Speakers with Substacks we're reading

Speakers with Substacks give you one of the best free samples of voice you will get before a booking. You see how someone thinks, how they build an argument and whether they can hold attention on the page, all before you commit them to a stage.

Why read speakers with Substacks before you book them?

A newsletter shows you a speaker unedited and on a schedule. You get their real range of topics, their actual voice, and evidence they can hold an audience week after week rather than for one rehearsed hour. It is the cheapest due diligence available to an event organiser, and it costs nothing but an email address.

It also gives you something to brief from. A recent post is a far better starting point for a scoping call than a bio, because it tells you what the speaker is thinking about right now. If you are shaping a programme from scratch, our guide on how to raise the bar with keynote speakers covers the rest of the process, and leveraging insights from business guest speakers looks at what to do with the material afterwards.

These speakers on the PepTalk roster all write newsletters we read (and love!) Here they are, and here's why we read them.

Stephanie Melodia

Hacking Luck · Read it

Stephanie is the former CEO of the award-winning marketing consultancy Bloom, ranked among the UK's Top 20 Female Founders, and now works as a founder coach and MBA mentor. Her signature keynote, Hacking Luck, pairs hundreds of firsthand data points from entrepreneurship with Nobel Prize-winning behavioural research on how opportunity actually gets created.

Her Substack extends that thinking. Stephanie treats luck as a skill you can practise, and the newsletter shows the working behind the framework. She also hosts the Strategy & Tragedy podcast, where CEOs talk through the decisions that nearly finished them, so there's a steady supply of real founder material behind the writing.

⮕ Learn more and book Stephanie Melodia as a speaker.

Anita Bhagwandas

The Powder Room · Read it

Anita is an award-winning journalist writing for The Guardian, Vogue and Elle, and the author of UGLY: Why the world became beauty-obsessed, and how to break free. The Powder Room lands on Fridays and covers beauty culture, beauty standards and the industry that profits from both, with around 7,300 subscribers.

She writes about beauty as a commercial system with a history, which makes the newsletter useful well beyond the beauty sector. Anyone programming around consumer behaviour, inclusion or brand trust will find something in it they can use on stage.

Learn more and book Anita Bhagwandas as a speaker.

Jess Ramos

Big Data Energy · Read it

Jess is a senior data analyst turned educator and LinkedIn Learning instructor. Recent posts run from "Mastering CTEs in SQL" and "Structured vs Unstructured Data" through to "Why your data strategy is your AI strategy" and "From $5/hour to $153K to fired".

She writes technical content that a non-technical reader can finish, which is a rare combination and the same reason she works in front of a mixed corporate audience where half the room codes and half the room doesn't.

Learn more and book Jess Ramos as a speaker.

Abi Adamson

Culture Blooming · Read it

Abi is a workplace culture consultant whose book, Culture Blooming, is published by Penguin Random House. Recent headlines from the newsletter include "Your Culture Lives in the Conversations That Stop When HR Walks In" and "Your Culture Isn't Inclusive If People With Disabilities Have to Exhaust Themselves Proving They Belong".

She names the specific behaviours that make or break a culture, which is far more useful to an HR or leadership team than another set of values on a wall. She writes the way she speaks, direct and evidenced.

Learn more and book Abi Adamson as a speaker.

Cien Solon

Cien and AI · Read it

Cien is the founder of LaunchLemonade, on a mission to make sure no one gets left behind in the time of AI agents. She builds AI transformation strategies for companies worldwide and runs adoption workshops for teams, and she has earned the nickname "prompt queen" along the way.

Her newsletter covers AI at the level people actually work at: prompting frameworks, agent design, and what changes about a job when the tooling changes. Practical rather than predictive, which is what most audiences want by now. If that's the brief, our guide to AI adoption speakers covers the wider roster.

Learn more and book Cien Solon as a speaker.

Dr Emily Leeming PhD RD

Second Brain · Read it

Emily is a registered dietitian and former chef who now researches nutrition and the gut microbiome at King's College London. Her stated aim with Second Brain is to help readers focus on what actually matters for their health so they can get on with everything else.

