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Publishing & MediaAugust 1, 202610 min

Homeowners invest in lasting renovations amid pandemic shifts

A new wave of homeowners is choosing comfort and accessibility over resale value and the numbers reveal a quiet transformation in how America thinks about home.

The numbers tell a quiet story. In the last year, 43% of Americans renovated their home. Another 33% plan to do so in the coming year. But the most striking figure isn't about the renovations themselves it's about what homeowners chose not to do. Roughly two-thirds of recent renovators decided to upgrade their current home instead of moving to a new one. For those planning to renovate in the next year, that number climbs to 71%. That data, from a Redfin-commissioned survey of 4,000 U.S. residents conducted by...

Publishing & MediaJuly 25, 202611 min

The Course That Taught Thousands to Write Online and Why It Eventually Closed

David Perell's Write of Passage built one of the most celebrated writing communities on the internet then shut down after five years. The story behind the decision reveals something important about what it costs to build something worth celebrating.

The email went out on August 19, 2024. "This has not been an easy decision," David Perell wrote to the Write of Passage community, "but it's necessary." The company was going to shut down at the end of the year. The next cohort running October 7 through November 13 would be the last. For readers who discovered writing online through Perell's essays or his podcast How I Write , the announcement landed like news of a friend's retirement: unexpected, a little sad, and freighted with the question of what happens next...

Publishing & MediaJuly 23, 202615 min

Dickie Bush and Nicolas Cole's newsletter empire explained

A profile of the writing program that grew from a 20-person Slack group to a multi-million-dollar educational enterprise and the curriculum design that makes it work.

It started with a single tweet. On a December evening in 2020, Dickie Bush then a portfolio analyst on Wall Street, writing online as a hobby typed out a question to his few hundred Twitter followers: "Is anyone interested in doing a daily writing challenge for 30 days?" He wasn't expecting much. Maybe a dozen replies. A small group of like-minded strangers willing to keep each other honest for a month. Within hours, around twenty people had joined a newly created Slack group. They were writers, aspiring writers,...

Publishing & MediaJuly 22, 202611 min

Journals' hidden rules determine which science sees the light

A behind-the-scenes look at how editors at top scientific journals evaluate manuscripts, what drives the eight percent, and what every author should understand before submitting.

Ever wonder why some scientific studies seem to vanish while others gain rapid prominence? The path to publication is far from simple, dictated by hidden rules within academic journals that profoundly shape which research reaches the public eye. These often-unacknowledged criteria determine not just career success for scientists, but the overall direction of scientific progress. This is the question at the heart of understanding modern scientific publishing. It is also a question with surprisingly specific...

Publishing & MediaJuly 22, 202611 min

Ghostwriters fuel indie publishing boom and author brands

A closer look at how Ghost's team infrastructure and publishing tools are helping independent creators run genuine editorial operations complete with staff accounts, bylines, and contributor workflows.

Are successful authors really outsourcing their writing, and if so, why is it suddenly so common? A quiet shift is underway in independent publishing, fueled by a growing reliance on ghostwriters. While it often appears seamless to readers a consistent voice in their inbox or feed many thriving independent publications are now powered by a single founder supported by a team of writers. This trend is reshaping author brands and driving a boom in indie publishing. Isaac Saul started Tangle as a personal project. By...

Publishing & MediaJuly 20, 202611 min

Lenny Rachitsky's Substack A Million Subscribers and How He Did It

A close look at the bundle strategy, tiered pricing, and psychological mechanics that turned a product-focused newsletter into a revenue-generating machine worth studying.

There's a particular kind of Tuesday evening that every newsletter writer knows: the quiet panic of a deadline approaching, the cursor blinking in an empty document, the creeping suspicion that the perfect insight has already been written by someone else. Now imagine you've crossed one million subscribers. The stakes shift. The pressure compounds. And somehow, the newsletter still goes out deeply researched, precisely targeted, and increasingly, attached to something unexpected: a bundle of premium software tools...

Publishing & MediaJuly 13, 202613 min

How Derek Sivers Built a Career Publishing Evergreen Ideas

From selling CD Baby to writing five books and 550+ articles, one entrepreneur turned his personal blog into a publishing operation that keeps working long after the algorithms moved on.

