Good morning. Next Tuesday is Election Day in the US. For those of us not caught up in the heated NYC mayoral race, this is a friendly reminder to check your voter registration status here and cast your ballot in local elections.

— Hannah Doyle & Syd Cohen

“Eight streamers. Millions of followers. No racing experience. Perfect.”

NASCAR is partnering with digital management company Night to launch the NASCAR 25 Creator Series, a livestreamed e-racing event featuring eight streamers and gaming creators.

Zoom in: Between now and February, pairs of streamers—including Emiru, Agent00, and CouRageJD—will compete in four online, simulated races for a $100K grand prize. The competition will stream on both the creators’ and NASCAR’s Twitch channels. 

NASCAR’s play? Leverage creators to connect with online viewers. The org’s viewership is up 30% on Twitch and 45% on Discord over the last year. NASCAR’s Roblox game has been played over 35 million times since its launch in February, and the NASCAR race tracks in Fortnite have topped the player charts.

Big picture: With ratings on a steady decline since the early 2000s, NASCAR is taking a page out of other sports orgs’ creator playbooks—Amelia Dimoldenberg recently partnered with F1 on a YouTube video series and Good Good teamed up with the PGA Tour as a title sponsor. Could this creator-focused campaign be NASCAR’s ticket to a new generation?

Startup founders launch companies while getting MBAs. Do creators join incubators while building their brands? BookTok creator Morgann Book has joined the 2025 class of the Hello Sunshine Collective, a creator incubator program through actor Reese Witherspoon’s media company.

Quick recap: In March, Book launched Bookish Media, a content and production company that adapts book IP into shows and movies. It also publishes a podcast and newsletter and hosts a book club.

Through the incubator, Book will learn from Hello Sunshine execs about its business operations, including its own successful book club and film adaptation arm. FYI: Hello Sunshine sold to a Blackstone-backed media company in 2021 for $900 million.

“The collective offers great mentorship where they’re helping me continue to build my own brand. They’re down with Bookish Media, my book club, my newsletter,” Book told us. “It also gives me some added credibility as a thought leader in the book world—it’s always great to elevate my name beyond ‘influencer.’”

In exchange for mentorship, Book will collaborate with Hello Sunshine across its content properties including Reese’s Book Club and The Brightside podcast. Book joins creators Brooke Johnson and Ashton Lansdell as part of the year-long program, which has run since 2023.

Zoom out: When creators launch businesses, they can navigate it alone—or they can get help through investment and education. Incubators like Hello Sunshine’s Collective give creators another avenue for business education, using content as currency.

Patreon is improving its newsletter capabilities, adding features to help audio and video creators expand into a new medium.

With the update, creators can →

The creator POV: Anne Helen Petersen of Culture Study—a Substack newsletter with over 400K followers—switched to Patreon following this update. In the past, Substack has targeted Patreon creators with its Creator Accelerator Program, promising participants 120% of their Patreon revenue.

👋 Hannah here! LA creators, this one’s for you. I’m hosting a fireside chat with longtime art creator Amanda Rach Lee next Wednesday, November 5, at The Lighthouse in Venice.

We’ll talk about how she built her Shop ARL stationery brand, get the deets on her business operations, and learn the key to building a lasting creator career. RSVP here.