If We Find Celebrities Taking Up Space on Substack Annoying, Imagine How Female Astronauts Felt This Week

This week I wrote a note on Substack and this is what I said: I see similar happening on Substack as that which has happened to writers in the publishing industry, celebs with all their other income streams turning up and taking up space and presumably subscriptions. This is why a lot of us writers landed here and decided to give Substack our all, because we were squeezed out of our own industry by the huge advances that celebs get. But then those celebs got word that there was money to be had here, their agents told them so, and here they come. So anyway, all this is to say, you can decide whether to support those people with their other jobs, or the writers still trying to make a living doing the only thing they have a chance to. You might want to bulk up some rich person’s pension, or you might decide to help us buy food and pay the lekky bill.

It got quite a lot of replies, lots of people saying thank you for saying this, but of course I am not the first, many other Substackers have been observing this too over the last few months. I have even replied to some of them, I have tried to be positive and said things like, ‘don’t worry, there’s room for us all… just keep turning up, being consistent, people recognise authenticity.’

Until I saw yet another celebrity turn up on Substack and I read her first post which I found hugely irritating. It would probably be unfair to name names here and single her out, but I will describe her thus: a member of an upper-middle class family who was born into all the advantages that had to offer, who has, as a result, carved herself out a career in all the areas that being ‘a celebrity’ gives her access to (including multiple book deals), and whose agent mentioned Substack should be the next place she could come to boost her coffers. Ah yes, your agent mentioned it.

There are many people writing here on Substack who don’t have agents. There are many people writing here on Substack who can only dream of finding an agent. There are many people writing here on Substack who have never written publicly before and yet they are dipping their toes into this water, writing brilliantly, gaining an audience slowly but surely and discovering that they do have something important to say and that their words resonate with the lives of many others.

Hence why I wrote this in another note this week:

These are the people whose posts I want to read, that is why I often ask my paid subscribers in our private chat to send me posts they are particularly proud of so I can expand my reading here and amplify their work in return. I want to read what they are writing, what they have to say about the world, as I said in another note here on Substack this week, this is what makes our relationship symbiotic, and this is what creates community. I don’t expect you to only read my words here, in the same way that when you do – thank you – I don’t expect you to agree with them, and I appreciate it when you tell me in the comments that you don’t. This is a conversation we are having here, and sometimes my pieces exist simply to kick that conversation off.

But anyway, back to me being peeved about celebrities. In my note which I posted at the top of this page, I mentioned that what I see happening here on Substack is what I have witnessed in the publishing industry, and in some ways, what drove many of us here to try and make a living from our words rather than get a job in a supermarket and deny the world our words altogether. This obsession with celebrity that I’ve witnessed in publishing means that the ‘real writers’ are being choked as our bills double and our wages halve just so that publishers can save the big money to spend on books by celebrities (which incidentally are mostly written by those ghostwriters that they’re choking in the meantime). What is printed inside those books very often doesn’t even matter because it is simply that household name on the front that will sell it. The same can be said for influencers, how many times in the last few years have I been offered the chance to ghost a social media influencer or a reality TV star I have never heard of. No, thank you.

I also think that it is grotesque that celebrities accept huge advances on novels (some of whom don’t even pen the books themselves) which costs the rest of us who spend years writing them. If they really cared about the publishing industry I don’t think they would like to see other writers suffer for their art, but mostly, as they take a pen to their handsome contract, I don’t think they give two shits about how anyone else makes a living.

I work one-to-one with many Substackers here who are painstakingly putting together book proposals, yet some of you might be surprised to hear that this is not something celebrities need to do to get their deals. At the end of last year I went to the Houses of Parliament to meet with a very well-known politician who was writing ‘their’ book (I’ll keep them sexless) and needed a ghost to work with. I saw the ‘proposal’ that had got ‘them’ the deal, it had not even been penned by ‘them’ but the editor at the publishing house that was acquiring it and it consisted of about a half a page of A4. The hard work – those other 400 pages that would make up the content – would need to be done by the ghostwriter who had a couple of months to craft the entire thing and who, I would imagine, was being paid about 10% of what ‘they’ were getting.

