The rise of newsletters and newsletter platforms continue, with the latest push coming from Salman Rushdie who has warmed up to Substack, which is largely a platform to facilitate subscription-based newsletters. The Booker Prize-winning author has published his first dispatch on the newsletter platform.
“The point of doing this is to have a closer relationship with readers, to speak freely, without any intermediaries or gatekeepers. There’s just us here, just you and me, and we can take this wherever it goes. I hope you’ll enjoy the ride. I’ll try to make it fun,” writes Rushdie in the intro to his Substack, Salman’s Sea of Stories.
A lot of the content that he will put out will come free but “some of it won’t be, including a new, unpublished, full-length fiction I’ll be putting up in installments every week”. The author has also promised that he will ask “questions” so that “we can have a conversation about it all”.
Substack is one of the more popular platforms for newsletters while others include Tinyletter and Ghost. Even Facebook has a newsletter service called Bulletin, which is limited to a few markets at the moment. Writers big or small, for money or fun, are publishing their content from platforms that have made it easy to charge for newsletters. Reasons are in plenty as to why newsletters work. Some people choose to read, say, a music magazine for two or three of its writers. What if the same set of people get to read only those two writers — and they will write something new almost every other day — for a small amount of money every month? According to Substack co-founder Hamish McKenzie, writers could make $100,000 a year, charging $5 a month but attracting a few thousand people.
The Mumbai-born author, who lives in New York, wasn’t aware of the platform until Substack reached out and then he found out that the likes of Patti Smith and Michael Moore are using the service. Rushdie has always been open to technology and has even posted limericks about Kim Kardashian (The marriage of poor kim #kardashian / was krushed like a kar in a krashian. / her kris kried, not fair! / why kan’t I keep my share? / But kardashian fell klean out of fashion), is active on Twitter and in the past, had a Tumblr account.
His first Substack post is titled ‘Thank God, I’m an Atheist: Notes on Luis Bunuel (and Jeanne Moreau and Charlie Chaplin)’ in which he lets the world know that during the pandemic he has been having “a sort of private film festival” for himself, “re-watching the classic movies that made me fall in love with the cinema long ago, and watching some of the new stuff that has taken over the movies these days — so, everything from The Leopard and Pather Panchali to Avengers: Endgame and Black Widow.”
