#Substack success

[mehmetyildizmelbourne-blog]

Why I Joined Substack: A New Chapter in Supporting My Readers

Welcoming the Value of Repurposing Content Across Platforms Throughout my career, I faced the challenge of reaching an audience for my scientific work. Simplifying complex issues for the public was difficult, and finding readers for these simplified messages was even harder. As researchers, our primary outlets were scientific papers in peer-reviewed journals, and writing for trade journals was…

[utterlyvapid]

[foxmulderautism]

one niche weird thing about reading for a litmag is the more online flash/micro fiction i've read the more i've found specific writers that i really admire or at least i can recognise their name when i see them published in litmags. and sometimes they'll they show up in the queue and it's like oh i'm really inspired by this writer and their skill but now i'm on the side where i read and analyse and vote on their submission. and my impostor syndrome is like what the hell

[vvicariart]

How to Use Influence and Political Savvy to Get Results

Check out the latest from ThnqLeadership for mid-level managers and project managers!

[anettrolikova]

Failure should punctuate a strong track record A rich person says, “I struggled a lot. Now, I’m here doing this cool thing.”

A broke person says, “I struggled a lot. Actually I’m still struggling.”

One makes you think, “What a rags to riches story. I’m so inspired.” The other makes you feel sad. You don’t want to be vulnerable at the expense of your ultimate goal, which at work, is generally about inspiring confidence in your abilities—so your startup gets funded, so you get hired, so your manager trusts you more.

Let’s say you’re a candidate interviewing for roles. Over-emphasizing failure makes you seem like a risky hire. The hiring manager thinks, Wow, I appreciate that they shared this, but it was kind of a poor judgment call, they missed obvious signs, and the expensive mistake probably could have been avoided altogether. Maybe we should pick another candidate who has better judgment. Failure can be perceived as a pattern match or a pattern break. Startups have to tow the line between simultaneously playing up aspects that make them the underdog (because they’re clearly not Google and can’t hide this) AND playing up that they are proven, trusted, the go-to, reliable, stable, etc (elements of the favorite) so customers are willing to take a chance. If you’re the challenger, not the default, you’re already deemed risky. When in doubt, show why you're the winning team to counterbalance.

People want to read about your failures if they deem you a success. If you’re talking about failure, remember to share a few points of credibility, so you give folks a reason to want to learn from you. If you're going to share widely-make sure you're sharing from your scars, not your open wounds. Love Warrior is intensely personal, but it's not a diary.

I started turning it into a memoir two years after it all happened, and I had enough distance to look at all of it somewhat objectively. 

If you’re still in the midst of struggle, talking about your failure can look like a cry for help. And most companies don’t want to hire a content marketer or product manager who seems like they’re in the middle of crisis.

[cinader]

Laurie Stone, Christopher D. Sims, Crystal Cauley

Martha Cinder speaks with Laurie Stone about her Substack, Tony Robles with Christopher Sims and Crystal Cauley about Juneteenth at the Carl Sandburg House

Episode 16 – Listen & Be Heard Subscribe at Spotify Subscribe at Apple Subscribe at Google Martha Cinader hosts live at WPVM in Asheville, NC, with interviews and spoken word. Laurie Stone Laurie Stone Martha speaks live from the WPVMfm studio in Asheville, NC with Laurie Stone in upstate New York, about her Substack: Everything is Personal, the series Succession, the VIDA count, (remember…

[onawhimsicot]

i know not many people would want to read a 10,000 word article about the minecraft end poem and how the author, Julian Gough, was never fairly compensated for his work and has made it public domain.

But it's a very well-written and heartfelt read, and he makes it very clear that none of this is a cash-grab and despite the fact that he is essentially a starving artist in this capitalist society, he only mentions his financial struggles despite Minecraft's huge huge success at the bottom of this article and not in the tweets so as to not dilute his message.

Anyway, I just think it'd be cool if those who are able to could support him in some way whether it be subscribing to his substack or donating to his paypal (that's linked in the article, you can ctrl + F to find it easier), that's all.

[facelessoldgargoyle]

god ok I’ve been reading aella’s public substack. I have a lot of faith in her expertise bc she’s a polyamorous slut who also worked as a camgirl and an escort. she’s also a spreadsheet nerd, and her surveys about kinks and taboos have gone viral, so she has a lot of data to work with. She’s also saying the most bonkers shit

I loved the idea that there were strategies men could use to make me want to have sex with them. I really wanted to have sex, but often had this stupid gatekeeper thing in my brain that would shut down and prevent me from getting sex. Teaching men to do a magical series of moves that would manage to circumvent my gatekeeper and help get me laid was a wonderful thing, and I advised my male friends to try it.

