on Publishing … and Other Forms of Insanity:

Subscription services for writers have had a spotty history. For one thing, these services have previously been based on borrows, rather than sales, and authors tend to focus on sales. As a consequence, there aren’t many subscription services that have stood the test of time. Oyster collapsed after a scant two years, leaving Scribd and Kindle Unlimited to hold down the fort, at least for book borrows.

The newest kid on the block, Substack, takes a different approach. For a monthly fee, which is set by the author, readers can subscribe to anything the writer produces: short stories, essays, commentary, serialized novels, you name it. Authors also have the option of not charging anything at all.

Why bother with yet another publishing platform? There are already so many of them.