Attention Economy is a newsletter about book publishing and internet culture
I’m an elder millennial who joined my first online community—a listserv fan club for Francesca Lia Block—in the late 1990s. I started publishing poetry and short fiction on Livejournal in the early 2000s.
I owe my writing career to the internet and now I try to help mid-career authors stay relevant in a competitive industry.
In this newsletter, I share writing advice on plot structure and your book’s designing principle, insights into novel marketing and what not to post on social, and analysis of what makes content different from art.
“You’ve been a guiding light in the mind boggling process of selling and publishing a book 🙏 “
—Emma Pattee, author of Tilt
If you’re a reader, but not a professional writer, I also publish essays that combine cultural criticism with personal narrative:
The Crack-Up (on Lena Dunham and F. Scott Fitzgerald)
Masturbation on the moors (Emerald Fennel’s Wuthering Heights)
“Truly brilliant.”
—Nora McInerny, memoirist and host of Thanks for Asking
I’ve worked in the publishing industry since 2008 and I’m one of the few publishing experts who is a working writer.
I’m best known for my novel Self Care, a scathing satire of the wellness industry and girlboss feminism that came out in 2020.
My most recent novel is If You’re Seeing This, It’s Meant for You, a Gothic suspense in the vein of Rebecca, about an aging millennial woman who reluctantly accepts a job managing a group of gen z content creators in a crumbling Los Angeles mansion—but one of the influencers has gone missing from the house. Kirkus calls it “surreal and bingeable” and LitHub says: “Leigh Stein [has] cemented herself as a satirist of Our Present Moment. Turns out nothing is scarier than the influence machine.”
