those who can build up a solid list of paid subscribers – like the big-name journalists who ditched traditional media for Substack and made more money doing so – it has the potential to be a nice little earner.
Emma Gannon, described last year by the Bookseller as “one of the most popular novelists on Substack”, says that “the thing I love about it is it’s sort of unlike classic social media. It’s based on interests, rather than the humblebragging of showing your life as a highlight reel. People are geeking out on Substack about the things they love: writing, knitting, gardening. It’s got a different vibe to it, because people are showcasing what they’re interested in rather than what they are doing.”
It is, she says, “like old-school blogging, but people are having long interactions with each other in the comments, which feels really healthy”. She adds that the mechanism for recommending other Substacks means that “it’s got a real generosity of spirit built into it”. In an age when writers make less and less money, the patronage aspect – “People want to support me financially because they like what I’m doing, and it feels like a kind of: ‘I will pay you, not for a word count, not for a content transaction, just to kind of keep you going’” – has a human value.
Another prominent Substacker, the Israeli writer Etgar Keret, shares that view. He says that with most social media the algorithm is the boss (a viral post he made on Facebook earned him 200,000 comments and dozens of death threats), but with Substack you’re engaging directly with people who are interested in your work: “I don’t want to outsource the decisions about this community to something that is inhuman and that has commercial interests.” When you interact with someone on Substack, he says, “I wouldn’t say it’s human – but it’s almost human.”
Author Margaret Atwood
Title In the Writing Burrow
Cost £5 a month or £47 a year
Typical post “The Oracle Mouths Off, Part 2”
What you get With characteristic puckish directness, Atwood promises subscribers a dose of “whatever comes into my addled, shrinking brain”. In practice, that means all sorts of sprightly stuff – a months-long digression on the French Revolution; notes from a book tour; prognostications about American politics; or personal material such as the inside story of Atwood getting a pacemaker (“The Report of My Death ...”). It’s like getting letters from a wise, spiky and confiding aunt.
Author Hanif Kureishi
Title The Kureishi Chronicles
Cost £5 a month or £35 a year; £240 for “founding member” (extra benefit: “a copy of one of my books, signed with an inked thumb, as I am unable to use my hands”)
Typical post “Small Town Rebels”
What you get Kureishi’s Substack started with a catastrophe. At the end of 2022, the writer suffered a fall that injured his spine and deprived him of the use of his limbs. He wrote (or, rather, dictated) his way through his experience of this sudden disability (“Your writer,” was the moving sign-off to his tweets from his hospital bed) and his 2024 memoir, Shattered, went on to tell the story of his illness. This Substack was and remains a very intimate, episodic first draft of his experiences, a characteristically unsparing and humorous account of day-to-day life (“Heidi comes down, empties my urine bag [...] before putting the kettle on”) mixed with a generous selection of essays, interviews and other material new and old.
Author Mary Gaitskill
Title Out of It
Cost Free
Typical post “Have Salt in Yourselves”
What you get Longform letters, about twice a month (though Gaitskill takes the occasional apologetic pause) on whatever crosses the mind of this outstandingly sharp and clear-eyed writer. Gaitskill – author of the short story collection Bad Behavior and the novels This Is Pleasure and Veronica – says she’s using her Substack “for the same reason I started writing a long time ago; to connect with people”. Literary meditation, memoir, rapturous appreciation of a pole-dancing video (“basically tickled my will to live”), or commentary on Donald Trump’s re-election through the prism of the memoirs of the eccentric, heroin-addicted British dandy Sebastian Horsley.
Author Elif Shafak
Title Unmapped Storylands with Elif Shafak
Cost £7 a month or £65 a year; £195 for “founding member” (extra benefit: personalised messages and signed copy of her new book)
Typical post “Reading Books in the Age of Angst”
What you get Audio, video, images, text. Shafak sees her Substack as a multimedia home for “literary fragments” and “vignettes from a bookish life”; a way of connecting directly with her readers. You’ll find reflections on Flaubert, Proust and George Sand, updates on Shafak’s globetrotting interventions, and meditations on the writing life and the life of the spirit.
