substack-ghostwriting

substack-ghostwriting is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from samber/cc-skills. It costs 207 tokens per session (3,463 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A writing aid for creating Substack newsletters and web articles, including ghostwritten pieces that match another person's voice. Substack is a publishing service that sends newsletters by email and also hosts posts online.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to draft or improve newsletter issues and web posts, plan Notes and search-friendly content, and develop growth or monetization plans.
Why use it?
It helps turn ideas into content suited to Substack's email, web, and discovery features. It also reduces the work of matching a client's voice and planning subscriber growth, search visibility, and paid content.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Part of the cc-skills plugin — 21 skills shipped together

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

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Or install cc-skills, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 21 skills.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for substack-ghostwriting

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/samber/cc-skills/substack-ghostwriting.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/samber/cc-skills/substack-ghostwriting)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/samber/cc-skills/substack-ghostwriting"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/samber/cc-skills/substack-ghostwriting.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 207 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 3,463 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin original No closer match found 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 $0.03463
Opus 5 $0.00103 $0.01732
Sonnet 5 $0.00041 $0.00693
Haiku 4.5 $0.00021 $0.00346

Measured 3d ago against content hash c16437af0b8f, 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 3d 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

Copies of this mod

1 near-identical copy found in the catalogue:

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. 3d ago First seen · 244 lines · 207 tokens per session scan A c16437af0b8f

Subscribe to this mod's changes

substack-ghostwriting is a skill published in the GitHub repository samber/cc-skills (198 stars, last pushed 3d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 207 tokens to every session and 3,463 once invoked, about $0.0010 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

Related

Other skills, from other repositories

golang-testing

Production-ready Golang tests — table-driven tests, testify suites and mocks, parallel tests, fuzzing, fixtures, goroutine leak detection with goleak, snapshot testing, code coverage, integration tests, idiomatic test naming. Use when writing or reviewing Go tests, choosing a testing approach, setting up Go test CI…

samber/cc-skills-golang · 115 tokens

golang-benchmark

Golang benchmarking, profiling, and performance measurement. Use when writing, running, or comparing Go benchmarks, profiling hot paths with pprof, interpreting CPU/memory/trace profiles, analyzing results with benchstat, setting up CI benchmark regression detection, or investigating production performance with…

samber/cc-skills-golang · 104 tokens

golang-continuous-integration

GitHub Actions CI/CD pipeline configuration for Golang projects — workflow files for test, lint, SAST, coverage and vulnerability-scan jobs, Dependabot and Renovate config files, GoReleaser release pipelines, Docker build/push, repository security settings, and AI-driven PR review. Use when setting up or improving Go…

samber/cc-skills-golang · 181 tokens

golang-dependency-injection

Comprehensive guide for dependency injection (DI) in Golang. Covers why DI matters (testability, loose coupling, separation of concerns, lifecycle management), manual constructor injection, and DI library comparison (google/wire, uber-go/dig, uber-go/fx, samber/do). Use this skill when designing service architecture…

samber/cc-skills-golang · 182 tokens

golang-design-patterns

Idiomatic Golang design patterns — functional options, constructor APIs, init() and global-state avoidance, enums, panic vs error decisions, resource management and lifecycle, graceful shutdown, timeouts and retries, streaming and iterators, and architecture styles (clean, hexagonal, DDD, flat). Apply when choosing…

samber/cc-skills-golang · 169 tokens

golang-documentation

Comprehensive documentation guide for Golang projects, covering godoc comments, README, CONTRIBUTING, CHANGELOG, Go Playground, Example tests, API docs, and llms.txt. Use when writing or reviewing doc comments, documentation, adding code examples, setting up doc sites, or discussing documentation best practices.…

samber/cc-skills-golang · 77 tokens