Substack is launching native sponsorships.
"During the pilot, Substack is simply facilitating payments and is not taking a cut."
Hello everyone.
Today’s letter includes: Becca PR’s new president, Hamish McKenzie tells me about Substack’s new ad product, and McNally Jackson shares some exclusive data about their bestselling books of 2025.
Jobs on the Feed Me Job Board includes roles at Perfectly Imperfect, Warby Parker, and Blank Street. Browse and post roles for free, here.
I spent a bit of time this morning looking through holiday party archives to see how it was all going down in a time before Substack and Instagram-bait cakes and sensitivity training.
This story from a December 1996 issue of The New York Times explained how Wall Street consciously celebrated a booming market with Tiffany boxes and $190 bottles of Cristal (that would be about $390 today).
More recently, in 2010, a young Kevin Roose covered Blackstone’s 25th annual holiday bash at the Metropolitan Museum of Art for New York Magazine — “trophy wives in furs, back-office workers talking about the Knicks, fresh-from-Princeton analysts laughing too hard at their bosses’ jokes.”
If you have any fond New York workplace holiday parties you want to reminisce about, see you in the comment section.
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News broke this morning that Brad Lander is planning to launch his bid for Congress.
The Hermès family has quietly been building up Krefeld, their family office. According to Bloomberg, they’ve quietly created a separate company within it, called Breithorn Holding, to handle fund and asset management. The 100+ heirs to the Hermès family fortune reportedly have a combined net worth of $186B, making them the richest family in Europe.
The estate of Grace Mirabella, former editor-in-chief of Vogue, is up for auction at Showplace. It’s unusual that zero publications have announced this yet, especially since there are tons of items up for auction that news editors will go crazy for. We reached out to Michael Grynbaum, the premiere historian of all things Condé Nast, who said he plans to bid on a few pieces himself: “I love the Helmut Newton and Deborah Turbeville prints, and the rare abstract canvases by Alexander Liberman, the legendary Condé editorial director who discovered Avedon and Penn. (Liberman was an accomplished artist in his own right and his work is rarely up for auction.) These handsome bound volumes of Mirabella (attn Library180!) and the vintage Vogues look really fun. If I had to pick just one... maybe this insane Irving Penn photograph of Miss Piggy??”
Exclusive: Comms and strategy firm Becca hired Business of Fashion’s Chief Growth Officer, Rahul Malik. He will be joining the firm in January as President. Becca launched a newsletter called Short Order last month, and I asked CEO Becca Parrish about it. “I’ve long thought there is no definitive ‘required reading’ in the food space, like BoF or Hollywood Reporter. Nothing as stylish or creative or interesting as the people who are in the biz. And we work with so many incredible people, who work so f-ing hard, and love what they do (like I do). Everyone’s too busy to learn from each other, or share what they know, or just get better at understanding the biz.” I’ll be spending the rest of my week convincing the firm to move over to Substack.
Substack is launching a pilot program for native ads. Which means investors in Substack can sleep a bit more soundly tonight. The intent of the new feature is to fill a gap, especially for independent creators who are spending a lot of time coordinating sponsorships on their own. Their comms team told me: “During the pilot, Substack is simply facilitating payments and is not taking a cut. We will shape the long-term structure after we learn from this phase.” One of my biggest unlocks to productivity was bringing on a team to help me sell ads, so I can imagine how helpful this will be to writers on here looking to sell sponsorships. I’m sure other people will view this news as a fundamental change to the quaint newsletter platform this company was a few years ago. I spoke to Substack’s co-founder Hamish McKenzie last night to learn a bit more about how this is all going to work:
Emily: Can you tell us a bit about the brands that are part of the pilot program and how you chose them? How can other brands get involved with being onboarded?
Hamish: “The pilot program includes brands that reached out to us and brands that have previously worked with creators on Substack. The focus is on partners who respect editorial independence, support the creator-first approach of the program, and those who really understand Substack (and may even have a Substack of their own). They know that the best conversations are happening on Substack, and they want to be close to them.”
Emily: You’re starting with a small set of creators for this. When can it be available to everyone?
Hamish: “The goal is to take our time, gather feedback, and refine the model before a larger rollout later next year.
If creators or brands want to be considered for future expansion of the pilot program, they can reach out to sponsorships@substackinc.com.”
