Online Writing Club Show

Today’s podcast guest is my long-term online friend and Online Writing Club member Yana G.Y. , and she has done what most newsletter writers only dream about.

She built a business of more than 1,000 paying subscribers on the side of a demanding full-time job at a bank!

Yana didn’t wait for the perfect moment.

She didn’t quit her job.

She didn’t go viral on social media.

She simply built a system and kept showing up.

And she just earned her orange Bestseller badge, which we want to celebrate in today’s podcast episode.

Please keep in mind: some keep telling me:” Kristina, it’s one of the toughest years for online writers and entrepreneus.” However, money is still moving, and the dollars are rolling in the Substack accounts of people who have decided to talk about it, ask for it and expect it.

Oh and we’ve got a surprise for you to really take ACTION and hit your 2026 goals together!

Want to make money with your Substack?

Only 3 days left to grab your seat for $47

We’re hosting a masterclass together on Friday, October 9.

Come learn how she did it, my tips and insights, and how you can get paid to be you.

It’s a no-brainer.

For only $47 you can join our exclusive circle!

Money is everywhere. It’s not scarce, even when it feels like it.

Who’s Yana G.Y.?

Why should I care, Kristina?, you ask.

Yana has spent 15+ years in telecom and banking, building subscription products that bring in billions in annual recurring revenue. Today she’s a director at a bank and she writes Yana G.Y.

She took everything she knows about subscriptions at work and applied it to her newsletter.

In about two years:

* 20,000+ subscribers

* 1,000+ paid members and the orange Bestseller badge

* $50K+ in annual recurring revenue, from paid subscriptions alone

* Her first $30,000 month this August

* All in about 2 hours a day, next to her 9-to-5

So how did she do it?

Here are the five things Yana is doing that you can steal for your own Substack and hopefully stop you from telling me:

* I don’t have a clue what to offer paid subscribers.

* People won’t pay that amount of money.

* I’ll wait until I’ll feel ready to go paid.

* Who am I to charge that much?

* Money isn’t everything.

Let’s hear from Yana now who was dreaming of doing something like this for a looooooooooooooong time:

1. She treats her newsletter like a product

Yana runs Unplugged like the subscription products she builds at work: a clear offer, a value ladder, and numbers she actually tracks.

And that’s exactly what the most successful newsletters do. They give their publication one clear focus from day #1.

2. She lets automations do the selling

About half of Yana’s paid subscribers come in through automations. Often while she’s sitting in meetings at her day job.

Instead of pitching every single day, she built systems that turn free readers into paying members in the background. It’s a proven play: one large newsletter brought in more than 311,000 subscribers through lead magnet automation alone.

3. She grows without other social media channels

Yes, you read that right. Yana doesn’t post all day. She grows with data, automations, and paid ads to Substack.

And honestly? That’s a smart bet right now. 68% of Google searches now end without a click. AI tools read your work but send back only a tiny fraction of visitors. The email list is the one audience no algorithm can take away from you.

Want to earn money on Substack with paid subscriptions and beyond?

Yana and I invite you to join our Monetization Masterclass on Friday, October 9. She’ll show her automations and ads live on screen.

Join the fun!

It’s a no-brainer.

For only $47 you can join and we’ll share ALL our insights!

4. She runs focused launch campaigns

In August, Yana ran one campaign that added 202 paid subscribers in 19 days. That’s the launch that got her the orange badge. Learn more on the podcast and our LIVE masterclass on Friday.

5. She built it on the side of a full-time job

The secret is having a system in place that’s soooooooooo Yana.

Newsletters actually get stronger over time: median open rates are about 40%. So if your numbers feel flat right now, that’s normal. Most people quit right before it starts working.

Join our Monetization Masterclass this Friday

On Friday, October 9, Yana and I open up our two Substack businesses, live on Zoom. What we sell, how we package it, how we launch, and the real numbers on screen.

* When: Friday, October 9, 11am New York / 5pm Berlin / 6pm Sofia

* What: 60 minutes inside our backends, plus 30 minutes of live Q&A

* Can’t make it live? The recording and slides are included

* Price: Only $47 for your live seat (it goes up to $97 after October 15)

Overthinking money is basically the whole problem we’re here to fix.

Now we want to hear from you

* Have you ever thought “I don’t have time to build a paid newsletter”?

* What would change if you only had two hours a day?

* Which of Yana’s five moves are you trying first?

* Any Qs for the LIVE masterclass on Friday?

GET A FEATURED SPOTLIGHT IN A NOTE

BONUS ⭐⭐⭐Join the Masterclass on Friday, tell us in the comments and I’m happy to feature you in a standalone note to my about 40,000 followers.⭐⭐⭐

▶️ Prefer to listen? Hit Listen. This conversation is worth your ears.

Here’s the thing about doubters: sometimes they live in your own family.

When today’s podcast guest Jen Chapin started posting videos about what she packed her kids for lunch and what she bought at the grocery store, someone in her family told her nobody would ever watch videos about groceries.

Nobody.

Then Jen set up her camera, filmed what she was already doing anyway, recorded a voiceover… and that video crossed one million views.

“And they were obviously very wrong about that.”

I love this sentence so much because every single one of us has heard some version of “nobody is going to read that.” Nobody is going to buy that. Nobody cares.

Jen is the living proof that somebody always cares. You just have to keep showing up long enough for them to find you.

Want to make money with your Substack?

4 days left to grab your seat for $47

Long-term Online Writing Club member Yana G.Y. . just earned her orange badge. That means 1,000 (!) paid subscribers, and counting.

We’re hosting a masterclass together on Friday, October 9.

Come learn how she did it, my tips and insights, and how you can get paid to be you.

https://monetization.yana-g-y.com/

It’s a no-brainer. For only $47 you can join our exclusive circle!

Who’s Jen Chapin?

Why should I care, Kristina?, you ask.

Jen is a nurse. For 20 years. She lives in a small town in the Midwest, she’s married, and she has two teenagers, 14 and 17. And she has always worked full-time.

Around 2017/2018 she saw a gap on YouTube: there were barely any full-time working moms making home and cooking content. So she thought: well, I’ll just create it myself.

Since then:

* 140,000 subscribers on YouTube

* 1,000 videos, all pre-recorded and edited

* A cookbook, The Essential Pantry Cookbook

* A physical meal planner she makes herself in her office (with her printer and binder plus laminating machine, “because I am crazy. And I say I'm good crazy”)

* And… $1 million made on YouTube

That’s how this whole conversation started. A few weeks back, on Notes, Jen casually mentioned the million. ONE MILLION. And her reaction?

“It’s funny because it sounds impressive. But then when you divide it by like seven or eight years, it’s actually not that impressive.”

And now she’s here on Substack with the Dinner Done Club.

Why, if YouTube works so well? Because YouTube never felt like a community. Even YouTube memberships felt like a one-way conversation: people watching extra videos. Jen wanted a place to talk back and forth, and she always had this dream of a membership with budget meal plans.

Want to earn money on Substack with paid subscriptions and beyond?

Yana and I invite you to join our Monetizazion Masterclass on Friday, October 9. Join the fun!

It’s a no-brainer. For only $47 you can join!

“Nobody will see your first 20 videos anyway”

Jen said something that might take so much pressure off you:

“I don’t know that there’s one successful YouTuber that I’ve met that wasn’t afraid to start filming themselves.”

Her golf comparison: you don’t go golfing once, play badly, get mad and never touch a club again. But that’s exactly what we do with YouTube and social media. Jen’s reality check: nobody will probably see your first 15 to 20 videos anyway. The algorithm needs time to learn what you’re about and who to send you to.

💡 TIP: Nervous on camera? Jen started by filming her cooking and adding a voiceover afterwards. And if you teach classes or give presentations at work… “you already know how to talk on video. You just don’t know it yet.”

What a 20-minute video really costs

“YouTube is very misleading. You see a 20-minute video on YouTube, right? And it probably took six to seven hours of total work to create that content.”

Here’s Jen’s workflow:

* Pick a theme. Cooking for two for X dollars. Five family dinners for less than $100.

