So that’s where our episode of The Creative Penn Podcast starts: why a writer would want power in the first place. Writers get told we’re not allowed to want it. We’re supposed to be starving artists, grateful for anything that comes our way because we get to make our art. When I was coming up in Hollywood, all of us were being funneled into the gatekeepers’ vision for our careers, and that meant handing over our power. The book is about taking it back.

Joanna was one of the original indie authors, back when self-publishing was still called vanity press, so this was a fun one. Here’s the full episode:

💡 Listen on Apple Podcasts

It’s also on Spotify, and Joanna’s show notes and a full transcript are on her site.

👑 From starving artist to creator CEO

I never wanted to be a business person. No spreadsheets, no accounting. But if you want a say in what your cover looks like, how your book is marketed, and when it comes out, that comes with the rest of running the business.

Here’s what made it worth it to me. Sell a book to a reader who likes your work, and your royalty can go from 10, 20 or 30 percent to as much as 70 percent, because you took on the CEO cap. The number of books you need to sell to have a beautiful life as a writer drops immediately. And instead of waiting two years for a book to come out, I wait six months and pick exactly how it enters the world.

🔁 The 3 income streams that feed each other

The income streams in Write for Money and Power are my own: freelancing, a paid newsletter, and book royalties. What I love about this trio is that each one funds the next.

A paid newsletter audience pays a subscription, then buys your book the day it comes out and becomes your early readers. That community is the proof point for your freelance services (so many novelists I know offer developmental editing on the side). And the freelance money funds your next book launch, or buys you more time to write here on Substack.

It’s an alternative to the day job we’ve all assumed writers need. And unlike a following on Instagram or TikTok, you keep every email address and take the list with you from platform to platform.

📖 The serial math, and the readers it built

When you sell a single book, you’re usually making about $6 to $7 of profit, depending on how you publish. A Substack priced at around $8 a month out-earns that the moment a reader stays subscribed past the first month.

The math is why I started serializing Let Me Be Your Ghost here on Sutoscience. What surprised me is who showed up. Readers have emailed me since the first chapters went out, telling me what they loved and what they’d change. They’ve found me beta readers, championed the book to their friends, and were first in line when preorders opened. I’m serializing what is essentially a rough draft, and thousands of chapter views later, those readers are helping me make the finished book the best it can be.

🧭 Getting traction from zero

Joanna pushed back, fairly. A lot of writers are arriving on what is now a crowded platform, posting a few chapters, and finding nobody there. Here’s what I told her.

Most of my subscribers, paid and total, come from Substack itself. Recommendations, the algorithm that suggests you when someone subscribes to a similar publication, the category pages. I don’t pay a cent upfront for those readers. Substack takes 10 percent of every paid subscription, so its incentives line up with mine, and it keeps building tools that send readers my way.

So make sure your publication is categorized correctly, go on other writers’ Substack Lives and host your own, and show up where discovery actually happens. Fiction is still a smaller category than personal essays and how-to, but it’s growing, and you get discovered alongside the journalists and novelists who give this platform its serious reputation.

🔇 Everything else is noise

Joanna doesn’t like chatting in comments, and I get it. It can be overwhelming to feel like you have to be on every platform, present for everyone who has access to you. Substack is one more place where you have to decide what’s right for you and what isn’t. I’m very rarely on Notes. I schedule ahead and don’t engage a whole lot, and I’ve still met the most fascinating people in real life through connections I made here.

The test I keep coming back to: we are writers, and we should be writing first. The platforms and the tools are only worth it if they buy you time to write work your readers will love. Everything else is noise, and the question to ask about any feature is whether it gets you closer to your true readers or just eats an afternoon.

✂️ Using AI like a scalpel

Joanna quoted my book’s AI chapter back to me, so we got into it. The way I think about it: in Hollywood, a showrunner brings together a room of 5 to 8 talented writers, bounces ideas off them, and everything still goes through the showrunner’s computer last. In traditional publishing, your editor, your agent and your publisher all shape the book. Writers have always had a room.

For me, AI takes the tedious parts of that room. Did I already use this anecdote? Here’s a 30-minute transcript of me talking through a chapter, help me shape it into something I can edit. You used the word “temperature” 37 times in the last six chapters. What was the name of that small town in wine country? Can you track this character’s eye color across the whole book, because I changed it five times?

It surfaces what a good editor would surface, and it will absolutely not replace my editors. I told Joanna I’d just put in a big order for red pens, because I need the analog experience of a printed draft at a coffee shop, writing in the margins. It’s still the author’s responsibility to sit down with the draft and have their hands on every single word before it goes out. We’re writing for other humans. Professional writers wield these tools like scalpels, and the slop epidemic is the opposite of that.

🎧 Also in the episode

• The spy show I was writing with a CIA agent when I decided to leave Hollywood, and how my digital nomad years turned into The Nomad Detective

• Start with the thing you’re most excited about: the sci-fi author who wrote a whole piece on which fountain pens survive an airplane, and why in the niche comes the universal

• Why I run two Substacks, and what ✍️ Make Writing Your Job does that 💡 Sutoscience doesn’t

• How I bridge audiences, like telling my nonfiction readers about a romantic thriller inspired by my memoir ghostwriting work

• Joanna’s own use case: asking Claude where her heroine would still be hurting in the fight scene of ARKANE book 14

🌱 Want help growing your own Substack?

The discovery tactics above, from categories to Lives to what goes behind the paywall, are what I teach in the 6 Week Substack Sprint, my workshop series on the formats I see working on the Substack bestseller lists. It comes with a Sutoscience Founding membership, along with our monthly Substack Lab calls, where you bring your Substack and get live feedback on growing it.

💡 Become a Founding Member

Thank you to Joanna for the conversation, and for reading the book so closely. I told her on air how much I love that she covers the mechanics of bookselling on her show and her blog, and I meant it.

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-Amy

P.S. Let Me Be Your Ghost comes out November 18. Preorder a copy in any format and I’ll send you my unpublished guide, How to Write a Memoir, for free. Preorder here.

Hey creatives! Lots to share this week, up first —

📝 the 8 Substack mistakes you’re probably making (I made all 8)

On Friday I published The 8 Substack Mistakes You’re Probably Making (I Made Them Too), and it’s a wake-up call. A cozy one. (I brought matcha.)

Between audits, our monthly Substack Lab calls, and the occasional 2-week sprint with a client, I spend a lot of my week inside other people’s Substacks. After enough of them, I can usually tell what’s wrong by the second scroll, because it’s one of the same 8 things. I know, because I’ve personally done all 8.

Click any mistake to jump straight to it:

• Mistake 1: You’re still on the diving board. Fear in a few different outfits, and the 2 things that got me off the board.

• Mistake 2: You’re an intensity person. Why consistency beats a sprint, as told by my very slow half marathon.

• Mistake 3: You don’t know whose pain you’re solving. Writing to one reader, and why pain points are what turn free readers into paid ones.

• Mistake 4: Your headline is a diary entry. A before-and-after cheat sheet, plus the Substack tool that A/B tests your titles for you.

• Mistake 5: You’re sending an essay to someone who wanted a list. Including the email I sent from Paris that accidentally became a business.

• Mistake 6: Your post won’t let people’s eyes keep going. The phone test I run on every draft before it goes out.

• Mistake 7: Your paywall is a wall. How to turn the 200 words above it into a tiny landing page.

• Mistake 8: Nobody can find you (the big one). Distribution, the one I’d fix first, and the full version of my hot take.

The hot take, if you want it now: there are writers who are not as good as you who are earning more than you on this platform. They market better — and marketing is a creative skill, which means you can learn it.

💡 read all 8 mistakes!

🎥 3 new Substack Lives, now on my YouTube

This week I hosted 3 Substack Lives over on Make Writing Your Job, with 3 writers who made it work in 3 completely different ways. All 3 are up on my YouTube now, so grab a coffee (or a matcha) and pick the one you need most.

writes Petal + Hearth from the south of France. She started it in early 2025 with zero subscribers, thinking Substack was a blogging platform (she had no idea it sent emails!), and today it’s a Substack bestseller with more than 27,000 subscribers. We talked about how she took it full-time, when to turn on paid, and the Notes and Pinterest engine that keeps new readers coming.

Short on time? Start with these 2 clips: her rule for when to turn on paid subscriptions, and the 1-year deadline she gave her Substack. (Month 9 is when it took off. If you’re in the crickets era, this one’s for you.) A new clip from our Live goes up on my YouTube every day through November 8.

is a journalist here in Los Angeles. After her master’s in journalism, she spent almost a year and a half job searching, and then she found the job she’d been hoping for on the Make Writing Your Job job board. She posted about it in our community chat (“I wouldn’t have found it without this job board!”) and I asked her to come on and tell everyone how she did it. If you’re in a long search right now, start here.

is an award-winning historian who planned to get a PhD. Instead, one proposal, sent before she even had a website, launched her ghostwriting and developmental editing business. Her proposal even linked to my website to show the client how ghostwriting projects get priced! She messaged me on Instagram that my work helped her go from “essentially a free freelancer” to a six-figure business, and as a fellow ghostwriter, this one was such a joy to host.

Prefer to watch on Substack? The replays also live on Make Writing Your Job: Olivia, Madelyn, and Katie. And if you want the next ones as they come out, subscribe to my YouTube.

🗺️ I’m going on book tour (and I need your favorite bookstore)

For most of my career, I assumed book tours happened to other authors. Then I started pitching bookstores for Let Me Be Your Ghost, and a lot of them said yes. So I filmed a behind-the-scenes video diary about planning my own book tour as a self-published author: no publisher, no team this time, just me and a lot of spreadsheets. (The written version is here on Sutoscience, with a few things I didn’t say on camera.)

One date is confirmed! I’m bringing Let Me Be Your Ghost to The Love Potion Library in San Francisco (284 Noe St.) on Tuesday, December 15, from 6 to 7:30pm. It’s a bookstore built entirely for romance, I taught a sold-out class there when it opened in June, and I can’t wait to go back with my own romantic thriller. Bay Area friends, I’d love to see you there. ❤️

I’m putting the rest of the tour together right now: a West Coast run, maybe a little of the Southwest, and possibly an East Coast leg, depending on whether I can brave New York in the cold. Every date goes out here on Sutoscience first, as soon as it’s confirmed. And if you come, I’ll have some surprises for you. 🎁

Now I need your help. Is there a bookstore you love that I should reach out to, or one you’d come see me at? Drop it in the comments with your city:

🎁 your last few weeks to get How to Write a Memoir free

Quick reminder, because it’s coming up fast: the buy-one-get-one-free preorder ends in a few weeks. Preorder Let Me Be Your Ghost in any format and you get my unreleased craft book, How to Write a Memoir, free. November 17 is the last day to claim it, since the novel comes out November 18.

