Could Substack Change The Way We Discover Books?
Amazon changed the way we buy books, but could Substack change the way we choose them? Fleur Hull, Founder of The Substack Bookstore, explores why relationships, community and personal recommendation might become an increasingly powerful part of how great books find their readers outside of Amazon.
There was something rather fitting about ending the first season of The Substack Live Series: Starting From Zero with a Fleur Hull who began with an idea she wasn’t entirely sure anyone else would understand, put it into the world anyway and, just over a year later, is watching it become something far bigger than she could have known when she started.
I discovered Fleur Hull at exactly the right moment, when she was celebrating the first birthday of The Substack Bookstore, and I remember seeing those words and immediately wanting to know more because the idea seemed to bring together several things I have been thinking about for years: books, independent creators, community, discovery and what happens when we stop waiting for people to somehow find what we’ve created and start thinking differently about how we take it to them.
Fleur joined me from Western Australia, where it was 8pm while I sat in New York at 8am, for the eighth and final conversation in this first Starting From Zero series, and what followed wasn’t simply a discussion about selling books or becoming an author, but a much bigger conversation about whether the relationship between writer and reader is beginning to change.
Because Amazon unquestionably transformed the way we buy books.
But perhaps Substack is beginning to change the way we choose them.
What if the book isn’t where discovery begins?
I published my own book, Live What You Love, in 2018 through the self-publishing route, and I remember very quickly discovering that writing and publishing a book is only part of the story, because putting something onto Amazon doesn’t automatically mean the people who need it are somehow going to discover that it exists.
That experience actually connected me back to something that happened much earlier in my career, when I worked within lifelong learning and leisure for a local authority in the UK and found myself sitting in meetings where declining library usage was being discussed.
I remember nervously raising my hand during one of those conversations and suggesting that perhaps we needed to stop expecting everybody to come to us and instead take books, authors and the stories surrounding them out to people, because how can somebody become interested in something they don’t yet know exists?
There was too much red tape at the time and the idea went nowhere, but I never forgot it.
Which is probably why discovering Fleur made me think, this is it.
Not necessarily the replacement for Amazon, libraries or traditional bookstores, because all of those things have their place, but another layer of discovery that allows us to encounter a book through something far more human: the person who wrote it.
From 400 subscribers to an entirely new bookstore
Fleur’s own journey to this point has been anything but linear.
She has lived in Western Australia, Sydney, southern Japan and New Delhi, built a career across writing, strategy and marketing, studied economics and marketing and experienced several significant moments of starting again, including being made redundant three times during her career.
During the second of those redundancies, which happened during COVID, she wrote her first book and managed to take it to Amazon category bestseller status within days of launch. Later, while beginning to market the book and work with other authors, she was diagnosed with cancer, before subsequently navigating her mother’s terminal cancer journey.
Through all of that, books and authors remained a thread.
Fleur eventually joined Substack in March 2025 and began building a book-marketing publication, growing it to around 400 subscribers before launching The Substack Bookstore in July. By September she had reached Substack bestseller status, and just over a year later the Bookstore had grown to more than 24,000 followers and was approaching 4,000 subscribers when we recorded our conversation.
What I particularly loved was the simplicity of the problem she was initially trying to solve.
Authors kept asking her:
How do I get more visibility for my book?
Rather than giving them another piece of generic marketing advice, Fleur wondered whether she could create an actual place on Substack where independently published authors could showcase their work and where readers could discover books they might never otherwise encounter.
One of her earliest Notes announcing the idea began with the words, “I’ve done something for the little guys.”
It took off.
And perhaps it did because those words touched something that sits at the heart of Substack itself: the possibility that independent doesn’t have to mean invisible.
Amazon has scale. Substack has something different.
Fleur shared during our conversation that around 70,000 books are published on Amazon every week, which gives some perspective on the challenge facing an independent author who has spent months or years creating something deeply meaningful only to discover that publication day is not the moment the work ends, but often the moment an entirely different kind of work begins.
Traditional publishers can bring established distribution, marketing budgets, relationships and visibility to that process, while independent authors are often trying to create momentum with significantly fewer resources.
The Substack Bookstore is Fleur’s attempt to create another route.
