A Field Guide to Literary Substack

In which I roast everyone, including myself.

AGENT: You have to hook me with the first page. No, actually the first paragraph. No, first sentence. No, first word. You have to hook me with the first word of your 90k novel.

BOOK MARKETING/PUBLISHING GURU: You novelists think marketers aren’t doing anything for your book, but look there are so many things we’re doing behind the scenes and honestly we’re all overworked and underpaid and trust me we’re not prioritizing our bestselling authors over you or letting balls drop even though we’re overworked and underpaid, and I’m sorry but we don’t have time to update you constantly on what we’re doing for you, you’ll just have to believe that we’re doing stuff even if you’ve seen nothing in the press, not even our website, and perhaps you should take it upon yourself to advocate for your book and reach out to your marketing team even though you’ve never published a book before and have no idea what questions to ask and where to send your inquiries, but whatever you do, don’t be rude because we’ll know, and I’m not saying there’s a blacklist, but we talk to each other, us publishing people, and you don’t want to be known as the difficult author, so yeah advocate but don’t be rude. And listen I know it sucks your books sold poorly and I don’t know how to tell you this, so you’ll just have to read between the lines, but the reason is because your book is bad, and no amount of publicity and book cover feedback or promotions can blow the stink off your novel. Sorry. Go be on a podcast or something.

EAST COAST BOOK CRITIC: The Emperor of Gladness was trash and if you don’t agree you’re part of the woke machine and a coward and you don’t deserve to call yourself a critic.

ALSO EAST COAST BOOK CRITIC: No, you idiot, shitting on Gladness is too popular now. All the smart critics are jerking off to Voung’s work again.

LAID OFF BOOK CRITIC: The New York Times Book Review is producing criminally incompetent book reviews. How dare they use vague words like “luminous” to describe books? And why are they so scared to criticize a bad book? (They’re all beholden to the New York literati). I guess I’ll have to correct the record with my own scathing reviews here on Substack. But everyone’s book taste has gone to shit lately, why do I even bother? The Correspondent was the most overrated book of the decade. It’s all dime store psychology and fake celebrity cameos. Where is the verisimilitude people? If I’m not given every detail of your protagonist’s boring life I can’t be bothered to believe that this person wasn’t made up in your dumb brain. It’s been 50 years since anyone wrote a decent book. And you people are reading all the wrong classics. Anna Karenina wasn’t even Tolstoy’s best work!

LITERARY RAGE BAITER: Pride and Prejudice wasn’t a romance novel. Also, anyone who says they enjoyed reading Ulysses is lying.

POPULAR BOOK REVIEWER: I read ten books a week and thousands of people pay for my book reviews even though I only write about a paragraph for each book and you can’t actually tell if I liked the book or not. Read this paywalled article about how I organize my life so I can read more. (The trick is to not have children, dependents, or pets. That’s how you have time to read a lot).

LITERATURE’S GREATEST DEFENDER: I’m super defensive about anything that has even a whiff of threatening the existing literary establishment. No, MFAs are not ruining publishing. Lit mags are not run by New York literati types that like all the same things and have all the same taste and all live in Brooklyn. They’re not the problem; all those Romantasy readers on BookTok are the problem. All the self-published Romance writers are the problem. KindleUnlimited is the problem. BookTok is an existential threat. GoodReads is an existential threat. AI is an existential threat, but also AI is super overhyped and can’t write for shit and I know this for a fact even though I claim I never use AI for anything remotely related to writing. But if AI-written books ever do take off, only the dumb plebs who read popular books would read them anyway, so not a big loss for us true lit fic authors. Popular cultural media is trash, obviously. Marvel? Trash. Romance novels? Trash. The Normies have bad taste, what do you expect? This is our safe space for good books so if you don’t like it, you can go f*** off to wherever you came from. WaPo killing their book criticism section sucked, but whatever we can save literature guys, let’s just be punk rock about it. First order of business, make sure all the people who like normal books don’t come sniffing around demanding books that are easier to read, watering down our true art. It’s up to us: the real writers vs the pop culture zombies eating the literature we know and love.

SUBSTACK GROWTH INFLUENCERS, EARLY 2025 EDITION: (To the tune of “Shots” by LMFAO) Notes! Notes! Notes-Notes-Notes-Notes. Everybody!¹

SUBSTACK LITERARY MAGAZINE EDITOR: Every day I post a Note with the following formula: A sentence starting with “Me” and then “Also me,” for example: “Me: a serious novelist. Also me: spending a day deciding whether to use a comma or a semicolon,” and other such bookish memes along the lines of “books will save you,” “literature is my whole personality,” in a tart but inviting tone like, “I couldn’t write this morning because I was dreaming up responses for my future Paris Review interview.” Wanna-be fiction writers read my Notes and then find their way to my Substack lit mag which now has more subscribers than the New Yorker and a lower acceptance rate than Granta. Our most recent issue included a short story by Litstack heavyweight LITERATURE’s GREATEST DEFENDER who used to be a former lit mag editor himself. All this just by pretending to relate to writers via Notes and breadcrumb their desperate wish to be seen and encouraged for their shitty writing. It’s like shooting fish in a barrel, honestly. Get yourself a good lit-related meme generator and you’ll run your own highly selective lit mag on Substack in no time, promise.

