Ryan Williamson Marketing

Google Can’t Find Your Substack (and Neither Can Anyone Else)

After fifteen weeks on Substack, I’ve got little over a hundred subscribers and some hard data about what doesn’t work. Google can’t index your content. Twitter censors your links. The platform’s discovery algorithm favors paid newsletters, leaving free publications invisible. I tried everything—Search Console setup, manual indexing, strategic tagging, Notes engagement. Result? Minimal improvement. These aren’t problems you can solve with better optimization. They’re fundamental platform limitations. If you’re driving 100% of your own traffic anyway, why accept a platform that actively prevents growth? I’ve migrated everything to my own site. Here’s why.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Ryan Williamson Satire

I Think I Can, Therefore I Oppress

This weekend, I’m honored to host Dr. K. N. Rosenberg-Chen (Evergreen State College, Gender Studies) for a searing takedown of The Little Engine That Could. What you thought was an innocent story about perseverance? Dr. Rosenberg-Chen reveals it as “bootstrap pedagogy for toddlers”—a masterclass in teaching children that disability is moral failure, that saying “I cannot” is shameful, and that masculine worth requires self-destruction. Packed with citations from Butler, hooks, McRuer, and Kafer, this review exposes how we’ve been training two-year-olds in toxic masculinity and ableist ideology for nearly a century. Buckle up—this locomotive is going off the rails.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Ryan Williamson Marketing

Dr. Strangelink or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Algorithmic Suppression

I dutifully hid my links in self-replies in Twitter for years like every social media guru recommends. Then I actually tested it. Tracked impressions, clicks, click-through-rates across multiple posts. The results? Original posts with links drove almost 1.5x the traffic to my blog or Amazon page despite the algorithm penalty. Why? Because two out of three people never expand threads to see your link. Everyone’s been optimizing CTR while ignoring basic human behavior: people scroll, they don’t read replies. The algorithm suppresses links by ~30%. Hiding them in replies loses two-thirds of your audience. The math is simple. The common wisdom is backwards.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Ryan Williamson Satire

The Road to Serfdom Starts at Bedtime

In 1947, Margaret Wise Brown published what would become the most successful piece of Marxist propaganda ever smuggled into American homes. Goodnight Moon has sold 48 million copies, conditioning generations of children to accept central planning, reject property rights, and submit to authority without question. The great green room is a command economy in miniature. The quiet old lady is a bureaucratic enforcer. The ritual teaches learned helplessness. As someone who’s endured this book nightly for eighteen months, my good friend Scott finally decoded its insidious message. Fair warning: once you see it, you can’t unsee it.

Ryan Williamson Politics

The Perfect Specimen

A couple days after publishing “The Price of Reform,” someone calling themselves “El Bearsidente” sent me 500 words of fury attempting to refute my documentation of dangerous rhetoric patterns. He accused me of ignoring the left, betraying conservatism, and being like Eichmann. Then he suggested I’m so unhinged I might “Charlie Kirk” my own family—proving my entire thesis about dehumanizing language in a single sentence. It was like watching someone angrily insist “I DON’T HAVE AN ANGER PROBLEM” while punching holes in drywall. Sometimes critics hand you exactly the evidence you need.

Ryan Williamson On Writing

Ripping the Guardrails off Literary Genre Fiction

If content warnings function as marketing copy for you rather than deal-breakers, keep reading. I write dark, pulse-pounding literary genre fiction where characters fail people they love, moral complexity doesn’t resolve into easy answers, and consequences are permanent. Jasmine survives sex trafficking with sarcasm intact. First-to-Dance carries trauma that doesn’t heal. Lenaja wakes screaming from nightmares of the woman whose consciousness she erased. No feel-good redemption arcs. No narrative assurance that everything happens for a reason. No lectures on how to think. Just hard questions, intellectual complexity, and stories compared to Gene Wolfe and N.K. Jemisin. Fair warning: guardrails are off.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Ryan Williamson Politics

The Price of Reform

Two weeks before Charlie Kirk’s assassination, I documented the rhetoric that historically precedes mass violence. When the crisis hit on September 10th, I watched the pattern activate exactly as predicted, grief weaponized into apocalyptic framing, half the country painted as existential threats. I refused to give them a grief exception. Four days later, my publisher cancelled my five-book contract. This is the timeline, these are the receipts, this is what it costs to document dangerous patterns when your own tribe demands you look away—and why I’d do it again.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Ryan Williamson Politics

This We’ll Defend

I raised my right hand in January 1994 and swore to defend the Constitution with my life. That oath didn’t expire. Now I’m watching domestic enemies dismantle it while calling themselves patriots. Federal troops in American cities despite courts finding no justification. Judges called “corrupt” for doing their job. The three-phase authoritarian playbook: delegitimize Congress, delegitimize courts, elevate the executive. My son serves under that flag. The same flag these bastards wrap themselves in while tearing apart everything it represents. This isn’t political disagreement. This is constitutional demolition at speed.

Ryan Williamson Commentary

You Were Made for One Purpose

Deep in the ocean’s crushing darkness, male anglerfish are born with a single purpose: find a female and bite down. What happens next is biological horror—teeth fuse, tissues merge, and the male dissolves into her flesh. His eyes cloud. His brain shrinks. He becomes a living appendage, nothing more than tissue and gonads feeding on her blood. Evolution doesn’t care about dignity or selfhood. It only cares that genes survive. But if we’re all just meat puppets dancing to genetic strings, where does that leave human freedom—and the soul?​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Ryan Williamson Commentary

When Motherhood Destroys Everything You Are

Every mother knows the moment she looks in the mirror and sees a stranger. The woman she was is gone. The woman she’s becoming hasn’t formed yet. In my novel *Immortal*, I explore that identity destruction at impossible scale—a warrior with amnesia discovers she’s pregnant with a genetically impossible child. Her body becomes proof that a three-thousand-year empire is built on lies. All she wants is to disappear and be a mother. But her pregnancy is prophecy, her daughter the True Heir to a stolen throne, and her womb is political property.