Is there still hope for writers on Substack?

A Sunday morning grump.

I read an article yesterday from somebody I do not subscribe to. At the bottom, I am encouraged to subscribe, and for some reason, also to Start Writing.

This, I presume, is for readers who are not signed up to the Substack machine, and rightly or wrongly it gives me hope, because Substack is still marketing itself as a place for writers.

Anybody interested in reading or writing on Substack will be painfully aware that the main marketing effort has been to sell Substack as a place to make easy money, thus attracting the grifters and chancers who fill the place with so much junk that it is almost impossible to find anything worth reading. This week, Ficstack closed, because Substack is no longer a place where people come to read, and this is not surprising, because the vast majority, and I don’t think I exaggerate by saying in excess of 99% of the content, is worthless pap, a complete waste of pixels.

Gary Mucklow put a huge amount of effort into creating Ficstack, but that was in different times, when there were good stories being posted and people wanting to read them, and there was no way of connecting the two, so he made that connection. During that short period of time, less than a year, Substack changed. The writers have either gone or have stopped writing fiction and now merely write content to a schedule, and readers no longer look to Substack to find their next story.

There are 35 million users on Substack now, or at least, 35 million accounts. I reckon a huge number of those, probably the majority, have signed up, failed to make money as easily as promised, and have already gone. The process is that these people sign up, follow all the advice to post to this schedule or that schedule, fill the place with the same old Dear Substack, or I want to find, you know the stuff, and when it gets them nowhere, they give up and go.

So why do I feel some hope for the future?

Well, all those grifting fools will only put so much effort into climbing the greasy pole, after all, the whole attraction is to make money by doing nothing, so when they find they are making no money, but are having to do something, that goes completely against their principles. They will go back to watching YouTube, playing video games, and scrolling through TikTok. At the moment, there is still a conveyor belt feeding in new people to replace those who give up, but surely this nonsense will lose its attraction, the dominance of How I built my Substack to a $100,000 business in X days will go, and it will become a place for writers again. Then we can hope that these writers no longer feel pressured to write content to a schedule, and will go back to writing fiction when they have a story to tell, or non-fiction when they have something to say.

There are days when I feel like packing the whole thing in. I don’t write any fiction for Substack at the moment because there really is no point. It would be just a tiny drop of writing onto the vast seething churn, and people have simply stopped reading. But I still stick around, and I think writers have to take the long-term view. It is constantly changing, and will not stay like this forever. If it gets worse, then we can go, but I have hope that it will get better again, so if you are disillusioned with Substack and are thinking of packing it all in, maybe take a back seat, but don’t get off the train altogether just yet.

You never know, it might still be on the way to a better destination.

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