No Faking It, Friends.
Not in this lifetime.
Hi friends.
A quick note before we get into this week’s letter: I launched the sign-up link for my 1000 Words of Summer workshop last week. Some of you were wondering if there will be a recorded version of it if you can’t make the actual workshop and the answer is: Yes! Also I feel like I should mention that absolute legend Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya, creator of the immaculate at-home residency flier, will be moderating the chat for this workshop, which feels like a true value-add. Hanging out with Kayla is always a good time.
Yesterday I participated in the New Orleans Book Festival for the first time and have to say I was pretty impressed by how efficiently managed, well-attended and sprawling it was. People seemed excited to be there which was fun to see. In the author’s lounge, I got to meet Molly Jong-Fast and she was delightful and funny and sharp and I wanted to take a nice walk with her immediately.
I also got to have a wonderful dinner with a great group of writers in town for the festival. Dear Tricia (and her husband Jason) was there, along with Katie Kitamura, Megha Majumdar, and Sigrid Nunez, who I thought I had never met but then she reminded we had in fact met many years ago via the great Marion Ettlinger, who is the coolest author photographer ever. Marion took a picture of me when I was a baby writer (35), young and fresh-faced and serious as a heart attack.
At the festival itself, I did a panel with the always funny Maurice Ruffin (who I would shoot the shit with anytime anywhere) which was moderated by the thoughtful Kate Baldwin. The topic of conversation was Substack which I am now obviously writing about on Substack and it all feels pretty meta, I might actually need a little nap after this.
Anyway, I have written before on How to Substack, but there were a few thoughts from yesterday’s panel I wanted to highlight and expand upon in terms of advice I might give if you’re thinking about starting one of your own or want to improve the one you have.
Write consistently, make it a practice. Commit to it. Can you send out one letter a week for a few months even just as an exercise? The best way to build an audience is to give them something to read. There are certainly people who can be more erratic about their publishing schedule and still maintain an audience but those people are usually already famous in another way.
If it makes sense with the material, keep your letters short. You don’t need to write ten-thousand word posts. (What you’re reading right now is about 650 words including the signature.) Be aware that the majority of the people reading your Substack are going to be reading it on some kind of screen. What if it made sense to break what you’re writing into multiple parts? What if you sat down and wrote three thousand words and, if there were logical places to break it, you suddenly got three (or six) posts out of it?
In terms of what kind of Substack to write, I always tell people to write what they’re passionate about. Maurice talked about writing from a joyful place, which is my preferred source of inspiration as well, but also there are so many great Substacks that are borne out of a frustration with the world or a passion for change, too. In the panel, I also used the “a” word—authentic. Don’t write what you think people want to hear. Write about the things you know or care about deeply. Write about what you really want to tell the world.
This applies to everything you want to write, obviously. Forever and ever. No faking it, friends. Not in this lifetime.
Sending love,
Jami
You are reading Craft Talk, the home of #1000wordsofsummer and also a weekly newsletter about writing from Jami Attenberg. I’m also on bluesky and instagram.
Sigh. I can't get people to read what I write and publish occasionally (poetry, nonfiction), much less a weekly letter. Trying to build a following on Substack feels like a fool's errand these days.
This is all such good advice - it can be so easy to forget that you have to find the thing you actually want to write about (and how you want to write it) vs just following a formula that seems to “work” for others. I’m so conflicted about substack - it seems like an easy way to become visible as a writer, but I also fear it just adds to what is already really noisy and saturated (and worse, would be distracting from what I really want to do, which is write the books). What advice would you give to someone just starting out - focus on the most important thing, or think about all the writing as contributing to each other, or something else?