The New Yorker reviewed my self-published novella
Substack summer has begun
Three days ago, Peter Baker published an extremely appreciative review in The New Yorker of a novella that I originally self-published on this very newsletter. He wrote:
The [reading] experience felt a little like getting unexpectedly absorbed in a trashy episode of reality TV, but also like suddenly realizing that a conversation that started in the shallows of small talk has at some point drifted into the deep waters of meaning. I reached the end in a happily disoriented daze. No other piece of new fiction I read last year gave me a bigger jolt of readerly delight.
This is insane. This is wild. I’ve been fielding congratulations for days. This kind of stuff doesn’t usually happen! Like, I’ve never even heard of something like this: a self-published work of fiction—published on a blog and nowhere else!—getting this kind of critical attention.
I am wary of good fortune
This review is probably the best thing that has happened to me since the day, eleven years ago, when I sold my debut novel in a six-figure deal to Disney Hyperion.
Back then I didn’t feel conflicted at all about my good fortune. I was a great writer, and I deserved good things. I walked around feeling like I had the publishing world figured out. It was simple: if your book is good enough, it’ll sell.
Then, in 2015, that all changed.
One of my best writer friends,
, showed me her book, The God of Longing. This book remains probably the best unpublished novel I’ve ever read: it’s about the star-crossed love between a Jewish girl, a Muslim man, and a Catholic man. It’s about the intertwining of the three Abrahamic faiths, and the ways that these characters had to choose between self-actualizing (through love) and carrying the weight of their family traditions. Courtney was twenty-five at the time, and the novel was intensely accomplished. It was told in a muscular third-person that switched between a dozen viewpoints, and it went forward sixty years in the future and backwards three thousand years into the past.Agents fought for this book. They vied for it. One pair of agents hopped on a train down to Baltimore to persuade her to sign with them.
Late in 2015 her agent sent out the book, and…it didn’t sell. Fifty editors, just as many rejections. To the extent there was a reason, it was because the protagonist, Hagar, was ‘unlikable’.
It was a shattering experience for Courtney, leading to a writer’s block that took years to lift.
But it was also a radicalizing experience for me. I knew this book was good. I knew it was better than virtually everything that gets published. I knew she deserved to get a New Yorker profile, deserved to get awards nominations, deserved to get every accolade routinely showered upon twenty-five-year-old wunderkinds.
Her book, I knew, was much better than anything I had written, but I had a book deal, and she didn’t.
And over the years, I had other friends whose books failed to sell. Some were literary novels, some weren’t, but all were much better than the average novel on the shelves. At least one was extremely good—the equal of Courtney’s. And I realized something: talent is not rare. Good books are not rare. They are much more common than we realize.
This is something I’ve argued time and again on this Substack. Mostly people disagree with me on this point, which I find perplexing because Substack is seemingly built on the idea that the mainstream often gets it wrong. That mainstream outlets quite frequently ignore what is good and extol what is bad. If that’s true, then a natural corollary is that many great writers must go unpublished, no?
I don’t expect anyone else to believe me on this point, but it is a core, foundational belief for me. Talent is not rare. We experience it as being rare because the mechanisms for bringing it to our attention so often bring us mediocrity instead, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t many, many talented writers who go unpublished.
Which brings me back to this New Yorker piece.
On October 31st of last year, I published a novella on Substack called “Money Matters”. At the time I had about 2,200 subscribers. My recollection is that it received approximately 5,000 views, 70 likes, and 8 re-stacks. After its release, Several people posted appreciative comments on Notes, and it was reviewed in two newsletters, by
and .Six months later, this novella got a review in The New Yorker.
When a friend texted me to say there was a New Yorker article about my work, I couldn’t believe it. Why in the world would The New Yorker write about a piece of fiction that hadn’t even been read by many of my own fans? Today I have 5,200 subscribers—double what I had when “Money Matters” was released—and most of you have probably have not read this novella.
