How Substack became the new book tour

It’s hard enough to publish a book, but getting people to buy it is an entirely different battle. As new platforms reshape how readers gather and interact online, authors are finding that sometimes platforms built to showcase writing can also double as powerful engines for discovery. The most high-profile example so far might be Girls creator Lena Dunham, who bolstered the traditional press tour for her new memoir Famesick with interviews and features on the newsletter platform Substack. In an interview with Arielle Swedback for her On Substack newsletter (which is published, of course, on Substack), Dunham made the case in blunt terms: “Someone I trust told me that, in book sales at least, every single Substack follower is the equivalent of many more Instagram or X followers … While I don’t have the actual numbers, that feels anecdotally true to me. There’s an appreciation of the written word that suffuses this whole place.” While promoting her memoir, Dunham did interviews with a range of the platform’s newsletters, from Emilia Petrarca’s Shop Rat, which has 32,000 subscribers, to Emily Sundberg’s Feed Me, with more than 150,000 readers. To Dunham’s point, many of these newsletters are built around tightly defined audiences that tend to be more engaged than those on broader social platforms. “It’s been really interesting to see how committed certain audiences are. I love that a newsletter with more followers but a less engaged audience doesn’t have the same value as someone with a tiny but rabid fan base,” Dunham added. And while Dunham may be the latest high-profile convert, she’s hardly alone. “Ten years ago the publishing industry’s center of gravity was the bookstore and the New York Times list,” Andrea Barzvi, an agent and president of Empire Literary, tells Fast Company. “Today, discovery has been outsourced to algorithms. And the publisher relies more heavily than ever on social media—whether it’s the author’s own platfor