Is the Great American Novel On Substack?

This past October, subscribers to Woman of Letters, the Substack newsletter of the writer Naomi Kanakia, received an e-mail titled “Why I am publishing a novella on Substack.” This novella, Kanakia wrote, was fifteen thousand words long. She was proud of it, and hoped that it might someday be the centerpiece of a book of stories that would be published in a more conventional manner. But that possibility felt distant, and obscured by all the uncertainties of the publishing ecosystem with which she’d become intimately familiar over years of releasing books and stories with conventional presses, sci-fi journals, and literary magazines.