8 Questions for... Tom Cox

The Villager

Photo by Claudio Schwarz on Unsplash

Tom Cox

is the author of 21st-Century Yokel, Help The Witch, Ring The Hill, Notebook, Villager, 1983 and (published March 2025) Everything Will Swallow You. In The Villager he publishes new writing on landscape, music, books, folklore, psychedelia, the natural world and other misty magical things outside the mainstream.

Stephen Fry

puts it best when he says he’s “One of the most enchanting (not to mention hilarious) writers around.”

1. Why Substack?

After getting on for 20 years as a journalist I decided, in 2015, to quit writing for newspapers and magazines entirely, and instead limit all my creative output to my books and website. Between then and the beginning of 2023 I managed to build a mailing list of (I think) just under 5,000 people for the new pieces I posted on my site, including a minority of readers who made a voluntary monthly donation to support my writing. Moving all that over to Substack felt like a risk in some ways - I'd receive a smaller percentage of each subscription, due to paying not one but two sets of fees, and I was aware that some people are just fundamentally resistant to change - but I could see something exciting was happening over here and was extra lured by the potential of Substack to rescue me from my (increasingly corrosive and algorithmically blocked) reliance on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram as a route to being seen and read. What soon made it more exciting, was when I became aware of the powerful community element fuelling the site. I have been flabbergasted by the kindness I have received from strangers since joining Substack. Yes, in the last two years I've worked harder than I've ever worked - sometimes to the detriment of my own health - but the reason I've been able to grow that initial 5,000 readers to over 33,000 is also because of people generously sharing my writing and recommending it to friends.

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

At first it was very much business as usual: I posted with similar regularity to the way I had on my website and with a similar approach. But in time I began to write more frequently, at a more varied length, and use photographs to tell stories and create humour in ways I hadn't before. The very nature of Substack, plus an increasing awareness that the people on it were proper readers who appreciated depth and nuance (as opposed to full-time scrollers, who generally don't appreciate those things), has made me more willing to experiment and more addicted to writing. And I was already extremely addicted to it.

3. How has it changed you?

It's made me even more aware of how vast the world is, how many great writers it contains, and the insignificance of what I do. Yet, paradoxically, it's also made me feel like I'm in a stronger position as a person who chooses to tell stories that aren't part of any current trend and sit far outside mainstream or newsworthy concerns. When you write something you're fully proud of, publish it, then experience, almost instantly, the strong connection you have made with readers thousands of miles away, it feels like truth. That truth feels like a solid argument against many of the barriers I've faced from the publishing industry over the years, and many of the timid, oversimplified statements I've heard from people in it about what "works" and "sells". I was told for years that I couldn't write the kind of novels I'm now writing because they don't fit or are too weird, and not enough like some other book that has been a proven sales horse. I believed what I was being told because the people telling it were from a far more middle class and educated backgrounds than me and spoke with a natural confidence about their opinions that I had never been taught to. But now I write those kind of novels and get confirmation, almost every day, that they do definitely work, from the people who read them. Substack has strengthened that connection. It's made me finally able to not give a fuck about the opinion of someone somewhere in an office in London who is thinking about sales targets and put my faith entirely in myself and my readers.

4. What mistakes have you made?

The usual ones, probably. Not always initially realising that a negative megaphone voice that comes back at you from something you've written tends to mean nothing: it's just an isolated cry from the swamp, probably has nothing to do with you, and is to be rigorously ignored. Also, getting too concerned about the numbers and/or misinterpreting them. Not all your subscribers will read every piece you post - or even half of what you post, probably - and some might only read one or two a year, and that's fine. Once you've got past a certain threshold of subscribers, you'll probably lose 70-100 every time you post, no matter what that post contains. It's all ok. You're just gradually sorting the wheat from the chaff and finding your people. The worst thing you can do - and this is one mistake I am determined to continue to avoid - is make an attempt to please everyone or get worried that something you wrote and totally believe in might piss somebody somewhere off, because something - no matter how innocuous - always will.

