8 Questions for... Ben Wakeman

Spotlight on Catch & Release

Photo by Claudio Schwarz on Unsplash

Ben Wakeman publishes Catch & Release, an eclectic collection of his creative output. He writes speculative short stories and novels, and essays ranging from the very personal to commentary on AI and the role creativity plays in society. He's also a singer-songwriter with over thirty years of experience performing and recording. This experience informs the music and audio narration that accompany the majority of his work published on Substack.

1.     Why Substack?

I came to Substack for the promise of earning a living with my creative work, but I’ve stayed because of the community I’ve found. The struggle to make any of my creative pursuits earn their keep has been a life-long source of angst for me. Regardless of where I’ve worked in the past thirty years or what my role was, I always considered it a day job—a means to put food on the table, pay the mortgage, and put the kids through college. In October of 2022 I was laid off from what was the high-water mark of my career in technology. After a couple of months of flailing, my partner encouraged me to take some time and dedicate 100% of my energy to writing and publishing.

I turned to Substack for a few reasons:

• Of all the platforms, it has the clearest strategy for monetising creative work and it does a great job of streamlining and simplifying the complexities of subscriptions, payments, and promotion.

• I like the simplicity of the editor and lack of options for how you can format and present posts. Too many features in authoring software result in highly fragmented design that can make your work look like a bad buffet.

• I like the flexibility to include audio and video as well as text in posts. I wanted to have complete freedom to produce my work in any medium I choose.

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

I think I thrashed around quite a bit during the first three months, running in four directions at once like a puppy off leash. I was writing about my creative process and publishing short stories. I was creating immersive audio flash fiction pieces and writing about my fascination with AI. I had a series called SongCraft where I walked through a song I was writing. I started an unscripted video series called “In the Works.” I had been bottled up for so long, I think I just needed the experience of unbridled experimentation. I settled down a bit and then started considering what I really wanted out of this and what kind of audience I hoped to have. I believe I found my groove when I decided, after much consternation to serialize my novel, “The Memory of My Shadow.”

Serialization was not an obvious choice. I had read about other authors, some very famous and many obscure ones who tried it and either abandoned it or vowed never to do it again. But with AI blowing up in the news, I felt a sense of urgency to get my novel out there and what better way to tell a cautionary tale about technology than on a technology platform like Substack? When I decided to score a soundtrack and include audio narration with each chapter, all my worlds came together. Now I’m three-quarters of the way through publishing my second serial novel, “Harmony House” and I feel like I’ve developed not just a solid groove but also been gifted with the attention of a loyal and generous audience who shows up every week.

3.     How has it changed you?

I don’t know that publishing on Substack has changed me in any fundamental way, but it has given me a platform to have my work seen and a channel to discover some truly brilliant writers, many of whom I’m lucky to consider friends at this point. We make art because we want to connect with others, to compare notes and confirm that we’re not alone in this journey. Substack has afforded me a means to create this kind of connection each week and it’s given me a reason to create something and publish it every single week for more than a year. That’s no small thing.

4.     What mistakes have you made?

It’s funny, maybe I’m more forgiving of myself in my advancing age or just delusional, but I can’t think of anything I’ve done in the past year that I really regret. Did I publish a few things that were half-baked? Sure. Was I overly ambitious at times? Absolutely. Every mistake is an opportunity to learn, adjust, and improve. Right or wrong, I like doing this process in the open. I don’t understand writers or artists who toil for years on a piece striving for perfection. The whole philosophy behind my publication, Catch & Release is about letting the work go so it can swim and find its own life and you can cast your line back out into the water. For me, life is too short to horde the small gifts we discover in our creative journeys in hopes of some bigger pay-off at an undetermined point in the future. It’s in the sharing of the work with others that the work becomes alive. It’s only in letting go that we are able to gain enough distance from our work to learn from it.

5.     To pay or not to pay?

For me it was never a hand-wringing question. I believe artists deserve to be paid for their work just as anyone else working in any other profession does. It’s been a hard lesson for me to learn, but if you don’t ask for something, you will never get it. The challenge on Substack is that you must make that choice with every single post. Putting everything behind the paywall means you will be dramatically limiting the potential audience you can reach but giving it all away, sends an implicit message that your work has no value.

The strategy that I’ve evolved over time is to publish every post without a paywall initially and allow the three month auto-archive function in Substack to move them behind the paywall. For my two novels, I keep the first two episodes free forever to entice new readers. I do occasionally go into the archive and remove the paywall when I repost a piece. I’m not making a living at this point, but this is a long-haul strategy for which I’m laying a foundation. At least that’s what I tell myself!

One final note on the question of people paying for your work. 98% of the people who are paying subscribers to Catch & Release do it because they love my work and want to see me keep doing it. 2% paid for a subscription because they hit a paywall. So, the incentive here, is to put yourself out there, connect with your audience and give them a way to help you if they want to. We’re not selling products here. Promotions, limited time offers, and mousetraps don’t work. Be kind, be generous, be yourself, and the people who your work resonates with will pay you if they can afford to.

6.     What artistic and technical choices have you made

The best part of this process is getting to make these choice on a daily basis—having the freedom to choose how I present my work. I’ve taken full advantage of generative AI for creating imagery for many of my posts. While I have some background in design, it’s not where I want to focus my efforts so coming up with prompts to get Midjourney to deliver a compelling image to accompany one of my posts is time better spent.

Maybe the biggest artistic and technical choice I’ve made with Catch & Release is to provide high-quality audio narration for my novels and for many of my individual posts. There are a few reasons for this.

·      I love audio and have a background in music and recording

·      Many people don’t have time to read but they will listen if given the option

·      There’s something wonderful about hearing a writer perform their work

7.     What’s been the effect on your writing?

I think my instincts have gotten much sharper as a result of the regular repetition that’s required to publish every single week. For my serial novels, my editing process has improved dramatically because of the process required to perform and record the audio narration. There’s nothing like performing your story and voicing your characters to uncover things that don’t work. I’ve done a lot of invaluable last-minute edits to my writing while sitting in front of the microphone.

In my other posts, I think I’ve gotten better at writing about subjects that connect with my audience. There’s still a fair amount of navel-gazing, but I try to think about what would actually be useful to my readers, many of whom are writers. I’ve come to the hard realization that there is a much bigger appetite for writing that is not fiction. I think fiction requires a huge level of trust and willingness to go along that we, as fiction writers forget. Asking someone to invest the time to build a fictional world with fictional people in their mind as they read your book is a much more demanding than telling them the top ten things you would tell your younger self. I look at my non-fiction posts as a gateway drug to my fiction. Hopefully as they get to know me as a person who occasionally shares useful things, they will become curious about this fiction stuff I bang on about. This strategy is not new. You will see it employed to greater and lesser degrees across Substack. I try to avoid the ones that come across like diet regimes. “Pay Me $150 and I will Make You a Great Writer!”

8.     In it for the long haul?

Yes, in as much as any of us know what the long haul is. I’ve discovered a community of writers here who I adore and each week I anticipate reading what comes out of their heads. This alone is a reason for me to continue to produce work and show up each week. Technology platforms grow, evolve, and become obsolete, but for now Substack has reached a wonderful equilibrium that gives writers a place to thrive and encourages community and cooperation over competition.

I plan to host another “Same Walk, Different Shoes,” cohort this summer because I’m a believer in the idea that the only worthy strategy for us as creative humans is to lift each other up. In this lifting of others, we discover something valuable about ourselves and we are lifted too.

Thanks to Ben Wakeman for joining this conversation. You can subscribe to his publication here: