(2026-03-14) Chayka Should You Write A Substack Instead Of A Book

Kyle Chayka: Should you write a Substack instead of a book? If you want to sustain a career as a creator of culture, you have to make money. Different kinds of artists do this in different ways.

Writers sell books — kind of. Only one out of five books, and probably far fewer than that, earn more money in sales than the author was paid as an advance, so real income from royalties is quite rare.

less-than-bestselling authors have to survive any way they can: teaching classes, hosting writing retreats, selling their clothes on Depop — or charging subscriptions for a newsletter.

Substack newsletters have been an economic lifeline for any number of writers who don’t quite fit in to a slot with an institutional salary. I see art journalists and radical novelists and longform magazine writers (among other semi-extinct breeds) paywalling their latest dashed-off dispatches.

For a writer, the LTV of a Substack subscriber is many times higher than the LTV of a book buyer.

We can say that newsletters better monetize an individual’s fandom, while a book better monetizes fandom at scale, hundreds of thousands of people at once, for the already famous.

the labor that goes into writing a book should be valued much higher than it is. A reader doesn’t pay a higher price for a physical book just because she wants it more, or because the book was harder to create; prices are relatively flat, whether it’s by a niche poet, an abstruse historian, or a big-idea blogger. A print book is also not necessarily the ideal container for the kinds of knowledge- or culture-production that happen in our video / audio / image-dominated digital environment. Email newsletters with multimedia embeds might make more sense for contemporary consumers.

larger media companies have lost track of the true value of unique content and aren’t particularly good at capturing the value of unique voices. Add to that the decline of institutional credibility — audiences may rather follow a single influencer / creator than subscribe to a magazine’s curated collection of voices — and there’s a real quandary.

So should a writer just embark on a Substack rather than a book and scramble to accumulate any paid subscribers she can? The whole idea is kind of facetious — you don’t have to choose, because newsletters and books are mutually reinforcing. A Substack audience is more likely to buy your eventual book and satisfied book readers are more likely to pay for a newsletter

The downside of the new, paywalled Substack Ecosystem of Knowledge Monetization is that no one is going to help you succeed. No publisher is going to pay you an advance, though I dream of Simon & Schuster subsidizing a new writer’s Substack in exchange for royalties forever. No one is going to edit your newsletter unless you pay them to do it, no one is going to design you a beautiful cover, no one is going to line up bookstore launches for you

When your diary entries are so profitable, why write anything else?

The iterative, ongoing, and intimate nature of a newsletter feeds the online demand for parasocial content, content that encourages audiences to imagine they know its creator personally in a kind of one-sided digital friendship. A book commodifies one carefully composed edifice of knowledge, while a newsletter commodifies the patter of someone’s internal monologue.

Books are not the most parasocial medium, but they are the best form we’ve invented for a reader drawing close in a sustained way to the consciousness of another human being. So if you’re trying to construct a monument to your own genius, a book is probably your best bet.