Comment About Substack Pro

Feel free to comment on my comment

One of Substack's co-founders, Hamish McKenzie, published a blog post this past weekend entitled “Why we pay writers.”¹ Yesterday I posted a comment, which I'm reprinting here. I'd welcome any of your comments about my comment.

A Pro program with perks for a few prominent writers might be good business in some ways. Attract writers with followings; attract more readers and writers.

But I think it was inevitable that a Pro program – in particular one that's limited and secretive – was going to cause problems. Other writers with substantial followings would wonder why they weren't deemed Pro or getting special perks. Writers without large followings would want to get into the program or get perks. There would be suspicions about who was in the program and why; did Pro reflect the Substack's biases and/or replicate society's inequalities? Jealousy and thoughts of unfairness would abound. And all this while most people are presumably making little or nothing (yet?) from paid subscriptions.

Now that you've rung the Pro bell, I don't believe you can unring it. You could stop adding people to the program. But many people will probably assume that you are still running the program or could if you wanted to – or are favoring some writers anyway.

So what to do? My thought is that you should give a perk to many if not all Substack writers. (I suppose you'd have to limit it to people with some regular readership. A newsletter with no posts or that no one reads wouldn't suffice.) I'm not sure what the perk would be: maybe crediting each writer with a monthly $5 subscription paid by Substack itself? That would send the message Substack is so confident that each newsletter with a regular readership can succeed that it will put money where its mouth is.

Substack shouldn't be about Haves and Have-Nots. It should be about all the writers, as long as they've got audiences and stay within Substack's content guidelines.

1. All the co-founders subsequently published a post on related issues entitled “Substack is for independent writers.”