* Plan the grocery list around prices so she stays on budget.

* Shop. In-store or delivery. People love the in-store videos, but Jen films discreetly, never other people, no spectacle.

* Film over five to seven days, often dinners she’s cooking for her family anyway.

* Edit for two to three hours, faster now with AI tools.

Let’s talk money: where the $1 million came from

I asked Jen straight out how the million splits. Her answer: roughly 50/50, maybe 60% sponsorships, 40% ad revenue.

Why are her AdSense rates so high? Her audience is 92% women over 45. Advertisers love that audience: women make a lot of the financial decisions at home, and people over 45 tend to have more money to spend.

💡 TIP: Your niche matters for ad revenue. But so does who is watching. Know your demographics.

“I don’t work for free”

A few weeks ago, someone left an angry comment because Jen had Amazon affiliate links in her video description for a salad spinner.

Her reply:

“I don’t work for free, and I don’t think any woman should work for free. And I think women especially, people feel entitled to our free labor, and I reject that.”

140k subscribers doesn’t mean easy mode on Substack

If you’re thinking “oh, Jen has a huge audience, Substack must be a walk in the park for her”… nope.

“It’s not a guarantee that all of my subscribers are going to come with me.”

Translating a video-first audience into readers is hard. Platform intent matters: people on YouTube want to watch, people on Pinterest want to scroll. She still has to show the value and invite people over. Yes, she has an unfair advantage but she earned it with years of sweat.

At the time of our live, Jen was at 54 paid subscribers, aiming for the Bestseller badge (100 paid).

The gap she’s walking into

The category Food & Drink on Substack is full of beautiful, gourmet, Hamptons-summer energy. Jen is very much not that, and proud of it.

“I live in a small town and I have limited access to, you know, fancier ingredients. And I think there is a lot of us like that in America.”

Normal family home cooking, on a budget. She’s also collaborating already on Substack and on YouTube.

And lives? Not really her thing. Live cooking has too much natural downtime, and her AdSense rates make YouTube the smarter home for her videos. Her Substack is for the community and the paywall.

Want to film your first video today? Start here

I asked Jen: smartphone in hand, some daylight, a few notes (she doesn’t use scripts, they make her sound robotic, just bullet points). Where do I start?

* Research what already works. Which videos in your niche get views? Which titles and thumbnails?

* Check AnswerThePublic by Neil Patel to see what people actually search for in your niche. (We used it back at Edelman, too. Highly recommend.)

* Film one practice video. Edit it. Tell yourself you don’t even have to post it. Hearing your own voice and seeing your face is uncomfortable at first. You get desensitized.

* Package it as a solution. YouTube is search-based. Title and thumbnail should tell people exactly which problem you solve.

* Be consistent and authentic. Upload on a steady cadence. Be yourself. Solve your viewers’ problems.

“Everybody that starts on YouTube starts with zero subscribers. So we all start from the same place.”

On Friday in our Live Meetup we talked about going live on Substack and the Substack Recordgin Studio for on-demand videos.

If you missed the lives, you find the recordings in the Trainings section in the video vault for paid members,

Now I want to hear from you

* Have you ever been told “nobody will watch/read that”? What happened next?

* Video, writing, both? How are you building your flywheel?

Oh, and if you’re feeling extra loving, I would be really grateful if you left me a review over on Spotify or Apple.

Indies, share this with a mom, a nurse, or anyone who’s been told their idea is “boring.” Every like and restack ♻️ helps our ideas travel farther and keeps the light on in this lovely little corner of culture on the internet streets.

Grab your ticket for $47 only to join this week’s masterclass with orange badge bestseller Yana!

We’re both doing Substack part-time. We’re both earning a good amount of money $ with Substack per month and year.

We want to show you how you can do it too as we were also in your shoes.

Going live on Substack is the fastest way for readers to really get to know you.

On a Live they hear your voice, see your smile, and ask you questions in real time. And you don’t need a studio, a shiny mic, or any tech skills or headaches.

Most of us never press the button because we think it’s complicated but it’s not.

At my very first Live, I expected nobody. More than 80 people joined. When Ayodeji’s Substack and I went live last week, 29 people were already in the room after only a few seconds.

Here’s your step-by-step guide, from “I’m nervous” to “I did it, Kristina”

* Before: the setup takes 2 minutes

* During: the first two minutes and the chat

* After: Substack does the editing for you

In our weekly Live I showed you livestreaming, click by click:

* where Live video is in your dashboard

* the only requirement you need to go live

* why your Wi-Fi matters more than your mic or camera

* how to pick the audience: everyone, all subscribers, or paid only

* why you should schedule your Live so people get an RSVP

* how to invite a co-host, even if they’re not on Substack yet

* the 15-minute rule and the 2-minute rule

* what to do with your recording, thumbnail, and clips afterwards

Invest in yourself! Join the Club + Substack for Beginners Group

This week: FRIDAY, 2 pm Berlin · 1 pm UK · 8 am ET · 5 am PT

Topic: Substack’s NEW Recording Studio

We’ll cover:

* where to find the NEW Recording Studio

* how to get into the studio and record yourself

* how to invite a guest and co-host a show

* how to share your screen

* how to add your branding to the recording

* how to do voice-overs

* how to go “faceless” if you’d rather not be on camera

* how to promote your recording

* how to share clips and create a video post

* 3 modes to pick from

* tips and tricks from my recordings

* how to monetize on-demand videos

BONUS: Frankfurt Book Fair BTS, booth parties, meeting Substackers, Substack insiders and more

Grab your FRANKFURT BOOK FAIR offer!

* Link behind the paywall, in the comments and in the paid chat.

Please upgrade via your computer!

* Need 1:1 support, just upgrade to Founding member (BEYOND member) or book a session here.

Can’t make it live? Come anyway. Every session is recorded.

🔗 Grab the Zoom link below the paywall 👇🏻

🥳🥳We’re celebrating! 🥳🥳

Online Writing Club member Yana G.Y. just crossed 1,000 paid subscribers and got the Orange Badge on Substack.

What I love is does all of this entirely on the side of a full-time job as an international business development director at a bank.

In our conversation Yana is fully transparent about moolah. She shared her screen and let the curtain fall for us. Stop guessing what a $50K+ publication looks like from the inside. Get to see:

* real screenshots,

* all numbers,

* her welcome page,

* subscribe page,

* About page,

* targeted campaigns and emails,

* ads,

* full email funnel,

* monthly cash flow flywheel

* you name it!

She told me:

“I’ve never showed this before.”

Thank you, Yana, for this transparency and for inspiring so many it’s doable to build an audience around the topic you love and make money.

As online writers we do a lot of unpaid labour. Don’t apologize for wanting more and asking for money. That’s what Substack was built for: to build a writing business that sustains you.

On Friday I talked with a Substack insider and he told me Substack will change even more in a direction where YOU can get paid to be you.

Now learn the full tank of profit-boosting tweaks to power your paid subscribers in my conversation with Yana.

You can meet Yana also inside our Club as she has been a member for more than two years now and we met in my early days on Medium.

We’re also cooking up something for you. We’ll offer you to join a Substack Monetization Masterclass.

▶️ Prefer to listen? Hit Listen. This conversation is worth your ears.

Here’s the thing about a witch hunt: the accusation is the evidence.

Substack partnered with an AI detection tool called Pangram. You can now scan posts, notes, replies, and comments over 100 words and get a percentage: human-written, AI-assisted, or AI-written.

Mine got this one…

My 100% human audio isn’t supported… aha…

You can scan your own stuff. And you can scan other people’s long form ans short form posts, whether they are AI slop or not.

There’s also a lovely new “How I make this” statement where you tell readers, in your own words, how your work actually gets made.

One of those two things is beautiful. The other one hands every reader a tiny courtroom, as tiday’s podcast guest refers to.

I wrote about the new AI detecor and the AI slop radar detectors a few days back and the idea of making Substack (and LinkedIn) “slop-free.” Since today’s podcast guest and I had both shared our two cents and these perspectives were complementary, I though I needed to bring this expert and fellow Club member on the show.