There is a desk in an undisclosed location. On it sits a computer, a notebook, and the accumulated output of nearly two decades of deliberate publishing: five books, 550+ articles, and a personal website that serves as both archive and ongoing broadcast. The man at that desk Derek Sivers has outlived several internet platforms, watched newsletters rise and fall, and kept writing anyway, on his own terms, through his own domain. This is the story of how one entrepreneur turned a personal blog into a framework...

Publishing & MediaJuly 10, 202610 min

Rob Wormley's snail mail empire rewrites publishing's rules

A content marketer with roots in journalism found his way back to the oldest publishing format the personal letter and built a business teaching creators why email still wins.

Is personal connection the future of publishing? Rob Wormley thinks so, and he's building an empire on the lost art of snail mail. By focusing on direct correspondence between authors and readers, Wormley is bypassing traditional gatekeepers and forging a new path for books and writers. His approach is proving that in a digital world, something as simple as a handwritten letter can still resonate and sell. Rob Wormley understands this. After seven years developing digital marketing strategies and content for...

Publishing & MediaJuly 6, 202612 min

Creators unlock 50k subscribers with smart newsletter swaps

Three independent newsletter creators share how they turned their existing audiences into growth engines and what the numbers actually look like once the referral loop kicks in.

Subscriber swaps - the deliberate exchange of newsletter access between creators to grow their audiences - are emerging as a powerful alternative to traditional marketing. Unlike relying on algorithms or paid advertising, swaps leverage the trust and relevance inherent in existing communities. This strategy is gaining traction now as creators seek sustainable, organic growth in an increasingly crowded digital landscape, and as platforms limit reach without paid promotion. This is the moment a referral loop starts...

Publishing & MediaJune 29, 202610 min

Sarah Peck's decade of publishing survived platform chaos

A writer and open water swimmer traces the methods she used to build publishing endurance across a decade of platform changes, algorithmic shifts, and the advice to 'never miss twice.'

There is a particular kind of cold that comes off San Francisco Bay in the early morning, the kind that finds the spaces between wetsuit and skin and settles there. Sarah Peck has felt it. She has felt it while swimming toward Alcatraz, the infamous island rising out of the fog, the water beneath her churned and indifferent. The crossing is roughly 1.5 miles of open ocean, and it does not care how consistent you have been in your training. What matters is whether you understand the water, whether you have built...

Publishing & MediaJune 27, 202612 min

Tire shops boost bookings by answering missed calls with AI

A quiet revolution is happening in independent tire shops across the country where unanswered phones are becoming the start of a conversation, not the end of a sale.

Everyone assumes a busy shop means booming business, but for many tire stores, constant hold times are actually driving customers away. While technicians hustle and the waiting room fills, unreturned calls represent a significant loss of potential revenue. Now, increasingly, shops are turning to artificial intelligence to answer those missed connections and convert ring-no-answers into scheduled appointments. Someone reaches for it interrupting a tire mount mid-torque. The customer on the other end wants to know...

Publishing & MediaJune 26, 202610 min

The Seven-Year Newsletter How Independent Publishers Are Building Businesses That Outlast Every Platform Shift

A look at how newsletter creators who started before the creator-economy boom turned a once-risky publishing experiment into durable, multi-platform businesses and what that trajectory means for anyone building something similar today.

The alarm goes off at 5:47 a.m. Not by accident the newsletter goes out at 6:15. That tight window has held for seven years, through the rise of three major newsletter platforms, two platform migrations, a global pandemic that rewired how people consume media, and the slow, strange emergence of AI as an internet force that nobody fully understands yet. The sender has never missed a Thursday. This is the rhythm of the independent newsletter economy, a world where a single person with a reliable voice and a modest...

Publishing & MediaJune 20, 202614 min

The Anti-Algorithm Stack How Newsletter-First Creators Are Building Audiences That Platforms Can't Touch

A growing movement of independent writers and creators is building subscriber-first businesses that promise stability in an era of unpredictable feeds.

## The Quiet Migration From Feed to Inbox In the summer of 2025, the San Antonio Express-News published a four-year, $229 million contract extension for NBA star De'Aaron Fox. The paper's Spurs newsletter had already gone out the day before the announcement, and there was little the editors could do to reclaim the moment except there was. The Express-News sent a special email blast to its most loyal subscribers, the ones who had signed up specifically for Spurs coverage. The open rates and click-through numbers...