Abstract
The internet has threatened the economic model of the newspaper industry but created real commercial opportunities for writers
Last week, I got an email from Substack. “Congratulations! You’ve published 44 weeks in a row,” it told me. “That’s longer than 94 per cent of writers. Keep your streak and start your next draft.” So I did, just like I always try to do my 10,000 steps – I like to please the algorithm.
The story of how I learned to stop worrying and love my Substack starts just before Christmas 2022 when – 20 minutes after filing that week’s column – I was summoned to a Zoom call with two people I had never met before and told that after nearly 18 years I was no longer wanted at The Times. New ideas were needed, and a severance proposal was on its way. For the first time in my career, I was being fired.
I had expected it for years in a kind of general way. I had seen too many good colleagues lose their jobs over the years to think I either was or should be somehow immune. Even so, the absence of any warning signs or of any conversations with the editor meant that the speed and brutality of it took me by surprise. It was a bit humiliating but the pay-off wasn’t ungenerous and I worked for another 10 weeks after that first conversation.
And then faced the question that many readers will have done: and now what? In addition to my work at The Times, I had been presenting a weekly BBC Radio 4 programme, The Briefing Room, for more than six years, contributing five or six columns a year to the Jewish Chronicle and doing the occasional paid personal appearance. Those seemed set to continue.
But there was going to be a big hole where most of the writing had been. Since the mid-90s, I had been on the staff of a newspaper, starting with The Independent, then The Guardian and The Observer, and finally for The Times. Most of it had been a lot of fun. In addition to columns, I had written leaders, TV reviews, book reviews and travel reviews. I had recounted experiences in spas all over Europe and contributed features on complicated things, like the rising therapeutic use of psychedelics, AI in medicine and genomics.
But the column was my anchor. It appeared week in, week out. I never missed because of illness, except for when I was in intensive care in 2011. Every week for nearly two decades, I provided the comment desk with three or four ideas.
Over that time, I saw a profound change in how editors commissioned and what they demanded. When I started in the mid-90s, the presumption was that columnists who had been hired for their skill were best when writing to their passions, which meant that if you were a good enough writer and motivated by the subject, you were likely to turn out something worth reading.
I think Dacrism helped end all that. Increasingly, editors inserted their judgments about subjects and argument into the process. Some of their demands made sense: the requirement, for example, that a column should try to tell the reader something new. We all know that some columnists become repetitive and occasionally even lazy.
But it also meant that some weeks the commissioning process became a form of mental torture. There were periods when my best ideas were knocked down week after week – sometimes completely arbitrarily – until I wondered whether there was ANYTHING that the editor would allow me to write about. I was told by a colleague after I had left that one of the editors had taken a perverse pleasure in rejecting the column suggestions from certain writers. Nothing was said explicitly but, after a while, a few patterns became apparent.
I write this to explain why losing my job at the end of 2022 was genuinely a simultaneous bereavement (loss of status, loss of institutional support) and a liberation. Though I had a big financial and employment gap to fill, I was out of the disrespecting grinder.
Anyway, in January I announced that I was leaving, without any big notion of what to do instead. I had heard of a monetising blog called Substack and had signed up as a free subscriber to three or four blogs. These writers’ new efforts would be notified by email and I read most of them. I had no idea who Substack were or whether many writers could make a living from it. The idea seemed unlikely, though.
Substack is yet another Californian invention, set up in 2017 with the stated (and implausible) objective of “allowing writers and creators to run their own media empire”. It took off during the pandemic. Substack provides the tools to create your own blog and the mechanisms to contact subscribers and to take payment from them. Substack takes 10 per cent of any earnings from subscriptions and the payment company Stripe takes another 3 per cent. The speed of the system’s payment to authors frankly astonished me from the outset, when money arrived in my account two days after my first subscribers paid up. Freelances who are on their third reminder emails to dilatory publications can only weep.
It was Will Storr the writer, whom I know a little, who emailed me after hearing that I had been defenestrated and suggested I contact his wife Farrah, an immensely successful lifestyle and fashion journalist and editor, who also runs the UK end of Substack. After two conversations with her, I decided to give it a try. She held my digital hand as I created an “about” page and a title – Notes from the Underground – for my new venture. I was terrified.