Michael Hyatt, yes, that Michael Hyatt, even picked it up

and posted about it to his audience on X.

Michael walked through the 100%-AI-then-100%-human test, made the point that even a perfect detector still couldn’t tell ethical use from unethical use, and landed on this:

“It doesn’t measure integrity. It measures tools.”

So the NYT bestselling author who wrote the book on platform building (!) read one Substack post about Salem and publicly agreed. That’s how much this framing landed.

Which brings me to the person who wrote it… drum roll please… Dr Sam Illingworth.

We’d been circling the exact same topic from opposite sides of the same room and had been trying to talk for ages.

I’m so grateful for this conversation. Because I want this newsletter to be a forum for talking about writing with AI. Out loud. Without whispering. We are in a trust recession, and the only currency that still works in a trust recession is communication.

Want to talk about AI and all things Substack and publishing? Join our Club for only $9 or $90 with 40% OFF and join our weekly Friday lives. Every Friday we meet for 60 minutes and talk about what happened this week on Substack, in your life and beyond!

Join the Substack for Beginners + Club circle of like-minded people!

So: I hope you trust me a little more after this episode. Especially because I'm not giving you my opinion. I'm bringing you an actual expert.

Who is Dr. Sam Illingworth?

Why should I care?, you ask. Fine for me.

Sam is a full professor of critical AI literacy in Edinburgh. His research are, his actual, peer-reviewed, day-job area, is AI detection and why it doesn’t work. Not just technically….Ideologically.

He writes Slow AI, a former #1 rising publication in Education, and he’s a Substack bestseller who…

…. jut hit 232,000 views and 21,000 subscriber. 21,000 coming from 1, only one subscriber. Probably me.

He’s also the principal investigator on the UK’s largest qualitative study into how students actually use generative AI. Over 7,000 students surveyed.

And he’s the author of Slow AI which is about knowing when to use AI and when to leave it alone, is now an Amazon #1 bestseller which my partner in crime Fleur Hull and I got to help him launch.

And when I tell you a book agen shared with m the average author sells less than 100 copies… this one crossed already 1,000!

📽️You can also watch Sam’s testimonial video here.

That’s the part I’m proudest of. Because the Club x Subsatck Bookstore collab is for indie publishers.

Indies, we launch each other’s books. We show up in each other’s comments. We restack each other at 11pm. Let’s keep supporting each other!

Like the interview and love Sam? Please support him:

👉 Get Slow AI on Amazon

The smoking gun

As a subject matter expert Sam tested the new AI detector.

“I wrote a post, ran it through the AI detection on Substack, and it came out as 100% AI generated, which obviously it wasn’t. I then took the whole post, copied it word for word into the humanizer tool, took out the output, without changing a word, put it back into Substack as a test piece, ran the AI detector again, and it came back as 100% human.”

How AI detectors work

Sam shared AI detecors look for predictable sentence patterns, because that’s how generative AI builds sentences, most likely word, then most likely next word.

Now guess who else writes in predictable, formal patterns?

* Neurodiverse writers (we’ve got lots inside the Club!)

* People writing in their second, third, or fourth language (it’s me, hi, i’m the problem it’s me! (I’m a Swiftie!)

This already happened early on when I was writing on Medium and they had new rules. I was using the tool Grammarly and to check for spelling mistakes and make my writing “better”. Nope. Not a good idea for me as non-native!

That’s why I got emotional in this conversation. You can hear it in my accent. I’m a non-native speaker. I learned English in a specific format, with specific words, in a specific structure.

It’s not one bad tool, either. A 2023 Stanford study tested seven detectors on essays by real students who speak English as a second language.

💡On average, 61% of genuine human essays were flagged as AI. On one detector, 97%. Every single one of those students wrote every single word.

Sam even ran his PhD thesis , atmospheric physics, submitted in 2010, more than a decade before ChatGPT existed, through a detector in 2026. It came back around 70% AI.

REMEMBER: These scores fall hardest on people who have spent their entire lives being told they write wrong. Now there’s a number to say it for them, with the authority of a machine and the deniability of an “estimate.”

AI is also making our writing worse

Ahhhhhhh….Today I met my publisher for the first tim LIVE! During the team meeting I told the group I wouldn’t use certain words in my book and when I’m speaking on stage or so because we’re living in the “AI age” and trust recession. Unlock is BANNED. Em dashes… a no no!

Because they’re on some invisible list of Words That Sound Like A Robot.

You might have read my viral post about my idea that Substack’s algorithm is a toddler we can educate. After hitting publish, I told Club member Brian D Smith I wonder what happens if I taught my toddler all these “bad words” to verbally (!) communicate with as she can’t write yet.

* Would she be AI?

* Produce only AI slop?

* Would she still be seen as “human”?

Also while writing this, I have a little self-talk.

Am I allowed to use this word? Will someone think a machine wrote this? Should I change this word? Is there a better one? No I can’t use this. No need to overedit…this typo is okay.. looks “human”.

That’s some kind self-censorship with extra steps. My prose gets worse, my voice gets smaller, and the only winner is a classifier that updates without telling me.

And here’s my actual question, the one I can’t shake off:

What does this do to our culture, folks?

Substack is culture. My international Online Writing Club is a corner of culture.

We’re not “content creators,” (this is also a bad word, am I right?!) we’re culture makers.

And if the culture we’re building is one where writers strip their own sentences to pass a AI detector test, we’ve traded something enormous for a percentage.

The new Let’s talk about AI culture

By reading this post, you just joined our forum.

It’s a culture of people who love to talk. Who talk about ALL things online writing and publishing and AI. As, similar to Substack years back (it’s turning 10 next year, can you believe it!), it’s buzzy!

Instead of pointing at each other, we’re curious. We see AI as an unfair advantage rather than a moral failing. And we quietly know this is a bubble and that one day the witch hunt gets forgotten… and the AI bubble is gonna burst.

Because I look at what people are actually doing out here:

* Bringing their book to life

* Designing their own covers

* Building a website for their book without paying thousands

* Illustrating ideas they could never draw before

* Finally having a buddy who helps a busy person get the thought out of their head and onto the page

Sam calls it removing the technological moat. The wall that used to stand between “I have an idea” and “I made the thing” is mostly gone. He built a 1980s BBC-computer-style website for 30 of his poems from a soft play centre, in five minutes.

In the live chat of the podcast recording, one of you wrote: “AI allows me to live with my disease.” Another is returning to college in her 50s. Another has 30 summers left and would rather spend them with her kids than debugging a landing page at 2am.

💡 TIP: The question was never good tool / bad tool.

The question is: does it level you up? Like Super Mario.

Do you come out the other side taller?

My son is a huge fan so the handmade “Schultüte” was, of course, full of Super Mario power - sugar pizza included.

In defense of the em dash

I saw a comic about em dashes this week on LinkedIn from Tom Fishburne and loved it so much I needed to share it via Notes.

No clue what to write on Notes and what to do? Gotcha!

Same artist made another point that I haven’t stopped thinking about:

What do people do with AI? They tell it to be more human. Less generic.

So where does all that great copy come from? As a solo writer, when the tool hands you a line that lands… where was that line born?

In human beings!

Brilliant copywriters. Essayists. Poets. Marketers who spent twenty years learning what makes a sentence hit. All of that human work is exactly what these models were trained on. The “AI voice” everyone claims to detect is a compressed echo of us! Of us as culture. As homo communicans.

And while we’re being honest: It hink, it’s not just AI slop out here.

There has always, always been human slop.

Ha! Nobody built a scanner for that.

Sam’s position is not“no rules”

* Keep the “How I make this” statement on Substack.

* Drop the score.

* If you suspect something, ask the person. Don’t become a hater.

* Default it to off: Let people opt in, not opt out post by post.

And one more, from me: check your Publisher Agreement. Our legal advisor Noemi from ME TIME 🎈 flagged this and she was right. There’s now a clarification on automated content analysis, and you granted a license to run your content through automated tools.

