Back to ChuckStack

Back in February 2025, with circa six months until the publication of my kickass novel Leverage, I decamped from ChuckStack and set up shop on Ghost.

The idea was simple: I had high but reasonable expectations for the book, and in the wake of what I'd hoped would be a successful launch, I wanted to direct interested readers to my own website and email newsletter rather than continue to cede creative and commercial control to yet another cynical tech platform.

Needless to say, this was a dumb plan.

Leverage was critically admired but commercially ignored, and all I ended up accomplishing was paying for the privilege of hosting a shit-ton of disengaged subscribers.

As I told my friend Leigh Stein during our Substack Live chat last fall, when it comes to operating online, you can choose control or you can choose scale. By migrating to Ghost and shunning social media, I opted for control. With the benefit of hindsight, it's easy to wonder if I should've learned to love the algorithms and chased scale.

But, after zooming out even further, and factoring in all the things I've learned about publishing (and life) thus far, I've begun to question the value of so-called author platforms altogether—especially when set against the craven, chaotic, and shockingly stupid media ecosystem Big Tech has built for us.

In fact, I've come to realize a harsher yet simpler truth for why Leverage didn't sell like hotcakes and why I'm not hella famous on the internet right now: I didn't get lucky.

Don't get me wrong: I got lucky with my literary agent, lucky with my book deal, and lucky with the wonderful connections I've made. But when Leverage hit the "marketplace," my luck ran out. The novel didn't get a ton of traditional media coverage, no BookTok influencers went ham on launch day, readers, reviewers, and booksellers struggled with the fact that the novel defies simple genre conventions, and, perhaps most problematic, publishing a vicious satire of Wall Street at a time when everyone is looking for an escape from the nihilism of neoliberalism—or not reading serious literature at all—was, shall we say, suboptimal.

Much of life is luck, though nobody wants to acknowledge this.

Plebes prefer the illusion that they're in control of their own destinies, while narratives built around chance, randomness, and generational wealth don't jibe with the venal worldviews of corporate executives, private equity barons, geopolitical warlords, nepo-babies, or techno-libertarian eugenicists.

Instead, to perpetuate structural inequity, polite society creates horseshit myths about "great men" who "pull themselves up by their bootstraps." I can all but guarantee these arguments are fallacious, because I can promise you this: There ain't a motherfucker alive who can pull on his bootstraps harder than me.

But here's the bigger issue: I can't control the "market conditions" or the intellectual devolution of Western culture or the American empire's descent into kleptocratic fascism or any of this exogenous bullshit.

On the other hand, here's what I do know:

1. I have total confidence in my talent and tenacity.
2. I can choose where to direct my finite time and energy.
3. I love writing novels.

So, in this game of chance called publishing (and life), the only logical thing to do is roll those motherfucking dice again and again and again. Seeing as I already have another batshit crazy novel in the works—and yet another batshit crazy idea for a third novel percolating—that's precisely the approach I'm taking.

Henceforth, rather than investing so much of my creative energy into an unclassifiable and unprofitable email blog, I'm going to focus on completing my current novel as quickly as possible while putting the bare-assed minimum effort into establishing a fanbase on Instagram, LinkedIn, and CuckStack.

I will continue to publish humor, satire, poetry, and essays on my personal website, though these will be for my own amusement and will not be distributed to anyone via email. Instead, I'll share links on CuckStack Notes and LinkedIn.

As for the next—and presumably final—iteration of my email newsletter, I've gone back to CuckStack for main reasons:

1. The service costs $0.00 per year.
2. The social media features, while largely half-baked, create a powerful network effect which can help me grow my subscriber base and will allow me to collaborate with other artists.

All my future missives will be free—I swear on the lives of my children I will never monetize an email blog again!—and infrequent and will include:

• Mordant and misanthropic micro-essays
• Bite-sized media recommendations
• Links to blog posts, podcast episodes, and upcoming events
• Updates on my publishing misadventures
• Special one-off posts (e.g., author interviews)

With respect to my social media game, when I'm in the motherfucking mood, I'll be posting comedic Reels on Instagram for all the sad, lonely, terminally online losers out there, triggering my old coworkers and classmates by napalming neoliberalism on LinkedIn, and antagonizing broke, depressed writers by shitposting on CuckStack Notes.

I'd like to connect in those places, but I'd love for you to put down your fucking phone and read Leverage.