Making the most of Substack as a fiction author - interview with Eleanor Anstruther
Author Eleanor Anstruther
I’m so excited to be sharing this interview with you! Eleanor Anstruther is an award-winning author and was one of my very first web design clients, five years ago. She recently booked me for a couple of Author VIP Design Days and we gave her website a complete makeover - but before I started work, we had a catch up and Eleanor told me all about the success she’s had recently on Substack!
Now, Substack is very much on my radar as I seem to be surrounded by authors who absolutely love the platform, so I was really pleased when Eleanor agreed to answer a few of my questions about it…
I hope you enjoy this entertaining and insightful discussion as much as I did…
Hello! Thanks so much for agreeing to be interviewed. Please can you introduce yourself and give us a little background into your writing career.
Hello! I’m a writer of literary fiction, published mainstream and indie. I began my writing career wrestling a complicated family story to the ground; my debut A Perfect Explanation took the true facts of my father’s beginnings – he was sold by his mother to his aunt - and connected them along emotionally fictitious lines, fictitious in that they were my best guess. Who can know what people long dead felt as they made their decisions?
Based on extensive research, I made it up. I hope I got it right. It took me a decade, was published by Salt Books and did very well, so well in fact that I thought reviews in The Guardian and interviews on Women’s Hour and Sky News were normal. Little did I know….
What made you decide to set up your Substack, The Literary Obsessive?
Ah yes, well there’s the rub. Three subsequent novels and three years later, my initial flurry of success had failed to turn into a bestselling litany of book deals. All subsequent novels were turned down, fallers at the first hurdle, no one wanted them. I’m planning an article on The Cult of the Debut, but that is for another time…
Meanwhile, miserable, down on my luck and beginning to think maybe I couldn’t write after all, my friend Fiona Melrose (look out for her latest novel, coming out this Feb) and I scheduled a zoom call to bemoan our lot (she, too was in the same boat, motionless on the same sea) and both came up with the decision to not let the bastards grind us down, and instead to find a way to take agency. Substack was mine.
There, and for the first time, I was in charge of that button marked, Publish.
And subsequently - what made you decide to serialise your novel, Fallout, on Substack?
Serialisation, the art and incredible usefulness of it, has been a happy accident of arriving on the platform. I’ve since learnt that I’m standing on the shoulders of not just Dickens and Trollope, but hundreds of others right up until the eighties who’ve used the form to try out work, assess readership and foretaste its eventual publication in book form. The only difference between now and then is that it’s me, the author doing it, not a publisher on my behalf.
I fell into it via an experiment, new as I was to Substack, to write and publish each day posts that took no more than one minute to read. A Memoir in 65 Postcards & The Recovery Diaries was the result, my memoir written and published in real time over one hundred and seventy-three days. Incredibly, and this is the tricky bit about serialising, my readers came with me, and by the end, a whole book was born which was published by Troubador last June.
Riding high on the back of that success, I thought of those three novels that had hit the skids in the mainstream world, three novels I was proud of, that deserved to be read but which would remain in the drawer if I didn’t do something about them.
So I pulled out the first, In Judgement of Others, written while my debut was in its submission process, gave it an editorial overhaul, restructured it for serialisation, scheduled the posts, pressed publish, and we were off. It too went well, more readers came with me, they loved it and so it followed in the tracks of my memoir, making its way into paperback, again published by Troubador; it comes out this January.
And so, we come to Fallout, next in line, another novel turned down by the mainstream that would have died had Substack not given me form and reason to bring it to life. We’re thirty-three chapters in, and this being my third novel to serialise, I’ve learnt a great deal about how to do it. Early lessons, like setting off before I’d finished editing, have been learned. Easy mistakes, like failing to create a navigation page, have been avoided. I’ll be teaching a class on serialisation in November if any of your readers are interested in coming along. I’ve found it to be one of the best editing tools there is.
For readers who aren’t familiar with Substack, please can you give an overview of what the platform is and how it works?
Sure thing. Substack is, as you say, a platform, but that word can’t be stressed enough; it’s literally a blank page, an online space in which you create your own publication.
It’s incredibly simple to use, the creators, some of whom I’ve got to know, were keen from the get-go for it serve the writer in two ways, to easily publish their work, and build a supportive community. They’re self-confessed idealists; Hamish, Chris, Sofia, Mills and others set out to change the publishing world, and for my money, they’re doing it. You can visit as a reader or set up an account and start publishing. If you’re there for the latter, you’ll find a system that even someone as technically dim as me can learn to navigate.
Of course there’s a deeper, more complicated level to get into once you’ve mastered the basics, but you can start publishing immediately, and most of us have learnt by trial and error, publishing as we go along. I call it, “Failing out loud” which has been a pretty healthy way to conduct myself through it.
It’s a really supportive atmosphere where nobody cares about the millions of mistakes we all make along the way, and for an experience that will rehabilitate your relationship to being online, and in my case, to being a professional a writer, Substack is your place.
“Substack is an artistic community designed to create connection. That’s it. And it does it in spades.”
How would you describe the Substack community? In what ways do you find it differs from other social media communities?
Ah, I probably should read ahead! As I’ve said, it’s Supportive with a capital S. I’m told the algorithm is such that it’s not designed to keep you scrolling or sell you anything or present you with accounts based on things you’ve clicked on, nor make you feel bad so that the dopamine surge feels ever more vital. It’s an artistic community designed to create connection. That’s it. And it does it in spades.
