I recently had a chance to connect with IBPA member Samuél Lopez-Barrantes about his use of Substack. If you’re unfamiliar, Substack is a platform that allows writers to publish newsletters directly to their subscribers, offering a space for creators to share content and build their audience without intermediary algorithms.

Lopez-Barrantes has successfully utilized Substack to share his creative expressions, foster a dedicated community, and sell his latest novel. His Substack newsletter (ifnotparis.substack.com) shows a commitment to authentic storytelling and meaningful engagement. In our conversation, Lopez-Barrantes shares his journey with Substack, effective strategies for indie authors, and insights on how platforms like Substack are reshaping the publishing industry.

What initially drew you to Substack?

I first heard of Substack in late 2021, when my wife, the photographer Augusta Sagnelli, told me about a platform where artists could share their work without fear of censorship or tyranny of the algorithms. When I saw what Substack was offering, which was, for the first time, a space built for readers and writers, a space where I could be me (and be discovered for being me), I knew it was worth giving it a shot.

How has your experience with Substack evolved since then?

I’m a novelist by affliction, which is why my initial goal on Substack was to prove to myself that I could write something that was short, thoughtful, and that I was proud of every single week.

After spending my first year on Substack dedicated to the weekly discipline of sharing something of substance (e.g., an essay, a short story, a poem, a song on the piano, a drawing), I have since become much more interested in engaging with fellow authors via interviews and epistolary exchanges, which allow me to meet fellow creatives and thus learn a lot more about myself.

If Substack was initially a space for me to identify as a writer who wasn’t solely focused on writing novels, now that my second novel, The Requisitions, is out in the world, I am ready to return to slower writing that can’t be shared every week, which means Substack is currently a space to engage with fellow readers and writers, and secondarily as a space to create whatever makes me tick.

What specific strategies have you found most effective in enticing readers to share their email addresses with you on Substack?

There are two basic strategies when it comes to Substack:

1. I believe in the basic artistic principle that if I don’t care what I’m putting out into the world, nobody else will, either. To that end, the discipline of publishing whatever speaks to me from week to week has been the most effective strategy for cultivating a following on Substack. Whatever I share, I share consistently, which is why I don’t know if I believe in enticing readers so much as wearing my creative heart on my sleeve.

2. The other essential strategy is engaging with others. It feels silly to put the following into words, but it’s incredible how often we forget that if we want people to engage with our work, we have to engage with others’ work, too. You only ever get out what you put in, which means actively seeking out and engaging with other writers.

Can you give us an example of a successful email campaign that boosted your engagement or sales?

The initial launch of my Substack was by far the most effective of any campaign, mostly because for the first time since I published my debut novel (Slim and The Beast, Inkshares, 2015), I was actively reaching out to my readership and saying “I’m back!”

Small wonder that the best way to build a readership is to identify those people in our lives who might actually want to read us: family, friends, old university acquaintances, close friends who want to understand a different facet of our lives, attendees at spoken word events, etc. If, as writers, we can’t count on our communities to support us, we will be hard-pressed to build a readership in an era when most people prefer screens to text.

To that end, the initial email sent to 100 of my closest connections that said, “I’m starting this new thing; it will involve fiction, essays, and music from Paris; you don’t have to pay for it necessarily, but if you do, you’ll get to see a deeper side of me” was the most effective campaign I’ve had. I have around close to 80 paying subscribers as of today and over 1,300 free subscribers, but about 50% of my paying subscribers have been there since the beginning when I started with an initial email list of 120. 

You sold 300 first editions of The Requisitions through your Substack. What were some key factors that contributed to this success?

Many of my Substack readers knew I was working on The Requisitions when I arrived on the platform because that was one of the reasons I started writing on Substack: to express myself in a way that wasn’t primarily related to publishing a book that had taken me 10 years to write about.

Nobody likes to be told to purchase something—advertising is already ubiquitous in all of our lives—so the success of selling 300 copies wasn’t so much about a single or even multiple posts but rather about a consistent mention that, yes, my latest novel is now available in a beautifully designed, signed, artisanal-printed first edition; there are only 300 copies available; and when it’s gone, it’s gone.

After six months of diligent posting on Substack (here’s my “query letter” to the Substack community: ifnotparis.substack.com/p/the-requisitions-a-novel), a few readings in Paris, stocking the book at Paris’ Shakespeare & Company and The Red Wheelbarrow, and some favorable reviews by fellow Substackers, I sold two or three books every few days, and now the first edition of The Requisitions is a thing of history.

How do you balance promoting your books with providing valuable content to your subscribers without making them feel pressured to buy?

If I promote The Requisitions, it’s only within the context of an excerpt, a review, or an interview with somebody about the book. One of the great challenges of being a published novelist in the 21st century is that however a book is published (traditionally or otherwise), writers are now their own PR team. Most traditional publishers expect writers to have large social media followings and/or a clear marketing vision when releasing a book. We all know the lamentable reality of traditional publishing (see: Substack’s own Elle Griffin’s viral article on the antitrust case against Penguin, “No One Buys Books”: elysian.press/p/no-one-buys-books), and yet somehow writers are still told (and tell themselves, it must be said) to march like lemmings to the proverbial cliff.

