Is Substack Good for Indie Authors?

Why I'm here, and where we're going

This long article is based on the research I did when thinking about moving my reader community from Mailpoet and Kit and Patreon and social media all to reside here, on Substack. It’s not a post for my readers, but for indie authors who are thinking seriously about where their reader community lives — whether they write fiction, poetry, or non-fiction.

It’s for writers who care about ownership, ethics, longevity, and the quality of their creative life, not just growth metrics or short-term visibility. Those who want to make deliberate, informed choices rather than chase the latest platform shift. It:

• explains why I moved here myself and what I hope for from the platform

• offers an FAQ for other authors considering Substack, including novelists and poets

• explores some of my concerns (yes, the Nazis), because every platform has pros and cons

• concludes with why I’m hopeful and hope to remain here for a long time

Why I Moved

Substack is better suited than any other platform to the kind of writing and sharing I want to do, going forward. For over a decade, I’ve advised other authors and helped compile how-to guides, policy decisions, and wider communications at the Alliance of Independent Authors, while producing and publishing my own books along the way.

In 2026, I’ll be taking a small step back at ALLi. As founder and director, I’ll still be leading the organisation but we’ve hired a new, younger community lead, and I’m moving into a more steering role. Which will make the day job less pressing and give me more time for writing and producing my own fiction and poetry books.

Here on Substack I want to share more about my own publishing, as a literary fiction and poetry book author—two challenging genres where indies can feel less visible. I want to open the doors to my own process, so I can explain more deeply my decisions and reasoning.

I want to bear witness to how how art, politics, grief, love, and power interweave over time and how creativity actually unfolds across one indie author’s writing and publishing life. I feel like this kind of witness-writing will carry more weight than advocacy in the age of AI. Showing not telling.

This is where poetry and fiction naturally live and where I want my social sharing to be centred.

Also, I’ve really missed community since ditching Twitter when Elon Musk eviscerated it into X, and Meta when they shifted their supposedly open platform into blatant political partisanship. Already I’ve discovered old friends and wonderful new writers and my inbox overfloweth with good things.

Substack is full of the kind of people I want to surround myself in the years to come.

What’s Good About Substack for Indie Authors?

If you’re here on Substack already, you know this but for the new people, here’s why Substack is different. Largely it’s because they integrate a number of things beautifully: newsletter + email + notes + chats are all in one place.

When writers publish on Substack, work isn’t just landing in inboxes—it also lives on a web and app ecosystem designed for it to be found, read, shared, commented on, and recommended.

• Free + paid subscription setup. Readers can consume freely. Writers can keep a wide, free readership while offering deeper, member-only work to fans and followers.

• Community features: Readers can respond, ask questions, and feel part of a living writing-and-reading space, not just a mailing list.

• Recommendations: When readers follow a writer they love, they can also discover other associated writers.

• Easy to understand stats: you can see what people are opening, clicking and sharing, and adjust accordingly, without needing to become a data analyst.

For indie authors, who are always balancing creation with connection, this makes for a great package, with Substack baking some of that ‘connection work’ into the platform.

Substack’s business model is monetising the content itself. They’re not selling ads (though they do now, just recently, allow for sponsorship). Like other email managers e.g. Mailerlite or Convertkit, writers have access to their subscribers’ email address but, unlike them, Substack runs a similar model to retailers that indie authors are familar with, like Amazon KDP, Kobo and Draft2Digital. They don’t get paid unless the writers gets paid.

Where it goes beyond those platforms, and where it completely differs from social media platforms like Facebook or Twitter, is that you know who’s following you: you have the list and good data about how they are responding to your work.

What’s Not So Good About Substack for Indie Authors?

Substack is venture-capital funded, which means it’s ultimately accountable to investors as well as writers and readers. That doesn’t make it unusual — most major platforms are — but it does matter. VC funding tends to favour:

• growth over sustainability,

• scale over nuance,

• platform priorities over individual creators’ long-term needs.

Right now, Substack’s interests largely align with writers’ needs: it wants good writing, loyal readers, and thriving publications but that alignment is not guaranteed forever. Business models evolve, incentives shift, and platforms change direction.

