The Substack Walk

Transcript of Helen Sword’s podcast episode The Substack Walk

Hi, I'm Helen Sword from helensword.com, and this is Swordswings, my podcast series for writers in motion. Whether you're driving or riding a train, out for a walk or just pottering around in your kitchen, this recording will help you move yourself and your writing to someplace new. 

Today’s episode is all about Substack, the publishing platform on which I publish my free weekly newsletter Helen’s Word. In March 2024, I invited Dr. Sarah Fay to talk about Scholarly Writers on Substack.  Sarah is an expert consultant who helps writers flourish on the platform; she’s also the author of the popular Substack Writers @ Work newsletter. 

Let’s tune in to hear about Sarah’s own scholarly and professional journey, why scholarly writers might choose to publish on Substack, and how they can thrive there.

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Helen: So Sarah, I always like to start off by asking people just to introduce themselves by way of telling us how you got here, how you got to being the Substack guru. I know it’s not something you expected, so take as long as you want, because writer's histories are always interesting and I always especially love the twists and the turns.

Sarah: There have been many. If someone had told me five years ago even, or any time that I would be geeking out on stats and data and how to help people succeed on a personal media platform, I would never have been believed them. So, I'm Sarah Fay, It's great that all of you are here and to get to talk to you. I am a scholar as well, or a professional, if that's what you're here for. So my story, I always wanted to be a writer. There was just no question. No one explained to me the financial repercussions of deciding to become a writer and the difficulty of making a living as a writer [laughs], luckily, 'cause I just went ahead and did it. That was always what I did. I got an MFA very early, so a master in fine arts, and that was in poetry. And I lived in New York City and was living the poet Lower-East-Side life for a while, and then… My mental health has never been good, I battled with serious mental illness for 25 years and my memoir Pathological, which came out from Harper Collins, is about those the 25 years I spent in the mental health system.

As I went along, I realized very quickly that academia is a very supportive, forgiving place. And I was very smart because I immediately went into a PhD program so that I basically… I had an income. I had a fellowship and I was fully funded for six years. If I had had to spend, I was just on NPR and interviewed about this and I said, everyone says, I was so high functioning: “yet you got an MFA and an MA and a PhD, and how could you be so high functioning and books coming out and writing for the New York Times?!” But the only reason I was able to do that is because I was in academia. If I had had to be in an office from nine to five, I would've been fired, by the third day [laughs]. So basically having the luxury of time, even though I'm not saying that being in academia is easy by any means. It's a different kind of stress and a different kind of pressure and strain and commitment, certainly. But it was one that I feel like, it allowed me to be very successful given the degree of mental illness that I was suffering from. 

But I did complete an PhD in English in English literature. So I had an MFA in creative writing and then went to get my PhD; I was an Americanist. I was a Victorianist for about 14 seconds -- that was a lovely time, I enjoyed being a Victorianist -- And then my PhD or my dissertation was on the tradition of the American literary interview. This is dovetailing into why I think all of you need to be on Substack and why academics have just this wasted knowledge in some ways. I don't wanna say wasted. Don't take that personally. Don't be mad at me for saying that. Let's just say it's.. you all, everything you know and your expertise and the depth at which you know it is just… It's exceptional! It's incredible. And we really take you for granted in the public sphere. You may be appreciated within the walls of academia, but I don't think people are benefiting enough from academics’ knowledge and expertise the way we should.

Journalists talk a lot. Media talks a lot, who are our pundits, but often it's not people from academia, people who have this very rich base of knowledge. Mine happened to be in the literary interview and so I documented from 1840 to the present starting with Charles Dickens's first North American tour. And so all that time I was still writing. So I was initially doing poetry and then shifted to fiction. I wrote some novels. They are in a drawer, as they should be. Actually, I think they've been trash now at this point. They're not very good. But it was, again, as I think a lot of you probably know, you have to write a certain number of books to get to the book you're meant to write. 

