8 Questions for... Gareth Southwell

Gareth Southwell

Photo by Claudio Schwarz on Unsplash

Gareth Southwell

is a writer of sci-fi and popular philosophy, and a professional illustrator and book designer. He’s using his Substack to serialise his novel Tidelands, write thinky things on diverse topics, and share book reviews – among other things.

1.         Why Substack?

I’d been working on a novel and wanted to try serialising it – I think I’d been reading a lot of Dickens, and I’d just finished Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities! I looked at Wattpad, Royal Road, and other platforms, but I’m not a romance author or into LitRPG, and nowhere seemed to offer the range of features and breadth of community that Substack does – and all that more or less for free. So I ditched Mailerlite and imported my newsletter here – it’s not perfect for that purpose, but the pros far outweigh the cons.

I’d also become fed up with traditional publishing. I’ve been writing popular philosophy books for almost 20 years and the publishers always wanted the same type of book – a general introduction. I got an agent in an attempt to approach publishers with more interesting projects, but they all seemed risk averse and conservative (you’d read a book about Plato in Hell, right?). The same seemed to apply to my attempts to get my fiction published: some partial interest, a few boilerplate rejections, and a whole lot of ghosting.

This left me with a simple choice: keep banging my head against the gates of trad pub in the hopes that I would find someone willing to publish what I wanted to write, keep on writing the same safe stuff that publishers wanted, or write what I wanted and publish it myself. So a few years ago I decided to explore indie publishing and haven’t really looked back since. I haven’t turned my back completely on trad publishing (Everyday Stoicism has just been published by Greenfinch and is available from all good bookshops!), but indie publishing has been a revelation. It’s a hard road, and far from financially lucrative at the moment, but I wake up most days excited that I can create whatever I want (I also do my own cover design and formatting, so I have complete creative control). I see Substack as a means of expanding on all this while providing new ways to connect directly with readers.

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

I think I’m just now finding it. Committing to a weekly serialisation definitely helped, but it’s taken me a while to figure out what I want to write, how often, whether to paywall, etc.

I think a lot of writers on Substack are stuck in the same sort of trap. They have a book or a project that they want to push, usually with a view to monetising it, but once they launch they realise that subscribers (paid ones, especially) don’t just show up; you have to go get them. So they start publishing posts about writing, or things tangentially related to the thing they want to sell. And then they realise that those things need promoting too, so they take to Notes and start telling the world. But you don’t want to come across as too “salesy”, so they start following and interacting with others in order to surreptitiously drive traffic back to their Substack. And before you know it, you’re not writing the thing you came here to write, you’re following 700 Substacks that you’ll never read, and spending all your time trying to think of something clever or funny or edgy to say in other people’s comment sections! And almost everyone is doing it. Substack seems to me to be largely populated by writers. Writers are readers too, of course – perhaps more so than the average – but it all gets to a point where it resembles that scene from The Simpsons where Moe Szyslak rings a sex chat line promising steamy conversations with young ladies, and the only other people on there turn out to be middle-aged men seeking steamy conversations with young ladies. Substack can feel a bit like that, some days.

The alternative is just to write what you love and share it. I’m not saying that you shouldn’t attempt to promote your work or engage with others, but writing is not a game with instant results, and – as Steven Pressfield puts it – “To labor in the arts for any reason other than love is prostitution.” Well, nothing against sex work necessarily, but I’ve done my fair share of that, and I wasn’t about to go back to it. (Um, writing for money, I mean! Yes.) As creatives, no one owes us a living, and there is no guarantee of success. The only groove worth having is to love creating for its own sake. Give me that groove every day and I’ll be a happy bunny.

3.         How has it changed you?

I think it’s made me more businesslike – in the sense of taking my writing seriously. Committing to a schedule has that effect, and it can also create a form of professional distance between you and your writing, which is healthy. It’s a job – though one with a soul. So write to the best of your abilities, put your all into it, and move on.

4.         What mistakes have you made?

I started off trying to stretch myself too thinly. I was planning to serialise both fiction and non-fiction and set paywalls for both of these after a few free sample chapters (of which, more below). I was also going to write regularly on self-publishing, philosophy, book reviews, etc. But I realised I just wanted to be too many things to too many people, and so I reined it in. For the moment, I serialise fiction and produce the odd think piece and book review. That seems like more than enough.