She filters an enormous amount of noisy nutrition science down to what the evidence supports. If you run wellbeing programming, she is one of the few voices who will tell an audience what to ignore as clearly as what to adopt. Second Brain has more than 39,000 subscribers so it's clearly popular!

Learn more and book Dr Emily Leeming PhD RD as a speaker.

Erifili Gounari

Crystal Clear · Read it

Erifili is the founder and CEO of The Z Link, a Forbes 30 Under 30 honouree, a LinkedIn Top Voice and a soon-to-be published author. Crystal Clear is her essay newsletter on designing a happy life, self-belief, agency and creativity, with tens of thousands of subscribers.

She is a Gen Z founder writing for a Gen Z readership at scale, which is exactly the audience most organisations are trying to understand from the outside. Reading her is faster than commissioning a report on it.

Learn more and book Erifili Gounari as a speaker.

Kimberley Wilson

Food & Psych · Read it

Kimberley is a chartered psychologist with a master's in nutrition, a Great British Bake Off finalist, the author of How to Build a Healthy Brain and Unprocessed, and host of the Stronger Minds podcast. Food & Psych is free and weekly, covering psychology, brain health and brain nutrition.

She is explicit that she deals in science-backed, psychologically informed research and skips the pop psychology entirely. She shows her sources, and she is happy to say when the evidence is thin.

Learn more and book Kimberley Wilson as a speaker.

Nick Butter

That Runner Guy · Read it

Nick is the first person to have run a marathon in every country in the world... And That Runner Guy is weekly and covers training, endurance, travel, philosophy and the reality of building a sports travel business. Paid subscribers get downloadable training programmes and live Zoom coaching calls.

The adventure stories are the draw, and the writing on motivation and perspective is the part that stays with you afterwards. It reads as a good preview of how Nick handles a resilience keynote.

Learn more and book Nick Butter as a speaker.

The Tempest Two

The Tempest Two · Read it

James Whittle writes the newsletter for the adventure duo behind a decade of expeditions. The stated mission is helping people reach their full potential by removing the word "can't", and it runs alongside a podcast and a YouTube channel.

The writing carries the same energy as the keynote, and the Adventure Capital strand is genuinely interesting on what endurance teaches you about business decisions.

Learn more and book The Tempest Two to speak.

Will Poskett

Behind The Brand · Read it

Will is an award-winning brand strategist and the founder of the agency Defiant. Behind The Brand is weekly, mixing strategy frameworks with honest conversations with the people running the most interesting brands around, and it has tens of thousands of subscribers.

He builds each issue around a real case, so you get the reasoning as well as the result. Posts like "Brand is your last defensible moat" are the kind of thing marketing teams forward to each other.

Learn more and book Will Poskett as a speaker.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why do so many speakers write on Substack?

Substack lets a speaker publish directly to an audience they own, without a publisher or a platform algorithm in between. For working speakers it doubles as a public archive of their thinking, which is why so many of them use it to develop the material that later becomes a keynote or a book.

Can you book a speaker from their Substack?

Not usually through the newsletter itself. Most speakers handle enquiries through an agent or a bureau. Every speaker on this page is available through PepTalk, so you can read their writing first and then send us the brief.

Which of these Substacks suit a corporate audience?

Jess Ramos, Will Poskett, Abi Adamson and Cien Solon write closest to the working day, covering data, brand, workplace culture and AI adoption. Kimberley Wilson and Dr Emily Leeming fit wellbeing programming, and Nick Butter and The Tempest Two suit conference and away-day keynotes on resilience.

How do you use a Substack to brief a speaker?

Pick two or three recent posts that match your theme and send them over with the brief. It gives the speaker a clear steer on which part of their material you want, and it saves a scoping call spent working out what they cover.

💡 Would you like to book one of these speakers for your next event? Let us know, and we will find the perfect PepTalk expert for your organisation. Email us at hello@getapeptalk.com or send us a message via the chat. You can also call us on +44 20 3835 2929 (UK) or +1 737 888 5112 (US). Remember, it’s always a good time to get a PepTalk!