Substack turned newsletters into a real income stream for writers, with all the usual catches. These articles cover using it well: building a paid newsletter, growing readers, and figuring out whether the platform actually fits what you are trying to do.
AEOAugust 23, 2026
Alex M H Smith argues that marketing stopped working because everything got easy, and that the fix is to make yours harder, more tedious and more expensive. The diagnosis is right and the prescription confuses a proxy for the mechanism.…
SEE » The Elephant in the Room: Marketing Your Books and Services series
Author PlatformMay 28, 2026
Most pre-book platform advice is build-on-LinkedIn or build-a-newsletter, with no real path from either to an actual book. Substack in 2026 is the underused option for authority authors who want to validate the idea, build the launch list, and pre-sell…
Book LaunchMay 28, 2026
A good foreword borrows credibility, pre-positions the book's argument, and hands you a sales hook; a bad one does the opposite of all three. Here is how to choose the right foreword writer, how to ask without sounding desperate, what…
Co-AuthoringMay 28, 2026
The 50/50 co-author split is the lazy default and rarely correct. Four variables decide the right one: who brings the audience, who brings the substance, who does the writing, who runs the launch. Here is the math behind 50/50, 60/40,…
Author BusinessMay 28, 2026
Every Amazon sale hands over about 65 percent of the cover price and your customer list to a company that competes with you. A direct sale through Shopify, Payhip, or your own site keeps the margin and, more importantly, builds…
Author BusinessMay 28, 2026
A book is the credential that unlocks speaker-fee tiers, from free-with-a-meal all the way to $5,000-to-$20,000 keynotes. The path runs through speaker bureaus, conference networks, and a one-sheet most authors botch. Here is which bureaus take ghostwritten authors, how the…
Becoming a GhostwriterFebruary 13, 2026
I did not set out to be a writer. I set out to understand my grandfather, and the writing followed, more than forty years and 113+ books ago. The path was never a straight line. Here is the real story…
AlgorithmsFebruary 12, 2026
I used to pull clients straight off LinkedIn, posts with hundreds of views, real comments, real business, and I wrote over 100 profiles, trained by the person who wrote the Dummies book on profile optimization. That was five years ago.…
Authority Through AuthorshipFebruary 11, 2026
If your site is not on the first or second page of results, the traffic simply is not coming. The gap between the bottom and the top is mostly one thing: backlinks. Here is a writer's guide to building them,…
Authority Through AuthorshipFebruary 10, 2026
I run two sites, one with 500+ articles and another with 45-plus handbooks and courses, and both quietly generate leads and sell books year-round. None of it was luck. It was blogging, the version that works instead of the version…
SEE » The Elephant in the Room: Marketing Your Books and Services series
ADHDFebruary 9, 2026
I wrote my grandfather's 52,000-word war memoir in two weeks, 187 pages spanning the Yangtze River Patrol to three years in Japanese prison camps. People assume discipline or a system; the truth is AuDHD. When my brain decides something matters,…
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