Newsletter platform Substack launched nearly a decade ago, but only recently has it begun to challenge the boundaries of traditional and new media, with the New Yorker, Harper’s, and a number of other legacy magazine publishers embracing its services.
The book publishing world, meanwhile, has taken a more tepid tack. Penguin Random House, for example, has claimed a username (“Words are our love language,” its bio reads) but has not posted, and its free professional development newsletter, Penguin Random House Careers, is largely unrelated to its publishing activities.
Then there’s Authors Equity. The publisher, cofounded by former PRH CEO Madeline McIntosh in 2024, has found Substack a natural home for its vision of a business that reflects the creator economy. Authors Equity forgoes book advances and gives authors a majority of sales revenue, aligning their payout more squarely with their book’s performance.
“We’re starting this big new adventure, this new experiment, and we’re committing to sharing here the things that we’re finding interesting as we go along,” McIntosh said. Much like a writer building their personal brand, McIntosh said, Authors Equity is using Substack as a vector for both its “personality” and its publishing business.
Now, Authors Equity is taking its affinity with Substack to the next level.
Last month, Substack cofounder Hamish McKenzie announced that Authors Equity would publish his new book, How to Save the Media—about what he calls the “transition” from an era of “gatekeepers” to one dominated by “direct relationships”—in October. In the post on Substack’s official newsletter, McKenzie lauded them for “practic[ing] what this book preaches.”
With the embrace of Substack, McIntosh—a Big Five defector—is aligning her press with the literary creator economy, which has been something of a bogeyman for the traditional book business.
The fear is not totally unfounded. In 2021, controversy broke out when Substack paid several major authors to serialize their work in what it called “pro deals,” according to the Guardian, which offered “advances on a sliding scale based on a writer’s profile.” Salman Rushdie, for instance, serialized his novella The Seventh Wave on the platform.
In a statement to PW, a Substack spokeswoman implied that reports of its attempts to disrupt book publishing were exaggerated. “At this time, we don’t have plans to formalize a publishing arm for serialized books,” she said, “but it is an interesting avenue for Substack to consider in the future!”
Authors Equity conducted its own experiment with serialization beginning last July, in an effort led by CMO and deputy publisher Carly Gorga, also a PRH veteran, and editorial support from Adrienne Westenfeld, formerly Esquire’s books and fiction editor. Westenfeld parsed out the title, Adam Cohen’s Captain’s Dinner: A Shipwreck, an Act of Cannibalism, and a Murder Trial That Changed Legal History, in four abridged bites via Substack. It felt “old-school,” Gorga said, like something that the glossies might have serialized in their heyday. Gorga said the idea was to “create a world around the book” to draw in readers who might not otherwise pick it up.
Authors Equity has used Substack to complement its IRL publishing activities. Likewise, many authors have employed the platform as a stand-in, rather than a wholesale replacement, for the ever-diminishing outlets for criticism, serialization, and short-form prose that used to make up the publishing ecosystem.
This is clearest in the case of first serial rights, sales of which have dried up as mags such as Esquire and Vanity Fair cease to publish short fiction. Ottessa Moshfegh and George Saunders are self-publishing prose on the platform, thrown into the same crowded arena as midlist and emerging authors. Jill Tew, author of the YA dystopian romance An Ocean Apart (Joy Revolution), said she’s serializing her new “anti–generative AI” novel, Melee, on Substack because it’s too timely to give over to standard publishing. Sometimes, this can lead to a book deal: last month, Random House won Woman of Letters Substack author Naomi Kanakia’s The Payoff, which builds on her Substack novella Money Matters.
Many Substack authors, like Kanakia, have stayed loyal to traditional deals, and the voices propping up Substack’s literature category “bestseller” list, measured by the number of paid subscribers, are publishing giants, such as Saunders.
While Authors Equity hasn’t yet decided if it will serialize McKenzie’s How to Save the Media, McIntosh said it will release chapters of the book—and is looking to creatively incorporate Substack into its publishing and publicity strategy.
“Needless to say,” she added, “we’re very excited to experiment with him.”