Emily: How distracting will these ads be from the reader experience?
Hamish: “This sponsorship program won’t change the look or feel of Substack. In many ways, it reflects what’s already happening organically, since many creators have independently brought in their own sponsorships. This pilot is a test to see if we can build infrastructure that makes the process simpler and more sustainable while keeping subscriptions at the core of the business.
This is not an ads marketplace. These are direct partnerships that creators choose, shape, and approve. Our role is simply to provide infrastructure and support, without influencing editorial content.
Formats will vary by brand and creator, and we are focusing on approaches that help amplify the creator-subscriber relationship by adding meaningful value for subscribers. This could include, for example, occasionally unlocking paywalled posts or introducing perks that complement paid subscriptions.”
Emily: Will sponsorships ever also be available for audio?
Hamish: “During this pilot program, we are focused on written content for now, but we expect to explore additional formats over time.”
The McNally Jackson team told Feed Me that Keith McNally’s memoir, I Regret Almost Everything, was the most consistent bestseller of 2025. Their team emailed me last week wondering if I’d be interested in sharing some data from the last year of their book sales with you all, and I had a feeling you’d be interested:
In less than a month, Patti Smith’s new memoir Bread of Angels outsold every other title, including some that had been on sale all year.
Eight of the top 100 bestsellers were self-help books, and three of those made the top 10: An Almanac of Birds by Maria Popova (#3), The Let Them Theory by Mel Robbins (#8), and Don’t Believe Everything You Think by Joseph Nguyen (#10).
Though technically not categorized as self-help, The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron is #17, and The Creative Act: A Way of Being by Rick Rubin is #31.
Seven books in the Top 100 are romance or romantasy.
Of the top 100 bestsellers of 2025, only 19 were actually released in 2025.
#1 — Bread of Angels by Patti Smith
#2 — I Regret Almost Everything by Keith McNally
#3 — An Almanac of Birds by Maria Popova
#6 — Sunrise on the Reaping by Suzanne Collins
#11 — Onyx Storm by Rebecca Yarros
#13 — Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico
#15 — The Emperor of Gladness by Ocean Vuong
#16 — Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson
#34 — Great Big Beautiful Life by Emily Henry
#48 — Strange Houses by Uketsu, translated by Jim Rion
#56 — Atmosphere by Taylor Jenkins Reid
#65 — One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad
#70 — When the Going Was Good by Graydon Carter
#72 — Audition by Katie Kitamura
#75 — Perfect Victims by Mohammed el-Kurd
#76 — Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams
#77 — Walking New York: Manhattan History on Foot by Keith Taillon
#85 — Vegas by John Gregory Dunne (originally published in 1974)
#100 — Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza by Peter Beinart
While we’re talking estate sales: Selima Salaun, the fashion-favorite optician beloved by Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy and Lady Gaga, is selling her archives online. If you’ve visited her flagship store on Bond Street, you’ll know that Selima is one of those singular New Yorkers who collects everything: you might go there for an eye exam or to buy a pair of Selima sunglasses, and leave with a vintage Saint Laurent jacket from her basement (where she keeps an archive of Hedi Slimane’s designs), a teacup from her huge collection of antique china, a pair of vintage Persols, or a book that she thinks you’ll like so she offers it to you for free.
The Golden Globes nominations for their first ever “Best Podcast” award are out. We asked Vulture’s podcast critic Nicholas Quah how he felt about podcasters finally getting their award show flowers. He said he found that question funny, given that “most of the nominees are already celebrities who could’ve gotten nominations elsewhere at the Globes” (Amy Poehler, Dax Shepard, the Smartless guys).
Jake and Logan Paul’s Anti Fund just raised $30mm. It’s pretty incredible that they’re in the Ramp seed round (they got in during Ramp’s Miami chapter) and Ramp is worth over $30B now. Just a reminder that you can be a Stanford GSB grad with a perfect cohort model, but it doesn’t matter if a frequently-punched YouTuber can get into the round and you can’t.
Best office party (I think holiday): my old firm taking over MOMA I think about 15 years ago. I was able to be alone in silence with some of the collection for a while. Perhaps antisocial of me but it was a unique opportunity.
I’m curious what incentive brands have to go through Substack and have them broker ad placements when brands can just reach out to writers directly, as they’ve already been doing, per Hamish. We shall see!