On Wednesdays, I try very hard to be unemployable.

Novel pages in the morning while the light comes up over Sutro Tower, dusted in morning fog. A matcha roughly the size of my ambition. Then my husband Kyle and I disappear into San Francisco for the rest of the day (a ferry, or a restaurant we’ve been circling for weeks) while the rest of this city sits in standup meetings.

Sounds dreamy, right? It is, but I’ve spent a lot of time, energy, and strategy to get here.

I’ve been a working writer for a decade now: a TV writers’ room, six-figure memoir projects, a seven-figure freelancing career, a newsletter business that hit $267,537 in gross annualized revenue, four published books and a fifth serializing on this very Substack. When people find out I write fiction every morning in one of the most expensive cities in the world, they usually want the one answer. The secret unlock.

Here’s the truth: there is no one thing. There’s a stack. Nine income streams, built in order, each one funding the next. And they are NOT equally hard.

So today I’m ranking every way I’ve ever made money as a writer, from “you could start this weekend” to “statistically, please don’t.” For each one: how hard it really is, how long until the first paycheck, how high the ceiling goes, and what it costs you in the only currency I actually budget these days (energy).

Two disclaimers, because I always tell you the truth here. Every number in this post is revenue, not take-home profit. And I’m a writer, not a financial advisor — run your money decisions past a real CPA.

Let’s dive in.

The Ranking, at a Glance

The tool is cheap. That was never the hard part.

From easiest to hardest:

1. Content writing & copywriting: 2/10

2. Freelancing on platforms (Upwork, Contra): 3/10

3. Digital products & courses: 4/10

4. Consulting & coaching: 5/10

5. Self-publishing books: 6/10

6. Ghostwriting memoirs & books: 7/10

7. A paid newsletter: 8/10

8. Serialized fiction: 8/10 for the money, 2/10 for the joy

9. Writing for television: 10/10

The first two are free for everyone today, strategy included. The other seven live below the paywall, and they’re where the numbers get bigger and stranger.

1. Content Writing & Copywriting (Difficulty: 2/10)

Time to first paycheck: days to weeks
Estimated ceiling: $1,000–$2,000+ per article once you specialize
What it costs you: almost nothing to start, your soul if you price too low

This is the on-ramp: blog posts, email campaigns, landing pages, product copy. Businesses have an infinite appetite for words that sell things, and most founders would rather pay you than write a single sentence themselves. If you can hit a deadline and absorb a brand-voice doc, you’re ahead of half the market already.

The low barrier is the good news and the bad news. The bottom of this market is content mills paying $5–$20 an article, and I need you to walk past them like they’re handing out flyers on a street corner.

The way up is specificity: pick a niche where the words are attached to revenue and become the person who writes THAT. Email flows for skincare brands. Case studies for B2B software. Greeting cards for houseplants with googly eyes. (Okay, maybe not that last one. But if the googly-eyed houseplant industry calls, you answer.)

Specialists get hired faster and paid more, because “generalist” reads as cheapest option in a client’s head, and “specialist” reads as insurance policy.

Where to start looking: my guides to content writing jobs that pay fairly and where to find freelance copywriting jobs. And if you’re choosing a lane, I broke down ghostwriting vs. copywriting vs. content writing (and which pays more) on the blog.

2. Freelancing on Platforms (Difficulty: 3/10)

Time to first paycheck: a few weeks of unglamorous proposal grind
Ceiling: $300,000+ (my lifetime Upwork number, plus $25K+ on Contra) but there are other freelancers with $1,000,000+ on these platforms (but they do pay boatloads in platform fees)
What it costs you: platform fees, and one small ego death per proposal

I made my first $10K on Upwork in 2018 while everyone around me insisted the platform was a race to the bottom. It’s only a race to the bottom if you line up at the bottom.

What actually worked, in order: a profile positioned around one expensive problem instead of “I write anything!” Proposals that open with the client’s problem instead of my biography. Raising my rate after every successful contract. And when the pandemic closed my TV writers’ room in 2020 and I went all-in on freelancing, I got ruthless. Fewer clients. Higher rates. Clearer boundaries. My income tripled.

Platforms are training wheels with a toll booth. You pay fees for the privilege of a deal-flow firehose, and it’s worth it exactly as long as it’s teaching you what clients pay premiums for. Then you graduate to referrals and repeat business, where the real margins live.

My comparison posts if you’re picking a starting point: Upwork vs. Contra and the 5 best writing job boards for freelance writers, plus how to price your writing services so you don’t anchor yourself in the clearance bin.

And if freelancing is the stream you want to build for real, that’s the entire mission of my other newsletter, Make Writing Your Job: step-by-step playbooks, live classes, and a community of working writers, for $19/month (or $135/year, which works out to three months free).

