I tried something similar a while back, as part of a scheme to increase local-community readership; I formatted and printed some of what I thought were my best essays and distributed them in urban hangouts like coffee shops. It was a one-time thing, so it doesn't exactly correspond to your idea, and I didn't gain many readers, but the experience was informative; you can read about the results and see some pictures here: https://twitter.com/william_collen/status/1548286398251159556?s=20&t=TImVKqF5Tz77a2DYzKQtWA
I think it's a splendid idea overall and wish you all success if you do it for your own blog. My thinking is it will have to be completely independent of substack's centralized platform; every blogger will have to make their own decisions about formatting, etc. Some photo and design blogs would be better suited to, for instance, a quarterly glossy-print magazine of readers' favorite posts; some text-only substacks might go the direction of the "family Christmas flyer" that you mention, distributed once a week. Blogs full of music or video links probably would find the printed format entirely unsuitable (unless the print edition had lots of QR codes included).
My feeling is that substack is just the beginning of a complete revolution in how people use the web for information retrieval (that's my awkward attempt to avoid saying "consume content", a phrase that I hate passionately). Remember that it took nearly sixty years for printed books to feature page numbers. Who knows what the future will hold!?
Thanks for sharing your own experience with printing...those look terrific! Appropriately minimal, and I could imagine any number of Substack's in exactly that format.
One thought...add a QR code that links to the article comment section? (It comes full circle!)
I know what you mean about the onus being on individual 'stack's and clearly, there are upsides to the creative freedom what would come with that. I guess part of my thinking is, what is great about Substack is, I think they used to have some kind of tagline that was like "you do the writing, we do all the behind-the-scenes stuff you don't want to do." And reading your twitter thread, it looks like it was kind of a burden for you to do the delivery on your own, and it's things like that where I wonder if the platform could plug-in and handle it. And, if there would be benefits at scale.
Personally, I think the thing stopping me from doing this is simply the prospect of all the busy work of manually gathering addresses, finding a print shop, putting into envelopes. Or even if the printing and distribution was somehow handled by someone else, there's still the management of all the addresses. And that's with a relatively small amount of readers I have that would want this. If this were to grow it could really become quite unwieldy. Imagine "Letters from an American" doing this, with say 20,000 people wanting printed versions (I don't think that's an unrealistic number)! I'd think in that case the platform (or some other kind of adjacent platform) would have to step in.
There is a fifth crucial problem to solve if Substack in Print is to become real. Following on you point from the office: “Listen, Scott. It’s no longer financially viable, we’re losing money. OK? It’s not a charity, it’s a business.” – Printing and mailing paper is expensive, orders of magnitude more expensive that electronic transmission. I recall the start of transition from paper to electronic medial in the late 1990’s. The corporate initiative was dubbed: “The War on Paper.” It was driven by cost saving in which technology was the enabler. That corporate drive continues today as evidence by the constant barrage from everyone you do business with to convert all bills, monthly statement, communications, etc. to an electronic copy. It’s expensive to mail paper. So, the fifth problem to solve is how to finance the cost of publishing and distributing Substack in Print.
There are technologies that will help minimize critical issue 2: The printing problem. Assuming content generation is “free” from the authors, the challenge of variable assembly and distribution can be enabled by technology.
Great points! My question would be: is there demand/willingness to pay that would cover the increased cost? And to answer that, probably another poll with sample size larger than 12 would be needed.
Very much agree with the point on tech-enabled printing.
Fantastic writeup of a much-needed and probably even inevitable idea. I am considering doing exactly this sort of thing with Hickman's Hinterlands this year, and I think it can work. It's also a fantastic way to avoid getting our work sucked up by giant AI-based LLM's and their burgeoning faux-literary slop machine -- and to circumvent the digital information ecosystem, which is often a 'bubble.' Paper encourages a reader to find himself where he is; to read by the river or on the porch or at the kitchen table -- where by contrast, screens are a sort of 'universal nowhere' that scrubs any sense of time or place from the reader's mind.
To tell my readers: "hey, we're outside of the screen bubble, the wind is in your hair, the AI bots can't see us here, these paragraphs won't wind up at the center of some kind of social media imbroglio tomorrow morning, the paper feels good -- mail me a reply, photocopy this essay, tell your friends, go, go, GO!" -- this is the goal, the dream. If there is to be some kind of unlikely, heretofore thought to be impossible literary renaissance in our time, I am totally convinced it will take place on paper.
Let us only hope that the readers understand that paper, ink, stamps, photo paper, and envelopes are NOT cheap. At a small scale, the economics are not favorable -- readers will need to understand and accept that. But knowing Substack readers, I seriously believe they will.
Shoot me a DM sometime, I'd love to talk more about this stuff. Perhaps on the telephone. God bless.