I have never been a celebrity ghostwriter though I’m told that is where the money is. I once did agree to ghost a household name, only because she is one of the most iconic women of the 20th century, but she literally had nothing to say and so I laid down my tools. Give me an ‘ordinary’ strong female voice to work with any day.

So here we are on Substack, very grateful right now as bills double to have a place that helps us keep afloat, and for many of us that is the honest truth of it, we’re treading water while our industries continue their obsession with celebrity and influencers and hoping that we’re still going to have a roof over our heads when we come out the other side. I have always just wanted to earn enough, but it seems for celebrities it is never enough, and Substack is another pie they want a slice of.

I’ve read two stories in the press this week concerning another celebrity muscling in on other people’s areas of industry, not one that is on Substack, but give her chance to realise there might be a pretty penny she can make here and she’ll be over. The singer Katy Perry is in a legal dispute with a woman named Katie Perry who has a fashion brand in Australia. Katie Perry started her business from Sydney’s Paddington Markets and has worked her arse off to build up her ethical brand and now has three shops. This legal dispute with the singer Katy Perry, whose real name is actually Katheryn Elizabeth Hudson, has managed to strip this small fashion brand of the trademark it registered in 2009 because the court was concerned this might infringe on the celebrity’s right to expand into merchandise including clothing.

Here’s how the New York Times reported on the appeal court decision:

"The judges said the Katie Perry trademark should never have been granted, and they ordered the designer’s mark cancelled. The pop star already had a reputation when the designer applied for her trademark, they said, making it likely the celebrity would expand into merchandise and that the Australian label could confuse customers.”

Katie Perry, the fashion designer

So a fashion designer who has built up her brand from market stall beginnings using her own birth name has less rights to that name than a woman who has adopted it for stage just in case she wants to expand into fashion?

This case is continuing.

And thankfully, as I have deactivated my social media, I missed much of the Blue Origin furore this week, but if we writers feel agrieved at celebrities arriving on Substack, imagine how female astronauts are feeling this week. It turns out that you don’t have to spend 10 years training at Nasa to describe yourself as ‘space flight crew’, you just need to be bestmates with Jeff Bezos’ girlfriend and fit into a tight-blue jumpsuit. As Katy Perry said, they were putting the ‘ass into astronaut’ — oh, how accurate that turned out to be! And as Marina Hyde said in her Guardian column: “You’ve heard of one small step for man? This was one giant leap backwards for womankind.”

Katy Perry in space

And so I ask myself, how much ‘space’ do celebrities actually want? And is it possible for them to leave any for the rest of us? I guess what Substack might say about the influx of celebrities is that it makes this platform better for all of us, because they bring their huge followings from other social media and make us all more discoverable, and I can see that there is some truth in that.

And so what can I say to put our minds at rest about this celebrity onslaught? Well, I would say this, how much time do these celebrities, running all their other brands and clothing lines, and radio shows and novels that they’re writing, have to create a nurturing community here? How much do they care about their subscribers and not just the money they’re sending their way? This will always be the advantage we have over them. White Ink has grown into a super supportive community of yes, mostly women, who support one another’s work, and I hope feel supported by me in return.

And I would also say, as in all areas of society, shop ethically, decide carefully where you spend your money and who is deserving of it. Because after all, if we hadn’t spent the last twenty years giving Jeff Bezos all of our hard-earned cash he wouldn’t have been able to afford to send his girlfriend and her mates into space — or at least he might not have been able to afford the return trip.

We can decide how to keep our own corner of Substack. And mine will always be focused on nurturing my brilliant community, and so, as always, thank you for being here and if you want to support my writing, you know which button to press.