#How to use Substack for book marketing

[mehmetyildizmelbourne-blog]

Why Print Books Are Not Dead and How to Be a Successful Author

For Book Authors, Substack Is Vital, & Medium Can Accelerate Your Growth I explain why print books are not dead and they are livelier than before. You can also read this story in my Substack newsletter for free or if you an account you read it on Medium to engage with your writing and reading community there. Inspiration for Book Authors As a seasoned book author who tried both traditional…

[jolenes-book-journey]

What Is Substack And How Can Authors Use It

Substack has emerged as a prominent platform for authors seeking to publish newsletters and share podcasts. It offers a streamlined approach to content distribution, but it’s essential to weigh its advantages and disadvantages to determine if it’s the right fit for your author. Jolene’s on Substack with her Publication called “The Indie Author’s Guide to Writing, Publishing, and Thrivin” Continue…

[emrowene]

Webserials and Why You Should Read Them

Welcome to a short primer on webserials! The concept behind them is pretty simple: webserials, also called webnovels or webfiction, are serialized online novels. If you read long fanfics OR webcomics, you're probably already familiar with the concept. Authors release new chapters on a fixed basis, usually one chapter a week (but sometimes more, sometimes less).

You can find webserials in several places: on big platforms like tapas and royalroad, on individual authors' websites or patreons, or on newsletter platforms like substack.

So now we know what webserials are, but why should we support them?

Because webserials are fun. Because webserial authors are sharing amazing works online for free! Because the publishing industry is disproportionately hard to get into for queer and marginalized folks, and those are the people writing webserials.

To climb a little higher onto my soapbox, I believe webserials are the future of accessible and diverse publishing. There's been more and more discussion about the problems with traditional publishing: how publishers are turning it into a "fast fashion" industry, spitting out books while overall book quality decreases. Regardless of whether you believe that, it's true that the industry prioritizes "marketability" over anything else. Experimental books, passion projects, books that have a lot of heart but no pithy "tropes" -- they stand little chance in the world of traditional publishing, and self-publishing is incredibly inaccessible for most of us. It's expensive, but more than that, it takes an incredible amount of time and effort. It's a business, and at the end of the day, some of just want to share the stories we love with people we hope will love them too. And that's the beauty of webserials!

One complaint I've seen about webserials is that "you never know what the quality will be like" - and I've seen this from people who regularly read fanfiction! Like fanfiction writers, we have our beta readers, we have our editors, we pour our hearts into developing our stories. So give us a try!!

Some recs and places to get started under the cut:

My webserials:

Fractured Magic - A queer epic fantasy series about a broken hero’s hunt for redemption and an elven prince’s quest to rescue his kidnapped king. The two estranged friends are racing against time - and dead gods - to achieve their goals. Will they make up and work together before it’s too late? (This story is currently ongoing)

The Case Files of Sheridan Bell - An old-school detective mystery set in Tamarley, a fantastical city with magical murders and doors to other worlds. Basically (queer, autistic) Sherlock Holmes but with more faeries. The first mystery is complete; the second will be published soon!

Some other webserials I follow/followed from start to finish:

What Manner of Man by @stjohnstarling - a queer gothic romance novel about a priest and a vampire.

The Warthog Report by @warthogreporter- this substack contains a selection of nonfiction writing, misc. fiction writings, and Battles Beneath The Stars, a serialized story about a tournament in a fantasy world, styled like a fighting game script/walkthrough.

Kiss it Better by DogshitJay - A (definitely 18+) queer adult romance about the messy endings and messier beginnings of love.

Warrior of Hearts by Beau Van Dalen - a queer slice of life romance following an online friendship that blossoms into something more. (Beau has lots of other great webserials as well!)

More places to look:

Tapas (Community novels page)

Royalroad (mostly known for its litrpg scene, but you can find other novels and genres here as well!)

The ao3 "Original Works" tag!

[the-inkwell-variable]

author ask tag

thank you so much for the tag, @the-golden-comet! ooh this is gonna be fun!

i'm going to focus on my current wip, Why Should I Be Careful? I'm Going To Die Anyway! because it's still very much in the planning stages (despite how much I'm writing for it) and I have Thoughts

What is the main lesson of your story? Why did you choose it?

I'll be honest, I haven't really thought that far ahead. I suppose, if there is a lesson to take from WSIBC?IGTDA!, it might be that you should always chase your goals and desires, and screw what other people think. Maybe put a little more thought and planning into yours than Aura does hers, though. I mean, she almost dies due to her recklessness. Don't be like Aura.

What did you use as inspiration for your worldbuilding?

Well, it's a zombie book - I love zombies, in case you can't tell - so the world is an amalgamation of zombie stuff I love. The zombies are based off of the Train to Busan zombies. This is a self-insert mess, so I'm using the town and people I know in the town as location and characters. Little tropes here and there that I love in movies and books alike. It's just a big chimera of stuff that I grab from stuff I remember and shove into it. It definitely needs polish when it's done, but I'm having a blast so far, so I'm'a keep doing it :3

What is your MC trying to achieve, and what are you, the writer, trying to achieve with them? Do you want to inspire others, teach forgiveness, or help the reader grow as a person?

Uhhhhhh this is a tough question. Right now, Aura is trying to make it to Roger's Grocery Mart to save her girlfriend, but most of the time, she's just trying to have a good time in the zombie apocalypse and hopefully not die. She does eventually grow into a character that (mostly) thinks things through and takes other people's situations into account, so I suppose the lesson is "the world doesn't revolve around you - be kind and helpful to others"?

As for what I'm trying to achieve... mostly, to be honest, I just want people to pick up my book and have a good time reading it. I want to write a zombie book because it's my passion and because there aren't enough zombie books out there. I guess I'm trying to inspire others? To show them that you can survive an impossible situation if you work hard and think things through?

How many chapters is your story going to have?

The only time I've written a full-length book (sorry, the only two times, forgot about Zero: ALPHA), it had about twenty-odd chapters. Z:A had...uh...thirty? That was a long time ago and I sadly no longer have that draft. This one is going to go until it's done. Hopefully more than thirty though!

Is it fanfiction or original content? Where do you plan to post it?

Original content! I have no idea where I'm going to post it. I'm torn between Draft2Digital (originally Smashwords) or Substack. Thing is, I'm really bad at marketing and keywords and all that technical stuff that goes into publicizing, so I'm really hesitant to share it at all. I'm the type of person that gets absolutely morally devastated if my own self-inflicted goals aren't met, and I'm not sure if I can handle that kind of crushing heartbreak with this one lol

So yeah. Might publish, might not. Unsure right now.

When did you start writing?

My dad set up a Windows 95 computer for me in his office, his old one, and taught me the basics of using it. I was five, about to turn six. I immediately sat down and wrote a story about unicorns. I've been writing ever since.

I didn't start writing fanfiction until I was thirteen and had just binge-watched Lord of the Rings for the first time. We don't talk about those works. They were awful.