More than 400 books across multiple genres have passed through the Bookstore, with more than 250 authors participating over its lifetime, and Fleur described a community in which authors don’t simply list their books but support one another through purchases, reviews, recommendations, restacks and genuine enthusiasm when somebody else succeeds.
This is where I think the difference becomes fascinating.
When we discover a book through Amazon, the journey may be relatively transactional: we see a cover, read the description, look at reviews and decide whether to buy.
On Substack, the relationship can begin months - even years - before the transaction.
We might read somebody’s essays, follow their Notes, watch them Live, leave comments, hear them explain the story behind their work and gradually develop a sense of who they are and what they believe before we ever encounter the book they have written.
By the time we’re invited to buy it, we’re not necessarily buying from a stranger anymore.
We’re supporting somebody whose work already means something to us.
That doesn’t make Amazon irrelevant; far from it, because many of these purchases will still ultimately happen there.
But it raises a question I find incredibly interesting:
Could Amazon remain where we buy the book, while Substack increasingly becomes somewhere we decide which books - and which authors - we want to invest in?
When the little guys find one another
One of my favorite moments in the conversation came when Fleur and I talked about that original phrase in her viral note: I’ve done something for the little guys.
Because perhaps the really interesting thing happens when all of those so-called little guys find one another.
An independent author working alone may have limited reach, but a community of authors reading, reviewing, recommending, restacking and celebrating one another begins to create an entirely different ecosystem.
Fleur shared the example of novelist Joe Taylor, who listed her book in The Substack Bookstore in August 2025 without doing any other paid advertising and has since accumulated more than 1.5 million Kindle page reads across her novels. Fleur also spoke about authors achieving Amazon category bestseller status through activity surrounding the Bookstore.
What I find interesting about those results isn’t simply the numbers, but what sits underneath them.
Discovery becomes collective.
The author is no longer standing alone saying please buy my book.
Other people are talking about it too.
And that is a very different kind of visibility.
Your book doesn’t have to be new to find new readers
I was particularly interested in this because my own book was published eight years ago, which naturally raised the question of whether platforms like The Substack Bookstore are primarily valuable during a launch or whether they can also help an older book find an entirely new audience.
Fleur’s answer was encouraging.
She shared the example of memoirist Gary Coulton, who discovered the Bookstore around ten months after his book had originally launched. A promotional push through the community subsequently helped the book achieve Amazon category bestseller status in the UK and Australia, with strong results in the US too.
Fleur was clear that launch remains an incredibly valuable window because Amazon’s algorithm is paying particular attention to early sales and reviews, but her experience also demonstrates that publication isn’t necessarily a one-time opportunity.
A book can have another moment.
It can meet new readers.
It can enter a different community.
It can become relevant to a conversation that didn’t exist when it was first released.
And for authors who have a book quietly sitting on Amazon while they assume its moment has passed, I think that’s a particularly useful reminder.
Perhaps authors should come to Substack before the book exists?
One of the strongest pieces of advice Fleur offered during our conversation was actually for the woman who hasn’t published anything yet but has the beginnings of a book somewhere inside her.
Her recommendation was simple: start writing on Substack.
Not because every essay needs to become part of the eventual book, but because Substack gives aspiring authors somewhere to experiment with ideas, develop their voice, receive feedback, find early readers and potentially connect with beta readers and reviewers long before publication day arrives.
I think this turns the traditional sequence on its head.
Instead of:
Write book → Publish book → Find readers
perhaps we can increasingly think:
Explore ideas → Find readers → Build relationships → Write book → Bring those readers with us.
That doesn’t mean allowing an audience to dictate what we write, but there is something incredibly valuable about discovering which ideas create recognition, which questions people ask in response to our work and which subjects we continually find ourselves wanting to return to.
The book no longer has to be created entirely behind a closed door.
What Fleur has learned from building on Substack
After a year of building The Substack Bookstore, I asked Fleur what she believed had made the biggest difference, and two things came up repeatedly:
Notes and Collaboration.
Fleur recommends authors use Notes regularly - ideally at least once a day - because she has seen the impact that consistent participation can have on discovery and subscriber growth, both for her own publications and for authors inside the Bookstore.