What amazes me and the friends I’ve made is how, in that great Substack ocean, we found each other, and I hear this all the time from different groups. Somehow, writers who’ve now become my actual, offline friends, found their way to me and I to them. It’s a mystery to all of us, yet a totally blessed one. Mills Baker, head of design, has done some magic. No kidding.
How can a fiction author make use of Substack to help support their writing? Do you have any thoughts on the monetisation side of Substack?
This is an interesting question, and one I pose in a different way on my interview series, 8 Questions. To pay or not to pay? And everyone comes up with a different answer. But first to get into the fiction aspect. One thing we fiction writers are constantly badgering the Substack high table about is its support of what we do in terms of our visibility in the stacks. Substack began life with cultural and political essayists out numbering fiction writers 1000 to 1, you’ll see there’s a huge political commentary aspect as well as health and well-being and every shade of memoir, review and social pundit. But us fiction writers have been gaining ground and we now make up a huge part of the platform.
Now hold on a second, let me clarify. There are many fiction writers who write about fiction and the writing life, how-to guides and class, the publishing game and so on, and then there are authors publishing their actual fiction. Whichever you choose to be (and you can be both), Substack is fast growing a reputation as a place to find new work, connect with established authors, join workshops and widen your networks. Publishing houses are setting up their own accounts. Writers are being picked up by editors and offered deals. Big name authors are exercising their artistic freedom in their own accounts, writing copy they didn’t feel comfortable publishing elsewhere.
I remember when Luke Jennings, author of Killing Eve, arrived and announced he’d be publishing original fiction there. We watched as Substack’s currency visibly rose in the publishing world. Many, many well-known writers have since joined bringing with them the eyes and ears of the industry and helping to make Substack a place of serious writing.
As to the monetisation of your work, you can make it pay both in terms of paid subscriptions and the ripple out effect of increased visibility leading to increased sales of your books; it is after all , another place to be seen. But it’s important to understand this is a slow and steady process. Many writers have reported to me that they know which posts win the most traction, but they’re rarely the posts they want to write nor the reason they came there.
So, and this is my warning to you, don’t get caught up in the nightmare of likes and numbers. Come because you’ve got something you need to say and say it. Your people, and your supporters including those who want to pay you, will find you.
Do you have any tips on building up your Substack audience quickly?
Uh oh I’ve done it again. Note to self: read the whole paper before you answer. (You can imagine how my O’ Levels went) My first tip is don’t make that your priority. My friend and Substack colleague Sarah Fay talks about identifying your Substack DNA as the number one most important step in creating and sustaining a publication that not only pleases the most important reader you have, that’s you, but which will draw to it those who’ll stay with you for the long haul. Know yourself. Be yourself. The rest will follow.
Having got those pithy sentences off my chest, I can also share that consistency is key, along with a visually straightforward Home Page (don’t clutter it), a title which speaks in few words what you are about, and a word count that people can manage. When I started out my posts were never more than five hundred words long. Keep it short until you’ve found your stride. And turn off notifications. They’ll do your head in.
“Take your time, swim around, don’t panic. Posts can be edited once they’re up and taken back into drafts if you change your mind about publishing them.”
What’s your number one tip for an author considering setting up their own Substack?
Have a good reason! And that can be anything from, I’ve a few things to get off my chest to I’m an indie author looking to promote my work. But know what your reason is. It will help you identify your Substack DNA.
And take your time, swim around, don’t panic. Posts can be edited once they’re up and taken back into drafts if you change your mind about publishing them.
What’s the one thing you wish everyone knew about Substack, or the most surprising thing you’ve found since you joined?
It’s not just writing. I record chapters using the audio function which also livestreams them into Apple Podcasts and Spotify, and you can also live video stream a la TikTok, and post video recorded interviews. On November 16th me and a couple of other writers are getting together on zoom to talk about literary fiction. It’s a free invite to anyone who wants to come along and listen, and we’ll be opening the discussion up to the room at the end for questions and comments. The whole thing will then be posted as a recording on Substack.
It’s a total experiment, but one we hope will be fun, a virtual literary salon, a place to get our nerd-writer hats on and speak with freedom about the subject we love best. This, and the many interviews and collaborative projects that I’ve been a part of in the two years I’ve been there was not something I expected or considered might happen, let alone need. Think Paris between the wars, or London and The Bloomsbury Group, or New York in the eighties. Substack is global and writers are finding each other, meeting, talking and broadcasting it. I had no idea the vibrancy of this was missing from my life until I found it.
Finally, please can you recommend some of your favourite Substacks, especially ones that would be useful for other writers to follow?
Too many! But I’ll try. For learning the Substack ropes look no further than Sarah Fay, Writers at Work. For beautiful writing and a perfect example of a clear DNA, look at Death and Birds by Chloe Hope and Raising Myles by Marc Typo. For fiction that’s hilarious, experimental, and artistically focused have a look at what Adam Nathan is up to. Kim Warner is up to something interesting with Unfixed, a memoirist who uses her experience to celebrate others, and for the big guns in social and cultural commentary, Ted Gioia’s your man.
I could go on and on. Is that enough? You can have a look at who I read by going onto my pre page and using the drop down menu, Reads.
