8 Questions for.... Adam Nathan

Spotlight on Adam Nathan

Photo by Claudio Schwarz on Unsplash

Adam Nathan has walked a 1000 miles, writes letters to his children they won’t open for 20 years, and is the author of 100 Stories.

#1 – Why Substack?

Let's start at the beginning: I’d given up.

I'd spent thirty years bobbing below the waterline of professional interest in my work, first in film and then in literary memoir. I'd written and rewritten to please agents that I'm convinced never read my entire manuscripts. Months of work would be returned to me after further months of waiting with three sentences and barely a "kind regards."

The piece that flew highest before crashing made it to team editorial consideration at five publishing houses. That crash site is littered with work like Scheherazade, and I believe that writing deserved more than three curt sentences, an em-dash hyphen and lowercase initials.

I was informed “nobody” can sell male memoir, I had no platform, my work was too much like another work they represented, too spiritual, not religious enough. Jesus.

At the bitter end of that dead-end chapter, I was in Moab mountain-biking, and I was putting my bike into the back of a pickup truck when I took a call from my agent. She asked me to consider self-publishing with her receiving a commission. I wanted to bicycle into a canyon.

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My very first submission was in 1992. I submitted a cover letter to a NYC agent, and she said it was the best cover letter she'd ever received. "Send the screenplay." It was like already being published. I must have told everyone I knew that It Is All Beginning. My birthright!

A single line came back months later to take the buzz out of that:

"I don't do animal stories."

(The story was about a boy and a horse. I’d made this crystal clear in the best cover letter she’d ever received. )

"What if I remove the horse?"

“Okay, okay… fair enough, what if I remove the boy?”

In 2019 I reached out to this same agent recalling the happier part of the previous account. She agreed to read the “Bicycle Death in Moab” manuscript. I groveled through rewrites for a year for her. Finally, I was informed with an em-dash hyphen and lowercase initials that it was "ready."

So was COVID. A hiatus. A year later she'd moved into film rights for her catalog of celebrated writers, and she was “no longer working in non-fiction.”

Her two rejections created symmetrical bookends for a shelf of writing that never existed.

I gave up.¹

#2 – How long did it take you to find your groove?

That’s funny.

I'm still struggling with brand, presentation, length, voiceovers, serialization, style and genre. My About Page is a mess.² I don’t have one of those cute pictures at the top where your newsletter header goes, let alone the banner to put at the top of your emails.

I've restructured my Sections thirty-seven times. I've published Excerpts that no one clicked through. I've published stitched together collections of serialized work no one has read.

I've used bad AI pictures, AI pictures with 6-fingered people, written stupid, regrettable things in my comments section. I’ve posted articles whose length would lift Tolstoy’s eyebrows.

I've felt despair, frustration, and shame from unsubscribes. I’ve suffered endless comparison fatigue. I’ve cried out to the lonely darkness in Threads. I’ve posted polls that I’ve had to remove because I am the only one who answered them.

I have no idea what to use Tags for let alone edit the social media editing section. I harbor deep suspicions of glowing compliments. I wander about lost in Notes looking for my previous replies like I'm half-blind.

As of a few weeks ago, I can no longer get my Stats page columns to swipe right on my iPhone without first pinching the size of the page down.

I pray for subscription milestones that I monitor by tens and not thousands. I daydream of “toggling off subscription notifications because they are annoying me.”

I count countries and states and stare at the little map filtered for All Time, and with the bandwidth that having no subscribers affords me, I investigate who lives in Zambia and Pakistan and which posts they are reading.

Sorry. I lost my place. What was the question?

#3 How has it changed you?

I did “movie actor” in my twenties.

I did “sell a business” in my forties.

Now I'm doing words and heart. My one, true game. My best for last.

This is my professional Third Act.

I plan on riding this runaway locomotive over the cliff, and I love it. Deeply love it. I’m so grateful to Substack that I even bought shares in it.

I think about Substack and my Third Act all the time. My artistic life is flowering here. Its beauty is tropical and its rains are warm.

