Serializing a Book Online: Lessons From My Web 2.0 Memoir by [[Richard MacManus]] 2024-10-29

https://peculiargenres.commons.msu.edu/schedule/

https://helenbeetham.substack.com/

Helen Beetham's work and newsletter are recommended by Doug Belshaw. If I heard correctly, she'll shortly appear on Season 8 of the Tao of Wao podcast: https://soundcloud.com/tao-of-wao/sets/season-8

Introducing Substack Notes<br /> by Hamish McKenzie, Chris Best, Jairaj Sethi

Substack slowly adding features and functionality to make them a full stack blogging/social platform... first long form, then short note features...

Also pushing in on Twitter's lunch as Twitter is having issues.

Owning your audience is key here.

Newsletter pieces can be recombined into longer pieces later.

Flow: Twitter/conversations > newsletter > essay.

https://every.to/letter

A manifesto about what the Every platform is all about. They're trying to create a new(?) economic model for writers working together.

I'm not really sure how this is dramatically different from prior efforts or if the economic incentives are actually properly aligned here. Many writers without critically looking at the whole may be led here as much by marketing hype as anything else. It almost sounds like they're recreating The Huffington Post, but giving away some of the value up front instead of leaving all the value in one person's hand for a future sale.

Who owns the copyright of the created works? Are editors and proofreaders just work for hire here? What about their interests?

While a writer may leave a collective with their email list, do they necessarily benefit from having helped to get a going concern off the ground in the first place? Where does that slice of value sit? Do they also collect a multiple of the present value of the concern the way one might in buying a pre-existing business from another?

https://hardhistoriesjhu.substack.com/

Taking a moment to send a warm thank you to all the work (both visible and invisible) that Dr. Martha S. Jones and her lab are doing for the Johns Hopkins Community and far beyond. Where ever you live, I heartily recommend their newsletter Hard Histories at Hopkins.

Aaron Davis uses the review through his website's posts, bookmarks, etc. to create his newsletter as a means of reviewing what he's read and thought about.

Every is an example of a newsletter built on Substack that realized what a massive cut was being taken out of the middle so they created their own platform instead.

https://every.to/news

https://defector.com/

From "former staffers of Deadspin".

http://puck.news/who-is-puck/

Another platform play of journalists banding together to find a niche space of readers.

https://puck.news/

Along with the proliferation of newsletters and paid journalism spaces, is this another in the litany of sites that do news analysis while chasing eyeballs? Is it following in the tradition of the move from hard news (or tiny amounts of it) to loud news analysis a la Fox News?

Will we see the volume and partisanship increase in this newsletter/paywall space over the next decade until the next thing arrives?

The ultimate value of newsletters is their more direct connection to a specific niche audience for which they curate news or content. The value they provide readers is as a filter of their area with some some useful analysis and perspective.

Today, we can announce that there are more than 1 million paid subscriptions to publications on Substack. On Substack, the newsletter from Substack https://on.substack.com/p/one-million-strong on 2021-11-15

Caveat emptor. A lot of these "influencer" methods are leaving 30% or far more of their value with the platforms they're using for distribution. A better path is to build and promote your own platform and have a direct relationship with one's readers (in newsletter spaces, it's about "owning"/having your reader's email address). Some other newsletter options can be found here: https://indieweb.org/newsletter as well as methods for building and owning your own technology stack across its site. If nothing else, consider having a website where you can have a portfolio/archive of your work.

Careful watchers of the newsletter space will notice that almost all of the highlight examples on these services are established big names with pre-existing platforms and audience. Where are the stories of the other 99.9% and how well they're doing? Who is actually making a full time living doing this without a significant leg up to start? As examples, look for major writers leaving the New York Times to set up newsletters, or people like Steve Hayes and Jonah Goldberg leaving The National Review to set up The Dispatch (as a newsletter platform)—it's a good bet that they're getting a better deal from Substack than the average person. The NiemanLab has some relatively good coverage of some of this space. (Their annual predictions series also has solid forward looking coverage of the journalism/technology space: https://www.niemanlab.org/collection/predictions-2022/.)

(Apologies for lurking... 😅, but happy to chat technology/publishing with anyone interested.)

https://eleanorkonik.com/obsidian-replaced-games-now-prolific/

People have begun serializing their novels using newsletters. This allows them to sell directly to fans without allowing middleman companies like Amazon, Patreon, or Wattpad to disintermediate them.

https://indieweb.org/this-week/2021-11-05.html

https://blog.remark.as/introducing-private-letters

https://indieweb.org/this-week/2021-08-06.html

the financial side is certainly subtext, but this piece doesn't play into the underlying structure of this story. Makes this a bit of clickbait within the title.

https://www.thecut.com/2021/07/email-newsletters-new-literary-style.html

The question of motivation about newsletter subscriptions is an important one. Some of the thoughts here mirror some of my feelings about social media in general.

