The Indie Lab
Marcin PilarczykBusiness intelligence for self-publishing indie authors. Most of what I publish here is free. Paid subscribers get the frameworks, prompts, and tools behind every post.
| Platform |  | Pricing | Freemium | Publishes | Daily |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Issues | 79 | Founded | 6 months ago | Last Issue | 39 hours ago |
| Active | |||||
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aifictionlab.substack.comLatest Issues
When AI Starts Feeling Your Book, Everything Changes
Let me tell you the thing no one in the “use AI for your writing” space wants to say out loud:
AI cannot replace a beta-reader right now. Not really.
The Indie Lab is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my wor...
Your Email List Isn’t Dead. It’s Just Being Ignored.
The most common thing I hear from authors who’ve been at this for more than a year: “I have a list, but I never really use it.”
Maybe you built it off a reader magnet in 2022. Maybe you sent a few launch emails, got distracted by the next...
Your Book Isn’t Failing. Your Marketing Is.
The book didn’t fail. You just never told anyone it existed.
That’s an uncomfortable sentence for most authors to sit with. We spend months – sometimes years – writing, editing, revising, polishing. The book becomes a person to us. So when...
Newsletter Swaps: The Free Growth Strategy Some Indie Authors Are Missing
Half the indie authors at any given virtual conference have never done one. Some of the people selling $500 email marketing courses haven’t either. Newsletter swaps – two authors, one email each, recommending each other’s books on the same...
I Formatted Books in Microsoft Word. Then I Found Atticus.
I still remember staring at a PDF export from Microsoft Word at 11 PM, watching the chapter headers float three millimeters off-center on every other page, somehow, despite the fact that I had not touched them. The book was supposed to go l...
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Authors
The writers behind this newsletter.
Laid off twice. Built a sci-fi portfolio. Sold 8,131 copies in 2025. Now I document what actually works on Amazon – in real time. Most of what I publish here is free. Paid subscribers get the tools and prompts behind the posts.
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