…

I view sex as a success for both of us, and thus seduction is a collaborative activity. We both want the same thing: to get around my annoying brain gatekeeper that got installed there by eons of evolution that doesn’t understand birth control and is trying to evaluate if you’re worthy of impregnating me. So please—use seduction techniques on me. Roleplay as an alpha male well enough to trick my vagina into believing that your cum will give me alpha sons.

Like??? Ok, to be fair, she specified at the beginning that this series of posts was for straight men who were into women who bottom, so this isn’t supposed to apply to me. But are straight women really out here living like this????

I guess if you have a horrible monkey on your back that works against your own interest in sex, then it’s useful to view seduction as instrumental, a useful tool. I do agree with/enjoy the idea of seduction as collaborative. But fuck dude, have you considered getting rid of the monkey?

Maybe I’m too hot for this post. Actually getting laid is easy. Seduction is just something fun to do while you’re still hanging out at the bar.

[drdemonprince]

I’ve only just read your Burnout piece on Substack and it made me think of the anon you answered awhile back about anti depressants and anti anxiety medications.

I’m Autistic and am on anti anxiety medication which basically masked all the warning signs and symptoms of Autistic burnout. Those usual indicators I usually can pick up on which indicate I’m doing too much and not resting enough weren’t present on the medication.

I felt good (although very numb like the anon said) so I kept on taking on more and more and initially thought it was great! I’ve never been able to commit to things or work on multiple projects at once even ones that super interest and excite me because I get overwhelmed and burnt out quickly.

But without the warning signs I kept going and going until I started to feel really weird. Disassociated, not sleeping, upset stomach, drinking a lot. I thought everything was great so it took awhile to piece together that this is maybe what Autistic burnout results in when it’s covered by meds.

I’m now slowly withdrawing from the meds. I figure the authentic anxiety is better than false measures of “success”.

So just a warning to Autistic people I guess, I don’t know if what I’ve experienced is common or just subjective but it’s worth being aware of.

This is pretty much how I feel about psychiatric medication for myself, as well. I want the warning signs. I want to notice my body and brain rebelling. A lot of psychiatric drugs are somewhat effective at making us feel more numb, for a while, which is why they are used as a stopgap when a person's situation is unmanageable. I'm a big believer in the "Affect as Information" Hypothesis: when we feel like shit, that means something about our circumstances simply has got to change. Often that means giving up responsibilities, letting people down, letting things go.

I even feel the same way about weed. I have a lot of friends who use weed daily to manage their overwhelm, and it seems to work great for them, and potentially I should be doing the same thing. But I am terrified of having a massive dependence on a large quantity of weed in order to function, and when I *did* use weed daily, it became a baseline need and made me dissociate even further from myself. I now take the desire to use weed or otherwise get blasted as a signal that something is amiss and that I'm overwhelmed and seeking escape -- that doesn't mean I don't listen to that desire some of the time. I get high and/or drunk on the weekends pretty often. But I don't want to lose touch with my body's warning system. AND I have the immense luxury of being able to change my life circumstances when things get to be too much. If someone doesn't have that freedom, well, sometimes substances are the best thing you can get - be that psychiatric or off market.

[strangebiology]

Do nonfiction authors really need social media to get a book deal?

I asked successful agents and trad signed authors how important social media is to getting book contracts. Here are some data and quotes about how they responded on my Authors of Nonfiction Books in Progress Substack! Read if you want more details and caveats to the data, as well as my story and why I like social media anyway.

TLDR: Social media is NOT necessary!

Here's an editorial explaining why. But for nonfiction non-memoir, you have to do something to prove that you know what you’re talking about, as you'll see repeated over and over in my Substack article. That proof could be social media.

Trad publishing is very hard and competitive, and sometimes even unfair. But the people who say "you can't get a deal unless you know someone or are TikTok famous" are flat-out wrong. (Also, you can become a person who knows someone by joining communities, attending conferences...hell, you can DM me if you have writing experience and I might hook you up with my agent. There, now you know someone and have no excuse. I've successfully hooked up 4 people I knew from communities I'm in, or something like that, not because they're my family members. I have said "come back when your query and/or experience are better" to 3 people, and 2 people didn't get the deal despite having good pitches and my recommendation, it just wasn't a match.)

Unfortunately, I think some aspiring authors are looking for an excuse, as many of these people don't often tend their writing craft. That is a much bigger indicator as to whether you'll get a deal, even if the trad world still isn't a perfect meritocracy.

Remember, I LOVE social media and have over 300,000 followers across platforms. I mostly do recommend that writers and journalists should use it! I find it sad, even, that there are so many writers with no audiences, when there are huge social audiences who would love to hear what these writers have to say! (But there are downsides too, so it's not ideal for all. Check out the pros and cons for science journalists being on TikTok.)

