I was thinking I’d send out another thing like this. There’s a poll where you can tell me you don’t want to read stuff like this anymore, or you can say you just want to read updates about my fantasy book, Eathel the Bastard, which you can find at stack.samliebl.com.
It’s hard to keep doing this day after day. Especially on Mondays. I actually forgot that today was Monday and woke up thinking it was Sunday. I went about my business and remembered, by virtue of it being on my phone’s calendar, and for no other reason, that I had a therapy session to start at 8 AM this morning. It’s rare we have any sessions on Sundays, but not unheard of. It was awesome to have such a lovely conversation with my therapist, but I was only so relaxed because I thought it was actually Sunday. That’s a very disjointed experience to have, as
might say.1Disjointed or no, it was very disconcerting to be so confused about the day. I don’t usually need a reminder for the day of the week. I operate under a fog of war, which doesn’t help.2
Substack features
I want to start using more of Substack’s features. Can you engage with me a bit more than usual by entering some information into a poll?
This poll will be open for a week from the publication and I wonder whether you might let me know if you only want original fantasy fiction, like Eathel the Bastard or Madta the Spy. As a reminder, I’m working on two stories; the latter is a subplot of the other.
Note that the first option is OK to select. If you don’t read me, or just read the beginnings of posts, for example, that’s totally OK; I’d just like to get a sense of the number of engaged readers that I have.
I hope you’ll take a moment to answer the above and I’ll do my best to incorporate the feedback into my stuff.
Eathel: unfiltered
As you can see, Eathel the Bastard has evolved to be more than a fantasy story—it’s now the tale of an online, indie creator struggling to make ends meet. I think this makes for a better story overall actually; it’s something I’d be genuinely interested to read—in tandem with the action, you’ve got a real, on-the-ground view into what it’s like to hustle your way to success on Substack and beyond.
Thanks for bearing with me as I attempt to build some buzz around a story I believe in when I’ve had my coffee, and hate when I’m fiending.
It’s sales.
I once had a sales manager who dropped some knowledge on me: “sales is beating your head into the wall until the wall breaks—or your head does.”
Sales managers always have the best stories and know how to work words to make them interesting. I used to have this cool collection of them.
They included such pearls of folk wisdom like “She could close a revolving door,” meaning someone was good at sales.
“If you’re not out selling, you’re being outsold,” said T. V., another sales mentor.3
Included here are some additional thoughts to augment the Live video.
Thank you to everyone who tuned into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app.
What sales has taught me
It’s interesting to me how much sales has given me
Boa live! The Live Experience across TikTok and Substack
Live is its own channel. Mark my words. And in the future, whatever from Lives take on Substack, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook and x/Twitter is going to be the way we passively consume content. I wonder if there is a paradigm of active vs. passive consumption. Maybe someone can help me with this. Well, this is Substack after all: it’s apparently the place for culture. Therefore, I’ll do some research and contribute to the conversation, I suppose.
The features in
’s Live product show potential, but they’re still not up to par with TikTok’s comprehensive, often overwhelming, array of options to enhance your Live for your audience.It’s really the backend where Substack shines: its emphasis on analytics down to the Note-reply level. The focus or encouragement toward automating one’s content: we writers are presented with easy options to schedule content, and, in so doing, create a kind of content calendar; and, we’re able to benefit from a considerable amount of integrations with important platforms in the content space: YouTube,4 Spotify, Apple Music, etc.
Synthesizing the best Live experiences for automated marketing
**Simulcast on TikTik (I am chai_phillips—follow me! Tell me you’re coming from Substack and I’ll follow back.)
On this one, my maximum credits for ChatGPT expired and I was forced to deal with the consumer-grade one.
Songs
McKenzie is the CEO of Substack and has a publication called “Disjointed.” Hence, well, you know…
The “fog of war” is what I call the clouds of CBD smoke I navigate mentally and physically every day.
You have a lot of mentors in sales; that’s one of the things I miss about it.
As a side note, has anyone noticed that Substack is saying that they’ll automatically chop your video into two shorts (a ‘short’ on YouTube is a small, brief video a la TikTok.
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