Before I get to Substack, I'll start with another story signposted by Jane Friedman this week. Be patient, it's relevant. Tim Ferriss is one of those “public thinkers” most of us will know from somewhere, whether that's the game-changing and hugely successful book The 4-Hour Workweek (and subsequent “Four Hour” titles) whose wisdoms many of us have spent so many more than four hours a week trying to implement in our lives, or his equally influential productivity and lifestyle podcast. If anyone is going to make a success of self-help writing, it's Tim.
ALLi News Editor Dan Holloway
Which is why his latest blog post-slash-warning hits so viscerally.
Sales Plummet in the Age of AI Summaries
Ferriss has noted that his sales have, to put it bluntly, fallen off a cliff. Down 87 percent since 2022 and down 57 percent year on year in the most recent year alone. And he cites the launch of ChatGPT 3.5 in November 2022 as no coincidence.
In short, well, he believes that (“in short”) is the problem. People en masse want summaries of long and dense self-help materials. They want one-siders and bullet points.
But for those of us (my last three books, after a decade sticking to fiction) who write how-to books, he sees good, or at least helpful, news. Because people who want bullet-point how-to summaries aren't really the people whose deep problems we are in a position to solve. As he puts it,
“I'd rather write books for 10,000 people who are genuinely changed by them than crank out short-form videos for 10 million people who forget about them within days or minutes.”
In an age of mass AI summaries, he sees our value as creators lying more and more in a return to the older model of 1,000 true fans, in particular in our skill as storytellers that helps people make the change we offer real in their lives.
Substack Introduces Creator Sponsorships
Which brings me to Substack. Which is one of the platforms many writers who are active in Ferriss's milieu of self-help use to hone and deliver that careful, personalized storytelling around their unique ideas.
Last week, Substack announced that it will be introducing sponsorship opportunities for its bestsellers. And by bestsellers it means those with 100 paying subscribers (an order of magnitude less than 1,000 true fans). It will do this through Creator Kits, which enable writers to partner with one of a group of sponsors to offer a variety of paid advertising, including unlocking paying content for the whole of someone's free subscriber list.
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