Through a Substack e-newsletter called Salman’s Sea of Stories, author Salman Rushdie will be releasing sections of his new novella, The Seventh Wave approximately once a week over the course of a year. He says the newsletter will also feature short stories, literary gossip and writing on books and film. His entry into the platform along with those of other fiction writers like Patti Smith has sparked discussions around a return to serialisation of novels—the way works by Charles Dickens were originally published for instance, replete with cliffhanger endings—albeit in a new digital context. “I think that new technology always makes possible new art forms, and I think literature has not found its new form in this digital age,” Rushdie told The Guardian, while reflecting on a recently-felt need to try new things, and whether readers’ feedback to the periodically-published sections would accordingly influence his writing. “People have been talking about the death of the novel, almost since the birth of the novel… but the actual, old fashioned thing, the hardcopy book, is incredibly, mutinously alive. And here I am having another go, I guess, at killing it.”

The American platform, founded in 2017 by Chris Best, Jairaj Sethi and Hamish McKenzie and headquartered in San Francisco, allows writers to sign up for free and publish writing which readers can then subscribe to, and has been attracting a steady stream of journalists and bloggers. Kathmandu-based Travel writer and climate change journalist Neelima Vallangi started a newsletter called Climate Matters on Substack to directly reach out to her audience. She had been looking for avenues to explore topics which perhaps were not newsworthy enough to be published in a mainstream publication, but nonetheless important and missing from discussions in the public sphere. “I was already writing about climate change and its effects on Instagram, but there, with just 2,200 characters in the caption, you are constrained by space. Even if I fill it up completely, it’s not like people will always read the entire thing,” she says. While applauding the platform’s easy integration with social media platforms like Twitter and the presence of a webpage, both of which allow the seamless sharing of posts with one’s network, she admits that it is difficult to build an audience on Substack as it is not a social media platform as such. “If someone wants to grow their Substack subscriber base, they need to have a follower base somewhere else which they can convert to Substack subscribers,” shares Vallangi while pointing out that having email addresses of readers is beneficial because of unpredictability of social media. “You don’t know which platform might suddenly go bust.”