Welcome to the party, Pal
Writing novels, what I've learned about online publishing, algorithms, and why email remains the future
TL;DR: As the next step in my writing journey, I’ve created this darkly humorous email newsletter, Field Research by Amran Gowani. This post is both introduction and guiding manifesto. If you received it via email, you’re subscribed. Welcome to the show! If an email was forwarded to you, or you found me via the Substack website or app, please consider subscribing.
If you want the full story of what I’ve been up to, what I’m planning next, and why you’re on this list, strap in. What follows is long, winding, and extra salty. Parental discretion advised.
HOW WE GOT HERE
I nuked my “career” in July 2018, shortly after moving to Chicago, when I resigned from a pretty good post at a small media company which was a bad cultural fit. I’d previously stepped away from investment banking in 2016 and pharmaceutical marketing in 2013 after getting an MBA in 2012.
I didn’t like any of those jobs (essay forthcoming). The common denominator in all my bad relationships is me, except I had an extraordinary run of bad luck in the “bosses” department (essay forthcoming). For example, from 1995-2002, when I was at my most emotionally volatile and clinically depressed, I worked as a stock clerk, with “regular” people, at the Kroger Company, and was considered a model employee and citizen and admired, praised, and valued for my competence.
It was only when I joined the “knowledge economy” — chemistry graduate school (2003-06), the pharmaceutical industry (2006-13), Wall Street (2013-16), and business intelligence/journalism (2017-18) — and became encircled by blowhards, sycophants, and other undesirables, that I was instructed to “tone it down” and wear a person suit all day. The common denominator in all my bad relationships was still me, but also bullshit jobs.
By late 2018, with one demanding almost three-year-old trampling on my otherwise wonderful marriage, another antichrist in utero, and a strong preference for suicide over more “white collar” work, I decided to write a novel. Obligatory note on privilege: Yes, I’m aware I was only able to make this choice because of my wife’s financial and emotional largesse. My gratitude is eternal; I love her more than she could ever imagine. Without her support, none of my writing would be possible. So, technically, all this is her fault.
At the end of 2020, now fully committed to the stay-at-home parent gig, and basking in the delights of the once per century global infectious disease pandemic, I finished said novel. It was a surreal feeling. An achievement like no other in my — humbly but admittedly — pretty successful forty years of existence. I revised and revised and revised then shopped it around to literary agents in spring 2021.
I went oh-fer.
With hindsight, the book never had a chance. At 121,000 words, it was far too long for a “debut” novel. I’m certain the majority of agents immediately dismissed it as such. Fun fact: Most agents never respond to “queries,” so you have to imagine the reasons why they “passed.” The process is like admission to a fancy college — they’re looking for any reason to reject, rather than accept, your work.
It was disappointing and disheartening.
Like every narcissistic prick who ever fancied themselves a “writer,” I was sure my novel was fantastic because it had a lot of valuable things to say, the genre was topical yet “differentiated” in the literary marketplace, and people would enjoy it because I’m clever and charming and hilarious and would look good talking to Trevor Noah on TV. Some of those things might even be true, but — objectively — the novel wasn’t quite good enough. Book publishing is a brutally competitive, utterly dysfunctional industry. To crack it you need A+ work in addition to luck, connections, and all the other things which make anyone successful at anything. Except at Kroger.
Quick digression: At almost forty-two years old, I no longer feel like an imposter for calling myself a “writer.” I’ve been writing since the mid-1990s: high school newspaper, college essays, organic chemistry papers, blogger, patents, research protocols, graduate school newspaper, funny emails to friends, business intelligence reports, PPT slides, sell-side research, financial journalism, 1.5 novels, and unhinged posts on Medium and now Substack. I’m not wracked with doubts about my abilities. I’m a motherfucking writer. Always have been, always will be. But this is the first time I’ve ever tried, in earnest, to commercialize my writing — an entirely different ballgame. Referring to myself as an “artist” remains a sensible bridge too far.
SYSTEMS ONLINE
Fast forward to fall 2021. I spent the entirety of the summer using power tools and stewing in the pointlessness of existence. Then I decided to buck the fuck up. I’ll write another novel. A better one. I’m stubborn like that, but also motivated by anger and spite and resentment. If you people don’t think I can do it, well, you wouldn’t like me when I’m angry.
