"Books" on Substack?

I've been spending a bunch of time at my desk the last couple of days, beginning to organize my coursework (in the background I've been gradually uploading my book club video collection).

Elle Griffin

wrote an interesting post about the future of books on Substack that I thought raised some interesting questions and issues. I've also been thinking, for a while now, about the continuum of writing, from making notes on what I read to formulating these into ideas, to writing little essays about them, and ultimately to producing longer-form and book-length content. And about how and where Substack can fit into that process.

I don't think it's a trivial process, going from blog posts to a book. My impression of some people who have done really well on Substack and then tried to shove their "greatest hits" into book form is that these have not been their most well-written books. But there are a lot of factors that could contribute to that, and they may not all be inevitable. I've also gone the other direction and serialized my biography of Dr. Charles Knowlton, posting its short chapters as individual posts, complete with my narration. It might be valuable to me if Substack created a way I could package that "playlist" of posts into a bundle that I could sell as a one-off, like a book. This might allow people to dip a toe into the water and see if they wanted to become subscribers.

I do think it's interesting that the support I get from subscribers is substantially more than what I get from people buying my books. Due to the low prices of my self-published books, I get just a couple of bucks when someone buys a copy on Amazon. Even my Yale University Press book, Peppermint Kings, only earns me a couple of bucks per copy. In contrast, even a month of a paid (I like to say contributing) subscription nets me about $4. So I've got to conclude I'd be better off with a thousand contributing subscribers than selling a thousand books.

The other thing that really fascinates me about Substack's potential as a publishing platform is the potential non-linearity of a reader's path through my content. I've been playing around with this idea for years now; it's been buzzing in the back of my mind ever since Andy Hertzfeld created Hypercard forty years ago. I have tried writing non-linear narratives with Eastgate's Storyscape, in Pressbooks (for open textbooks), and in Obsidian Publish. A couple of days ago, when I mentioned I was going to consolidate all my Substack posting into MakingHistory,

Pat McNamara

suggested I might be able to do something interesting with tagging. I think he's onto something there: a combination of tagging and hyperlinking might allow me to create breadcrumb trails through my content. That might be more interesting, in the long run, than forcing the issue with playlists.

Of course, it would mean that the content I link and promote in this way would need to be of uniformly high quality. Also, in order to facilitate reaching the linked destinations, people would probably have to contribute. Or I'd have to permanently make much of or perhaps even my entire archive accessible for free. Since I'm looking at potential unemployment after the coming year of teaching in Saint Paul, I'm not sure I'm ready to make that commitment yet. I guess we'll have to see how it develops. In any case, it’s an interesting project for me, thinking about reviewing, organizing, and continuing to refine thoughts I’ve had and posted as Substack content.