Scavenging in the Media Wastelands: Or, Substacking While Trying to Make a Living Writing

Chatting with John Warner about the state of literary magazines, freelancing, Substack, and vanishing writing careers.

From The Triumph of Death by Pieter Bruegel the Elder (Yes, I acknowledge this is a bit of an overly dramatic image choice.)

For this week’s Counter Craft, I’m trying something a little different and co-publishing a conversation with John Warner about Substack, the state of literary venues, and trying to make a living as a writer in the modern media wasteland. Warner is publishing the conversation simultaneously on his excellent Substack The Biblioracle Recommends, which is well worth subscribing to for anyone interested in writing, education, and literature.

Before I get to the conversation, I saw two depressing writing landscape tidbits I thought I’d share to depress you too. But also because both seem relevant to my conversation with Warner about surviving as a writer in the current landscape.

First, a chart from a National Bureau of Economic Research study showing that the number of ebooks published each month has tripled since ChatGPT was released:

I think the chart is self-explanatory. The slop book tsunami is here:

Surf's Up in Slop City

The second depressing tidbit is also LLM related:

News Corp’s CEO recently described the company as “an AI inputs company.” News Corp is Murdoch’s non-Fox corporation and owns (among other things) the Wall Street Journal and Big Five publisher HarperCollins. I imagine most of my readers will find this depressing. I can’t imagine many journalists, editors, or authors would like to think of their job as providing “AI inputs.”

However, I also wanted to highlight this because I think it is of a piece with something I allude to below about the way media companies have shot themselves in the foot in the internet age. I’m not a businessman and don’t pretend to be. Still, it seems like a mistake to make your business working to help another business replace you. Remember when media companies built their businesses around social media traffic and tech partnerships only to be screwed over and over again by e.g. Facebook demanding “pivots to video”? Social media companies were always going to siphon as much revenue as possible away from media companies. AI corporations will, of course, do the same.

Anyway, on to the conversation with John Warner. The conversation was conducted over a shared Google Doc and was inspired by some Substack Notes discourse about some BlueSky tweets about Substack. Yes, it’s a bit inside baseball. However, we spun it into a larger conversation about trying to make a career in the modern publishing/magazine/media landscape as two writers who started careers at different times. I think you’ll find it interesting if that is something you are navigating yourself.

John Warner is the author of ten books, most recently More Than Words: How to Think About Writing in the Age of AI. His other books range across humor, fiction, and higher education and honestly don’t make all that much sense as a collection of work to anyone but him. He writes a weekly column about books and reading at the Chicago Tribune and The Biblioracle Recommends newsletter. He’s also been one of the longtime color commentators for the Tournament of Books (which featured a novel called Metallic Realms this past year), and from 2003 to 2010 was editor of McSweeney’s Internet Tendency.

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John Warner: So, we both took note of a particular BlueSky comment from writer/bookstore owner Lauren Groff:

I don’t think either of us have any beef with Lauren Groff. I recommend her books all the time and she put her money where her mouth is by opening a bookstore in her Florida hometown, but there’s something off about this right? Like is Substack to blame for this state of things?

Lincoln Michel: I’ll start off by saying I admire Lauren Groff as a writer and as a person. I think she’s a real “literary citizen” who cares about the state of literature and is probably speaking from that place. That said, her comments strike me as exactly backwards.

I do agree with Stratis that it’s quite bad we’ve lost great magazines with strong editorial guidance and real pay rates. But writers under, say, 45 (this includes me) missed out on a world where you could make real income freelancing for great magazines that would help you shape a career. That didn’t exist for any but a very small handful of us.

John Warner: I’m 56 and I would say that while the world still existed to some degree when I was coming up, it was well past its peak even then.