She gave the example of 73-year-old author Mary Lee Pangman, who has recently begun writing novels and has embraced Notes as a way of getting her work in front of readers, with Fleur describing her as an inspiration and pointing to the visibility she has created through consistently participating there.
But Fleur’s second lesson may be even more important.
Collaboration.
She talked about recommending other people, receiving recommendations, restacking work and forming partnerships, including her collaboration with Kristina God, MBA from The Online Writing Club, whose audience overlapped naturally with the authors Fleur wanted to serve.
And this is where our own conversation has already created something new, because Fleur and I will now be collaborating through Intentional Living Magazine, where we will begin introducing some of The Substack Bookstore’s authors to another readership.
That wasn’t planned when either of us started.
It happened because two people building things independently discovered an overlap and asked what might become possible if we connected them.
Perhaps that is one of the most important lessons from this entire Starting From Zero series.
We don’t always grow by getting bigger ourselves. Sometimes we grow by connecting what we’re building with what somebody else is building.
If You Have a Book Inside You… Or, One Already Sitting on the Shelf
There was so much practical value in my conversation with Fleur, but these are the ideas I would take with you.
1. Start building readers before you need buyers. If you have the beginnings of a book, don’t assume you have to disappear for two years, write it completely alone and only then begin thinking about who might read it. Start sharing the ideas and conversations surrounding your work now.
2. Let people meet the author, not only the product. Your book is one expression of your thinking, but your essays, Notes, Lives, conversations and comments give readers an opportunity to understand the person and worldview behind it, which can create a much deeper reason to care when the book arrives.
3. Don’t assume an older book has finished its journey. A different platform, audience, collaboration or conversation can introduce existing work to readers who simply didn’t know it existed before.
4. Use Notes as a discovery tool, not simply a promotional feed. Fleur’s experience has shown her that authors who participate consistently in Notes can create significant visibility, but the emphasis should be on becoming part of the conversation rather than repeatedly announcing that you have something to sell.
5. Collaborate before you compete. Recommend other writers, celebrate their wins, share work you genuinely value and look for natural partnerships, because a network of people helping one another be discovered can become considerably more powerful than everybody fighting independently for attention.
6. Think beyond Amazon without abandoning it. Amazon can remain an incredibly useful place to sell books, but it doesn’t have to carry the entire responsibility for helping readers discover you. Consider where relationships with those readers can begin before they arrive at the product page.
7. If you’re completely starting from zero, start writing anyway. Fleur’s advice to the woman with a book still “bumbling around” inside her was simply to keep going, begin sharing ideas and allow the warmth, feedback and community available on Substack to make writing feel a little less lonely.
Eight Women. Eight Conversations. And This Is Only Season One...
As Fleur and I finished our conversation, I realized there couldn’t have been a more appropriate way to close this first season of The Substack Live Series: Starting From Zero, because every woman I have spoken to has, in her own way, demonstrated the same thing: we rarely know exactly what something will become when we first have the courage to begin it.
This series itself started as an idea connected to my birthday on 8/8. Eight women. Eight conversations. Eight opportunities to ask what it really looks like to build, change, create or grow when the ending isn’t yet known.
It has become so much more than I expected, and enough women have already contacted me asking whether they can be part of another series that I can officially say: Season Two will happen.
Takeways from Fleur’s Interview…
Fleur certainly didn’t have nothing when she started The Substack Bookstore. She had decades of marketing experience, a book of her own, knowledge of what authors struggled with, personal experiences that had tested her enormously and a conviction that independent writers deserved another way to be seen.
She didn’t know thousands of people would follow and she didn’t know hundreds of books would eventually appear in the store.
She simply saw something she believed should exist and was willing to begin building it and by doing so, authors have become Amazon category bestsellers and one novelist has gone on to accumulate more than 1.5 million Kindle page reads.
Incredible.
We spend so much time waiting for evidence that our ideas are good enough, wanted enough or likely enough to succeed before we allow ourselves to take them seriously, when sometimes the evidence can only appear after somebody has been brave enough to go first.
So whether the thing sitting inside you is a book, a publication, a community, a business or simply an idea you haven’t quite had the courage to say aloud yet, perhaps you don’t need to know exactly where it will lead.
You may simply need to start.
And, as Fleur reminded us at the end of our conversation, when you get knocked down along the way - keep going.
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