Hoping to Get a Book Deal for Your Memoir on Substack? Read This.

How the Substack-to-traditional-publishing pipeline is changing

It used to be that if you wanted to serialize on Substack and go the traditional publishing route, you had total freedom.

Most traditional book publishers (book, not magazines, journals, or newspapers) didn’t consider Substack previously published because it was (technically) a newsletter, not a publication.¹

Well, things have changed. A client of mine just got a book deal from from a Big Five publisher and was told to have no more than 10 percent crossover between the book and her Substack. (“Big Five” = Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, and Hachette Book Group.)

How much can you safely publish on your Substack without publishers feeling it’s too much?

There’s no one answer.

If you ask ten different editors how much of your book manuscript or potential book can be previously published on Substack, you’ll get ten different answers.

So I asked a few experts:

• Publisher, coach, teacher, and author

  Brooke Warner
  of Writerly Things with Brooke Warner

• Author and publishing expert

  Courtney Maum
  of Before and After the Book Deal

• Publishing PR and marketing veteran

  Kathleen Schmidt
  of Publishing Confidential

Here’s what they had to say about the how-much-of-my-memoir-can-be-published-on-Substack conundrum:

“Publishers are always going to be excited about a platform that has built-in audience-building capacity. Substack allows publishers to measure good writing, a writer's following, and their engagement. If there was any early resistance to Substack from publishers, I didn't notice it. Publishing is always looking for that next best or better thing that offers proof of potential readership—and Substack is delivering, big time.

Not more than 10 percent previously published on Substack makes sense for essays, but in my experience most people who get book deals from a platform like Substack (previously blogging) end up doing a ton of work to turn this kind of writing into a book. Unless it's a compilation. Or in the case of writers serializing their stories.

Publishers don't usually just republish posts, so for a lot of people who are doing Substack and get a publishing deal, the posts will serve as inspiration, or something to build on. Back in the day when I was acquiring a lot of authors based on their popular blogs, we would give someone a book deal because they were a great writer and had a following, but the work to create a book from the blog was still something—to shape it into a book project. I see this being a direct equivalent.”

—Brooke Warner, Writerly Things with Brooke Warner

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“It reminds me of when blogs were ‘the thing’ in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and publishers felt like authors were giving away too much for free. They—publishers—feared readers of authors’ blogs wouldn't pay for an entire book.

Publishers will start treating Substack in the same way, which is good and bad. Authors can’t give away all their material in newsletters because it is then much tougher to get readers to pay upwards of $24.95 for a book. At the same time, publishers want authors to keep developing their audience on Substack, which requires a consistent flow of content. This is not that different from when publishers acquire books based on a TikTok or Instagram account. In those instances, publishers also fear that too much content is given away for free, and in some cases, it hurt book sales.

Publishers must work with writers to determine the right percentage of crossover. 10 percent seems too little; 40 percent is too much. I’d say 20-25 percent is a good compromise because it is good marketing for the author, but leaves a good amount of new material for their book.”

—Kathleen Schmidt, Publishing Confidential

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“I think that savvy editors are combing Substack posts and even Notes looking—the way they do through The Cut essays or Modern Love—for ideas and hot takes that can be developed into longer pieces or projects.

Just last week I was contacted by a major editor who wanted to game out how a Substack post of mine could be adapted into a longer feature for her outlet, and far from caring that the angle was ‘already published’ on my Substack, she appreciated that it had been because she saw the warm response and was excited to discuss how we could transform the essay into something that could receive attention on a national scale. While the person who contacted me edits an international newspaper—I know that Big Five book editors (and agents) are also turning their attention to Substack.

I think a lot of career-changing discussions will continue to take place between Substack writers and editors who come to the platform sniffing for fresh work, and I find that exciting for myself and for my peers.”

—Courtney Maum, author and publishing expert who pens Before and After the Book Deal

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Why you may still want to publish (a bit of) your memoir

Publishing a bit of your memoir on Substack—or with your Substack readers in mind—can do two transformational things. It will

1. help you avoid solipsism (which is the death of many a memoir) and

2. allow you to cultivate your voice (which has made many a mediocre memoir a bestseller).

1. Avoid the memoirist’s predisposition to solipsism

The easiest way to write a memoir people want to read is not to write about yourself for yourself. You’re just the vehicle for the reader to have the universal experience you’re writing about. The events in your story may be unique, but the mental and emotional dimensions should be human.

Most memoirs fail not because of how they’re written but because of how the writer went about writing them, i.e., in a room, at a desk, alone. Writing a book about yourself in a room with only yourself with one reader in mind (yourself) is a recipe for a deathly dull memoir.

