Hey creatives! Lots to share this week, up first —
I’m spending the month in Los Angeles
I’m writing to you from Los Angeles this morning, where I’m spending the whole month. That photo is from my balcony on one of my first sunrises here.
I lived in LA for the better part of a decade (USC, the Hollywood assistant years, the TV writers’ rooms), so coming back always feels a little like running into an old friend who knows exactly how I take my coffee.
The plan for the month is bookish events and a lot of meetings, because Let Me Be Your Ghost comes out November 18 and launch season means saying yes to everything.
In between, I’m doing the two things I do best in this city: drinking ~ really ~ great coffee and meandering through bookstores with no list and no plan.
If you’re in LA and need a place to write this week, I keep a running Los Angeles page with every cafe, restaurant, and matcha spot I’ve reviewed here, plus a map.
And if there’s a bookstore or a coffee shop I need to wander into this month, tell me in the comments:
two ways to learn my content system: a 2-hour workshop and a 30-day course
Almost every creative I talk to lately is stuck in the same place: the writing is done, and nobody has seen it.
Distribution is the part most of us were never taught — and it’s the part I’ve spent the last year building a system for. Both of the offerings below help with it directly, because they’re the system itself, taught by me.
Here’s how it works: you batch a week of posts and short videos in about an hour, AI handles the editing and the busywork in your own voice, and the rest of the week is yours to write, read, or wander through bookstores. My systems save you time so you can work less and be more creative, which is a sentence I never expected to write about social media.
The workshop is The Lean Content System, one live two-hour session on Tuesday, October 27 at 5:30pm PT (8:30pm ET), for $350. We go deep on written posts and short videos: writing in your own voice with AI, making videos without a video editor, batching the whole week in one sitting, and reading your numbers so you know what to make next.
The course is Build an Organic Content System With AI in 30 Days, $1,500, running November 1 through December 1 with a live session every Sunday at 3pm PT plus weekly office hours. It’s the full build: everything from the workshop, plus articles that rank on Google and get quoted in AI search, slideshows and graphics without a designer, and tracing every post back to signups and sales. By day 30 you’re running the same system I use for this Substack, for my jobs platform CozyJobs, and for the launch of my novel.
If you came to Tuesday’s free Lightning Lesson, these are the two ways to go deeper that I mentioned at the end. If you want the routine in one evening, take the workshop. If you want me looking over your shoulder for a month, take the course.
And if you know a writer or a small business owner who posts when they can and wishes they didn’t have to think about it, send this to them.
you have until November 18 to claim your pre-order gift
Let Me Be Your Ghost comes out on November 18, and November 17th is also the last day to claim the pre-order gift: a free copy of How to Write a Memoir, my unreleased craft book, for everyone who preorders the novel and shows me the receipt. After launch day, the gift is gone.
I started writing How to Write a Memoir in 2021 and rewrote the whole thing in coffee shops in Athens, fueled by way too many freddo espressos. It’s a ghostwriter’s secrets for turning your life into a bestseller, written for anyone writing their own memoir and anyone writing someone else’s. I’m not sure when I’ll publish it on its own — so for now, the pre-order gift is the only way to read it.
Hardcover, paperback, or Kindle of Let Me Be Your Ghost all count, from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or Bookshop or anywhere else you buy books. Upload your receipt on the claim page and your free copy of How to Write a Memoir is yours.
If you’ve already preordered (thank you!!), send this to the friend who keeps asking what to read next.
creating
250+ Grants, Contests, & Residencies for Writers at Make Writing Your Job. This is the past week’s edition of the opportunities list: a $100,000 creative thinking prize with a book deal, CAD $15,000 for literary and performing arts production, and a $5,000 unrestricted state fellowship for literary artists.
50+ Calls for Pitches We’re Loving, also at Make Writing Your Job, where a science publication is offering $1,500 per reported feature, an arts publication is paying $650 for spotlight pieces, and a racial justice outlet is commissioning editorials for $600.
reading
Fourth Wing has its Violet and its Xaden. TheWrap’s Tess Patton reports that Esther McGregor (We Were Liars, Babygirl) will play Violet Sorrengail and Emilio Sakraya (Those About To Die) will play Xaden Riorson in Prime Video’s series, with Michael B. Jordan executive producing, Meredith Averill (The Haunting of Hill House) as showrunner, and Lisa Joy (Westworld) directing the first episode. Amazon hasn’t confirmed it yet. I gave Fourth Wing 4 stars, so yes, I have Opinions about who gets to brood as Xaden, and I’ll share them once I’ve seen him do it on screen.
Freida McFadden’s The Witch debuted at number one, with first-week print sales double her last hardcover. Publishers Weekly’s bestseller column says The Witch, a thriller split between a present-day timeline and 1692 Massachusetts, is only McFadden’s second hardcover original, and its first week doubled The Intruder, which sold 65K copies in its first week last year and more than 350K since. She built that readership in paperback and e-book long before anyone would print her in hardcover — which is the part I love. If you want to start at the beginning, the reading-order guide is up in creating above.
Substack says its app drove nearly 800,000 paid subscriptions in six months, and more than half of them came from Notes. Substack announced new content preferences on October 14: readers can dial video, audio, longform, and community posts up or down, mute specific keywords, and fine-tune the topics they follow. The number for writers is further down the post: nearly 800,000 paid subscriptions and more than 80 million free ones came through the app in the past six months, with more than half of the paid ones starting in the Notes feed. Substack’s line to readers: “You get to decide.” I post short, casual Notes with no links in them, and this is the number that tells me to keep doing it. I’d also keep an eye on that mute button. If readers are tired of a topic, they can now make it disappear.
Someone analyzed 3.9 million Substack Notes, and one Note a day beats posting six to ten. Orel Zilberman at The Writing Edge, here on Substack, pulled 3,915,024 Notes and found that writers who post once a day earn 46% more impressions per Note than writers who post six to ten times, Notes without links beat Notes with links by 30%, Notes of 33 to 64 words beat longer ones by 19%, and the best single hour is 4pm ET, worth about a 19% bump. His conclusion: “Post when you can, and stop chasing the perfect hour.” Short, link-free, once a day. That has been my Notes rule for a while, and it’s nice when the data agrees with me.