Nobody fro Substack emailed us. They have all our addresses. They could have. I reported on this in my viral post which you can read, if you’d like to binge-read what I have to offer:

Now I actually want to hear from you

No good thing, no bad thing. Everything you do and think is fine. No judgement here, which feels almost radical in a moment where a machine is judging whether you’re human enough.

You know what I also don’t like… if I need to wait when I’m online for a site to decide whether I’m human or not. Just happened today AGAIN:

Join our weekly Friday live by becoming a paid subscriber.

Do you say: Let me become a paid subscriber, please?

Then I’ll say: YAY!

So tell me in the comments:

* What do you think about the new AI detection feature?

* How do you write with AI or without it?

* What have you made that you’re genuinely proud of? Share it with us!

Last words from Sam:

Go slow.

Oh and if you’re feeling extra loving, I would be really grateful if you left me a review over on Spotify or Apple.

♻️Indies, share this with someone who got flagged and felt terrible about it. Every like and restack ♻️ helps our ideas travel farther and keeps the light on in this lovely little corner of culture on the internet streets.♻️♻️

♻️♻️Built by a part-time indie publisher together with 19,000 ! international writers, creators, dreamers, do-ers and builders.♻️♻️

Fleur and I just came off our birthday celebration live video, and I’m still buzzing.

If you missed it, the recording is right here in this post. Grab some of our virtual vanilla cake, watch it with us and join our first ever…

Substack for Authors Summer Camp in August.

Use CELEBRATION to get it for $249 $129.

What we’re celebrating?

The Substack Bookstore turned one year old and nothing sells books like a great Substack!

And Fleur Hull, the mother of the bestselling newsletter baby Substack Bookstore, showed up with a real vanilla cake, an edible printed cover she designed herself in Canva, and a candle she lit on camera while her son slept on the couch behind her.

Meanwhile I couldn’t get into my own live. Network error. Invalid token. Smartphone one, smartphone two. Substack simply would not let me in…

We were also both wearing pink. Nobody planned that. Fleur is in Australia, I’m in Germany, and somehow we’re connected anyway…

A one-year-old newsletter, and what a year it’s been

As a mom of two, I think about what a human being does in their first 365 days:

They arrive knowing nothing. They wobble. They fall over. They say one word and everyone in the room cries. They take a first step holding onto the furniture, and then one day they let go.

That’s exactly what this year looked like.

Fleur started her Substack in summer 2025. Late, as she’ll happily tell you. She had no idea what the platform even was.

One year later, this “baby” has:

* Nearly 4,000 subscribers and over 20,000 followers

* Close to 300 authors who have listed their books

* Over 400 books listed across 365 days

* Well over 1,000, getting up to 1,500, clicks on those books

* And 12 Amazon category bestsellers. Some of them multiple-category, multiple-country bestsellers.

* Gunnar Habitz went triple #1 on Amazon Australia with Happy Habits. I read the whole thing in an afternoon, go get it.

* Sarah Tinney was the quiet achiever. Fleur didn’t even do a promotional note for Jack’s Train Day. She simply listed it. Two days later it was an Amazon bestseller, in one of the most competitive categories there is.

* Gary Coulton’s Demons to Champions was already ten months old. That Amazon launch magic had long faded. Fleur and the bookstore community revved the algorithm back up anyway. Gary went #1 in three categories and then went kayaking, because he’s still Gary. As he said in the chat tonight:

“You took my year-old memoir and made it a number one bestseller. It’s still selling another year later.”

* And Paul Cobbin’s Decode Your Diagnosis became an International Best Seller. In his words: launching through the Substack Bookstore is

“truely Fleurific.”

That’s a one-year-old. Now we’re heading into the toddler phase. And you know what toddlers do? They run.

Here’s what Fleur did while all of this was happening

She lost her mother at the end of April 2026. She took four months off. She’s raising two kids on her own. She’s doing all of this part-time, like me.

And she came back and said: I’m not quitting anytime soon.

“Everywhere else I go, I think I should be on Instagram, I should be on TikTok and it’s just got nothing of the heart that Substack has. There’s so much more of a sense of people cheering each other on.”

I’m doing this part-time too, with two kids in the house, a corporate job I actually love, and a non-native accent. So please hear this from both of us:

You can write your book part-time. You can be all in without really being all in.

🎉 And now… the announcement - Grab your seat for $129 TODAY!

There are around 70,000 books published on Amazon every single week. Standing out is about being SEEN and being SUPPORTED.

Remember when Fleur and I said last year around this time we were writing a book together called Substack for Authors?

I picked up the phone. I said YES. And then life got its hands on us. Her mum got sick. I moved house. The kids, the jobs, everything.

So instead of making you wait for a book on Amazon, we’re giving you something better: direct access to both of us for a fair and no-brainer price.

Fleur asked me to co-host the first-ever Substack for Authors SUMMER CAMP and if you’ve been following me for a while, you know I’m a big fan of summer camps. (Bootcamp, summer camp, call it what you like. We’re calling it summer camp.)

We cleared our calendars for you!

🏕️ Substack for Authors · 4–6 August · Live

Three live masterclasses. One live Q&A. 14 days together in a brand-new community we actually own.

* Day 1 · Set the foundation — build (or refine) a publication you own, in the right order

* Day 2 · Grow real readers — Notes, recommendations, and your backlist

* Day 3 · Turn readers into buyers — free reader → superfan → paying subscriber → book sale, plus your launch playbook

9am ET · 6am PT · 2pm London · 3pm Berlin. Every session is recorded and yours to keep forever.

We’re going deep on Substack and on Amazon KDP, Fleur’s zone of genius.

Remember the 81% statistic?

81% of self-published authors will sell fewer than 100 copies of their book. Ever.

Definetly NOT because the books are bad but because nobody helped them get SEEN. That’s the whole reason this summer camp exists.

👉Use the code CELEBRATION

To celebrate the bookstore’s first birthday and every indie author out there with a dream and a manuscript, we’re opening the doors with the code CELEBRATION.

Six people who were on the live with us a few minutes back have already grabbed their seat.

With CELEBRATION you get the Summer Camp plus ALL 6 bonuses:

* Substack for Authors Guide — the must-have guide for 2027 ($49)

* StackBuddy, 1 month full access — schedule and analyse your Notes ($29)

* Substack Quick Start Guide — set it up once, set it up right ($19)

* Amazon Visibility Checklist — 7 quick wins before launch day ($19)

* Book Description Analyser — turn browsers into buyers ($29)

* Indie Author Scorecard — know exactly where you stand ($19)

That’s $164 in bonuses, free.

Save my seat with code CELEBRATION →

Split it into 2 × $129 or 3 × $89 if that’s easier. And if you truly want to be there but the money isn’t there right now, just reply to this email. We’ll figure it out. That’s a promise from both of us.

Show us your book baby in the comments, please 👇

Fleur and I are building a list of indie authors on Substack so we can all support each other, buy each other’s books, read them, review them, restack them, cheer each other on. That support is the entire reason twelve authors became bestsellers this year.

So drop a comment below and win:

Your book baby — the title, and one or two sentences on what it’s about

Where we can find it — your newsletter, your Amazon page, your book page

Where you’re stuck — the blank page? the marketing? the launch? the “who am I to write this”?

What you’d love help with from Fleur and me

Whether your book is published, half-written, or still just an idea you whisper to yourself at 6am, it counts.

Post it and win a special susprise!

I had a conversation recently with a woman who is 75. She told me her kids and grandkids aren’t interested in her stories yet but one day they’ll ask,

“What was grandma’s story?”

So she sits down every morning for an hour and writes her memoir. That’s who this is for. Every single one of you who FINALLY wants to give birth to that book baby inside you.

Happy birthday, Substack Bookstore 🎂

Thank you, Fleur Hull , for what you’ve built in 365 days while carrying more than most people could. What you’re doing for the indie publishing community and connections are mind-blowing.

And thank you, all of you, for showing up tonight from every time zone on the planet.

See you live on 4 August and in one of the upcming LIVEs with Fleur and myself leading to the biggest SUMMER CAMP for (indie) authors this year!

