Substack and the literary micro-hype machine
Virality and the power of niche literary attention markets
Self-publishing literary fiction is extremely difficult.
If the average traditionally-backed, publisher-supported writer is continuously pumping out thinkpieces about how perma-fucked their careers are, then their indie equivalents are even more fucked.
Fortunately, we are playing a different game altogether (rather than teach creative writing to the disinterested children of transnational plutocrats, I make my money training a team of Southeast Asian monkeys to pickpocket Western tourists).
Yes—sometimes I find it disappointing that literary fiction is now just a tiny subset of the algorithmic attention economy, but rather than complain about, I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s important for writers to make peace with this.
By wont of its very nature, a substantive work of art inherently resists being flattened into an interchangeable piece of content in the attention economy. This is not because of any numerical measurement of success, but because of its intrinsic characteristics and long tail of considered appreciation. A good novel takes hours of focus to pass through you and lingers for long afterward, a video is hardly ever remembered.
Thus, I often return to Tony Tulathimutte’s tweet on the subject: accept that literary fiction is more or less a niche conservatory art form. After you do this, you can take the additional step and release yourself of the need to engage in yet another low-agency lamentation on the current state of affairs.1
To that end, I have been extremely lucky to accrue a niche audience from my regular blog posting, and as my Substack readership continues to grow, sales from my novel keep on trickling in.
At the same time, I can’t help but engage the analytical side of things, and to that end, I find the dynamics of literary success interesting within the context of its own niche.
Who cares how other art forms are doing right now? This is the one I like!
As I’ve gained more experience in establishing my profile and cultivating an audience on the internet, I’m increasingly of the view that virality is the essential determinant of literary success.
Virality as an economic strategy has by now long exceeded its apotheosis and yes, it feels tiresome to port over a term from the 2010’s and reapply it to the wordcel context.
But when I approximate the pathways to substantial (or even modest) literary success, I’ve come to the conclusion that books that aren’t spreading are actually dying. If this hypothesis is correct, the novelist’s chief aim is therefore to continuously inject energy (via content ancillary to their novel) into the attention economy in a manner akin to starting a flywheel.2
Book marketing is a notoriously difficult task and often fails even at the highest level with the highest profile authors (unless, of course, a novelist has become a coveted “brand” and people are chiefly buying their books as the wordcel equivalent of status-objects).
My theory here is that it’s not just indie novelists who don’t know how to really sell books. Publishers don’t know how to sell books because they recognize that the reason that you have a power law distribution for literary success is because no one can systematically engineer the virality of a novel in advance.
Virality in the context of literary success looks something like this:
A book is published.
Once in the wild, the book garners favorable reviews which attracts more attention (proceed to step 3).
The attention in turns garner more readers, who write more favorable reviews (return to step 2).
Note that the reviews are both cause and consequence of this virtuous feedback cycle.
To this effect, Goodreads has largely been a failure, particularly after the Amazon acquisition. Discovery on Goodreads sucks because the site is dogshit and Bezos-chan et al have deliberately decided to let it stagnate (thank you to Technofeudalism for another cultural win!).
Amazon, in turn, has polluted its book pages with ‘sponsored’ book ads that compete with its more substantive internal recommendation algorithm, which does not drive as much profit as its advertising platform (which delivers both ad revenue and book sales revenue).
Enter Substack.
For all its faults—including its recent descent into content-slop world—Substack is a viable social network where this positive feedback cycle can take place for literary fiction (Booktok, as far as I can tell, is primarily another slop factory when it comes to literary fare).
I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the number of reviews my novel has garnered on Substack, and I’ve been even more surprised by the caliber of these reviews.
Of particular interest was
’s piece on the novel:
Kim’s review was particularly interesting because he explored a unique structural critique of the novel.
However, only a relatively small number of readers seem to have paid particular attention to Incel’s structure and stylistics, if there has been any. The pre-existing reviews, when mentioning the formal aspects of Incel, are content to make no more than passing references that are exploited to comment on Anon’s psychology or ARX-Han’s competence as a writer who can swiftly deliver inner harangues of a troubled character. Such approaches are fair enough, but they are all without exception reduced to assessments that do not fall in the domain of formalistic criticism.
He starts by breaking down the structure of the novel’s chapters:
Examining the macroscopic structure of Incel deepens the problem. In each of its chapters, we are generally faced with a situation in which Anon finds himself and his reactions to it, which often amounts to lengthy inner monologues or dialogues. What happens in a chapter—whether it be what Anon encounters, does, or thinks—tends not to directly affect what happens in the succeeding chapters.
From there, Kim moves further into the theoretical, placing the novel in the context of Zola’s historical attempt to integrate something like psychological frameworks into narrative:
What Zola proposed was the idea of the novel “not limited to the expression of sentiments […] because it is essential also to exhibit the working of these sentiments […] not only in their phenomena, but in the causes of these phenomena.”(ibid., p. 49, emphasis added) In a sense, he aimed to devise a scientific program of narrative literature that would reveal what causes certain human reactions or social interactions under controlled environments. This, I believe, was one of the most ambitious literary projects of the High Modernity.
Zola’s project, if I understand Kim correctly, is something almost akin to injecting a form of behaviorism into a narrative format (“Factor A caused person X to do Y under conditions Z.”).
