substack-ghostwriting

Guidance for writing and improving Substack newsletters and web posts. Substack is a publishing platform that combines email newsletters, articles, subscriptions, and social features.

In plain words
What is it for?
Ghostwriting newsletters or articles, formatting posts, writing Notes, improving discoverability, growing subscribers, and planning paid content.
Why use it?
It helps shape writing and distribution for both email readers and Substack’s website, including cases where someone else’s voice must be matched.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/hssh8917/cc-skills/substack-ghostwriting
Any agent
npx skills add hssh8917/cc-skills --skill substack-ghostwriting
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/hssh8917/cc-skills

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 207 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 3,465 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin 97% copy Near-identical to another mod in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5 $0.00207 $0.03465
Opus 5 $0.00103 $0.01733
Sonnet 5 $0.00041 $0.00693
Haiku 4.5 $0.00021 $0.00347

Measured 2d ago against content hash af9f34bf2f45, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

substack-ghostwriting scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 2d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

Origin

This is a copy

97% identical to substack-ghostwriting — 2 lines differ, which has more behind it and is treated as the original. This page carries a canonical link to it rather than competing with it.

skills/substack-ghostwriting/SKILL.md · 244 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 244 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

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.


Platform formatting constraints

Substack is a social-media-newsletter hybrid with an algorithm that optimizes for subscriptions, not engagement. Revenue comes from subscription cuts (not ads), so quality genuinely wins. For ghostwriting: the job is capturing someone's existing insights in their voice — clients are "insights-rich and time-poor."

Read references/platform-constraints.md for post fields, Notes limits, special content blocks, and media embeds.


Mode detection

Determine two dimensions:

Voice dimension:

  • Own voice — the user writes/publishes under their own name. Go directly to the Writing Workflow.
  • Ghostwriting — writing in someone else's voice, or preparing content for a client. Complete the Ghostwriting Workflow first, then the Writing Workflow.

Format dimension:

  • Newsletter issue (email-first) — sent to subscribers' inboxes. Subject line and email formatting matter most. Read references/email-formatting.md during Phase 3.
  • Web post (web-first) — published as a Substack article/essay, discoverable via search and Substack's feed. SEO and web formatting matter most. Read references/web-post-formatting.md during Phase 3.

Read the full file on GitHub · 244 lines

Files

What ships with it

7 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 2d ago First seen · 244 lines · 207 tokens per session scan A af9f34bf2f45

Subscribe to this mod's changes

substack-ghostwriting is a skill published in the GitHub repository hssh8917/cc-skills (2 stars, last pushed 2d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 207 tokens to every session and 3,465 once invoked, about $0.0010 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. It is 97% identical to substack-ghostwriting, differing in 2 lines, and is treated as a copy.

Related

Other skills, from other repositories

dingtalk_channel_connect

Use a headed browser to automatically complete DingTalk channel integration for QwenPaw. Applicable when the user mentions DingTalk, developer console, Client ID, Client Secret, bot, Stream mode, binding or configuring a channel. Supports pausing when a login page is detected and resuming after the user logs in.

agentscope-ai/QwenPaw · 69 tokens

pdf

当用户需要对PDF文件进行任何操作时,请使用此技能。包括从 PDF 中读取或提取文本/表格、合并多个 PDF、拆分 PDF、旋转页面、添加水印、创建新PDF、填写PDF表单、加密/解密 PDF、提取图片,以及对扫描版 PDF 进行 OCR 使其可搜索。如果用户提到 .pdf 文件或要求生成 PDF,请使用此技能。.

agentscope-ai/QwenPaw · 95 tokens

make_plan

For external plan request scenarios, guides the Agent to request a clear, actionable, step-by-step plan from a stronger Agent via listagents and chatwithagent, emphasizing that the plan is executed by the requester, not by the consulted Agent.

agentscope-ai/QwenPaw · 51 tokens

browser

Drive a live browser with async Python against QwenPaw's builtin Browser SDK. The full reference is below; re-load this browser skill after context compaction.

agentscope-ai/QwenPaw · 35 tokens

QA_source_index

Maps topics and keywords from user questions to QwenPaw official documentation paths and common source code entry points, reducing blind searching. Intended for the built-in QA Agent to quickly identify which files to read when answering questions about installation, configuration, skills, MCP, multi-agent, memory…

agentscope-ai/QwenPaw · 65 tokens

writing

将共享历史中的已验证事实和计算结果整理成符合受众、格式与长度约束的成稿。.

bojieli/ai-agent-book · 27 tokens