Substack Needs to Romance Authors
Newly Updated with Additional Information about Ream
This was originally posted in December of 2023. Just seven months later and Ream seems to have entered a fight that may redefine or even end their platform dreams. If you’ve already read this article, you can scroll down to the bottom where I’ve included the updated material with all the details that I currently know about the situation.
Substack’s reputation problem
Substack has a growing problem. It is quickly developing the reputation that fiction authors can not succeed on this platform. I’ve seen this expressed by several of my author friends whom I have tried to convince to use Substack as a place where they should share their fiction. “Why would I go to Substack when everyone is already using Patreon?”
That’s a fair question and one that I hadn’t really worried about until this past week. After all, I’m talking about a handful of authors. How indicative of a greater trend can a few authors be?
Jane Friedman has a storied career. She has spent her adult life worked as an editor, a teacher, and an author. She is well known as having been the editor at Writer’s Digest for many years. She teaches several classes on writing for The Great Course, and has served on grant panels for The National Endowment for the Arts. In short, she knows what she’s talking about and more to the point I am making, people listen to her and value her insight.
Earlier this year she shared her thoughts about the fiction ecosystem on Substack. She said, “Substack has been mostly a dud for serializing and publishing fiction, despite its built in marketing and promotion features.” This was published in the May issue of her Hot Sheet newsletter. That was seven months ago. Have things changed in all that time? Have we seen Substack make moves to try to be make fiction more viable on its platform?
I believe it’s fair to evaluate how well fiction does on this platform. When compared to non-fiction, I think the honest appraisal that none of us actually want to admit is that “Fiction does abysmally on Substack.”
But, why? And, can it change?
Substack’s culture is a reflection of its founders
Substack was founded by two engineers and a reporter. If you spend any time considering Substack’s actions and directions, you can see how the world views of its founders have influenced and guided every decision. Almost all of the strategic moves that Substack has made have been created with the intention of creating a welcome environment for reporters. The early Substack Pro grants, many the people who were approached on Twitter, and their initiatives to save local reporting and other moves that the company has made have made it clear that reporters and non-fiction authors were welcome here. More than that they were actively courted. Some of them were even paid to switch to this platform.
None of this is bad. In fact, much of it is brilliant. It’s a great strategy and it really did cement Substack as a thought leader in a lot of areas. They quickly went from being some startup to the company that everyone was talking about and that early success is a direct result of those early moves they made to appeal to the non-fiction world.
The other approach that we see guiding Substack’s actions is that of the engineer. Much of their focus has been on creating new features with the goal of offering an alternative platform for content creators in all forms of media. Podcasting has experienced a renaissance in growth and there are several reports that show that it’s a fast growing and profitable industry. How did Substack respond? They incorporated audio features and the ability to create paywalled podcasts. Recently, they have rolled out improved video features in what one would assume is a play at winning over disillusioned YouTube creators or TikTok stars.
These too are great strategies. Not only does it make Substack more appealing to an increasingly diverse set of creators, but it also improves the ecosystem for everyone using this platform. We are seeing the development of an increasingly robust platform. Personally, I believe this is an assault against Patreon and an attempt to woo its creators here. Again, this is a great strategy and I hope it works.
My concern is not their past initiatives nor is it the addition of these new features. It is in the underdeveloped nature of the existing features that I believe are core to the experience of every user, but for the purposes of this article, I will focus on the fiction author specifically.
Nowhere is the emphasis on non-fiction articles and journalism seen more clearly than in the list of possible interests from which readers are expected to choose. There are only two dedicated categories for prose fiction. If you wanted to push you could include comics as a fiction category, but if you read many of the posts that are classified as comics you’ll discover that they are actually non-fiction pieces about the comics field or journal entries from creators working in the comics industry.
This is a large part of why fiction has floundered on Substack. They have not created a welcoming environment for readers. Readers don’t want to sift through every written piece that describes itself as fiction in an effort to find their chosen genre. They want to be able to go to a platform and say, “Show me all of your science fiction or romance or fantasy… or whatever type of story interests them.
Substack clearly understands the need for some degree of granular sorting because we see it evidenced in the many specific categories that have been created for non-fiction. Crypto fans aren’t forced to sort through posts about Fashion & Beauty. The same is not true for the would-be fiction reader on Substack.
The Amazon Opportunity
To me, it seems that Substack is looking for creators who are seeking something better than their native platforms. You can see this in their continual development and refinement of tools devoted to audio and video. These tools are a way to distinguish Substack and leverage its more creator-friendly business model.