The proximate reason The New Yorker wrote about my work was that a subscriber of mine,
, read this novella, and he also writes somewhat-frequently for The New Yorker.The other reason for the appearance of this piece in The New Yorker is that over the last six months, Substack has become a significant driver of literary publicity and literary reputations. Substack is one of the only places where a relatively-unknown writer can build an organic following. It is one of the only places that doesn’t feel locked-down, where you can hear about a book that’s different from the ones the big publishing companies have set apart as lead titles.
The last three weeks have seen the release of three novels that have gotten a fair amount of publicity because they were written by popular Substackers: John Pistelli’s Major Arcana, Ross Barkan’s Glass Century, and Matthew Gasda’s The Sleepers. This has inaugurated a burst of literary activity that I’ve taken to calling “Substack summer”.
As a result of Substack summer, there was some desire amongst mainstream literary outlets to figure out whether any of these Substack novels are actually any good. Valerie Stivers at Compact used her review of John Pistelli’s Major Arcana to denounce the whole Substack literary ecosystem.
The New Yorker, because Peter C. Baker is apparently a fan of mine, took a different angle. He was able to say, Hey, at least one of these Substack writers is good. And he actually did a great job of describing and contextualizing this ecosystem, because in truth a variety of writers publish their fiction on Substack. As he put it:
[There] are writers who already enjoy considerable levels of professional success and are using Substack to experiment with new styles, build direct connections with their readers, or make a few bucks selling premium-tier subscriptions to their biggest fans. On the other end of the spectrum are passionate amateurs who post stories, serialize novels-in-progress, commiserate about the joys and agonies of writing, talk smack about the literary establishment, and cheer one another on. In the middle sit writers who have, like Kanakia, acquired some of the markers of professional success without becoming names. Their outputs are a mélange of the passion and experimentalism of the amateurs with the polish and ambition of the pros, and they often possess a briskness that feels shaped by an awareness that an endless selection of other stories is mere clicks away.
Obviously if Ottessa Moshfegh or Sherman Alexie post a story on Substack, it’s more likely to be good, because they’re widely known to be good writers.
When people talk about whether there’s talent on Substack, they mean, “Can we find new talent there?”
His answer to this question was mixed.
The piece is largely a review of my own output. After rhapsodizing about my novella, Baker went on to the more difficult question of whether Substack was an essential part of my novella’s success. As a data point in Substack’s favor, Baker contrasted “Money Matters” with my own traditionally published literary novel, The Default World, and held the novella to be superior!
“The Default World” is a distinctly less successful fusion of story, form, and style. Unlike “Money Matters,” it plays out largely in scenes rendered in a literary approximation of real time, and observed almost entirely from the main character’s perspective. The novel has more descriptive density than the novella, but it often has a flimsy feel, like something the book is rushing through out of a sense of obligation.
I agree with this assessment! As my newsletter has taken off, my novel has gotten more and more critical attention, but I actually consider “Money Matters”, along with a few of my tales, to be my best-realized work. As Baker notes, these stories constitute a type of work that I didn’t think had a place in the traditional literary world. In my mind, at least, these stories would never have been published if not for the existence of Substack.
And Baker concludes his piece on this note, saying, “To the extent that Kanakia’s newsletter made her feel like she could write this way, it deserves a nod of recognition, regardless of what else may be published on the platform.”
No other self-published work came in for praise
Although this article was quite complimentary about my work, it was ultimately somewhat bearish on the question of whether it was possible for fiction to flourish on this platform. As Peter Baker put it:
Of course, as generations of bomb-throwing literary upstarts have discovered, decrying the mediocrity of much published and acclaimed fiction—perhaps the most common activity on literary Substack—is one thing; doing better oneself is another. So far, none of the stories or novels-in-progress I’ve read on the platform has captured my attention as “Money Matters” did.
The centerpiece of Baker’s case against Substack was a qualified, but ultimately negative, review of John Pistelli’s Major Arcana.
Now, okay…Baker didn’t like Major Arcana. This is fine. Valerie Stivers didn’t like it either. That is also allowed. Substack novelists shouldn’t be immune to criticism.
But what I don’t believe—what I emphatically reject—is the idea that I’m somehow uniquely excellent.
