For those of you who are new in town, here’s my version of the Substack story and an explanation of how and why I’m using it.
What is Substack
Substack helps writers like me reach readers like you.
Created seven years ago by three tech bros in San Francisco,1 it is an app for your phone and a website for your laptop.
I don’t know what the word Substack means. The internet doesn’t seem to know either. It might have something to do with obscure mathematical terminology2 but we can overlook that.
If Substack had a beating heart it would be the thoughtful and attentive heart of a writer.
On Substack, people who like to write string words together for people who like to read. If the reader enjoys the experience, they can give the writer money, and therein lies the appeal: Substack helps writers get paid for writing.
Substack is not for numbskulls or dolts but that doesn’t mean there aren’t any numbskulls or dolts hanging around.
Since inception its popularity has increased and it is attracting more and more people, like me.
And unfortunately, the dreaded content-providers.
Take Ozzy Man for example, a veteran of the content-provision multiverse, whose puerile Destination Fucked videos I enjoy from time to time, particularly while sitting on the toilet.
Like many others, Ozzy Man has recently come over to Substack because he is unhappy with his first home, Facebook, where the algorithms are no longer serving him. Facebook wants to be more like TikTok, where mindless three-second videos stupefy the masses and imprison sentient beings inside an endless hell-scroll. Anything that requires an attention span is cast aside, which is where Substack comes in.
Substack was designed for people who can concentrate.
In this quote, Substack founder Hamish McKenzie explains:
We started Substack because we believed it was important to offer writers and readers a way out of the media systems that were serving them poorly. We wanted to show that there can be something better than the attention economy, the incentives of which were leading to the types of content and behavior that corrode trust and comity; that turn readers into mindless doomscrollers; and that strip writers of their financial dignity.3
In an interview with American journalist Noah Smith Substack investor Marc Andreessen adds:
So much of legacy media, due to the technological limitations of distribution technologies like newspapers and television, makes you stupid. Substack is the profit engine for the stuff that makes you smart.
Substack makes you smart. In the early days when most people had no idea what it was, it seems there was something of a Cambrian explosion4 of writing, mostly, but not exclusively, from the creative left.
Then came the conservative writers with their own ideas, and in the ensuing culture clash Substack suffered its first crisis of confidence as the lefties indignantly demanded that Substack show the new arrivals the door.
Substack refused to acquiesce and the right-wingers were not turned away. Substack kept its doors open to all, which is another reason it is popular.
People can write whatever they want on Substack.
No censorship.
Why am I here?
Substack is a useful tool that helps me share my writing with you and get paid for it.
Not all the money goes to me of course. Some of it is diverted by the intermediaries: Substack takes ten-percent and the online payment provider Stripe snatches an additional two-point-nine percent plus twenty pence for each transaction.
If you send me five-pounds, it drops into my bank account as a diminished four-pounds-and-sixteen-pence. Such is the world we live in.
You send £5
Substack takes 10%
Stripe takes 2.9% + 20p
I receive £4.16
Chris Best, Substack’s chief executive, said the aim of the site was to allow writers and creators to run their own media empire.5
I don’t know about that. I don’t want to run my own media empire. Why it is assumed that everyone is a money-obsessed, power-hungry sociopath who wants to build a personal empire I don’t know. We’re not. Well I’m not anyway. I don’t need masses of cash and I definitely don’t need an empire. We know what happens to empires.6
Currently I have four-hundred-and-two subscribers, most of them gathered up during the YogaBen days.
Most are free subscribers but a precious twenty-one are paying subscribers, which means they give me money once a month or once a year (some also send me cash gifts every now and then, for which, thank you, it really helps).
Total subscribers 402
Paying subscribers 21
Thanks to the magnificent-twenty-one (a generous and clear-sighted bunch) I have an annual income of one-thousand-two-hundred-and-thirty-nine pounds. That’s one-hundred-and-three pounds a month.
Annual income £1,239
Monthly income £103
If I could multiply that by ten and earn around a thousand pounds a month from my writing, that would do me just fine.
The route to that personal nirvana involves me continuing to write and you continuing to read (and show your appreciation by opening your wallet).
The one problem I notice is that it doesn’t seem financially viable for normal people at the arse end of austerity, lock downs and inflation to pay out monthly for an increasing number of Substack writers.
Let’s say you find three writers you like and subscribe to all of them at £5 per month. That’s a monthly outlay of £15. Let’s say you like and subscribe to ten writers. That’ll be £50 a month please.
I myself subscribe to just one writer on Substack, Darren Allen at Expressive Egg. There are one or two other writers I’d like to give money to but I don’t because I’m trying to pay off debt.
If there are too many writers and too few readers the Substack model could stumble but what you do with your money is your affair so I’ll leave that to you to sort out.
I’m not simply after your money. I’m here to write and I will write to delight but I’ll never write to please. I’ll lay out life’s hard-truths in prose, confront and challenge. You might get fed up with me or grow weary of this, in which case you can always stop reading, unsubscribe and say goodbye.
On the other hand, if you are rankled by something, rather than slouching off, you could stick around and be troubled aloud. Take me to task. Comment on the article or send me a message, like this reader did:
I would have liked reading it if it hadn’t made me feel so depressed.
If you do engage with me, there’s a chance we’ll become broader-thinking, more informed people with wider horizons and deeper connections. We might learn something.
Do be warned, I can be an arrogant, disagreeable bastard.
However, I am also capable of absorbing competing ideas, holding paradox, changing my mind and standing corrected when I am wrong.
I’ll continue to fight the good fight, and write the good write, as truthfully as I can, with as much integrity as I can muster.
I hope you will join me.
If it is written, may it be so.
For those of you reading for free, consider becoming a paid subscriber from £5 a month. Writing is my craft: direct, honest and authentic. Money expresses your appreciation.
Or become a spontaneous supporter with a one-off donation (any amount).
Hamish McKenzie, Chris Best, and Jairaj Sethi (L-R) founded Substack in 2017.
In mathematics a stack or 2-sheaf is a sheaf that takes values in categories rather than sets. Stacks are used to formalise some of the main constructions of descent theory, and to construct fine moduli stacks when fine moduli spaces do not exist.
Around 530 million years ago, a wide variety of animals burst onto the evolutionary scene in an event known as the Cambrian explosion. In perhaps as few as 10 million years, marine animals evolved most of the basic body forms that we observe in modern groups. Among the organisms preserved in fossils from this time are relatives of crustaceans and starfish, sponges, mollusks, worms, chordates, and algae, exemplified by these taxa from the Burgess Shale.