I started my second novel in September. The words came faster, with more confidence. After two months I had almost twenty thousand. I’m now sitting near forty-seven thousand and just outlined a foggy, tortuous path to an explosive ending. The target length is eighty thousand words. I’m feeling very motivated and, when the project is done, I plan to bring it into the world in some way, shape, form, or fashion. Please support it when I do.
In the broader publishing industry, however, I remained an unknown. According to the advice of writers, agents, editors, and other hacks entrenched in the publishing ecosystem, I needed a “platform” to showcase my writing, make connections, and build a readership. Made perfect sense. As someone whose only online presence was a derelict LinkedIn account, it also highlighted just how much catching up I had to do.
Enter Medium.
I’d known about the publishing “platform” for several years and had stumbled across interesting articles every now and then — but had never subscribed. I’d also heard about Substack — mostly through liberal panic about how the right was commandeering it to promote hate speech and anti-democratic voices. To which I thought, ever heard of Facebook? What about Twitter? Notably, the legendary George Saunders was a key get for Substack. Not exactly Mussolini. Or maybe they chose him on purpose? To de-Nazify the platform’s image?
Nonetheless, at first I was swayed by the negative Substack vibes. I wasn’t enthralled with several of the site’s outspoken writers either. There’s Bari Weiss, a polarizing culture warrior, formerly of the New York Times, whose basic value prop is: libs and serves are both bad, but libs are worse. Freddie deBoer, a guy I probably agree with on many things but who still puts me off a little — I know a lot of people like this; you surely feel this way about me. And Matthew Yglesias, a co-founder of Vox, who went solo to enjoy more editorial independence, and whose Substack newsletter highlights just how much he needs editorial oversight.
Medium, on the other hand, had Obama. It also featured a large, built-in community of other big- and small-time writers and readers, and an intriguing business model. For $5 per month, or $50 per year, a user could read unlimited articles — ad free! — on a decent though not great mobile app and website.
Two specific things about Medium jumped out and seemed like big advantages relative to Substack.
The first was distribution. Housing content within Medium instead of relying on staid direct-to-consumer email seemed like a significant differentiator. Starting out, with friends and family as my primary supporters, I didn’t want to burden anyone with tons of emails. Everyone complains about the volume of emails they receive already. More on this below.
The second, more compelling factor, was the monetization strategy. As a total rando, it made a lot more sense to ask people to sign up with Medium, where for $5 per month they could read all my stuff, but also that of thousands of other – better – writers as well. To monetize on Substack, I would’ve had to ask strangers to pay me a minimum of $5 per month, or $50 per year. Moreover, I didn’t feel comfortable pressuring my friends and family into coughing up real money for one, maybe two, comedy pieces per week.
Consider the “competition.” Famed humor site McSweeney’s is free, though they ask you to send at least three bucks per month to their Patreon account. You can read the entire crew at Defector.com, with commenting privileges, for $119 annually. Multiple world-class publications, which of course benefit from significant economies of scale, are nonetheless inexpensive. The Economist — the world’s greatest newspaper — is $189 per year. Apple News+, which features access to The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, the Wall Street Journal, and the Los Angeles Times, including many more, is $120 per year (not including the overpriced iPhone). Scribd (e.g., Netflix for novels), which is somehow amazing and terrible at the same time, comes to $144 annualized.
A case could be made these products are dramatically undervalued — they are — but when deciding which publishing service to choose, they were the anchors to which I compared my own prospective content. As such, I struggled with the idea of asking for direct payment.
Medium was the clear choice. I went with it. What could go wrong?
WELCOME TO THE MACHINE
The CEO of Medium, Evan Williams, is a co-founder and former CEO of Twitter. Hence, Medium is a “platform.” Hence, algorithms.
I’m not a tech guy. I have no clue how Medium’s “algorithm” works, how it’s designed, or how to exploit it. I don’t care to know. Worse still, I’d wager nobody at Medium knows how “it” works either. What I do know is this: content ranking and promotion is opaque and inscrutable, and because of that many, many Medium writers piss into the wind trying to outsmart and out-game the system. An entire cottage industry of apparent bots, scammers and spammers — designed to regurgitate anodyne posts and elicit artificial engagement — has also cropped up, dominating and polluting the site.
