Hey creatives! Lots to share this week, up first —
the rewrite is done, and my novel is out to ARC readers
I am officially done with the rewrite of Let Me Be Your Ghost — and I feel really proud of everything I put into this book. I’m so excited for you to read it, and I hope you dig it!
It’s out to ARC readers now. Thank you to everyone who raised your hand and said yes to reading it early. I can’t wait to hear what you think.
It’s also live on NetGalley! If you’re a reviewer, librarian, bookseller, or anyone else with a NetGalley account, go request it there.'
Not on NetGalley? You can preorder it in hardcover, paperback, or Kindle on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Bookshop, and your receipt still gets you How to Write a Memoir, my unreleased craft book, for free.
A free class on Tuesday: the social media system behind this launch
One of the biggest things helping this book launch (and growing this Substack) has been using social media in a clever way — with about an hour a week, you can do all your posts and handle the work around them. I’m showing you more of how on Tuesday.
On Tuesday, October 13 at 9am PT (12pm ET), I’m teaching a free 45-minute Lightning Lesson on Maven called How to Turn Instagram Views Into Customers With AI. It’s totally free. Even if you can’t make it live, sign up anyway, and Maven emails you the replay.
I’ve also got more ways to learn with me coming soon, all built to help you grow as writers, creatives, and creative solopreneurs. I’m excited to share them with you! In the meantime, I hope to see you on Tuesday.
creating
Verity Ending Explained by a Real Ghostwriter on the blog. The manuscript, the letter, who killed Verity, and what the new movie keeps from the book, from someone who actually writes other people’s memoirs for a living. Full spoilers, so finish the book first. I haven’t seen the movie yet, and my take goes in the post once I do.
270+ Grants, Contests, & Residencies for Writers at Make Writing Your Job. This is the past week’s edition of the opportunities list: a $25,000 poetry prize, an $80,000 writing fellowship with editor support, and a residency with a $1,100/month stipend.
50+ Calls for Pitches We’re Loving, also at Make Writing Your Job, where a major romance publisher is offering $5,000 to $8,000 advances and a science publication is paying $1,500 for reported essays.
reading
Three of the Big Five publishers are using AI behind the scenes, and their own staff are pushing back. WIRED’s Adam Morgan talked to more than two dozen workers at HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, and Hachette, who say tools like Claude and ChatGPT are writing publicity and back-cover copy, emails to literary agents, and marketing materials, often at an executive’s request. HarperCollins drafted dozens of staffers into monthly AI Champions brainstorms, Simon & Schuster employees are gathering signatures against a workflow-tracking tool called Skan AI, and agents are adding contract clauses that bar running their authors’ manuscripts through an LLM. Even Meg Reid, publisher of the independent Hub City Press, told WIRED that AI-written marketing “feels pretty inevitable” for the big houses. I agree with her — AI is kind of an inevitability, because it’s cost-cutting, cost-saving, and efficient, and I think we’re about to see it sweep through publishing, especially on the business side, where so many of the tasks are rote. Here’s the part I keep coming back to: the tools these publishers are using are the same ones you have access to. You could use them yourself for the marketing and outreach side of publishing your own book. I think this is definitely a reckoning of sorts, but I’m curious to hear what you think in the comments.
Substack is rolling out new sponsorships, including one where a brand pays for your free readers to try your paid tier. Substack announced three formats at Advertising Week on October 8: the Upgrade (a brand gifts your free subscribers a month of paid access), the Unlock (a brand sponsors one paid post so anyone can read it), and the Masthead (a brand-curated zine of writers on one theme). Earlier tests ran with Balenciaga, Uber, and T-Mobile, and for now it’s opt-in for small groups of Substack bestsellers through their Creator Kits. Substack’s pitch: “a world where ads work for writers instead of writers working for ads.” The Upgrade is the clever one. It’s basically a free trial of your paid posts with someone else covering the bill.
Simon & Schuster launched an imprint just for self-published authors, and it pays no advance. Publishers Weekly’s Natasha Poliszczuk reports that Simon Stream releases its first titles this month in e-book, print-on-demand paperback, and audio all at once, with 50% net royalties on e-books paid monthly plus S&S marketing and publicity. It’s acquiring psychological thrillers, cozy mysteries, and romance, and it’s led by Victoria Pepe, who came over from Amazon Publishing: “The indie market has matured enormously over the last few years.” A Big Five house building an imprint around indie authors tells you how much power self-published writers have now. Still, run the numbers against what you already earn on KDP before you sign anything.
Goodreads finally lets you give a book 3.5 stars (or 3.75). Goodreads announced on October 5 that ratings now run from 0.25 to 5 in quarter-star steps. The histogram still shows five bars, your old whole-star ratings stay put, and book averages “may shift.” Good e-Reader reports readers added 3.5 million ratings in under two days, and 3.5, 4.5, 3.75, and 4.25 were the most popular new values. As someone who scores every book on my blog out of 5, I’m thrilled. Some books are just a 3.5!
A 200-page story collection just had the biggest debut of the year. Rebecca Yarros’s Threshing Day, 13 stories set in her Empyrean romantasy world, sold 857,802 print copies in its first week, per Circana BookScan, which makes it the third-bestselling book of 2026 so far, behind two books that have been on sale all year. Publishers Weekly’s bestseller column called it “a snack before the fourth novel arrives.” (I gave Fourth Wing 4 stars, so I understand the appetite.) If you write a series, this is your sign that readers will pay for the stories in between, too.
Indie authors can now take preorders for audiobooks on ACX. ACX announced on October 6 that rights holders can set up audiobook preorders, verified audiobooks can now run Sponsored Products ads on Amazon in the US, and free promo cards live at audible.com/promocards. Dale L. Roberts broke it down at Self-Publishing with Dale here on Substack. ACX’s case for it: “Pre-orders give you a way to build anticipation.” I’ve been running a preorder campaign for Let Me Be Your Ghost since August, so I love seeing audio get the same tools.
MacKenzie Scott published her third novel as a Substack serial. The New Yorker’s Rhoda Feng reviews Last Days in Two Nations, which Scott released in installments on Substack in August: a near-future, divided America, eighteen characters, one week. Her first two novels came from Big Five houses, and her 2005 debut won an American Book Award. One self-published writer told The Wall Street Journal that serializing fiction online “is a risk only a billionaire can feel comfortable making.” I’d gently disagree, since chapters of Let Me Be Your Ghost have been dropping here every Friday (and I am very much not a billionaire).