Lincoln Michel: Yeah, as my age cutoff implies, this has been true for at least a couple decades. From my vantage point, the growth of Substack is a response/symptom/whatever you want to call it to the constriction and, in many cases, decimation of career paths in writing. Mostly in journalism, but also in literary writing. All of the damage wrought by cheap online ad rates, “pivoting to video,” self-inflicted missteps, and above all the big tech platforms like Facebook and Twitter/X sucking up revenue—that all happened long before Substack even existed as a company. Certainly well before it took off in the last 3 years or so.

John Warner: It’s not entirely clear what Substack is being blamed for. As you say, all this stuff predates Substack by quite a lot. To the extent that Substack appears ascendent right now is mostly a matter of a kind of luck and timing. It’s not hugely different from the vision for Medium which failed to thrive in the same way MySpace tanked while Facebook became its own nation state.

Contra the language of the platform’s founders (who I honestly think are kind of dopey and routinely say shit that makes me cringe) Substack is not a revolution. It’s just next.

Lincoln Michel: I agree. Substack is a blogging platform with a functioning payment system. It’s basically Blogger meets Patreon. Smartly executed and designed with a good discovery system, but it is not something radically new. I don’t think it’s the “literary revolution!” that some on here like to say. But I don’t see how you could rank it high among threats to literature in 2026. I think there are a lot of problems with the state of media in general and the literary world more specifically. Plenty of problems with Substack too. But Substack seems like a little lifeboat in a tsunami. Not sufficient, but certainly not the problem.

For example, I can’t imagine blaming Substack for the death of newspaper book review sections, like when Bezos decided to gut the Washington Post’s book section recently. But Substack has been the home to a lot of book reviewers, including now former WP critic Ron Charles. It’s provided a source of new book review coverage as other sources dry up. That’s a good thing, even if Substack can’t fully replace what was destroyed by others.

On Making Money (Or Not) Writing

John Warner: I actually started my Substack in 2021 because the Chicago Tribune was purchased by a private equity firm and I thought it was only a matter of time before my column got 86’d. That hasn’t happened because I’m just that good!

No, more likely because my freelance rate hasn’t changed in a decade, I deliver my copy on time and the page where I appear every Sunday is already laid out. I’m grateful to still be there, but the audience has steadily eroded as the circulation drops. If I was 15 to 20 years older I could’ve had that sucker syndicated in 100s of newspapers for a decade and I’d be corresponding with you from my yacht.

In this reality, I’ll keep doing it until they tell me to stop, but there’s no future in it, and if I were to hang it up on my own initiative, they wouldn’t replace me with books coverage.

Lincoln Michel: I also started mine in 2021, and it was for similar reasons. There just didn’t seem to be a future in freelance writing for me. A newsletter was more a fallback plan than a strategy. The economy of freelance writing—especially for anything literary—has been broken for a long time. There’s a million things we could blame here from smart phones to America’s anti-intellectualism to whatever, but it kind of doesn’t matter. We have to make a career somehow and pay rent somehow. What do you expect writers to do? Crank out 2,000 book reviews a year at 25 bucks a pop to be part of literary venues?

That’s barely hyperbole. Lit sites paid (and still pay!) like 25-75 bucks for a piece. Sometimes more if you’re lucky or the piece is long. I’m not saying they’re exploiting writers per se. Most sites and mags just don’t have the funds to pay well. The online arms of established journals—GQ, Rolling Stone, big newspapers, etc.—pay several hundred but that is still hard to live on because it’s hard to get that many pitches accepted, much less find the time to write them all. The tradeoff was supposed to be that these institutions would, if not pay you much, at least get you readers, confer legitimacy, and help jump start a career by leading to book contracts or a staff job. That deal evaporated sometime in the 2010s. Publishing in those magazines and venues just doesn’t lead to as many other opportunities as they used to.

So the question is, again, what do you expect writers to do?

John Warner: Again, this is no shade against Lauren Groff, her success is deserved on every level—talent, work, hustle—but she has reached a level where she has a readership in what remains of the critical apparatus, among the regular book buying audience, and also—and this is underappreciated—among the independent bookstore crowd which generates things like the Indie Next list. If there is a larger erosion of reading/book buying it will affect her like it will every else, but she has a solid readership. Most of us don’t achieve that.

