Steven Pressfield built this week’s Writing Wednesdays around a simple trick: split yourself into two people — the one who sets the agenda and the one who shows up and does the pages.
No boss, no client, no editor required to hand out the validation. You’re the CEO who gives the orders and the worker who cashes the paycheck. Try it next time you’re negotiating with yourself over whether today’s the day.
Dave Pell has run the NextDraft news digest since before most of us had broadband, writing it from roughly 75 open Safari tabs and publishing it as a blog, an app, and a newsletter, every single day. Cotton Bureau sat down with him this week to talk about the shirts and hats they’ve been making together for almost ten years now.
Pell’s pitch for the newsletter is “I am the algorithm” — a human curator standing against whatever a feed decides to serve you next. Hmmm. I used to sell merch here. Hmmmm.
Panic put a tariff surcharge on Playdate orders when new tariffs landed this year, same as plenty of other companies building hardware right now. When some of that money came back, NPR’s Planet Money asked co-founder Cabel Sasser what they did with it.
They refunded it. Nobody made them — the surcharge was already collected, and plenty of bigger companies have quietly kept windfalls like that without a word to anyone. It only matters because Panic’s whole business runs on people trusting them enough to preorder a handheld console sight unseen, and that kind of trust is the one thing a direct-to-fan maker can’t buy back once it’s spent.
The Hustle’s business newsletter spent a chunk of this week’s issue on the romance bookstore boom — more than 230 new shops in three years — and traced it back to one origin story: Bea and Leah Koch raising $90,000 on Kickstarter in 2016 to open the first one, The Ripped Bodice.
Romance has been running the self-published playbook for a decade now: BookTok audiences, reader-built demand, authors who never needed a gatekeeper’s permission. Now that audience is funding its own retail infrastructure too. What would your own readers build for you, if you just asked them to?
Kaleigh Moore writes one of the sharper newsletters tracking how AI search treats creator content, and this week she broke down new research from Scrunch on sponsored YouTube videos specifically.
Moore’s writing to brand marketing teams here, not to creators, but the finding cuts both ways. Scrunch found that when an AI system cites a sponsored video, the sponsor shows up in the AI-generated answer 40% of the time, versus 32.3% when it doesn’t, and that lift traces mostly to what’s written in the video description, not what’s said out loud. That’s something to know the next time a sponsorship negotiation gets down to the description box.
Life With Machines asked readers where they still buy or borrow physical media instead of renting it from whatever app currently owns it, and got enough replies back to turn into a full community guide this week.
Most of it is for anyone trying to own a movie instead of streaming it — libraries, thrift stores, eBay lots by the pound. But the “direct from the makers” section is the one worth bookmarking if you’re the one making things: Bandcamp, where more of the sale actually reaches the artist, and Faircamp, a free tool that turns a folder of your own audio into your own website with downloads built in, no middleman required. No biggie if you never need it. Most of us eventually do.
Michael Lopp’s been writing as Rands in Repose for decades, and in Tuesday’s letter he ran the numbers on his own archive: out of ten pieces, half land with nothing despite real effort, and the ones that actually take off are rarely the ones he expected to.
His biggest hit, “Shields Down,” came out of an argument in a Pinterest conference room — he blurted a metaphor, wrote it in the back of a car, and hit publish before he even arrived, no outline, no plan. People wanted to republish it; there are shirts now. None of that came from a content calendar — it came from years of writing in public until he was ready when the moment showed up.
Scott Bryan writes Worth Watching, a reader-supported Substack where he reviews television and, as of this week, also covers the business behind it. He’s adding industry news and analysis because the readers who no longer catch him on social media asked for it directly — not because a platform demanded it.
That’s the case for owning your list: the people still reading can tell you what they want, and you can actually hear them. Free subscribers still get a recommendation and some analysis each week; everything else moves behind the paid tier.
Here’s a fascinating data analysis using Ravelry as a petri dish for the broader creative economy:
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, and rarely the deciding one, since she has to believe she can sell a book more than she has to love it. So write the book only you can write and let the market take it from there. Simple to say. Harder to do with a rejection sitting in your inbox.
