![]() Poems, and reviews, and recipes, and serialized fiction or memoir are here too, but it’s essays most of all. The appeal of that has proved almost irresistibly powerful, and for the most part, what’s for sale on Substack is simple: essays. Person after person, from Substack execs to self-styled newsletter gurus, have suggested that you might be able to get quite a lot, six figures even, to work from home in your pajamas. We’re being asked not just “what’s on your mind” but “how much can you get for it?” Now, award-winning professional authors and curious amateurs alike are being encouraged to resurrect the spectre of blogging and remake it as an entrepreneurial project. The tech industry and billionaire hangers-on enshittified social media. As Laura Bennett wrote in her now famous piece for Slate, “first-person writing has long been the Internet’s native voice.” The websites we logged onto every day-first out of curiosity, and then, increasingly, out of social and professional necessity, from the earliest iterations of Facebook to the current interface on Substack Notes-all asked us the same thing: What’s on your mind?īut then social media killed blogging and decimated the landscape of traditional print media. Bloggers were getting book deals, and those books were getting turned into movies, and so this seemed like a not unreasonable path to literary success. Aspiring writers were encouraged to bare their souls to the readers of xoJane or Jezebel for $50 to $200 a pop. The 2000s saw the meteoric ascendance of the personal essay, both as an art form and as harrowing, garish spectacle. It was the century of the individual voice. For better and worse, we were all given a platform and a theoretical pathway to virality and fame. Then came the rise of the Internet with its blogs, forums, online magazines, and social media. This was probably for the same reason that Sedaris did not and does not self-identify as an essayist, despite being one: this earlier negative connotation that essays were “box office poison.” ![]() It is as clear an example of an essay collection as you will find, but the cover did not say what kind of book it was. David Sedaris-a professional essayist more commonly referred to as a “humorist” or a comedian-became a household name after the publication of his 2000 runaway bestseller Me Talk Pretty One Day. It was better to repackage your essays as a memoir. ![]() As Phillip Lopate wrote for the Paris Review in 2021, as the new century dawned, essays were still considered “box office poison” in the publishing world. The essay as a genre has been on the rise since the beginning of the 21st century. (That book, The Girl with the Lower Back Tattoo, came out in 2016 and was billed as biography, not essays, but was still a #1 New York Times bestseller.) She never wrote it, and cancelled the contract two years later, but then signed another contract with a different publisher in 2015 for close to $10 million. Comedian Amy Schumer was given a $1 million advance for an unwritten essay collection in 2012. Įven creatives who were not strictly speaking “essayists” were encouraged in the trend. ![]() All of a sudden, it seemed, we wanted to know not just what women were doing, but what women thought. Even Helen Macdonald’s 2014 hit memoir H is for Hawk had a distinctly essayistic bent, weaving meditations on grief and loss with falconry, nature, and a shadow biography of the early 20th century queer novelist T. Eula Biss’s On Immunity, Lesley Jamison’s The Empathy Exams, Roxane Gay’s Bad Feminist. More surprising still, many of the most popular collections or book-length essays coming out then were written by women. In 2014, MacLean’s proclaimed essays to be the publishing trend of the year. The popularity of essays as a genre has skyrocketed in the past decade.
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