I don’t know yet when I’ll put How to Write a Memoir up for sale on its own, so after launch day it’s disappearing for a bit. This is your last chance to get it — and you get 2 books for the price of one.

Hardcover, paperback, or Kindle all count, and you can order Let Me Be Your Ghost from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop, or anywhere else you buy books. Upload your receipt on the claim page and How to Write a Memoir lands in your inbox right away.

💡 claim your free book!

If you’ve already preordered (thank you!!), send this to the friend who has been “meaning to write a memoir” for 5 years.

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🎬 Tuesday’s workshop, plus a course that starts November 1st

If Mistake 8 stung a little, this is the fix I teach. On Tuesday, October 27 at 5:30pm PT (8:30pm ET), I’m teaching The Lean Content System, a 2-hour live workshop on Maven: how to write posts in your own voice with AI, make short videos without a video editor, and batch a whole week of posts and videos in about an hour.

It’s $280 with code GETSTARTED20 (instead of $350), and enrollment closes tomorrow, Monday, October 26.

💡 get 20% off the workshop!

If you want the whole system with my feedback on your work for a month, Build an Organic Content System With AI in 30 Days starts next Sunday, November 1, with live sessions Sundays at 3pm PT plus weekly office hours. It’s $1,200 with code LETSGO20 (instead of $1,500), and enrollment closes Saturday, October 31.

💡 get 20% off the course!

Founding Members, you get 50% off both, and your links are on the perks page. (Not a Founding Member? You can sign up here!) Can’t make a live time? Everyone who enrolls gets the recordings and all the handouts.

🍵 a weekend with my inbox, from Los Angeles

I’m writing to you from Los Angeles again this morning, and I have to say, I’m loving this month.

Launch season means my days are full of meetings, podcasts, bookstore pitches, and a camera pointed at my face, and I’ve been really enjoying digging into all of it. It’s the most fun kind of busy — the kind where every task is for a book I love.

The downside of the fun kind of busy is my inbox. So this weekend, I’m catching up on all of my emails, one by one. I’m getting close to a sweet, sweet inbox zero, and if you’ve ever watched that number tick down to single digits, you know it’s ~ a spiritual experience ~.

creating

• Write For Money And Power: Becoming A Creator CEO on The Creative Penn Podcast. Joanna Penn had read Write for Money and Power before we recorded, and the first thing she wanted to talk about was one word in the title: power. From there we got into going from starving artist to creator CEO, the 3 income streams that feed each other, and the serial math behind Let Me Be Your Ghost. Her site has the full transcript if you’d rather read it.

• How a freelance writer turned a job board into a thriving subscription business on The Business of Content, including the email I sent from Paris that became the paid tier of Make Writing Your Job. Over at Make Writing Your Job, We don’t have to be bartenders between shows tells the backstory: the blog post I wrote for my Hollywood assistant friends that turned into my freelance writing career.

• The most boring Substack advice you’ll ever hear, from my episode of ’s Creative Nonfiction Podcast. The advice is consistency. I’m sorry. It works.

• You Can See Everything Review: Nathan Fielder’s Holmes Doc on the blog. I don’t like cringe comedy, and I still gave Nathan Fielder’s Elizabeth Holmes documentary 5 out of 5 stars. It runs 174 minutes (pack snacks), and if you can, watch Nathan for You and The Rehearsal first.

• The Best Gifts for Writers in 2026 (Only Things I’ve Used), also on the blog. My one rule: nothing goes on the list unless I’ve used it, owned it, or been given it, starting with the MacBook Air my dad gave me for Christmas. Bookmark it for the holidays.

• Chapter twenty-one of Let Me Be Your Ghost, “because i could not stop,” is up for paid subscribers. The serial is still the rough draft, and the finished novel comes out November 18.

• 290+ Grants, Contests, & Residencies for Writers at Make Writing Your Job. This is the past week’s edition of the opportunities list: a $25,000 publishing deal for a horror novel, a $2,800 mentorship with 8 acclaimed authors, and up to $25,000 for playwrights adapting their work into audio drama.

• 50+ Calls for Pitches That Pay, also at Make Writing Your Job, where an established podcast is paying $3,000 per piece, a literary review is offering AU$3,000 for nonfiction, and a Scottish arts network is commissioning posts on monstrosity. (Very on theme for Halloween week!)

reading

• South Pasadena finally has a bookstore, and opening day had a line out the door. LAist’s Laura Dux reports that Outpost Books opened in September on Fair Oaks Avenue: just under 1,000 square feet of new and used books with a trading-post, Route 66 theme. Owner Nicole Novembrino picked South Pasadena because it had no bookstore, and one local influencer’s post brought the opening-day line. Her take: “They’re just excited to have a bookstore. I wasn’t expecting that.” A brand-new LA indie, the same month I’m in LA pitching indie bookstores? I’m taking it as a sign, and it’s going on my list of places to wander into.

• A Court of Thorns and Roses book 6 comes out Tuesday at 12:01am, and more than 500 Barnes & Noble stores are throwing midnight parties. AFP reports that’s roughly 70% of the chain, with about 250 Target stores holding countdowns and indies going all in: a costume contest at Moonlit Vine Bookstore in Indiana, faerie hairstyling and flash tattoos in Asheville, and a sold-out pajama party at Jupiter’s Eye Book Cafe in Washington state. A Court of Splintered Harmony is part one of a story so long that Sarah J. Maas split it across 3 books, and A Court of Forgotten Melody follows January 12. My favorite detail is buried in the middle: Maas started out posting early chapters of what became Throne of Glass online, years before Bloomsbury bought it in 2010. My ACOTAR books in order guide has both new books in it, if you need a refresher before Tuesday.

• Colleen Hoover self-published Verity, and the movie has now made more than $122 million. Publishers Weekly’s Kerensa Cadenas profiles Heartbones Entertainment, the production company Hoover launched with producer Lauren Levine in 2023: 3 features from her books so far, a series in the works, It Ends With Us at $351 million worldwide on a $25 million budget, and Verity at more than 4.7 million copies sold since Grand Central published it in 2021. Hoover: “Lauren and I wanted to develop projects ourselves rather than only selling the rights.” I thought the movie was solid but a bit underwhelming (my Verity ending post has the whole take), but this part of the story I love. Self-published book, nine-figure movie — and the author kept her seat at the table.

Read more

Most of the content that makes people smarter stays free. On Make Writing Your Job, that’s every author and writer interview, every class and every case study. What goes behind the paywall is the job board, the grants, contests and residencies list, and the calls for pitches. Those take hours of hunting every week, and they’re exactly the hours a working writer will happily pay to skip. Simon put it better than I did: the paid stuff is time-intensive, but it takes less creative energy.

Simon Owens hosts The Business of Content, a podcast about how publishers create, distribute and make money from their work, and our episode is out now:

💡 Listen on Apple Podcasts

It’s also on Spotify, and Simon writes about the media business on his Substack.

🥐 The Paris email that became a business

The job board started by accident. I was visiting Paris, buried in emails from people who wanted me to ghostwrite or edit their books, and I was too busy to take any of them. So were the writers I’d normally pass them to. I put the leads in one email, added a handful of good gigs I’d seen on LinkedIn, and sent it to my Substack.

People were obsessed with it. That email turned into the paid tier of Make Writing Your Job.

If you’re stuck on what to charge for, look at the work you already do that your readers would gladly pay you to do for them.

📚 How I sell the same book twice

I’ve been serializing Let Me Be Your Ghost here on Sutoscience. The first four chapters are free, then it’s $8 a month to keep reading. A self-published book nets me about $7 a copy. A serial reader pays $8 every month for months, and a lot of them preorder the finished book too, because what they’ve been reading is my rough draft.

It changed how I market, too. Instead of “buy my book, buy my book, buy my book,” every week is “here’s a new chapter, tell me what you think.” Most of my beta readers came from those subscribers.

The mistake I see is authors who serialize a book and never put it on Amazon. The serial is a workshop with your earliest readers. The launch reaches a completely different crowd, the people who will never read a novel on Substack.

📕 pre-order let me be your ghost

💻 One brand, two Substacks

Simon asked how I hold a personal brand together across ghostwriting, a job board, freelance advice and novels. As I put it to him, “I look at personal brand not as a kaleidoscope of many different things but a singular perspective.”

That’s why I run two Substacks. ✍️ Make Writing Your Job stays on freelancing and writing careers. 💡 Sutoscience is where I bring the rest of me, the fiction, the travel and food lists, the personal essays. The real question is when to niche down and when to bring your whole self to the party.

💫 Also in the episode

• How I fit all of this into mostly 20 to 40 hour weeks, with seasons instead of routines and protected deep-work blocks of 4 to 6 hours

• Why Write for Money and Power is 99 cents on purpose

• The 12-hour Substack Live launch that put that book in Amazon’s top 10 business books

• How Kyle and I built CozyJobs from scratch (he vibe-coded it with Claude, then we spent 6 months testing it with our founding members)

• Why I build things that compound, so every business could stand on its own someday

Thank you to Simon for such a sharp conversation. If you care about how media businesses make money, his newsletter is worth a follow.

-Amy

P.S. The finished book comes out November 18. Preorder a copy in any format and I’ll send you my unpublished guide, How to Write a Memoir, for free. Preorder here.

For most of my career, I assumed book tours happened to other authors. Authors with a publisher. Authors with some dedicated person whose entire job is to call a bookstore in Portland and ask about their Tuesday availability.

I’m self-published, so I filed “book tour” under not-for-me, right next to “advance” and “someone else picks your cover.”

Then I started pitching bookstores for Let Me Be Your Ghost, and a lot of them said yes. So now I’m planning a book tour, by myself, with a lot of spreadsheets.

I filmed a video diary about it from Los Angeles, where I’m spending the month on launch prep (plus a few things I can’t talk about yet, which is the most annoying sentence a writer can type). I was drinking a San Pellegrino peach sparkling water the whole time, and for the record, it was delicious.

Here’s the written version, with a few things I didn’t say on camera:

⚖️ Two launches, one year, almost nothing in common

This year I’m releasing two books, and the launches could not be more different.

In January, Write for Money and Power came out with a whole team behind it. I had a publicist (the great Haley Raymond), a book marketer and a virtual assistant, all working in tandem for 4 months. Everything was digital. I ran Amazon ads and nothing else. I did a 12-hour Substack Live and interviewed 12 guests about the book’s themes, back to back. (The replays are still here on 💡 Sutoscience, all 12 hours of them.)

And it worked. Write for Money and Power hit the top 10 of all business books on Amazon. My favorite part is still the notes from writers who say it changed how they think about getting paid for their work.