P.S. — Still reading? Consider this your loving kick in the pants. Your book has waited long enough and so have you. Code CELEBRATION, all 6 bonuses, doors close before we go live. Save your seat →

P.P.S. — Tag Fleur and me when you share the summer camp and there’s an extra bonus in it for you. Spread the word! 🎈

Thank you Dr Donna Blevins, Sarah Stone, Sandy, Louise S Williamson, Jessica Onne, and many others for tuning into my live video with Fleur Hull!

Here’s a thing nobody prints on the back of a book: How people actually get book deals is one of the great mysteries of modern life, right up there with where all your socks go.

We see the shiny headline (“Signed with Hachette!” “Out March 2027!”) and assume it happened the way lightning happens: random, rare, and definitely not coming for you.

But nobody shows you the boring, beautiful, page-a-day middle. Which is exactly the part you need.

So I sat down with Jeremy Ney who’s driven by the desire to make the American dream a reality for millions of underserved families and made him show his work.

☀️ Limited-time only: Join the Club as an annual member + get FREE access to the Substack for Beginners Course 2026 this summer!

On-demand trainings + live classes.

Next live class is today, Friday June 26, 2pm CEST · 1pm BST · 8am ET · 5am PT

Who is Jeremy Ney?

Jeremy is a Columbia Business School professor, a former Federal Reserve numbers person, and the human behind the Substack American Inequality, yep, the one with those weirdly addictive maps you’ve definitely seen and definitely sent to one friend with the caption “look at our state.”

He’s also the author of The Opportunity Map (Hachette, March 2027). That’s a deal with one of the Big Five, the publishing equivalent of getting seated at the grown-ups’ table.

And here’s what’s so important for you:

He had no audience when he started. And he wasn’t even trying to write a book.

He started exactly where you’re sitting right now

Jeremy launched American Inequality in 2021 for the least glamorous reason imaginable: he had a pile of cool maps and data just sitting there, and figured someone might enjoy them. That was the entire master plan.

“For the first probably two, maybe even three years, I was really just writing for friends and family. My mom was one of my biggest commenters on my posts…”

I love this so much. Because right now somebody reading this is sitting on their version of the maps, the memoir, the niche obsession, the thing they know cold, waiting for permission to hit publish.

💡 TIP: You don’t need the permission. All you need the publish button. Jeremy’s whole career is what happens when “I’ll start someday” becomes “I started, and my mom commented.”

So join one of the biggest Online Writing Clubs on the internet and get FREE access to the Substack for Beginners class to kickstart your list and publication this summer.

Maps became his “thing” and thumbprint

As I always say, every writer who breaks through has a thing, the signature move you can spot from across the room. Jeremy’s was turning intimidating government data (EPA, FBI, HUD… basically the alphabet) into county-level maps that actually make you feel something.

“People love the maps. They know where they were born, where their parents live, where they went to college…”

👀 REMEMBER: Your “thing” is also your moat against AI. As my friend Karen Salmansohn says: The YOU-ier the better! Or as Jeremy puts it, robots are pretty good at facts and pretty bad at you. (We get deep into the “staying original when ChatGPT exists” question in the episode, don’t skip it.)

Jeremey wasn’t trying to write a book at all

“Strangely enough, I was not planning to write a book. Like when I started the Substack, I did not intend for it to turn into a book deal.”

So how’d it happen? An old college friend (who was writing his own book) opened a door. A few weeks later, Jeremy had an agent, Dan Greenberg.

Three months after that, he had a book deal.

That’s what Jeremy called in his guest post increasing your surface of luck, a phrase he borrowed from poker champ-turned-founder Cate Hall:

“The more times you interact with the outside world, the more chances you have to get lucky, to find collaborators, friends, and projects that, together, provide the right soil for you to bloom in.”

In other words: luck is gardening. You plant a lot of stuff, you water it weekly, and eventually something pops up.

The “I’m too small” excuse is sneaky

This is the part I want tattooed on the inside of your eyelids.

When Jeremy pitched his book, here’s the audience he had:

“I had… 12,000, I think.”

Twelve. Thousand. That’s not “famous influencer” numbers. That’s “respectable turnout at a regional event with decent parking” numbers. And it was enough.

Meanwhile, half the internet swears you need 50,000 subscribers and an orange or purple checkmark before you’re allowed to dream. You don’t. 10,000 is genuinely impressive.

* Online Writing Club member Colette Jane Fehr, LMFT, LMHC signed with Penguin Random House at ZERO and gre her list to 5,000 later.

⚠️ WARNING: The “I’m too small” excuse is sneaky, comfortable, and completely fake. Do not let it tuck you in at night.

Listen to our podcast NOW to dream big!

Why your Substack is secretly your best negotiator

“What I realized is that Substack turned my writing into a market test.”

Publishing houses are, in their hearts, venture capitalists in cardigans. They place a bunch of small bets praying one becomes Harry Potter. Every bet is risky.

So when you stroll in with open rates, comments, and an audience that actually shows up, you’re not a gamble anymore, you’re closer to a sure thing. Your stats do the convincing while you sit there looking modest.

Jeremy’s best moves for you

1. Treat your Substack like proof

Those stats and comments? That’s your evidence locker. It’s literally how Jeremy ended up in TIME, Business Insider, and Harvard Magazine.

2. Hold your best stuff back

Plot armor for your book. Every story in it is brand-new on purpose, so readers can’t just Google their way out of buying it.

“I kept the big picture in mind and held some stories back so that way when someone read it in my book, it would be the first time that insight was out in the world.”

3. Write one boring, unsexy page a day

“I wrote a page every single day basically for a little over a year.”

💡 TIP: Do the math and that’s a 300-ish-page book in under a year. His final manuscript clocked in at 95,097 words. One page at a time.

Listen to our conversation to learn from Jeremy!

4. Give first. Ask later (way later)

The #1 thing that grew his newsletter was recommending other writers in the dashboard and being recommended back. He linked, quoted, hyped, and cold-emailed generously before he ever needed anything. Karma with a recommendation button.

Want to plant your own writing garden of luck?

Jeremy’s whole story is living proof that Substack is where the stories, the collaborations, and yes, the actual book deals, tend to start.

And you put yourself in luck’s path the moment you stop reading from the sidelines and start publishing.

If you want to learn Substack the fun, fast, hand-held, “wait, that wasn’t scary at all” way, come join the Substack for Beginners Course 2026 inside your annual Club membership:

✅ On-demand lessons + weekly live sessions (hop in anytime!)

✅ Masterclasses + Q&As with people building real newsletters right now

✅ Every future update, automatically yours

👉 YAY, let me join — just upgrade to an annual Club membership. That’s the whole checkout process.

You’re in!

Keep going (more from the Club)

* Jeremy’s guest post: How to Become a Published Author With Substack (and Increase Your Surface of Luck)

* Running superstar Raziq Rauf : What Raz Did With 0 Readers That Changed Everything

* Colette Jane Fehr, LMFT, LMHC who listened to her publisher Penguin Random House and started an email list on Substack and grew it from zero to 5,000

* Veronica Llorca-Smith 🍋 went from unemployed to book deal.

Hey you! 💓 Would you do me a tiny favor and share Jeremy’s story with someone who needs it today? And I genuinely want to hear yours:

* What’s your big writing dream for 2026?

* And what’s one small thing you could plant in your garden this week?

Every like and restack ♻️ helps these ideas travel farther and keeps the light on in this lovely little corner of the internet. We’re one of the biggest active online writing communities in the world now 😃😃😃

If you’ve been following me for a while, you know I LOVE bringing behind-the-scenes publishing stories to the readers to one of the largest active writing communities on the internet,The Online Writing Club, and our podcast… because honestly, you don’t know what you don’t know when you’re starting out.

Especially when you see the publishing industry shifting under our feet faster than ever.

For most of us on the outside, what happens at a big industry event feels like one giant mystery:

* What are publishers ACTUALLY talking about right now?

* Is AI really coming for our writing?

* Where are readers even hiding these days?