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 the center of his thinking is the fifty-person “Indie Creators” block in his map, people with a fraction of the big names’ followers who still out-earn plenty of them because their audience responds when asked. ESHAP’s own numbers back it up: three platforms, under 200,000 people combined, and a business he says now pays better than the corporate job he lost nine years ago.
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 in 2026 with no real money or career in it, and treating that work with your full attention is the least anyone can do. For a musician putting something out into the void, that’s the actual value of a newsletter like The New Cue — not the specific bands they name, but the standing refusal to only cover people who’ve already made it. Find the writers who keep that promise.
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 while. He turned the conversation into a full post on his own site explaining why.
The post walks through why the #1 spot pays so disproportionately more than #10, revisits a 2015 dinner with Ruben Gamez that reset his own ambitions, and gets concrete about what building something that actually works costs you — your time, your weekends, the version of normal life you don’t get back. Jackson’s closing argument, that you can want it more without grinding yourself into the ground, is worth sitting with if the independent path has ever felt like an all-or-nothing bet to you.
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 for both software and publishing.
After two years of mainstream AI adoption, that niche is vaporizing.
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 tracking pixel attached — you read it, you pass it to a friend, and neither of you becomes a data point. Bell makes the same case from the other side of the industry: when media consolidation closed off the kind of show he used to make, he built one himself and paid the people who helped him do it.
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 weighing cameras and lighting against rent, sit with that number first — video may still be worth it for discovery, just don’t budget as though your listeners moved.
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 from an actual person. Anthropic’s Claude-SearchBot alone crawled his site 35,000 times for every human it referred back. If your analytics tool only counts visitors who run JavaScript, which is most of them, you’re probably not seeing any of this either.
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 for an interview with Piers Morgan on Friday and, partway through a basic question, drifted into Chinese.
The pitch to Hollywood was that Tilly doesn’t come with a cast member’s incessant demands. (God forbid a producer have to spend one more dollar on craft services.) One unscripted minute on live television undid that math.
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 for about as long as I’ve been alive. An artist uploaded tracks under the name Squeeze, oblivious to the prior band’s history or their own run-in with American trademark law.
Days later, those tracks disappeared, re-filed under a modified artist name. It seemed weird, I thought at the time, that anyone with a music distribution account can just upload a track under an existing band’s name and the services just assume they’re telling the truth. It’s a litigious industry, I guess, and fair to assume that a band’s management or label would handle any kind of incursion.
Emanuel Maiberg broke a new version of this story in 404 Media’s newsletter: he spent $3.75 on a digital distribution account, typed in the name of a real Brooklyn punk band, and had an AI-generated song live on their verified Spotify, Apple Music, and Tidal pages within a day.
As before, nobody at the distributor or the streamers checked a single box he ticked.
So many of these tools were developed at a time when the barriers to this kind of activity were so high, it was unreasonable to expect anyone would actually do this. But AI cheap music distribution tools make it nearly trivial for someone to hijack another artist’s account.
Spotify seems like it’s first out of the gate with some tools for artists to claim their profile. (This is the same service notorious for serving up “soundalike” acts to replace artists who don’t want to be on the platform.)
Could a scam “artist” get away with jamming a fake album into a catalog and actually getting paid? Maybe, but only with a few layers of identity theft and compromised bank accounts, unless they’re desperate to get caught. I think it’s much more likely that someone tries this to either get their own music noticed by fans, or worse: dumping an embarrassing recording long enough for an artist’s reputation to get damaged on social media.
“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 algorithms.”
Rolling your own publishing tech is expensive and slow, and most independent writers decide it isn’t worth the trouble. However, if there’s one thing I can tell you after working online for three decades: never trust a backup plan, always post to your own platform first (and syndicate from there). You never know when your favorite platform’s going to suddenly disappear, demonitize you, or delete you.
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 100, a fresh ranking of online creators built on engagement instead of follower count.