Here’s what didn’t work: traditional press. A book that is this anti-gatekeeper had, shockingly, next to no luck with the gatekeepers. The big exception was an essay I wrote for Publishers Weekly, which Haley landed for me, and which drove some really good traffic.

Let Me Be Your Ghost is book 5 for me, and this time I’m doing everything myself. Part of that is because my last launch taught me exactly what I want, and part of it is the connections I made along the way. If this is your first book, I really do think hiring help is worth it. It’s how I learned all of this.

Here’s what’s been working so far:

• NetGalley. It’s the most effective ARC platform I’ve ever used, and I’ve tried a lot of them. It puts your book in front of bookstagrammers, librarians, booksellers and press you’d never reach on your own. (Here’s how NetGalley works, from both sides.)

• A big ARC campaign. Early readers mean early Goodreads and Amazon reviews, and sometimes libraries and bookstores ordering the book before it comes out.

• Free chapters, right here. Posting Let Me Be Your Ghost chapter by chapter as I wrote it built the early fan base that became my beta readers, my ARC readers, and a lot of my preorders. Plenty of readers haven’t tried a romantic thriller yet, and a free chapter lets them try one.

• Influencer outreach and a few experiments. I’ll tell you what worked and what flopped after launch, here and on YouTube.

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🗺️ So, about this book tour

The money that went to a team in January is going to in-person events, travel and ads this time. I’m running Meta ads for the first time ever, plus more Amazon ads, and the rest goes to getting me to all of these events.

The plan, as of today: a pretty extensive West Coast tour, maybe a little of the Southwest, and possibly an East Coast leg, depending on whether I can brave New York in the cold. I’ll be doing signings, talks, and a mix of both.

Putting on events isn’t new to me. I did a sold-out talk for the Big Brain Lecture Series, and I taught a sold-out class at The Love Potion Library when it opened in June. What’s new is putting my own book at the center of an event and saying, “Hi, I’m the author, and here’s my book.”

One date I can already share: I’m bringing Let Me Be Your Ghost back to The Love Potion Library in San Francisco on Tuesday, December 15, from 6 to 7:30pm. Bay Area friends, I’d love to see you there. ❤️

The rest of the dates go out here on 💡 Sutoscience first.

I also want to thank everyone who shows up in person. I know it takes time to get in your car and drive to a bookstore on a weeknight. So if you come, I’ll have some surprises for you. 🎁

🏪 How to pitch a bookstore (for my fellow indie authors)

If you’re self-published, you can reach out to bookstores yourself. I was really impressed by how many of them wanted to work with me. My pitch is 3 lines long:

1. Here’s my background.

2. Here’s what I can bring to the event.

3. Here’s the book.

Bookstores will often be interested in stocking your book and doing an event with you, especially if your book is set up through IngramSpark, which makes it easy for them to order. Setting up IngramSpark is its own adventure, and some of it is kind of complicated. Let me know if you want a tutorial video, and I’ll bump it up my list.

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💸 Why the indie math makes this possible

When I sell an ebook on Amazon, I keep 70% of the sale (that’s Amazon’s rate for ebooks priced between $2.99 and $9.99). A traditionally published author might get somewhere between 10 and 30%, depending on the deal, the format, the advance and the publisher. I break down the real numbers in Write for Money and Power, which is still 99 cents.

More ownership means you need fewer sales to be profitable, and fewer sales to write full-time. I’m also lucky to have income from Substack, freelancing, consulting and YouTube, so no single book has to carry the whole house.

That’s what pays for the road trip. Owning your book means you get to decide what’s worth spending on.

🫶 Come find me

A few ways to help, if you’d like to:

• Tell me where to go. Reply with your favorite bookstore and your city. I’d love to know.

• Preorder the book. Let Me Be Your Ghost is my romantic thriller about a memoir ghostwriter who secretly informs on her clients for the FBI, then falls for her final one. It comes out November 18. Preorder one copy, in any format, from any retailer, and you get my unreleased book How to Write a Memoir free. It’s everything I’ve learned in more than a decade as a memoir ghostwriter (and, conveniently, everything my protagonist Lola uses). Upload your receipt at amysuto.com/ghost and it lands in your inbox right away.

💡 Preorder + claim your free book

And if I owe you an email right now: I see you, I’m a little slow at the moment, and I’m working on it.

Thank you for being here for all of it, the spreadsheets included. See you in person soon. 🍵

-Amy

Business Insider wrote about my Substack this month, which is fun and ~ mildly terrifying ~ when your relatives start texting “saw you on my newsfeed today” in the tone of people who have just seen a mugshot.

The piece was about the money: multiple six figures a year from a newsletter that started at $0 in June 2023, without paid ads.

What it didn’t have room for is the other half of my week, which I spend inside other people’s Substacks. Audits. Our monthly Substack Lab calls with Founding Members. The occasional 2-week sprint with a client. And after enough of those, I can open a publication cold and usually tell you what’s wrong by the second scroll, because it’s one of the same 8 things, and because I have personally done all 8.

Here’s the hot take, and then I’ll be nice:

There are writers who are not as good as you who are earning more than you on this platform.

I’m not being cute. I’ve read their stuff. They’re out-earning you because they market better than you, and marketing is a creative skill, which means you can learn it.

The catch is that you have to learn it without it eating into your writing time, and almost nobody teaches it that way. (I’m teaching it that way in a workshop next Tuesday. More on that at the end.)

So consider this a wake-up call. A cozy one. I brought matcha. 🍵

📝 A short quiz before we start

One point each. Be honest, nobody’s watching:

• You’ve renamed your Substack more times than you’ve posted on it.

• There’s a Notion doc somewhere called “Substack strategy.” It was last opened in March.

• Your most recent post is a “Hello, I’m back!” post. The one before it is also a “Hello, I’m back!” post.

• You’ve read 4 pieces about growing on Substack today. This is the 5th. Hi. 👋

• Your subscriber count has been the same number for so long that it’s become a personality trait.

• You haven’t launched your Substack yet, but you’ve spent more time announcing the launch than writing a single post.

• Your headline is a mood. (”Some thoughts on October.”)

• You’ve shared a link to your Substack exactly once, on a platform where your aunt is your most engaged follower.

Scored 3 or more? Welcome. Sit down. I love you. This is going to sting a little. Scored 0? You’re either lying or maybe you should be sharing your advice with everyone! Which you can do in our monthly Substack Lab mastermind groups :)

🔮 What you think is wrong (and what’s actually wrong)

Every audit starts the same way. I ask what they think the problem is, and I get one of the answers in the left column. I have never once opened a Substack and found Mercury.

The right column is this post. Let’s dive in.

🏊 Mistake 1: You’re still on the diving board

The most common thing I see in my audits is a Substack that doesn’t exist yet. You’re standing on the diving board. Toes over the edge. You’ve been standing there for 11 months. You have the swimsuit (a gorgeous About page), the goggles (a logo you paid someone on Etsy $40 for), the little towel folded on the chair (a welcome email, drafted, unsent). Below you, the pool is full of writers who are objectively worse at this than you, and they’re doing cannonballs, and they’re having the time of their lives, and lots of them are getting paid for their half-baked ideas.

I know what’s keeping you up there, because it kept me up there. Fear, in a few different outfits. Fear that it has to be perfect. Fear of what your peers will say. Fear that someone from your day job will find it. Fear of the one bad review in a pile of love letters. (I have the love letters. A reader painted me a watercolor for Write for Money and Power. Yet I still think about the mean reviews sometimes.)

Two things got me off the board:

1. The regret test. Which will you regret more in a year: posting the thing, or not posting the thing? Starting now, or not starting now? Most people regret the things they didn’t do, because doing the thing means you tried and learned something, and not doing it means you have a Notion doc.

2. Building in public. I’ve been publishing Let Me Be Your Ghost here chapter by chapter as a rough draft. A ROUGH DRAFT. The version you’ve been reading on my Substack is not finished. And it’s been the best thing I’ve done for the book: readers email me what they loved, they found me beta readers, and they were first in line when preorders opened. When I interviewed Brooke Warner of She Writes Press on ✍️ Make Writing Your Job, she told me about authors who query agents for 6 years before they get the yes. 6 years, holding a finished book. Imagine the readers you could reach in 6 years if you put the thing out half-baked and finished baking it with the people who showed up.

You don’t need the name. You don’t need the niche figured out. You don’t need the welcome email. Everything about my Substacks has changed since I started, because that’s the only way anything changes.

You cannot grow a Substack from the diving board. I’ve checked.

🏃‍♀️ Mistake 2: You’re an intensity person

(I was an intensity person. I understand you! But this will burn you out.)

Brendan O’Meara asked me on the Creative Nonfiction Podcast how to get a stuck Substack moving, and I gave him the most boring answer on the planet: consistency. He cut it into a clip and titled it “The Most Boring Substack Advice You’ll Hear.”

Think about the gym, because it’s the right comparison. When I trained for half marathons, the training was: get up and run, multiple times a week, forever. The cute running clothes were not training. The little pouch of energy gels was not training. Running was training. I say this as someone who tried to cram the whole plan into the last 3 weeks and ran a slow, exhausting half marathon as a result. (I had a good time! I was just slow, and clearly should have been more diligent about a more consistent training plan.)

Substack is the same sport. In the beginning, showing up doesn’t compound. Then it does. I declared a $96,000 goal on YouTube in June 2023 with a newsletter making $0, and I posted the whole climb. On YouTube I showed up almost monthly. I missed months, I’m a human woman. But on Substack I never broke the streak: once a week at first, without missing one, then 5 to 7 posts a week on Make Writing Your Job for the last 2 years, with a team now, rain or shine, holidays excepted.

The growth curve went hockey stick right alongside it. 60,000+ subscribers and multiple six figures a year, and the sickest I’ve ever been (Athens, high fever, autoimmune flare, Bachelor in Paradise on the laptop) I still published from the hotel bed. I’m not saying that’s healthy. I’m saying it’s a streak.

National Novel Writing Month taught me this in high school (RIP NaNoWriMo, you were perfect). 1,667 words a day for 30 days and you have a 50,000-word draft. There were days I missed and had to write 10,000 words to catch up. I still got the novel. The goal was never a perfect day. The goal was to write most days.

And I’ll own my version of this mistake, because it’s recent. I did not post a Sunday Tea every Sunday this summer. I got married, I took time off, I read romance novels in bed. 💡 Sutoscience is the Substack I run for joy, and the streak shows it. ✍️ Make Writing Your Job is the one with the 5-day-a-week spine, and it’s the one with the highest revenue. Those two facts are related.

Everything I’ve ever wanted was on the other side of consistency. Intensity got me a nap and a slow half marathon.

