“It was about how the prevailing media system was broken because it was based on this incentive structure that rewarded behaviors and content that drive people apart rather than help them work together, or work toward some idea of truth,” McKenzie said.
Best had written an essay and shared it with McKenzie, a tech journalist who had also been lead writer at Tesla. The company was founded in 2017 by Chris Best, Hamish McKenzie, and Jairaj Sethi, who had all worked together at Kik, the Canadian messaging app, which Best cofounded. But what nearly everyone can agree on? Substack is rewriting the rules of writing. To many writers, Substack is a buoy to cling to in dangerous waters others feel like they’re just being cast further out to sea as they attempt to simultaneously be their own scribe, editor, publisher, art director and PR machine.
#AUTHORS ON SUBSTACK PLUS#
Then there are the questions and inevitable complications that ensue when a company that solidly falls in the VC/tech space attempts to disrupt the old-school media landscape, giving creators a chance to DIY it in a time in which misinformation and disinformation run rampant but where, also, the odds of landing a staff job with a decent salary plus health benefits feels almost like winning the lottery. But just because some subscribers will pay some writers for content doesn’t mean everyone can make big bucks (or even a living) that way. The top 10 writers on the platform, ranked by leaderboards divided by revenue and audience across common categories, make more than $20 million annually, according to the company.ĭollar signs like these in the current media environment have resulted in a sort of feeding frenzy over the money to be made via Substack. In many ways, it’s working: There are well over 500,000 subscribers paying writers to read their newsletters on Substack, along with millions reading for free. It sounds really corny, again, but it kind of gave me back my career as a writer, and I got to be the writer that I wanted to be.”Īs the media landscape has been fraying and decaying for two decades, and most old-media companies have never fully found a way to square paying for high-quality writing with the transient, clickbait-y nature of what a Google algorithim rewards, Substack is one of a handful of companies that are trying to right that equation by connecting writers with readers who will pay for their work. “It compares to my salary at the Chicago Tribune, and I had a pretty good salary there. “I’m not making a million dollars, but it feels really stable,” she said.
With more than 15,000 subscribers, she charges $5.50 monthly or $50 yearly the typical conversion rate you can expect from unpaid to paid readers is somewhere between 5% and 10%, Substack says.
#AUTHORS ON SUBSTACK FREE#
But Substack also pays an editor of her choice to work with her and provides her access to Getty Images and free transcribing (with a monthly limit).
#AUTHORS ON SUBSTACK PRO#
The Pro deal has limited requirements the one Nunn finds most burdensome is the need to publish at least twice a week (in the free phase of her newsletter, she just did one weekly post). Nunn, who recently moved to Atlanta, won’t disclose the amount of her deal, but she says it “was enough that when he said it, I was like, ‘Well, there’s no other way I’m going to make that much money in one year. When the deal is over, the share reverts to the standard Substack agreement: The writer takes nearly 90% while Substack gets 10% and Stripe gets about 3% for processing credit card payments. They also take home 15% of their paid subscriptions. Nunn was offered a Substack Pro deal, which functions kind of like a book advance: It’s a set amount of upfront money for a year, or sometimes two, that writers can live on while growing their business. By late March, the company had taken note. By February 2021 she had introduced a paid option. In October 2020 she did, launching The Department of Salad on Substack, an online platform that lets writers create and send newsletters directly to subscribers. Smith-Cameron encouraged her to do a newsletter. This is gonna sound so corny, I hate this word: They were healing.” She posted her creations on Twitter, where the food writer Regan Fletcher Stephens and the actress J. Surrounded by amazing produce, “like really Norman Rockwell fruits and vegetable stands and markets,” she started throwing together “peaches and plums and berries and tomatoes, everything that I liked and not worrying about whether it matched.
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