It's OK to want your writing to be popular

Hi, I’m Amber Eve — author of smalltown romantic comedies, and my long-running blog, Forever Amber. If you’d like to know more about me, start here. If you’d like to hear more from me, meanwhile, hit the button below…

A few weeks ago I posted a photo of my friend’s puppy on Notes, along with a throwaway comment about how I was hoping little Nellie would be the thing that would finally make me ‘popular’ here on Substack…

(Seriously, though, would you look at that face?!)

I’ll be honest: I didn’t really give that caption much thought. It was supposed to be tongue-in-cheek: an observation that Substack Notes is one of those slightly weird corners of the internet where you can spend hours on end crafting a 3,000 word essay on a topic of huge importance (Or, OK, in my case about things that aren’t particularly important, but which I nevertheless spend a lot of time on…), but it’ll be a random photo of someone else’s dog that ends up going viral.

And this, it proved, was true. That photo of Nellie the Poochon peeping over the back of my couch got far more ‘likes’ than anything I’ve ever written here (Although zero new subscribers, so, you know, take from that what you will…), but, while most people who saw it responded to it in the manner in which the post was intended, after a couple of days I started to get a slow trickle of comments from people who were clearly under the impression that I was being totally serious in my statement that I wanted Nellie to make me a Substack Superstar, and who wanted to gently scold me for it.

There were a few more of these1, all with the same general theme: that I should stick to writing, and not worry my pretty little head about being ‘popular’ because that’s not something I should want for myself. Kind of uncool, really. A bit cringe.

When I started getting those comments, my first instinct was to reply explaining that, OMG, I was just joking, Steve! Like, OF COURSE I don’t ACTUALLY want to be popular! Heaven forbid!

If I’m totally honest, though, I’d have to admit that while I didn’t for a second think my photo of Nellie was the thing that would do it, actually, yeah, I kind of DO want that. I would like my newsletter to be ‘popular’. My books, too. I would like to make the bestseller list. I would LOVE to earn enough from books and newsletters that I didn’t have to take on dull copyediting work, in which a dashing duke is forced to take a wife.

And I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that.

(With wanting my writing to be popular, I mean. There IS quite a lot wrong with the dashing dukes and their marriages of convenience, actually, but that’s a whole other topic…)

(Also, I AM a bit cringe and uncool, and you know what? There’s nothing wrong with that either…)

A lot of people do think there’s something wrong with wanting to be ‘popular’ though: the comments on my photo of Nellie prove that, as do all of those Substack Notes I keep seeing from people claiming they ‘only want to follow small, unpopular accounts!’, as if the bigger ones are somehow less ‘worthy’. Sometimes the authors of those notes will be very specific about their requirements, saying they only want to subscribe to newsletters with less than 200 subscribers (For some reason it’s always 200…), and anyone with more than that is … just dead to them, I guess?

And, look, I know, OK? I understand that the people who write these notes are really just trying to show their support for what they call the ‘small’ accounts, probably believing that the ‘bigger’ ones don’t need it (Spoiler: they do). But I think what they’re missing with that technique is that if everyone decides to support ‘smaller’ accounts, purely on the basis of their smallness, then those small accounts will soon become the ‘big’ ones, and what are you going to do then? Unfollow them all because they no longer need (or deserve) your support? (Again; they will.) Kick them to the curb for having the audacity to become OMGPOPULAR?

The thing is, I’d hazard a wild guess that most of us — both here on Substack and in the bookish space in general — secretly want to be ‘popular’, in the sense that we want people to read what we write. Are there really writers out there hitting ‘publish’ on a Substack essay and thinking, “Gosh, I hope hardly anyone reads this! I wouldn’t want to be popular!”?

Probably not. Because there wouldn’t be much point in writing things on the internet if you didn’t want anyone to read it, would there? You’d be better off just buying yourself a diary; ideally one of the ones with a lock and key, so you can rest easy in the knowledge that no one will ever read a word you’ve written in it.

If you want to make a living from writing, though, people have to read the things you write … which means you kind of HAVE to be ‘popular’ — or, at least, the things you write do. It’s not enough to just write them ‘for the love of it’, and not care if no one ever reads them. It doesn’t work that way.

Most writing advice, however, completely ignores the inconvenient fact that we all need to make money in order to survive, and assumes that writing should only ever be a nice hobby or labour of love. And so, again and again I’m told not worry about whether or not anyone ever reads my work; to ‘just write’, as if writing is reward enough in itself, and it’s a bit much to expect any more than that. As a blogger, I was repeatedly scolded for focusing on what people described as ‘the numbers’ rather than only caring about the words; I was told constantly that I shouldn’t care how many views my website got each month, even though my livelihood literally depended on this incredibly important statistic. As an author, meanwhile, I’m told it doesn’t matter how many books I sell, and led to believe it’s a bit weird to even think about that, really. Like, why are you even looking at your Kindle dashboard, Amber? Why do you insist on needing something as vulgar as money to survive, when other writers do it just for love?

And this, I think, is one of the biggest challenges for modern writers; we have to be popular without being seen to actually want to be popular. We have to make enough money to live off, while convincing people that we really don’t care about money. We have to write things people will want to read while pretending not to care if no one ever reads them. We are no longer allowed to be ambitious. We are not allowed to want things; least of all success. All we’re supposed to aspire to now is ‘being cosy’, and… something to do with blankets and fluffy socks, I think? Anything more than that is too much, and heaven forbid anyone — especially a woman — be considered too much.

But I do care. If I didn’t, I’d just get myself a journal and write in that, and I would never, ever show anyone what I wrote in it. Instead, though, I have a newsletter, and a blog, and books I very much hope people will one day want to read. I also have a list of very specific goals scribbled in the back of my 2026 planner which I absolutely will not be sharing with anyone, because then you would all know that I secretly want to be one of the ‘popular’ writers, and that would be my cover totally blown.

Oh no, wait: it kind of already is, isn’t it?

Whoops…