I’ve published 10 books over 26 years, but if you look at the list, it’s bizarre. The first one (My First Presidentiary co-authored with Kevin Guilfoile) was done in colored pencil. I now opine on how we should still teach young people to write. I sometimes think of myself as one of those land mammals who have to keep moving toward the remaining source of sustenance. The time when the abundance of the wild could nourish everyone is long gone. That’s why you might find me in your garbage cans, my grubby little paws latched onto the carcass of your rotisserie chicken.

Deep down, my personality and interests are ill-suited to a networked platform like Substack—I mostly want to be left alone with my thoughts as I write them down for later consumption—but if I want to write as a profession, it makes sense to be here.

Lincoln Michel: To pull back a second to the original tweets, I’m also not actually sure “small literary venues” specifically are dying. Has the number of lit mags on Submittable or Duotrope notably declined? The damage and missteps I’ve alluded to mostly seem to have destroyed for-profit businesses. Glossy magazines. Regional newspapers. Etc. Places that need ad revenue and subscriptions to survive. Most literary magazines are some combination of nonprofits, hobbies/labors-of-love, or funded by universities and staffed by undergrad or grad students. Have small lit venues disappeared? Lit mags are always dying and being replaced by new ones, of course. But has the churn changed? And here we need to note Substack itself has helped create some interesting new magazines such as Strange Pilgrims, Zona Motel, and The Metropolitan Review.

What do you think? Are small literary venues dying out? And more importantly, where do you think Substack benefits or damages writers?

John Warner: Some literary venues have disappeared. Glimmertrain wrapped things up in 2019. The Gettysburg Review was casually erased by an indifferent college administration a few years back. Both these places were a tier below the elite, but they were significant credits.

Here’s what I know, essentially that for the entirety of my life studying writing and then working as a writer the ways writers made their livings have been disappearing. When I was in college (1988-92) the conventional wisdom was that you write a lot, publish stories in little magazines, and then see if you can’t break through to a bigger spot (New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, Paris Review, Esquire, Playboy, Story Magazine, maybe) after which an agent would be in touch and you would get a two book deal (stories then novel) with a reputable press. Those early stories were enough for the tenure track job and then the books would be for tenure.

Badabing! Badaboom! The life of a writer. Some folks coasted, others continued to produce. Either way, not a bad gig. Did anyone, including publishers, make any money on these books? Sometimes, not always, but that wasn’t really the point.

But by the time I finished my MFA (1997) while this path still existed, it was rare and narrow. The academic industry of creative writing had expanded to unsustainable levels, and it’s only greater now. I think there were about 50 MFA programs when I applied. What are there now, 300?

You could still hope to be discovered, and I had a couple of nibbles in the late 90’s, early oughts when I was a finalist for an Esquire fiction award and published my first story in McSweeney’s and agents came looking for fresh prospects, but for a combination of reasons (I was good, but not like undeniably good) and increasingly scarce opportunities, that compact was not on offer. There were exceptions. I remember eating my heart out over Gabe Hudson and Arthur Bradford getting deals for story collections, (Then I read them and recognized they were better than I was.), but they were the exceptions.

A bunch of those heavy hitter publications I named don’t publish fiction anymore. The New Yorker essentially doesn’t publish unagented fiction. I wrote this (now embarrassing) cri de coeur against the new New Yorker fiction editor Deborah Treisman, who casually dissed the slush pile inhabitants as “unsavvy” near the start of tenure, in 2003! This would be the latest possible date for that old path, but as the piece shows, by then, that path was closed.

Thoughts on Publishing a Novel in 2025

Lincoln Michel: Yeah, I graduated college in 2005 (and an MFA in 2009) so I heard a lot of the same advice you did from professors or visiting agents/editors. People who still remembered the old models. I was told how agents read lit mags—not just The Paris Review but second, third, and fourth tier magazines—to find new clients. How it was common to start your career with a two book deal from a big publisher with the short story collection first. How a good debut could land you a tenure track job. Etc.