GRIFTER AGENT: Here’s some basic info about the publishing industry that I’m putting behind a paywall and also here’s my insider knowledge about said industry even though I only started agenting a year ago, have no authors under contract and have never sold a book. It’s worth the subscription, you’ll see once you’ve prepaid for a year.

GOOD LIT FIC AGENT: I’m not on Substack. I don’t need you people.

COZY CONTENT INFLUENCER/GRIFTER: Here I am sitting on a chair in my study with my woolen scarf and a blanket and a cup of tea writing to all you lovely people. I adore this scarf (link to buy scarf). Physical books are so great for my sensitive nervous system. I like to keep things calm here on All Things. You’ll never find any advertisements on my publication, friends. Oh affiliate links? Yes, well...By the way did you see my latest article in Elle magazine about why I choose to mother cats instead of human babies? I included it in my weekly roundup of things I’m reading (yes I read my own articles sometimes). My roundup is one of the most popular features of All Things, even though I just put links to articles everyone else is reading. And I include links to things I love to buy. So you pay me twice for that one—first for the All Things subscription and then with the affiliate marketing kickbacks. I started this publication as a fun little hobby and look I’ve turned it into a 6-figure business. Traditional media is such a racket (but see above my Elle article), self-employment is the way to go. But I will say, it’s such hard work. In my twenties I worked too hard. I had a blog, and a podcast, and Instagram and I wrote for magazines and then I wrote a book about how I did it all. But wait, don’t follow the advice in my book because it encourages overwork. But I did accomplish so, so, very many things. So I guess overwork is ok, but only if you’re in your 20’s or you’ve done enough to show your friends how accomplished you are. Here I am at an Italian villa where I will be hosting a writing retreat (sign up before it’s too late). If you’d like to stay at the villa, use code COZY for a discount. At my last retreat I wrote My Year of Rest and Relaxation. But unlike Moshfegh’s book, the protagonist (me) doesn’t do a lot of drugs to numb the pain of her parents’ death, she really does just rest and relax for a year. I’m publishing it using an innovative new model where I pay for the marketing, editing, printing, and everything else but I get to keep all the royalties. It’s a hybrid model, not self-publishing. I don’t self-publish, I’m a trad pub author. You can buy all my books here and here.

AI SLOP TROLL: I disagree with you but can’t form any actual criticism so I’m just going to shut you down by claiming you wrote everything with AI. AI slop. AI slop. AI SLOPPPP!!!

PRECOCIOUS GEN Z THOUGHT LEADER: That conservative media reporter is very unserious. She tries but fails to capture Joan Didion’s voice. I know because I’ve read Didion’s entire oeuvre even though Didion’s popularity peaked about 20 years before I was born. I never read those dumb YA novels about teen detectives and toxic vampire boyfriends. How did I discover Didion as a teenager? I mean, didn’t you? Next you’re going to tell me you just discovered Susan Sontag. I didn’t even study literature or philosophy or journalism in college. I was a physics major. I don’t mean to crush you with my overwhelming genius or anything. Have you seen my apartment? It’s very messy. I’m very normal.

PRETEND AI HATER: AI is bad. Terrible. Very Bad. But also, I just uploaded my 600,000 word manuscript into Claude and he turned my turd of a novel into gold. So maybe AI is...good? No. It’s bad. AI is bad! But also, book publishers are using AI to read and assess your book for quality, so maybe you should run your manuscript by some AIs to make sure it’s good? But really, I think AI is bad. So, so bad. Please like and subscribe.

WEST COAST BOOK CRITIC: We don’t exist. Oh wait, I’m here, hi. I’m actually a tech worker with a highly successful Substack about tech culture (tech anthropology, if you will) but lit mags publish book criticisms that I work on after my day job and after writing my regular Substack content. You could probably do it too if you stopped scrolling on your phone so much.

WRITING CRAFT TEACHER: I know my newsletters are too long and kind of woo woo and full of terms I made up like “Aboutness” which I did define like 30 letters ago, so go look that up, but if you forget to unsubscribe and hang around long enough, eventually you’ll give in and join my cult of overly empathetic middle aged women writers.

PATRON SAINT OF WRITERS ON THE OUTSIDE OF IMPREGNABLE LITERARY INSTITUTIONS: I couldn’t figure out why it’s so damn hard to get anything published in the New Yorker so I spent 6,598 hours researching this topic and discovered that the magazine has (or had) really specific taste and if you can fit your writing style into that particular box it might even make you a better writer (like with John Cheever) but if your writing doesn’t fit their particular taste, you shouldn’t feel bad about it because some of the best fiction writers of the last century couldn’t get published there, and maybe for the better because the New Yorker style might have mangled their writing voice. I’m sharing all my research and conclusions here with you all for free because traditional media won’t publish my essay and you deserve to know this stuff, so we out here on Substack fam.

HYPOCRITICAL ATTENTION SEEKER: I make fun of popular Litstackers by reducing them to caricatures for laughs and attention while secretly being a devoted consumer of said Liststackers’ work and benefiting from their wisdom and knowledge.

1. I can’t parody Substack Growth influencers effectively anymore because last year I muted/blocked all but one of them (something I highly recommend doing) and they don’t show up in my Notes feed anymore, thank god.