🎯 Mistake 3: You don’t know whose pain you’re solving

In an audit a while back, someone told me their target reader was 60-year-olds thinking about doing something creative. Also 30-year-olds figuring it out. Also maybe 20-somethings? I adore this person’s writing, but that’s 3 different letters, and they were trying to mail all 3 in one envelope. If you talk to everybody, you talk to no one. Write the letter to one person, with a face and a name and a backstory, and other people like that person will show up, because people follow writers who are like them in some way.

The easiest reader to write for is a version of you. The you from 3 years ago. The you in the alternate timeline who never figured this stuff out. That’s who most of my posts are for: a younger Amy who needed someone to say the things out loud and save her a lot of heartbreak. It isn’t selfish. It’s a tactical advantage, because you know exactly what she’s stuck on.

Then there’s the part I think most of us forget: the pain point. Think about what makes you click. When we were kids, the nightly news ran “Is Your Deli Meat Trying to Kill You? Details at 11,” and our parents sent us to bed and stayed up for it. I’m not asking you to fear-monger. I’m asking you to know what your reader wants and doesn’t have, and to put that near the top. The posts that do well on this platform almost always name a want, a lack, or a problem with a solution on the way. Or, they’re angled to touch on someone’s deepest thoughts, fears, or desires in a way that’s unsaid but still clear in the positioning.

This is true for fiction, too. Romance novels are doing banging numbers right now because they solve a pain point: loneliness. Human connection, intimacy, and a found family where you get the most powerful man in the kingdom AND his 4 best friends, who are now your friends. Personal essays solve “am I the only one.” Serials solve “what happens next,” which is the oldest pain point there is, and the reason a paywall works in fiction at all.

Pain points are also what turn free readers into paid ones. People upgrade when something hurts and you have the thing.

Which brings me to the part where I show you instead of telling you.

🔐 Okay, watch what I do here

This is the fix for Mistake 7, which I’ll talk about below!

Here’s what’s behind the paywall today:

• Mistake 4: why your headline is a diary entry, with a before-and-after cheat sheet and the Substack tool that A/B tests titles for you

• Mistake 5: the wrong format for the job (you keep sending essays to someone who wanted a list, or the reverse), including the email I sent from Paris that accidentally became a business

• Mistake 6: the readability test, or why people’s eyes stop halfway down your post and what to move

• Mistake 7: how to turn your paywall into a landing page (you’re looking at one)

• Mistake 8: distribution, the one I’d fix first, and the full version of the hot take about the writers out-earning you

• My 20% off codes for the workshop I’m teaching next Tuesday and the course that starts November 1 (Founding Members, your 50% is in there too)

$8 a month gets you all of it, plus every chapter of Let Me Be Your Ghost as it drops.

💡 Upgrade to read the rest

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“Because I could not stop for Death —

He kindly stopped for me —”

-Emily Dickinson

previous: about | chapter one | chapter two | chapter three | chapter four | chapter five | chapter six | chapter seven | chapter eight | chapter nine | chapter ten | chapter eleven | chapter twelve | chapter thirteen | chapter fourteen | chapter fifteen | chapter sixteen | chapter seventeen | chapter eighteen | chapter nineteen | chapter twenty

The estate told me before I was through the gates.

Places have vital signs. Nine years of entering strangers’ houses teaches you to take a pulse from a driveway. The gate with the golden C opened on my code, too slow, the way it always opened—but the house beyond it was dark in the wrong pattern. Kitchen dark at an hour when Tini’s early bread should have had the windows gold. Security floods dark. And the front door—the heavy, handle-less, pressure-plated front door of the most defended private home in California—standing open to the fog by the width of a hand.

I was out of the Jeep before it finished stopping, left the door ajar, a polite ding as the keys dangled from the ignition as I ran.

Inside, the wrongness had a smell—cold ash. Angela’s ashtray by the side door held a cigarette burned untouched to its filter, a gray worm of it, abandoned mid-shift. In the kitchen, dough sat over-proofed and collapsing in its bowl. Tini’s phone lay on the counter next to her knife roll, and Tini has never in the time I’ve known her been more than a body’s-length from either, and the absence of reggaeton and total silence from the kitchen was the loudest thing in the house.

Staff gone. Cleared out—summoned off-site, some emergency invented by someone whose instructions the household trusted. You’d need root access to the schedules for that. You’d need everyone to recognize the sender’s name.

I took the stairs to the private wing at a dead run.

“EZE—”

His bedroom door stood open. The lamps were on, warm and domestic and obscene, and Ezekiel Crane was on the floor between the bed and the window, half on his side where he’d gone down reaching for the nightstand, and the world narrowed to a corridor with him at the end of it.

Gray. That was the color, the color I will be buried knowing—his lips gone the gray-blue of dawn fog, skin waxen, sweat-soaked, and his breath—when I got to him, slid on my knees the last four feet, hands on his face, his chest—his breath came in long, spaced, paper-thin pulls, each one arriving later than the last like a train service being discontinued without an announcement.

“Eze. Eze. Look at me—” His eyelids dragged. The green found me from very far down a well, held on, worked at focusing. His hand moved a centimeter toward mine, and even dying, even gray, the corner of his mouth tried—tried—to do the thing it did.

“L—” he managed. “—la. Run—”

“Shut up,” I said, already moving, already cataloguing, the cold panic-trained lizard of me taking the controls while the woman in love screamed somewhere aft. No blood. No wound. Pupils blown wide and sluggish. Vomit on the rug, and beside him—there, on its side by the nightstand, dropped—a cut-crystal ashtray, and in it the stubbed half of a celebration cigar.

The humidor on the dresser stood open. Spanish cedar breathing its sweet reek into the room. Conrad’s cigars—the oldest ritual between them, older than Tini’s protocols, the one incoming channel in this fortress no one screened because it predated everyone paid to screen things. He won the contract, boys. He survived a poisoning, boys. Have one with me, brother, I’m in D.C., smoke it and think of me.

Nothing touches his plate that I don’t inspect first, Tini had said. Nobody had ever said plate to the man about his oldest friend.

“Okay,” I said, to him, to myself, to the lizard. “Okay. Up. We’re going.”

He was two hundred pounds of dying man and I was all length and no softness, and I will never know where the strength came from except that it came—his arm over my shoulders, my whole body under his, the two of us lurching through his big empty house like one broken animal. Down the stairs on rage and geometry. His breath spacing wider. His feet forgetting their job on the last landing, and me talking the entire time, a filibuster against the dark—stay, stay, you don’t get to join the cold dark fog, not you, not tonight, stay—

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The biggest hurdle I see for writers right now is distribution. So many of you are writing great books and great Substack posts that just aren’t reaching enough readers.

Maybe some of this sounds familiar:

📚 You’re launching a book, and you’re scared it’ll be met with crickets.

📉 Your Substack posts are great, but your subscriber count has barely moved in months.

📱 You know you should be posting on social media, but you never know what to post.

🎥 Short videos feel like a second job between the filming and the editing.

⏳ Every hour you spend making content is an hour you’re not writing your next chapter.

Readers have to find you before they can buy your book or subscribe, and content is how they find you. It just shouldn’t eat your writing time.

So I built 2 different offerings on Maven that teach the system I use to do all of it in about an hour a week.

✨ It’s the same system that took CozyJobs’ brand-new Instagram account to 1.1 million views in its first 30 days, and the same one I’m using right now to launch my new novel, Let Me Be Your Ghost, on November 18.

And as a thank-you for being a Founding Member, you get 50% off both.

(Not a Founding Member? You can sign up here!)

🎬 The workshop: The Lean Content System

• What it is: a 2-hour live workshop on Maven, Tuesday, October 27, 5:30 to 7:30 PM PT (8:30 PM ET)

• What you’ll learn: how to write posts in your own voice with AI, make short videos without a video editor, and batch a whole week of posts and videos in about an hour

• Who it’s for: writers, solopreneurs, consultants, and creative pros who are their own marketing department

• Your price: $175 instead of $350, with the recording and all my handouts included

💡 get 50% off the workshop

🎓 The course: Build an Organic Content System With AI in 30 Days

• What it is: a 30-day cohort-based course on Maven, November 1 to 30, with live sessions Sundays at 3 PM PT plus weekly office hours

• What you’ll learn: the whole system, built on your own brand: posts and short video, articles written to rank on Google, slideshows and graphics, and a weekly debrief that shows which posts bring in readers

• Who it’s for: creatives, writers, and solopreneurs who want readers to find them on social and on Google, with my feedback on their work along the way

• Your price: $750 instead of $1,500

💡 get 50% off the course

🤔 Which one is for you?

• Start with the workshop if you want posts and short videos going fast.

• Pick the course if you want the whole system, Google included, with my feedback.

🎟️ How to claim your 50%

Click a button above (or find both perks on the perks page), and your perk link takes you to Maven with the 50% already applied.

Workshop enrollment closes Monday, October 26, and course enrollment closes Saturday, October 31.

Both offerings are anti-slop, by the way. AI handles the production chores so you can spend your time on your voice and your ideas.

Can’t wait to see what you make!

-Amy

If your Substack is stuck spinning its tires, how do you get it moving, and then how do you get it some altitude?

I gave him the most boring answer on the planet. Consistency. When I started my Substack 3 years ago, I published every single week, tried different niches, and paid attention to what readers responded to until I landed where I wanted to be. I didn’t want to hear that answer back then either. Brendan cut it into a clip and titled it “The Most Boring Substack Advice You’ll Hear.” (Accurate.)

Brendan has hosted The Creative Nonfiction Podcast since 2013, and episode 550 is our full conversation. We talked about my TV writing days, ghostwriting memoirs for Olympians, NBA players and Silicon Valley CEOs, and how the Substack side of my business actually works.

Listen to the full episode:

💡 Listen on Apple Podcasts

It’s also on Spotify, and Brendan’s show notes are on his site.

💡 What we talked about

• Why I left TV writing in 2020 and started ghostwriting memoirs while traveling the world

• Negotiating my own rates instead of handing that conversation to an agent, and the early client who sat me down and said, “Amy, you are undercharging.”

• How Make Writing Your Job started out as more of a travel blog before readers told me what they wanted from it (the Substack part starts around 35:00)

• What makes me nervous about Substack long-term, including the new AI detector

• Why I plan my year in seasons instead of daily routines

• Seth Godin, Jonathan Haidt and Andy Weir, three writers who tested their books in public before they were books

💡 Substack is the new book tour

I told Brendan that Substack has become the place to do a book tour. Lena Dunham leaned on Substacks big and small for interviews when her latest book came out, and I’ve watched the same thing happen on a smaller scale with my own books. A lot of my beta readers and ARC readers found me here first.