None of that really happened to me or my peers. We didn’t find agents through mid-tier lit mag publications. We did not get two book deals or when we did it was a novel first and a story collection begrudgingly later (and even that feels like ancient history as big publishers almost never do story collections anymore). I do have some friends who landed teaching tenure-track jobs early on, although widespread adjunctification has made the number shrivel too.

John Warner: We’ve both spent our time in the non-tenure track teaching world and in a lot of ways higher ed parallels publishing in that some folks made it over the line to something sustainable while lots of other, equally qualified people doing the same labor found themselves in jobs that were not viable long term. I relied on writing/editing and a well-employed spouse always during my teaching career. I was more fortunate than many, but in a “just” world, those tenure track jobs would’ve still existed.

Lincoln Michel: I think this gets at something central to the conversation, which is that it feels like all the typical career paths for writers imploded at once. Staff magazine jobs evaporated at the same time newspapers were collapsing and adjunctification took over universities. In publishing, the midlist and thus advances have been shrinking (unless you’re writing to whatever the latest commercial fiction trend is). Plenty has been written about how even film and TV jobs pay less and are harder to find.

That said, I don’t want to sound like I’m spinning a big sob story. Most of my dedicated writer friends did find agents and did/do publish. But, we didn’t get there through the old model. I’ve published in tons of literary magazines, including big ones like Granta and The Paris Review. Yet, I’m pretty confident my other activities—like having a lot of Twitter followers, blogging at Electric Literature while I was an editor there, and yes having a popular Substack—that has helped me the most. To pick a specific example, I got my first adjunct MFA class because the program director had been following my tweets about genre fiction and asked if I wanted to teach a speculative fiction class.

The old model didn’t work for most to begin with. It just doesn’t seem to work for anyone now. The younger writers who are making it work are following other paths.

John Warner: The early days of the internet had some promise. I was getting $600 a pop from Modern Humorist for bits like writing a Britney Spears fan letter in the voice of Camille Paglia, but that was never going to last either. Any time a path has been identified, it’s probably already disappearing from in front of you.

More importantly, I think you’re illustrating one of the principles that has been constant essentially during the digital age, which is that opportunities require you to be, to some degree “present” online. My early breaks were publishing at the McSweeney’s website, and getting noticed there by the guys at Modern Humorist, which turned into the first book followed by just playing out the string until all that went away. My second book came from a parody of writing advice at McSweeney’s that my editor (Jane Friedman) saw and asked if I could do a book along those lines for Writer’s Digest Books. That project turned into a short-lived humor imprint with F+W Publications where we put out a handful of titles, including one by Wendy Molyneux who has gone on to big stuff in TV and film (Bob’s Burgers, The Great North) and Chris Monks who took over from me as editor of the McSweeney’s website.

Oh yeah, somewhere in there I started editing the McSweeney’s website because I knew Dave Eggers and he was looking for help. The Tournament of Books was started by my buddies at The Morning News and Kevin Guilfoile had this idea that it would be funny if he and I did color commentary on the judgements. That was almost 20 years ago. One day when we’d run out of stuff to say, on a lark I declared that I would give everyone who told me the last five books they’d read a personalized reading recommendation. I called myself “The Biblioracle” and doled out like 200 recommendations over a few hours. A year later I got a chance to do a sample column for the rebranded Chicago Tribune books section (Printers Row) and haven’t missed a week in over 15 years. If I hadn’t been doing all this different stuff, primarily online, I never would have come to anyone’s attention who had the power to put me proximate to an opportunity.

Don’t get me wrong, I worked hard and delivered as best I could on these projects and I “deserved” whatever success and opportunities came my way, but there’s also undeniable chance involved and tons of stuff failed! That humor imprint doesn’t exist anymore. By the end, I couldn’t give the books away for free, even though the books were great. My novel is out of print. A threatened lawsuit nixed another book. Printers Row is long gone. Etc…etc….