And then my mental health journey led me to write my memoir of the 25 years I spent in the mental health system. When I went to go get representation for it and find an agent…And I had, when I was living in New York, I had a dream that I would find land my dream agent. And it was something I thought of all the time, fantasizing about it on the subway as I rode the subway for two hours sometimes to get to schools and teaching. And I didn't even have a book at that time, but I still coveted the big book deal. And the powerhouse agent. And so when I finally did go to get an agent for Pathological, I submitted to seven of the biggest agents 'cause I decided if you're gonna shoot, shoot high.

So I did. And oh, the dream that I had in New York was that an agent would call me and say, “don't talk to anyone else. I love your book. I'm halfway through. Don't talk to anyone until I'm done.” And flash forward I'm selling my memoir and I got an email on a Sunday afternoon right before Covid hit from my powerhouse agent, and it said “I’m two thirds of the way through your book. I love it. Don't talk to anyone else. I'm gonna CC my assistant for a meeting on Monday.” And it was like, oh my God, my dream just came true! And the world is falling apart! So as the world fell apart my life got better and I ended up, we sold it very quickly. I wrote it in five months, I wrote it very quickly, in a stream, I was ready to write it, obviously. And because I was so well trained as an academic, the research came very naturally to me. It wasn't that hard. I just had developed that skill in six years in a PhD program, and so it came out and then…I should say, so we go into production with a book the year before it comes out. And so we were just going into production. I met with the marketing person at Harper Collins and she said to me what nearly all agents and editors are saying to every writer right now, which is “Get on Substack”. So I did, and I did what most people do, which is I just started writing. I did look around and got the vibe on there and so I named it, Start with a question, and I would ask a question and then answer it, and I thought it was quite clever, It was fine, it did well. We didn't have a lot of the discoverability, tools and features that we have now on Substack back then. And so it didn't grow at all. I mean, I had an email list of 300 and it stayed at 300, I think went to 301 or something. And it wasn't the quality of it, 'cause my writing was already there, et cetera. It just, I didn't have what a Substack needs. But, of course, I didn't know that.

Then finally, my agent introduced me to Sophia, who's the head of writer relations for Substack in the US and she and I met and we were fast friends. She's just an amazing woman. I have a video on Writers at Work that I highly recommend you watch. It's with her and she's just…Everyone at Substack, I'm not sure how they do this, but they're the coolest people across the board. Every single one, every single employee! And she is just no exception. I just find her to be really wonderful person. The other thing that's very different about Substack than other social media platforms is most of them, the majority of them are writers. Sophia was a writer. She has an MFA.

Hamish McKinsey, who is the CEO, he was a journalist. And so they come at this from a very different perspective and really created Substack for writers. That's what drew me to it. So we sat down, she looked at my Substack. She said, “change this, change this, change this. This doesn't work. This doesn't, this does.” On the platform she showed me around, she showed me ideal Substack, Substacks that they know work really well. She pointed out why they work really well. I made all the changes she suggested and I went from 300 to 1800, like in two months, and it was just extraordinary. It was unbelievable. So that was it, shocked me. 

And I had started teaching on Substack. And so I'd started a second Substack--ill advised, don't do it!--but I did start a second Substack where I was teaching serialization and writing about serialization. And I had quickly realized, “wait, this is too narrow.” So I went to Substack and I said, can I do this? Can I bring what you gave me to people?

And they said, “yes, please!” They would work with each of us individually if they could. So I decided to start Writers at Work and which quickly became Substack Writers at Work. Meaning it started as a place for writers on Substack, but Substack has really shifted. So it was a platform for great writing, that was their messaging. Now they call themselves an “economic engine of culture”. So there's really so much, we were getting so many social media influencers and doctors and my clients, I can't tell you, thought leaders and real estate agents and then, sex workers… and I just meet with so many different types of people and of course professional writers, et cetera.

