Black Friday prep for adult creators starts with Halloween
Blog Post Written By: Melrose Michaels
My best holiday week ever brought in $16k in sales, and it landed over Halloween, which also happens to be my birthday. The size of that number is not what made it useful to me though. What made it useful is that I could hold it up against a normal week and see exactly which parts of that campaign did the earning.
Black Friday is November 27 this year (2026), which puts 4 weeks between Halloween and the biggest shopping weekend on the calendar. Those 4 weeks are the most valuable planning time you get all quarter, and most of us burn them reacting to whatever is on fire.
Halloween is the rehearsal and Black Friday is the show for adult creators. Everything I published this week runs on that one idea.
The 6 day countdown, in short
Most creators post one costume photo on the 31st and call that their holiday. A countdown instead gives a fan a reason to open your DMs every single day of the week, and the costume at the end does not need to be expensive to work.
The whole week runs off 3 sets you shoot in advance. A fake costume look that is deliberately not the one you reveal, a late night in the dark sexting set that carries no seasonal markers at all, and your real costume look. That middle set is the one I would shoot first, because nothing about it is tied to Halloween and you can run it with any fan at any point in the year.
From there the rest of the week takes on a shape. A trick or treat opener in DMs that rewards anybody who replies with something free, a flirty would you rather that needs no content whatsoever, a costume teaser where fans buy hints and guesses at a look that turns out to be a decoy, a spooky sexting drip, a flash sale to pull new subscribers in before the big day, and then the reveal itself built as a target post.
I walk through all 6 days in this video, including the exact captions, why the hint prices need to stay low, and the social proof trick on that reveal post that gets your fans selling to each other. The "20 haunted would you rather questions" and the full "sexting drip outline" are sitting inside CEO Society for free.
How to tell a good week from a busy one
Here is where most of us lose the value of a holiday entirely. The money comes in, we move straight to the next thing, and when the next holiday arrives we are guessing all over again.
A big earnings number on its own cannot tell you whether to run any of it again. You need a normal week to hold it against, which means writing down what your baseline actually looks like. How many mass messages you usually send, roughly how many fans buy something, how many real conversations happen in your DMs.
Then pick your 3 or 4 numbers before the holiday rather than after it. After a big weekend you will be drawn to whatever number feels good, and choosing them in advance is how you read the outcome honestly instead of generously.
Go play by play and ask the same 3 things of each one. What did it earn directly, who answered or participated, and who bought from you for the very first time. Say your decoy costume teaser went to 200 fans, 40 unlocked the first hint, 25 made it to the third, and 6 of those had never bought anything from you before. Each of those numbers is telling you something different about what happened.
The part worth sitting with is that every play has its own definition of working. The trick or treat opener was built to wake up cold fans, so judging it on unlocks misses the point entirely. A sexting drip tells you where fans stop paying, which is information you cannot get any other way. A flash sale cannot be judged on the day after the holiday at all, because a subscriber count is a promise and the payment arrives 30 days later when that discounted sub either renews or does not.
I go through every play and what to measure in this week's podcast, including how to tell whether your reveal video sold itself or whether your own fans sold it for you.
The number that decides who you message first
Write down everybody who participated rather than only the people who paid. The fans who guessed in your comments and played along with the games want a role in what you are doing, and that is a different and more durable thing than a single purchase.
Then find the one number that matters more than your revenue total, which is how many fans bought from you for the first time during Halloween week. A fan who has never spent a dollar with you is the hardest sale you will ever make, and a fan who has spent $5 once is far likelier to spend again. Your first time buyers and your participants are the 2 lists your Black Friday messages should hit first, and you already know what each of them liked.
That is also where the newsletter picks this up, because concentration is the quiet risk underneath all of it. Plenty of creators are carried by somewhere between 3 and 10 whales, and a roster of around 200 engaged fans spending $5 or $10 or under $50 a month is a far steadier business than that. I get into why in this week's newsletter, along with the personalized message I would send an engaged fan on Black Friday instead of a generic sale blast.
The participatory fan is also the one who gifts you, which matters a great deal with gifting season about to start. If somebody is commenting on everything and playing every game you run, a wish list gives that fan somewhere to put the impulse, and Spoil Me even built a Halloween edit into the app for adding costumes to yours.
If you are too deep in survival mode for any of this
I spent years moving straight on to the next thing without ever looking back at what worked, so I am not going to pretend the analysis is the hard part. The hard part is that creators in survival mode have no time to do it.
The newsletter lays out the fix I use, which is buying yourself a 2 week hiatus on purpose. Daily scheduled mass DMs with a locked PPV, feed posts you already have being reused as billboards rather than revenue, and your filming batched into a month of content in a single predictable rhythm.
What you come out with is a 30 day runway, enough breathing room to actually read your own data, and a baseline you can plan the rest of the quarter against, and GPTease will build the content calendar and script the videos if you are short on time or ideas.
What ties all three together
A holiday is only expensive if you learn nothing from it. By the end of this year I want you holding a short list of plays you know your fans respond to, so the next holiday is a matter of swapping the captions and the theme rather than starting from scratch at midnight.
Halloween is the first page of that playbook, and the 4 weeks in front of you are where the show gets better. That only works if you actually sit down and read the rehearsal.
It's time
Spend an hour with your numbers while the week is still fresh. Write what each play earned, who answered it, and who bought for the first time, then sort every play into repeat, change or drop.
Then open your calendar and work backwards from November 27. What needs shooting and by when, how long editing takes you, which messages you can write and schedule right now instead of in 3 weeks when you have no time left.
PS: Come compare notes with the rest of us inside CEO Society, which is free, because we all learn faster watching what worked for each other.
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