Lincoln Michel: Your point about needing to be online to get opportunities makes me think of another reason Substack is thriving. It’s not just the decline of magazines. It’s also the decline of other social media networks. This is most obvious with Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter. Twitter used to be the ideal place to share work and get readers for your journalism, criticism, whatever. Now it’s all spammers and scammers paying for bluechecks and outgoing links are suppressed in the algorithm. It doesn’t help writers anymore. Facebook is a wall of ads and AI slop. BlueSky and others all lack the reach of old Twitter. Instagram and TikTok are image and video based. Substack is what’s left for writers. The opportunities I used to get from my tweets, I now get from my Substack articles.

John Warner: Totally agree. Twitter was a real help in terms of drawing attention to my work, particularly writing about higher education and now it’s been well over a year since I looked at it. It has no utility whatsoever in terms of writing and career-building.

Substack strikes me as the place people have gone when there’s nowhere else to go. For writers, it’s going to work great for some, okay for others, and not at all for most until it stops working entirely at some point in the indefinite future.

For readers, I think it’s clearly a worse proposition than a world of robust publications that collect different voices under an umbrella. I know there’s a lot of frustration with the gatekeepers of the world—check out my twenty-three-year-old rant about Deborah Triesman above—but they serve a purpose.

Lincoln Michel: Right, I would prefer to be edited by serious editors in high-quality magazines that paid decent rates and had a significant readership! That sounds great. Sign me up!

I feel like some people act as if writers here were debating A) a hard but rewarding career in magazine writing or B) self-publishing on Substack for more money. Like we gave up valuable literary community (or whatever) to be mere individual mercenaries. That’s maybe the case for a few big names in journalism and politics writing. For most of us though, especially in the literary space, A) was never an option. It’s like blaming authors who self-publish for not sticking it out and getting that six-figure Big 5 deal. That huge Big 5 deal was never coming, at least for 99.99%.

Not only was there no steady career for us to leave at all but even an unsteady one didn’t necessarily exist. Most of what I write at Counter Craft I could not have sold to magazines at all. I actually pitched a craft column with the name “Counter Craft,” to some lit sites that liked working with me. I was told columns didn’t work in the social media SEO age. They could only consider individual, occasional articles.

I don’t even think the success of Counter Craft proves they were wrong. Probably a craft column would not have driven a lot of traffic on a magazine’s website. Certain things do work on Substack (or individual newsletters on other platforms) that simply do not work in traditional magazines, online or off.

Do you feel that way? As a Substack writer and reader, are there things that Substack enables that simply don’t work elsewhere?

The Writer as Chimera (and Where Substack Fits In)

John Warner: I think there’s a lot of different approaches/genres that are kind of native to or suited to Substack like what Naomi Kanakia calls an “effort post,” but I think the commonality among most of this stuff is that it feels like you’re having a sustained conversation with a specific readership and that pieces don’t need to be wholly figured out and polished, the thinking can be fresh and contingent.

At least that’s how I think of it because I almost always write my newsletter between 7:30 and 11am on Saturday morning. I spend the week gathering material in my head and browser tabs and then let loose. Because we both go back some, I think it’s really just blogging and tend to think the blogger’s mentality is still what works best. Counter Craft is pretty focused, but it seems to me that you’re often reacting to what’s in the writing world ether, right?

Lincoln Michel: It definitely feels like a return to blogging to me, with the same jumble of stuff that made blogging interesting. Longer essays mixed with very short reaction posts to news or digressions to unusual topics (I remember when Ta-Nehisi Coates blogged for The Atlantic, he’d have a long history post about say the reconstruction era followed by a post on superhero comics). I love that mix, as well as the response / counterresponse discussion that can happen between bloggers.