The math rewards a tight, responsive audience over a sprawling one: nano and mid-size creators post better returns than megastars trying to be everywhere at once. Names like Blair Imani and De’arra Taylor sit near the top because they built products and partnerships around a community that actually shows up, not because of reach.
Personally, I’m having a lot of “Curtains for Zoosha” moments with this list, so I need to go eat some fiber.
(Disclaimer: Seeso’s parent company was and remains a client of my user experience practice, but our team was not involved with Seeso.)
The Authors Guild is running a free webinar this Wednesday on defamation in fiction and nonfiction, walking through what happens when a book — invented or not — cuts too close to a real person.
Traditional publishers have lawyers who quietly vet a manuscript before it ships. Self-publish, and that job’s yours now. An hour with a media lawyer who’s actually done this work is worth more than the webinar-reminder email makes it look.
Steven Pressfield tells the story of the first agent he ever had, and the arithmetic she gave him about unfinished work.
If the finished book is 427 and you’ve written 426, you don’t have 426/427ths of a book. You have nothing.
Double Your Freelancing built a sortable ranking of every freelancer marketing strategy, organised by where you actually are right now.
There’s no best strategy, only what’s best for you given your goals and experience — which sounds like a hedge until you see it sorted by whether you need rent money this month or an asset in three years. Most advice about finding clients quietly assumes you’re already the person who wrote it.
https://dyf.link/all-marketing-strategies-ranked-notion
Mandy Brown has been publishing A Working Library for eighteen years. Saturday’s issue is a memorial for Nevan Scott, a teacher and developer who died this year, and who had been quietly keeping the site running since he wrote in to flag a typo around 2009.
The arrangement they landed on was a barter. He’d reach out to talk through his own work and she’d listen and offer counsel; she’d email when she broke something, always with a note that it wasn’t urgent, and a pull request would show up an hour later carrying a bug fix she hadn’t asked about. If you publish on your own, you already know the question sitting underneath this — who fixes the thing when you can’t, and what do you have to trade for it. She had an answer for eighteen years.
https://aworkinglibrary.com/writing/in-the-world
Nathan Barry got James Clear on stage at Craft + Commerce, years after the last time Clear spoke there — back when Atomic Habits hadn’t come out yet.
Thirty million copies later, the conversation is about the four-million-subscriber email list and the publishing company he’s building on top of it. That’s the machinery most author interviews skip straight past.
Ben Werdmuller spends most Fridays rounding up links that caught his eye at the intersection of technology, media and society. This week, the top slot went to the newsroom lawsuits against OpenAI and Microsoft, and to who actually ends up holding the money when those fights get settled.
Here’s what happened after Anthropic settled: a lot of publishers kept the money instead of passing it to authors, even where the rights had already reverted. So go dig out your contracts and work out who’s holding your rights today. Ben also points at Really Simple Licensing, an ASCAP-style standard for creative work that no major AI vendor has agreed to comply with yet.
Nate Chinen recorded fifty-four minutes with biographer Andy Beta on why Alice Coltrane’s moment took as long as it did.
“I’m reluctant to classify Alice Coltrane as an example of a beloved artist going from obscurity to belated discovery,” [Beta] clarifies. “The stars are always above us, but the conditions on Earth must be right to fully glimpse their splendor.”
The Rebooting talked to Vivian Schiller about what happens to publishers who spent a decade arbitraging search traffic.
If that was your model and Google Zero killed it, you’re done — unless there’s a real community that comes looking for you directly. Schiller meant legacy digital publishers, but that second half lands on anyone making a living from their own work. Does anyone come looking for you by name?
Martijn Doolaard moved alone into the Italian Alps to restore two stone cabins, and published one long, finely edited video a week for years. Dense Discovery framed it well.
Weekly is slow by every metric the platforms reward, and the slowness isn’t a limit of the format — it’s his editorial position. How much of your own publishing pace did you actually choose?
Anna Sproul-Latimer, a literary agent writing at Neon Literary took on “the writer you can’t stop measuring yourself against.” You can’t girlboss your way out of envy, she says, and she isn’t buying the standard advice about converting it into ambition.