I am a very good writer. You all enjoy reading my work, I hope. Anyone who wants to read more of it is free to subscribe to my newsletter. Someday I would like to publish a short-story collection so that there’s some record of my work—something that future generations can read to see what I was doing. What’s wonderful is that this New Yorker profile has made it much more likely that I will be able to sell this collection.
But I see my artistic success as being inextricable from the growth of this platform. As I detailed in a previous post, I got popular last year because of a series of incendiary posts about the state of the mainstream literary world. I felt that the contemporary publishing world didn’t have any place for my brand of stylistic innovation. Moreover, I felt that the whole ecosystem was so lacking in credibility that even if something good was published, nobody would actually notice.
My audience on Substack exists because many thousands of people feel the same way.
The excitement surrounding Major Arcana and the other Substack novelists—it only exists because people no longer trust the opinion of mainstream publications like The New Yorker. Newsletter writers like
and , who’ve both written about Major Arcana, have more credibility with many of their readers than The New Yorker does.That lack of trust is one of the main drivers of the popularity of Substack, and that popularity is the main reason The New Yorker was willing to address Substack as a literary phenomenon.
We can be better
I believe very strongly in what we are doing here on this platform. I believe that we are creating a better literary world. And this literary world is going to play an increasing role, over the next five years, in determining literary reputations. And I do think more fiction will be published by this world that is worthy of being taken seriously even by those who are skeptical about Substack.
There was a year of my life, 2020, when I tried and failed to find an agent who was willing to send out The Default World. The book was originally told in an omniscienr perspective, but it was during that year that I rewrote the book to more closely resemble a conventional novel. I’m not saying the prior versions were great. Probably they weren’t. Maybe if I’d sharpened my original vision, I could’ve produced something more like “Money Matters”—and perhaps that version would’ve somehow pleased these agents. I have no idea. But I was so beaten down by the rejection and the ghosting that I just did what was expected: I rewrote the novel to conform to expectations.
And during that year I experienced a lot of anger. For a while, I experimented with the idea of ascribing all this rejection to transphobia. But it didn’t really fit, because that was also the year Torrey Peters’ novel broke out and a lot of trans women found agents at that time.
Instead I decided that I would feel this anger not on behalf of myself, but on behalf of my friends. And that I would keep fighting and keep writing, and I would do it not just for myself, but for everyone who struggled against this arbitrary, unfair system. That I would fight for Courtney and Amber and Julia and Nate and all my other friends who’ve written great novels that never got read by anyone besides them and me and a few agents or editors who “didn't feel as confident as they would need to be in order to truly champion this project.”
I swore that if I was ever on top, I would tell the truth about this system. I would make sure that people knew—I would make sure they understood—that these books that get published are not the best books. There are better books out there that are languishing on hard drives—unread, forever. I know that for a fact.
And it would be one thing if the books that got praised by book reviewers were actually good. That would be fine. Then if you got rejected, it would just be luck. But in many cases the books that are critically acclaimed are not very good. They are aggressively, terribly, unreadably bad.
It’s fine to dislike
’s novel. I disagree with Baker’s opinion, but I accept that it represents his honest take on the book in question. However, I wish we lived in a world where all novels were held to the same standard to which John is being held.Instead what happens is that certain people get set aside as geniuses, a process I call “anointing”. And big money gets invested into acquiring and marketing these writers. And, somehow, through some process of conscious or unconscious coordination, these writers just don't get bad reviews.
And many people, including many folks in the Substack ecosystem, would like nothing more than to become one of these anointed writers. But they don't see that this whole system is dishonest! The problem isn't that John sometimes isn’t reviewed well, it's that there are so many writers whose work doesn't really get subjected to critique.
Now some would say that Substack is the same. If an author is popular here, as John is, then their book doesn't really get negative reviews. There is some truth to this.
But…think how insane this is. We are a small group of friends who, to a large extent, actually know each other and who mostly write for free on our blogs. Once a book escapes this circle of friends, nobody treats it with kid gloves—John’s reviews in Compact and The New Yorker show that. What is insidious about the larger literary world is that if you're one of the anointed, people treat your book with reverence even if they don’t actually know you, and even if they're a book critic who’s being paid to seriously interrogate the experience of reading this book.