Serializing on Substack forces you to keep a collective of subscribers in mind. It will keep your readers and your readers’ experience of the material in your mind instead of just you, yourself, and your story.

2. Voice, voice, voice

Voice in most memoirs is preachy, pretentious, or precious. The writer often thinks they’re being poetic and creative, but it comes off as stilted and self-conscious, a voice readers don’t trust.

When publication is far off in the distance and one’s readers even farther away, it’s easy to slip into memoir-speak. On Substack, you’re writing to others.

Marya Hornbacher

and I taught an amazing voice workshop in which we looked at why voice is perhaps the most overlooked and most important creative nonfiction/nonfiction craft technique.

On Substack, voice is everything. Scroll through the top Substacks in nearly every category and you’ll find one thing in common: voice. Not great writing (no one’s winning the Nobel Prize for Literature on here, folks); voice.

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The Case for Serializing on Substack

I hadn’t expected to serialize my second memoir Cured on Substack in 2022. It’s the sequel to my debut Pathological: The True Story of Six Misdiagnoses and recounts my full recovery from twenty-five years of serious mental illness.

My amazing agent and my editor at HarperCollins encouraged me to serialize it on Substack, which I did. The idea was that we’d serialize it, show proof of concept and reader interest, and then sell it.

Doing so turned out better than I could have imagined:

• It gave me a real platform, i.e., a space on the internet I call my own, filled with subscribers and followers who read and comment on my work, and a place where people can find me and ask me for interviews and other media appearances.

• I grew my email list from 400 to over 4000 in one year (!).

• I got off all social media platforms. (It’s the best!)

• It helped and continues to help sell Pathological, which is truly the little memoir that could.

• Most importantly, it exploded how I think about memoir and what a memoir can do and be when it’s not a book.

I ended up creating a multi-media exploration into mental health recovery, tapping into Substak’s audio and video—bringing in other people’s stories of mental health recovery, my public appearances speaking about recovery, and interviews with some of the most powerful mental health professionals in the U.S. to get their views. Plus, I was able to recommend mental health resources to readers.

I recorded the audio version and distributed it on Spotify, where it now lives as an audiobook.

I didn’t paywall the initial run because it was more important to me to get Cured to as many people as possible. Cured is a memoir and a work of rigorous investigative journalism. With the same detail and research that characterized Pathological, I examine the history of the mental health recovery movement and explore why the possibility of full recovery is rarely discussed in mainstream mental health conversations and how this silence impacts those struggling with diagnosis.

I believed—and still believe—it’s essential reading for anyone touched by mental illness, mental health professionals, and those seeking a deeper understanding of one of the most pressing issues of our time.

Now I ask for a $30 honor-system donation via Stripe. That’s about the price of a hardcover book, and I’m a professional writer and should be paid for what I do professionally.

I earned about $5000 from it, did very little to promote it (I’m unbelievably busy helping all of you build your Substacks :), and the money still trickles in as part of my paid offering on my author stack, Beyond Pathological.

It did not, however, lead to a book deal.

I’m not terribly interested in publishing it traditionally as a single volume anymore. It feels like Substack is where Cured is supposed to be.

Which is good because traditional publishing is always changing its mind about things and by publishing all of Cured, I may have rendered it ineligible in the eyes of the Big Five.

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Why memoirs—and parts of memoirs—serialize well on Substack

Memoirs are well suited to the platform if you publish chapters or parts of chapters as standalone posts. Don’t even tell people it’s part of a book. Why? Because Substack is a one-off culture. Our readers are busy. They don’t hang on our every post. They’ll miss some posts and catch others.

A memoir installment or excerpt looks an awful lot like a personal-essay-esque post that may or may not need a synopsis or any mention of the fact that it’s part of a larger work. With Cured, I was amazed by how little exposition is needed in each post. Charles Dickens called this “the weekly view,” i.e., treating each installment as if it’s the only one the reader will get.

(Note: He did this with novels, which is even more challenging.)

Novels don’t serialize easily because they privilege point of view and plot, neither of which work well on Substack:

• A point of view other than first person is odd when it appears in our inboxes sandwiched between a notice that my Amazon package has been delivered and test results from my cat’s vet.

• Fiction writers meticulously braid the threads of a plot only to have their Substack subscribers miss a week (or two or three), not want to bother with the synopsis, and give up on reading altogether.

Memoir is all about voice and character arc.

Substack may (or may not) be the place to serialize full memoirs. It offers an opportunity to rethink the process of writing a memoir and reimagine what it means to bring our/a story into the world. But always do so with the long game in mind.

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1. I did warn people that publishers could change their minds about how they classify previously published work on Substack, and it was best to stick to the 30-50 percent rule, i.e., only a third or half the book can have been published in journals, magazines, newspapers, and online.