The writing site, Substack, has taken the world by storm. At a time when everyone thought blogging and online writing was dead, superseded by YouTube, Substack came along and solved the problems of discovery and monetisation. Their feed and recommendations have allowed many to discover interesting writers that they wouldn’t have ordinarily found out about. And their subscription model where writers can earn money from their writing through a paying audience has provided an incentive to people to write and build up their audiences. Except if they’re in Africa.
I set up a new Substack publication to host the short stories I write – Tales from Fourways. The reason for choosing Substack was that there was only a once-off cost to have my own domain, and publishing remained free after that. This turns out cheaper than other sites such as WordPress where this site is hosted, where a monthly fee is paid if one wants their own domain. But then, I tried monetising it.
Firstly, one needs a Stripe account to do so, so that they can receive payments. To my frustrated later realisation, one cannot get a Stripe account in South Africa. It requires a bank account in a “Western” or “First World” or “Global North” country. For a company like Substack, the cost of setting up the legal infrastructure to receive payments in South Africa is probably not worth the benefit they’ll get. The number of potential monetised publications would be too small to justify the cost. But there’s another thing.
The price of a subscription is relatively very expensive. One of my favourite local publications costs $7.50 per month. At the time of writing this, that converts to R137.67 per month. That’s for only one writer, for a few articles a month. The more writers I subscribe to, the more I’ll be spending every month. On the other hand, I pay R160 per month for a subscription to the Financial Mail. The magazine, with several articles is delivered to my door every Thursday. There are several quality articles, and a number of not-so-great articles, but the above-average collection makes the subscription worth it.
Because I’m writing this from a Starbucks, I’ll use the comparative pricing of a Starbucks flat white coffee to illustrate the point. At the Starbucks I’m writing from, a flat white coffee costs R38. This would make the above-mentioned publication worth 4.2 badly tasting Starbucks flat whites. In the USA, a flat white coffee at Starbucks is $4.15. This would make the publication worth 1.8 flat whites. Coffee is already generally expensive for the local market. Subscribing to a publication where the writer publishes a few times a month, with some good and some bad posts, for that price, does not make economic sense for an individual.
So, on the fantasy chance that Substack does allow South African publishers to monetise, a writer would be incentivised to write for a “Global North” audience who can afford these prices. This would take away the unique content and voice that catering to a local content would give, as the writing would bend towards relating to a “Western” readership. (Imagined title: Trump Assassination And Implications for Policing in Diepsloot, Johannesburg).
So, what does that mean for local writing? Is there a solution? One possibility could be to pull collective resources together, because, as is said, “I am because we are”. Get a group of people to write together, and sell the collective piece to the public. Because of the combined effort, marketing, audience-building, distribution and the finances can be handled centrally instead of by each writer. Buyers then aren’t paying for each writer, but for an editorial position or them. We can even be so crazy enough to call it a “magazine”.
Photo by Bernard Hermant on Unsplash
Patrick Kayongo 