Do you have any words of encouragement for fellow writers of writeblr? What other writers do you follow?

Write it. Oh it's cringe? Who cares? Write it. Oh, it's a rare pair? Write it. You're worried people will hate it? Fuck the haters. Write it. Writing is about having fun. Writing is about pouring your soul onto the page. Writing is about getting those ideas out of your head so they don't drive you insane. It's about reaching that one person that finds your work and loves it. Even if no one reads it - you still accomplished something. You still wrote it. And no one can take that from you.

I have so many writers in my follow list. Uhh. I have no idea how many are still active, so I'm just going to tag who I know and hope for the best lol

@idyllicocean, @keeping-writing-frosty, @bloodtiesnovel, @asher-writes, @kitswrite, @theink-stainedfolk, @karkkidoeswriting, @lavender-gloom, @orphanheirs, @aquixoticwrites, @alinacapellabooks, @marlowethelibrarian, @flock-from-the-void, @dyrewrites, @storycraftcafe, @writer-imagination, @toragay-writing, @inseasofgreen, @stephtuckerauthor, @thatndginger, @finickyfelix, @eternalwritingstudent, @drchenquill, @paeliae-occasionally, @the-golden-comet, @talesofsorrowandofruin, @watermeezer, @goldfinchwrites, @winterandwords, @badscientist, @clairelsonao3, @i-can-even-burn-salad, @leahpardo-pa-potato, @mjparkerwriting, @rowanwriting, @oliolioxenfreewrites, @emelkae, @rita-rae-siller, @rebelxwriter, @kaylinalexanderbooks, @stesierra, @francineiswriting, @sunset-a-story, @chauceryfairytales, @hollyannewrites, @jaydenswaywrites, @captain-kraken, @violets-in-her-arms-writes, @romy-thewriter, @pure-solomon, @writingmaidenwarrior, @koiwrites

go, go follow them. they're all so good and make my timeline glow.

[probablyasocialecologist]

Sourcing food in biotech  factories requires a reorganization of the food system to be highly centralized, arranged into corporate-mediated value chains flowing from industrial processing facilities. To my mind that is exactly the corporate industrial food chain model at the root of so many of our current problems. We don’t want the food system concentrated in the hands of less and bigger corporations. Such a concentrated food system  is unfair,  extractive, easy to monopolize and  very vulnerable to external shocks  - which we are going to see more of in our unfolding century of crisis. Consider which food system is more likely to fall over in the face of climate catastrophe, dictatorship  or cyberattack: - a handful of large electrically dependent food brewers  or a distributed network of millions of small farms and local food relationships  spread across diverse landscapes? Which brings us to Chris’s other central premise in ‘Saying No to a Farm-free Future’ - the one that George does attempt a partial response to. Chris argues that the way to organise food to survive in the face of climate crisis is to withdraw away from the corporate controlled industrial agrifood chain  and attempt instead  to put power back into the distributed local ‘food web’ of small growers, local markets and peasant-type production . This ‘food web’ may sound  ‘backwards’ to modernist global north sensibilities of someone like George but it is what still characterizes much of  the food systems of the global South. It is also better suited to our times of crisis and challenge. Strengthening food webs is not a “one stop” bold  breakthrough. Rather its a distributed social process of ‘muddling through’ together  in diverse and different ways that are at best  agroecological and collective, culturally and ecologically tailored to different geographies. The food web (or ‘agrarian localism’ as Chris terms it) can’t be summed up in one shiny totemic widget. It doesn’t fit  a formulaic  “stop this, go that” campaign binary (“stop eating meet , go plant-based”).   Leaning into the complexities of  local agroecological diverse food webs is maddeningly  unsellable as a soundbite.  George presents agrarian localism as a ‘withdrawal’  but its more in the gesture of “staying with the trouble” - a phrase feminist scholar Donna Harraway so brilliantly coined to dismiss  big, male, over simplistic technocratic solutionists who claim to have the ‘one big answer’ to our global polycrisis. (sound familiar?). Staying with the trouble and leaning into food webs means embracing a messy politics of relationship, nuance, context, complexity and co-learning. It means a single clever journalist sitting in Oxford can’t dream up a cracking saviour formula all by himself in the space of a 2 year book project. . its why (and how) we build movements - to figure this stuff out collectively. So relax - take off the armour - make friends.

[darkmaga-returns]

Monday April 7, 2025 Truth Bomb

Karen Bracken

Globalists, Satanists, and Pedophiles - I had never heard of the guy (Col. Larry Kaifesh) doing this presentation so I looked him up and found him to be legit. He has been referred to as the Constitutional Colonel. Worth taking a listen. 1 hr. 32 min. ARTICLE/VIDEO (the presentation is 60 min. the rest is Q&A)

A review of the $2.2 TRILLION blown in the CARES Act - now where is DOGE on this one?? ARTICLE

British man’s body flown 3,700 miles to ‘deep freeze’ chamber for chance of reawakening - ARTICLE

Planned Parenthood's gift to kids: Sexually graphic coloring books - ARTICLE/VIDEO (4 min.) just remember the earlier people start having sex the more abortion customers for Planned Parenthood…THAT is the REAL reason they exist. Just follow the MONEY.

State Dept. Shuts Down Country’s Entire Visa Program After They Refuse Deportees - Rubio should shut down ALL immigration from ALL countries until every illegal is removed from America. Then we need to scale back the immigration laws to what they once were. LIMITED. Had to have promise of a job and a sponsor and only people with skills to fill American jobs in which there were not enough Americans to fill…..In todays world I can never see a REAL situation in which they could not find an American to fill a job need (aside from seasonal work) or find an American willing to be trained. Immigration was never meant to be an open door to our country. Immigration was meant to benefit America. That is why immigration from the Middle East was banned at one time. It was well known they would not and could not ever assimilate to America culture and assimilation was also a requirement. It was US Senator Ted Kennedy that fought to have that changed and of course he was successful in convincing (?) his fellow Congressmen that people from the Middle East could and would assimilate. That was a lie then and it is a lie today. ARTICLE

Freedom-loving Scotsmen protested the National Museum's Pro-Globalism, Pro-Lockdown, Pro-W.H.O. exhibit - more and more countries are following the US lead to get out of the WHO - they will need 2/3 of the member states in June to vote in favor of the Pandemic Treaty and it is quite possible they will never reach that objective - ARTICLE

How MMR Adverse Events Led to Market Removal in Japan and Change from Mandatory to Elective Childhood Vaccine Schedule - Those that have followed me for years (even before Substack) is well aware that I have repeatedly talked about how the Japanese addressed their extremely high SIDS rate. Understand, healthy babies do not die for no reason. SIDS deaths are deaths with no apparent cause. Well I believe Japan proved that to be false many years ago. Today Japan has one of the lowest infant mortality rates of any industrialized country (while the US doesn’t even make the top 20) and it all started to decline after they made changes to their vaccine agenda. They no longer give the combined MMR shot. So glad someone of importance has finally talked about this. I felt like I have been screaming into the wind for years. What Japan proved is ignored here in the US. Gee, I wonder why??? Ya’ll know why. M O N E Y. ARTICLE

[mitigatedchaos]

"Writing? In 2024?"