Kim is to correct to point out that this was one of the theoretical throughlines in the novel and I’m thankful that he enjoyed it:
This is where I find the brilliance of Incel. Combined with its characters, themes, and contents, its literary form as a non-novel or an “incorrect” novel discloses the impossibility, or absurdity of writing a novel in this age filled with the spirit of scientism or modernity itself.6
I very much enjoyed Kim’s piece and I confess that it took me a couple of read-throughs to fully understand it (even now, I’m sure there are some subtle points that he’s making that elude me).
Causation is something that has always interested me in the philosophical sense, and yet, my book was not rigorously plotted with the aim of achieving a forceful narrative momentum—as a matter of taste, this can be both a weakness and a strength.3
wrote a review on his stack as well, which I also suggest you check out:
INCEL: The Novel — A Stylistic Masterclass
Before examining the book in greater detail, I must comment on its style. Indie novels have a reputation (sometimes deserved) for being rushed and poorly edited. Such is not the case with the book under review. Great care has been taken to craft every sentence. ARX-HAN demonstrates a mastery of language use.
INCEL is also a novel of ideas, philosophical and especially scientific. ARX-HAN incorporates ideas from various scientific disciplines, such as biology, neuroscience, and especially evolutionary psychology. Readers like me, approaching the book from a liberal arts background, may encounter unfamiliar scientific language. But that’s not a bad thing. It is recommended that non-scientific readers keep Google handy to query unfamiliar terms.
I had a lot of fun with the stylistic maximalism in INCEL.
While I don’t regret this approach to execution, for my next novel, I’ll likely write in a more minimal & accessible style.
That said, pulling in interdisciplinary topics from a range of academic disciplines was one of the most fun parts of writing the book.
One thing that frustrates me in a lot of modern literary fiction is how many elite writers seem to lack curiosity outside of a purely literary domain.
This means that many of the elites index heavily on non-empirical mental models about topics of great salience, which I often find disappointing. The “world-models” of their literary universes are therefore woefully incomplete and lack depth and sophistication.
There’s a balance between only referencing, say, other novelists & non-fiction essays versus integrating ideas from other fields. That balance is generative: one reason I like Houellebecq is because of his tendencies toward being a polymath. He used to be computer programmer, for instance, and also references biologicaly concepts in some of his books. This breadth makes them more interesting.
’s review of the novel interested me via his own personal story as it relates to finding meaning in personal relationships:
Luckily, over the course of my junior year of college, I was saved by the intervention of Divine Providence. At the beginning of that year, I lost my virginity to a girl from tinder. It was an empty, shitty experience that left me feeling drained for weeks. This showed me that even “winning” in the world that the redpill and the blackpill believed in didn’t amount to much. At the end of the same year, I stepped into the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem, saw a sunbeam shining down onto Jesus’ tomb, and knew I didn’t, and couldn’t believe in (pure) materialism anymore.
As an elder millennial, I am firmly convinced that millennial dating culture was an escalatory step-function in terms of the behavioral sink template of cultural liberalism: fundamentally, it was always about cumming as much as possible (from what I understand, Zoomers are pushing back against this to an extent, although their cultural response function seems quite bifurcated given that they also invented the term gooning).
Joshua’s turn toward religion interests me as a personal arc, and I’ll look to explore theism as a narrative theme in my next work.
’s review similarly presents an indictment of millennial sexuality in his piece on the novel:
Or, it is at least recognizable to those of us who feel we have lost something after spending a bit too much time online. Thus, Incel is one of the few novels that takes seriously the tragedy of us digital natives: a sense of both having grown up too fast and being locked in arrested development. Anon has seen hundreds of bare breasts and pussies before he fucks, he has had refined the art of conversation with other Reddit nerds instead of flesh and blood human beings, and he has developed an understanding of psychology far removed from the common sense of everyday social interactions.
Coda
As I get older, I am trying to better inculcate the practice of gratitude in my daily life.
I am thankful to have the opportunity to write, and I am even more thankful to have the opportunity to be read.
Although every novelist wants to sell more books, that my niche success is a decidedly humble result feels like an entirely appropriate outcome on levels both economic and metaphysical.
If you’ve enjoyed my novel, the number one thing you can do is post a review of my novel on Amazon and Goodreads.
If you’re relying on your publisher to do this for you, you are engaging in low agency behaviour. Unless you are already a massive success, they are not really incented (or even resourced) to push any one bet over the other by a very hard margin.
A great both that achieves both deep psychological analysis and narrative momentum is Hari Kunzru’s Blue Ruin. Absolutely loved it.
It's nice to see reviews continue to trickle in for Incel (and corresponding sales). I read somewhere that if a novel has been for sale for a certain number of years (20? 50?) it is likely that it will remain for sale in the next 20 or 50 years. This speaks to the feedback cycle you reference... Secondly, I think few writers understand the concept of the sales funnel - using shorter-form content as a way to push your longer-form content. Marketing is such a different skill than writing. I ran into this problem when I published my long-form essay on Substack, which garnered some fair attention at the time but then rapidly died off after it was finished. I realized there needed to be some feedback mechanism to draw future attention to it -- hence the second Substack (which has morphed into its own thing anyway)...
"One thing that frustrates me in a lot of modern literary fiction is how many elite writers seem to lack curiosity outside of a purely literary domain." This is a valid point, and sometimes I feel that their curiosity is even limited to the literature of a certain era. Not many are self-aware where and how they are situating themselves within the history of literature.