How Substack got me a literary agent

I haven't "made it big." But I've made something.

iStock | master1305

Welcome! Body Type is a newsletter about how to think differently about body image and body culture, from a woman who's been through the wringer of it all.

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An excerpt from one of the best emails I’ve ever received:

I’m a fan of your Body Type newsletter and wanted to reach out and see if you've ever considered writing a book. Or, even better, if you have any book-length projects in the works? 

In November 2022, Kayla Lightner from Ayesha Pande Literary contacted me out of the blue to ask that question. I was at the gym (v. on-brand; the book I’m now writing is about how exercise can change your entire life, not just your body), and I’m not too cool to say: I wept on that treadmill. Have I ever considered writing a book? What a question. It’s not like it’s been the primary goal of my creative life since I was 10 or anything, Kayla!

Writing can be so isolating, and unless you’re cranking out viral pieces for one of the big-time pubs, it can feel like you’re writing for no one. I write because I love it, but I also consider writing a conversation, and for the first few months I published on Substack, I was basically talking to myself. Hearing from Kayla, who I’m now signed with, was an affirmation that people were starting to listen — and maybe more people would, too.

Now that the book proposal I worked on for months is out on submission¹, I’m reflecting on what writing on Substack has done for me over the past couple of years. Not because I’ve made it big — the book hasn’t sold, I can’t quit my day job, and I haven’t been invited to any of the Events for Cool Writers that Substack is now hosting in cities including my own, no big deal, I was busy that night anyway — but because publishing consistently on Substack has offered me more opportunity and potential than I’ve ever had in my writing career.

I didn’t land a literary agent or grow my readership because of LinkedIn-esque tips or alleged marketing hacks. All I did was identify something I liked writing about, that I could discuss with some authority, that I thought other people would find interesting — and then I just kept going.

✤✤✤

I started posting on Substack in November 2021. I’d been a sometimes-staff, sometimes-freelance reporter for around 10 years, but I had almost no platform to speak of. No huge Twitter audience — I have, like, 2,000 followers and the only ones who interact with me anymore are “🔥OF link in bio🔥” bots — no podcast or appearances on any, no invitations to panels or events in the writing world. I had a few bylines in legacy media publications (The Atlantic, once; The Washington Post, once; a New York Times newsletter blurb, once) but nothing recurring enough to build up my name recognition.

Freelancing had become arduous and mostly fruitless, and I was sick of spending hours on pitches that led to nothing. But I had so much I wanted to say and explore about the cultural moment around exercise, weight, eating, beauty standards, body image, and bodies in general. So I started Body Type.

My earliest posts have between two and 11 likes. Maybe 250 views. Four comments, if I was lucky. It took me nine months to earn 300 subscribers. I was doing nothing to promote Body Type and I was not being “strategic.” I was just kind of showing up regularly and making some new internet friends.

Then, in August 2022, I was featured on Substack Discover. The email told me exactly why:

We look for writers who, like you, are covering a clear topic in a unique way and exemplify Substack best practices, like posting regularly and engaging with readers.

That’s what was valued here: generating purposeful, fresh writing and communicating with the people who read it. Great! That’s what I wanted to do anyway. I stayed committed to the idea of writing as conversation: I responded to every comment on my posts, commented on and shared work I liked, and I started publishing Q&As with and guest posts from other writers.

The more time I spent here, engaging with what was going on in my own publication and others’, the more I grew. I was featured on Substack Discover again in January 2023, which earned me another several hundred subscribers. Those boosts certainly helped, but I’ve had the biggest jumps in my subscriber numbers outside of those features, now that Substack has grown and there are simply more people here. I’ve focused on making Body Type the kind of place where people want to spend time talking to me and each other. I think that happens pretty naturally if you, the creator, like spending time there, too.

From all that, Kayla found me. She didn’t sign me because I’m already an in-demand, big-on-social, superstar writer. I believe she signed me because she could see that I care about what I do and am willing to work my ass off. There are a lot of people like that on Substack. I think good things are going to keep happening for them because it’s obvious that they like what they’re doing. Enthusiasm is contagious. People want in.

One of the things Kayla told me about how she’ll try to sell my book is by positioning me as a “curator of body discourse.” This is a more elegant way of saying that I like yapping about body stuff and inviting others to do the same. Maybe someone in the industry will be attracted to this premise and publish my book, maybe they won’t. Even getting to the point of being on submission, though, represents a year of incredibly tough work — I won’t mention the author who said they wrote their first proposal in a weekend and how that haunts my psyche — that I’m glad to have done. It taught me a lot about myself, like writing Body Type does.

There’s something I haven’t seen mentioned when I come across those “how to succeed on Substack” posts: generosity. Good writing requires it. You have to be generous with your time, your words, and your vulnerability to build a community here. If I’ve become a curator of discourse, and that has anything to do with eventually getting a book deal, I believe it’s because I’ve been able to practice being generous here and have received so much generosity in return. No matter what else happens, I’m grateful for that.

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While you’re here:

A few other places you can catch me and my work:

If you’re in the DC area, Body Type is live on stage this July — my storytelling show about bodies and body image, The Body Show, is back in the Capital Fringe Festival starting July 13. Tickets and info at the link!

“How To Start Strength Training,” Slate’s “How To!” podcast, June 18.

The Gen Z and Millennial consumers making fitness a priority, The Washington Post, June 12.

Radio interview re: Washington Post article, on “All Sides with Anna Staver,” WOSU Public Media, June 19.

“Ozempic and the new era of commenting on people’s bodies,” DAZED, May 10.

“Small Dick Energy,” (on the problem with small dick jokes), the Unladylike podcast, February 20.

(I’m also on Instagram and Twitter.)

Thanks to

Sarah Fay

for encouraging me to share this story.

1. Being “on submission,” in the nonfiction world, means your book proposal — the pitch document for the book, which is all about the idea, the potential execution, how you’ll sell it, etc., but isn’t the full manuscript itself — is sent out for consideration to editors at publishing companies via your agent. It’s a lot of waiting and trying to distract yourself from checking your inbox every three minutes, for TBD weeks or months.