Alan Jacobs is right to defend the open web (despite the likely poverty that attends it), but I don’t think being on Substack is antithetical to the open web.

For instance, my Substack is entirely free, and since Substack can still be read on a browser and not exclusively through an app, it is free and searchable to anyone with an internet connection. I don’t paywall anything except the links to my ebooks for patrons who are paying subscribers. But my writing, as such, is totally free and open to all. Being on Substack is just an easy way for me to manage a newsletter—mostly because it’s free. When my previous newsletter service raised prices and then went defunct, I figured I needed to switch things up. Substack was still relatively new, so I made the switch.

My intention was never to monetize the newsletter. I see it as a way to write essays while keeping in touch with people who read my books. I still maintain a wordpress blog (this one) where I post more often than on Substack (intentionally, by the way; I want my own real estate to be where the action is), and I keep my Substack free. If folks want to subscribe with money, they do so knowing it is a patron-model, and their payment is really because they like my work and want to support it; they get free access to any new ebooks I publish, but as that’s (at the moment) rather infrequent, they aren’t getting much for their money other than my eternal gratitude. I do not use Notes or try to gain followers on Substack in any way. I simply write my missives, send them out, and read and reply to those writers whose work is of interest to me. I barely even look at the Notes feature because it does indeed feel too much like social media/Twitter/Instagram/blah. I’ve never once done a chat or whatever they offer as add-ons. Not interested. I write a newsletter. It gets delivered to peoples’ emails. It’s readable on the web via html. Here is an example: https://jmbaldwinwriter.substack.com/p/in-which-i-weigh-in-on-adventure

If at any time I find Substack to be not-so-easy, or not-so-free, then I’ll switch it up again and move to a different newsletter provider. I don’t intend for Substack to be my income source. It’s a nice-to-have, but I don’t base my career around it. And that’s partly because I don’t think paying for substacks is a sustainable model for nonfiction writing (or fiction writing either). Maybe if several writers got together and turned their individual substacks into a magazine, then paying for subscriptions makes sense. But I simply cannot afford to pay for all the different substacks I enjoy reading. I’m nearly always a free subscriber, even to those whose work I value. I do pay for Kleon’s newsletter, but he is the only one, and that is truly my limit. It’s ludicrous to pay for multiple writers on Substack (for $5 a month!). Even if I only subscribed to four people, that’s $20 per month! More than the cover price of a monthly magazine! I can get a yearly subscription to Commonweal or similar for $25, and I’ll get an actual physical magazine to go with my subscription. The Substack paying model is ridiculously overpriced, and utterly unsustainable in the long run.

So I don’t plan my writing career around something so unsustainable. If people want to pay for my writing online, they can patronize me through Buy Me a Coffee or Substack, but they don’t have to. I believe in the open web. Substack is merely a website (like wordpress) that lets me host my writing, but I’m not wedded to it, and I can easily take my wares to another piece of real estate if I wanted to.

This isn’t me shilling for Substack; I just want to respond to Jacobs’s point because his characterization makes it sound like it’s not freely available to anyone with a browser. It is. If writers want to make their writing paywalled, that’s their affair, but Substack doesn’t mandate that we do. If they ever do mandate it, I’ll leave the site in a hot minute. If there’s something you want to read on Substack and it’s not freely available on the web, that’s because the writer–not Substack–has put it behind a paywall.

Like Jacobs, though, I don’t rely on my writing to put food on the table. I work as a teacher; that is my main source of income. And I don’t plan on hustling my way to a “side gig” any time soon. Teaching is enough of a gig to keep me busy, I don’t need to hustle on top of it!

Writing is my way of engaging and processing the world, of living my life. Language and story are how I think and how I communicate. They are my modes of play. I could no more stop writing as stop breathing. I hope folks enjoy my writing enough to pay for it, but I don’t expect it nor do I need it to be monetized. Frankly, I’m sick of the ways in which our economic system forces creative people, journalists and artists alike, to be hustling all the time, busking all the time, and submitting to tech overlords’ demands and systems. I know artists have always had to scrounge for money and struggle, but that doesn’t mean it’s right. We could—we should—have a system in which people can make art and at the same time not feel economically precarious for most of their lives. We should have a system in which people can live while working less than forty hours per week so they have time and energy to make their art, to volunteer at church, to take up worthwhile hobbies. Especially in two-income households. The fact that both spouses need to work full-time just to eek out a living is the real problem here.

But I’m a bit of an anarchist too, so I don’t see why anyone’s life should be precarious when we could all support one another in mutual aid…