Monday, April 29, 2024

(~2,400 words, 12 minutes)

@northshorewave Re: this publishing post:

I've read through the post that was linked, and an earlier related post by the same author that preceded it.

Her position is that the traditional publishing industry is essentially buying books as lottery tickets, paying for most of them using the few big winners they can't predict.

NorthShoreWave - The personal qualities of NSW specifically.

LLMs - Is AI a threat right now? Mostly as spam.

How Many Readers? - One famous book had 3,000 readers on an email list before its Amazon e-book debut, and went on to traditional publishing.

Funding Options - Many authors and artists are currently using subscription services. Some reasoning and numbers are provided.

Illustrations - Should you use illustrations? This lengthy section does a bit of fundamentals analysis of posting to suggest that maybe, you should.

Interaction - Reader replies are one method by which a post will spread.

Search - The people who want to read your story can't read it if they don't know about it. Writing a good book is essential, but only half the battle.

Some thoughts for you:

1 - NorthShoreWave

You implicitly asked if we had discussed your story in detail before, but the answer is that we hadn't. I have a sense of what you're trying to accomplish based on what I've observed of your character. While you think of yourself as seething, I think you're actually wise, compassionate, self-aware, and able to view things from multiple perspectives. A significant number of people are much worse at practicing at least one of these virtues. On its own, that's not enough to write a best-seller, but I think it does provide you with an advantage.

2 - LLMs

Based on my experiments (see @mitigatedai for some logs), I wouldn't worry about competition from AI. For you, the chief issue caused by AI will be spam. AI moves sideways (different text) and downwards (less meaning). I may tell LLMs to "combine Inspector Gadget and Death Note," but...

Do I actually use the information provided? No.

3 - How many readers do you need?

From one of those publishing posts, to get a sense of the number of readers you need...

Andy Weir first published The Martian as a serial for his own blog, then as a self-published novel on Amazon, then as a traditionally published novel with Random House. “I had an email list with about 3,000 people on it, so, initially, the audience was roughly that much,” he tells me. “When I first posted it to Amazon, I didn’t do anything to market or publicize it. All I did was tell my readers it was available there.” The book was on Amazon for five months, at a price point of 99 cents, and he sold 35,000 copies before Random House bought the rights in February of 2014.

Note that being a provocative firebrand doesn't necessarily mean you'll sell copies. Some politicians with tremendous name recognition failed to move copies of their books.

4 - Funding Options

I don't recommend using a Kickstarter to publish your book at this time or in the near future. You just don't have the name recognition, but also, Slashdotter Caimlas (who I don't know, so I don't know how trustworthy he is) wrote:

I'm personal friends with a number of authors who publish books in one of several subgenres. Mostly, they rely on Amazon's Kindle Unlimited: some of them are prolific enough that their book sales account for most of their income, simply based on peoples' reading of their works. Mostly, unless people want a piece of history or something they can reference, folks seem to hate having clutter. Fiction that sells isn't usually, primarily sold as a hardcopy book anymore, I don't believe - short of the kinds of books that end up at the end of the grocery store isle or in an airport novelty store.

A lot of publishing is done online these days, often through subscription services such as Substack (for essays) or Patreon. (Kindle Unlimited is also a subscription service, costing $12/mo.) As an example, the webcomic Spinnerette has a Patreon (bringing down $3.3k/mo), and then runs Kickstarter campaigns for print runs (volume 8 raised $27k).

To give you an estimate, Spinnerette's Patreon has only 536 subscribers, and pulls down $3.3k/mo, but you probably haven't heard of it. El Goonish Shive, which I'm confident you have heard of, brings in $3.6k/mo on 2.4k subscribers. The famous Kill Six Billion Demons has ~5.4k subscribers, bringing down ~$8.4k.

In Patreon terms, a good foothold to try for might be 100 subscribers at $3/mo each, with an initial focus on getting to 50.

5 - Illustrations

You've posted some drawings. They have some character, showing that you have the basic aptitude to develop the skill if you applied yourself to regular practice. However, the proportions are too far off to attract much attention (except as a stylistic choice, which, I can tell, it is not).

This blog tends to break things down into their abstract fundamentals for analysis. I promised myself I wasn't going to do that here, but eh, we'll do just a bit.

To quote one of the publishing articles...

“People tend to buy the books that are already really popular,” Deahl says. “They look at the bestseller list to see what they want to buy and that reinforces this tiny amount of books at the top. It’s a very top-heavy system. The tricky thing in publishing is success begets success. But it’s really hard to create that spark.”

Let's stop to think about this.

a. Banter - Fame

There is one layer to this that you can't do much of anything about, which is that people will watch the same shows their friends watch in order to have something to talk about with their friends.

b. Investment - Background

However, there is another layer over which you have more influence. It's very easy to make a quick judgment of a movie based on its visuals, or a short trailer. It's also relatively easy to judge short songs, since they're only a few minutes long (but I don't find myself doing this often).

In order to judge a book, you have to read the text and process it. You can't make a snap judgment off a single picture, because you have to read the text first to produce the mental picture.

This website does have viral text posts, but they're like...

You seem to have fundamentally misunderstood me, Anon.  Go read all 5,640 posts again.

Some of these posts can get a bit long, but it's usually a back-and-forth where each individual post is short. Often, they'll mix in images, or memes.

People supposedly read at 200 words per minute. Based on that estimate, this blog's most viral post of all time can be read in 5 seconds. That's about the same amount of time someone would spend looking at a jpeg.

That doesn't mean people don't enjoy effortposts. They will follow a blog upon encountering a good effortpost! They just don't like or reblog them.

I think you already know this part, but for "acceptable" length for reblogging, it's usually best to keep it under one "Tumblr page," meaning around one screen length on desktop, or around 200-300 words. I've talked about this part before, but if the reader can see the end of the post, it feels like less of an investment to read the post, and reblogging it won't fill up a friend's Tumblr dash.

Obviously that's tough for long-form fiction, because it has to load more context about the characters in order to establish the stakes. (Unless it's fan fiction, where the audience already knows the characters.)

c. Investment - Strategy

As you know, this blog will sometimes post political cartoons and other illustrations as part of its general stream of content.

The obvious strategy is just to have some nice-looking character images or images of scenes from the story. It can be "read" faster, so it's more shareable.

I think that strategy suffers from a weakness in that it's easy to just look at the image and disregard the text. This would reduce your fiction blog to an art blog - and it is not an art blog.

Therefore, I would like to gently suggest - and keep in mind, I do not have any published novels - a different potential approach. This proposal is speculative, and this technique is not widely used.

Do you know that famous Rockwell painting, Breaking Home Ties? Rockwell is a master of telling a story with just a single still-frame painting.

