Some Meandering Thoughts on Quitting Publishing + Link Love
Just because it's a gift doesn't mean we have to keep it forever
Yesterday morning some friends of ours and their respective parents came over to see The Little River Cottage. When we knew we’d be moving this year, we immediately thought of them: a young couple getting married this fall whom we love and who are committed to this locale for the long-haul. As some of them toured the house, others sat at the kitchen table with me, and one said, “I can’t imagine ever wanting to leave this place, it’s such a gift.”
Two tears welled up in my two eyes as I said, “It has been a gift and we don’t want to leave it, but not every gift is for always. It’s been a gift for a time and now it can be a gift to someone else.” I feel that truly, though I also feel a deep sadness in me to leave it—the sadness is layered and complex, as most grief is.
It is Monday morning and I am back at the work of work. These days my work is our sole income and I take the work seriously. I’ve heard many folks say things like “Writing alone can’t support a family” or “Women in particular can only write because they have a husband with a real job footing the bills.” I’m not ashamed to say that while Nate’s work has generally paid our bills during our marriage, it has been my work that has put down-payments on two of our houses and mostly my work that afforded a full renovation of our home and my graduate schooling. Not to mention I supported myself through freelance writing alone for several years before we got married. It is now my work that is keeping our bank account afloat and our bills paid. I don’t say this to brag, actually the opposite. It has taken me 25 years of writing—of labor—to get to this place. And while book advances are nice for some chunks of change when we’ve needed them most (i.e. house downpayments or renovations), it is Substack that is actually paying the bills these days. It is Substack that is making me think—after writing and releasing three books in five years—that I don’t have to keep churning out books anymore in order to contribute to our family’s livelihood.
Last week
(arguably one of the most thoughtful and smart writers in the Christian space these days) shared a post titled The Day I Decided to Quit Book Publishing. As I read, I was reminded of a conversation I had forever ago with fellow writer Michelle DeRusha, who had quit book publishing years ago. Reasons for quitting book publishing are varied and personal, but the many, many, many times I’ve considered quitting has been because it’s book publishing in its current iteration that makes it difficult to live off of what one makes writing.1 And once the book is published, as I wrote about several weeks ago, there isn’t a lot of incentive for the author to keep trying to market the book.I’ve always been of the belief that if one wants to write and feels called to writing, one doesn’t have to write books to be called a writer. I wrote on Sayable for twenty years before publishing a book and for ten years before touching social media. Those years honed my skills and gave me courage and brought me my most faithful readers. I have always considered my Sayable work to be my real work, the work I’ve really loved, the work I do best, the writing I’m most proud of. When people were saying blogging was dead, I guess I kept on beating a dead horse because my love for this form of writing had never been stronger. I love this medium. But until Substack, there hasn’t really been a way to legitimize this work as real work because it couldn’t pay the bills.2
And paying the bills = a real job. Anything else is a hobby, right? Or simply the clawing work of “building a platform” which everyone assumes immediately to be “get your social numbers up,” but which is actually just doing the damn work instead of leaning into one’s physical aesthetic or Canva skills or institutional backing.3
said in 2021 that the “platform is the work, not that we build a platform in order to do the work.” Writer Mirella Stoyanova said something similar on Jane Friedman’s blog recently: “The author platform follows the work. Not the other way around.” Karen has said elsewhere something like she considers her book writing to be the overflow of her vocational work, which has been teaching until the past year. I find that interesting, especially in light of Jen’s post today, about institutional backing and female writers, because I think as long as you have the institutional backing of a university or seminary, it’s a little bit easier to practice writing as overflow instead of writing as (paying) vocation. Once you lose that, as Karen has in the past year or as I have over the last several years or as so many of us women have in recent years, we have to figure out what it looks like to keep writing without the podium that institutions, theological circles, churches, or bros of various kind give us. In other words, we really have to let the writing itself be the platform itself.So all of this has had me thinking over the last few months. Publishing books is a gift, but does that mean it has to be a gift that I keep for the rest of my life? I’m ramping up to releasing The Understory, a book I loved writing, a book that feels like me, but a book that I still have to spend the next four or six months trying to sell, which, to me, feels like selling my soul off piecemeal. I’m not exaggerating. The amount of anxiety I feel in these months is paramount. In the current climate, even the professionals like
aren’t sure how to ease this anxiety for writers. If I want this book to do well, I have to show up on podcasts or videos (a medium I’m never comfortable with), do speaking engagements, travel at times, pitch and publish op-eds—all things absolutely at odds with my deep vocational call, desire, and platform, of writing.But now I have Substack. And I know a lot of you may have lots of feelings about Substack one way or another, but here’s what I know: I have the opportunity to do a thing I love—writing essays on a myriad of subjects in a myriad of styles, a thing that doesn’t wear me out or force me in front of a camera or dangle book sales in front of my eyes if only I’ll travel or speak or whatever, and get paid for it? You and you and you and you will chip in $3.50 a month to support the work I do here? The non-anxious, overwhelmingly enjoyable, constantly-challenging-me work of showing up here and this will keep our family afloat during this (unexpectedly longer) time without Nate’s salary? This will pay just as much as a book advance or even more over the long-haul? And it’s also a space where I can help support my fellow writers who are doing the work of writing instead of burning themselves out on the work of platform building?
Sign. me. up.
Many of the pieces I wanted to include in Link Love this week were linked throughout the piece above. As I was perusing my recent saves, I found the through line and just wanted to think aloud about it all for you, so please do click on those links above. There’s some great food for thought up there. And there’s lots more link love down there 👇🏼