Why?

Definitely a hot take, but a truthful sounding one.

There's something in this quote that sounds more like old school blogging to me. Putting ideas out there and allowing the community to react and respond as a means of honing an idea can be useful and powerful. However, are writers actually doing this meaningfully over time? Are they objectively doing this and providing thoughtful updates over time?

This is a great description which is roughly how I feel about the awesome uniqueness that is https://www.kickscondor.com/.

There's something a bit depressing about the idea of paying for online friends. Though creating, managing, and tummeling these sorts of community is definitely a form of social and creative "work".

How much work do these creators do on this front? How much is the writing and creating versus the management and community building? What else goes into it all?

Compare and contrast the work done by individuals in the IndieWeb community.

What sort of spaces do newsletters create based upon their modes of delivery? What makes them "safer" for marginalized groups? Is there a mitigation of algorithmic speed and reach that helps? Is it a more tacit building of community and conversation? How can these benefits be built into an IndieWeb space?

How can a platform provide "reach" while simultaneously creating negative feedback for trolls and bad actors?

Email delivery apparently isn't much different than RSS. What sorts of functionality do RSS readers provide over email in terms of search, filtering, and presentation? Surely RSS is more powerful at slicing and dicing one's reader data.

How do all these different forms of content fit into the greater set of genres in Western culture?

There is something to be said about the potential forms of response that newsletters can have. Some have online versions where users can respond and be a direct part of the public conversation, but many also have the ability to reply directly and privately to the author.

How common is this private reply and conversation? Does it contribute to the ecosystem significantly? This article indicates that it's possible and I've heard one or two people mention that it happens. I've yet to see data to indicate that it's a frequent thing though.

This seems a reasonable description of the depth and diversity of the newsletter idea.

Indication of the morphing of long emails into newsletters.

How does blogging fit into this space and continuum? Blogging as the expansion of ideas to test them out, garner feedback and evolve ideas over time?

How meta embedded in an article about newsletters...

https://theoatmeal.com/comics/reaching_people_2021

https://obsidianroundup.org/about/

I have a feeling some of the money framing in the newsletter space is overblown. Some bigger names with pre-existing platforms (and by this I mean exposure, popularity, voices, and other possible media outlets already) have some serious upside to creating paid newsletters. Many of these platforms are trying to not only capture a slice of these pies, they're trying to leverage those same big names to actively make it seem to the average person that they too could have a paid newsletter (see how easy it is...). The reality is that many of these others are going to spend a lot of time and effort to try to garner pennies on the dollar or ultimately fail. This sort of game works much better in the YouTube space where self-hosting the video and doing distribution is a much higher bar. The VC space for newsletters is going to have a dreadful crash when folks realize that there's more competition in the space than they bargained for.

Knowing market efficiencies can significantly help some platforms. Not all platforms have this value built in. Many writers are unlikely to see this sort of value in places like Substack which are trying to buy in bulk while they're experimenting. What happens to well-paid writers a year from now when the experimentation ends or dies completely? Where do they take their business then?

I don't see this ending well for most.

This is an important data point. Almost no one is putting any value on editing and other institutional support that outlets provide. Some writers can see at least a little bit of the future.

I keep hearing the same "top names" who are making seven figure sums. Where are the middling names and what are they making?

Why is everyone touting the top and ignoring the snake oil being sold to those at the bottom who think this is going to pan out the same way for them?

This is very IndieWeb in flavor.

It reminds me of Stanley Meyer who would read newspapers and magazines every day and cut out articles which he put into envelopes for his friends and children and mailed out every couple of weeks. Essentially his own newsletter, but by snail mail.

This covers a lot of material in the other article I read this morning.

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Aram Zucker-Scharff</span> in Ernie Smith on Twitter: "You don’t need Substack. Today’s @readtedium explains how you can self-host your newsletter on the cheap: https://t.co/yp2tLBRS4a" / Twitter (<time class='dt-published'>03/18/2021 23:48:57</time>)</cite></small>

This is the short version of what Substack is and why people want to use it.

Frank, a networked newsletter will have the backlinks, but why not do the notifications and display of them using Webmention as a layer on top? Why not let a reader reply to the newsletter via email and then take that content and attach it to the newsletter like a comments section?

Why not have all the things?

This is one of the key reasons people look to social media--for the connections and the network they don't have via non-digital means. Most of the people I've seen with large blogs or well-traveled websites have simply done a much better job of connecting and interacting with their audience and personal networks. To a great extent this is because they've built up a large email list to send people content directly. Those people then read their material and comment on their blogs.

This is something the IndieWeb can help people work toward in a better fashion, particularly with better independent functioning feed readers.

Something to watch with respect to this is Jonah Goldberg and Steven Hayes who are working with Substack to put out a membership driven news website.