Kate McKean has repped books for twenty years at Agents & Books, and this week’s newsletter walks back a belief a lot of querying writers hold about her job. Her point: an agent’s personal taste is one filter among several,…
→ The Creator Economy Just Stopped Rewarding the Biggest Audience
Evan Shapiro— an independent media analyst who built his following across LinkedIn, Substack, and his own podcast after getting let go from a media-exec job with Seeso, an early NBCUniversal-backed streaming service — previewed his new Creator Ecosystem Map. At…
→ There’s No Money in New Music. The New Cue Covers It Anyway.
Ted Kessler and Niall run The New Cue, a weekly Substack built almost entirely around music that came out this week — not the stuff everybody already agreed mattered a decade ago. Kessler says it himself: people still make music…
→ What wanting it more actually costs you
Justin Jackson — the indie SaaS founder behind Transistor.fm and the MegaMaker newsletter — posted a short video last week asking “Do I want it the most?”, and says it generated more replies than almost anything he’s sent in a…
→ A coding educator’s book income went from rent money to zero in two years
I wouldn’t have my career in UX if it hadn’t been for generous writers and educators at places like SAMS, Sitepoint, and NN/G. Teaching folks how to develop code for the web has been an important (and, sometimes, lucrative) pillar…
→ Why an Indie Bookstore Owner Doesn’t Want Your Data
W. Kamau Bell visited Moon Palace Books in Minneapolis for his newsletter’s video series and asked co-owner Jamie Schwesnedl why independent bookstores matter right now. Schwesnedl’s answer has nothing to do with foot traffic. A book changes hands with no…
→ Ninety percent of podcast listening is still listening
Audio Insurgent went after podcasting’s pivot to video with consumption numbers rather than vibes. Ninety percent of podcast consumption is still audio. Video’s growth is real but it isn’t evidence that the medium is switching. If you’re an indie show…
→ Nick Gray Counted His Website Traffic. Humans Were 1 in 215.
Nick Gray runs PatronView, a database of nonprofit donor lists, and spent the past year logging exactly what’s hitting his servers. The count: 2.5 million requests in one week, 1.28 million pages served, and just under 6,000 of those views…
→ Hollywood’s AI Actress Stumbled Through Her First Live Interview
Ted Gioia — who’s spent much of this year tracking Hollywood’s push to replace actors with AI on his Substack — flagged this one over the weekend. Tilly Norwood, pitched to studios as the industry’s first AI-generated movie star, sat…
→ It took $3.75 and no ID check to hijack a real band’s Spotify page
Folks who know me understand I listen to a lot of Squeeze. A few years ago, I noticed a surprise new track in my Apple Music library, but I knew right away it wasn’t by a band that’s been around…
→ Marc Elias built his own publishing stack so nobody could switch him off
“We did not do this through corporate investors — it has none. We did not do this by relying on big aspiring tech companies like Substack, which platforms hate groups and may well become just another tech giant feeding you…
→ The creators topping this new ranking aren’t the biggest ones
Evan Shapiro used to run Seeso, an early comedy streaming platform that was a little too ahead of its time. Today, he edits Media War & Peace, a newsletter about the fight for attention, and this issue introduces the Affinity…