It helps my ghostwriting business too, in a way I didn’t plan for. Clients look me up before they hire me, and an audience tells them I’m not just some stranger on the internet.

Still, I don’t marry platforms. A few years ago every writer I knew was on Medium, Medium paid well, and then that era ended and those writers couldn’t take their subscribers with them. Whatever you build on, make sure you can export your email list and walk out the door with it.

💡 The cavalry is not coming

The TV show I was working on got canceled in the middle of the writers’ room, before we’d written many scripts. I asked the showrunner what I should do next, and he told me he didn’t know. The industry in front of me looked nothing like the one he came up in.

Mark Duplass gave a whole SXSW talk about this called “The Cavalry Is Not Coming.” At every stage of his career he waited for the call that meant he could stop doing everything himself. When the offers finally showed up, he realized he didn’t want them. He wanted to keep making films with his friends, his way.

So here’s what I told Brendan. You choose yourself first, and then your readers choose you. If you want a gatekeeper to anoint you someday, get readers first. They’re your leverage when you walk into that room.

Brendan sent over this quote card from the episode, coffee rings and all:

💡 Want help growing your own Substack?

I mentioned the 6 Week Substack Sprint on the show. It’s my workshop series on the formats I see working on the Substack bestseller lists, and how to adapt them to whatever you write. It comes with a Sutoscience Founding membership, along with our monthly Substack Lab calls, where you bring your Substack and get live feedback on growing it.

💡 Become a Founding Member

Thank you to Brendan for having me and for asking such good questions. If you write nonfiction, his Substack Welcome to Pitch Club is for writers who want to get better at selling their stories.

Now go publish something this week. Boring counts.

-Amy

P.S. We also talked about Let Me Be Your Ghost, my romantic thriller about a memoir ghostwriter who feeds her clients’ secrets to the FBI. It comes out November 18. Preorder a copy in any format and I’ll send you my unpublished guide, How to Write a Memoir, for free. Preorder here.

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Hey creatives! Lots to share this week, up first —

I’m spending the month in Los Angeles

I’m writing to you from Los Angeles this morning, where I’m spending the whole month. That photo is from my balcony on one of my first sunrises here.

I lived in LA for the better part of a decade (USC, the Hollywood assistant years, the TV writers’ rooms), so coming back always feels a little like running into an old friend who knows exactly how I take my coffee.

The plan for the month is bookish events and a lot of meetings, because Let Me Be Your Ghost comes out November 18 and launch season means saying yes to everything.

In between, I’m doing the two things I do best in this city: drinking ~ really ~ great coffee and meandering through bookstores with no list and no plan.

If you’re in LA and need a place to write this week, I keep a running Los Angeles page with every cafe, restaurant, and matcha spot I’ve reviewed here, plus a map.

And if there’s a bookstore or a coffee shop I need to wander into this month, tell me in the comments:

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two ways to learn my content system: a 2-hour workshop and a 30-day course

Almost every creative I talk to lately is stuck in the same place: the writing is done, and nobody has seen it.

Distribution is the part most of us were never taught — and it’s the part I’ve spent the last year building a system for. Both of the offerings below help with it directly, because they’re the system itself, taught by me.

Here’s how it works: you batch a week of posts and short videos in about an hour, AI handles the editing and the busywork in your own voice, and the rest of the week is yours to write, read, or wander through bookstores. My systems save you time so you can work less and be more creative, which is a sentence I never expected to write about social media.

The workshop is The Lean Content System, one live two-hour session on Tuesday, October 27 at 5:30pm PT (8:30pm ET), for $350. We go deep on written posts and short videos: writing in your own voice with AI, making videos without a video editor, batching the whole week in one sitting, and reading your numbers so you know what to make next.

🎓 join the workshop!

The course is Build an Organic Content System With AI in 30 Days, $1,500, running November 1 through December 1 with a live session every Sunday at 3pm PT plus weekly office hours. It’s the full build: everything from the workshop, plus articles that rank on Google and get quoted in AI search, slideshows and graphics without a designer, and tracing every post back to signups and sales. By day 30 you’re running the same system I use for this Substack, for my jobs platform CozyJobs, and for the launch of my novel.

🎓 enroll in the course!

If you came to Tuesday’s free Lightning Lesson, these are the two ways to go deeper that I mentioned at the end. If you want the routine in one evening, take the workshop. If you want me looking over your shoulder for a month, take the course.

And if you know a writer or a small business owner who posts when they can and wishes they didn’t have to think about it, send this to them.

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you have until November 18 to claim your pre-order gift

Let Me Be Your Ghost comes out on November 18, and November 17th is also the last day to claim the pre-order gift: a free copy of How to Write a Memoir, my unreleased craft book, for everyone who preorders the novel and shows me the receipt. After launch day, the gift is gone.

I started writing How to Write a Memoir in 2021 and rewrote the whole thing in coffee shops in Athens, fueled by way too many freddo espressos. It’s a ghostwriter’s secrets for turning your life into a bestseller, written for anyone writing their own memoir and anyone writing someone else’s. I’m not sure when I’ll publish it on its own — so for now, the pre-order gift is the only way to read it.

Hardcover, paperback, or Kindle of Let Me Be Your Ghost all count, from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or Bookshop or anywhere else you buy books. Upload your receipt on the claim page and your free copy of How to Write a Memoir is yours.

🎁 claim your free pre-order gift!

If you’ve already preordered (thank you!!), send this to the friend who keeps asking what to read next.

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creating

• 250+ Grants, Contests, & Residencies for Writers at Make Writing Your Job. This is the past week’s edition of the opportunities list: a $100,000 creative thinking prize with a book deal, CAD $15,000 for literary and performing arts production, and a $5,000 unrestricted state fellowship for literary artists.

• 50+ Calls for Pitches We’re Loving, also at Make Writing Your Job, where a science publication is offering $1,500 per reported feature, an arts publication is paying $650 for spotlight pieces, and a racial justice outlet is commissioning editorials for $600.

reading

• Fourth Wing has its Violet and its Xaden. TheWrap’s Tess Patton reports that Esther McGregor (We Were Liars, Babygirl) will play Violet Sorrengail and Emilio Sakraya (Those About To Die) will play Xaden Riorson in Prime Video’s series, with Michael B. Jordan executive producing, Meredith Averill (The Haunting of Hill House) as showrunner, and Lisa Joy (Westworld) directing the first episode. Amazon hasn’t confirmed it yet. I gave Fourth Wing 4 stars, so yes, I have Opinions about who gets to brood as Xaden, and I’ll share them once I’ve seen him do it on screen.

• Freida McFadden’s The Witch debuted at number one, with first-week print sales double her last hardcover. Publishers Weekly’s bestseller column says The Witch, a thriller split between a present-day timeline and 1692 Massachusetts, is only McFadden’s second hardcover original, and its first week doubled The Intruder, which sold 65K copies in its first week last year and more than 350K since. She built that readership in paperback and e-book long before anyone would print her in hardcover — which is the part I love. If you want to start at the beginning, the reading-order guide is up in creating above.

• Substack says its app drove nearly 800,000 paid subscriptions in six months, and more than half of them came from Notes. Substack announced new content preferences on October 14: readers can dial video, audio, longform, and community posts up or down, mute specific keywords, and fine-tune the topics they follow. The number for writers is further down the post: nearly 800,000 paid subscriptions and more than 80 million free ones came through the app in the past six months, with more than half of the paid ones starting in the Notes feed. Substack’s line to readers: “You get to decide.” I post short, casual Notes with no links in them, and this is the number that tells me to keep doing it. I’d also keep an eye on that mute button. If readers are tired of a topic, they can now make it disappear.

• Someone analyzed 3.9 million Substack Notes, and one Note a day beats posting six to ten. Orel Zilberman at The Writing Edge, here on Substack, pulled 3,915,024 Notes and found that writers who post once a day earn 46% more impressions per Note than writers who post six to ten times, Notes without links beat Notes with links by 30%, Notes of 33 to 64 words beat longer ones by 19%, and the best single hour is 4pm ET, worth about a 19% bump. His conclusion: “Post when you can, and stop chasing the perfect hour.” Short, link-free, once a day. That has been my Notes rule for a while, and it’s nice when the data agrees with me.

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“I am no bird; and no net ensnares me—I am a free human being with an independent will.”

-Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

previous: about | chapter one | chapter two | chapter three | chapter four | chapter five | chapter six | chapter seven | chapter eight | chapter nine | chapter ten | chapter eleven | chapter twelve | chapter thirteen | chapter fourteen | chapter fifteen | chapter sixteen | chapter seventeen | chapter eighteen | chapter nineteen

I tried Eze from the first parking lot I found, and got as far as unlocking the Crane phone before my thumb stopped.

Root access. The whole case lived on those two words—every gap, every dark camera, every convenient blindness, all of it the work of someone who could reach into the machine’s bloodstream, and this phone was the machine’s. So was his. So was the estate’s network, the cars, the walls, the beautiful all-seeing house. There was no channel between me and Ezekiel Crane that didn’t run through infrastructure the name in the ledger could touch, and one wrong sentence into a compromised line wouldn’t warn Eze. It would start a clock.

Face to face, then. An hour and change of road, say the name in a room with no eyes, and let the world end in an orderly fashion.

I put the phone face-down on the passenger seat like the small treason it was, and drove.

…

Dusk came down long and orange over the valley, and I stopped for gas at one of those middle-of-nowhere stations where the highway shrugs off into scrub—two pump islands, a mini-mart the color of old teeth, moths already mobbing the sodium lights. The tank was half-full. I filled it anyway. Nine years of fieldcraft—you never pass fuel when you’re carrying something that can get you killed.

I had the nozzle in the tank and the tape warm against my spine when the black Escalade came off the highway with no hurry at all and rolled to a stop across my Jeep’s nose, close enough to trade paint. Blocking me in with the geometric tidiness of a man who had done it before.

Matthew got out alone.

He looked wrong from the first step, and it took me a second to catalogue why—the boyishness was gone. Not aged—removed, like a slipcover off a chair, and what sat under it was leaner and flatter than the man who’d brought me coffee with fancy logos and called me his best asset. He came around the pumps with a folder in one hand, strolling, and stopped eight feet away, and looked at me the way you look at a car you’re about to scrap for parts.

“Lola Whitman,” he said. “You’ve had a week.”

“Matthew.”

“You went to Ashcroft’s alone today.” Not a question. “After Babylon. Yeah—” at whatever moved in my face, and his smile was brand new, I’d never met it, “—I know about the island. I know you flew into a fog bank with the target and came back wearing his shirt, metaphorically, though from the tabloids maybe not so metaphorically.” He lifted the folder, let it fall open at arm’s length like a man showing a dog a rolled newspaper. The warrant on top was dense and federal, and my name was spelled correctly, and paper-clipped to the front—a trophy, a taunt, the reason the folder existed—was the tabloid photograph of the Alcatraz exercise yard, Eze’s hand at my waist, my face turned up to him, caught mid-laugh at something I no longer remembered being funny long before Kira was found at the bottom of those damned stairs.