I tried something similar a while back, as part of a scheme to increase local-community readership; I formatted and printed some of what I thought were my best essays and distributed them in urban hangouts like coffee shops. It was a one-time thing, so it doesn't exactly correspond to your idea, and I didn't gain many readers, but the experience was informative; you can read about the results and see some pictures here: https://twitter.com/william_collen/status/1548286398251159556?s=20&t=TImVKqF5Tz77a2DYzKQtWA
I think it's a splendid idea overall and wish you all success if you do it for your own blog. My thinking is it will have to be completely independent of substack's centralized platform; every blogger will have to make their own decisions about formatting, etc. Some photo and design blogs would be better suited to, for instance, a quarterly glossy-print magazine of readers' favorite posts; some text-only substacks might go the direction of the "family Christmas flyer" that you mention, distributed once a week. Blogs full of music or video links probably would find the printed format entirely unsuitable (unless the print edition had lots of QR codes included).
My feeling is that substack is just the beginning of a complete revolution in how people use the web for information retrieval (that's my awkward attempt to avoid saying "consume content", a phrase that I hate passionately). Remember that it took nearly sixty years for printed books to feature page numbers. Who knows what the future will hold!?
Thanks for sharing your own experience with printing...those look terrific! Appropriately minimal, and I could imagine any number of Substack's in exactly that format.
One thought...add a QR code that links to the article comment section? (It comes full circle!)
I know what you mean about the onus being on individual 'stack's and clearly, there are upsides to the creative freedom what would come with that. I guess part of my thinking is, what is great about Substack is, I think they used to have some kind of tagline that was like "you do the writing, we do all the behind-the-scenes stuff you don't want to do." And reading your twitter thread, it looks like it was kind of a burden for you to do the delivery on your own, and it's things like that where I wonder if the platform could plug-in and handle it. And, if there would be benefits at scale.
Personally, I think the thing stopping me from doing this is simply the prospect of all the busy work of manually gathering addresses, finding a print shop, putting into envelopes. Or even if the printing and distribution was somehow handled by someone else, there's still the management of all the addresses. And that's with a relatively small amount of readers I have that would want this. If this were to grow it could really become quite unwieldy. Imagine "Letters from an American" doing this, with say 20,000 people wanting printed versions (I don't think that's an unrealistic number)! I'd think in that case the platform (or some other kind of adjacent platform) would have to step in.
Here's to the information retrieval revolution!!
There is a fifth crucial problem to solve if Substack in Print is to become real. Following on you point from the office: “Listen, Scott. It’s no longer financially viable, we’re losing money. OK? It’s not a charity, it’s a business.” – Printing and mailing paper is expensive, orders of magnitude more expensive that electronic transmission. I recall the start of transition from paper to electronic medial in the late 1990’s. The corporate initiative was dubbed: “The War on Paper.” It was driven by cost saving in which technology was the enabler. That corporate drive continues today as evidence by the constant barrage from everyone you do business with to convert all bills, monthly statement, communications, etc. to an electronic copy. It’s expensive to mail paper. So, the fifth problem to solve is how to finance the cost of publishing and distributing Substack in Print.
There are technologies that will help minimize critical issue 2: The printing problem. Assuming content generation is “free” from the authors, the challenge of variable assembly and distribution can be enabled by technology.
Great points! My question would be: is there demand/willingness to pay that would cover the increased cost? And to answer that, probably another poll with sample size larger than 12 would be needed.
Very much agree with the point on tech-enabled printing.
I love this idea. I hate reading on a screen.
Amazon already manufactures print-on-demand books. (See it done here, at the world’s biggest Kinko’s)
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9KjPcw64Izg&pp=ygUWYW1hem9uIHByaW50IG9uIGRlbWFuZA%3D%3D
So why not a custom tailored magazine containing the latest articles from just the authors you had first separately subscribed to.
It could look like an old issue of Encounter, the flagship magazine of the Congress for Cultural Freedom:
https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/51eomDspC-L._AC_SL1500_.jpg
That is a very interesting idea
Fantastic writeup of a much-needed and probably even inevitable idea. I am considering doing exactly this sort of thing with Hickman's Hinterlands this year, and I think it can work. It's also a fantastic way to avoid getting our work sucked up by giant AI-based LLM's and their burgeoning faux-literary slop machine -- and to circumvent the digital information ecosystem, which is often a 'bubble.' Paper encourages a reader to find himself where he is; to read by the river or on the porch or at the kitchen table -- where by contrast, screens are a sort of 'universal nowhere' that scrubs any sense of time or place from the reader's mind.
To tell my readers: "hey, we're outside of the screen bubble, the wind is in your hair, the AI bots can't see us here, these paragraphs won't wind up at the center of some kind of social media imbroglio tomorrow morning, the paper feels good -- mail me a reply, photocopy this essay, tell your friends, go, go, GO!" -- this is the goal, the dream. If there is to be some kind of unlikely, heretofore thought to be impossible literary renaissance in our time, I am totally convinced it will take place on paper.
Let us only hope that the readers understand that paper, ink, stamps, photo paper, and envelopes are NOT cheap. At a small scale, the economics are not favorable -- readers will need to understand and accept that. But knowing Substack readers, I seriously believe they will.
Shoot me a DM sometime, I'd love to talk more about this stuff. Perhaps on the telephone. God bless.
I value craft in all its forms; count me in on the Endnote #9 pilot as part of interested 25%, Endnote #10 is spot on!