Right, now I will write what I want to write about
What should I write about? How often? At what length? How would I tell people who had read me in The Times – which is, after all, a publishing behemoth with a very big advertising budget – that this corner of the internet was now where I was writing? Could I make enough from it to justify the effort I’d have to put in? Wouldn’t I be better off spending my time touting for freelance work from print magazines and newspapers?
The first thing I decided was that I would write whatever I wanted to write, whenever I wanted to write it. But I would write it in such a way that people wanted to read it. In other words, I went back to that principle that used to govern the employment of columnists – let them enjoy themselves. The second decision was to publish at least once a week (no matter what), and often more. And third, I would experiment with formats and illustrations.
So, at the end of March last year, my first Substack appeared – trailed by me on what was then Twitter. It was a magazine-length mega-column on why those trying to argue that Rishi Sunak had a clear path back to re-election were reading their runes upside down. In the piece I embedded the various pleas for subscribers – paid and unpaid – that Substack encourages you to add. Several thousand signed up, a couple of hundred as paying subscribers at £7 a month. Two days later the money was in the bank.
I realised something that will have been obvious to others: we are a society of niches, of minority enthusiasms, of pastimes, hobbies and opinions. Shock jocks had long ago realised the possibilities of making a living by pleasing relatively small groups of people enough to get them to pay for their media. I arrived at it much later.
True, the highly partisan hacks of left and right have more success galvanising their even more highly partisan followers into supporting them. My niche is slightly different. As it has evolved, it is broadly liberal, well read, and dislikes displays of naked prejudice. It wants its analysis mixed in with some good writing if possible. It wants to be argued with and to argue, not to be whacked over the head with a rhetorical mallet. Good. That’s what I like reading too.
To reach this conclusion about who they are, I don’t just have to go on the (paid) readers’ comments, which I publish under every post. The other remarkable thing about Substack is its truly creepy metric information. I know, hour by hour, how many subscribers I have, how many I have added (or, on a bad day, lost), how many have opened a new post (usually between 57 per cent and 62 per cent), why paid subscribers have decided to stop paying and – get this – who they are (or, rather, what their email address is).
It also means that I can look at who has and has not subscribed. I shouldn’t and I try not to, but I can easily check which old colleague or ancient friend has not even quite managed to take out a free subscription, despite their desolation at losing me from The Times. More constructively, I can see what kind of posts get more traffic and what get less. I don’t let it affect what I do – in fact, it encourages me to experiment just so I can follow what happens, but I can see it.
For example, my three-part extravaganza on Nadine Dorries’s bizarre conspiracy book The Plot was a huge indulgence because I would never have been commissioned by any publication to write at that length. It divided my own readers (I asked them), but God, it was fun to do. Substack has also been a great place to write nuanced and pithier arguments about the current tragedy in the Middle East.
I had thought that what got posted on Substack would stay on Substack. Not entirely true. Totally unexpected was the revelation that other commissioners from various newspapers and magazines were reading NFTU, and I have actually sold two Substack pieces in the last few months, including one on Ozempic to The Mail on Sunday. I have also been republishing (with permission) freelance pieces I have written for other sources, usually after a fortnight’s lag, and discovering that my readers are almost always seeing them for the first time.
Then there was the wonderful moment when, for various political reasons, a piece that I had written for a particular publication was looking likely to be spiked, much to the embarrassment of the comment editor who had commissioned it. “No problem,” I told her, “and please don’t worry about the kill fee” – and published it myself instead. That was me right there, running my own media empire.
I am writing and I am earning from my writing and I am having fun doing it. I think my community of readers – some of whom I am getting to know – are enjoying it too. And I didn’t expect any of it.
The biggest problem I have is letting new possible subscribers know that I exist and what I am doing. After 10 months, I have more than 12,000 subscribers, with just shy of 1,000 being paid subscribers. The growth after the first flush has been slow and steady. Twitter would once have been a fantastic vehicle for promotion, but Mr M has put the skids under that one, so much of it is about recommendation and word of mouth. And, coming up, I will face my greatest financial test when those who signed to become an annual subscriber on Day One review their subscriptions. I am taking nothing for granted but remember: should you be considering not renewing – I know where you live.