Thank you, Substack.

#4 What mistakes have you made?

• I'm a thousand miles from the brand polish of someone like Ben Wakeman and brand clarity of Chloe Hope, wonderful writers both. I need more birds. I need more death. I need more Eleanor.

• I use a tagline that would really, really irritate me if I read it on somebody else's site.³

• I’ve tested the patience of my readers with a relentless onslaught of posts and ridiculously inaccurate AI pictures of Bob Dylan.

• I’ve written so many different genres and styles that readers who sign up for one thing have no idea where they are the following Thursday. “I thought it was funny in here.” “Why are you crying?” “Where did Sinead go?” “Why are you in Spain?” “How much should I tip the hardware clerk?”

#5 To pay or not to pay?

So, I am about to charge.⁴

I need some barrier between my professional life and my bleed-it-out personal work. My worlds are now crashing into each other. This means that my most personal writing is getting paywalled. I'll probably keep fairly long pre-paywall teasers. But I don’t know. There are huge trade-offs here, many I worry about.

But I don’t want my personal writing to be part of someone else’s professional curiosity about me, and that seems to be happening. I’m also far more comfortable sharing fiction than remembrances of the death of my father not to put too fine a point on it.

Alas, modest monthly subscriptions aren't going to take me far with the cost-of-living in Brooklyn.

So, I have another preferred plan.

I intend to plow the money directly back into the Substack subscription ecosystem. This means: I will match subscriptions for fellow writers 1:1 as a matter of professional courtesy, and mutual support.

Writers do need to support each other. This is a simple way of doing that.

I understand the math. I’m aware this is a losing approach from a taxation perspective especially with Substack’s hand-in-the-till.

There is of course a non-trivial, bottom-line terror that no one subscribes to my work, but I’ll get over that, too.

If lived through a near-fatal bicycle crash in Moab when an agent tried to push me over a cliff into self publishing where the agent would still get a cut — then I can handle this.

#6 What artistic and technical choices have you made?

The big one was the very first time I clicked publish on something deeply personal. I’m not even going to share which one it was, but it was heavy, and I took a long walk around the block several times. I was shaking.

In my being dream of being published fantasy, I always thought I’d have the imprimatur of a publishing house to protect the intimacy of my work with the hard armor of legitimacy or through the soft veil of superiority. Now I have none of that. Substack is all splinters and hard plank. I find it solid. Genuine.

So I hit Publish.

I did it.

My name was on it.

I hit the button and waited for the universe to return my call.

Call it an artistic coming out.

And then, in a surprise to no one with half a dollop of wisdom, the universe returned my call(s).

#7 What's been the effect on your writing?

Focus.

#8 – In it for the long haul?

Emphatically so. There will be no going back.

My site recently pivoted focus and rebranded to “100 Stories.” As foolhardy as this was, I’m now committed to publish one story a month for 8 years and 4 months. This will take me past retirement and solidly into 2032. This will possibly be the most regrettable artistic choice of my entire life. #3 comes out on 3/31. The stories will continue to be available to all. The personal memoir and the rest are now paywalled. I'm leaving existing work available to both free and paid.

The stories will be available to all. The personal memoir and the rest will be paywalled. I don’t know what I’ll do with the existing work yet.

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I will write stories about horses.

And I will set them in canyons in Moab.

(But I won’t sell the film rights to the agent with the em-dash and the lowercase initials.)

And I will charge her $5.

And I will spend it on you.

1. A year and a half ago my brother texted me and said “you should publish your book on Substack.” And that’s exactly how a love affair starts. You barely see it coming. It’s practically hidden.

2. I’ve since updated the the site with 100 stories rebrand. About Page is arguably less of a mess. I have a new, improved, tag line. The shame, frustration and despair remain the same, but I lost my subscriber from Zambia.

3. Formerly 'Feel something.'

4. Please, please read the About Page for terms on quid pro quo subscriptions and ideally message me directly to make sure we get this handled correctly.

Thank you to Adam Nathan for joining this conversation.