Rohini Chowdhury, Sonya Dutta Choudhury and Neelima Vallangi

IIM Calcutta alumnus, author and journalist Sonya Dutta Choudhury started a book subscription service called Sonya’s Book Box and monthly newsletter Sonya’s Read to Lead on Substack during the pandemic to build a book community and nudge readers to return to a reading habit. As a journalist hemmed in by structure,  angle and word count, she says, she has long envied the more freer, conversational tone and language at the disposal of bloggers. There is a need to stay invisible within this hardened format of traditional journalism, while more and more people were interested to know the person behind the writing. A newsletter enabling creative freedom and quirky, anecdotal writing, she says, “felt very liberating because suddenly I didn’t have a house style which I had to conform to. I could just think about who my readers were, how I could talk to them, and what would be interesting for them.” The software also provides swift analytics to tell writers how many users opened their mail, clicked on links or shared it with their network, the relationship with the reader becoming more immediate. Author Rohini Chowdhury who currently writes the newsletter The Story Birds on Substack with friend and writer Shaiontoni Bose, which brings out original fiction, retold or reinterpreted myths and folktales every week with accompanying illustrations, agrees. “I love the direct reader engagement,” she says. “For me as a writer, hearing back from my readers is the greatest motivation to keep writing and writing better. On Substack, I know within hours how many subscribers have read my work, and the feedback from readers begins coming in within a day. That never happened with traditional publishing—there we have to wait till the book is done, and on the shelves, and the first statement with sales information comes in months later from the publisher. Reader interaction is also delayed till readings are organised, or a literature fest happens somewhere,” says the UK-based writer for whom geography has limited this kind of traditional interaction. “I find Substack gives me an international audience with great ease. Not so with traditional publishing, despite the fact that almost all my books are on Amazon.”

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The newsletter has also helped Dutta Choudhury connect to a vibrant and talented newsletter creator community. “As soon as you sign up, you are pulled into this world where you are directed to little packages, areas, conversations and other newsletters where you can look, learn and have a cross-fertilisation of ideas.”

For Rohini Chowdhury who had been looking to break out of “the tyranny of traditional publishing,” Substack offered a no-strings-attached model. “My work remains mine as do all rights. So I am free to present my writing the way I want it—I can turn it into audio or video if I want, I can upload it or take it down, I can charge for a story or not—the freedom is amazing. That is completely missing with traditional publishing, where the publisher, since it holds publishing rights, calls all the shots.” Moreover, as Substack does not charge till the writer starts earning, there is space for experimentation, allowing her to slowly build readership.

“Most writers usually have a body of work which traditional publishers do not want or cannot publish—they may be limited by their list, or a piece of writing just doesn’t sit well with the editor looking at it. There are no such constraints on Substack, and it is the reader who decides whether a piece of writing is good or not. And while this self-publishing often lets substandard work get ‘out there’, it also holds a writer accountable for what they write,” says Chowdhury, while admitting that the views of an experienced editor is the one thing she misses about this new format. Chowdhury also plans to compile The Story Birds’ published stories into a book in the future along with serialising a novel on Substack.