* How do authors find an audience when nobody seems to read for fun anymore?

And maybe the biggest question of all:

“Where do I, a writer building something online, fit into all of this?”

That’s exactly why I loved today’s conversation with podcast guest Jen Baxter ✒️ copywriter, former insider at the hybrid publisher Scribe Media in Austin, and the writer behind The Skillful Scribbler | Jen Baxter Substack.

Because while I was sitting in Germany (I would have had to fly to New York City for this one!), Jen was walking the floor of the U.S. Book Show, the Publishers Weekly industry event where hybrid and traditional publishers come together to talk about what’s actually happening inside the industry today.

And she came back with GOLD.

☀️ Limited-time only: Join the Club as an annual member + get FREE access to the Substack for Beginners Course this summer!

Commit yourself, learn and grow together!

On-demand trainings + live classes. Our next LIVE class is on Friday.

* Friday, June 19

2pm CEST · 1pm BST · 8am ET · 5am PT

You can meet Jen for our upcoming Author Summer Summit in July 2026. Stay tuned and be the first to grab your ticket.

Jen said it best:

“Book people are great people, so I just want to say that, too.”

Passionate about books, passionate about reading, and they actually like the people in the halls, that was the energy she walked into.

But underneath this, there were two huge conversations rumbling through every panel and once you see them, you can’t unsee them.

So in our conversation Jen peels back the curtain on the 7 things that stuck with her the most.

7 Things I Learned at the U.S. Book Show

1. Reading is becoming SOCIAL again (the analog renaissance is real)

This was the one that genuinely excited me. Because of all the AI noise, people are quietly craving analog. As Jen put it:

“We’re in the age of the newsletter right now, the art of the newsletter.”

Reading communities and reading events are having a MOMENT. Jen met someone who runs a company called Reading Rhymes, he’d just gathered something like 1,500–2,000 people in Bryant Park in New York, where everyone showed up with whatever book they wanted, sat on the grass, read together, and then talked about it afterward.

And the second she got home to Austin? An ad popped up for a brand-new spot called The Analog Room. You walk in, they take your phone and lock it in a box, hand you the key, and you read for an hour, then there’s wine and cheese and conversation.

This event is happening today! Some people would call this retro. I don’t. I call it a renaissance.

As Jen said, it all comes back to a very basic human need:

“We all need a sense of belonging and our sense of belonging has been kind of shattered in the last five years since COVID.”

2. The power is shifting, toward YOU, the writer

For decades, a small group of tastemakers in New York and the Big Five publishers decided what books we read. That’s changing fast.

“The power and influence is shifting quite a bit from having sort of tastemakers in New York with the big five publishing companies deciding what books we read… to now authors thinking more like entrepreneurs, because they have all these tools that will help them have a direct relationship with their readers.”

And then the line I keep coming back to:

“So that can either be overwhelming to you or that can be exciting to you.”

I choose exciting. And the people who do this best? Romance writers. As Jen said:

“Romance writers are amazing writers at… building a brand.”

You know the book from the cover, you know the characters, and you have readers who are completely dialed in and waiting for the next one. We could ALL learn from them, which is exactly why building your own community (on Substack), your own garden, matters so much.

3. There are actually TWO AI conversations (don’t confuse them)

This was such a clarifying takeaway. Jen said she walked away from the show realizing:

“There’s really two big conversations happening.”

* AI in the creative process (writing and editing the actual books). Everyone basically tiptoed around this.

* AI on the back end of publishing (search, discoverability, operations). Here, people are leaning ALL the way in, because there are so many genuinely useful cases.

So when you hear “publishers are using AI,” ask which AI conversation they mean. They’re not the same thing.

4. Stop being data-driven” Start being “data-informed”

Data-driven treats your readers like consumers of a product. Data-informed is the opposite:

“Data informed is really looking at people’s behaviors, what they buy, what they read, what they tell their friends about.”

For us as online writers, this is everything.

* Are people replying to your emails?

* Leaving comments?

* Jumping into your chat?

That behavior is telling you who your readers are and what they actually want from you.

5. SEO is becoming GEO, learn to write for AI search

One of the most technical (and most important) panels was about the shift from SEO to GEO, from optimizing for Google to optimizing for how people search inside ChatGPT and Claude.

The big lesson: don’t keyword-STUFF anymore (as in my 20s for Edelman where the Edelman Digital team handed me a keyoword list and said: “we need these keywords 5-10x in this post”. Instead, find the phrases that capture who you are and your work and use them consistently in every single place: your author website, your Substack description, your Amazon page.

As Jen explained it, you want to make sure those phrases…

“…shows up the same in each place, because now AI will track that.”

💡Want to know wheter AI know what you do and who you are? Go into one of the AI assistance and asks who can help with topic x. Topic is should be your topic. You’re not showing up after a few prompts or even asking about this specific person to help? you’ve got some work to do.

When your message is consistent everywhere, AI picks it up and serves the right you to the right readers. (Funny enough, I learned a version of this three years ago from a Google expert who told me my Knowledge Panel worked the same way. He was just early.)

6. We have a literacy problem and it’s partly our job to fix it

This one made me a little sad as I have two kids in the house.

“Reading for pleasure is down 40% in the last 20 years.”

Add in book banning in schools, and there’s a lot going on with literacy. Publishers feel it too. Hachette was handing out tips and tools for reading WITH kids, basically asking parents to help raise the next generation of readers.

Because here’s the hard math for every author and marketer:

Fewer people reading for pleasure + more books than ever = you HAVE to cultivate your own community of readers. It’s survival and it’s also kind of beautiful.

7. Polished and corporate is OUT. Personal is IN

Reading is social again, and the same thing is happening with content everywhere. People don’t want to be sold to all the time, we’re all over that. They want to feel like your newsletter is a letter to a friend. Which leads me straight into Jen’s tips…

☀️ Limited-time only: Join the Club as an annual member + get FREE access to the Substack for Beginners Course this summer to become a SUPERSTAR! On-demand trainings + live classes.

Jen’s top 3 copywriting tips you can use THIS week

Because Jen is an actual copywriter (she even knows the legendary Laura Belgray who you can use in October inside the Club for a LIVE conversation), I asked her for tips we can use immediately to make our newsletters and promo emails stronger.

1. Lead with a personal story

“Your personal stories are always the biggest hug.”

Don’t run to ChatGPT or Claude and say “write me a promo email.”

“You do the thinking. You are the person and that’s what people connect with.”

Tell a real story that pulls people in, then make a natural segue to the thing you’re sharing or selling. (Yes, the Laura Belgray “tuna sandwich” method.)

2. Obsess over your subject lines

“Your subject lines really matter.”

Our inboxes are crowded, and the subject line is what stands out. If you’re going to use AI here, use it well: run your headlines through a free headline analyzer.

People can’t love your writing if they never open the email.

3. Develop a consistent voice and sign-off.

Jen described hers as a “down-to-earth, writer-to-writer friend.” And on the sign-off:

“Having a nice, consistent sign off and something that’s personal really makes it feel like a letter to a friend.”

One bonus mindset shift on AI that I adored. Jen’s whole philosophy when authors finally embrace it:

“If we’re going to do it, let’s get the paid version, use it well, make it a thought partner and train it on your body of work.”

Most people now ask AI “what kind of writer am I?” The real power is to flip it and tell AI who you are. But for that… you have to actually write.

The new Substack tools

Because Jen and I are both deep in Substack, we also nerded out over the new community features rolling out, reply rules (set the house rules for your space, with automatic moderation that learns your boundaries over time), beefed-up tiers and subscriber perks, the chat, direct messages, and the email templates at the bottom of your posts.

My one big nudge:

* turn on your chat button from day one, the same way I tell everyone to turn on the paid button from day one.

* On a recent live, about 80% of people said they DIDN’T have their chat on.

* You want an actual conversation with your people, the chat is your living room, the DMs are a walk in the garden, and that’s where the real connection (and real feedback) happens.

👉🏻Visit my YouTube channel for all the tutorials. Make sure to subscribe to stay on top of things.