Rockwell has to tell the whole story in one picture, because that's the medium he's got to work with. This limits how much story he can tell. As an author, you don't have to limit yourself to what can be told in just one image, because you have the text.

This strategy would involve a two-step maneuver.

First, the image at the top of the post communicates the essentials that the reader needs to know about the characters through the composition of the scene (so that they don't need to read background material), as well as various subtle details, while raising questions, also through the use of details/etc, to increase the viewer's curiosity.

Fortunately for the viewer, second, the questions raised by the image are answered in the text right below it.

The post would form an entry point into a network of related posts; tags for particular characters could be linked at the bottom, or links to other posts in the sequence.

Secondary characters would be ideal for this, because you can manipulate their scenarios/context/character to fit the short format, while your overall project will focus on the main characters and thus have a greater, long-term narrative investment for appropriately larger payoff.

As I wrote in my post on 'text wall memes,' people will read text in an image, and they'll even reblog it, but it's contextual. So again, this is speculative, but it should be feasible. It's a matter of creating the appropriate context.

d. Investment - AI Art

I don't think you should use AI-generated art. Yes, people will be able to tell, but the even bigger problem...

Compare this AI knockoff to Norman Rockwell's original Girl with Black Eye.

The expression is wrong. The pose is different. This is a completely different story from the one Rockwell was telling! The prompteur 'borrows' the right 25% of the image from Norman's original because he can't reproduce it. And what is that random white cloth on the left side of the image?

There is a significant reduction in the amount of intention in the image. Putting it back in involves working over the image, repeatedly, usually with inpainting, and often working against what's in the AI's training data, forcing it to pull from more and more improbable parts of the distribution (until eventually, there's no matching data in the training at all; you have to get out and draw it yourself).

I'm going to borrow a post of my own here from 2019.

This isn't oriented towards the strategy I've described, and it only got 21 notes, but note the teacup with steam and tea bag tag, the obscured flag in the background, and the Youtube-style video tracker on the bottom. The combination of the special effect, text that looks like a subtitle, and video tracker imply that the image is a screenshot from a streaming anime.

The character is casually (as indicated by the cup of tea) sitting at a computer desk (as indicated by the faintly sketched keyboard and hand position for a mouse). What's that flag in the background? It certainly doesn't belong to any extant country. (In fact, as the artist, I'll tell you - it's based on an O'Neill Cylinder.)

Obviously this art is very much just a sketch in quality terms. An AI rendering usually looks much fancier. However, an AI would not put that detail in.

e. Investment - Technical Skills

However, I will suggest the use of software if you go this route. (Or the hiring of an artist, but that could get expensive.)

Your issue is with proportions. Lots of people have trouble with proportions. (You also have trouble with hands. Lots of people have trouble with hands.)

One way to deal with this is to just train. You'd be surprised at how fast you improve if you draw from realistic sources such as photographs an hour a day for a year, even if it's just a quick sketch. You probably aren't willing to do so. You have other things to worry about, including writing.

However, you could use posing software. You could save the proportions of several characters and position them throughout the scene, as well as having a grid for the ground and potentially other props to help with positioning of items like lamp posts or the edges of buildings. (I've experimented with posing software a bit myself.)

Dan Shive (of El Goonish Shive) does not use posing software as far as I know, but he has used 3D software. Although his style is cartoonish, one thing people like about him is that he does put effort in at improvement, and the quality of his work has improved substantially. (That was actually the inspiration for the second part of the "in 2028, Hollywood runs out of ideas and adapts El Goonish Shive" post.)

6 - Interaction

Though shorter posts tend to go more viral, I find that posts which someone can reblog and share their opinion tend to show up a lot in my top posts (as long as they're only about one tumblr page long). The MOON PRISON poll is a good example of something that's approachable and neutral, but fits heavily with the themes of my blog, but other posts may take a political position that invites disagreement, resulting in discourse, and get reblogged that way. (You may also remember the silly Swift Pill poll.)

I don't recommend courting disagreement on purpose. Not only is this bad for the social environment, but it tends to make people go crazy.

7 - Search

I think you've probably noticed some of this already and are working with it (posting short excerpts, initial art). Most of this is, again, speculative. This is all just information for your consideration.

Writing a good book is the first problem. Getting the readers who would enjoy the book to find it in such a noisy environment is the second problem. I think you can do it, but if your trajectory isn't currently looking as good as you want (e.g. # followers on your story's sideblog), I would recommend expanding your strategy so that you're in a good position when the book itself is ready to launch.

[inkedwingss]

For the ones joining my new writing-only blog, my baby Substack: I will upload one poem every day for the next 15 days, so expect some e-mails in your inbox! :)

If you have been here for a while, you must know I was in desperate need of a writing-only platform — in fact, if you remember, I even tried a side blog, but that didn't work for me (and the novel is cooking atm). So, for the sake of my peace of mind and my writing, I will upload all the poetry in here to this sparkling, brand-new Substack.

After a few days on that platform, though, I can already tell I'm not going to follow what I perceived to be the pattern. Do I feel like a fish out of the water? Yes. Do I plan to change? No. Is it good for ''marketing''? Nope! But I literally can't force myself into a non-authentic space. It gives me anxiety.

I believe in using the platform instead of letting the platform use me. I'm free. That is unnegotiable. So, I will do my best on my own terms, as many things annoy me about the writing culture of these times we live in and I refuse to wear the halter. Oh, I promise I'll never try to coach you, start mothering you, or try to sell you a "how to write poetry in 5 steps" guide. No hooking titles. I won't join the experts-on-shit FOMO cult to prey on other people's triggers or to feel ''good'' about myself at the expense of others. This type of thing actually creeps me out.

But I do promise we can just resonate and inspire each other by being honest and raw, by having a brave heart so we can keep being kind, and by pursuing truth, beauty and art... How about that? We can enjoy the vibe and cultivate this appreciation of words! We can even chat as writer friends, as reader friends or just as friends friends — and encourage each other through real, second-intention-free presence.

If my writing doesn't touch you, it's fine. If yours doesn't touch me, it's fine. It's not personal, it's not a bad thing. We are all finding our voice. The day you think you know everything, you're dead, so we have to keep searching, moving and growing together! How many times have I needed the words from @cssnder @goodluckclove @hersurvival or @remnantofabrokensoul, and so many others around here (iykyk)? And I'm very grateful for every word and idea you all shared here in this amazing space, helping me to keep going, to break from my shell and lay another brick in the foundations of what I want to create.

That is the beauty of it. Creation demands connection. That is respect and human experience. And I repeat it: sometimes what I create won't touch anyone but me.

Oh, but what if it does!

Well, that being said: I actually do have some crazy ideas for the Substack. At first, the focus was on creating some substantial and self-indulgent content about literature (I like to study). Although I still think that's important, exciting and valid, Poetry is making its way through my inked fingers more and more, demanding space, attention, and voice; so I will not neglect this calling.