It’s a good strategy, but I would like to point out a neglected group: the Amazon author.
There is growing discontent among authors who use Amazon. Year after year they have seen the Kindle Unlimited payouts continue to decline. Many authors have had their read through rates adjusted and cut because… well, sometimes they aren’t even told why. Amazon is capricious like that. Other authors have been accused of cheating the system in some way. Still others have even lost their entire ability to post their work on the platform. Romance authors regularly live in fear of being censored or having their books banned. And recently, Amazon has pivoted to becoming an ads first platform. Their search function is almost entirely unusable because they want to create dependency on ads. Organic discovery has all but disappeared on the platform when compared to just a few years ago. The product has been made worse so Amazon could make more money.
Authors see this and are actively looking for alternatives. Last year, a little over 1000 authors made 20 million dollars from subscriptions.1 That represents a 20% increase from the year before. This means that authors are actively seeking out and sometimes building their own subscription-based websites so they can sell directly to their customers instead of involving an untrustworthy intermediary like Amazon.
Why couldn’t Substack be a viable alternative? The truth is that it could be if it would address core features and improve the existing ecosystem in ways that benefit fiction authors.
Categories: Expand the number of categories so there is representation for at least the major genres of fantasy, science fiction, romance, and mystery. If I have missed a major category add that one as well, but at the very least start with these. In an ideal world, readers would be able to drill down to particular flavors of that major category. Not only do I want to read science fiction, but I’d like to read space opera or cyberpunk or whatever.
Hashtags: Give users the tools they need to follow topics, i.e. some type of hashtag. Movements like Macabre Monday, Tech Tuesday, or Sci-Friday are severely hampered in their ability to grow because of the lack of hashtags and having to manually tag every individual participant.
Search: This matters because these types of movements are how stories go viral. Reader and subscriber numbers go up when everyone starts talking about the same story.
Conversation Flow: While I love the fact that Substack continues to innovate, I do wish that they’d stop focusing on new features and take a moment to fix the existing toolsets. It’s difficult to have a long conversation on Notes. Notifications are wonky. It’s so easy to miss replies and useful viewpoints in a discussion unless someone has replied directly to you or tagged you specifically.
These aren’t just problems for fiction authors. Each and every one of these issues will be a pain point for every podcaster, very video creator, and for anyone else who joins this platform.
Romance authors lead the way
Romance authors are the front line soldiers of the fiction world. They are the Marines storming the beaches, capturing new territory, and making it safe for all who follow after. They are almost always the first ones to explore new features, the first ones to seize new opportunities, and many times they discover innovative and unexpected ways to use existing features to benefit themselves and their readers.
Romance authors are some of the most savvy business people on the planet. They have to be because romance is such a competitive field. There is a lot of money to be made in those happily ever afters.
The romance field is so competitve because romance readers are voracious. They are always looking for the next story and are more willing to try out new authors than readers from any other genre. Additionally, they are willing to follow their favorite authors into unknown territory. Historically, romance authors have been early adopters for Kindle Singles, Kindle Shorts, Kindle Serials, and routinely dominates the best seller lists.
This isn’t true of every genre. Think about that last paragraph. What I have said is that romance readers are willing to accept stand alone stories that are not part of a series, they’ll read short stories, they’ll read serialized stories spread out over a number of weeks, and they read full length novels in such numbers that romance as a genre represents a majority of the titles listed on best seller lists when all of fiction is lumped together.
Fantasy readers tend to reject stand alone stories. They want the series books. LitRPG readers will not read short stories in meaningful numbers. You could go down the list and examine the quirks of every genre, but they all tend to have some media format that they are not willing to try out. Romance readers aren’t like that. They are adventurous and willing to try new things.
Any would-be fiction platform would do very well to court romance authors who will in turn bring their readers to that platform? Would you like an example of a small company who has found success by doing just that?
May I introduce you to Ream?
Ream has fewer than ten employees. They have been out of beta for around a year, but during that time they have seen several individual FICTION authors grow to making just under a million dollars on that platform.
Why are they succeeding? It’s because one of the founders is a romance authors. She, Emilia Rose, primarily serves as an advisor ensuring that the product caters to fiction authors and delivers the features they want and value most.
She teamed up with Michael Evans, a science fiction author, and Sean Patonode, their lone developer, to build a subscription platform for authors. All told, the company has fewer than ten employees and yet the thing that has distinguished them is their focus on fiction authors.