“Material witness, to start,” Matthew said. “It gets worse inside, but the inside pages are negotiable and the cover isn’t. You’re done, Lola. Compromised past salvage. Now you’re going to get into the truck, you hand me whatever’s in the bag you keep not looking at—yes, you just did it again—and we spend some weeks having conversations about Ezekiel Crane in a facility with better security than your little lighthouse. Cooperate and maybe, maybe, the New Haven file stays in its drawer.”

The pump clicked off behind me. The tank was full. The moths thrashed at the light, and the whole highway stood empty in both directions, that particular American emptiness that towns like this are built out of, and I understood several things in one clear cold stack.

That he knew about Babylon within a day, which meant his information came from inside Crane’s walls, which meant the Bureau had been drinking from the same poisoned well as everyone else, and had no idea what swam in it.

That the name in the ledger and the voice tipping Matthew were the same, and the same man was, at this hour, alone at the estate with Eze, with the walls, with root access to everything—and I was standing, unarmed, with the only warning in my mouth, being served a warrant by its unknowing courier.

And that Matthew had come alone. No second car, no backup, a black-site warrant executed solo at a gas station at dusk. Because extraction was supposed to be quiet. Because I was an embarrassment now, a line item to be corrected off the books, and men correcting embarrassments don’t bring witnesses.

“You were never going to sign me out,” I said. It came out almost gentle, a revelation burning my tongue. “Nine years. Three books. It was never going to be just three books.”

“It was three books if the third book closed,” Matthew said, with the patience of a man explaining tides to a child. “Then it was Crane. Then it was Crane plus whatever Ashcroft is. You kept being useful, Lola. That was always your problem. So we had to use you to serve justice, don’t you see? You were always part of something bigger than you could possibly have understood. Now put the bag on the ground—”

“I killed a man with a bookend,” I said, “because he decided what I was for. You’ve had nine years to notice the pattern.”

I pulled the nozzle out of my tank and turned it on him.

I want to be precise here, because I have been precise about everything else, and because someday there may be a room where this matters—I did not spray Matthew, and I did not aim at Matthew. I held the trigger down and laid a fat glistening line of gasoline across the concrete between us, pump-island to pump-island, the smell of it rising up sharp and huge into the dusk, drowning the desert-night smell, drowning everything, and Matthew stopped moving with the totality of a man whose training has just seized the wheel.

“Lola.” Very still. “There are cameras.”

“There are always cameras. I live in the eye now. Ask around.” The lighter came out of my bag—brass, old, my whole arsonist bloodline warm in the knurling—and I thumbed it open and lit it, and the little flame stood up in the still air between the moths and the gasoline like the only honest witness in a hundred miles. Matthew’s face over it did something I had waited nine years to see, and it was not fear of burning, not really. It was recalculation. It was a man discovering that the tool had a temperature.

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If you’ve been building your Substack and wishing you had a room full of brilliant, opinionated writers to think with —

This is that room.

Welcome to our monthly 🧪 Substack Lab — a small-group live Zoom session exclusively for Founding Members of 💡 Sutoscience.

💡 become a founding member

Think open office hours meets writer’s workshop meets the best writerly conversation you had but didn’t want to end.

💡 Join Our Monthly Substack Lab and Get Feedback on Your Substack from Fellow Writers

📅 When: Sunday, November 15th at 1:00pm PT/4:00pm ET

💻 Where: Live on Zoom (link below the paywall, Founding Members!)

✍️ What to bring: Your Substack, your questions, your half-baked ideas, your “is this too niche?” spirals — all of it welcome.

Here’s how it works:

• 🔍 Bring a specific question or something you’re stuck on when it comes to your Substack

• 💬 Get live feedback from me and the group

• 🔁 Come back every month and keep the momentum going

• 💻 Nothing is recorded, and this is a cameras-on Zoom meeting to keep this intimate and collaborative

Not a founding member yet? ✨ The Substack Lab is just one of the perks waiting for you on the other side of an upgrade.

🎁 Founding Members get exclusive access to monthly Labs, the 6 Week Substack Sprint, and everything I’m building out for the writers who are serious about making this work. You can unlock your Founding Member perks here on my perks page.

👇 Ready to join us? Upgrade to Founding Member here.

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Hey creatives! Lots to share this week, up first —

the rewrite is done, and my novel is out to ARC readers

I am officially done with the rewrite of Let Me Be Your Ghost — and I feel really proud of everything I put into this book. I’m so excited for you to read it, and I hope you dig it!

It’s out to ARC readers now. Thank you to everyone who raised your hand and said yes to reading it early. I can’t wait to hear what you think.

It’s also live on NetGalley! If you’re a reviewer, librarian, bookseller, or anyone else with a NetGalley account, go request it there.'

👻 request it on NetGalley!

Not on NetGalley? You can preorder it in hardcover, paperback, or Kindle on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Bookshop, and your receipt still gets you How to Write a Memoir, my unreleased craft book, for free.

🎁 claim your pre-order gift!

A free class on Tuesday: the social media system behind this launch

One of the biggest things helping this book launch (and growing this Substack) has been using social media in a clever way — with about an hour a week, you can do all your posts and handle the work around them. I’m showing you more of how on Tuesday.

On Tuesday, October 13 at 9am PT (12pm ET), I’m teaching a free 45-minute Lightning Lesson on Maven called How to Turn Instagram Views Into Customers With AI. It’s totally free. Even if you can’t make it live, sign up anyway, and Maven emails you the replay.

🎟️ save your free spot!

I’ve also got more ways to learn with me coming soon, all built to help you grow as writers, creatives, and creative solopreneurs. I’m excited to share them with you! In the meantime, I hope to see you on Tuesday.

creating

• Verity Ending Explained by a Real Ghostwriter on the blog. The manuscript, the letter, who killed Verity, and what the new movie keeps from the book, from someone who actually writes other people’s memoirs for a living. Full spoilers, so finish the book first. I haven’t seen the movie yet, and my take goes in the post once I do.

• 270+ Grants, Contests, & Residencies for Writers at Make Writing Your Job. This is the past week’s edition of the opportunities list: a $25,000 poetry prize, an $80,000 writing fellowship with editor support, and a residency with a $1,100/month stipend.

• 50+ Calls for Pitches We’re Loving, also at Make Writing Your Job, where a major romance publisher is offering $5,000 to $8,000 advances and a science publication is paying $1,500 for reported essays.

reading

• Three of the Big Five publishers are using AI behind the scenes, and their own staff are pushing back. WIRED’s Adam Morgan talked to more than two dozen workers at HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, and Hachette, who say tools like Claude and ChatGPT are writing publicity and back-cover copy, emails to literary agents, and marketing materials, often at an executive’s request. HarperCollins drafted dozens of staffers into monthly AI Champions brainstorms, Simon & Schuster employees are gathering signatures against a workflow-tracking tool called Skan AI, and agents are adding contract clauses that bar running their authors’ manuscripts through an LLM. Even Meg Reid, publisher of the independent Hub City Press, told WIRED that AI-written marketing “feels pretty inevitable” for the big houses. I agree with her — AI is kind of an inevitability, because it’s cost-cutting, cost-saving, and efficient, and I think we’re about to see it sweep through publishing, especially on the business side, where so many of the tasks are rote. Here’s the part I keep coming back to: the tools these publishers are using are the same ones you have access to. You could use them yourself for the marketing and outreach side of publishing your own book. I think this is definitely a reckoning of sorts, but I’m curious to hear what you think in the comments.

  Leave a comment

• Substack is rolling out new sponsorships, including one where a brand pays for your free readers to try your paid tier. Substack announced three formats at Advertising Week on October 8: the Upgrade (a brand gifts your free subscribers a month of paid access), the Unlock (a brand sponsors one paid post so anyone can read it), and the Masthead (a brand-curated zine of writers on one theme). Earlier tests ran with Balenciaga, Uber, and T-Mobile, and for now it’s opt-in for small groups of Substack bestsellers through their Creator Kits. Substack’s pitch: “a world where ads work for writers instead of writers working for ads.” The Upgrade is the clever one. It’s basically a free trial of your paid posts with someone else covering the bill.

• Simon & Schuster launched an imprint just for self-published authors, and it pays no advance. Publishers Weekly’s Natasha Poliszczuk reports that Simon Stream releases its first titles this month in e-book, print-on-demand paperback, and audio all at once, with 50% net royalties on e-books paid monthly plus S&S marketing and publicity. It’s acquiring psychological thrillers, cozy mysteries, and romance, and it’s led by Victoria Pepe, who came over from Amazon Publishing: “The indie market has matured enormously over the last few years.” A Big Five house building an imprint around indie authors tells you how much power self-published writers have now. Still, run the numbers against what you already earn on KDP before you sign anything.

• Goodreads finally lets you give a book 3.5 stars (or 3.75). Goodreads announced on October 5 that ratings now run from 0.25 to 5 in quarter-star steps. The histogram still shows five bars, your old whole-star ratings stay put, and book averages “may shift.” Good e-Reader reports readers added 3.5 million ratings in under two days, and 3.5, 4.5, 3.75, and 4.25 were the most popular new values. As someone who scores every book on my blog out of 5, I’m thrilled. Some books are just a 3.5!

• A 200-page story collection just had the biggest debut of the year. Rebecca Yarros’s Threshing Day, 13 stories set in her Empyrean romantasy world, sold 857,802 print copies in its first week, per Circana BookScan, which makes it the third-bestselling book of 2026 so far, behind two books that have been on sale all year. Publishers Weekly’s bestseller column called it “a snack before the fourth novel arrives.” (I gave Fourth Wing 4 stars, so I understand the appetite.) If you write a series, this is your sign that readers will pay for the stories in between, too.

• Indie authors can now take preorders for audiobooks on ACX. ACX announced on October 6 that rights holders can set up audiobook preorders, verified audiobooks can now run Sponsored Products ads on Amazon in the US, and free promo cards live at audible.com/promocards. Dale L. Roberts broke it down at Self-Publishing with Dale here on Substack. ACX’s case for it: “Pre-orders give you a way to build anticipation.” I’ve been running a preorder campaign for Let Me Be Your Ghost since August, so I love seeing audio get the same tools.

