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I'm Publishing My Next Book on Substack

tedgioia.substack.com

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Re: I'm Publishing My Next Book on Substack

#31

Post by NoboruWataya »

gregdoesit wrote: post #17

(Disclaimer: I both self-published books and also write a paid newsletter on Substack) The author of this article makes the point that Substack pays ~90% in revenue, versus traditional publishers which do ~10%. While this is true, I do think the author seems to deliberately avoid mentioning the self-publishing platforms like Gumroad, Podia etc which allow authors to keep 95-96.5% of revenue when publishing books, and…

> A real (financial) pull of publishing a book via a monthly, paid newsletter is the higher revenue per customer. A customer won’t pay more than, say, $40 for a book. But they’ll more likely pay ~$120 by paying $10/month for a year. See also how Steven Sinofsky is publishing his book series Hardcore Software on Substack with the option to pay up to $300/year to get a final, printable PDF edition of the series once finished. I paid $100 to read this series for a year and one of my friends went for the $300 option.

Wow, this sounds awful (for the customer). Is that where publishing is going? $120+ for a book?

Re: I'm Publishing My Next Book on Substack

#32

Post by auggierose »

I don't find it very strange that his substack follower count grows more quickly than his twitter follower count as the twitter count will have direct influence on his substack growth. I am sure he is also aware of that, that's why he grew his twitter account in the first place.

Re: I'm Publishing My Next Book on Substack

#33

Post by math-dev »

baby wrote: post #25
math-dev wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s a YC company. I don’t see much special for it, let’s see how long it lasts. At least Medium did some very unique things with their text editor (I challenge anyone to find a more enjoyable _writing_ experience than Medium in the world of online editors, barring Google Docs)

What? Medium is horrible to write. We basically migrated from it because it’s like word. Who likes to write using word besides non-techies? And even then, I’d chose wordpress over medium any day because of how restrictive and gated medium is. Their rss feeds are also so hidden it’s annoying.

You may not agree, but from a technical / UX perspective it is impressive - the rest of their UI platform sucks but I think their editor is top notch

https://medium.engineering/why-contenteditable-is-terrible-1...

Re: I'm Publishing My Next Book on Substack

#34

Post by ekianjo »

threatofrain wrote: post #16

I'm surprised that substack shows up so often on HN. It doesn't support syntax highlighting, tables, Latex, and has no widgets for data or interactive visualizations. Perfect for lots of audiences who want long-form writing, but HN?

YC company. Thats all you need to know.

Re: I'm Publishing My Next Book on Substack

#35

Post by paulgb »

DawnQFunk2 wrote: post #23

This is an unlabeled advertisement for substack. Please stop the endless substack spamming. They just lie about the earnings they all have relationships with substack, stop fucking commuting fraud by allowing all these fake “I’m just a random influencer and I love substack” posts, it’s illegal to not disclose that they are paid to say this.

How do you know it’s a paid ad by Substack? I’m perfectly willing to believe that, but the simpler explanation seems to be that it’s an ad for the author’s book.

Re: I'm Publishing My Next Book on Substack

#37

Post by math-dev »

paulgb wrote: post #35
DawnQFunk2 wrote: post #23

This is an unlabeled advertisement for substack. Please stop the endless substack spamming. They just lie about the earnings they all have relationships with substack, stop fucking commuting fraud by allowing all these fake “I’m just a random influencer and I love substack” posts, it’s illegal to not disclose that they are paid to say this.

How do you know it’s a paid ad by Substack? I’m perfectly willing to believe that, but the simpler explanation seems to be that it’s an ad for the author’s book.

After your comment, I went and read the article too. Scroll down to the below part onwards

> 10 REASONS TO PUBLISH A BOOK ON SUBSTACK

> (1) Substack is an accelerating platform:

> A few days ago, I had a chance to sit down with Substack’s founders while they were visiting Austin. I told them that I was initially skeptical about the platform, but a moment arrived when I finally grasped the way Substack empowered me.

I honestly doubt someone who just met the founders of a company face to face would then write an article purely void of any need to promote the platform, plus when you look at the text following what I quoted, I doubt that would be written without checking with the company first.

My 2cents, I could be wrong.

Re: I'm Publishing My Next Book on Substack

#38

Post by systemvoltage »

baby wrote: post #26
systemvoltage wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no one on Gumroad that wants to read books. Substack is more than a e-commerce stripe checkout flow. Author can keep 100% of their earnings (except CC processing fees) if they use a static webpage and a Paypal button; this is missing the point entirely.

You’re saying gumroad doesn’t have the “discoverability” or “reachability”? I’m interested because I wanted to publish my next book through that platform.

That's not what I am saying. Specifically for books. There might be users logged in to look for other things regularly, but Gumroad would not be a place to find readers.

Re: I'm Publishing My Next Book on Substack

#39

Post by saltymimir »

It might just be me, but I'm not sure what substack has over other platforms that offer better commission rates or even flat fees. They have some social graph / discovery features, but it feels very half-baked at this point. Most of the people who're tremendously successful on substack, Ted included, seem to already have an audience outside of the platform itself anyway.

In fact, some of the controls that I have to cede to them just to get my posts pay-walled were just unacceptable to me. Just the other day I realized that it's very easy to bypass the paywall to any substack websites. You just simply have to:

1. Change the useragent to 'googlebot'

2. Clear your cookies, if you'd visited the before.

3. Profit(?)

I get that they probably did it for some SEO optimization purposes, but I'd like to have to liberty to opt out of this behavior for my newsletter, hosted under my own domain no less.

Re: I'm Publishing My Next Book on Substack

#40

Post by DawnQFunk2 »

math-dev wrote: post #37
paulgb wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you know it’s a paid ad by Substack? I’m perfectly willing to believe that, but the simpler explanation seems to be that it’s an ad for the author’s book.

After your comment, I went and read the article too. Scroll down to the below part onwards > 10 REASONS TO PUBLISH A BOOK ON SUBSTACK > (1) Substack is an accelerating platform: > A few days ago, I had a chance to sit down with Substack’s founders while they were visiting Austin. I told them that I was initially skeptical about the platform, but a moment arrived when I finally grasped the way Substack empowered me. I…

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