I don’t systematize my posts really, but it’s a mix for me. A long craft essay I work on for weeks followed by quick commentary on some lit world topic, plus interviews and other things. But yeah, it is the sort of thing you can only do in a blogging format. It wouldn’t work as a proper column in a print magazine. You’d want that to be more standardized. Which is just to say that again part of the appeal of Substack is that it allows you to do things you can’t really do elsewhere.

To switch gears, since we’ve critiqued Groff’s tweets, it’s probably fair to say what we think is correct. You’ve talked about how readers are better served by good magazines collecting a variety of voices. I agree. And I think Groff’s comments in context with Stratis’s do get at a big problem, which is that it is really hard for new voices to get a foothold anywhere including Substack. Good magazines, good mentors, and yes even good “gatekeepers”—a term I don’t think makes all that much sense in the internet age, but…—can really help emerging writers. (Bad ones, of course, can destroy them. Much has been written about how 2010s websites encouraged writers to write messy personal essays that got rageclick traffic for the magazine but left writers, often young women, out to dry.)

Substack leans pretty heavily to already famous voices. Perhaps it’s no worse than anywhere else online in that regard, but it doesn’t seem like a great venue for new voices.

John Warner: I think there was a first-mover advantage to some of the earlier arrivals that no longer holds for new, non-prominent writers. There will always be exceptions of unique and incandescent voices that gather attention, but my newsletter wouldn’t have been viable if not for arriving with a couple thousand subscribers who followed me from the Tribune. Ron Charles, formerly of the Washington Post, has been here a couple of months and well-eclipsed me already because he’s probably the biggest name in book reviewing for regular readers. An independent writer who does reviews could not achieve that here no matter how talented and prolific.

Lincoln Michel: The old magazine model was better at this, in part because new magazines could rise to the top and bring new voices and formats with them. You brought up McSweeney’s, and that is the perfect model of how I used to think these worlds worked. My understanding is McSweeney’s largely started to publish the kind of work that the older institutions turned their nose at. By the time I was in college, McSweeney’s was the cool and popular magazine. It had become the new institution. Other magazines cropped up to publish different styles in response. That’s the good and healthy way culture used to work. Old institutions got staid and either evolved or were replaced by new ones. Rinse and repeat. I’m not sure the current internet ecosystem, Substack included, can foster that healthy cultural churn in the same way. The algorithms flatten everything and encourage repetition over divergence.

John Warner: You noted some of the Substack publications that are an effort to establish a “scene” under editorial mastheads, and even as some of this writing is not for me I’m very encouraging of these efforts because I think experimentation is necessary and healthy. In More Than Words I have a chapter titled “On the Future of Writing for Money” that sorts through Substack, crowdsourcing, traditional venues, and other models in terms of how sustainable they are for individual writers and a larger reading culture, and my conclusion is that writer collectives like Defector and Flaming Hydra are the most promising way forward, so bringing people together under different umbrellas is a necessary thing.

I do wonder if the incentives of Substack being a social media platform are going to be distorting. There’s already a kind of rivalrousness/chumminess aspect to it, which is good for attention and short term drama, but ultimately you have to produce stuff that readers want to read. Spectacle only goes so far.

But honestly, it’s not all that different. In the early oughts a bunch of people who wrote for McSweeney’s used to hang out in the Salon Table Talk message boards and that shit could get weird and petty too.

None of it was probably healthy, but things keep on keepin’ on.

Lincoln Michel: I also admire the Defector model. Although I do think the most accurate criticism of Substack as a model applies to it as well. There’s just not enough subscriber money to go around and pay as many people as the magazine and newspapers did before the internet. The blunt economic reality is that the old model rested on high-paying print ad rates (or things like classifieds), which the internet has undermined, and subscriptions, which will always be harder to get in a world of ever proliferating entertainment options. (Media organizations that survived often have other revenue streams—e.g., the New York Times games department apparently is a huge driver of subscriptions—that can’t simply be recreated by everyone else.) Both factors seem like they can only get worse. LLMs/AI corporations are overtly working to decrease even the meager ad revenue websites get—e.g., Google showing AI summaries at the top of searches so users don’t click off of Google—and using Chatbots to generate things or date an AI bot or whatever is just another thing dividing people’s time.

