Substack, he said, has become a target for “a lot of people to project their anxieties.” “The mindshare Substack has in media right now is insane,” said Casey Newton, who left The Verge to start a newsletter on Substack called Platformer. For those who want to charge subscribers on their email list, Substack takes a 10 percent fee. Lavery, heatedly criticize the company.įeuds among and about Substack writers were a major category of media drama during the pandemic winter - a lot of drama for a company that mostly just makes it easy to email large groups for free. Signing up two high-profile transgender writers was a signal that Substack was trying to remain a platform for people who sometimes hate one another, and who sometimes, like Dr. Substack has been facing a mutiny from a group of writers who objected to sharing the platform with people who they said were anti-transgender, including a writer who made fun of people’s appearances on a dating app. His wife, Grace Lavery, an associate English professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who edits the Transgender Studies Quarterly, had already signed on for a $125,000 advance.Īlong with the revenue the Laverys will bring in, the move is good media politics for the company. Lavery’s household has two Substack incomes. Lavery’s subscription income for those two years. The contract is structured a bit like a book advance: Substack’s bet is that it will make back its money by taking most of Mr. Lavery already has about 1,800 paying subscribers to his Substack newsletter, The Shatner Chatner, whose most popular piece is written from the perspective of a goose. Lavery, who founded the feminist humor blog The Toast and will be giving up an advice column in Slate. “I think the thing that I’m the most looking forward to about this is to start a retirement account,” said Mr.

Danny Lavery had just agreed to a two-year, $430,000 contract with the newsletter platform Substack when I met him for coffee last week in Brooklyn, and he was deciding what to do with the money.

Anxiety by Danny Winter