The Work of Selling Your Writing on Substack

Do the work

The other morning I was sitting at my desk, the same black standing desk¹ where I've written everything for the past fifteen years, when I remembered something newspaper columnist Jimmy Cannon wrote about Stan Musial. Cannon said Musial — the pride of nearby Donora, PA² — played ball the way little kids did, for the love of it, like he'd play for nothing if they'd let him. That's how I feel about writing, except they do let me do it for nothing, and often I have.

Ernest Hemingway once said of Cannon³ that he wrote "to end writing." Not to finish it or complete it, but to end it, to write something so perfect and true that nothing more needed saying. That's what we're all trying to do, those of us who care about this work. Write something so pretty it'll make you think, make you cry, make you different than you were before you read it.

You readers have helped make this Substack moderately successful. Not wildly successful, not quit-your-day-job successful, but successful enough that I can keep doing what I've always done: Write whatever I want, when I want, on whatever topics I can address with the kind of critical detail other folks might not manage. It’s one hell of a privilege, sitting down to write the most interesting thing I can possibly write. The request for money is an ugly part of this enterprise, you betcha, but it's not the whole kit and kaboodle.

This subscription writing world has developed its own strange rituals. You've seen them. There are folks who insist they don't care about money at all — everything's free, they do this purely for love, they only read the small accounts because nobodies are pure. What the more cynical ones don't say is that nobodies are no threat, that reading them is like a heavyweight boxer sparring with children.

Then there are the metrics obsessives. Heat maps and tracking pixels and conversion funnels. Just yesterday in one of the many "monetizing" chats associated with this work, someone asked simply: "how do i make a lot more money." No punctuation, no pretense. Others fret about their stats not loading, about video post delays, about the discrepancy between their subscriber count and what shows on the graph. They discuss "rate of publishing that corresponds to higher engagement" and wonder about "conversions from paid to unpaid." "I need to know this shit quickly so I can AI pivot my content to trending topics for max impact," says one literary entrerpreneur

The whole thing reminds me of that scene in Sinclair Lewis's Elmer Gantry, when the pious Andrew Pengilly listens to Gantry go on about his successful ministry:

"You say, Brother Pengilly, that you've heard of our work at Wellspring? But do we get so near the hearts of the weak and unfortunate as you here? Oh, no; sometimes I think that my first pastorate, in a town smaller than this, was in many ways more blessed than our tremendous to-do in the great city. And what is accomplished there is no credit to me. I have such splendid, such touchingly loyal assistants—Mr. Webster, the assistant pastor—such a consecrated worker, and yet right on the job—and Mr. Wink, and Miss Weezeger, the deaconess, and dear Miss Bundle, the secretary—such a faithful soul, so industrious. Oh, yes, I am singularly blessed! But, uh, but— Given these people, who really do the work, we've been able to put over some pretty good things—with God's leading. Why, say, we've started the only class in show-window dressing in any church in the United States—and I should suppose England and France! We've already seen the most wonderful results, not only in raising the salary of several of the fine young men in our church, but in increasing business throughout the city and improving the appearance of show-windows, and you know how much that adds to the beauty of the down-town streets! And the crowds do seem to be increasing steadily. We had over eleven hundred present on my last Sunday evening in Zenith, and that in summer! And during the season we often have nearly eighteen hundred, in an auditorium that's only supposed to seat sixteen hundred! And with all modesty—it's not my doing but the methods we're working up—I think I may say that every man, woman, and child goes away happy and yet with a message to sustain 'em through the week. You see—oh, of course I give 'em the straight old-time gospel in my sermon—I'm not the least bit afraid of talking right up to 'em and reminding them of the awful consequences of sin and ignorance and spiritual sloth. Yes, sir! No blinking the horrors of the old-time proven Hell, not in any church I'm running! But also we make 'em get together, and their pastor is just one of their own chums, and we sing cheerful, comforting songs, and do they like it? Say! It shows up in the collections!"

"Mr. Gantry," said Andrew Pengilly, "why don't you believe in God?"

Why don't you believe in God? That's what Pengilly asks, and it's always what I want to ask the metrics obsessives. Why don't you believe in writing?

I learned early that this game was rigged. Back at UNC, I had a journalism adjunct who taught me the real business. He'd show up to movie screenings with a pillow and blanket, sleep through them — his sleep apnea shaking the whole theater — then wake up and paraphrase Ebert's review for 50 bucks. "Nobody reads this shit," he'd say, "so don't waste your time polishing these turds." He taught me to write under other people's bylines, to transform my rough life story into their sob stories, changing names and dates as needed.