My more general mistake was to assume that Substack would be a game changer. I mean, it’s great – it’s a far better way of engaging with newsletter subscribers than my previous formula of Mailerlite + social media, and it allows people to discover your work more easily. But I think initially I expected hordes of people to pour down from the hills waving debit cards. The truth is that social media (and I’d include Substack in this) tends to turn us into isolated passive consumers. So like rats, or cockroaches, for every engaged commenter you see, there are 99 unseen lurkers and scrollers. The frustration with this is that you really don’t know who is “engaged”, because this bastardised metric is no indication of who is really reading and enjoying your work. Substack stats are opaque and privacy changes to email providers now mean that we can’t be absolutely sure who’s even opening our newsletters. The answer is therefore not to care too much with all that side of things and to carry on with what you came here for. Which was what, now…?

(I seem to have compared my subscribers to vermin – moving swiftly on…)

5.         To pay or not to pay?

I’ve come full circle on this – sort of.

I started off with a simple plan: regarding fiction and non-fiction serialisation, I would make the first few chapters free, and then paywall the rest. I would then use my non-paywalled writing as content marketing to entice people towards the paid serialisation. As I say above, however, I decided that this wasn’t working, primarily because I wasn’t a big enough name to draw interest, and a few chapters isn’t enough to get someone to put their hand in their pocket. Unless you’re Chuck Palahniuk or Luke Jennings, then I think you’re unlikely to get this method to work for you.

So, I abandoned the paywall and decided to give it all away for free. This definitely went against the grain, at first, but there is a logic to it. There is just so much stuff out there now. We live in a media saturated age, so you need to find other ways to stand out. So I reasoned that it is better to give your work away and use it as its own form of marketing, then give people the option to reimburse you in other ways (by buying physical or eBook copies of your books or treating their paid subscription as a gesture of support for what you’re doing).

And it did sort of work. But the problem with this approach is that it ultimately devalues the thing you want readers to value. You risk presenting yourself as a hobbyist and a dabbler, someone not to be taken seriously. And – the bottom line – why should anyone “support” you when they’re getting everything for nothing? Some will, sure, but probably not enough of them.

And so now I’ve decided to adopt a middle ground, where I give away a sizeable portion of the serial for free and then paywall the rest. This is quite an effective test of reader interest, for if a free subscriber is not willing to pay for something after 20 free instalments (essentially, a free novella), then they’re probably never going to. So I’m now focusing on writing for its own sake and trying not to worry about the best strategy for succeeding. There is no magic bullet for success. The machinery is there, for those who are motivated to read and pay for my work. But whether they do or not is something that’s not really within my control.

6.         What artistic and technical choices have you made?

I think I’m sort of lucky in that the way I write is already optimised for serialisation. In my non-fiction writing, I had years of training in summarising topics into bitesize chunks. When I came to fiction, I found I was writing in relatively short self-contained scenes, often with “hooky” endings. Going forward, I don’t think serialisation will change that much about the way I write, though with new writing I’ve already found myself having half an eye on scene length (whether it’s too long or too short for an instalment).

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

Aside from the above influence on scene length, I think – as I’ve said – the main effect has been to make me adopt a more businesslike approach to my writing. Having to stick to a weekly schedule, commit to a certain amount of output, has made me in some ways less precious and sensitive to criticism and self-doubt – it’s a job, one with deadlines, where perfectionism is an indulgence. On the other hand, it’s made me more precious about my time, aware of the need to prioritise my writing activities over other things, or to triage the most important and meaningful writing projects. Writers spend too much time not writing. We should really do something about that. I wonder what…

8.         In it for the long haul?

I think so – whether or not that will be on Substack, I can’t say, but serialised fiction will probably be a feature of what I do from now on. It’s good that Substack allows you the option to just take all your subscribers and go somewhere else, but unless something awful happens to the platform (some right-wing tech bro buys it up as a pet project to run into the ground), then I can’t see myself leaving.

As for the writing itself, well, that was always a long haul thing.

Parts 1 and 2 of Tidelands are out now in eBook and paperback (https://garethsouthwell.com/books/tidelands/)

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