Everything I’m talking about we also discuss every Friday in our inner circle of the Club. Join us today and let’s meet tomorrow! No more guessing. Learn with a true bestseller and someone who helps thousands of people get on the platform, be successful in their niche and earn money.

I’d LOVE to hear from YOU:

* Which of these 7 shifts surprised you the most?

* Are you building a reader community yet — or still shouting into the void?

* Have you turned on your chat button?

* And what’s your writing dream for 2026?

♻️♻️Hey you! 💓 Would you mind sharing Jen’s behind-the-scenes Book Show insights with your network, or with a writer who needs to read this today?

Because I truly believe conversations like these matter. The more we openly talk about what’s really happening inside publishing, the less mysterious and intimidating it becomes for everyone else trying to find their way too.

With every like and restack ♻️ you help these ideas travel farther and keep the light on in this beautiful little corner of the internet called The Online Writing Club.

Thanks a million times 💓 Kristina♻️♻️

If you’ve been following me for a while you know I LOVE bringing behind-the-scenes publishing stories to the readers of The Online Writing Club because honestly… you don’t know what you don’t know when you’re starting out.

Especially when you see writers suddenly ending up in The New York Times or The Guardian.

For most of us, publishing feels like one giant mystery:

* How do people ACTUALLY get published?

* How do they find editors?

* What do they even say in those emails?

* How many rejections happen first?

* How do you know if your story is good enough?

* How do writers suddenly end up in The New York Times?

And maybe the biggest question of all:

“Could this ever happen for me too?”

That’s why I loved today’s conversation with podcast guest Tyler Donohue , who I originally found through Substack Notes.

Because Tyler peels back the curtain on ALL of it.

☀️Limited-time only: Join the Club as an annual member + get FREE access to the Substack for Beginners Course 2026 this summer! On-demand trainings + live classes.

The invisible work to become a published author

One thing we don’t talk about enough inside the Club is… the invisible work.

The unanswered pitches. The emotional messiness. The late nights. The self doubt. The moments where she had absolutely no clue what she was doing.

And Tyler herself said this perfectly on the Online Writing Club Show:

“I love writing these ‘behind the curtain’ pieces about how I got published in the NYT or the Guardian! When I started pitching it felt like such a mystery, so I’m happy to shed a little light! It’s actually really fun for me to peel back the curtain and revisit how I got to publication.”

THIS is exactly why I wanted to bring her story to the Club.

Because I think we need WAY more stories about the process behind the success. Not just the shiny headline or accolades at the end.

As someone who’s worked in journalism and has also been published, you know these things do NOT just happen overnight. We should be SO proud of all the invisible work.

And Tyler’s story begins with her whole life changing.

She left a four year relationship and called off her engagement after realizing her fiancé was involved in what she describes as a “high control group cult-like program.”

“I really blasted myself through a portal leaving that relationship and like so much of my life changed very quickly.”

And suddenly, for the first time, she had something she had not really had before:

Time. Time to think. Time to travel. Time to write. Time to finally build the life she actually wanted.

“This is the singular thing I want to do in my life is like write and tell stories.”

So she sat herself a goal.

A REAL one.

In 2025, Tyler made herself a promise

“In 2025, I am going to get published in The Cut by New York Magazine.”

At that point she had never been published before and she had ZERO insider publishing knowledge.

“So, I started by googling: How do you pitch an editor?”

Honestly, I think so many people are sitting exactly there right now. Wanting to write. Wanting to publish. Wanting to be taken seriously. But having absolutely no clue where to begin.

And Tyler KEPT going anyway.

“I have thrown so much proverbial spaghetti at the wall.”

Then came Tunisia.

The rejected Tunisia story changed everything

She originally pitched a travel story to a smaller publication. But once she actually arrived there and started interviewing people, the story completely changed shape.

A more honest story appeared. A more alive story. The publication rejected it because it no longer matched the original pitch. But Tyler trusted the story she had found. And that changed everything.

Late one night, she found an editor at The New York Times who had served in the Peace Corps in Africa. Tyler had too.

“And I thought, if anyone at the New York Times is going to read my email, it is this guy.”

So she emailed him. And he replied.

A few weeks later, Tyler was standing inside the newsroom of The New York Times.

“There’s the breaking newsroom with all the clocks on the wall. And I was like, this is so crazy.”

And then? After getting published?

She kept pursuing her BIG dream

Because once she stopped treating writing like a fantasy and started treating it like her REAL life, bigger things kept happening.

Writer sends draft → editor edits → writer sends draft→ Over and over and over again

Now she has ALSO been published in The Guardian.

And again, she openly shares what the process ACTUALLY looked like:

“Writer sends draft → editor edits → writer sends draft→ Over and over and over again”

Then came the moment that honestly made me emotional.

Tyler was walking through New York City when the email arrived saying her Guardian story was live.

Later she got home from the gym and hugged her friend Joanna.

“‘I can’t believe it,’ I say. ‘I got published in another international publication.’

She turns around and shakes her head at me,

“Yeah girl, you’re a f*cking writer. This is just the beginning.’”

I mean COME ON. How inspiring is that?

And I think there are so many lessons in Tyler’s story for every writer here.

☀️Limited-time only: Join the Club as an annual member + get FREE access to the Substack for Beginners Course 2026 this summer to become a SUPERSTAR! On-demand trainings + live classes. We start on Friday May 29!

Tyler’s top 3 tips to get published in The New York Times

1. Do pre-reporting before pitching

This was one of Tyler’s biggest lessons. Don’t just pitch an idea. Talk to people first.

Interview them. Gather real stories and bring substance to the editor.

“If I could give one piece of advice to people who want to do narrative reporting like I did for The Guardian, you must do pre-reporting.”

2. Use your Substack as your portfolio

Tyler literally sent Substack essays to editors when they asked for writing samples.

Your Substack is not just a newsletter. It’s proof. It’s your voice. It’s your body of work

And honestly, her Substack Girl Resting played a MASSIVE role in all of this.

Online Writing Club member and Columbia Business School professor Jeremy Ney is a great example:

Same with running superstar Raziq Rauf:

3. Tell the stories you’re scared to tell

Tyler said:

“I’m very drawn to stories that say the thing out loud that you’re not supposed to say out loud.”

That’s where the best writing often lives.

In telling the truth.

Substack for Beginners Course for FREE as a THANK YOU

🙏🏻🙏🏻Almost 19,000 subscribers and 34,000 readers! Thank you all so much! Thanks so much to Substack.

This summer, I want you to feel the main character energy and power Substack gave me (Top #14 International, non-native, part-time with 2 kids) and gives you, too.

If YOU want to build your own Substack this summer, find your voice, grow your audience, and maybe become the next “f*cking Substack writer” getting published everywhere too…

For the long Memorial Weekend, …

* you’ll get 20% off The Online Writing Club

* ticket to the Substack for Beginners Course (on-demand) starting on Friday, May 29 with a live session (6 weeks of live sessions included, you can join anytime!)

You’re an annual member and want to join, hit reply so I put you on the list.

Hey you! 💓 Would you mind sharing Tyler’s powerful behind-the-scenes publishing story with your network or with someone who needs to read this today?

And I’d LOVE to hear YOUR story too.

* What invisible work are you doing right now?

* Which media outlets have you pitched already?

* What keeps you stuck at the moment?

* What could help unstuck you?

* And what’s your writing dream for 2026?

Because I truly believe conversations like these matter.

The more we openly talk about the behind-the-scenes reality of getting published, the less mysterious and intimidating it becomes for everyone else trying to find their way too.

With every like and restack ♻️ you help these ideas travel farther and keep the light on in this beautiful little corner of the internet called The Online Writing Club.

Thanks a million times 💓Kristina

Right now, as I’m writing this letter to you, my garden is doing the thing it does every May that makes me want to drop everything and just stand there.

The roses and rhododendron are opening. The bees are fat and slow and absolutely unbothered. My kids are bouncing on the trampoline in the background, shrieking about something that will be completely forgotten in about four minutes. And I’m standing in the middle of all of it thinking about you and about what it actually means to be seen as a writer.

