Are Substack Launches the New Book Parties? Vogue Asks. I Say Yes, and Even More.

This week, Vogue published an article titled Are Substack Launches the New Book Parties? and I smiled when I saw it because I’ve spent the last year watching this, and even more, happen in real time.

It’s no secret that Substack is exploding. Writers are building real communities here. Newsletters are becoming media companies. Authors are launching books without waiting for permission. Women are realizing their lives are worth writing about and they are no longer waiting for a big publishing house or a magazine byline to do it. They’re writing weekly columns, serializing books, hosting literary salons, creating businesses, and generating meaningful income from their words.

The Vogue article, which is about the launch of award-winning journalist Carson Griffith’s new Substack called Rich People Shit, writes:

“The literary parallel felt fitting, though. For decades, New York’s media and publishing worlds have marked milestones with book parties. Increasingly, newsletters are building the same kind of connection and finding equally good reasons to gather in person. “At a certain point, it felt like the newsletter had escaped from my laptop and become a real-world community,” Griffith noted.”

My own literary salon, which I've hosted in Brooklyn for the past two years, exists because of Substack. Women who first connected through my writing began showing up in person. Friendships formed, collaborations emerged, and a whole creative community took shape. And that community eventually helped inspire the creation of my indie hybrid publishing house, Pink Ink Press.

I came of age as a writer were there were gatekeepers everywhere. If you wanted a book launch party, you had to hope your writing was good enough to be chosen by one of the big publishing houses. If you wanted to be published at all as a writer, you’d have to spend hours pitching magazines. You spent more time hoping and praying and trying to be chosen as a writer than actually writing.

But only a tiny percentage of us were ever actually chosen. So as a result, millions of women internationalized that rejection and the story that their words weren’t worth sharing. But it was never about lack of talent. It was simply that they weren’t handed a mic.

Now a woman can write, in real time, inside a divorce. She can publish a Substack from the trenches of motherhood as her newborn sleeps and she questions her identity. She can document what it’s like to fall in love again. She can write an essay about her relationship with her body. With her drinking. With herself. And within minutes, that essay can reach thousands of other women who can read it and say, “Thank god someone else gets it.”

That is a revolution.

After spending this past week New York surrounded by fellow authors, publishers, Substack writers, literary salons, and conversations about the future of publishing, I came home more convinced than ever that we’re witnessing a massive shift in how women build audiences, communities, and careers.

Substack has been the vehicle for us to do it, but I think what we’re seeing is so much more than the rise of a newsletter platform. We’re seeing a generation of women reclaim the narrative of their lives. And I have a feeling we’re just getting started.

PS - Over the past few months, I've had dozens of conversations with women who know they have something to say but aren't sure how to shape it into a Substack, book, business, or body of work. If that's you, I've opened a handful of Substack Power Hour sessions this summer. You can learn more here.