I have complicated feelings about self-publishing. And they started with my background as a graphic designer.
When I was working at a youth-oriented daily newspaper a number of years ago, I designed a cover that I was really proud of, and everyone loved it. (It was horror-movie themed.) But what caught me off guard was something my editor said.
She suggested that we sell it as a T-shirt … which hit me like a ton of bricks. She meant nothing by it, of course, and no shirt went on sale. But it made me realize that everything I had created in my career up to that point was work-for-hire. I technically owned none of it. My employer was within its rights to reuse my work, but it still bothered me.
I realized that if I was going to maintain ownership of some of the work I created in my career, I was going to have to publish it myself. So I did. I started a blog, and later, a newsletter. Now I’m a writer who dabbles in graphic design. The blog taught me something about ownership, too. I used Tumblr for years, and found the owners at the time seemed more focused on trying to find a monetization model for themselves, rather than the people whose creative work kept people coming back. (Or if they did care about monetizing stuff for users, not telling them.) And since I was working quite hard on trying to build something, this was really tough. I decided that, with my next project, I would avoid platforms and build whatever I could myself. And since then, I have—and it’s given me the freedom to do things I might not have had otherwise. In my case, I write the newsletter, but I also code the website and design the templates. Most people probably won’t want to do that, but with newsletters, they get the choice.
Probably what’s gotten the most attention about the recent rise in newsletters, particularly with Substack, is the freedom to work outside the traditional editorial structure. There’s a movement of some big-name writers over to Substack, partly because they don’t want an editor and they want to avoid censorship. Personally, I love having a good edit on my piece, but I realize self-editing is a sacrifice I often need to make if I want to have ownership of the stuff I do. (Plus, Substack reminds me too much of Tumblr. It has a business model, but it is very much a platform.) This is a complicated dynamic, but I think a lot of what this comes down to for newsletter publishers is a desire to have a little more control over their own destiny—something that they may not get in a traditional newsroom.
Should writers try to find their own home on the digital frontier, like I did? Or should they embrace the relative stability of traditional newsrooms instead?