These days everyone is on Substack.
From well-known writers whose books I’ve read, to non-professional writers sharing their everyday thoughts. Many of them have a subscription rate of up to $60 a year—one I know donates 5% of their monthly subscription income to a charity of their choice. I understand the need to charge for Substack newsletters, as some people put a lot of work into them and want to be compensated for it. But I can only subscribe to one before it becomes too expensive in addition to my news and magazine subscriptions.
So I tend to gravitate towards Substacks that are free, one good one being Sarah Kendzior’s, who covers the roots of American politics and predicts what will happen next. She’s also written three books about American politics, but keeps her newsletter free of charge. There’s also Brian Marchant’s Blood in the Machine, which covers technology and politics, and stems from the concerns of the Luddites, who weren’t anti-technology, but worried that technology would take away their jobs (which it did). Marchant has also written a book about these topics.
I myself haven’t made the leap to Substack. I started my blog way back in 2012. I was on Blogspot for some time, until I switched to WordPress. I imported all my blog posts from Blogspot and just kept on posting. Originally I wrote a lot about science, as I was still a scientist at the time and that was how my brain worked. Now I write about writing, about nature, about mental health, about books, and yes, sometimes about science.
I post once a week, on Wednesdays, not sure why but I always think of it as a nice pick-me-up in the middle of the week. It goes out at 7am so people can read it before or on their way to work if they want, or can file it away to read later. I get a fair bit of traffic—200-300 hits a day. Which is more than I ever got in the past.
I do photo essays on the second Wednesday of month, and a book review on the last Wednesday of the month. The first and third Wednesdays are reserved for essays. In months with five Wednesdays I write an extra essay.
Sometimes those essays take different forms, like last week when I wrote to the prompt: I am waiting. Or a few months ago when I wrote a sentence for each day, drawing on what I’d read and learned from Chris LaTray and Frances Peck. Other times I write straight essays, like On Ambition and Language in Politics.
But why do I write a blog? What’s the point? I blog to practice my writing. To get my work out into the world because it’s hard to get published and sometimes I don’t have the stomach to keep pitching something everyone is rejecting. To share my ideas and thoughts with readers, and to hopefully spark a question or an idea in their mind.
Is a blog old-fashioned? Maybe. I have it set up so that if you subscribe you get an email with the blog in it, so you don’t have to go to my webpage every Wednesday. You can just read an email—same as with a Substack newsletter. I’m sort of a lonely blog out there, though. I co-founded Science Borealis back in 2013, which aggregated Canadian science blogs on one site. It was popular while it lasted, but people stopped blogging: I’m not sure if they switched to Substack or just quit entirely.
Should I have a Substack instead? What’s the difference, really, between a blog and a newsletter? The way Substack is structured is a way to build community, what I’m missing on my blog. There are sections for notes and messages, and when you sign up for a newsletter you’re given a recommendation for three others you might want to follow. So it’s built like a social media platform, very different from a blog.
But what you read on my blog would be the same thing you’d read on my Substack. I don’t need another social media platform. I just want to write my humble words and hope that someone will read them.
