In book world, the summer of 2025 is officially the summer of Substack.

Over the past few years, Substack has been slowly building a literary scene, one in which amateurs, relative unknowns, and Pulitzer Prize-winning writers rub shoulders with one another. This spring, a series of writers — perhaps best known for their Substacks — released new fiction, leading to a burst of publicity that the critic, novelist, and Substacker Naomi Kanakia has declared “Substack summer.”

“Is the Next Great American Novel Being Published on Substack?” asked the New Yorker in May. Substack “has become the premier destination for literary types’ unpublished musings,” announced Vulture.

Can Substack move sales like BookTok can? No. But it’s doing something that, for a certain set, is almost more valuable. It’s giving a shot of vitality to a faltering book media ecosystem. It’s building a world where everyone reads the London Review of Books, and they all have blogs.

“I myself think of BookTok as an engine for discovery, and I think Substack is an engine for discourse,” said the journalist Adrienne Westenfeld. “BookTok is a listicle in a way. It’s people recommending books that you might not have heard of. It’s not as much a place for substantive dialogue about books, which is simply a limitation of short form video.”

Three years ago, Westenfeld wrote about Substack’s rising literary scene for Esquire. Now, Esquire has slashed its book coverage, and Westenfeld is writing the Substack companion to a traditionally published nonfiction book: Adam Cohen’s The Captain’s Dinner. That progression is, in a way, par for the course for the current moment.

All the sad young literary men that are said to have disappeared are there on Substack, thriving.

With both social media and Google diverting potential readers away from publications, many outlets are no longer investing in arts coverage. The literary crowd who used to hang out on what was known as “Book Twitter” no longer gathers on what is now X. All the same, there are still people who like reading, and writing, and thinking about books. Right now, a lot of them seem to be on Substack.

What strikes me most about the Substack literary scene is just how much it looks like the literary scene of 20 years ago, the one the millennials who populate Substack just missed. The novels these writers put out tend to be sprawling social fiction about the generational foibles of American families à la Jonathan Franzen. They post essays to their Substacks like they’re putting blog posts on WordPress, only this time, you can add a paywall. All the sad young literary men that are said to have disappeared are there on Substack, thriving. On Substack, it’s 2005 again.

Substack is a lifeboat in publishing… or maybe an oar

Substack has a lot of big-name writers, some of whom the platform courted aggressively with advances when it began scaling up around 2021 and 2022. (Substack was first founded in 2017.) Acclaimed literary icons like George Saunders and Salman Rushdie are on Substack — so are newer voices like Elif Batuman and Carmen Maria Machado.

Writers can offer Substack literary credibility, while Substack can offer writers a direct and monetizable connection to their readers. In a literary landscape that feels perennially on the edge, that’s a valuable........

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