If you’d like to share your experience with trad publishing and social media (or lack of social media!), I still look at the survey results, so feel free to fill it out here and I may share the results in the future. Some questions are optional and of course I redact the (optional, anyway) emails:

[goodluckclove]

Stop Calling Yourself an Aspiring Author: A Proposition

So this post is dedicated to @dreambigdreamz, who asked me a question about when you can stop calling yourself an aspiring author. I had to wait until I could go to sleep to properly answer, because this is going to be a long one, probably. I'm actually doing this before I get to work for the day, because if I could get one goddamned person to stop labeling themselves like this I will feel success for at least three days.

It's a question for new writers - the difference between a writer and an author. If you Google the difference it appears there are two camps:

Writer and author are synonyms

You are only an author if you publish your work/write as a career

This is odd to me already. It's odd and it's immediately gatekeep-y, and it's so fucking surreal that ours is the only artistic field that has this strange distinction. For most other outlets there's still a separation between hobbyist and professional, but that's considered optional as far as I've seen.

Someone who paints or does digital art isn't likely to call themselves a hobbyist artist, even if they aren't doing it as their main source of income. They're just an artist.

If someone practices the piano but isn't actively in a performing band or symphony, they probably don't call themselves an aspiring pianist. They're already doing it. They're a pianist.

I briefly considered cook versus chef, but in that context cook doesn't necessarily mean amateur. There are line cooks and prep cooks and fry cooks and sauté cooks who work professionally. I have the qualifications of a prep or line cook, but I'm currently only cooking meals at home. So does that mean I'm an aspiring cook? That's weird. That doesn't sound right.

So by this point it should be clear that I find it deeply reductive to say that you can only call yourself an author if you've professionally published a work of writing. Maybe that was the case, like, a hundred years ago? Even then, though, one of the definitions of author is a verb describing the act of writing something. You could author a scientific paper. You could author a poem.

It's 2002. The scope of what it means to publish is infinitely vaster than it was in the days of Virginia Woolf or Ernest Hemingway. You could traditionally publish your novel - that's still an option. But you could also indie-publish. Or self-publish. Or produce your own zines or chapbooks and distribute them online. Or send our newsletters on platforms like Substack. Or serialize through websites like Wattpad, Tapas, Itch.io, Patreon, AO3, or even tumblr.

I never called myself an author, but my reasons have nothing to do with whether or not I've been published. I prefer writer, as it has a more versatile feel that tracks whether I'm working on a novel or a poem or a play. But that's beside the point.

Personally, I'm in the first camp. Writer and author are essentially synonymous, only in my eyes an author is someone who writes fiction or nonfiction prose. That's it. Have you done that? Cool. Good job no longer being "aspiring".

If you have the words aspiring author in your life somewhere, there's a good chance you're actively gatekeeping yourself from feeling good enough to do your own thing. Why not replace it with something like the following?

future bestseller

soon-to-be published

new author/writer

growing author/writer

developing author/writer

practicing author/writer

author/writer in training

just author/writer

If someone does the whole "you're a writer? what have you published?" welcome to the conversation that all writers have to tolerate at some point. People are dumb. People typically don't know our industry and how it functions, and that's fine. Just smile and nod and shrug your way out of the conversation.

Yes, there's infighting within writers who should very much be spending less time arguing who gets to wear the nametag and who doesn't. Those people are lame dipshits who should shut the fuck up and get back to writing. If you have a passion for writing, be it fanfic or scripts or short stories or novels, you are my peer and colleague. I might not like the structure or content of your writing - which is fine, by the way - but I would never even say that you aren't a writer holy shit.

I don't care if you use every genre and trope that I find trite and excessive. If you genuinely care about the stories you tell and you still present yourself as an aspiring author, you have a duty to take yourself more seriously than that.

You are a writer. You are an author. This should not be a question.

We need to move past this and start asking ourselves the real questions that come after you answer "Am I an author". Am I a safe author? Am I an advocate and an ally? Am I a supportive member of the community? Am I still learning? Am I a capable author? Am I adaptable? Am I resourceful? Am I determined?

I'm running out of steam here. I need the writers here, especially the younger writers, to move past this stage of their creative careers as quickly as fucking possible. I was there too. I get it. And I'm telling you it's time to soak the label of aspiring so as to loosen the adhesive, gently peel it off, and throw it in the trash forever. Don't even keep it for sentimental reasons to look back on later.

Toss it. Burn it. Eat it. It is not helping you.

Okay that's all. You should close this now and write three hundred words of whatever the fuck you want. I love you.