If you’ve been following me for a while, you know I looooove flowers. They are the first thing I notice in a room. The thing I planted all along the fence this spring so that every time I open the back door, something blooms.

Which is maybe why, when I found today’s podcast guest, Brian Gomes, CEO of Social Flowers, on Google last autumn, I almost fell off my chair.

🌷🪻🌹Flowerful surprise — exclusive for Online Writing Club readers

There’s something waiting for you at the end of this post. Free bouqets of flowers worth $100 … for 3 Online Writing Club readers. Keep reading. You’ll want to get there!

* Do you love flowers? Do you grow them? Has someone ever sent you flowers at exactly the right moment?

Hit reply, let us know and win FREE credits!

Besides Kofi and Buy me a coffee, there’s now a new way to show your appreciation with flowers

I was Googling, honestly. Looking for ways to help writers get appreciated that weren’t just paid subscriptions. I knew about the tipping tools Ko-fi. Buy Me a Coffee. Done all of it myself back in the day when I was writing daily on Medium. But I kept thinking :

“Is there something that actually crosses the line? That lands not on a screen but in someone’s actual life?”

And I found Social Flowers which we gonna talk about in today’s podcast episode.

But before I tell you what it does, let me tell you where it comes from. Because the origin or lean-in story is everything.

Brian’s business partner comes from a flower family that goes back to 1959. A real, local florist on Long Island, New York. His grandfather had greenhouses in the early 1900s. His brothers wholesale flowers, grow flowers, supply CVS stores across the country. Brian calls them “one of the first families of flowers” and when he says it, you can feel that he’s not exaggerating.

Their company has been delivering flowers online since 1999. The Social Flowers concept, sending blooms to someone you know only through a screen, no address needed, launched in 2007.

They were the first to send flowers on Facebook. It went viral on what was then Twitter (now X): 4.2M views in a single day.

There was especially one moment in Brian’s life that changed what flowers meant to him personally. His father passed away:

“It was important to me that people sent flowers to my father’s service. And they did. And then I realized…okay, this is about connection. This is about being thought of and being cared for and remembered.”

That sentence is the whole thing. That’s what we’re really talking about today.

Why your writer’s thumbprint can change the way your readers see the world

I wrote my MBA thesis on identity-based marketing (my bootcampers know this concept very well). I won’t bore you with the theory but in short, it’s the idea that the most powerful thing any brand can do is know precisely who it is and let that identity do all the work.

For writers, I call it the writer’s thumbprint. Your DNA.

The thing that makes your writing recognisably, irreplaceably yours. The quality that AI can get close to but never actually replicate. The YOU-ness is what makes you paid.

We talk about this constantly in the Club. How to find it. How to protect it. How to build everything, your newsletter, your Notes, your offers, on top of it.

But here’s something I’ve never said out loud quite like this:

What if your writer’s thumbprint was so clear, so felt, so specific…that a reader reads one of your essays and thinks:

“I have to do something. Not just comment. A like. I don’t want to be a PayPal notification. I want to be something real.”

And then the doorbell rings.

A person standing at your door with flowers and a card that says:

“I read what you wrote and it changed something in me.”

Is that not the most insane, wonderful, writerly thing you’ve ever heard?

Recurring revenue is nice, so are flowers

Yes. Of course. Paid subscriptions are the dream. Recurring revenue, a community that invests in you, the feeling of sustainable creative work. I love all of it and I will never stop talking about it.

But here’s what we also know, especially in the beginning.

Before someone pays you, they have to know you, like you, and trust you. That takes time. That takes posts and Notes and showing up and being consistent and being real. And in that whole beautiful runway, while the relationship is building, what happens when a reader wants to show how much your work means to them?

They type “this really moved me” in the comments. And they mean it with their whole heart. And it still feels like almost nothing compared to what they wanted to do.

Here are some moments I heard from my Club members:

You post something vulnerable about your marriage. You write about your kid being sick. You share the essay you’ve been avoiding for two years. You announce a book pre-launch and your readers have been with you for the whole journey. You have a birthday. You’re exhausted and it shows in the writing and three hundred people felt it. Someone reads your words at 2am and thinks:

“this person just described my entire year/life.”

In every single one of those moments…your reader wants to show up. They just have absolutely no idea how.

What flowers do that money can’t

Years ago, when I was writing daily on Medium, I had the Buy Me a Coffee link. The Ko-fi. I was doing all the things. And the tips came in sometimes and I was genuinely grateful.

But I’ll be honest with you the way I always am.

It landed in my bank account and got absorbed into whatever was waiting. The grocery bill. The electricity. The gesture was kind. The feeling evaporated within about twenty minutes.

Theer’s this hunger we all have. Not for fame. Not even for money. For the feeling of mattering enough to someone that they go out of their way. That they choose you, specifically, on this day, and do something just for you.

Also, the most powerful thing you can do is make someone feel like the only person in the room. That specificity, that I see you, I mean you, not a follower, you, is the whole game.

Flowers do that.

A human being goes to a website. Chooses something they think you’d love. Writes you a personal note. And something alive and beautiful appears at your door. You find a vase. You put them on the kitchen table. You look at them for ten days, every morning with your coffee, every time you walk past, and every single time you think:

“Someone who knows me only through my words decided I was worth this.”

That doesn’t evaporate into the grocery bill.

Social Flowers: how it actually works

The concept is almost offensively simple.

You can send someone real flowers without knowing their delivery address. You only need their email, their phone number, or a social media connection like a Substack handle.

The recipient gets a link. They choose when and where the flowers arrive. They provide the address. You never see it. Flowers show up and make your fave writer smile!

Social Flowers currently delivers across the US and Canada. International is coming…Brian told me he had lots of requests and he’s planning to expand in the next year or so. (I’m in Germany, so I’m already waiting.)

But if you’re stateside, here’s what I’d do:

* Visit socialflowers.com and click “How It Works” to understand the full flow

* Create a free Flower Me profile at flowerme.socialflowers.com … takes five minutes

* Link to your profile from your next post

* Let your readers know you’re open to being celebrated this way

I’m sending flowers to Ellen and Karen

I couldn’t write this post and not do the thing.

Ellen Scherr Karen Salmansohn my female co-hosts, my collaborators, two women who show up for the community again and again with everything they have, I’m sending them flowers.

And to every single Bootcamp grad and Online Writing Club member who has put in the work this year: you’ve earned something that arrives at your door, not just your inbox.

Because that is the whole point. Saying thank you in a way someone can actually hold.

🌷🪻🌹Free flower credits — exclusive for Online Writing Club readers

Brian has set aside $100 in Social Flowers credits for a handful of Online Writing Club members.

To enter: hit reply and tell me one of the following: your flower story, which writer you’d send flowers to right now and what you’d write in the card, or what it would mean to you if a reader sent flowers to your door.

3 winners get $100 in credits to use on socialflowers.com

**US and Canada delivery only for now — international coming soon.**

* Do you love flowers? Do you grow them? Has someone ever sent you flowers at exactly the right moment?

* Who would you send flowers to right now and what would the card say?

* What moment in your writing life would have been completely transformed by a bouquet at the door?

THE Substack for Beginners Course 2026

My fully updated Substack for Beginners course opens its doors in the last week of May 2026 with weekly live Q&As with me included.

Everything I know about starting, growing, and monetising your Substack, rebuilt for 2026.

How do you get access?

Simply upgrade to an annual Club membership. That’s it. You’re in!

The course will start in the last week of May 2026.

Because your writer’s thumbprint, that specific, irreplaceable YOUness you bring to every post, deserves more than a like.

It deserves someone standing at your door.

More flower power to everyone,

Hey you! Would you mind sharing this innovative idea with your network or with someone who needs to read this today? You can also share your flower story right here in the comments.

Conversations about connection, appreciation, and showing up for the writers we love only matter if they reach more people.💓

With every like and restack ♻️ you help ideas travel farther and keep the light on in this beautiful corner of the internet called the Online Writing Club.

Thanks a million times!