A Short Personal History of the Blogosphere

A reintroduction to my readers through the blogging platforms that have shaped my publishing career

I came to Substack late, by some measures. When it comes to new platforms, I’m not a jump-in-head-first kind of gal. I’m an I-don’t-need-another-thing-on-my-plate kind of gal. But then Elon ruined Twitter, and Grant Faulkner told me about how his dispatches to Substack were a bright spot in his writing week. So I started, and 32 weeks and 32 posts later—here I am.

I’m writing about my experience with Substack (so far) this week because I have a lot of new subscribers (thank you!), and Dan Blank offers the very good advice to Substackers that we reintroduce ourselves from time to time. The history of blogging* is so tied up with my history in publishing that I figured I’d do a twofer—reintroduce myself by way of a brief tour through my corner of the blogosphere.

For the intro/reintro, hello, I’m Brooke, a publisher, coach, editor, and memoir teacher. I landed in the Bay Area in 2000 at age 23, on the hunt for a job in book publishing. I was inspired by having spent the previous summer (1999) living and working at Shakespeare & Co. in Paris. Prior to that, I didn’t know working in and with books could be my future. But jobs were scarce in Bay Area publishing, so a mentor suggested I send my resume to any publishers I could find, cold-calling basically. Forget waiting for job postings. Call it ambition or luck or both, but that proactivity resulted in my first job with North Atlantic Books as an editorial assistant working customer service halftime. My boss apparently wasn’t all that impressed with how I womaned the phones, and I was promoted to fulltime editorial assistant before the end of the year. (Phew!) I learned everything I know about traditional publishing over the next 12 years, first at North Atlantic, then at Seal Press, and the story of why I left traditional publishing in 2012 to start She Writes Press is documented in my TEDx talk.

During these past 24 years in this industry, I’ve watched many platforms come and go. At Seal Press, especially, part of my job as an acquiring editor involved reading tons of blogs, looking for talented writers. In those years, I combed MySpace, Livejournal, and later Tumblr. Having a Wordpress or Blogger blog was all the rage. Because of Seal’s feminist bent, we hit the mommy blogging craze hard. I read Dooce religiously (RIP, Heather Armstrong), and closely tracked women contributors to Jezebel, Feministing, The Toast, and, of course, SheWrites.com. Seal Press even started its own ill-fated blog. We only posted a handful of times before we got caught up in a major dust-up, which I’ve written about, that killed any ambition to carry on.

SheWrites.com was the first site that led me to realize I had public-facing things to say in my early years at Seal Press. Despite what some people might imagine, not everyone in book publishing yearns to write. I came to publishing because of my love of books, and reading, not writing. I didn’t grow up yearning to be a writer. But writing platforms will make writers out of us if and when we step up onto them. And SheWrites.com, founded by my friends Kamy Wicoff and Deborah Siegel, was a portal to a community, camaraderie, and incredible interaction among passionate women writers.

Later, from 2014-2018, I blogged regularly for HuffPost. I didn’t post every week, but often enough, and HuffPost regularly featured my posts the Books homepage, which was always a thrill. But then they pulled the plug on us “contributors” without notice, and just like that, countless writers lost a valuable platform.

There have been other popular sites for writers, notably Medium. Plenty of people treat social media platforms (Facebook, especially) like mini-blogs, but the difference between substantive blogging platforms and social media is that the former enforces a kind of discipline and focus. Blogging platforms are less likely to be the terrain of provocative, attention-grabbing thought bubbles or the best and latest pet poses. Blogging platforms allow us to curate who we want to read and keep reading, where social media is scattershot—insofar as we follow people we admire, but also friends and family and people we used to know sharing everything from newsworthy stories to what they had for dinner last night.

Ever since I’ve started on this platform, I’ve been a Substack evangelist. It’s by far the best platform I’ve written for. I recently had dinner with Kamy Wicoff (SheWrites.com), who rightly marveled at Substack’s innovation in figuring out how to pay writers. SheWrites.com was an amazing community in the 2010s, but impossible to monetize. Once writers start getting paid to write, they’ve landed themselves a gig, so the incentive is about eyeballs on the work, but it’s also about meeting readers’ expectations, especially the paid ones.

I spent the month of December figuring out how to monetize this Substack. I thought of all my potential add-on offerings—additional and exclusive posts, quarterly classes, office hours, Ask Me Anything sessions, private threads. I love that writers are doing this successfully, and that people are making real money from their hard work here is inspiring. And . . . thinking about adding an entire silo of Substack-related work to my already-full plate brought me right back to the reason I was wary about starting a Substack in the first place. Thank you again to Dan Blank who told me, “You don’t have to do all that.”

With those permission-giving words, I laid down the burden of building out my Substack silos and realized I am truly content with my weekly posts. I feel inspired, I’m writing more than I’ve written in years, and some of my readers are even paid subscribers. (A special thank you to those of you who are supporting me that way.) All this is more than I ever imagined back in August when I wrote my first post. So for now, no silos, no paywalls, and just a commitment to good content about writerly things. And a shoutout to Substack for its important work in offering writers a platform to amplify their voices and their messages and their passions. I know from past experience that these platforms come and go, but for the time being, I feel like I’ve found a new home.

I’d absolutely love to reminisce with fellow blogging veterans in the comments. Where did your blog live (or who did you blog for?), what did you write about, and circa what year(s)?  

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*Substack calls itself a newsletter platform, but it’s basically a blogging platform with a newsletter function. I’m calling this out to prevent anyone from correcting me. :)