I was honoured to be asked this month to write a guest post by Jennie Nash (The Art & Business of Book Coaching).
The upshot is: if you are having trouble getting into the flow of writing your book try writing posts on micro-topics related to your book on a platform with immediate access to readers like Substack.
It’s like testing something out in a ‘sandbox’ environment.
But can you harness all those lovely words you’ve spent time on, and are proud of, in service of the manuscript you will present to your eventual publisher?
Read on — here is my article, reproduced with permission.
An agent told a writer recently that if she wanted to publish a nonfiction book that incorporated her Substack posts, she would have to alter the content significantly. A publisher, she said, would regard the posts as “previously published” material and that would render them unusable in a future book.
This came as a horrible shock to the writer who had drafted a great book proposal but got stuck when she started to write the sample chapters. She was using the discipline of writing regular posts on Substack in order to build up confidence in her voice and to use the posts as material for their eventual book.
Writing on Substack, she found, was fun. It helped her release her inhibitions because she felt she was talking directly to the people who needed to read their book. The posts helped to overcome her self-doubt, which had almost overpowered her when she sat down to write the sample chapters of the book. On hearing she would not be able to use the posts as content, she was devastated. It seemed like she’d been wasting her time and energy.
It wasn’t a waste of her time. The agent may have expressed an individual publisher’s preference, but other publishers are likely to make up their own minds after weighing up the commerciality of the book and the writer’s circumstances.
Publisher Preference
There are writers who might find themselves having just that discussion with a potential publisher.
On the one hand, if someone has an enormous and highly engaged following on Substack, and by enormous, I mean 70,000+ followers, and that following is made up of all of the people who might have one day bought the published book if they had not read the posts first, then you could understand a publisher getting nervous about reissuing the content.
On the other hand, a publisher might be attracted by a writer who is savvy enough to know their market and to gain valuable experience, and even feedback, in writing directly for them. The writer has demonstrated they are more than capable of shouldering the marketing burden that falls on most traditionally published authors.
The Legal Position
And what about this re-publishing scenario from a legal perspective?
As a matter of law, Substack does not hinder a writer from publishing their posts elsewhere.
Substack’s Publisher Agreement sets out the legal terms that govern the relationship between the Writer (“Creator”) and Substack; the Publisher Agreement hooks in the Terms of Use of the platform.
Both documents are explicit on the Creator’s copyright:
“First and foremost, you own what you create.”
So, when you post on Substack, you retain copyright in your work.
Then you, as Creator, look at the terms on which you licensed publication by Substack of your work.
A Creator grants a Limited License to Substack to “to display, perform, and distribute” and to “translate, modify, reproduce” Posts, “royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, and worldwide.”
Crucially, the license is “non-exclusive.” That means the Creator is free to engage in publishing arrangements with other publishers using the same content.
As if all that isn’t enough to argue that Substack has no ownership rights in a Creator’s post, they go so far as to disclaim responsibility for content: completely undermining the possibility that Substack might require a Post’s content to be changed before publishing elsewhere.
“We aren’t liable,” they say, “for any errors or omissions in any Post and you hereby release us from any damages or loss you might suffer in connection with a Post.”
Tips for writing forward with Substack
Let’s assume you are a writer with a great idea for a book and a relatively small following on Substack.
The idea of using Substack to get into the swing of writing your book, by writing short posts to your ideal readership every week or so, is one that appeals because you sense it will help you grow in confidence.
⚓ Decide on your short-term goal: is it to find your voice? Is it to generate material for chapters that you intend to re-use? Is it to find out what topics resonate with your subscribers? Write down your goal somewhere you can find it again and check your progress every so often.
⚓ Start with a mindset of exploration, creativity, and fun. If it was hard to write the sample chapters after working on your book proposal, it’s going be just as hard to write them on Substack.
⚓ Take baby steps. Don’t try to Write Chapter One. Let aspects of the book come to mind: what issue appeals to you right now?
⚓ Imagine, or picture a real potential reader of your book. What would they most like to hear about, in this moment?
⚓ If you have written an Annotated Table of Contents, glance over it, and jot down an informal list of writing prompts on topics that appeal to you. The aim is to rekindle your interest in your book, not to come up with a rigid content plan.
One of my own clients lost confidence in his voice after writing a splendid proposal right up to the sample chapters.
It wasn’t the book idea he had lost confidence in, but he could not get comfortable with the way he wanted to write it.
He is now recovering his sense of purpose, and therefore his voice, on Substack by writing directly to his audience about the things he knows they are interested in.
So if you are feeling a bit unsure about how you want to say what you want to write, give yourself some time in the sandbox.