That focus has allowed them to custom tailor the product around the needs of authors. Their entire focus was on ‘What don’t we like about Amazon? How could Patreon’s model be better? What do authors want? What do readers want?’
The user experience
Using Ream is similar to using early Substack. They don’t have all of the features and niceties that a more established platform offers, but what they do have is the ability to deliver features that matter for authors and one of the biggest features they deliver on is an active reader base who is not only hungry for more fiction, but willing to pay for it.
And yet, Ream isn’t a romance only platform. Authors from every genre are welcome there. I have found science fiction, fantasy, and even webcomics hosted on the platform. I do think that romance does much better there than any of these other genres, but that’s always the case. More to the point though, they have created an ecosystem that appeals to fiction readers. Now, it’s just a matter of growing their base and appealing more broadly to other genres.
They are releasing a robust list of genre tags and categories within the next two weeks. This will allow readers to more easily identify authors and stories they would like to follow and help bolster discover. There are additional plans to further aid author discovery in the works as well.
Each author profile also offers a space where authors can create posts for their followers. It’s very similar to the subscriber only message board known as Substack Chat.
Beyond that, authors are free to setup a tiered subscription program with the ability to offer an increasing number of perks and benefits to subscribers at each subscription level. It very much resembles Patreon in that way.
They don’t currently seem to offer an annual subscription which is different than Substack. That interests me and I’m not sure which approach is the right answer. I know that, speaking as a subscriber and a reader, I personally prefer to just pay a lump sum up front and not worry about it for a year, but younger readers may prefer the monthly option. It’s also possible that fiction consumers prefer to pay by the month because it allows them to sample an author’s offerings without committing.
Subscriptions tend to average around five dollars a month, but it’s possible to set the lowest tier to three dollars a month. I have seen some authors who offer tiers that charge 100 dollars every month. Additionally, some perks require membership at a certain level for 3 or 4 months before you qualify for the offered reward. Can you imagine someone paying 100 dollars a month so they could read your stories? And yet, there are people doing this… on a different platform where the culture is different.
Is it time to abandon ship?
It’s fair to point out that Substack does have to prioritize where they put their engineering hours. Staying in business sometimes requires evaluating where to best place your developmental dollars. They see an opportunity in video which causes them to improve the video player and quite honestly do some revolutionary things around the idea of being able to have additional control over how and when to implement paywalls in video. This may lead to growth. It may lead to an entirely new cohort of creators joining Substack and finding paid subscribers from segments who would have never before considered using this platform. That’s possible.
Recently, John Gruber and Nilay Patel were in discussion about the media landscape for writers and Nilay pointed out how that if both of them were in their twenties right now that neither of them would have become bloggers. They would have ended up on TikTok or YouTube because there aren’t really incentives to do blogging when compared to all of the possible rewards for doing video well.
That’s why it makes sense for Substack to pursue these ‘hot’ areas that are growing rapidly. They’re profitable and have a lot of potential upside for the company, but it also makes sense for fiction authors to consider whether their careers are being best served by the features that Substack offers to them.
Fiction on Substack hasn’t improved in the seven months since Jane Friedman spoke about it on her newsletter. Will we be saying the same thing a year from now? Exactly how long should fiction authors have to wait before their concerns are given priority by the engineers?
Am I encouraging people to leave Substack? No. Honestly, I’m not. I believe in Substack. I just want them to evaluate which features are being given primacy. I would like to see basic, core features given a little love.
And while I do not think that anyone should leave Substack, I do think it’s worth remembering that Substack does not have an exclusivity clause. Each of us are free to consider other platforms. Each of us are free to repurpose old content somewhere else and see how well it does there. It may be that you find a more receptive and eager audience for your stories on a platform full of readers who are actively looking for new stories to read.
It’s worth thinking about.
An Update about Ream
Ream has kind of imploded. Maybe? It’s too early to tell. Around July 11, 2024, the CEO of Ream was abruptly fired. They are presenting it as if he stepped down, but I believe that’s an approach at charitable phrasing. The rumors I have seen feature statements from him about how he hasn’t been paid for years and was basically working for free. The founders and owners of Ream have accused him of financial improprieties. He is now suing Ream. I don’t know where this is going, but it would give me pause if I were considering using the platform. It’s possible that they may weather this storm and be stronger for it, but everything is up in the air at the moment.
Here is a link to Ream’s official statement on the matter.