[mehmetyildizmelbourne-blog]

How Ted’s Return to 9-to-5 Made Him Happier After an Online Writing Business Failure

Discover why going back to corporate life made this person happier and wiser and the key lessons aspiring content entrepreneurs should know before attempting such business. Summary of a Case Study As a content strategist and ethnographic researcher, I conducted extensive case studies on book authors, online writers, freelancers, ghostwriters, and affiliate marketers, providing valuable insights…

[utterlyvapid]

So much will be made about Ewan and his grand stage taking turn. The “sad, little sob story��� about one of the greatest traumas two children could ever go through. The conclusion of Rose Roy and her tragic death finally revealed as due to polio. He is offended that nobody would want him to speak, that they would dare hold him back. It is his birthright to rip his arrogant and often delusional brother one last new one. The two men’s rivalry is not dead, even if one of the parties is.

But even there, he can’t help but exalt the man they’re burying. Logan may have been “meagre”, but it was that meagreness that allowed him to speak to the souls of others. He responded to them the way they wanted to be spoken to. Ewan has never seen this ability as a gift, but on even this day, reading people is clearly something that not everyone can do. He feels the need to nod towards a special ability of sorts. The ability to communicate to an audience is something that many aspire to and few can accurately do well.

[rubyvroom]

Silicon Valley's Parasite Culture

From Ted Gioia's substack -- and I do realize the irony of reposting a substack post about parasitical behavior as content on my Tumblr yes -- that said, I really want people to read this

...For the first time in history, the Forbes list of billionaires is filled with individuals who got rich via parasitical business strategies—creating almost nothing, but gorging themselves on the creativity of others. That’s how you get to the top in the digital age. Instead of US Steel, it’s Us steal. Instead of IBM, it’s IB Robbing U. But when parasites get too strong, they risk killing their hosts.

Recall that only ten percent of animal species are parasites. What happens if that number grows to 30% or 50% or 70%? That must have catastrophic consequences, no? This is precisely the situation in the digital culture right now. Google’s success in leeching off newspapers puts newspapers out of business. Musicians earn less and less, even as Spotify makes more and more. Hollywood is collapsing because it can’t compete with free video made by content providers. It’s no coincidence that these parasite platforms are the same companies investing heavily in AI. They must do this because even they understand that they are killing their hosts. When the host dies, AI-generated content can replace human creativity. Or—to be blunt about it—the host will die because of AI-generated content. And then the web billionaires won’t even need to toss those few shekels at artists. It’s every parasite’s dream. The host can die, but the leech still lives on! But there’s one catch. Training AI requires the largest parasitical theft of intellectual property in history. Everything now gets seized and sucked dry. No pirate in history has pilfered with such ambition and audacity.

now, I think we are finding that there are diminishing returns on the AI training at this point (in this gen of the technology at least) such that they are not able to replace human creativity. But if they could, they would, is the point. And when we talk about AI we need to address the parasitical business models that make it an inevitability.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Amee Vanderpool at SHERO:

The issue of abortion protections will be on Missouri’s statewide ballot in November, thanks to a successful initiative petition, put forth by the Missourians for Constitutional Freedom coalition, that was finalized on Tuesday, just before the 5pm deadline. In order to be successful, the amendment proposal must receive more than 50% of votes in approval, which would then protect abortion procedures up until the point of fetal viability, generally around 24 weeks. A successful amendment like this would return the State of Missouri back to the standard used after the Roe v. Wade decision in 1973, but before the Dobbs Decision, which overruled the guaranteed rights from Roe. The language of this new amendment also includes exceptions after viability “to protect the life or physical or mental health of the pregnant person.” The new law would also protect the patients receiving medical care as well as anyone performing or assisting in the abortion procedure.

The current law in Missouri currently holds that doctors who perform abortions can be charged with a class B felony and face up to 15 years in prison. As a consequence of providing medical care, a doctor’s medical license can now also be suspended or revoked for performing abortions in the state. This latest win of providing a ballot initiative for abortion comes after a grueling battle with Republicans in the Missouri House of Representatives, that sought to keep any type of abortion protection measure off the ballot. Missouri is currently among 18 states with an abortion ban, and one of more than a half-dozen states which will allow the voters to decide on the issue of abortion protections on the 2024 ballot. This week, officials in Arizona also announced that local abortion-rights supporters had amassed enough signatures to put a proposed amendment on the November ballot that would formalize abortion rights in the Arizona State Constitution as well.

Amee Vanderpool writes in her SHERO Substack that Missouri’s abortion rights referendum is a very big deal for the state of abortion access post-Roe. Missouri currently has a near-total abortion ban as a result of the Dobbs ruling.

See Also:

Jess Piper: Abortion is on the Ballot in Missouri