That’s bad enough. I personally encountered another of Medium’s crucial limitations early on as well. Namely, if I didn’t distribute my pieces via email — to my roster of seventy-odd people — they’d get pitiful engagement on the Medium website and within its attendant mobile apps. For example, one of my favorite pieces — a mock transcript of a K-8 sex-ed forum gone awry — was never distributed via email (there was an unexplainable and unresolvable error). After two-plus months sitting in the bowels of Medium’s servers, the story has twelve “views,” nine “reads,” and a grand total of zero seconds of reading time by Medium subscribers.
In a separate, planned experiment, I published a piece on Medium but purposefully didn’t email it to my subscribers. After one full day, it had two views and zero reads. Then I sent it via email. SkyNet immediately became self-aware and activated its automated defense protocols. The piece wound up generating a total of one hundred forty-four views, thirty-two reads, and thirty-four minutes of member reading time. I’m aware these numbers are still sad and regrettable, but they taught me something illuminating about how the algorithm “thinks.” Note: If anyone’s interested in more granular data, please leave a comment or reply to this email.
The key takeaway was thus: if I needed email distribution to get traction within Medium, then why TF was I bothering with Medium at all? I suddenly realized housing my content inside Medium’s digital walls was just another roadblock, not a boon, for my dozens and dozens of adoring fans.
The appeal of Substack became clearer. I submit this tweet as forensic evidence:
Seven whole likes!
Another consistent theme, and the primary grievance of countless lamentations by Medium, on Medium, about Medium, is the algorithm rewards quantity. Again, I have no way of knowing whether that’s true, but anecdotally it seems like a reasonable assumption.
It’s also a total non-starter.
As a matter of principle, I’m vehemently, adamantly, violently against quantity over quality as a content strategy. As evidenced above, email distribution is required to generate engagement on the Medium platform. Unfortunately, I can think of few things more offensive than bombarding my beloved email subscribers — my biggest supporters and most active readers — with two-to-three emails per day. There’s also zero chance I could produce worthwhile, humorous content at that frequency (if at all).
There’s a writing philosophy which argues for quantity as a means to discover quality, because you never know which ideas or pieces might resonate. From a creative process, it makes total sense. Typing a bunch of shit onto your screen to get the juices flowing is a great exercise. But from a commercial standpoint, dare I say from a branding standpoint, I couldn’t disagree with it more.
To me, it’s imperative my personal brand carries the imprimatur of quality. Like a luxury brand (I buy my clothes at Costco). When people see a story from me, or they see my name pop up in their email inbox, I want them to feel excited. To know that, for a few fleeting moments, they can expect to be entertained. To have the dull, aching pain of our modern, vacuous dystopia washed away. It wouldn’t be possible to convey that sense if I wrote multiple times per day. I often wonder if writing two times per week risks overwhelming.
Finally, and I say this with moderate shade, there’s a lot of negative energy on Medium. The endless stream of writers complaining about the algorithm, questioning the algorithm, lamenting the arbitrary and capricious changes instituted by Medium management, and longing for the halcyon days of yesteryear — in tandem with the accordant Medium on Medium violence among many of its most prominent writers — doesn’t inspire confidence in the platform’s seriousness or its long-term viability (#hypocrisy). I won’t link to any of it because it’s not worth your time, but suffice it to say Medium suffers from many of the same issues other social networks do.
BACK TO BASICS
More prosaically, battling algorithms and churning out a high volume of mediocre posts doesn’t jibe with my current day-to-day existence.
First and foremost, my primary responsibilities include, but are not limited to, the following: washing the dishes, doing the laundry, mopping up puke, tending the garden, changing shitty diapers, packing lunches, chauffeuring, vermicomposting, vacuuming the floors, watering the houseplants, staying home with sick kids, shoveling the snow, seizing the HOA in a bloodless coup, going to Home Depot, picking up the kids from school, screaming, yelling, bitching and moaning, using power tools, making shelves, taking out the trash, reading to my kids, watching TV with my kids, having lightsaber duels with my kids, and never sleeping. It’s the best job I’ve ever had, save Kroger.
My second full-time job is writing my current novel. Odds are it’ll never generate life-changing income for my family. But it’s a real product, with intrinsic market value, that could and hopefully will — through the sheer benevolence of the One True God — be commercialized one day. Every minute spent trying to outwit the Medium algorithm is time lost on my quest to become rich, famous, and even more of a condescending, insufferable asshole.
Hence, given where I’m at in my writing journey, I realize I’ve confused the apparent strengths of Medium with the supposed weaknesses of Substack.
