Your Novel Called—It Wants Its Author Back

If you spend all your time building an audience, when do you actually write?

This one’s for those of us using Substack to market ourselves and our work, not as the main event. If Substack is your main event, rock on—you’re living the dream. But if your novel is gathering dust while you perfect your open rates… let’s chat.

Me dropping this newsletter about not spending so much time on newsletters into your email box. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

It starts as a flicker—an idea for a newsletter piece, just something quick between novel chapters.

I put down my shower beer (yes, I’ve been in the shower this whole time—look away, you pervert) and make a note in the steamed up glass: “Shawarma—chicken, beef, pork?—as a metaphor for mixing genres.” And then, somehow, I’m here, staring at my 17th draft featuring rotation Middle Eastern lunch options while my novel sits in the corner like an abandoned houseplant, drying out by the day. Somewhere between the analytics page and the paid-subscriber pitch, my actual writing practice—the one whose sales I eventually want to feed my family, not just my dopamine receptors—has become collateral damage. It’s a sneaky little coup, and before I know it, I’m not a novelist, short story writer, or essayist anymore. I’m a content creator.

I get it. Substack has the intoxicating appeal of immediate validation. Unlike the cold void of a half-finished manuscript, it provides a direct line to readers who actually engage, comment, and sometimes even pay you (well, not me yet, but some of you). And, hell, isn’t that why we write? To be read? To have someone out there nodding along, thinking, “Damn, this person gets it” or, as I thrillingly experienced recently, “Damn, this person doesn’t get it at all”(if you missed it, I got my first hater last week! Awesome!)? It’s exhilarating, even addicting, in a way that writing alone in the dark never quite manages to be. But therein lies the trap.

At first, it’s just a tool—a place to sharpen your voice, experiment with ideas, connect with your audience. But then you realize how much strategy is involved and, before you know it, your writing becomes a means to an end rather than an end in itself. You start tracking your open rates like a Wall Street trader. You sign up for yet another paid newsletter about how to optimize your paid newsletter. You draft headlines that would make a clickbait journalist blush (it’s me, I’m you). And the more you do this, the more the machine demands of you. Soon, you’re not writing because you have something to say—you’re writing because the algorithm demands it.

So, how do you avoid this fate? If you dream of other publishing avenues, how do you keep your Substack from devouring the writing practice that made you want to start a Substack in the first place?

Here’s the line you have to toe: if you’re genuinely enjoying the platform, and it’s helping you build an audience, great. But if you’re in it for traditional publishing, if your heart still beats for novels, plays, or short stories, you need balance. Otherwise, you’ll wake up one day and realize you’ve written 50,000 words this year—all of them newsletters.

Try this: set a schedule that prioritizes writing projects first. Maybe it’s an hour on your novel or poem before you even think about drafting a post. Maybe it’s three days a week where Substack doesn’t exist. Or, if you’re the type who thrives on volume, let the two practices fuel each other—Substack as a warm-up for your novel, a place to work out ideas in miniature before tackling the beast itself.

For a lot of us Substack is supposed to be a means, not an end. It can be a powerful tool, a community, even a revenue stream. Hell, maybe all of us make it big here and this becomes our full time gig—I’d take it over a day job any day. But if you’re serious about your writing dream, don’t let it become the thing you do instead of your real work, and definitely don’t let the strategizing over engagement, Notes and likes push you to burnout.

Substack will survive without another newsletter. Your dream won’t survive without you.