So then Substack Writers at Work grew far more quickly because I'm also teaching on there, and we can talk more about this, but Substack offers many different things that it didn't when I first went on there and that all of you can take advantage of. So just to give you an idea, this is my author Substack. And again, it's a little bit different now. Initially it was Start with a question and I would start with a question and I would answer it. That was pretty much the system. The kind of familiarity of it, the way that it was the same mode or structure each week, that can work very well on Substack. I've now started Less and Less of More and More, and this was, I'm going to take you through this exercise as well.

I'm getting you to think about your own Substack or if you have a Substack, maybe thinking about it a little differently, even if you've been on Substack for a while. I feel like it's always good to ask these questions. Less and Less of More and More is for people who want a little less in a culture of too much.

And basically like how do we have less and less? Of the more and more, not necessarily minimalism, not necessarily, no moralizing in that respect. No Marie Kondo cleaning out closets. More of the deeper work, like what do we think we need more and more of and why. And so I asked myself the question after Cured came out that I'm gonna ask you, which is, what would I want to receive? What Substack newsletter would I want? 

And I ended up saying I'd want one once a month. And so it comes out once a month. And I have to tell you, I got more subscribers and more paid subscribers in a weekend than I did in a year of fighting for mental health recovery with Cured, which I found hilarious. Just shows that our culture is very exhausted. 

When you're just writing on Substack, the growth is somewhat limited. People teach on Substack, so I had been toying with that idea. And then George Saunders came on the platform. If you don't know George Saunders, he's an amazing short story writer, an American short story writer and novelist and he has Story Club. And so when he came on here and has 126,000 subscribers, I thought, “what is he doing?” And I looked and he's teaching the short story. And so each one is him really analyzing, in a very classic way, a short story and close reading it, but also reading as a writer. But he has that English department, more literary studies bent, just not through a lens of, necessarily, psychoanalysis or some of the stuff that we do in literature departments. So when he started doing this, I thought, “huh, I wonder if I could teach on here!”. And then Robert Reich, who was Secretary of Labor under Obama, he presented his final course at Berkeley on Substack. And that made me think, “yeah, okay, there's something going on here!”

And it was really phenomenal. It is the whole course and you could take it and it wasn't paywalled initially. I don't know if it is now. No, I'm pretty sure it is not paywalled. Which is amazing. And so I just started thinking about, okay, what would I teach on here? That's how Serialized came into being, and I still do write on serialization.

Every now and again, I have a serialized workshop. I do have a Kickstart your Memoir and Kickstart your Novel to serialize mini course on here, but this was where the focus was initially, and then realizing, “wait a second, I've gotta broaden this.” Then I went into, “okay, how can writers use Substack in particular to reclaim, for lack of a better word, their power in the midst of a traditional publishing system that is very unfair and very difficult to manage.”

Everyone does it a little bit differently, teaching on Substack. For me it's workshops. That's my zone of genius. I love doing them. They work really well. Jeannine [Ouellette], and Robert Reich, that's what he did. Video workshops. Jeannine does challenges and a lot of hers is text. We looked at George Saunders. He is doing more analysis in posts, but he also does an ‘Office hours’, which is someone asks a question and then he answers it, but all written, so you don't necessarily have to be accessible in the live sense. 

So just different ways of doing it. As opposed to me: mine are live workshops that I then send out, and this is Substack video now. People get the replays, so this is what I am comfortable doing. So there are many different ways to write on Substack, many ways to do video on Substack, podcasts on Substack. And teaching on Substack. So that is something that I think is really exciting. 

And then Substack did a piece on academics who are bringing their teaching to Substack…how modern thinkers are expanding their ideas, and I was interviewed for this, but it was great. And just basically what I said in this piece is that I think Substack is the University of the future. Right now what we have is a prohibitively expensive (at least in the United States, this is not true in the UK and elsewhere), educational system. And yet we are angry that people don't vote and that they are not talking about the things we want them to, and yet we are not willing to educate anyone or broaden their ideas and that kind of thing.

So the fact that you could reach Robert Reich on here, or Jeannine Ouellette, or George Saunders. It's phenomenal. It's just an amazing opportunity. That was a very long answer to your question. Don't ever ask me who I am, that's what happens. 

