Cancelled! Cancelled! Cancelled!

None of you are free of sin!

I’ve cancelled your paid subscription to my substack. I’ll tell you why shortly, but it needs a bit of shop talk first. Jump to the bottom if you haven’t the patience.

I love shop talk. Writing is, by its nature, a pretty solitary task, at least on the business end, and so I always find those anecdotes where writers spill their work routines or trade secrets tremendously illuminating. They reveal a lot, not just about how successful authors write, but about the conditions of their writing. You see some recurring themes; stop while you’re in full flow (Hemingway and Miller); write at night (Susan Barker and Peter James) or at dawn (Kingsolver and Angelou); exercise daily (Murakami and Vonnegut); work daily, even when your work is bad, just keep writing (everybody). Often they’re the routines of successful writers who are knocking out lucrative books as their only job (I note Ian Fleming’s daily routine on his Jamaica estate included time for spear fishing and pink gins,) and when they’re not, they’re often about stealing time from responsibilities like steady work and parenting. For those without independent income, without wealth, becoming a writer is a bit like trying to reach orbit: an enormous amount of exertion is expelled in the hope of reaching a self-sustained weightless, an income from one’s writing that makes it sustainable.

Enough money buys enough time. There’s a very funny essay by Ursula K. Le Guin for the New Yorker from 2012 in which she discusses her early problems with publishing science fiction as a woman. The academic establishment, she wrote, were struck by a bias which allowed them to “remain both superior and ignorant” of science fiction, while places like Playboy, which would sometimes publish interesting science fiction, were scared of publishing women. In the end, she compromised with the pen name “U.K. Le Guin” in order to not scare the poor little darlings who actually did read it for the articles, and got the bag.

At the end of the article, however, there is a short denouement which is just as indicative of that bygone world as a literary canon or a literary Playboy. “Game to the last, Playboy printed that. And my husband and I bought a red VW bus, cash down, with the check.”

Goddamn. A short story by an unknown author, even one as remarkable as Le Guin, for a non-literary magazine, and it pays enough to buy an entire VW van? In 1968, you’re talking $3000 for that van, perhaps $30,000 in today’s money. It’s inconceivable today, as shocking as when I learnt that Carrie Bradshaw supposedly received $4.50 a word writing for Vogue back in 2002. She’d have made the best part of $2k already if she were writing this substack, which she wouldn’t have been, of course.

I couldn’t help but think that perhaps this sort of shop talk is less inspiring for writers than the exciting routines of Henry Miller or Maya Angelou. To put it another way, it’s harder to make a living as a writer than it used to be, especially on the lower rungs of the ladder. That’s why I started this substack, some seven years ago. I felt like the newsletter model they were developing offered real potential to help writers early in their career get an audience for their writing where editors might be more cautious, and to receive financial compensation that would allow them to write more, and more adventurously, which is what all those writers’ routine anecdotes suggest is the only way to make it as a writer.

For a while, for me, it worked. I was an early adopter, as my URL suggests, and in the first couple of years on substack I was regularly high in their leaderboard of most read articles. That gave me a huge boost of confidence, and it was matched by seeing that Substack’s prediction - that about 10% of free subscribers would end up converting to paid - was about right. The extra income was enough to feel like I was being rewarded for my work, while the extra reach meant that I was receiving more commissions from more interesting outlets for paid work. In the earliest days I even received a small grant from Substack itself to help support Huw Lemmey’s Utopian Drivel, and presumably to allow them to demonstrate the viability of their product.

I don’t want to get too much into the politics of Substack. I have my own opinions, sometimes strong, about how it transformed itself into a major outlet, about its position on free speech, and about the, to my mind, overemphasis on demands put on cultural producers in political discourse—a sort of strike-by-proxy cultural politics that seems to dominate social media. But for me, the turning point for the platform came when Substack began courting and poaching writers with huge established audiences, given to them from mainstream outlets, in order to challenge those outlets. It seemed a little lopsided that having had the resources, training and editors to build their reputation, they could then take the audiences those outlets had given them and go it alone. Their audiences, often attracted by their own culture war bugbears, followed them, and I’ve been led to believe those former columnists could make serious bank by offering their juice straight from the source, as well as through the Substack Pro program that existed at the time. The growth of the platform meant that there were a lot more writers going after a paid market that didn’t grow at the same rate.

Around the start of the pandemic, my conversion rate dropped. Taking into account churn, it hasn’t grown since. Is this sour grapes? Very well then, it’s sour grapes. There are a lot of factors at play here. For a start, I noticed very early on that shorter form content and political writing that engaged with the culture war simply did much better, as a result of it being more widely shared on social media. Yet this coincided with a change in how I wrote; that stuff was much less interesting to me compared to cultural criticism and essays, and once I’d deleted my Twitter, I wasn’t subject to the daily stream of rage-inducing content that would have triggered those pieces.

Another thing; much better writers than me joined the platform, and wrote more consistently. Much worse writers too; it was interesting to see which mainstream commentators, many who had been writing for broadsheets for decades, actually couldn’t write very well without an editor wrangling their prose into something legible. But with the increase in traffic, it became clear that holding attention on substack was much more akin to Youtube than anything else. The only thing that allowed enough growth to outpace the churn was consistency, and if you couldn’t post an essay a week, it would be hard to reach a new audience at all. This was compounded by the fact that people no longer share anywhere near as much as they did a decade ago on social media, unless it’s ragebait.