The two phenomena—being popular on Substack and being an anointed literary writer—are really only superficially similar. One is rooted in community and friendship, while the other is rooted in the fact that for a critic to make a career in letters, they need to eventually sell a book to a large, faceless corporation, and that’s something which can only happen if you’re a member in good standing of the American literary community—a standing that tends to be disrupted if you speak too intemperately about an anointed book.
There is no need for anyone to be anointed
Of course I think my own work is good. It is very good. It is excellent. It’s just that I reject the whole idea that talent is rare. For starters, I am not the only great story writer on Substack. Right in my own subscriber list, there’s
, who writes amazing fable-type stories, and Scott Alexander, who is honestly one of the most intriguing fiction writers working today.1 I am sure there are others on this platform who I haven’t encountered, or who have yet to establish themselves.Now, I’m not saying that good and bad don’t exist. Obviously there are many terrible writers on Substack. What I am saying is that this platform possesses certain conditions that have allowed me to write innovative work, find an audience, and achieve some broader recognition. And those conditions will surely give rise to other writers as well.
I spent five years writing and rewriting The Default World in response to the demands of the publishing industry. Then I wrote “Money Matters” in three days, and it was unambiguously superior to the novel that's been edited and shaped by the industry. Why? What happened? What’s the difference? Well…I stopped writing for editors, and I started writing for you.
Substack is not a complete meritocracy—it’s controlled by cliques and algorithms, just like everything else. But at least there is some room here for something strange and new and uncontrolled to occur. In particular, I think it’s very possible for small accounts to grow rapidly here. I’ve already seen that dynamic just this year with
, , and . None of these people have significant credentials outside Substack; all have found success here recently. I have no doubt that many writers much more talented than myself will emerge from this platform before the algorithm slams shut and Substack summer comes to an end.If you want honest talk about books, follow these newsletters…
Like I said, if my work has succeeded, it’s only done so because it exists in an ecosystem where people are willing to give a chance to little-known writers. It’s not necessarily fair: there are many great Substacks whose relative lack of popularity is baffling to me. For instance, every time I read
, I am shocked by how few subscribers she has.But, overall, I still think the Substack ecosystem is healthier and more open and more honest than the mainstream literary world. If that wasn’t true, it just wouldn’t be worth dealing with. You could simply read NYRB or The New York Times instead.
In honor of that, I wanted to give a shout-out to ten literary newsletters that I think are worth following:
- is a journal edited by and that strives to publish long, thoughtful pieces about books. It’s become something of a nexus for the literary culture on Substack. It is most notable for the extremely free hand they give their writers: once they’ve given you the keys, they let you say whatever you want. Their best piece is Alexander Sorondo’s 11,000 word profile of William T. Vollmann and his seemingly-unpublishable 3,600 page novel.
- is a different journal, edited by , which provides something of a contrast to TMR. Whereas the above is attempting to be a serious literary review, is distinctly more playful. Sam’s signature is to stage week-long debates between different writers, arguing various facets of the same point. These are quite fun to read, and I highly recommend them. But he’s also got an incredible series drawing attention to forgotten writers. I really liked this piece on Maxim Gorky and this piece on Washington Irving.
- largely writes about the classics, but he also weighs in magisterially on all topics related to letters, including some contemporary book reviews. His most well-known essay is “How to have good taste”.
- is a newcomer to Substack, but she is already calling attention to herself with her clear, powerful craft advice. Amusingly, Courtney and I conceptualize writing completely differently: she cares only about language (supposedly), while I prefer story, but…we usually tend to like the same books! Here’s a great post where she discusses the kind of openings she finds to be instantly compelling.
- made a name for himself with a long profile on William T. Vollmann in The Metropolitan Review, but on his own Substack he blogs about a mix of historical topics, great literature (he’s currently re-reading the Sherlock Holmes stories), and reviews of other Substackers book. Nobody is more honest than this guy. For instance, here he gives a mixed review to a self-published novel that Ross Barkan raved about in TMR.
