Substack is changing writing like YouTube changed indie filmmaking

Entirely new ways of being a writer are emerging before our eyes

When YouTube launched in 2005 I was at the tail end of my obsession with filmmaking. For a decade-and-a-half, from the age of about 10, I’d absorbed every behind-the-scenes book and magazine and TV special I could find: and this was the 90s, when it was really hard to get useful material on the filmmaking craft.

I watched this on endless loop.

I studied Film & English at university, starting in 1999. DVDs had become a thing, bringing with them unprecedented access to filmmakers and education in the craft. Those early Robert Rodriguez DVDs — El Mariachi, Desperados — were more instructive than 90% of my university degree. I got a job at a tech startup making visual effects software for young and amateur filmmakers.

But amateur filmmaking was astonishingly difficult back then. Most of the 90s were still analogue: terrible hi8 video and wrestling with dual VCRs and minidisc audio dubbing (and that’s if you were lucky). Digital editing become possible on a home computer around 2001 but the machines were barely up to it, even at sub-HD resolutions. Anyone who successfully made anything even vaguely half-decent was a legend in the online filmmaking community.

The trickiest bit was that it was expensive and awkward to show people your work. You had to rent or borrow a server, understand codecs and bitrates and wait hours and hours to upload a 1 minute clip at postage stamp quality. There was a vibrant filmmaking community around the company where I was working: mostly early teens, mostly Americans.

For younger readers, this is what online video looked like pre-YouTube:

A whole hour of videos to watch!

The arrival of the digital filmmakers

It was a pivotal moment for the industry and the nurturing of a new generation. I knew Sam and Niko, the Corridor Digital guys, when they were 12 years old — and already pushing the boundaries further than anyone else. Pioneering YouTuber-turned-producer FreddieW swung by. Chris Cowan, now action director and choreographer on The Acolyte, Shang-Chi and many more did his earliest work in that scene (he’s a lovely guy, incidentally). AJ Rickert-Epstein found his love of cameras and has now enjoyed a long career as a cinematographer. I remember hanging out with Adam Kirley at a pub in Norwich, a few months after he’d broken the world record for most car flips while rolling the Aston Martin in Casino Royale. Matt Plummer took his amateur VFX enthusiasm, strapped it to a rocket and blasted into a career working at Framestore as a compositor, where he’s worked on almost every big Hollywood film from the last decade.

While the software startup that nurtured them is long gone, acquired and subsumed into a larger, anonymous corporate entity that shut down and deleted all remnants of the 20-year old community, those kids have gone on to quietly grow up and define much of the modern filmmaking era. There will be books written about them, in the same way books were written about the Scorsese/Lucas/Spielberg/Coppola cohort.¹

There were two key aspects to most of their successes. The first was their undeniable skill and tenacity (is that two things?). The second was the arrival in 2005 of YouTube. By that point it was considerably easier to shoot and edit digital video. Suddenly there was a free way to show your projects to the world on a massive scale, at increasingly high quality.

Here’s Sam and Niko in their latest video, which conveniently also includes clip from those early-2000s experiments:

While most people were chuckling at YouTube for being home to silly cat videos, these young creators were busy revolutionising their own careers and remixing the concept of ‘the film industry’, publishing short films and demo reels.

I was in my mid/late-twenties by this point. My life had gone off in a different direction, and a lot of the new advances were beyond my filmmaking knowledge or skillset. I’d learned how to use the previous generation of hardware and software, growing up in the 90s, and never quite managed to adapt. I missed the YouTube wave, not recognising it for what it was until years later.

There was not a little jealousy there, I admit.

This is the home video tech I’d grown up with, which become rapidly obsolete.

When technology meets creativity

Around 2013 I refocused on writing rather than filmmaking. In 2015 I started publishing my first online serial, not realising that I was onto something that would change my creative career. In 2021 I switched over to publishing via my own newsletter, using Substack as the tech foundation.

And here we are, on a new wave. These don’t come along often. They require the perfect alignment of creative energies and technology, at the right time. Substack, Ghost, Beehiiv and the other top-to-bottom newsletter systems are providing the tech foundation, and writers are more than ready ride the wave. Our boards are ready to go.