• MacKenzie Scott published her third novel as a Substack serial. The New Yorker’s Rhoda Feng reviews Last Days in Two Nations, which Scott released in installments on Substack in August: a near-future, divided America, eighteen characters, one week. Her first two novels came from Big Five houses, and her 2005 debut won an American Book Award. One self-published writer told The Wall Street Journal that serializing fiction online “is a risk only a billionaire can feel comfortable making.” I’d gently disagree, since chapters of Let Me Be Your Ghost have been dropping here every Friday (and I am very much not a billionaire).

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If you’ve been building your Substack and wishing you had a room full of brilliant, opinionated writers to think with —

This is that room.

Welcome to our monthly 🧪 Substack Lab — a live Zoom session exclusively for Founding Members of 💡 Sutoscience.

💡 become a founding member

Think open office hours meets writer’s workshop meets the best writerly conversation you had but didn’t want to end.

💡 Join Our Monthly Substack Lab and Get Feedback on Your Substack from Fellow Writers

📅 When: Sunday, October 11th at 3:00pm PT/6:00pm ET

💻 Where: Live on Zoom (link below the paywall, Founding Members!)

✍️ What to bring: Your Substack, your questions, your half-baked ideas, your “is this too niche?” spirals — all of it welcome.

Here’s how it works:

• 🔍 Bring a specific question or something you’re stuck on when it comes to your Substack

• 💬 Get live feedback from me and the group

• 🔁 Come back every month and keep the momentum going

• 💻 Nothing is recorded, and this is a cameras-on Zoom meeting to keep this intimate and collaborative

Not a founding member yet? ✨ The Substack Lab is just one of the perks waiting for you on the other side of an upgrade.

🎁 Founding Members get exclusive access to monthly Labs, the 6 Week Substack Sprint, and everything I’m building out for the writers who are serious about making this work. You can unlock your Founding Member perks here on my perks page.

👇 Ready to join us? Upgrade to Founding Member here.

Read more

Subscribe now

“Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heaven.”

-John Milton, Paradise Lost

previous: about | chapter one | chapter two | chapter three | chapter four | chapter five | chapter six | chapter seven | chapter eight | chapter nine | chapter ten | chapter eleven | chapter twelve | chapter thirteen | chapter fourteen | chapter fifteen | chapter sixteen | chapter seventeen | chapter eighteen

The lie I left home on was four words long.

“Devi needs me downtown.” Signatures, filings, the tabloid cleanup—boring, bureaucratic, safe. Eze was half into a board call when I said it, one ear in a war he was fighting for my name, and he squeezed my hand and mouthed take Xavier, and I said I would, and I didn’t, and the four words worked the way lies work on people who’ve stopped guarding against you.

It was the first thing I’d taken from him since the island. It cost more than everything I’d taken before it combined.

I drove myself to Los Altos in an estate car with, at my request, Tini’s own eyes on the brake lines that morning—“you think I don’t check everything with wheels now, escritora?”—and the gates swung open the moment my plates were read, and Poseidon reared over his fountain in the noon glare, and Dorian Ashcroft received me on his limestone terrace in linen the color of nothing, delighted, unsurprised.

“No Ezekiel,” he observed.

“You said ‘just Lola.’”

“I did. And here she is, on time and unaccompanied.” He smiled at some private math resolving in his mind. “He doesn’t know. Oh, that’s much better than I’d planned for.”

Security processed me at the door like an airport with taste—phone surrendered into a velvet drawer, a wand, a young man with oatmeal linen and dead eyes going through my bag. He lifted the tape recorder out and his eyes posed a question at his employer.

“I’m a ghostwriter,” I said, bored. “You invited me to discuss a book. I record interviews. It’s in every profile your people compiled on me, which I assume runs to volumes.”

Dorian laughed, waved a hand. “Let her keep her instrument. Writers without their instruments get restless, and everything in this house is swept on the way out anyway.” His eyes met mine, warm as an autoclave. “Everything.”

Noted, I thought, and followed him into lunch.

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👻 apply to be an ARC reader

Let Me Be Your Ghost is my romantic thriller novel, and it comes out November 18. I’ve been sending early ebook copies to readers who like their suspense with a slow burn, and I’m closing the form soon so everyone has time to read before release day.

🖤 She was sent to destroy him. She fell in love with him instead.

Lola is a memoir ghostwriter with a nine-year secret: everything her clients confess goes straight to the FBI. Eze is the billionaire who hires her to write his memoir, never suspecting the Bureau is listening. He’s her last job. One more book and she’s free. Then she starts falling for him.

Tropes on the menu:

• ✔️ forbidden slow burn

• ✔️ forced to play a couple as cover

• ✔️ morally gray billionaire

• ✔️ “Because I can’t lose you”

It’s a romance first, but with a real thriller engine underneath: secret tapes, a surveillance empire with a thousand eyes, and a party on Alcatraz that goes very wrong. If you like your suspense with a love story, this one’s for you.

The book is inspired by my real-life experiences as a memoir ghostwriter who’s been flown around the world to write some really wild books.

📋 The details

• 📖 Free early ebook copy (ARC). Full-length novel, about 120,000 words.

• 🗓 No deadline to read. Release day is November 18.

• ⭐ A review on Goodreads and/or Amazon is optional and hugely appreciated, before or after release, but not required.

• 🔞 18+ only (open-door romance scenes).

• 🎙 Podcast hosts, book influencers, newsletter and book-list writers, booksellers, and press: I’d love to send you a copy too. Happy to support with interviews, and I can crosspost any media or interviews to my Substack email subscriber audience of 60,000+ readers.

👻 request your free ARC copy

If you’d rather wait for the finished book, you can preorder it from any retailer in hardcover, paperback, or Kindle, and I’ll send you my unreleased book How to Write a Memoir for free. Just upload your order confirmation on this page.

See you around my creative lab this week,

-Amy

p.s. know someone who reads romantic thrillers in one sitting? feel free to send this their way!

Share

If you’ve been building your Substack and wishing you had a room full of brilliant, opinionated writers to think with —

This is that room.

Welcome to our monthly 🧪 Substack Lab — a live Zoom session exclusively for Founding Members of 💡 Sutoscience.

💡 become a founding member

Think open office hours meets writer’s workshop meets the best writerly conversation you had but didn’t want to end.

💡 Join Our Monthly Substack Lab and Get Feedback on Your Substack from Fellow Writers

📅 When: Sunday, October 11th at 3:00pm PT/6:00pm ET

💻 Where: Live on Zoom (link below the paywall, Founding Members!)

✍️ What to bring: Your Substack, your questions, your half-baked ideas, your “is this too niche?” spirals — all of it welcome.

Here’s how it works:

• 🔍 Bring a specific question or something you’re stuck on when it comes to your Substack

• 💬 Get live feedback from me and the group

• 🔁 Come back every month and keep the momentum going

• 💻 Nothing is recorded, and this is a cameras-on Zoom meeting to keep this intimate and collaborative

Not a founding member yet? ✨ The Substack Lab is just one of the perks waiting for you on the other side of an upgrade.

🎁 Founding Members get exclusive access to monthly Labs, the 6 Week Substack Sprint, and everything I’m building out for the writers who are serious about making this work. You can unlock your Founding Member perks here on my perks page.

👇 Ready to join us? Upgrade to Founding Member here.

Read more

Hey creatives! Lots to share this week, up first —

A free class on turning Instagram views into customers, October 13

On Tuesday, October 13 at 9am PT (12pm ET), I’m teaching a free 45-minute Lightning Lesson on Maven called How to Turn Instagram Views Into Customers With AI.

It’s the story behind CozyJobs, the jobs platform I co-created: 1.1M Instagram views in 30 days with $0 on ads, and the one short video that brought in 146 signups and 17 paying customers in three days. I’ll show you what gets views versus what gets customers, the $66/month tool stack behind it, and how I let AI handle the production chores while the ideas and the final call stay mine. I wrote up the backstory here if you want the numbers first.

It’s free and live on Zoom through Maven. Can’t make 9am? Register anyway, and Maven emails the recording within 48 hours.

🎟️ save your free spot!

Know a writer or small business owner who’s posting into the void? Send this to them.

Out November 18, and I’m looking for ARC readers

Let Me Be Your Ghost comes out November 18, and I’m looking for ARC readers. You get a free early ebook about a month before launch day, with no reading deadline. An early copy never comes with a review quota. If you love it, though, a review on Amazon or Goodreads once the book is live is how the next reader finds it.

👻 apply to be an ARC reader!

You can also preorder it now in hardcover, paperback, or Kindle on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Bookshop. Preorder one copy in any format, upload your receipt on the claim page, and I’ll send you How to Write a Memoir, my unreleased craft book, in PDF and EPUB. Chapters keep dropping here every Friday for paid subscribers.

🎁 claim your pre-order gift!

the best book I read all year has the worst cover

Don’t look at the cover of The Spymaster’s Lady by Joanna Bourne. It’s the cheapest dime-store romance cover you’ve ever seen: some dude’s abs, a shirt that has given up, a manor house in the background. Just download it to your Kindle (it’s $0.99 as I write this) and read it anyway, because it’s the best book I’ve read all year. I read it in 2 days. I gasped at the plot twists. It’s so beautiful and intricately plotted, and it felt like a true romance novel.

Historical romance isn’t usually my cup of tea, but I love spy thrillers, and this turned out to be an incredible, completely underrated one. The spies operate as a unit, reading each other’s micro expressions, all ten steps ahead of each other. There are scenes where people at war with each other end up in the same room, and it’s not guns blazing — it’s social politicking (and yes, okay, guns are blazing too!). I love James Bond and Jason Bourne, but I miss this kind of nuance, and my jaw was on the floor.

It also made me realize I’ve felt a little starved for this kind of book. My gripe with a lot of current romance is that the sex gets pushed to the forefront and the books end up feeling like cheap fanfiction instead of a true romance novel. There’s nothing wrong with books that lean harder on the spice, and there’s room for every kind of reader. But there has to be a level of artistry, because that’s what art should be. The Spymaster’s Lady is a romance novel, and it’s also the story of a woman growing into herself, and the love story lives inside that instead of replacing it. I ~ loved ~ that.

I gave it 5 stars, which shocked me, and I wrote up my full review on the blog (spoiler-free, I promise).

Also this week: Business Insider ran an essay on how my husband Kyle and I built Make Writing Your Job, as told to Kaila Yu. It traces the idea back to a café in Paris, where I was turning down client work and running out of writers to refer it to, and follows it to where our job board for writers is today: more than 58,000 subscribers and more than $263,000 in annual gross recurring revenue. What I’m proudest of is that we built it almost entirely without paid ads, and most of our paid subscribers found us through Substack itself. One caveat, because I always give you the real math: that’s revenue, before Substack’s cut, Stripe fees, and our own expenses. My advice in the piece is the same advice I’d give you here. Write about the thing you can’t stop talking about.

