What I Learned From an Hour With Jane Friedman, “The Most Trusted Voice in Publishing”

When Jane Friedman said yes to my Substack Live invitation, I didn’t expect it. She’s been called “the most trusted voice” in publishing. She’s been reporting on this industry for 25+ years. And me? I’m a small fish swimming in a very big pond.

But Jane is the kind of person who supports the underdog. And as it turns out, this was her very first Substack Live, ever. I got to be the one to break her in.

Twenty people popped into the live within seconds of me hitting “go.” By the end, we’d covered everything from why she still hasn’t moved her newsletter to Substack, to whether self-publishing is eating traditional publishing alive, to what AI is actually doing to authors (hint: it’s not what the loudest voices are screaming about).

Here’s what stayed with me.

Substack is ‘both great and terrible’ — and she stands by that

I asked Jane about her now-famous take that Substack is both great and terrible for authors. After Lena Dunham reportedly moved 60,000 copies of her memoir Fame Sick in a single week using Substack notes, lives, and cross-collaborations — did Jane want to revise her position?

She didn’t.

Her concern was never about Substack as a book marketing tool. On that front, she’s bullish. She thinks every author should be paying attention to who’s on Substack and building relationships with the right people there. What worries her is something else entirely: Substack quietly nudging the vast majority of authors — maybe 90% — to charge for newsletters that should really stay free.

For Jane, an author newsletter is a marketing vehicle for your books. The moment you put it behind a paywall, you’ve narrowed your reach. And Substack, by design, keeps suggesting at every turn: shouldn’t you charge? People might pledge. How about earning some money?

It’s not that paid newsletters can’t work. Jane’s own paid newsletter (The Bottolm Line hosted off Substack since 2015) is proof they can. But she said she runs hers on her own website through MailChimp because she “fully owns and controls what’s happening there.” She’s not handing over 10% of revenue to a platform for infrastructure she already built.

For someone like Jane — established, with website traffic, with a free newsletter feeding the paid one — staying off Substack makes total sense. But she was clear: she’s not telling other writers to follow her lead. For early-career and emerging authors, Substack’s built-in discoverability, recommendation system, and social layer are genuinely valuable.

This is where I pushed back a little. Because I’m not only an author. I’m an authorpreneur. My books are a small slice of my income. Ghostwriting, book coaching, masterclasses — that’s the real engine. And Substack, for me, is the connective tissue. I give the newsletter away free, but paid subscribers get access to my monthly masterclasses. They’re getting something concrete in return, not just “buy my book, buy my book, buy my book.”

Jane heard me out and agreed: the author vs. authorpreneur distinction matters. Unless you’re Stephen King, you’re not living off books alone. Substack fills the gap for everyone in between.

Self-publishing isn’t the stigma it used to be

I asked Jane where self-publishing is heading in 2026, and her answer surprised me with how forceful it was.

Self-publishing has been growing for years, but in the last two it’s gone into overdrive — partly because of AI, and partly because of something I hadn’t fully appreciated: publishers are now actively acquiring self-published authors. According to Publishers Marketplace, those acquisitions doubled from 2024 to 2025.

Jane’s read on why: publishers don’t move fast. When they spot a hot sub-genre — romantasy, LitRPG, certain corners of sci-fi and fantasy — it’s easier to scoop up an author with a proven readership than to build one from scratch. The risk is lower. The audience is already there.

There’s a caveat she was careful to flag. A lot of the recent self-publishing growth is from AI-driven get-rich-quick operators flooding KDP with low-quality books. That’s not the community she’s interested in, and it’s not the path she’s describing. The real opportunity is for genre fiction writers who can produce consistently — usually in series — for two to four years before things click.

She added that traditional publishers used to be the gatekeepers of book discovery because newspapers, magazines, and book reviewers were how readers found new titles. That ecosystem has collapsed. Discovery now runs on word of mouth, BookTok, peer influence, and social media — exactly the channels where self-published authors are often stronger than their traditionally published peers.

On AI: she’s tired of the circular firing squad

Jane doesn’t want to be in the AI war. What she calls the “circular firing squad” — authors attacking other authors for whether they use the technology — is exhausting and, in her view, unproductive. She sees her role as bringing factual information, lowering the temperature, and giving people a 360-degree view rather than another hot take.

A few things she said that I want to sit with:

The AI scandals dominating the discourse (Shy Girl, the New York Times book reviewer caught using AI, all the rest) are not actually indicative of how AI will change publishing. They’re the worst actors. They’re loud. But the enlightened uses exist — Jane confirmed she uses AI for business administration and efficiency in her own one-woman operation. The people doing thoughtful work with AI mostly aren’t talking about it publicly because they don’t want to get attacked.

Jane added authors’ deepest fear with AI is being written out of the publishing story entirely. That fear is valid. But she pointed out something publishing leaders increasingly recognize — the industry’s core problem has never been “how do we get more books out faster.” Producing more books or producing them faster has never been what makes publishing stronger. So the AI use cases that actually move the industry forward aren’t about replacing authors. They’re about analyzing the vast data publishers already hold about readers and sales — data they currently can’t process at scale.

The marketing advice nobody wants to hear

Toward the end, I asked Jane what trends authors should be tracking — BookTok (still relevant, but she doesn’t personally engage with it), live selling (fascinating, especially on TikTok Live, where authors like AP Beswick are reliably moving inventory by literally boxing up orders on camera — but the fulfillment burden is real and it mostly works for self-published authors).

Her advice: whatever the new shiny thing is, it’s probably just the old thing with a new name. The “podcast tour” used to be the “blog tour.” There has never been — and will never be — one formula that works for every book and every author. The trap most writers fall into is chasing whatever’s trending instead of looking honestly at their own strengths.

Don’t go on podcasts if you’re bad at podcasts. Don’t do TikTok Live if you can’t be charming on camera. Build on what you’re actually good at, especially for a first book launch. That’s where success comes from.

How Jane stays on top of everything

I had to ask — how does she know everything? Her sources:

Core industry baselines: Publishers Lunch, Publishers Weekly, the Bookseller (UK), Publishing Perspectives. Then her Substack Reads list, which has about 150 publications she follows — Kathleen Schmidt’s Publishing Confidential, Lincoln Michel’s Counter Craft, Dear Head of Mine by an anonymous Big Five editor, Ann Trubek of Belt, Doug Seibold of Agate. Off Substack, she follows agent Kate McKean’s Agents and Books. And because writing and digital media now share the same problems — AI, multiple revenue streams, the freelance economy in collapse — she also reads media analysts like Brian Morrissey’s The Rebooting and Simon Owens.

That’s the playbook.

Until next time —

Natasha

Thank you From the Source | D.L. Lee, Roja, Alyse Diamond, and many others for tuning into my live video with Jane Friedman! Join me for my next live video in the app.

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