If I sound sassy about industry gatekeepers, it’s because I used to be in an indie rock band and was signed to a label and toured Europe, and the same exact problems of exploitation, being paid in “exposure,” and a general impossibility of making money as a professional plagued the music industry, which was a primary reason I got out of it.

For me, self-promotion is most effective when it involves readers in the process of the creation. My first novel, Slim and The Beast, was the flagship novel for Inkshares, a crowdfunded publisher that said, “Daniel Wallace, author of Big Fish, is our first author. He’s doing a children’s book with us because his publisher won’t let him do it. However, we’ve never done novels before. If you can raise $10,000 in preorders in three months, we’ll send you on a book tour.” A few months later and I was doing a reading at McNally Jackson’s in Manhattan because, importantly, by telling the 232 people who preordered the book that they were not only buying a novel but also participating in a better system for writers, this provided my supporters a deeper sense of purpose.

For indies looking to start on Substack, what advice would you give them?

Consistency is key, which means 1) consistently publishing work that is meaningful to you so that if exactly zero people read it (which may be the case when you’re starting off), you still feel fulfilled and 2) consistently engaging with other Substack writers by commenting on posts that move you, reaching out to writers who inspire, and generally being generous with your attention and time for others.

This is one of the problems of social media in the 21st century: everybody wants followers, but followers imply leaders, and if we’re only trying to lead people to a paid subscription, we’re no better than the politicians and celebrities and trolls who dominate the digital space. I do believe in the principle that in a society that values everything monetarily, artists should also value themselves, which means occasionally paywalling our work, but this is a philosophical choice and one everyone has to consider themselves: if I’m going to ask people to pay me for my art, what am I providing (and do I think it’s worth paying for?). We as writers know when we’ve created something of value, just as sure as we know when we’re pandering to the commodified crowd. Philosophically speaking, it’s essential to continually remind myself of the essential difference, which is why just like Substack pays writers 90% of all royalties, I also offer 90% of my work for free.

Are there any common pitfalls or challenges they should be aware of when using the platform?

There’s a nefarious philosophy that has developed in this cultish, identitarian era of individualism, which is that just because everyone has a story, each story is by definition worth being read. The biggest pitfall I’ve seen on Substack is writers who get frustrated that nobody is reading their oh-so-personal work, and that it must be the world’s fault, not theirs. If we want to be discovered, we have to discover others, too. It’s a cliché, but it’s especially true on Substack: You only ever get out what you put in, so if we only focus on sharing our work and expect the masses to bask in our genius, we’re missing out on a genuine dialogue.

It’s taken two and a half years of almost weekly posting for me to get where I am as a still very-much obscure writer on Substack. I can’t pay my rent yet with the income, but I’m getting close, and while yes, I’d like to think this has something to do with my writing, it has more to do, I suspect, with consistently engaging with the community.

In your opinion, what makes Substack a game-changer for serious writers?

It gives us a revolutionary opportunity to professionalize, and I mean the word in the most basic sense: being paid to write.

The most famous example of a writer’s life being changed on Substack might be that of Heather Cox Richardson, a Boston College history professor who started writing a daily newsletter called “Letters From an American” in 2019. Lo and behold, Richardson is a fantastic writer, deep thinker, and diligent professional, which means that each and every day she showed up for herself, slowly building a readership until she was clearing $1 million/year (as of July 2024, she has 1.5 million followers on Substack, hundreds of thousands of whom pay her $5/month).

How do you see the role of platforms like Substack evolving in the publishing industry over the next few years?

I strongly believe Substack will become one of the main arenas for discovering new books in a few years time. John Pistelli, author of a sweeping metamodern novel called Major Arcana, is as far as I know the first literary fiction author to secure a publishing deal after serializing their novel on Substack—and this is just the beginning.

By allowing writers to connect directly with their readerships, well-established authors like the musicologist and journalist Ted Gioia have been able to garner massive followings (we’re talking tens of thousands of paying subscribers) by simply being themselves and bidding farewell to the gatekeepers of old. There’s just simply no ceiling to the amount of control and income a writer can harness via Substack, primarily because Substack has a vested interest (10% of profits) in seeing its writers succeed. Given the reality of POD services and associations like IBPA, all of the tools are in place to subvert the systems of old in favor of a viable, scalable way to take back control from traditional gatekeepers. If we as writers, publishers, readers, and humans actually believe in freedom of expression, independence, and community over algorithmic profits, five seconds of social media fame and becoming “content creators,” I have no doubt Substack will continue to thrive for years to come. As with anything, though, it’s not a given, which is why now more than ever, we have to stand up for what we believe in, and as a new member of IBPA, I’m proud to be attending the 2024 Frankfurt Book Fair as author and publisher of The Requisitions because I believe in the enduring values of artistic integrity, equitable publishing, and supportive literary communities.

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