20 Agents Open for Queries Right Now
Where to Query This Week (6.18.25) | Plus, how to maintain a weekly Substack while writing a novel
Welcome to Sub Club’s Where to Query This Week!
Trying to write a novel and keep up with your Substack? Same! This week,
, author of dear diary—an online journal here on Substack—shares an essay that offers smart, honest advice on staying consistent with your newsletter while still showing up for your biggest creative goals. You can do both!
Finding Balance: How To Maintain a Weekly Substack While Writing a Novel
About four months into drafting my novel, I started a Substack. This was both an earnest, enthusiastic effort to grow as a writer and also a desperate bid for external validation. After all, I’d been holed up, working on a book-length project no one would read for years. It was lonely! I had things to say! I wanted attention!
Maintaining a newsletter provided more meaning than I expected. Writing weekly posts helped me hone my style, build community, and even share work that scared me (in a good way). I vibrated with excitement before hitting “Publish”—real human beings were reading my work in real time, which I now understood was a luxury.
Then, I noticed my daily manuscript word count dwindle. I was torn. I didn’t want to give up Substack, but in my gut, I knew it was the hot young thing distracting me from my True Love: the novel.
Something had to change.
To keep up my weekly newsletter while preserving the creative energy necessary for a long-term project, I adopted a few ground rules. For those of you in the same boat, here are my favorite tips.
Keep your newsletter short
Let’s start off super easy and actionable. Shorten that newsletter! This way, you can devote most of your weekly writing time to your novel (or any other long-term project you consider your personal True Love). When drafting on Substack’s post editor, check out your newsletter’s reading time by hovering over the “Post Info” button in the bottom left corner. I aim to keep it between 5 to 7 minutes.
Keep your newsletter simple
The concept of my newsletter, dear diary, is simple: a fiction writer’s online journal. This broad positioning helps set expectations for readers. They quickly understand that posts will be written in a casual voice, and that they’ll be feelings-driven, not research-driven. Don’t get me wrong, writers who bring references and citations to their posts are amazing, but that takes a lot of time to curate! To keep up with Substack while regularly working on your long-term project, you need to optimize your time. Brain energy related to research and analysis goes toward my novel.
Keep your newsletter fun
Plot! Character! Timeline! Structure! You’ve got a lot running through your head as you delicately weave your novel into being. You probably don’t have time to come up with intricate or flashy newsletter topics.
This one’s maybe my best tip: Make your newsletter a space for creative play and use it to write whatever you want. I’ve managed to publish my Substack weekly because I genuinely enjoy writing it. When you write about what you’re interested in, the process becomes easy. You arrive at your computer in an excited, curious state. You’re eager to spend this time with yourself, which supports deep flow and focus. Suddenly, your Substack seems to take care of itself without demanding too much of you. The creative spaciousness needed for your True Love remains intact.
For me, writing whatever I want means taking a moment each week to reflect on what’s been showing up in my internal world. What caught my attention? What am I ruminating on? What’s been bugging me, and what do I want to talk about with anyone who will listen? Answering these questions provides a wellspring of simple topics that you’ll actually want to show up for.
Keep your eye on the true prize
External validation feels so good, especially because it lies in contrast with the slow, often private process of working on a book. Between views, likes, comments, and New Subscriber! emails, your Substack may provide a bounty of weekly dopamine hits (or what-the-hell-am-I-doing spirals, but I suppose that’s another column). It took me an embarrassingly long time to realize that, at the end of the day, Substack is really just a glorified social media platform. We need to be aware of this dynamic so we aren’t pulled into its illusion of importance.
This is where I tap back into the reasons I’m committed to my novel.
Ask yourself: Why have you chosen to commit to your project? If it’s not already, how can you make your project insatiably interesting to you? What’s still left to discover? What matters more to you than likes and subscribers? For me, the rewards of Substack feel like fool’s gold compared to the steady, soul-expanding satisfaction I get from working on my novel.
I don’t claim to have cracked the universal code, but since reorganizing my time and attention, I’ve sent out fifteen months of weekly newsletters while staying on track to query my novel at the beginning of next year. If you think I’m out of my mind for posting weekly, you might be right! These tips are applicable to any writer, publishing at any frequency, struggling to balance their creative endeavors. With intention, we can have fun on Substack and still keep the focus on nurturing our True Love.
Lindsey Peters Berg is a writer based in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Her fiction has appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review: Mixtape, Okay Donkey, Rejection Letters, and others. She keeps an online journal called dear diary and is currently writing a novel about marriage, queerness, sex, and hyperpop. Find her at lindseypetersberg.com and on IG @lindspetersberg.
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20 Agents Open for Queries Right Now
This week, we’re doing something a little different. Below is a list of agents currently open to submissions across all genres: from fiction and nonfiction to YA, memoir, thrillers, fantasy, and more.
If you’re querying and want a curated list specially made for your manuscript AND help with your query letter, be sure to check out my Personal Agent List service!
»» Get your own agent list here ««
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