Helen: There's so much there, really! There's so much about what it means to be an academic, I think, which is this kind of endless curiosity and the way academics can often reinvent themselves, even within tenured or tenure track jobs that can often shift into a different specialty.

And nobody says, oh. You're fired. It's usually it's allowed and encouraged. I was quite fascinated that you said that academia was where you went with mental health challenges because it was…I can't remember what words you used, but sort of safety. It's forgiving. That's not what I hear from most academic writers, which is about how stressful the writing is, particularly a certain kind of writing. But you stayed away from that, I think by, not having the kind of ‘publish or perish’ kind of book you don't want to write imperative, which is I think one of the biggest weights on a lot of the academic writers that I work with.

They're passionate about their subject, their research, they love it, but the way in which they're being asked to write about it, the way in which the whole peer review system works….And then as you alluded to the small size of the audience. Sometimes for something where you've done all that work, you've got this small group of other deeply interested colleagues, but that's about it. And you don't really even expect it to go beyond that. That's the story for a lot of people. I love the fact that you gave us a different narrative and I've experienced academia, I think both ways. 

Sarah: Yeah. That's why the work you do is so important because I do think part of it is that I'm a writer, so for me, the writing was a no brainer.

I had to learn other things in my PhD program, but the churning out of words, I was very well trained as a journalist. And that's not to say that it's that others are not, or anything along those lines, but I think that's why it was easier for me in that sense. But you're right, I think a lot of what is stressful, at least with my friends, 'cause I have so many friends in who are tenured professors now is just the lack of appreciation and the the feeling that people aren't seeing what you do really, or a very small group of people are seeing it.

And then going back to what I was just saying about your work being so important, it’s teaching people how to write for varied audiences because in academia we're told one way, it's one audience, one mode. So yeah. 

Helen: Yeah. I know for the work I do, for people here who are familiar with it, I wrote a book called Stylish Academic Writing and various other books after that. But, my contention is that you can write in a more engaging style, even within the academic conventions. Can and should! Why not write in a way that's more enjoyable and accessible even for your closest colleagues? But then there's this whole other step of, “can I write for a larger audience?” Which sometimes, depending on the discipline, that may mean changing the way you write for everyone, but it may mean developing several different languages. 

So over the years I've interviewed a lot of academic writers about their work. Pre-Substack, in kind of the heyday of blogging, I was always struck by how some of the academic bloggers I talked to… I remember one guy who was, what would the academic discipline be? He worked in, it's kind of weather science right. Climatologist or something. He had a blog then that was the nerdy stories behind the weather, told for a popular audience and for high school students and things like that. And he got such a joy from being able to share his knowledge to that wider audience in the same way that he did when giving an undergraduate lecture.

So it was an extension of his passion as a teacher. So that's clearly one mode that people could go with Substack. Think of Substack as your public lecture forum. Your place where you can reach a wider audience with your expertise. And I think of a publication like The Conversation for those of you who know that. Their tagline is Academic rigor, journalistic flair or something like that. And so, they pair journalists with academics and get the academics to write sentences that are no longer than 15 words each or something like that. And to explain their expertise for very much a lay audience because these go out then and get published in newspapers. You've probably read things from The Conversation without even noticing, You'll always see that little logo. But there's a whole range in between there where you can get quite nerdy and detailed, but reach an audience of people who aren't academics but are interested in what you're doing. 

George Saunders, that's very much the sort of, “let's teach you about the short story.” Plenty of people out there obviously who are interested in this. Jillian Hess, those of you who don't know her Substack noted. I highly recommend that you go and sign up for it. She gives away a lot for free, and then she also has the paywall version where she gives you even more. But I think I was one of her first paid subscribers, like the day she announced she was going paid, because I just so appreciate what she does. And the way she put it was, “if I get enough paid subscribers, I can teach one less course.”