What about the future? I don’t know. Paid subscriptions for specific academic literature content? Prophetic, devotional newsletters?Generating debates on books for the community? Just poetry that you can read for free and not engage at all because I can be quite antisocial at times? Digging around some old ancient advice on writing? None of the above? Anything is possible, really. For now, I will slow down and avoid contributing to the hamster wheel of modern despair for the speed of light living and likes.

For now, poetry, please.

And tea. Lots of tea, because it's raining.

The grass looks so green!

[mariacallous]

After years of sitting on the sidelines, content creators became a part of the mainstream political media this year, delivering election news, analysis, and political commentary to their online fans—all while sidestepping the traditional press.

Eighty-one-year-old Joe Biden was serenaded on camera by the delightfully cringe TikTok singer Harry Daniels. Bernie Sanders stumped for Kamala Harris on a Twitch stream cohosted by an anime catboy VTuber. Donald Trump collabed with the quintessential creator brothers, Jake and Logan Paul. Instead of making time for traditional sit-down interviews with the mainstream press, Harris and Trump relied on creators to galvanize votes and spread their campaign messages.

“There’s just no value—with respect to my colleagues in the mainstream press—in a general election to speaking to The New York Times or speaking to The Washington Post, because those [readers] are already with us,” Rob Flaherty, deputy campaign manager for Harris, told Semafor in December.

Influencing has grown into a $250 billion industry. More than 70 percent of Americans between the ages of 18 and 29 say they follow an influencer on social media, a Pew Research survey found last year. A more recent survey, published in November, found that one in five US adults get their news from news influencers. That shift in media consumption was met with record spending on creator partnerships. Priorities USA put at least $1 million toward influencer marketing. The Harris campaign paid at least $2.5 million to management agencies that book creators for political advertising campaigns.

This election, creators were everywhere—the Republican and Democratic conventions, fundraisers, rallies, and even parties at Mar-a-Lago. But the foundations for this creator takeover of political messaging were propped up nearly a decade ago. In 2016, Trump showed how social media platforms like Twitter could influence voters. Throughout the 2020 election, former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg spent more than $300 million on a presidential campaign that recruited influencers and meme pages as paid digital surrogates, and the Biden administration routinely invited creators to the White House for briefings.

By embracing creators, politicians have started blurring the lines between talking heads and journalists. Unlike reporters, news creators are often not beholden to editorial standards and substantial fact-checking—something that is one high-profile defamation lawsuit away from changing but that, for now, marks a difference. Many creators do work similar to what journalists do—absorbing, translating, and communicating news to audiences online. But in the online political ecosystem, many of them come off more as fans than as objective observers. Some are explicitly party activists. Still, they are often provided access similar to what the traditional press gets.

The next step in the influencer political takeover could be lawmakers becoming the creators themselves. The industry has become so fruitful that Republican ex-lawmakers like George Santos and Matt Gaetz turned to the creator economy as part of their post-congressional careers. Santos and Gaetz are setting hefty prices for personal messages on the video platform Cameo.

Elected officials like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Jeff Jackson are also leveraging creator-like tactics in their everyday communications with their constituents and voters. Ocasio-Cortez can often be found answering follower questions on how Congress works or what’s inside a bill on Instagram Live. Jackson authors a regular Substack newsletter discussing his work in the House of Representatives. Ted Cruz has a podcast.

“Your candidate needs to become the creator; they need to find their niche and stick to it,” says Caleb Brock, a senior digital strategist for Democrats. “We need to find our 2028 presidential Hawk Tuah Girl—and I mean that seriously. Whichever candidate steps up and wields their respective, genuine personality into something that continuously pumps out content—content that people want to see, share, and engage with—will win.”

Adopting these tactics could be crucial to winning over young voters, millions of whom enter the electorate every four years. More than 8 million members of Gen Z entered the electorate in 2024, according to Tufts University. This year, 41 million of them were eligible to vote.

The industry hasn’t run up against much friction from the federal government either, despite criticism over its opaque nature. This year, the Federal Election Commission opted against requiring political influencers to disclose when a political group or campaign paid for content on their accounts.

“Because this is such a substantial part now of the information economy and information ecosystem, it’s absolutely vital that there are disclosures,” says Robert Weissman, copresident of the public interest group Public Citizen. “And just as disclosure is a core part of fair advertising law, it's a core part of fair election law too.”

[linkablewritingadvice]

Where can I post or share my writing?

First, figure out why you want to post your writing.

Do you just want to put it somewhere, anywhere, on the internet where people could see it? 

Understand that it is rare for readers to look for books or short stories on random people’s blogs, reddit, or social media. It is unlikely that simply sharing your writing online will lead to much attention to it. You’ll need to do other work to drive traffic to your work and encourage people to read, comment, pay, or whatever else you want them to do.

But if you just need a place to host your work for whatever reason, there are tons of options for creating a blog or personal website where you can post your work - here’s an overview of some of the top platforms. 

Some people like to make a personal subreddit to post their work. I don’t recommend this because reddit is not meant to be a static content hosting site, but if that’s what you want to do, go nuts.

Some people suggest using Archive of Our Own to post original works. This is a violation of their TOS. While a lot of people do post non-fandom writing to that website, I absolutely don’t recommend using that website in ways that its creators have explicitly said that it is not for. 

Do you want to monetize your writing and post it somewhere where people can pay for it?

Understand that it is very difficult to monetize (make money on) writing just by posting it online. But there are websites that let you do that, if you can consistently share quality content that readers want, and do the marketing work to attract paying readers.

Some platforms you can use to try this include Substack, Patreon, or Wattpad.

Always be careful to read the terms or contract of any website you upload your writing to. Some platforms that make big promises about helping you profit off your writing can get you stuck in predatory or scammy situations.

See more about making money on fiction writing here.

Do you want constructive feedback from other writers to help you improve your work?

Simply posting your work anywhere you can find, including various writing forums, will not guarantee you quality - or any - constructive feedback. You’ll need to find a community explicitly for this sort of thing, and you’ll need to make sure you are following that community’s rules.

Always polish your work as best you can and make sure it’s the absolute best you can make it before posting for feedback - that ensures that you get more useful feedback and are not wasting people’s time. 

Remember that spending the time to read someone else’s writing and give them helpful feedback, for free, is not something anyone else is obligated to do, and if they do it, it’s a huge favor! Be respectful of communities you’re posting in and follow all their rules. Give critiques in addition to asking for them. 

Places to share writing for constructive feedback:

Scribophile

Destructive Readers

Writing.com

Critique Circle

However, just posting your work to a general critique forum may not get you quality, in depth, helpful feedback from someone who understands your genre. You’ll be better off cultivating one or two close collaborators and friends who are interested in and excited about your work and can help you out with it. If you do happen to find someone on one of those critique sites who seems to get what you’re doing and what you’re trying to do, consider reaching out to them personally to see if they want to be friends and critique partners.

Here’s my post about how to find “beta readers” or critique partners. 

Do you want help attracting readers with a focus on prestige, attention, and portfolio building?

