substack-ghostwriting

substack-ghostwriting helps write, optimize, and grow Substack content across two formats — newsletter issues (email-first) and web posts (web-first articles and essays) — and two voice modes, the user's own voice or ghostwriting in someone else's. It covers voice matching, Substack algorithm optimization, Notes strategy, email formatting, SEO, growth tactics, and monetization planning. It triggers on Substack-related work, and also on general article or newsletter writing and adapting existing content (a blog post, talk, or thread) into newsletter or web-post form; it explicitly defers generic blog writing without a newsletter context to a separate technical-article-writer skill. It is user-invocable and can use web search and fetch.

The skill's philosophy is that Substack is a social-media-newsletter hybrid whose algorithm optimizes for subscriptions rather than engagement, since revenue comes from subscription cuts rather than ads — so genuine quality wins. For ghostwriting, the job is capturing a client's existing insights in their voice (clients are "insights-rich and time-poor," writers "time-rich but insights-poor"), making extraction and voice matching the core craft. It first detects two dimensions — voice (own vs ghostwriting) and format (newsletter issue vs web post) — and routes to reference files: platform-constraints, voice-matching, email-formatting, and web-post-formatting.

The workflow is deliberately gated on user input. Ghostwriting begins with a voice guide built from samples (transcripts preferred over writing over media), 10-15 voice markers with examples, validated with the user before drafting. The Writing Workflow then runs Phase 0 voice calibration (own-voice mode, ideally from an existing Substack URL), a mandatory Phase 1 intake interview covering topic, format, audience, objective, context, and length — with explicit instruction to stop and wait for answers — and Phase 2, which generates 5 title/subject-line variants and 3 distinct hook options for the user to pick or remix before any body is written. Title guidance favors specificity, a clear benefit, and 6-10 words; newsletters pair a subject line with complementary preview text, while web posts add a keyword-rich SEO title under 60 characters and an SEO description. Notes are framed as a cheap testing pipeline to validate topics before committing to long-form.