She teaches at CUNY, she has like a three, four teaching load or something, and she was able to take her income from Noted and buy out some of her undergraduate teaching so she could do this different kind of thing. And what she does is she goes into archives and she's written, this is her academic research area as well, but she's obsessed with people's note-taking. And she goes and finds people's notes and then writes about them because she's a born teacher.

Sarah I'm processing everything you talked about here, but, one thing that really struck me was when you talked towards the end there about the variety of ways that people can not just write, but teach or be on substack. And that's changed even in the nine months that I've been there.

So in my case, I write books about writing and now I have lots of online workshops that I do through my website at helensword.com. And I have my WriteSpace community, which is a whole sort of world over in my website that I can't replicate on Substack, but I want to use my Substack to alert people to all these other things that are going on, but also to give them value if they're free subscribers. So people don't just go, “oh, she's just advertising her own stuff, I'm gonna delete.” So finding that little balance. But I think one of the Aha!s for me that's come along is that I'm actually tired of writing. Each of my books on writing took me five years. I'm a very slow writer. I'm the opposite of Jeanine whose work I just revere. She's another paid subscription for me because she's so amazing on creative writing. But she also has an ability to just write at a volume that I see with awe and amazement.

I think a lot of creative writers and a lot of journalists have something that I do not have, and that's why I became an academic where I could be paid to be slow, right? But I don't wanna write about the same things I've already written books on, and so what I've found that I really love doing on Substack is actually more the teaching side in, in other words, having the ability to talk about something, to run a workshop, as you said. So I'm very much shifting to fewer words and more videos. Snippets that send people to the resources I've already written because they're going to be better than what I can churn out in a day or two.

So lots and lots of different possibilities. I think we've both alluded to them, but should we see if we can make a list of all the things you could do? Let's say we've got a very busy, tenure-track assistant professor teaching, with publish-or-perish pressures weighed down by writing because there's so many anxieties around it, and they're actually, they're a little scared about the time commitment of Substack. That might be one thing, but also excited about the idea of maybe finding a wider audience or even just finding a different voice, the relief of being able to write in a different voice. So if I'm that person, I'm really worried about the time commitment, but I also want to know what are some of the different options of what I could do.

So one would be, write something once a month!

Sarah: We're going into subscription fatigue, and that's something I'm going to be really focusing on with Substack Writers at Work, which is that everyone has figured out that the subscription model works better than anything else because you actually do have access to your people. Social media followers or fickle meta is doing things so you're trapped on the platform and have to buy ads in order to get in front of people.

So that is what we want, we want people that we can either reach via their inboxes to get to our external offerings. Let's say those are books or it could just be courses, whatever it is. And we want that. And people are getting a little tired of it because they have their Netflix subscription and they have their Amazon Prime subscription and they have a million different subscriptions.

So thinking about that, I think the trend that we will see on Substack is media, maybe even posts or video or something. So two ways I think it will go is making posts shorter. So less frequently, once a month, or very small snippets with different media in there. So it could be audio, it could be video, whatever it is.

And the other thing is, I was just working with an academic, and I mentioned he does basically, he's a musician and now is in Australia. And he teaches, I think it was called Expression. And so what we were talking about is I said, why don't you put yourself, you're already a musician, you can just put what you do up there as well. And he said, “oh yeah, I could go into the studio. I have all the equipment.” But that's not Substack. Substack does not need to be clean and shiny. It doesn't, that's not actually what people want. So what I showed him, going to Helen's point, is if you look at people like Patty Smith, who is not an academic, but she does pretty much just video. What could you do on Substack? She really barely writes much anymore and so she is just doing video and often they are just little weird. This is her at the airport. And Catherine May who's a wonderful writer and she does some audio and sometimes it will just be her going for a walk and it's terrible sound and you can hear the leaves crunching and that kind of thing.