Instead of posting your work on any website or platform that just lets anyone upload their writing, you can submit your work for publication to an online magazine. This means anyone who reads or subscribes to that magazine can find your work, and you get a “publication credit.”

(This really only applies to short work like short stories, poems, or essays - for information about publishing a novel, see here.)

You’ll want to find a magazine or publication that takes writing in the same style, length, and topic that you’re trying to publish. Their website will have instructions for how to submit to them for consideration.

Advice on submitting to lit mags and other magazines:

How To Submit To Literary Journals

Submitting To Literary Magazines

How To Submit To A Magazine

Platforms to search for a place to submit:

Duotrope

Poets & Writers

Submission Grinder

Driftwood

[mehmetyildizmelbourne-blog]

How Substack Writers Can Leverage Reedsy to Become Published Authors

And How They Scale Their Publishing Business with Global Collaboration Dear Subscribers, Earlier today, our chief editor Dr Mehmet Yildiz published Chapter 18 of his best-selling book Substack Mastery for free for our community. His goal is, while educating our community, to obtain feedback from beta readers to improve the quality of this exceptional book for next versions and make it a…

[laikaflash]

Writers never /needed/ AI before so they dont /need/ it now either.

That said though, I think there are still ethical ways to use it that dont necessarily constitute as pawning off creative work. For example, would you find it wrong if someone fed a sentence or two that they wrote into an AI in order to figure out how to make their writing more concise? Or what about if you can't find the right word to use so you give an AI a definition with the expectation that it gives you a list of words that might fit what you are looking for? Or would you say that AI has no place in writing at all? /gen

Well, there is a difference between using Grammarly to fix sentences and feeding prompts to ChatGPT and coasting from there. I'm aware that GrammarlyGO is powered by GPT-3, but I think any sort of proofreading software should be benign in of itself. I'm not going to pretend I completely understand LLMs, but I'm willing to listen. The hype over generative AI as a whole still leaves a bad taste in my mouth, though.

The latter is how Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing got flooded by Tim Boucher and others who pounced on the trend the first chance they got. What bothers me about that is the hustle culture around it. (ETA: To Boucher's credit, he does make some good points in this interview about responsible AI use. He was definitely caught up in the hype last year, let me put it that way.) I'll let this passage from Robert Evans' Substack article sum things up:

The main barrier in terms of both production time and profitability was the ghostwriting. A human being can only write so fast, even if they’re just re-wording a Wikipedia article. ChatGPT and other large language models provide an incredible opportunity for these hustlers to increase their output. There’s only one problem: getting ChatGPT to write an entire proper novel (50k+ words) is basically impossible right now. That’s why all of Tim Boucher’s books were just a couple thousand words long.

Yes, hustle culture is nothing new; this method is a relatively new one. At the end of the day, all those people did was scramble to make money with the latest thing. Said latest thing happens to be a tool that makes it easier to saturate the market for however long the hype lasts. That is cynical bullshit at its core.

That sure got away from me... I just wanted to be clear on where my misgivings are. My issue isn't so much with the tools themselves than it is with the environment they're being used in. I've said something along those lines before and I think the sentiment is worth repeating.

[marlowe1-blog]

Book Review: Lost Souls by Poppy Z Brite

Still the most disturbing vampire novel

Recently Billy Martin, aka Poppy Z Brite, announced that he was back to writing. He sold a short story to a friend's anthology and he was writing another one. This was met with a great deal of excitement. For Generation X, Billy was the greatest. Then a few days later, dispirited and depressed, Billy wrote on his Patreon that he was no longer writing. He wrote a story for another editor and that editor rejected the story.

On Facebook, the outpouring of love and support for Billy was amazing. Billy has been through a lot and around Hurricane Katrina, he gave up on writing. HIs restaurant books were not selling and his publisher was demanding more horror. He was depressed from a great deal including gender dysmorphia (he still presented as female at the time) and eating disorders.

The support was either "We REALLY want to see you writing again, because you inspired us" or "take care of your mental health first".

Writing is a tough gig. It's hard to make money at it. It's hard to believe in yourself. It's almost impossible to sustain that belief over the years. The doubts set in. The rejections pile up. The occasional acceptance can feel false. Like ok, this editor is saying that my story is great and wants to pay me money. What's wrong with them? Most writers build up calluses, stop putting their self-worth in the next acceptance, struggle with the feelings that they suck. We read old stories that we thought brilliant and wince with embarrassment, but also take pride in how far we've come.

Billy didn't benefit from these experiences. He was an overnight sensation. Yes, he wrote a lot of garbage as a teenager like we all do and he had some disappointments and rejections, but he sold his stories to a zine when he was young and then when there were enough stories, got a collection published. Harlan Ellison read those stories and got very excited. So did Dan Simmons.

Then came Lost Souls. Billy was in his early 20s when he wrote this book. Most writers are writing trunk stories and embarrassing manuscripts at that time. Billy wrote the nastiest vampire book of its time, inspiring horror writers - especially splatterpunk and extreme horror writers - ever since.

Unfortunately for modern readers who might love to see anything new from Billy, Billy had to deal with all the self-doubt and struggles afterwards. On Livejournal, I criticized a media tie-in book he wrote for the Crow series and he was pissed. We both apologized for the incident (or at very least the nasty feelings from the incident) years later and we're friends now - well online friends - but it was very confusing at the time.

I was a nobody. I mean I'm still a nobody with a few books published through Dybbuk Press and some stories in anthologies. But back then I was even more of a nobody. I had maybe Teddy Bear Cannibal Massacre published and as far as my stories were concerned, I had sold a few of them and made maybe $20 total. That's $20 spread out over 4-5 markets.

So why was anything I said getting under the skin of the guy who wrote Lost Souls?

T-Nightingale at Devientart

When I revise this for Substack, the above is going to be seriously edited down.

Anyhow, Lost Souls came at a strange time. Anne Rice had written two amazing vampire books, one pretty good vampire book that got real dumb in the last third (Seriously Queen of the Damned has a woman thousands of years old deciding to create world peace by killing all the men? REALLY? That bullshit wouldn't fly in an Introduction to Women's Studies class). Francis Ford Coppola turned Dracula into a comedy. Vampires were more popular than ever, but defanged.

When Molochi, Twig and Zillah come to the French Quarter looking for absinthe and fucks they are fucking intense. Christian, the bartender and the one vampire that might walk through an Anne Rice novel, doesn't like these vampires, but they are fellow vampires. What are you going to do.

Within a few pages, the vampires are revealing their identity to a vampire groupy and Zillah is fucking her in the backroom. Mardis Gras is over and that girl is doomed.

Because in the world of Poppy Z Brite, vampires aren't made by other vampires. You don't become a vampire by drinking vampire blood. You don't kiss your new master and then sink your teeth into his new cut. No. Vampires are born.

Vampires are born by eating their way out of their mothers.

Later on Christian fucks a goth boy who wants to become a vampire. Christian drains him and feels bad about it, but it's not Christian's fault if the normies don't understand vampires.

