Substack Ghostwriting

This is a production-level ghostwriting skill that treats Substack as what it actually is: a social-media-newsletter hybrid with subscription-driven incentives, not a blog with an email bolt-on. It walks you through voice matching first (sample collection, marker extraction, validation), then forces an intake interview before drafting anything. The workflow splits cleanly between newsletter issues (email-first, subject line optimization) and web posts (SEO-first, evergreen articles), with dedicated formatting guidance for each. What I appreciate is the brutally honest framing on ghostwriting: you're extracting insights from clients who have them but lack time, not generating thought leadership from scratch. If you write for founders or execs on Substack, or run your own technical newsletter, this gives you a repeatable system instead of winging it every week.

skills.sh installs: 5.2K
GitHub stars: 242
last updated: Aug 21, 2026

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Install

$ npx -y skills add samber/cc-skills --skill substack-ghostwriting --agent claude-code

Installs into .claude/skills of the current project.

Files

Substack Ghostwriting & Content Optimization

A skill for writing Substack content — both newsletter issues (email-first) and web posts (web-first articles/essays) — that grows subscribers and converts readers. Handles two voice modes (own voice, ghostwriting) and two format modes (newsletter issue, web post).

Core philosophy

Substack is not a blog with an email list. It's a social-media-newsletter hybrid with an algorithm that optimizes for subscriptions, not engagement. This changes everything about how you write, format, and distribute content on the platform.

The algorithm's incentives genuinely align with quality. Substack's revenue comes from subscription cuts (not ads), so gaming engagement metrics doesn't help. What helps: writing content good enough that readers convert to paid subscribers and recommend you to others.

For ghostwriting specifically: the job is capturing someone's existing insights in their voice, not generating insights from scratch. As Nicolas Cole frames it: clients are "insights-rich and time-poor", writers are "time-rich but insights-poor." The art is extraction and voice matching.