Author George Saunders
Title Story Club with George Saunders
Cost £5 a month or £39 a year
Typical post “About This Here Sentence Right Here”
What you get A masterclass in the mechanics and techniques of short story writing from an outstanding critic of the form and a Booker prize-winning practitioner of fiction. The jumping-off point was Saunders’s book about the Russian masters, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain. He’s interested in what short stories can tell us about ourselves and the world, too. Posts on Sunday (for paid subscribers) and every other Thursday (for everyone) include page-by-page close readings, as well as writing prompts and other discussions of the craft. Feedback and interaction are encouraged.
Author Salman Rushdie
Title Salman’s Sea of Stories
Cost $6 a month or $60 a year; $180 for “founding member” (extra benefit: “I’ll come up with something! For now, thank you very much”)
Typical post “The Seventh Wave, Episode 7”
What you get As well as a strong strand of the author’s musings on literary nonfiction (“Journalism as Literature”), which is one of the courses he teaches at New York University, the main sell for paid subscribers is access to emailed instalments of Rushdie’s serial novel The Seventh Wave: An Entertainment in 51 Episodes, which he has been writing since autumn 2021. His last Substack post was in August 2022, but the hiatus isn’t down to laziness. Five days later came the nearly successful attempt on his life.
Author Etgar Keret
Title Alphabet Soup
Cost £4 a month or £39 a year; £115 for “founding member” (extra benefit: “immortalised by having a problematic character in a future Alphabet Soup story named after them”)
Typical post “God the Midget”
What you get Keret is a hugely prolific Israeli writer of short stories whose Substack is the one that Rushdie (“So witty and enjoyable, and he’s clearly having a wonderful time doing it”) credits with getting him on board with the platform. In this newsletter, his “About” page says: “We serve two types of soup”. “Fresh soup” is a new text or first English publication (he writes a lot in Hebrew) of one of Keret’s texts – from stories to poems to screenplays to fragments of memoir or other nonfiction. “Canned soup” is something that’s been in print before. You can even get “alphabet audio soup”, which … makes your ears wet?
Author Roxane Gay
Title The Audacity
Cost £6 a month or £55 a year; £265 for “Ride or Die” (extra benefit: “my endless, boundless gratitude”)
Typical post “Private Rites: Lesbianpalooza”
What you get Gay is a novelist, memoirist, essayist, podcaster, comics writer (making her one of the first Black women, with co-writer Yona Harvey, to write a Marvel comic), journalist, cultural critic and academic. So you get a bit of all of that when you sign up for The Audacity. The heart of it is the Audacious Book Club, where Gay introduces a book every month (recent featured authors include Laila Lalami and Kevin Nguyen), with regular prompts for community discussion in the newsletter. There are also opportunities for paid subscribers to join an interview with the author over Zoom.
Author Howard Jacobson
Title Streetwalking with Howard Jacobson
Cost £5 a month or £55 a year; £150 for “founding member” (extra benefit not specified)
Typical post “The Necessity of Offence”
What you get Jacobson is as distinguished a journalist as he is a novelist, and his Substack hops tracks ad lib. Sometimes it’s an opinion column, sometimes whimsy (he kept a post about pleated trousers behind the paywall because, he notes wanly, “readers who might otherwise be circumspect are happy to pay for fashion tips”). There’s cultural commentary (including an excellently feeling post on the cultural appropriation of bagels) and in response to Trumpism and the war in Gaza, some characteristically acidic reflections on free speech and antisemitism. He’s a grouchy man, with good reason to be grouchy, and few grouch more eloquently.
Author Miranda July
Title Miranda July
Cost £5 a month or £47 a year; £135 for “founding member” (extra benefit: “you’ll be the first and possibly only people to know about certain things”)
Typical post “What is fun and how to fun and why fun”
What you get The Onion once published an article headlined: “Miranda July Called Before Congress to Explain Exactly What Her Whole Thing Is”. Accordingly, July’s Substack makes no promises to stay in its lane, and it offers subscribers “New writing! Lists! Dance videos! Other body things! Experimentation! Free form!” July is a multidisciplinary writer and artist, and if her Substack has a guiding principle it’s July’s magpie sensibility. So in addition to the newsletter the site hosts podcasts and vlogs, there’s a commenting community which July hopes will be “an actual good way for people to make friends, colleagues, lovers”, and an unboxing post commemorates the arrival of a vintage lavender dress July ordered on the internet.