Subscribe now

creating

• How 55,000+ Readers Found My Substacks Without a Single Paid Ad. The six doors behind my subscribers, from social media and my YouTube channel to Substack’s own discovery, collaborations, and Substack Lives.

• Beta Readers vs. ARC Readers: How I Find Both. My Self-Publishing Secrets episode on early readers, including where I find beta readers (Facebook groups, of all places), what a NetGalley listing costs (about $500), and when to send ARCs. The most surprising part: a big share of my preorders come from beta and ARC readers, who already get the book free.

• How I Got 1,000,000 Social Views in 30 Days With 2 Tools. My SocialBu and Claude tutorial, video plus written steps with prices, if you want to try the system before the class on the 13th.

• How I traveled the world on a writer’s income at Make Writing Your Job, with photos from Vienna, Singapore, and Tuscany. And on Friday I went live with Brooke Warner, publisher and co-founder of She Writes Press, on publishing your book: hybrid publishing math, alternatives to querying agents, writing about real people in memoir, and how to spot a fraudulent book marketer.

• 230+ Grants, Contests, & Residencies for Writers at Make Writing Your Job. This is the past week’s edition of the opportunities list: $500 to $5,000 for professional development from a state arts council, $15,000 for excellence in American literature, and research library fellowships at $5,000 a month for 4 to 9 months.

• New reading lists on the blog: Enemies to Lovers Books (12 of them, ranked, Fourth Wing and Phantasma included), Dark Romance Books (from a reluctant convert, with spice levels and the ones I quit), Books Like Throne of Glass, Hockey Romance Books, and INTJ Characters, where Amy Dunne, Kaz Brekker, Xaden, and Rhysand get ranked by an actual INTJ.

• For the working writers: NetGalley: How to Get ARCs, from an author who sends them, and Substack vs Ghost, from someone who did the fee math and stayed on Substack anyway.

• For the San Francisco readers: The Best Coffee Shops in San Francisco (for working, meeting someone, or a 6am start) and The Best Desserts in San Francisco, from Naya’s Mango Tango to warm fortune cookies in Ross Alley, each with a map card for every spot.

reading

• The pumpkin muffins I can’t stop making are made in a blender, with oats instead of flour. Tim Laielli’s Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Blender Muffins are in his September 18 meal plan at the bare minimum here on Substack: pumpkin, Greek yogurt, rolled oats, eggs, maple syrup, and chocolate chips, all thrown in the blender, 12 muffins, and they freeze well. I’ve been in a gluten-free baking phase lately, making healthy-ish baked goods (use certified gluten-free oats if that’s you too!), and these were so good. They taste like fall.

• Amazon KDP now caps you at 2 new books a week per format, down from 10. The Alliance of Independent Authors reports that the limit took effect September 21. It applies to ebooks, paperbacks, and hardcovers separately, resets every Sunday at midnight UTC, and doesn’t touch books you’ve already published. Amazon’s own notice says it’s “to help maintain a positive publishing experience for all authors.” For almost every author I know, this changes nothing. If you were planning to drop a whole series in one week, though, stagger the launch.

• Reese’s Book Club now shows its paid Substack members the pick before anyone else. October’s pick is Meg Mason’s Sophie, Standing There, about a book-festival worker who gets obsessed with an author, and paid members got the reveal early on September 29 (“Dive into our October pick before the rest of the world”). The top tier sends the book as a gift, and the free post carries a Target tote sponsorship. Early access, a physical gift, and a sponsor, all in one post. Reese Witherspoon’s team is running the small-creator playbook, and it works for them for the same reasons it works for you.

• The Universal executive who bought Dungeon Crawler Carl while it was still self-published wants more self-published books. Publishers Weekly profiles Jordan Moblo, EVP of creative acquisitions at Universal, who runs a book Instagram with nearly half a million followers and picked up Dungeon Crawler Carl in 2023. He has a first-look deal with Kennedy Ryan, partly so she can introduce him to self-published romance authors, and her Before I Let Go was just greenlit at Peacock. On romantasy: “a lot of them have been acquired and are in various stages of development.” From my Hollywood days, I can tell you this is new. Studios used to wait for a Big Five deal. Now they’re reading self-published books.

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“A cage went in search of a bird.”

-Franz Kafka, The Zürau Aphorisms

previous: about | chapter one | chapter two | chapter three | chapter four | chapter five | chapter six | chapter seven | chapter eight | chapter nine | chapter ten | chapter eleven | chapter twelve | chapter thirteen | chapter fourteen | chapter fifteen | chapter sixteen | chapter seventeen

Author’s note: Heads up: this one’s 18+, no minors beyond this point, please. We have arrived at the open-door chapter. If you’re under 18, at work, or related to me — this is your stopping point. The full scene lives behind the paywall, where it can’t scandalize the algorithm.

…

chapter eighteen // strong as death

“Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.”

-Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights

There was a villa on the cliff edge, and it was the most beautiful set of rooms I have ever stood in.

We were still on Babylon—not planning on flying back that night, as neither of us were thinking of leaving then—and Eze led me through the spacious home with a terrace in the middle. But we didn’t stop to admire any of it. Eze pushed the bedroom door open, and I held back a gasp at the room beyond.

Floor-to-ceiling windows encircled the room, the fog wall burning rose-gold in the last light beyond them. A bed dressed in white linen, facing west. Lemons in a blue bowl. A bottle of crisp wine older than both of us, sweating on a table with two glasses, courtesy of Enzo, the island’s keeper.

The sea moved on every side of us, far below.

“This was built for me,” Eze said. “It was the villa modeled after the one he wanted me to live in back in his village, had we stayed in Italy and lived a simple life.” He gently let go of my hand, and went to pour two glasses of wine.

I stepped toward him as he pressed one of the stems into my hand, his fingers grazing mine a beat longer than the handoff needed, close but not fully touching, and there should have been awkwardness—there is always awkwardness, there is protocol even for this—but we had used ours out on the rocks. He knew what I was. I knew what he owned. Every lie either of us had was face-up on the table.

“It’s beautiful,” I said, but I wasn’t looking at the grand room or the panoramic windows. I was watching the man in front of me take a sip of a crisp white wine, the long line of his throat moving as he swallowed, the golden hues dancing off his sun-kissed skin.

“You are,” he said, and suddenly his glass was back on the table, and I set mine down as well. He shifted towards me with an intensity, and the air in the room changed pressure, and I felt it everywhere. My body was alight with anticipation, wanting him so desperately in ways I barely had the courage to name before.

“Wait,” I said, once, when his hands found my waist.

He waited. Instantly, completely—hands stilling, we were so close, his breath ragged but body gone patient as he let me lead—and that, the way he could hold a whole storm at a standstill because I’d asked, undid more of me than I thought it would.

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On August 22, my husband Kyle Cords and I launched a brand-new Instagram account for CozyJobs, the jobs platform we run together. It had zero followers, zero ad budget, and about 24 hours of my total time over the next three weeks, filming included.

Thirty days later, that account had 1.1 million views and 15,600 new followers.

A million views makes a very nice screenshot. But I’ve been doing this long enough to know views don’t pay anyone’s rent, so the dashboard I actually cared about was Stripe. Between August 25 and September 21, CozyJobs’ annual recurring revenue went from $23,867 to $80,855.

(Disclaimer: These are my own numbers from my own business, not a promise of yours. But I’ll show you exactly how we got there.)

So I’m teaching a free class about the gap between those two screenshots. On Tuesday, October 13 at 9 AM PT (12 PM ET), join me live on Maven for a 45-minute Lightning Lesson: How I Turned Instagram Views Into Customers With AI.

💡 RSVP for free!

📱 What We’ll Cover

• Posts for reach vs. posts for customers. What gets views, what gets customers, and why one short video brought in 146 signups and 17 paying customers in three days.

• How to sound like yourself when AI helps you write. The voice guide, fact bank, and banned-words list that keep my AI-assisted posts from sounding like AI. (Yes, I keep a banned-words list, and the words you’ve learned to spot in AI posts are all on it.)

• How to turn AI into a self-learning social media manager. How I prompt AI so that it learns from our real-time Instagram analytics and tells me what’s working.

• My whole AI tool stack, priced out. Every tool I use, what it does in my week, and where I still make the call, starting at $66 a month.

💡 Why I’m Teaching This One

AI has flooded every feed with polished, generic posts, and I’m guessing you’ve scrolled past a few hundred of them this week. At CozyJobs I used it differently. The ideas are mine, and so is the final call on what goes out. AI does the production work around them, like edits, captions, scheduling, and reading the analytics so I know what to make next.

That split is how the CozyJobs account shared 149 posts in 30 days while I spent about 24 total hours on it across the month. (Filming and building the entire system included!)

I built this lesson for the solo founder, the newsletter writer, the freelancer, and the author with a launch coming up. Hi, that last one is also me: Let Me Be Your Ghost comes out November 18!

Can’t make it live? Register anyway. Maven sends the recording to everyone who signs up, and I’m saving time at the end for your questions.

💡 RSVP here!

Want the backstory before class? I wrote up how I got 1,000,000 social views in 30 days with 2 tools, with the setup and prices.

See you on the 13th. Bring your hardest social media question, I’d love to see you in the Zoom!

-Amy

P.S. Know someone running a small business on no team and no time? Forward this to them. The class is free, and it might save them a few hundred dollars in ads.

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If you’ve been building your Substack and wishing you had a room full of brilliant, opinionated writers to think with —

This is that room.

Welcome to our monthly 🧪 Substack Lab — a live Zoom session exclusively for Founding Members of 💡 Sutoscience.

💡 become a founding member

Think open office hours meets writer’s workshop meets the best writerly conversation you had but didn’t want to end.

💡 Join Our Monthly Substack Lab and Get Feedback on Your Substack from Fellow Writers

📅 When: Sunday, October 11th at 3:00pm PT/6:00pm ET

💻 Where: Live on Zoom (link below the paywall, Founding Members!)

✍️ What to bring: Your Substack, your questions, your half-baked ideas, your “is this too niche?” spirals — all of it welcome.

Here’s how it works:

• 🔍 Bring a specific question or something you’re stuck on when it comes to your Substack

• 💬 Get live feedback from me and the group

• 🔁 Come back every month and keep the momentum going

• 💻 Nothing is recorded, and this is a cameras-on Zoom meeting to keep this intimate and collaborative

Not a founding member yet? ✨ The Substack Lab is just one of the perks waiting for you on the other side of an upgrade.

🎁 Founding Members get exclusive access to monthly Labs, the 6 Week Substack Sprint, and everything I’m building out for the writers who are serious about making this work. You can unlock your Founding Member perks here on my perks page.

👇 Ready to join us? Upgrade to Founding Member here.

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