- burst fully-formed from my comment section. One day he just unmasked himself, attached his real name to his Substack account, and started writing thoughtful, erudite summaries of mid-century novels and memoirs. His stand-out piece is his re-evaluation of J.D. Salinger’s entire ouevre (he gives Catcher In The Rye a B/B+).
- is a pseudonymous loose-canon who lurks, like me, somewhere between the rationalist and literary spheres. In addition to being a stand-out story writer, she posts quite frequently about literature: I enjoyed her piece on Lily Bart’s virginity.
- is a blogger with a tech and design background who personifies a certain kind of literary chic. She’s quite interested in brodernism: she’s always writing about some European novel that I’ve ever even heard of before. But her stand-outs tend to be long, thoughtful highly-researched essays on literary or design topics. Here’s a great piece on the different types of openings used by personal essays.
- was an early supporter and fan of Woman of Letters. She shares my interest in New Wave science-fiction and in literary discourse. She’s a serious critic, well-published elsewhere on the internet (and author of a forthcoming book on Le Guin, Russ, and Butler), but reading her newsletter is like luxuriating in the company of a friend. Whether she’s watching Neon Genesis Evangelion or sampling perfumes, you’re definitely going to know about it. My favorite of her recent posts is one where she crankily tries to rescue Ursula Le Guin from being sainted.
- runs a traditional blog that often pairs recent releases with backlist titles. The great thing about Abra is that if you’re a careful Abra-watcher you can figure out when she really doesn’t like a book, but is too polite to say. She’s someone I trust when it comes to figuring out if any of these frontlist books are actually any good. For instance, I somewhat gather (from Abra) that Kitamura’s latest isn’t her best.
The Samuel Richardson Award For Best Self-Published Literary Novel
If I have self-published something on Substack that is good and worthy of notice, then I am surely not alone. The New Yorker found me. Anne Trubek at Belt Publishing found John Pistelli. We are not alone. More of us exist out there.
However, I do agree that it’s difficult to honestly evaluate a self-published book. It feels cruel to single out some little-read novel and give it a bad review. But neither is it good for Substack novels to be subjected to the same puffery that afflicts literary books from big presses. That is not the way forward.
Instead, I’ve got a solution. Let’s just sift through a pile of self-published books and then we can say, “Out of everything in this pile, here is the best book.” To this end, I am announcing a novel contest: The Samuel Richardson Award For Best Self-Published Literary Novel. It is named after Samuel Richardson, one of the first novelists in the English language. He was a printer, and he quite literally printed and sold his own books, often financing them by collecting subscriptions, in a sort of 18th century version of Kickstarter.
I’ve already collected a crackerjack crew of six judges for this contest, which will be based on the long-running Self-Published Fantasy Novel contest. Rules will hopefully be forthcoming next week, but the precis will be this:
The contest entry must be a story collection or a novel that’s over 40,000 words in length, available for purchase (or serialized online) at the time of submission. Please submit the book as an epub document or pdf.
We will divide up the pile, and each of the six judges will read their pile and select one finalist.
After the finalists are publicly announced, all the judges will read each finalist and decide upon a winner.
Reviews of all the finalists will be published in each of our newsletters.
The deadline for entries will be July 31st, 2025 (at an email address TBD).
Alexander blogs on Substack at Astral Codex Ten, but his best-known stories are on his old blog, Slate Star Codex.
What a great piece Naomi. Thank you for the shout-out and thrilled to see you get this much-deserved recognition. Couldn't have happened to a better Substacker!
People often say they're "humbled" to be recognized by prizes, The New Yorker, etc., This has always struck me as false, bordering on silly. A person isn't humbled to be elevated, they're enlarged!
But this piece is the closest I've ever seen to it being true. You are being honest about the process for yourself and the structure for us all, and also generous toward others. And that's a hard thing to do when the process has finally extended a hand.
This recognition from TNYer is the result of a ton of writing, reading, and labor that you've undertaken in a new ecosystem that doesn't have a clear pathway. It's not an anointing like we've both seen people get for reasons of imagined hope for the unknown ingenue, before they've even written a full book.
Thank you for the shout-out. I'm glad our cynicisms have had a decade now to flourish and find actual shapes.