For indie authors, this means Substack is best approached as:

• a powerful publishing and discovery tool,

• a place to build relationships with readers

As with any platform, the wise stance is engagement without dependency: enjoy the benefits, keep your eyes open, and retain control of your work, your archive, and your reader connections.

Writing a newsletter for money is not the same thing as writing an author newsletter for readers. Substack is always, subtly it must be said, promoting paywalls and revenue strategies that won’t be right for every author.

Substack also controls discovery in ways that aren’t always fully transparent. Recommendations, Notes, and the wider network effects of the platform can be wonderfully generative — but they also mean that reach is, to some degree, mediated by systems you don’t fully see or control.

Most writers can’t easily tell why one post travels and another doesn’t, or what exactly triggers amplification beyond the usual basics of quality, consistency, and engagement.

And, as with any fast-growing platform, early adopters and high-profile accounts tend to benefit from structural advantages: more visibility, more cross-promotion, more inbound recommendations, and an easier glide path into discovery.

None of this is a reason not to use Substack — but it is a reason to approach it with clear eyes, and to build your readership deliberately rather than assuming the platform will do it for you.

So yes — Substack, like all platforms, has pros and cons. The question isn’t whether it’s perfect, but whether you’re using it deliberately, in service of your own creative and publishing goals.

Is Substack only for Nonfiction Writers?

Substack began with a strong non-fiction bias, and that’s still reflected in much of its most visible content but being venture-capital funded and under pressure to grow, the platform is now turning its attention to fiction, poetry, and comics.

It’s early days. The norms, formats, and reader expectations for these genres are not yet settled on Substack in the way they are for essays and commentary.

What’s emerging now feels more like experimentation than a finished model — writers testing how serial fiction, poems-in-public, drafts, readings, and reflective commentary might sit alongside more traditional posts.

I’ll be including my own fiction and poetry here as part of that exploration, sharing what works and what doesn’t as I go. What I can say for sure right now is that authors and readers of fiction and poetry are beginning to adopt Substack in greater numbers. It’s a good time to come aboard.

Should I Start A Substack?

Maybe. Maybe not. Like any platform, it depends on the kind of books you write, the kind of publisher you are, your definition of success, and your goals for your Substack.

If you’re an unpublished, unknown writer who has no work available, and no existing readership, could you benefit from and grow a newsletter here? Absolutely, but you’ll have to figure out what you’re going to write about that’s going to be of value to your target reader.

What content will you use to attract a readership? As ever, that question is easier for non-fiction writers and poets to answer than novelists, and non-fiction is always read more than fiction or poetry online.

The majority of those doing well on Substack, currently, are non-fiction authors who value serious reads—that is changing as novelists and musicians and comic book writers and artists arrive. It will be interesting to see how it evolves.

No matter who’s here, though, getting people to read your Substack is no different than getting people to read your blog, subscribe to your podcast or YouTube channel, or follow you on social media. You have to provide information, inspiration, or entertainment and do it well.

Writing for Substack calls on adjacent skills: a feel for what travels in online spaces, some basic copywriting for headlines and subject lines, and a willingness to publish frequently and conversationally. These are different skills to writing a book.

And if you want to use your Substack to promote your books, you’ll have to offer your offering in a way that appeals to your target reader.

All tricky stuff that takes most authors some time to figure out.

The most important question, though, isn’t how quickly you grow or how many subscribers you can attract on Substack, but whether the practice of writing here will strengthen your creative life or drain it. If Substack helps you write more honestly, more consistently, or be more alive to your readers, then it’s doing a powerful job for you — regardless of the numbers.

Here’s an email from Elizabeth Anne, one of the many indie authors who’ve reached out to connect since I joined Substack last week: E A Carter

Last summer I lost my best friend to cancer and all that’s really left to us online of her are her Facebook posts. I realised my writing was all over the place, scattered far and wide. So, I decided to create an archive of my writing (by structuring my Substack into different newsletter topics on I write about since my interests are quite varied beyond fiction). Then I set about uploading all my works. It took ages! I decided to upload all my books in full and anyone can read them for a paid subscription which if they are a fast reader could only set them back $5.00!

I’ve had a few annual subscribers sign up already, and although I lost a few people on my mailing list despite taking care to make the move as seamless as possible, I guess not everyone fancies the Substack way.