This scene sets the tone for a book that has zero chill. Nothing, the sad goth boy (and vampire who doesn't realize that he's a vampire) would be a parody of teen angst in another book. Then there's Steve and Ghost, semi-adult band members who have a tangled history and a lot of heartbreak between them. They run the band that gives the book its name but they are also messy characters. Steve is borderline abusive to his girlfriend while Ghost protects Steve.

They are the nicest characters

Nothing is a big fan.

An aside: the writing style is fucking poetry. Seriously check this out

The, last dying days of summer, fall coming on fast. A cold night, the first of the season, a change from the usual bland Maryland climate. COLD, thought the boy; his mind felt numb. The trees he could see through his bedroom window were tall charcoal sticks, shivering, afraid of the wind or only trying to stand against it. Every tree was alone out there. The animals were alone, each in its hole, its thin fur, and anything that got hit on the road tonight would die alone. Before morning, he thought, its blood would freeze in the cracks of the asphalt.

That was later an issue with Billy's writing as Billy did not like editors telling him to change his sentences.

Ok. More tomorrow. I need to actually talk about the book itself past the prologue, but I also have a paper to finish (800 more words to go) and I need to wake up early tomorrow for jury duty.

Fuck Jury Duty.

[abruptlymystic]

channeling my fumbles with trying to be ✨commercially viable ✨ into a potentially useful information

I made a post? Article? on substack about my first month on kindle vella, the highlights are;

Gee it sure would be nice if this worked out for serial fiction

I have seen people launch their indie author careers with kindle vella bonus money and that would be pretty great if I can get it to work out

I'd like to be more disciplined anyway, experiments fun

I made $9 between bonus money and royalties in my first full month of 'trying'

I wasn't able to hustle the way some people who see greater success are able, I am still unable to work out a consistent posting schedule due to Life™.

In May I made absolutely nothing, as I was unable to get a new chapter up pretty much at all or participate in facebook promo games (maybe my seething hatred for them gets its own post later...)

June I was able to post a couple chapters and participated in a few more promo games... I made $5

July is not going to plan once again but I have gotten a chapter up, made a chapter trailer about it, and here's hoping everything settles enough that I'll be posting more chapters this last week of July.

Currently, I feel extremely doubtful even if I do get myself on a schedule it would fix anything. I haven't tried hard enough with chapter trailers to make a definitive judgement; They work for my RoyalRoad series, but that's 100% free. The name of the big bonus game seems to be promo games on facebook and I hate that so much. Maybe people find actual, loyal readers that way, but I have yet to. I also am uninterested in spending so much on coins or reading things I don't actually care about just to hit quota. IF anyone even reads, I have a suspicion most just unlock and move on.

Also beginning to doubt this series' ability to earn enough to put back into things like buying ISBNs, hiring a cover artist who isn't me, editors, formatting, paying for things like bookfunnel... At least, it doesn't seem like it'll be happening through kindle vella.

I'm not allowing myself to quit until I have finished this book (In The Hollows of the Wilderbog if anyone is so inclined) or felt like I've given vella a fair shake (consistent posting, better marketing, etc) but it's a little disheartening how hard you have to work to find readers on the platform.

that's it, that's my report, hopefully maybe it helps somebody else gauge if they'd like to try with the platform or nah, idk.

[how-to-make-money-in-2025]

How to Make Money in 2025: Smart Strategies for Financial Growth

Making money in 2025 is all about adapting to the latest trends, leveraging technology, and building multiple streams of income. Whether you're looking for a side hustle, a full-time business, or passive income, there are endless opportunities to capitalize on. Here are some of the smartest ways to make money in 2025.

1. Build a Personal Brand and Monetize It

In today’s digital world, personal branding is a powerful tool for making money. Whether you’re an expert in a field, a content creator, or a niche influencer, you can turn your reputation into income.

Ways to Monetize a Personal Brand:

Sell digital products like courses, e-books, or templates.

Offer coaching or consulting services.

Launch a membership community or subscription service.

Partner with brands for sponsorships and collaborations.

2. Master AI-Powered Side Hustles

AI is changing the way we work, and those who use it wisely can create new revenue streams. Many businesses are searching for AI-powered solutions to streamline their processes, and you can provide them.

Profitable AI Side Hustles:

AI-powered content creation (writing, graphics, and video editing).

AI automation services for businesses.

Selling AI-generated assets (logos, stock images, voiceovers).

Creating and selling chatbots for customer service.

3. High-Ticket Service-Based Business

Instead of chasing small sales, focus on offering high-value services that generate large payouts. In 2025, many professionals are turning to service-based businesses that cater to high-paying clients.

Examples of High-Ticket Services:

Business consulting and coaching.

Premium web design and branding services.

AI integration consulting.

Luxury travel planning or concierge services.

If you have expertise in a field, positioning yourself as a premium service provider can lead to big earnings.

4. Monetize Your Knowledge with Online Courses

E-learning is bigger than ever, and people are willing to pay for high-quality educational content. If you have expertise in any subject, you can create and sell an online course.

How to Get Started:

Identify a topic people want to learn about.

Create a course using platforms like Teachable, Udemy, or Kajabi.

Use social media marketing to attract students.

Offer upsells like coaching or exclusive group memberships.

5. Become a Paid Community Builder

More people are moving away from traditional social media and looking for niche communities. If you can create a valuable online space, people will pay to be part of it.

How to Monetize a Community:

Start a paid Discord or Telegram group.

Launch a Patreon or Substack with premium content.

Build a private membership site with exclusive benefits.

Organize mastermind groups or virtual events.

6. Invest in Digital Real Estate

While traditional real estate remains lucrative, digital real estate is becoming a major player in wealth-building. This includes domains, websites, and virtual assets.

Best Digital Real Estate Investments:

Buy and flip domain names.

Invest in revenue-generating websites.

Purchase virtual real estate in the metaverse.

Build and sell authority blogs or niche websites.

7. Create a Subscription-Based Business

Subscription models create predictable income by charging customers on a recurring basis. This can be applied to both digital and physical products.

Subscription Business Ideas:

Exclusive content memberships (newsletters, premium blogs).

Subscription boxes (beauty, fitness, lifestyle).

Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions.

Private community memberships.

8. Leverage the Power of Micro-SaaS

Micro-SaaS is a small, highly specialized software solution that caters to niche audiences. Unlike massive software companies, Micro-SaaS businesses can be launched by a single person or a small team.

How to Start a Micro-SaaS Business:

Identify a niche problem that software can solve.

Use AI tools or hire developers to create a simple software solution.

Offer a monthly subscription for access.

Scale by adding features based on customer feedback.

9. Invest in Alternative Assets

Wealth-building in 2025 isn’t just about stocks and crypto. Alternative assets offer new ways to diversify and grow your money.

Top Alternative Investments:

Fractional real estate investing.

High-value collectibles (watches, rare sneakers, digital art).

Peer-to-peer lending.

Farmland investing.

