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Liz Rios Hall's avatar

Such a great perspective, as always! I'd add Sweater Weather to your list of bookish pubs to read and support (it's free!). The most exciting thing for me about the current newsletter environment (whatever's enabling it), is the freedom it gives writers to play around with form and style in a way that wasn't possible with traditional print pubs. It feels like Brandon Taylor has taken that freedom and done something new with it. (Or maybe returned to a very old form, the familiar essay, and made it new again? Don't know. Either way, it's brilliant and I hope to see more like it.)

I considered starting a bookish Substack a couple years back, but never did because of the time and labor it takes to make it successful. Running your own publication isn't something we can all do. I'd love to see more paid opportunities for freelance contributors in newsletters. (I know Book Post does this and The Biblioracle just started doing it.) Maybe that takes away from the appearance of "authenticity," but I'm not sure how else independent book review writers and critics can survive here.

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Ann Kjellberg's avatar

Exactly! Thanks so much for this, Anne, and for the Book Post recommendation! I also think that one thing people underestimate about becoming a nonprofit is how it changes your workload. When you are a nonprofit fundraising and grant-writing become a significant part of your day. Graywolf, Milkweed, they have development staff. Your audience becomes, in a meaningful way, your funders as well as your readers. And fundraising is hard: it’s a lot of work and not everyone is good at it. As with the billionaires, it becomes people with disposable income "doing good" steering the ship rather than readers paying for what they want to read. When I wrote up the Bookforum closure for Book Post what I found interesting was that it actually grew out of a thriving business model (gallery ads for art magazines), even though that too was linked to wealth... What you nail here is that with newsletters the financial link between the reader and the writer is very direct, no layer of patronage, no other influence or interest asserting itself.

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Anne Trubek's avatar

Perfectly said! And why I never wanted Belt Publishing to be a non-profit. Pros and cons with all models.

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Ann Kjellberg's avatar

Likewise.

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Henriette Lazaridis's avatar

Thank you for writing this. You so consistently have super-smart things to say about the book business, and this post is no exception. I think it's important for us in the book business to really examine all the sacred cows we hold onto and see them for the sacred cows that they are. Print is nice, but. . . it's expensive, and carbon-costly, and has other problems. And that's just on of the points you make here that I think is worth thinking about.

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Anne Trubek's avatar

thank you so much for this!

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Dec 19, 2022
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Anne Trubek's avatar

I mean it is unsustainable, all these newsletters. And if a bunch gathered together to create one umbrella review pub, I bet paid subscriptions would decline, as it seems—like TikTok—it’s often about the fact that it is one “authentic” person creating things that inspires ppl to pay

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