![]() ![]() ![]() What’s tempting some of today’s most decorated novelists to hang out their shingles on the world wide web, you might wonder? As with any literary venture, there’s an economic proposition. ![]() Each of these newsletters, though free to sample, ultimately run subscribers $6 per month. Saunders rounded out the picture in December with Story Club, an “interactive, challenging, and rigorous” series of guided readings, writing exercises, and notes of encouragement for aspiring writers, almost like a budget MFA program. Then, later that same month, Palahniuk joined the fray with another similarly roving enterprise: Plot Spoiler, which hosts serialized chapters of his latest novel, called Greener Pastures, lessons on the craft of fiction (complete with homework assignments), and charming snapshots of his Boston terrier. “There’s just us here, just you and me, and we can take this wherever it goes.” Since then, it’s gone to myriad places, from serialized chapters of a new novella to “ask me anything” posts to Rushdie’s pan of Dune. ![]() “The point of doing this is to have a closer relationship with readers, to speak freely, without any intermediaries or gatekeepers,” Rushdie wrote in his inaugural missive. The first marquee novelist to strike out on Substack was Rushdie, who started his newsletter, Salman’s Sea of Stories, last September. But as these novelists light the way for what a safe, congenial online community can look like, they raise questions about their beleaguered platform, and about what it will take to build the digital world we all want to live in. Many months into the experiment, they’ve amassed thousands of subscribers, deepened their dialogue with readers, and built the digital enclaves we all dream of: positive, vibrant, teeming with good faith discourse. There, titans of contemporary literature like Saunders, Salman Rushdie, and Chuck Palahniuk are serializing fiction, teaching the craft of writing, and yes, believe it or not, wading into the comments section. A small but significant cadre of novelists are migrating to the publishing platform best known as a newsletter distribution tool for journalists. What if you could hear from your favorite novelists on a regular schedule-essentially, enter the slipstream of their minds on demand? Enter Substack. The advent of social media brought readers and writers into closer contact than ever before, but increasingly, an author’s social presence is just another thing to manage and manicure, rather than a freewheeling real-time discourse with readers. But when readers want to continue the conversation, how can they speak back? For most of literary history, the only answer was to enter a lopsided pen pal program with your favorite novelists by sending letters care of their publishers. Great novels make us feel changed, seen, spoken to. The comments section is a modern invention, but it stands to solve a longstanding problem for the literary world. ![]()
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