Despite being boring and ubiquitous, email is GOAT. Whereas I previously thought it would be annoying to pop up at all in people’s inboxes, I’ve come to remember email remains the killer internet app. Your email inbox dominates your digital, work, and personal life because it’s curated specifically for you. You engage with the content in your inbox when you’re ready, and it’s always there.
The key is balance. You want to elicit enthusiasm without inducing fatigue. For instance, in exploring which Substack newsletters I myself would like to subscribe to, I’m already feeling overpowered by a few. A delicate equilibrium needs to be struck, in particular when asking someone to pay for something. On the one hand, you want to make sure you're providing them sufficient value for their money. But on the other, less is often more. With too much content people get overwhelmed, fall too far behind, and then it becomes easier to just ignore and unsubscribe than try to catch up and keep pace. Readers of The Economist and The New Yorker know the feeling well.
Email is also perfect for dissemination. Unless it’s a Facebook post from your smooth-brained parents, when your friends, family, or colleagues forward you an email it’s usually something worth your time. For example, a friend who follows me on Medium told me how much he and his family enjoyed my ludicrous piece on Duke basketball. He said they thought it was from McSweeney’s — be still my palpitating heart! — and it circulated amongst their clan.
As a thirsty writer desperate for the attention my father never bestowed upon me because he abandoned me as an infant, that was delightful to hear.
But here’s the rub. Because the story trafficked outside Medium — on the vast, barren highways of Gmail — it did nothing to stimulate new followers on Medium. Again, that’s not the fault of my friend or his family! It’s still annoying though. Begging people to read my stuff is sad enough. Asking them to do it on Medium, while “clapping” and “commenting” and “highlighting” to stimulate the algorithm’s erogenous zones, is downright pathetic.
SUBPAR TO SUBSTACK
In conclusion, I’m disappointed in myself for not being born into generational wealth.
I’ve also rectified my poor initial choice to join Medium and have migrated my email distribution list to Substack. I’m energized by the change. If you received this piece via an email from my shiny new Substack newsletter, Field Research by Amran Gowani, you’re all set. Welcome to the show! If you’re up for it, it’d be amazing and fantastic if you forwarded it to your friends and family and encouraged them to subscribe. Click the button below, yo:
My Medium archive is available on my Substack homepage. Feel free to explore, revisit any favorites, and promote what you deem worthy to any relevant audiences. Hopefully I haven’t cocked anything up. If I have, please bear with me while I figure it out. I’m just getting the hang of this whole internet economy after willfully sitting on the sidelines for fifteen years.
Now I’m aggressively online tho. And my shit’s dope AF.
Which brings us to the final issue of cost.
Field Research will remain free for the foreseeable future. I’ve never had any delusional designs about generating mega-riches from writing online. If I wanted lots of money, I could’ve stayed in Corporate America. Or, as my man Common explained, “not for the money, I could’ve sampled Diana Ross a long time ago.” Also, if I hit it big, my wife might not be able to claim me as a dependent anymore.
At some point, of course, I will introduce a “paywall.” But, like any good opioid manufacturer, I have to get you hooked first. When I’ve amassed a solid archive of badass content, and routinely produce high-quality material with genuine market value — like edgy short fiction, a novel broken into its component chapters, or a blog about NFTs — I’ll make the jump. This is a dynamic, evolving, exciting experiment. I’m glad you’re along for the ride. We’ll figure it out together.
As for Medium, I may continue submitting to some of its popular in-house publications. I’ve taken one (unsuccessful) stab at a Medium pub and it’d be nice to break through in the future. For my Substack subscribers, fear not. Any future pieces published on Medium will be redistributed, or linked to, in subsequent email newsletters.
Ultimately, it’s imperative for the people who most engage with my work to receive it in the cleanest, easiest, most user-friendly way. I’ve now come to believe that exists on Substack. I’m almost certainly wrong (again). Of course, by respecting you and your time as readers, it’ll also be much easier to guilt you into subscribing to a paid tier in the future and buying my novel if and when it comes out. You’ve been warned.
Sincere and immense thanks to everyone who’s supported me thus far and to those who plan to support me in the future. Switching to Substack will give me more control over my content and make it easier for readers to discover and share my work. It’ll also send me back to square one in terms of building a broader audience, but I’m good with that. As the late, legendary GURU once rhymed, “nobody put me on, I made it up the hard way.”
Happy reading.
Happy writing.
Happy apocalypsing.
Now, back to the laboratory.
Amran