An essay a week? I’m not that interesting. In fact, I’m not sure anybody is that interesting. I don’t think I have a new idea every week, at least not anymore, and certainly not one worth sharing. A number of years ago there was the whiff of an offer of a columnist role for a newspaper waved under my nose, and I pushed it away without much thought, because I know what most columnists write, and I have aspirations to be a better writer than that. Even the best writers inevitably end up producing filler under those pressures to produce, and you end up drawing yourself into caricature, into ragebaiting, into asking ‘so, what is up with airplane food?’ Only one writer I know can pull that off, and the King is already on his throne.

Algorithms, churn, reach, conversion rates: I actually, quite simply, do not give a shite about these things. It’s not that I think I’m above them: they’re clearly important parts of the modern publishing world, and I have friends who do understand and care and are very good at it. But they don’t interest me as a motivation for writing. I felt my own soul corroding when I found myself wondering what I could write that would make readers enraged or disgusted enough to reach a 4% growth target. You’ll see even in the title of this piece, which is not about “cancel culture,” the hustling instinct to drive traffic and bump my open rate has become habit. I can see how for some writers—especially those producing news, commentary, or covering niche topics, insider baseball stuff—it’s an ideal model, but that’s not my work. What was more dispiriting, and I know other writers feel the same about this, is seeing something you’ve really worked on, really thought about, that you regard as good, receive a like and two shares, while the punchy culture war screeds, knocked off in a pique of rage, go viral. I just don’t have the hustle in me.

This is nobody’s fault, least of all the readers’. As Jay Springett has written, your attention is sovereign, and nobody is obliged to read or enjoy or share anything. It’s the nature of the cultural system that we have, both collectively and under the material conditions of late capitalism, somehow produced. But, at the risk of sounding like a snob, a bore, a conservative: I don’t actually think it’s good. All those writers who talked about the importance of writing to a schedule didn’t talk about publishing to a schedule; creative work, art and literature, needs failure to work. Don’t ask me how, but it does.

In one way, being a writer is hard work. Not coalface hard work, not care worker hard work, of course. But when you’re trying to reach orbit, it takes a lot of words to pay the rent. Taking into account a new novel, film treatments and screenplays, book reviews, Bad Gays episodes, catalogue essays and more, last year I wrote over 190,000 published (or soon to be published, or hopefully soon to be published) words. That’s the equivalent wordcount of two PhDs, and in terms of compensation amounted to a little more than an entry level graduate salary for the year. So a strong writing routine isn’t just a matter of finally finishing the novel inside you; it’s also absolutely necessary to get by. On the other hand, being a writer offers incredible rewards; being the administrator of your own time and director of your own work is really a most thrilling double-edged sword to wield, and for every late night trying to meet a deadline, there’s an afternoon taken off work to sit alone in a cinema. But you must make it work, even with all the privileges I’m thankful to have.

So, whether as a good Marxist or a good businessman, the ultimate determiner must be economic. Substack as a paid model doesn’t work for me anymore, and I think the deal I made with you, the reader, seven years ago, I have reneged on once too often. There is no direct “this amount of money in exchange for this amount of essays” relationship I can offer, and my inability as a writer to reach that golden ratio that makes such essays and stories financially viable means I shouldn’t continue. I feel shame when another week passes and I’ve written for a magazine, but not for you. And I haven’t changed the subscription rate in line with inflation, meaning it pays less. The balance is all off.

As such, I’ve cancelled everyone’s subscriptions, and I’ve made all the essays and short stories that were subscriber-only open to everyone. In the coming weeks I’ll do a new post signposting some of what I felt were the better ones. If there are any that you particularly liked, please do share in the comments.

Don’t worry, if worried you were: I will still be writing here. In fact, with the anxiety and guilt of wanting to produce decent essays for paid subscribers lifted, I imagine there might be even more. I love writing here, and love the responses you get from an audience following you specifically. There’s also the fact that having you all in one place is an economic and cultural value all of its own. As the old joke goes, “it might not pay, but it’s great exposure. And nobody even died of exposure.” But I didn’t think it was fair to continue under the old agreement.

What other models are there? Well I am a paid subscriber to a number of different writers, film and audio makers etc, and ironically, it never really occurs to me to think of that relationship as a transactional cultural one. Plenty post inconsistently, and it’s fine by me, because I understand that the creative process is not one of content creation but much more complex. Even if a writer writes every day, there can be gaps between work; some stuff stinks, and publishing for the hell of it just to provide some content doesn’t help anyone.

And some work takes time. In fact, the term “micro-patronage” is really fitting; if a writer I support doesn’t give me anything for a year, then delivers a really stonking novel, that support was, to my mind, well worth it. What’s more, I know from my own experience just how important that support can be; taking the time needed to write my next novel simply wouldn’t have been possible without readers and listeners like you dropping $5 a month, and, over the past 7 years, I don’t think I’d have got to the position where I can make a living from writing—orbit, let’s say—without the financial bridge substack offered.

So although I’ve cancelled your paid subscription (if you had one) I’m going to leave the paid subscriber option open for people to become micro-patrons of my work if they so wish. Just resubscribe! If for some reason you haven’t had your paid subscription cancelled (the backend of Substack is unwieldy with these things, and although I was diligent in going through them, I pay have missed one of you), and you’d like to, please, feel free. If you have some other bone to pick, drop me an email.

So, please do pay for a subscription if you want to support my work. You won’t get anything extra (well, I’ll see your name, and I’ll regard you as a better class of cultural consumer, and perhaps a better, sexier, more empathetic human, but that’s it). I suspect many of you already conceived of your paid subscription as a patronage model, rather than a cash-for-content one. But I think it’ll be a fairer expression of the relationship between writer and reader that we have here, and fairer relations are surely what we should be looking for right now.