5. To pay or not to pay?

I had so many reservations about setting up the voluntary subscription system on my site in 2015, even though it was mostly just people chucking me a quid per month (aka 67 pence, once PayPal had taken their fees). It feels very unBritish to ask for money for your writing. But I have never felt like I shouldn't pay for writing or music I enjoy. I have spent over £100 on a record several times. One part of the problem is that the early internet made people feel they should be able to consume art for free: music, books, audiobooks, films. Which is an unsustainable system. While not perfect (what is?), Substack feels like quite a fair attempt to redress that - in fact, to redress, and repair, a lot of the "You should view the exposure as payment enough!" bullshit that was going around a decade or so ago. I am grateful for every one of my subscribers, paid or otherwise, and far, far more of my posts have been free than paid-subscriber only, but when I've worked hard on a piece of writing and feel drained from the thought and research I put into it, I feel less apprehensive about pressing the "paywall" button than I once did. I want to give my paid subscribers value for money. When I was knocked flat by Covid a couple of months ago the main worry on my mind, through the worst depths of the virus, was, "Shit, it's starting to become quite a long time since I posted something on Substack."

6. What artistic and technical choices have you made?

I'm planning to serialise, for free, the first chunk of my upcoming novel on Substack - which is also a novel that Substack has played a vital role in making me brave enough to write. The thought of being able to have that kind of direct line to more than a third of the people you could fit into Wembley Stadium would have been unimaginable a couple of decades ago. I also view that serialisation as far more valuable as, say, one in a newspaper read by a much larger number of people, because the difference here is that it's going to the right kind of people. I was already a stubborn git before I started on Substack but it's made me even more independent, more at peace with not being well-connected, with being outside literary cliques, with being a bit of a loner who puts the few above the many in terms of his audience. I have crowdfunded the most recent seven of my fifteen books. Substack is making me think further outside the box, constantly giving me ideas of how I can break more of the rules that my writing career up to 2015 taught me and become even more artistically disobedient. That includes physical as well as digital publishing. In some ways, I feel like I'm on a gradual journey back to myself. The way I started as a writer was by making my own fanzine as a teenager and selling it for £1 a copy at gigs. I have far fonder memories of that period than the period directly following it, after the fanzine had opened more supposedly prestigious doors to me (the music press, broadsheet newspapers). I see a lot of similarities between the anarchic freedom of fanzine writing and the potential anarchic freedom of Substack writing. Who knows? Maybe I'll revive the fanzine, too.

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

I remember when I used to write a monthly column for the Guardian on rural life, I'd already be mentally pre-empting some of the more tedious, wilfully misinterpreting and judgmental below-the-line comments as I wrote. Writing independently for my website took me away from that and felt like throwing off at least a couple of leg irons. That feeling has grown since I signed up to Substack. If there is a problem, it's that it's rendered me more impatient. The feedback is so instant after you've published here, it makes the deferred gratification of publishing a book seem even more interminable. I also sometimes get too drawn into Substack Notes. You soon become highly aware that more people will read your newsletters if you post more on Notes but you are simultaneously aware that time on Substack Notes takes you away from the real business of long form writing. I am not ultimately writing for people who read my Notes; I'm writing for people who read my long form work. But Notes are a useful way in, especially as I'm a compulsive notebook keeper, and even published a compilation of my own notebook notes a few years ago in book form. So it's a balance, and one I'm still learning about. I am trying not to be too absolute about it, one way or the other. Additionally I am liking the way that things I've written on Substack - and stories readers have told me - can sometimes feed unexpectedly into my novels. It all becomes part of the big word and idea ribollita that you gradually cook down when you write a book. As PD James once said: "Nothing is wasted."

8. In it for the long haul?

Everything changes so scarily fast in culture these days. It makes me hesitate about making any predictions about where I, or Substack, will be in ten, or even five, years. But what I do know is that I wake up every morning feeling thankful this site exists - that I'm not still back in the dark place of hustling for work in poshboy metropolitan newspaperland and speaking to publishers who tell me insane things like "animal books don't sell any more" or "we can't publish you any more unless you start going on TV and build up more of a profile" - and my long term commitment to writing what the fuck I need to feed my soul and trying to learn and improve in the process could not be more absolute. I will always write books - even if I end up publishing them myself and leaving them vacuum-sealed in a cave to be discovered 164 years after my death. But if someone found some way to stop me (they won't) the idea of bumbling along in my own uncurated way just by publishing regularly here, and answering to nobody on questions of topical relevance, subject or potential width of appeal, does not sound to me like the worst way to exist. I want to write less about me, more about books and music, more fiction, lose myself further down historical and topographic rabbit holes, send myself on more weird missions within the landscape. I really feel like I'm only just getting started, in terms of what I want to do.

Tom Cox

’s most recent novels are Villager, 1983 and Everything Will Swallow You, which can all be ordered from Blackwells, who do free delivery to most places worldwide.

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