25 dollars here, 50 there. I wrote high school football recaps solely from scorecards, movie reviews for films I'd never seen, columns for exhausted staffers on tight deadlines. I learned early that lots of prominent writers don't write their own words, that this whole enterprise is shot through with what dril once called "a growing network of 'CON MEN' and 'IMBECILES.'"

But I kept writing my own stuff too. And that's where the struggle sessions took place.

By 2016, I thought I could freelance full-time. I was wrong. As I wrote in the Columbia Journalism Review, between March 2016 and the end of 2017, I scraped together $27,000 from mainstream publications between a pair of full-time jobs. Around $4,000 came from kill fees — a quarter of what I would have made if those stories had lived. My Google Drive became a graveyard of dead drafts.

The worst was a personal essay about my adolescence. It had mattered to me, this story about boyhood pain and loneliness, about being locked in my bedroom playing Final Fantasy VI⁴ while my parents went all Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? on each other. I wrote about "the ghost of Oliver Bateman," how he "lingered behind…in an old future that had once seemed far beyond the horizon but now was history."

After months of edits, after pouring everything into it, the editorial killshot hit its mark: "It just wasn't coming through the way we'd envisioned." Of course it wasn’t. It was only my life, after all.

Deep down, all I'd ever wanted was to write. Each time a meaningful story died, I felt like I'd wound up missing happiness by a few minutes at some appointed location. What does it mean to be so close to something you can taste it, yet still so far that nobody would believe you were ever there?

Losing the big features hurt, too. A story about drug testing in professional bodybuilding for the Outline — 20,000 words across two drafts, 75 hours of work, sold for $1,500.⁵ Killed for $300 when a new editor decided they wanted something different. Another colleague sold a story to a Hearst publication in December 2016, was reassured for a year that the editor was "so excited to make this work," then got a $200 kill fee on an $800 story because he didn't "have the bandwidth."

I started calling myself "The Ghost of Oliver Bateman" on Twitter. It was a joke that wasn't a joke, a way to acknowledge that I was haunting editorial inboxes for $50-$100 kill fees on stories that had taken pieces of my soul to write.

But here's what matters: I never stopped. Even when I had to take one boring day job after another, even when the big commissions weren’t coming and the little ones lingered in editorial inboxes for months at a time, even when my best work was dying in Google docs.⁶ Because unlike Elmer Gantry, I still believe in this thing we do.⁷

I'm not going to pretend money doesn't matter. I grew up in a staunchly blue-collar family that knew the value of a dollar because they'd (literally) bled for every one. Anyone who says money doesn't matter has never really needed it.

But money isn't why I wake up at this desk every morning. I do this because I can't not do it. Because sometimes, rarely but sometimes, I write something that does what Cannon said — ends writing, at least for a moment, by being so true nothing more needs saying.

What it's really about is this: trying to connect across the vast gulf of incommensurability between human beings. Trying to write something real enough that it makes someone else feel less alone, as I suppose this essay did. That's the whole game. That's all it's ever been.

So yes, I'm always asking for your support. Not just your money, though money helps keep this operation running. I'm asking you to believe in this thing we're doing here, this attempt to write honestly about whatever needs writing about on any given day.

If you can support this work financially, I'm grateful. If you can't, I'm grateful you've read this far. Grateful that anyone is still reading anything, let alone reading "ya boi" here …hell, that's an honest-to-goodness miracle, right up there with the loaves and the fishes. It’s nice to know we can still send these volleys across the void and sometimes, sometimes they land.

I think about those old ragtime professors, playing their sad songs for cocktail peanuts in sneak-joints, singing the blues to the dead-end drunks who understood them. They couldn’t play for the concert halls. They played because the music had to come out, because someone needed to hear it, because it was better than silence.

That's what real writing is. Not heat maps or conversion funnels. Just sitting here in the wee small hours of the morning, trying to find words for something true, believing that somewhere out there you're reading this and feeling something too.

As I said, the money's part of it, but it's not the heart of it. The heart is this: writing to end writing, one true sentence at a time, for as long as you let me.

And you’re still letting me. For now.

1. That’s right. I’ve had a standing desk for a long time, but I almost always position it in the (normal) seated mode.

2. Donora has given both the best Polish-American player (Musial) and one of the all-time great Black baseball families (Ken Griffey père and Ken Griffey fils).

3. My idol, at least as far as short-form deadline writers go. Check out his best work here.

4. Read that essay. It’s really good.

5. That editor has killed my work everywhere she’s gone but hey, it’s all in the game — she’s released a new book on powerlifting that was reviewed in the New Yorker and elsewhere, and I haven’t. So it goes.

6. Much of that work is now beginning to appear here.

7. Look at that bibliography: 1,000+ paid bylines since 2010. That’s the work you do for the love of the game.