John Warner: Indeed, the remaining sources of revenue for writing are always being cannibalized and it’s harder and harder for that money to make it to the writer. I don’t see a scenario where this improves at a systemic level. Yes, a Brandon Sanderson can make a bunch of bank through crowdsourcing, more than just working through traditional publishing, but he was a success in traditional publishing first and I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to get in the order fulfillment business. I want to write stuff.

You’re someone I would point to as a person who is figuring out how to build a “career” as a writer of books—I mostly make my money on non-book or book-related work like speaking—with each new project moving you forward on a trajectory. Do you think along these lines or is it just one foot in front of the other?

Lincoln Michel: While I’m glad it seems that way, I’m afraid I’m definitely not in the “can live on fiction writing” camp. The majority of my income comes from teaching. I teach composition fulltime and do various other teaching gigs too.

As far as a book career, I’ve always wanted to write the kind of weird books I loved to read growing up (and still love to read). The kind of stuff that few ever lived on. I don’t have interest in order fulfillment or made-to-order fiction chasing whatever trends and tropes editors are buzzing about at a given moment. Of course, I hope—like we all do—to be the rare exception who writes startlingly original work that is also somehow bestselling and award-winning at the same time. And why not, let’s throw in an acclaimed adaptation that leads to a sprawling multimedia franchise universe too while we’re dreaming. But back in reality, I’ve always planned to support myself on other things to allow me the freedom to write what I want to write. A career that lets you write books, rather than a career of book writing.

John Warner: I’m a subscriber to the How I Make Money Writing newsletter (on which you recently appeared) and it’s clear that it’s very hard to make money only through writing. Lightning could strike, I suppose. If Reese or Jenna pick your book, you’re going to get a nice payday at the least and you have (by my rough estimate) a one-in-four shot at making a million bucks if your sales go nuclear, but even that kind of promotion isn’t a guarantee of a life-changing breakthrough. And maybe that breakthrough is also not a great thing if what you’re after is a life as a writer.

Maybe you saw the New York Times story about Kathryn Stockett, author of The Help, who got dumped by her publisher when she couldn’t deliver the next book after being battered by late-arriving backlash to that first book. She clearly made a massive pile of dough from The Help, so cry me a river, but if writing is the thing you want to do, she wasn’t doing all that much of it over the last seventeen years.

At some point I started looking at my career through the lens of whether or not I was looking forward to what I had to do that day when I got up in the morning. I count myself lucky that, for the most part, I’ve achieved that.

But it still feels pretty precarious. I’m working on my next nonfiction book proposal now, and I think it’s a strong idea that will both appeal to the audience for my recent books and maybe expand the circle a bit, but despite recent successes, there’s zero guarantee it’ll be traditionally published.

Putting on your crystal ball, where do you think we’re going to be in say, five or ten years? When it comes to Substack, I worry about the people who are going all in on the platform as their vehicle for supporting themselves. I think the owners could unilaterally change the ecosystem in a way that makes the situations of writers much worse at any time and the more locked-in you are, the tougher it will be.

Lincoln Michel: It’s very precarious and the sands are always shifting. “Don’t quit your day job” remains, sadly, probably the best advice. I’m with you that writers should not put their chips all in on any given platform. Look at Twitter again. But I think if we broaden out from Substack and think of newsletters and blogging (like you I still think of this as a form of blogging), I bet they will remain very useful for writers. I think their importance will increase.