[cleverhottubmiracle]

HAPPY 2025!! I can’t believe I am writing those words. Last year flew by, and to be honest, I was glad to slam the book closed on 2024. It was such a challenging year for me personally and I am looking forward to all the milestones 2025 will bring. Atlantic-Pacific turns 15. I turn 40. And, I celebrate a big wedding anniversary! I am hoping ’25 will be much more kind than ’24. I thought I would kick off the year with an updated Q&A. Every few months on Atlantic-Pacific I like to round up some new (and a few recurring) questions that I receive via comments, emails, and DMs. So today I am answering some of your most recently asked questions! You can also see older Q&A posts here, here, here, and here as well as visit many of my FAQ posts below. If I didn’t answer your question this time, please reach out and I will try my best to get to it! How do you achieve your low bun hair? See my tutorial here. What is your everyday make-up routine? See it here. How did you start Atlantic-Pacific? Read about it here. How and when did you get into the fashion industry? You can read all about that here. Q: Where do you see the influencer space heading? A: The influencers space is more nuanced than ever. Where we used to see HUGE OVERT trends in the space, I think the growth in diverse platforms and the overall number of influncers means we are seeing the rise of micro communities. Influencing will continue to grow due to more and more people of all ages turning to different platforms for advice, education, and inspiration. Now that there are creators covering any and all topics, and there are so many platforms to deliver information, the influencer space continues to grow and find new ways to reach people. In the beginning traditional blogs were king, then YouTube exploded, then Instagram took over. Now you can look out and find so many different platforms to be successful on and through different types of content. The diversity of platforms allows creators to focus on the content they love and how they choose to deliver – writers on Substack, comedy on TikTok, educational videos on YouTube, controversial conversations on podcasts, etc. Marketing dollars continue to flow to the influencer world because time and time again many influencers can prove their ROI better than traditional marketing. We have seen year over year increases in digital marketing spend in every sector and I don’t think that is going to change. Overall the space will continue to grow and thrive, but now it is much less about being the ‘biggest’ or following a trend and more about micro influence. It is about building communities and having more specific interests to attract a very like minded audience that is highly engaged. And thanks to the growth of different platforms to reach this audience you can do this in different ways and how it feels most authentic to you. One trend I do hope to see is the influencer space more widely embracing privacy, especially for children and non consenting individuals (people in the background of videos, being included in content without permission). Next to time I think one of the most valuable things in our lives is privacy. I think authenticity and sharing is still important, and I am not trying to call any one influencer or type of influencer out, I just hope we can all embrace being safe and protecting our peace in what can be a dangerous online world. Q: Any collabs in 2025 or co-branded product? A: This comes up every year, and always makes me feel so grateful that so many of you enjoyed my past collabs and may be looking forward to more. At the moment, the answer is no. I took a very intentional pause in 2024 and am open to possibilities moving forward. I am having conversations, but nothing is set in stone at the moment. For me a product collaboration is my ultimate stamp of approval. It needs to be the right brand fit, the right price point, and the brand has to have the team/bandwidth to execute new quality designs that can be delivered on time with great customer service. I prefer not to partner with brands that have done multiple collaborations in the past and careful with brands that are too green or with little experience. It is all a delicate dance and after many successful, beautiful collaborations that I am so proud of, I will only commit to the perfect fit moving forward. Q: Ins and Outs for 2025? A: Sometimes I hate year end trends, but this year I loved reading so many intentions for 2025 with what is ‘in’ and what is ‘out’. I do set goals, but they are typically quarterly, and usually professionally grounded. That being said, I’ll take a stab at my ‘Ins and Outs’ for 2025 below: IN: secondhand shopping, monthly purges, taking up a new active hobby, shutting down negativity, learning to cook new dishes, handwritten notes, recognizing rest is important and being unproductive at times is okay and not lazy, and consistency over controlled perfection. OUT: doomscrolling, obsessing over the weather in hurricane season (this is joke but also not a joke), too much mindless Amazon spending, being impatient with Penny when she is having an anxious day, sending the reply (text or email) ASAP vs. ruminating, creating a more concrete working schedule. Q: How often do you clean out your closet? How do you decide what to keep vs. get rid of? What do you do with your old clothes? A: Okay, this is always my most asked question. I’ve decided to do a BIG, BIG post on this topic and it will go live later this week! Q: Cute professional work attire? Lightweight clothes for a trip to India? Do you offer personal styling services? A: One thing I have tried to embrace over the years is that I can’t be everything to everyone and I need to stay in my lane. I love fashion and sometimes will dip my toe in beauty and lifestyle where is makes sense. I don’t like doling out advice or giving product recommendations if I am not confident in them. I haven’t worked in a true professional environment in over five years and even then it was more of a ‘wear whatever you want’ office. I have never been to India (would love to go) and wouldn’t want to give recommendations as I am not well versed enough in the climate or culture to provide sound advice. I LOVE dressing myself, but dressing others is a whole different type of art. I have so much respect for stylists, but I am not one! I love answering your questions but always want to honest about where I can truly add value. This hopefully keeps you coming back and trusting me. Q: What is a trend you used to love you find yourself no longer reaching for? What is a trend you are looking forward to in 2025? A: I have a hard time answering questions about letting go of something because I never want to offend anyone. Trends ebb and flow, but know if you love something, WEAR it. For me personally, I am not reaching for overt western boots, headbands, or oversized tunics as much as I used to. This is not at all to claim they are ‘out’, I just find myself gravitating towards different items in my closet! As for 2025, I am most looking forward to sheer materials and the return of more romantic/feminine dressing. I am also not hating the trend of styles becoming more voluminous and baggy. I think when done in a more sophisticated way, mixing and matching volume can be so fun and beautiful. ITEM SPECIFIC QUESTIONS: Q: Where did you get your silver Adidas? A: I bought mine on Nordstrom, but sadly they are sold out. They are still in stock here and here! Q: Best understated luxury bag that won’t break the bank? A: For me that would be the Savette pochette. They are well made, timeless, and I personally love a top handle design. I have the bag in three colors now! Q: Favorite item you bought this year? A: This Oscar De La Rent runway skirt that is SO fab. Almost all my favorite purchases this year were second hand! Q: Favorite outfit of 2025? A: It would probably be this outfit or this one. I think having style means to have a common thread in how you dress but also to be ever evolving. These two outfits feel like a grown up version of 2012 Blair – and I love that! Q: How to create your own personal style and a unique closet? A: I actually did a whole post on that here. It can be frustrating while you are experimenting and figuring out what works for you and makes you feel great. My biggest piece of advice is to take it slow and not invest in anything until you feel you have really nailed what you feel is your unique style expression. Q: Can you do more styling posts? A: In 2024 I did a lot of styling posts and you can see a few examples here, here, and here. I have vowed to do more in 2025! On my list are how to style the button down, loafers, a simple bodysuit, and more. If you have any specific requests DM or email me! The post THE FIRST Q&A OF 2025! appeared first on Atlantic-Pacific. Source link