Unlike in 2005, when I couldn’t figure out a way to fit into the new filmmaking paradigm, this time I feel perfectly positioned. I’ve been serialising for a decade, even before committing to the newsletter game. I’m a considerably better writer than I ever was a filmmaker.²

If it was just me, then it wouldn’t be a wave, obviously. It’s not just me: there’s hundreds, thousands of us. Fiction writers, journalists, essayists, memoir writers, cartoonists, comedy writers — we’re all here, riding the wave. We were here at the right time, in the right place, with the right skills and tenacity.

Writers have been around for centuries, long before the filmmakers and the game designers and the podcasters. We’ve been oddly starved of tech innovation, watching bemused from the sidelines as movies and games and radio and music reinvented themselves for the internet era.³

If we get this right, and if the people at Substack and Ghost and Beehiiv get it right and stay true to their missions, we’ll look back on the 2020s as a time every bit as pivotal and vital for fiction writing⁴ as the 2000s were for indie and online filmmaking. There are big name writers here reinventing how they write and publish their craft. Even more exciting are the newer writers — of all ages — who are conceptualising and testing entirely new forms and distribution models.

A decade from now it will be obvious to see in retrospect, but you can already see it if you squint.

Russell Nohelty

,

Claire Venus

,

David McIlroy

and

Sarah Fay

prodding at the edges and figuring out the business framework.

Eleanor Anstruther

is serialising her work and melding the traditional and digital ends of the industry, and digging into the wider scene with her 8 Questions interviews.

Margaret Atwood

,

Chuck Palahniuk

,

Luke Jennings

,

Molly Knox Ostertag

,

ND Stevenson

and

Brian K. Vaughan

have made newsletters part of their creative process.

Elle Griffin

keeps tearing at the firmament and spreading the word to print media.

💎 Jaime Buckley

is reinventing his comics career in front of our eyes.

T K Hall

is publicly chronicling and celebrating his recovery from devastating writer’s block, inspiring the rest of us at the same time. Developers of software Scrivener are turning to Substack to find exciting writers to feature on their webinar series, courtesy of

Oliver Evensen

.

Alex Dobrenko`

is fighting

Mike Sowden

and nobody knows why.

In other words, it’s a community.

We’re actually in a healthier position than filmmakers were, because this is all happening in the post-social era. On the newsletter platforms we get to properly own our readerships, and can take our subscribers with us as we navigate any choppy waters up ahead. As much as YouTube enabled an explosion of creativity, those most successful such as Corridor Digital have spent the last five years trying to figure out how to extricate themselves, or at least build a future-proofed foundation: that’s why they have their own platform now, based around direct subscriptions. They’ve had to do that because YouTube has always had one foot in the old way of doing things, powered by advertising and reluctant to properly share with its lifeblood creators; the likes of Substack and Ghost have had a healthier respect for their writers from the beginning. Substack’s subscription model is designed to address some of the tech mis-steps from the last decade. Whatever else is to come over the next twenty years, we’re in the position to roll with it.

I could add another 1,000 words to this essay simply by listing other exciting writers. But, really, it’s better if you go and discover them for yourself.

And if you’re a writer, grab your (key)board and get on the wave with the rest of us.

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Thanks for reading.

If you’re new to these parts, you can read my ongoing serial fiction here:

This week I’ve been enjoying:

• A new podcast from Simon Furman and Andy Wildman, key creators on the 1980s Transformers comics. That was back before Transformers was anything more than a formerly successful toy line. Furman approached the material with a heft and seriousness that made my tiny 10 year old brain explode. The Rest is Giant Robots is a fascinating glimpse into being a comics writer or artist in the 1980s, regardless of whether you have any interest in Transformers specifically.

• Continuing to enjoy various monthly comics: Destro, SAGA (obviously), DWJ’s Transformers. Black Cloak and Scarlett from

  Kelly Thompson
  . Being honest, the latest SAGA is in a drawer waiting to be read: I’m always slightly scared of what BKV is going to do next.

• Playing a fair bit of Monster Hunter Rise with the boy. Lots of fun: the concept artists and animators on this were evidently enjoying themselves.

• Started the latest series of Only Murders in the Building, which so far remains very clever and is somehow avoiding a) running out of ideas and b) wallowing in its own cleverness.

Right, that’s it for today. Hope you all have fabulous weeks ahead.

1. Damn, maybe I should write that book? Huh.

2. If you think this is a humblebrag, you clearly have never seen any of my short films.

3. No, ebooks don’t count.

4. And maybe other forms of writing, too.