The “enshitification” of the internet will continue apace. It will probably accelerate with LLMs. Facebook and Google search and whatever else have no incentives to drive traffic and revenue to writers. They can replace us, for most of their users, with LLM slop. But, they aren’t the entirety of existence. Lots of people still care about art. Lots of people read. And I expect a lot of the population—maybe the majority, maybe not—will actively seek out human authors and individual voices with idiosyncratic interests as a counter to a beige slop world. Part of that will be people seeking out more real world experiences. Perhaps a new flourishing of reading series and salons or something. But online, as far as literary culture goes, I’d place my bets on newsletters and blogs. Though the form they take will probably change and mutate. (Back in the blogging heyday, many glossy mags and newspapers hosted blogs. Maybe that comes back and revives some literary ventures?)

John Warner: This is a source of some hope for me too. The digital revolution when I was coming up was exciting because it allowed us to connect with all these like-minded people we didn’t really know existed online. I think the next phase is more likely to be, cripes, let’s get off our fucking computers!

Lincoln Michel: Sorry to be a little corny at the end here, but I feel like we’ve talked about many true problems and maybe it is nice to include what’s good or interesting or hopeful about the present state of literature. Author income is in a dire state. OTOH, I think this is a very exciting time for authors who want to experiment in new forms, try out new models, and do whatever we want. (Maybe that’s the freedom of not expecting money?) One thing that sucked about the old models is authors got slotted into roles. If you started as a horror writer, you were a horror writer. If you started a small press author, you were probably staying on small presses. Etc. Now? There’s way more freedom to bounce around between imprints, genres, and forms. You can be self-publishing science fiction on Monday, putting out a big press literary novel on Tuesday, and doing a weird experimental work on a small press on Wednesday.

Correspondingly, this is a great time to be a reader. Really. Yes, discoverability is a problem, but there are so many interesting works being put out in so many different genres and such a greater access to world literature in translation than perhaps ever before.

Can I toss these questions back to you? If you were starting your career today, with an eye for the next 5-10 years, what would you do? And what about the state of literature excites you, despite whatever problems it has?

John Warner: I agree that there is an opportunity and atmosphere available for people who are willing to just try stuff. I keep referencing McSweeney’s because I was around for its origins, but it was born out of Dave Eggers being frustrated that the glossy magazines weren’t publishing stuff that seemed genuinely interesting and worth reading. There was no intention beyond doing one issue of a journal and then another and another. They’re up to 82 issues.

The website existed simply because the internet was new and you were supposed to have a website. Prior to me taking the reins as editor it wasn’t even primarily a humor website. I looked at what had been published and thought that this weird funny stuff seemed like it would play best online so we should focus on that. Thanks to the superior efforts of my successor, Chris Monks, It’s now a quasi-institution and because the whole enterprise is now non-profit, sustainable.

The key, that you hit on, is for people to do the work that compels them. Don’t try to chase someone else’s path because that looks like the way to have a hit. Success in this realm is always idiosyncratic. After the fact, we go looking for the next Gone Girl or whatever, but I’ve always viewed that as a dead end.

I also think and hope we’re going to see another era of successful small/independent publishers. The math of the business is punishing (as this piece from the Dalkey Archive’s Chad W. Post shows), but there is a desire for people to both write and read stuff that falls outside the main paths of publishing. I’ve been reading a bunch of books from a Canadian publisher, Biblioasis, lately (most recently Silver Lake by Alex Pugsley), that are fantastic. (They also published this year’s Tournament of Books runner-up, Passenger Seat.) Reese and Jenna are probably not going to latch on to these books, but there must be at least some audience for these things because they’re great.

I hope there’s a way for the work to make sense for everyone involved.

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My new novel Metallic Realms is out in stores! Reviews have called the book “brilliant” (Esquire), “riveting” (Publishers Weekly), “hilariously clever” (Elle), “a total blast” (Chicago Tribune), “unrelentingly smart and inventive” (Locus), and “just plain wonderful” (Booklist). My previous books are the science fiction noir novel The Body Scout and the genre-bending story collection Upright Beasts. If you enjoy this newsletter, perhaps you’ll enjoy one or more of those books too.