Charlie Jane Anders wrote about Problem Patterns, a Belfast punk band who posted a protest song called Bodies four days after the anti-immigrant riots in Northern Ireland.
Riots June 9 to 11, song out June 15, proceeds given away. Cancelled tours and dead mid-size venues and labels chasing the safest acts, and the band still turned it around in four days. Speed is one of the few advantages an independent act actually has over everyone bigger.
Laura Elizabeth built Client Portal, a small software product, and still runs it. She went on a Dutch podcast in English to tell the origin story.
We use this tool at Johns & Taylor every day, and it’s delightful that something so powerful comes from an indie developer who now counts it as a significant source of her revenue.
Netflix, Sony, A24 and Versant are all bidding for Letterboxd, and this newsletter covers the entertainment business with the numbers attached.
Elizabeth Joyce has a counter-plan built on the public benefit corporation model, trying to hold social good and a working business in the same structure. If your film writing lives on Letterboxd, the place you built an audience inside is currently being priced. Whether a PBC counterbid can survive that room, I genuinely don’t know.
Anne-Laure Le Cunff writes Ness Labs, a newsletter about experimenting your way through creative work, and runs a paid community alongside it. This one arrived in the September 10 edition, written the week she got back from Burning Man and found September waiting for her.
If you work for yourself, September is when you’re most likely to throw out a system that was mostly working. Le Cunff’s fix is small enough to actually run: pick one change, give it two weeks, and see what it teaches you. The keep-stop-experiment question she closes on is the part worth stealing for your own quarter.
How do you choose a project and stay with it? How do you begin when inspiration refuses to show up? How do you build a practice that reliably produces pages?
Tim Ferriss pulled years of his interviews with working writers into one compilation episode on craft.
GQ added a note to the end of the article conceding Slime Dot was an AI avatar, but said the “talent behind the music remains undeniable.”
“But even though influencers largely seem like regular people sharing their love of music, the content they’re making can sometimes be a form of hidden advertising.”
Turns out it’s trivially easy to scoop up millions of songs for use as training data.
Bestselling author Robin Sloan wonders why and how we became so rigid about the works we create, as he undertakes a new edition of his best-known work.
Unsettling news from Woodstock, where Amy Helm posted to Instagram about “disturbing circumstances” at the legendary Levon Helm Studios that seem to have pushed her and other longtime team members out of day-to-day management.
“I wouldn’t say that we make most of our money from touring, but I will definitely say that we make more money when we are going on tours that aren’t financial failures.”
Audiences trusted that they were watching independent content, but instead of being an unpaid ad, the influencer had a secret partnership with Polymarket to create fake gambling opportunities for their followers. The “bet” could be something as ridiculous as how many times Donald Trump said “McDonald’s” at a press conference. If you earn your income based on people trusting you, then when someone else is secretly taking money from them by placing an undisclosed bet, it’s an unfair advantage.
Hank Green credits Ze Frank with inventing video blogging, and while both of these guys picked up and ran with ideas that bubbled up from the early web, Ze’s work set early standards for what would become its own industry. Here’s a conversation between two creators who figured out how to be actual humans on the internet, comparing notes across twenty years of doing it their own way.
Mathers’ 30-day challenge — one tiny public post a day — is the lowest-stakes audience-building advice you’ll read this week. Short doesn’t mean slight.
Everyone who greenlights any kind of creative venture right now—not just the sitcoms Paul Scheer describes in this great essay—is running through this same dilemma right now. The way we used to place bets about investing time and energy into creating anything is completely busted by a business model that favors measuring success by “minutes consumed.” There are other models, and there’s already proof that they can work.
“Users, and especially users who are developers have an enormous amount of leverage to control where AI goes. And if those communities of users can coordinate, they can put power back into the hands of the people.”
“…there’s something about perimenopause that brings me back to that teenaged girl who loved to sit in her room, or anywhere really, and write poetry, without caring if it’s good or correct. I mean this literally and figuratively, whether it’s poetry or just me being me, dressing how I want, etc.”
