Chinese social media giant, ByteDance, has avoided the worst outcome, Reuters reports.

Five years since U.S. President Donald Trump ordered the Chinese group led by Liang Rubo to sell the American operations of its TikTok app or face a ban on national security grounds, a deal that will keep the short-video app operational in the world's largest…

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TikTok is currently owned by ByteDance—a Chinese technology company founded in 2012.

September 25, 2025, President Donald Trump signed an executive order approving a $14 billion deal to divest TikTok’s U.S. operations to a consortium of American investors—separating TikTok US from ByteDance’s control.

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Under this agreement ByteDance will retai…

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If you’re a name brand journalist then you’re good to go.

If you’re anyone else (including, importantly, lesser-known journalists, then you’re SOL if you need support)

It’s fair to say that Substack is a remarkable platform. In terms of the variety and type of tools it provides its users…

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• Locate your Substack URL: If your Substack publication is, for example, https://stack.samliebl.com, that’s the base URL.

• Add /feed to the end: Simply append /feed to your base URL.

• So, it becomes https://stack.samliebl.com/feed.

• Test it: Paste that URL into a bro…

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1. Format

2. Guidelines

3. Categories

   1. Fiction

   2. Nonfiction

4. Notes

5. Changelog

Today, I'm happy to announce the Genre: growth Quarterly Review.

This is going to be a literary review featuring selections of genre fiction from across Substack.

Publication date: April 1, 2025

Format

• This is going to be a post of a list of the best fiction & nonfiction across genres each quarter.

• the link is a cross post that drives traffic directly back to your Substack. That's why we're here right? Putting eyeballs on your work.

Guidelines

• Each individual piece must be no longer than 5,000 words.

• One submission per person.

• Those 5,000 words must be self-contained. If they consist of multiple chapters, they must wrap up into a cohesive story in and of themselves.

• Piece must be published on Substack. Cannot only be published somewhere else. Make sense?

Categories

There will be one entry from all of the following published:

Fiction

• Historical fiction (filled, “Hild’s Tale, Chapter 6” by Holly A Brown)

• Romance fiction

• Fantasy fiction (filled, “An Angry Man in the Road, Covered in Blood” by )

• Horror fiction (filled, “I Watched a 10-Year-Old Boy Get Murdered (Shifting Shadows: Forward/Chapter One)“ by Merlin Senthil)

• Sci-Fi fiction (filled, “Murder on the Stellar Schooner, part 1“ by Brian Heming)

• Speculative fiction (filled, “Beautiful Boy in the Window” by )

• Poetry in any category (filled, “Dead Man’s Fingers” by The Scorched Pages)

• Poetry in 'traditional' meter

Nonfiction

• Academic paper (filled, “what's pragmatic about medieval romance literature?” by )

• Cultural essay (filled, “Princess Bride The Great Fairy-Tale Movie of the 80s“ by )

★ ★ ★

First person to nominate a piece in this chat (and you can self submit) gets the spot. Looking forward to seeing who wants to participate!!

★ ★ ★

Notes

• I do reserve the right to veto stories that are grotesque, insulting, hateful, poorly written, bigoted, anything that makes the Internet a worse place, basically.

• By the way, I want edgy and boundary pushing.

• If for no other reason than it drives traffic.

• But also, that's usually where the best writing is.

• if you're concerned your piece won't be considered at least a little bit, then you're probably going to be fine.

Changelog

2025-03-21

• Cosmetic updates.

• Adding Brian Heming

• Added Hild’s Tale: Chapter 6 (~1,300 words)

2025-03-27

• Adding The Threshold.

2025-03-29

• Adding in from shieldbreaker Saga

Executive Summary

On March 18, 2025, Sam, an author and content creator, hosted a live discussion with David Jakopac, a seasoned expert in artificial intelligence (AI) and technology, who also happens to be Sam’s uncle. The conversation, intended for Sam’s Substack audience, explored David’s ex…

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• You know those little web modules encouraging you to follow multiple accounts?

• Following ≠ subscribing, so you won't be inundated with new writing.

• You'll attract people likely to follow back…

• …increasing your influence and reach on Stack.

Rule 2—Only Grow Evergreens

Create what marketings hacks like me call “evergreen content.”

Check out …

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1. Changelog

2. To begin, then, at the beginning…

3. So…I had AI write the introduction

   1. We open: a précis of the term “genre fiction.”

   2. And what was the definitive turning point?

4. How this plays into what we’re doing [AI]

5. Operations [AI]

Changelog

2025-03-06

• Added in “Surface-level gloss” an operation that will clean text w/o altering its content. Surface-level edi…

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Today I’m announcing a brand new addition to my Substack publication: Genre: growth subscriber chat.

This is a conversation space exclusively for subscribers—kind of like a group chat or live hangout. I’ll post questions and updates that come my way, and you can jump into the discu…

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1. Overview: what is this?

   Who this is for (there are three types of writers that this will work for; it crosses genres, but not individual writers)

2. Yet another grow-your-substack newsletter?

   Why this might be actually just what’s needed to get genre fiction on Substack to an inflection poin…

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