8 Questions for... Laurie Stone
Spotlight on Everything Is Personal
Laurie Stone is author of six books, most recently "Streaming Now, Postcards from the Thing that is Happening," longlisted for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award. She is a frequent contributor to The Paris Review and Oldster Magazine, and writes the Substack Everything is Personal.
1. Why Substack?
I published a book about 18 months ago called Streaming Now, Postcards from the Thing that is Happening (Dottir Press), and Lucian Truscott suggested Substack might be a way to attract more readers. I quickly saw Substack was a different kind of engagement, a publishing venue of its own I would have to play with and understand. I became interested in generating a readership there, not for my book, although perhaps the book has also benefitted.
2. How long did it take you to find your groove?
I think this is an excellent question. Lucian publishes daily. He’s a political reporter, and he occasionally writes personal essays. He had a substantial paid subscribership when he started his stack. I tried following his daily model, and it wasn’t right for me. I now publish a piece and then there are four days off, so I am publishing about 84 pieces a year, the equivalent of several books in terms of length, subject matter, and form.
3. How has it changed you?
I feel very changed in exciting ways, as if I have a whole new publishing landscape and ability to interact with readers. I feel encouraged people want to read my work and will pay for it. I’m thrilled to be making a living from my writing in a way I have not since, more than 20 years ago, I stopped writing for the Village Voice, where I was paid weekly for about 25 years. I am now approaching 8000 subscribers, and I have 535 paid subscribers.
4. What mistakes have you made?
I made the mistake of writing to unpaid subscribers who read the stack regularly and asking them directly, in an email, to upgrade to a paid subscription. It didn’t work, and I think people felt annoyed. People want to decide for themselves to subscribe, not in response to a request, so I won’t do that again.
I’m eager to offer paid subscribers more benefits since I don’t place the writing behind a paywall. I want it to be available to everyone to read. In a sense, paid subscribers are funding the access of everyone to the writing. I write an entirely literary publication. The pieces are finished. There is no chitchat. There are no wordy diary entries. The stack is always feminist in its perspectives and interests. I write in several alternating genres—memoir, criticism, fiction, social commentary, and hybrid mixes of several genres—and readers don’t know ahead of time what kind of piece they will get.
Sari Botton, who publishes Oldster Magazine on Substack, is a friend. I write a monthly column for her called “Notes on Another New Life.” She offers me suggestions that work for her publication, but they don’t always work for me. Something that has worked is offering paid subscribers monthly Zoom conversations on writing craft. The Zooms are popular, and they are helping create an interactive community.
Sari also suggested I post a weekly prompt exercise that readers could try out and post on “Chat.” It didn’t work for me. I think readers felt too challenged, as if it were an assignment. I decided not to make the prompts a separate feature with a separate email and just include them in the regular posts for everyone from time to time.
5. To pay or not to pay?
I included a paid option with the first post. I knew I was offering accomplished literary work, so in that sense I didn’t need to practice. Immediately, friends chipped in, but soon complete strangers were paying, and that has felt good. It’s also the only way to grow the stack as a business of sorts. It’s become a full time job, and I need to make a living from it. I don’t write for free—except, in a sense, for the readers who don’t have paid subscriptions. From my point of view, this is a business approach that works to keep the whole enterprise afloat. As long as the paid subscribership continues to grow—albeit slowly, because there is a lot of churn, as everyone on Substack knows—as long as it continues to sustain itself and grow slowly, I consider what I’m doing a success.
6. What artistic and technical choices have you made
I like this question. In a sense, I haven’t made any adjustments. I just do what I have always done, pretty much, on Substack, as well as for a few other publications I write for. The exciting and gratifying thing is that readers who have never heard of me before are enjoying the work. What do they especially appreciate? Long, literary essays about women. Anything that looks at life through a clearly feminist perspective. Who knew?
I like art directing the posts. That is new-ish for me, although I’ve been doing it for a long time, in a less involved way, on social media. I try to choose images that counterpoint the writing rather than illustrate it. It’s another artistic form, although it’s pretty spontaneous for me, unlike the writing, which may appear to have been written, as I am writing to you here as a first draft stream, but it never is.
7. What’s been the effect on your writing?
I love writing on deadline. The schedule I’ve set up has made me far more productive in a daily sense than I would be otherwise. I will have a new book manuscript soon I’ll compose from pieces that feel connected to me. I love producing larger work by arranging pieces I didn’t plan ahead to connect. They just look that way after they accumulate and I see where my thoughts and literary experiments have drifted. It’s a lot of work to stir interest in the stack on social media, but I think it’s effective. Social media—Facebook, Instagram, and “Notes”—is also a safe lab for me to see what readers may respond to before I work up the pieces for the Substack. I think of the stack not as social media but as a literary publication, and most of the people who comment are respectful and don’t add stories about their cats and the time their child buried a frog. Not that there’s anything wrong with cats and dead frogs.
8. In it for the long haul?
Absolutely. I hope so. I will keep producing as long as there is interest in what I write and I can continue to earn a living from it. I love every aspect of it. Except the proximity of Nazis in Stackland. Otherwise, I’m happy.
Another thing to love about Substack - to have regular access to quality literary writing by a pro. I like the idea of a regular zoom to connect with readers around shared interests.
Great interview, I love the respect and dedication to the craft, it's inspiring to see a growing paid readership despite nothing being paywalled, and great attitude in general toward writing online with an emphasis on quality and consistency.