So Substack is very much about being you. And that I think is maybe the hardest part for academics and other professionals to get used to is that it doesn't mean you let us into your private life at all. Because what we really want is for you to be focusing on, give us the topic. So if we look at Jillian Hess and Noted, this is not about her in any way. But it is about her because this is her life. This is her scholarship, this is what she does. So everything is a vehicle through her. So she's still there. But you'll notice her posts are very very image heavy. Obviously for good reason. There's that aspect too. Her posts are not actually that much text.

And again, I'm not diminishing it, but you don't have to necessarily be writing anything that would go into a section of an article or an academic article. It can be more image heavy, especially if you have access to the archives. That's just so of interest to people.

This is Eric Cole. He's the one who resigned from Tufts. So again, doing a little bit more of the classic Substack post, which is primarily text. Adam Tooze, he does round-up links, and this is what a lot of people are doing. Essentially roundups of links, things that you know of that I wouldn't, you're curating the world for me.

And another option too is you don't necessarily have to be doing your scholarship on Substack. I think that's just a wonderful way to do it. But you could be, for lack of a better word, more Facebook-y, but talking more about yourself and then moving into some sort of recommendation, but a more, a deeper, more analytical view of a book or a film or something along those lines that may not be your field or your area of expertise, but you're giving us your brain. Because whatever you do, no one else can do as well as you can. You just don't know it because you're so used to doing it. 

Helen: And I think those examples show us a few things too. I couldn't do what Patty Smith does and have people want to watch me for four minutes at the airport saying, “oh, here I am on my way to my concert in South America.”

I love her things because they're just so genuine. But let's face it, it's an insider look to Patty Smith's life. Others though…

Sarah: You’d be surprised! There are people on here who are nobody, who have huge followings…

Helen: You’re right. Another one I just love, Anne Kadets. Do you know her? Cafe Anne, she's this journalist who just writes about life in Brooklyn.

I don't live in Brooklyn. I never lived in Brooklyn. I don't particularly want to live in Brooklyn, but she's such a lovely, funny writer that just every one of her posts makes me smile. And I follow quite a few artists, but choosing to pay for something is a tough one because.. Hamish Mackenzie, all those people, they like to talk about how this is empowering readers and writers and all this, but it adds up really quickly. I can't subscribe to every Substack I would like to subscribe to, either to get the content or to support the writers. There's just too many, so I have maybe half a dozen, maybe seven or eight that I subscribe to. And I always spend quite a few months hanging out on somebody's Substack before I make that decision.

And it's a decision, partly it's less sometimes about wanting to get to the paywall content and more about wanting to support that person, as with Jillian Hess, to just keep doing what they do. Or knowing them really well. So Austin Kleon, for any of you know who know his work now, he's not an academic, but he knows so much about creativity. He has his 10 things every week that's for free with tons of links to other things. And then he has his paywalled one, which is a deep dive into wherever Austin Kleon's brain is taking him this week, and it's worth paying for because he's so good. But I already knew his work before I opted to pay. And it's a little harder to get a glimpse into that world.

And again, he came onto Substack with a hundred thousand subscribers already from his newsletter. But then there are others that just grab one's attention. And I'll just share this one, which is Joumana Medlej’s Caravanserai, and I must have just seen it as somebody else's recommendation. And she just writes about her scholarly area, which is…I'm not even sure how she describes herself…“the comings and goings in Arabic script”. It's a lot of stuff about Arabic script and art, and she'll take you through some piece or she'll make ink to try to discover old techniques. And it's just so beautiful and so nerdy at the same time. And so for me, that's exactly what you're describing. That kind of yeah, deep dive into something that I didn't know I was interested in.

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That’s the end of today’s podcast episode. I hope that both your body and your mind have moved to someplace new, and that perhaps you’ll try writing for a larger audience with your own Substack newsletter.

If you want to see some visual examples of successful substacks, you’ll find the full 2-hour video of my special event in the Videos section of the Writespace Library at helensword.com; and you can also go to Substack and search for ScholarStack, a compendium of newsletters by scholars, for and about scholars, or on scholarly topics.

Thanks for listening, and I look forward to walking with you again soon.