Why Substack?
When I began writing, or rather first imagining I wanted to write, an intense glamor accrued to independent publishing. Book culture was important, and Burroughs, Nabokov, or Beckett were found not at midtown mainstream houses but at independent presses Grove, New Directions, City Lights, Paris’s tiny Olympia Press. As my own winding path through books and publishing unfolded, from underground to over, obscure to known, free presses to big conglomerates, my writing took a variety of turns. Along the way I toiled in a book warehouse, worked at a university press, taught English in Japan, managed a bookstore, and wrote for little mags and free presses. I designed music and film campaigns for record labels and movie studios, wrote songs and screenplays, and became a publisher myself, founding a small arts press that would run for thirty-odd years.
Selling a novel to Doubleday, then another to Simon & Schuster, marked a kind of arrival, but also a departure from the freewheeling terrain of expression and experiment I’d known. A memoir and a pair of travel narratives followed with editorial giant Random House. Now there were advances on works not yet written, year-long pub dates, intrusive editing and imposed book design. There were also publicity budgets, media exposure, book tours, bestseller lists, translation rights, and royalty streams. This new wilderness, wide-reaching and market-driven, was in many respects less interesting than the unfettered landscape I’d emerged from. Eventually, settling in Mexico, I resumed the less circumscribed fiction I’d started out writing.
Whether the proclamation of Substack’s directors to build “a new economic engine for culture” or predict “what comes after social media as we know it” turn out to be true, or even partly true, it would seem to offer another way to connect readers and writers. I’m game to try it. So tomorrow, Sunday, I’ll post the first two chapters of a new novel, then in weekly installments thereafter, along with intermittent commentaries on the writing life, Mexico, and perhaps more. The novel, which is called THE COAST, is about 32,000 words, or 130 typed pages. I plan to post a chapter or two each Sunday, to the end. I hope you’ll join me.