Writing a Book on Substack | Hacker News Reader

Writing a Book on Substack

hardcoresoftware.learningbyshipping.com

17 pointsjseliger8 comments

I do understand that there is much more flexibility of content to be hosted on Substack. It is, as it were, a OneNote page that can have access charged for. Pretty nice!

What I don't understand is...how do I get a PDF / talk authors who take this path into making one?

When the book was being authored, the True Blue subscribers could get a PDF when the book was done.

Can I do that now? If I pay $300, do I get a PDF still? Or has that opportunity passed, and in order to have an offline copy, do I need to subscribe and scrape all the content for my personal archive?

Like TFA states, one day Mr. Sinofsky can decide to download his zip and close up shop, what happens to the rest of us who subscribed? Our interesting nerd / business running / retro windows insider war stories archive goes poof.

I like this information. I want to 'own' it forever if only to review it and learn its lessons over and over during my career. I don't want to make unauthorized copies, but I can't actually buy this, I can only rent it, and that's a bummer.

So. I'm not subscribing nor am I scraping it. I just look at it regretfully from the distance of a free viewer.

Edit: less flamey mode

I'm in the process of starting a webspace where I can both blog and write short fiction. So many people have tried to push me toward Substack instead of building my own space, but like you, Substack just looks too ephemeral for my taste. It feels like the hot new platform that everyone talks about migrating to, might try it for a month or two, then goes back to whatever they were doing before. Maybe I am wrong?

I don't know. I know that nothing digital is truly permanent outside of like CD-Rs and Project Silica, but websites you own tend to be way, way more permanent than services like Xanga, MySpace, old LiveJournal, etc. and I don't see how Medium, Substack, and their similars also manage to hang around.

It's the age old 'control of technology vs convenience of content authoring'.

Personally, I don't think so.

Decided to reboot my website and blog over the holidays for various reasons though I haven't repointed my domain to it yet. I'm not interested in monetizing. In retrospect, I should maybe have just hosted it somewhere like Lightsail rather than using Wordpress.com. But I can always do so when the hosting I bought needs to be renewed.

My personal experience is that the lack of things to fiddle with (themes etc), the pleasant writing interface plus the knowledge that I have the privilege of sending something into inboxes have made me much more disciplined than I ever was on a blogging platform. And I didn’t expect that at all!

Agreed. Even when you own the space, from time to time you revamp some major subsystem (e.g. your typesetting pipeline) and it's a pain. But at least its on your terms.

If your hoster shuts down, you're looking at lot of work to port your stuff elsewhere.

That said, there are a lot of things about Substack that I like. They're doing a pretty good job of it.

That said, I still 100% plan to host my own stuff. :)

These are all valid points.

Fundamentally there is a conflict between a subscription model and a one off purchase of something like a book. I’ve had a bit of a think about how this might work on my own Substack (I have an idea for a book but still a long way from being realised).

1. Make the book something that is provided alongside other content so that subscribers get more value than just the book when they subscribe. This might be additional content or discussion groups Q&A’s with the author on each chapter.

2. Make a pdf of the content of the book available to anyone who has paid more than a certain amount in subs. So if you just want the book then just subscribe for a few months and then cancel.

I like #2 because, while I do have subscriptions lasting years, at some point, I will turn them off. Life circumstances change. But having a 'rent to own' model for digital files is perfectly acceptable to me.

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