Author Jami Attenberg
Title Craft Talk
Cost $8 a month or $60 a year; $100 a year for “dreamboat supporters” (extra benefit not specified)
Typical post “I Want You to Be Both Gentle and Tough With Yourself”
What you get Attenberg’s Substack is strongly tilted towards aspiring writers. The novelist and short story writer known for The Middlesteins and All This Could Be Yours has been running what she calls an “accountability practice” for writers called 1,000 Words on her newsletter since 2018. For two weeks each summer the Substack features #1000wordsofsummer – “a 52,000-strong community of writers of all levels who are all supporting each other to write 1,000 words a day for two weeks”. Which means a daily keep-it-up email from Attenberg, additional thoughts from a published writer guest-star most days, and a Slack and social media community for participants to share encouragement and brag about their word counts. The rest of the year sees Attenberg posting on aspects of literary craft – prompts, vignettes from the writing life, and even the odd interview – once a week, every week.
Author Chuck Palahniuk
Title Chuck Palahniuk’s Plot Spoiler
Cost £5 a month or £35 a year; £150 for “founding member” (extra benefit: “lifetime admission to Study Hall perks as Chuck invents them, personalised shit”)
Typical post “The Orgy Moment: Cascading Payoffs”
What you get Chuck Palahniuk’s lunch spoiler, potentially. The author of Fight Club has always had a taste for extreme material, and as he told me a few years back, Substack gives him “complete licence to put anything on the page that I want, and not be curbed by the timidity of the editor”. Subscribers can enjoy his Substack-exclusive serial novel Greener Pastures, as well as “short, upsetting fiction from me”. But it’s also a writing community, where Palahniuk showcases the work of his best students, dishes out “homework” (watch Animal House, “the douchiest movie ever”, carefully), offers giveaways and discusses craft in a direct and unpretentious way.
Author Emma Gannon
Title The Hyphen by Emma Gannon
Cost £8 a month or £69 a year; £100 for “I can expense this!” (extra benefit: “my eternal love and appreciation”)
Typical post “How I Make Six Figures on Substack”
What you get Gannon has a millennial’s ease in the multimedia environment: she’s a popular novelist, a podcaster, a journalist, trained life coach, wellbeing and business influencer, and all-round self-facilitating media node. She’s very engaged with her community and generous in paying it forward: a fortnightly “Slow Sunday Scroll” rounds up her recommendations of books, links, podcasts and consumer items she likes. Typical posts are savvy and friendly stuff about professional life and hanging on to your sanity in the social media age.
Author Catherine Lacey
Title Untitled Thought Project
Cost £4 a month or £43 a year; £75 for “founding member” (extra benefit: “my endless thanks”)
Typical post “Oh, God”
What you get Lacey, author of the astounding short story collection Certain American States, and fugitive postmodern novels such as Pew, Biography of X and Nobody Is Ever Missing, never writes the same book twice. Accordingly, perhaps, her Substack promises “a place of confusion and curiosity, a repository for open emails and things that are not quite essays”. Her special sauce in the Substack are her Oulipian micro-essays – exactly 144 words each, “a dozen times a dozen, also known as ‘a gross’, a term I learned while doing an inventory of nails and screws in my family’s hardware store”. A particularly charming aspect of the Substack is that the word limit means that even though the posts are “only for paid subscribers”, you get the whole micro-essay in the preview pane anyway.
Author Elif Batuman
Title The Elif Life
Cost £5 a month or £47 a year; £115 for “founding member” (extra benefit: “Periodic mini photo-essays of things I find interesting”)
Typical post “Adventures in Molybdomancy”
What you get Batuman’s bouncy brain bouncing into your inbox. Here, she muses on 1924, the connections between James Baldwin and Henry James, and the person who dissected Lenin’s cerebellum. There, she realises what the Beach Boys have to tell us about environment and culture, and how Surfing USA can, besides, cheer up the crosspatch writer. And elsewhere, she offers a bonus multimedia post “about my experience trying to have my fortune told with Turkish coffee grounds”. Erudite, elliptical and irrepressible.