It’s okay because for me, writing newsletters on Mailerlite felt more like homework, where here I just write my heart about about the things that I want to and then send out a fortnightly email magazine with links to the posts I’ve posted so subs can pick and choose.

What About the Nazi / Hate Speech Controversies?

And yes, Substack has had its share of controversies, not least around free speech and platforming — including the decision, some years ago, to continue taking payments from a small number of neo-Nazi profiles.

I personally think the furore in parts of the writing community became overheated. That’s not to minimise the issue. Substack’s ‘Nazi problem’ was real, and the underlying question is serious: where do you draw the line between a strong free-speech stance and the harms that come from allowing extremists to operate — and profit — on your platform?

A lot of the public argument also muddied terms. Substack didn’t ‘host’ or ‘fund’ extremists in the way those words are commonly understood (as in actively promoting or commissioning them). The conflict centred on whether Substack should remove a small number of vile paid accounts — and whether taking their money was, in effect, enabling them.

Substack’s early response leaned on principle without fully engaging with complexity, and that predictably inflamed matters. At first they defended their strong free-speech policy, without fully engaging with the complexities. The result, predictably, was uproar!

My favourite summary and commentary was Margaret Atwood’s:

No, Substack...you can’t have both the terms of service you have spelled out and a bunch of individial [sic] publishers who violate those terms of service. One or the other has got to go, and hiding under the sofa and pretending it isn’t happening will not make your dilemma go away.

Nor will some laudable rhetoric about free speech – not when you yourselves have clearly stated that not everything is allowable, including threats of “violence” and “physical harm” to “protected classes.”

So, one or the other, dear Substack. Tell us which.

I am sure you mean well, but you are young and inexperienced, and did not think this through. It’s not too late!

Substack did remove a small number of accounts, which then produced backlash from both directions — those who felt it wasn’t enough, and those who saw it as censorship. Anyone who has led a values-driven organisation will recognise the bind.

At ALLi, for example, we’re regularly told we’re simultaneously too pro- and too anti-AI, depending on the speaker’s position. With a real community, you don’t get to please everyone — but you do have to engage seriously, and consistently, with disagreement.

From what I can see, that episode forced Substack to grow up: clearer moderation policies, stronger anti-abuse measures, and more robust reporting tools. The headlines were loud, and many people heard only the first wave of noise, not the follow-on. Others are opposed on principle to any platform that doesn’t ‘no-platform’ aggressively — and that always gives me pause.

I grew up in Ireland in a climate of censorship — even book burning — so I’m permanently alert to who gets to silence whom, even when I despise what is being said. At the same time, we are in dangerous times: the far-right is mobilising internationally in ways we haven’t seen since the mid-twentieth century, and moderation failures on any large platform can do real harm.

No platform is without risk. Patreon, for example, has faced repeated safeguarding controversies, including delayed responses to sexual abuse involving minors. At scale, these problems are hard, ongoing, and—too often—inevitable. The only durable reassurance I’ve found is an engaged, thoughtful community that keeps asking hard questions, and a platform willing to respond with seriousness when issues arise.

Speaking as someone who closed her Twitter account when Elon Musk eviscerated it into X, and left Meta when they shifted their supposedly open platform into blatant political partisanship, I’m willing—after months of research and lurking—to give Substack the benefit of the doubt.

When I look around now, I see a platform dominated by respected journalists, essayists, and authors across the political and cultural spectrum, with clear rules against hate, harassment, and illegal content — anything but a far-right enclave.

Heart Open and Eyes Open

Substack is not perfect. No platform is but after months of research, lurking, and listening, I’ve chosen to be here because it supports the kind of writing life I want now: slower, deeper, more relational, and more integrated with the work itself.

Without doubt, Substack can be a powerful place to publish, connect, and think in public but for indie authors, the real question is not whether Substack is good or bad in the abstract, but whether it serves your creative goals, your genres, your temperament, your definition of success.

I’m here with my eyes open, my archive backed up, and my centre of gravity firmly in my books. For now, Substack aligns well with how I want to read, write and share and feels like a place where serious writers and readers can meet in good faith.

That’s reason enough for me to be here and to keep testing what’s possible and see what it can hold over time.

How good it would be if it stayed true to its roots and we could all still be here in twenty years time.