As of this moment, I haven’t seen a statement from Michael Evans, the former CEO, who was very helpful with this article and provided all of the information that I’ve listed above. If and when he posts one, I’ll update this. If you are in the Ream Facebook group and assuming the moderators have not deleted it, there is a statement from his mother as a comment Emilia Rose’s post from July 11th. I would share it here, but that’s a private group.
Fallout from Ream’s Difficulties
This is probably the most visible fallout that happened as a result of the changes at Ream. Several authors are now working on developing their own Subscription platforms. A Facebook group has been created and they are exploring options. Why they won’t join Substack is beyond me, but that’s a different issue.
Here is their announcement about forming the group.
Here’s a link to the Subscriptions for Storytellers Facebook group in case you’re interested in checking it out.
Downsides to these Non-Substack Approaches
The biggest downside that you will face on any of these alternate platforms is that none of them have an organic social component. Notes is just over a year old and it does appear to be gaining more mainstream adoption. Posts that go viral on Notes are starting to see engagement that numbers in the thousands of reactions verses the tens. Moving your fiction entirely off of Substack would deprive you of a very strong and useful promotional tool. That being said, as I stated in my initial conclusion above: Substack does not have an exclusivity clause. If you can diversify and become even moderately successful on multiple platforms, it’s only going to help your career. Personally, I would still try to send everyone back to Substack so you can get their email address and form a more direct relationship with your reader, but different individuals have different priorities and strategies.
Alternate Online Fiction Platforms
As of 2019, Wattpad had 80 million readers using their app. Wattpad is the largest web-based fiction portal. The majority of their readers are under 25 years old.
Radish is for romance/steamy romance
Royal Road is primarily home to stories devoted to the LitRPG and Portal Fantasy genres
Tapas- webcomics, fantasy, and romance
Six-figure Subscription Author Accelerator
Source: Subscription for Authors Industry Report https://subscriptionsforauthors.com/2023-subscriptions-for-authors-industry-report/
Adding my comment and expanding it as per your request lol.
As I said in an earlier note, Substack's UI is not set up to favour fiction writers, so they will have a harder time sharing their work or for them to be found.
Here are my recommendations from a content design and UI standpoint:
- Enable chapter and series posts
- Under categories, fiction should be subcategorised to genres
- Have an ongoing and completed option as well as readers look for that
- Enable an authors page, like what Amazon has for authors, where their works/novels are listed. Each work should have its own page with chapters listed. This enables casual browsers to take a chance on the story as it's well organized. Currently they have to dive into the archives and it's not efficient.
- Have a just updated timeline rather than an algorithmic one to ensure everyone, small, big, famous can have a fair chance of being seen.
Personally I find Wattpad’s UI to be great for fiction. So you can have a look there to get what I mean by "good UI for fiction".
That said, Substack was built with the email newsletter in mind. We may not be able to implement any of my suggestions.
Also, from a tech company's standpoint all this takes huge resources to implement, something they may not want to do. It takes a lot of work to even add ONE feature let alone a slew of them. So, they may not think it's a priority right now. However, one can dream.
So what can authors do in the meantime? Wait for Substack to take action?
No, I urge you to be mercenary, selfish and platform agnostic. I do like some asepcts of Substack, for one I appreciate that they enable me to have an email list without burning my bank account. So, stay on Substack if you like, but don't forget other platforms.
It is more work, for sure, to be at more than one place at a same time. But be mercenary about discoverability - don't think Substack only.
Unfortunately, a platform will always have its "preferred genre". It is usually hard to change. Therefore, go where your readers dwell and be there.
PS: I have a background in content design, journalism and tech writing. So I'm very nerdy in that aspect.
I really appreciate this piece, John. You did a fantastic job and I'm really excited you found Ream. We actually only launched out of Beta in May, so about 7 months ago. We went into Beta in Mid-January last year. We are a small bootstrapped team, but that allows us to focus on our fiction authors. A lot of other players in the space have raised lots and lots of money from VCs and have very high expectations and thus have to chase bigger and bigger markets to just keep the lights on for their next fundraising round. Thus, it is not a surprise that fiction is overlooked. We wanted to change that. And by fiction authors for fiction authors, means that. The authors you see on the home page all joined Ream before we launched to the public and many of which were Emilia's friends. We've grown beyond that to nearly 4,000 authors on the platform now. And we are excited to highlight the depth and diversity of the authors in our community with discovery coming very soon. Excited for what's to come. Storytellers Rule the World!