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1 week ago | 
caffeinatedwriter.substack.com | Michelle Richmond
Sam Freedman has been teaching a class in long-form journalism at Columbia Journalism School since 1991. Students fortunate enough to be admitted to the class are challenged to “produce a book proposal to sell and hopefully publish.” I’d never heard of Freedman or the class until I read 1 Writing Class, 35 Years, 113 Deals, 95 Books, by Emma Goldberg for the New York Times. If you want to write a nonfiction book proposal, read the article.
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2 weeks ago | 
caffeinatedwriter.substack.com | Michelle Richmond
Everything you need to know about using Substack as an author platform. Substack Author Studio subscribers get access to my course SUBSTACK FOR AUTHORS, my 6-Week Writing Reboot, every new post on The Caffeinated Writer, the complete archives, and exclusive Q&As.Everything you need to know about using Substack as an author platform.
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2 weeks ago | 
caffeinatedwriter.substack.com | Michelle Richmond
This post is for Substack Author Studio members. Members of Substack Author Studio get access to my information-packed course Substack for Authors, as well as every new post on The Caffeinated Writer, the complete archives, live Q&As, and exclusive chats. Go here to subscribe. How do you write a Substack post that resonates with readers and draws new subscribers to your Substack? In this video, I share one of my most successful Substack posts, along with insights into how and why it gained traction.
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3 weeks ago | 
caffeinatedwriter.substack.com | Michelle Richmond
Since moving The Caffeinated Writer to Substack in 2022, I’ve received a lot of questions from writers about how to use Substack as an author newsletter. This led me to create the course Substack for Authors, in which I help writers launch their author newsletters, write engaging posts, serialize fiction or memoir, breathe new life into previously published work, and connect with new and existing readers in meaningful ways.
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3 weeks ago | 
caffeinatedwriter.substack.com | Michelle Richmond
Your job as a novelist is to entertain your readers. Enlighten them, sure. Wow them with beautiful sentences, yes. Give them something to think about, someone to relate to, a new way of seeing an old thing: absolutely. But job number one is to entertain. You have to give them a good story. If your novel is boring, it will be difficult for you to find an agent or publisher. If you do find a publisher, the book is unlikely to resonate with readers. Not boring your reader is half the battle.
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4 weeks ago | 
caffeinatedwriter.substack.com | Michelle Richmond
Thank you for reading The Caffeinated Writer. Paid subscribers can listen to this post here. “The road you can talk about is not the road you can walk on.” Lao TzuEvery now and then my husband likes to remind me what I said to him the first time I ever rode in a car with him. A truck, actually. This was in Fayetteville, Arkansas, and we’d just met a few days before. He invited me to go for a drive, and about fifteen miles into the journey he asked why I was so quiet.
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1 month ago | 
caffeinatedwriter.substack.com | Michelle Richmond
If you’ve been on Substack for a while, you might be familiar with of The Author Stack. Nohelty’s thoughtful post on walking away from a taxing creative endeavor got me to thinking about how much we try to do, and how often these competing efforts lead to burnout. After deciding to end a program called Writer MBA, which cost him money and enormous amounts of time, Nohelty writes:In influence, we succeeded wildly. In money, we failed spectacularly.
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1 month ago | 
caffeinatedwriter.substack.com | Michelle Richmond
Good morning (or afternoon, or evening, depending on where you are). Have you poured your third cup of coffee yet? Substack has brought me a lot of peace and calm lately. Assuming you might enjoy a little piece and calm too, I thought I’d a few posts on the writing life that I’ve read and bookmarked recently. Today is Indie Bookstore Day! You know what that means: go to an independent bookstore in your community and buy a book or two! You know you’re going to be reading anyway.
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1 month ago | 
caffeinatedwriter.substack.com | Michelle Richmond
About once a month, my husband and I drive from our home on the Bay Area Peninsula to Haight Street, where he visits Amoeba Records and I visit The Booksmith. I head straight to the essay section in the back right of the main room. There, I read back covers and first pages until I find at least one essay collection to bring home with me. Last weekend, I found OPACITIES by Sofia Samatar.
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1 month ago | 
caffeinatedwriter.substack.com | Michelle Richmond
When I first started creating ebooks and paperbacks for my micro press, , formatting a book involved complicated html, clunky table of contents creation, and laborious conversion from Word to epub. Fortunately, the time-intensive process of formatting ebook and print book files is a relic of the past. All you need to create gorgeous, professional ebooks and paperbacks is one super-simple, user-friendly piece of software: Vellum.
