Consumers, collectors & curators

Are newsletters the missing piece of the puzzle?

2021 has ended up being all about serialisation. Substack is all over the news, Salman Rushdie is giving it a go, a bunch of amazing comics writers and artists have been signed and there’s a vibrant community of independent and early career writers eager to jump in. As someone who has been writing serialised fiction since 2015 this is thrilling, but I’ve been worrying about sustainability.

The core concept of putting work up as an online serial is that you don’t need huge sales numbers to succeed financially. You don’t need to be JK Rowling. Instead, you aim for a smaller but highly engaged group of readers: the magical 1,000, which is more than enough to generate a reasonable income. Most writers seem to be looking at charging readers $5 per month, or $50 per year. The exact offerings differ from author to author, but conceptually everyone is playing the same game.

My concern was that while $5 per month to support your favourite writer is quite doable, $50 per month to support your favourite ten writers is not. It doesn’t scale tidily for readers who like lots of writers. Especially if you start comparing it to something like your Netflix subscription cost, which gets you access to thousands of movies and TV shows.

That very comparison, I think, is where I’m going wrong. The per-creator subscription model, whether via Substack or Patreon or any other system, is aimed at a different kind of person to the Netflix subscriber (though I’m not saying these are 100% mutually exclusive).

The way I see it, there are a few different ways people engage with entertainment and art. These aren’t mutually exclusive and people will hop between them at different points in their lives, and it’ll vary per person depending on whether they prioritise literature, music, films, comics etc.

Here’s how I’ve tried to make sense of it.