What’s Behind the Paywall Today

The seven remaining streams are for paid subscribers. Below the line:

• The consulting rate ladder ($90 to $350 to $750 to $1,000 an hour), including the client who answered my quote with silence, then “send the invoice.”

• How my 2023 book pulled roughly $110K of client work to my inbox, and why the new one costs $0.99 on purpose.

• Six-figure memoir math: the $150K quote a client called undercharging, and the async system that means I take zero calls.

• The real paid-newsletter timeline: $0 to $267,537 gross annualized, the version with the boring parts left in (three years, I ran basically no ads, fees disclosed).

• What serializing a romantic thriller chapter by chapter actually pays. (And why I’d do it for free. Don’t tell my accountant.)

• Why television, the “real” writing career, is ranked dead last by someone who held a winning lottery stub.

• The calendar architecture that bought my Wednesdays back, and the energy budget that keeps the novel first in line.

If this newsletter has ever made you money or made you braver, today is a very good day to upgrade. Paid subscribers get every essay in full, plus my romantic thriller Let Me Be Your Ghost as it serializes (the first chapters are free here).

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Every chapter of Let Me Be Your Ghost now has a publish date.

I finished the rough draft a few weeks ago. Now the first pass of the edited draft is done too, and I’ve scheduled the entire rest of the book on Substack (!!!). The whole novel, queued up and waiting to find you.

It feels completely surreal. It does every single time I finish a draft and a big round of edits. This is when the book stops being a private thing between me and my document. Suddenly it’s real, and it’s exciting and scary all at once, because it means one thing — I get to share with you, my readers!

Some of you got here early and have already been emailing me your thoughts on the chapters as they come out, which I so, so, so appreciate.

Which brings me to the fun part.

📕 I’m Opening the Book Up to Beta Readers

Beta readers are an important early voice in my books. My nonfiction book Write for Money and Power had 90+ of readers, and they made it a sharper, better book. Now it’s this novel’s turn.

Here’s how it works: I send you the entire draft, you read it for free, and you give me whatever level of feedback you want. That can mean detailed notes in the Google Doc, or just three things you liked and three things you think could be improved. As much or as little as you want. It’s a pretty low lift.

As a thank you, beta readers who finish the book get:

• Your name in the acknowledgments of the finished book

• A free copy of the finished ebook when it comes out

• Priority access to my future books — first in line for early reads from here on out

The one thing I’m asking for is speed. I’m looking for readers who can get through the book in a week or two and send feedback within the next 30 days, because your notes will feed directly into the rewrite pass I’m working on right now.

Apply to be a beta reader below if you’re interested!

📚 apply to be a beta reader here!

📚 The Book I’ve Been Carrying Since Hollywood

I started developing this story back in my TV writer days in Hollywood, and it’s been with me ever since. There’s a lot of my real life that inspired elements of it (I’m a ghostwriter, I live in San Francisco, and I’ve worked with plenty of tech professionals), so Lola’s world is built from true-to-life detail — but of course, wildly fabricated and 100% fictional beyond the basic premise. The murders, I promise, are fully invented.

I’ve been calling it a romantic thriller: a romance novel with thriller elements and a murder mystery to sleuth through.

At heart, I’m a romance reader who loves thrillers and murder mysteries, so this book is me checking every one of my own boxes.

The romance is the center point, though, and every pass I make on the manuscript is about turning that dial up further. If that’s your kind of book, I’m excited for you to read it.

And if you’re new here, you can catch up on the first four chapters for free right here.

✍️ My Biggest Lesson So Far in Serializing Fiction

A note for the writers reading this: I wrote a whole guide on how to serialize fiction, and this stretch has confirmed the biggest rule in it.

The more of your book you finish before chapters start going out weekly, the better everything gets. With the full novel scheduled, I’m not writing toward a weekly deadline anymore — I’m spending that time on deeper edits and real, creative thinking about marketing. Chapters in the bank buy you a clear head.

Serializing this book has been ~ so much fun ~ and getting to watch new readers find Lola and Ezekiel every week is my favorite part. Thank you for coming along on the journey.

I hope you’re having a great weekend. See you in the story. 🌉

-Amy

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“You know what charm is: a way of getting the answer yes without having asked any clear question.”

-Albert Camus, The Fall

previous: about | chapter one | chapter two | chapter three | chapter four | chapter five | chapter six | chapter seven | chapter eight | chapter nine | chapter ten

The fog hadn’t burned off when I went looking for him.

I found Eze in the kitchen garden below the east lawn, standing on the gravel between Amos’s raised beds with a coffee he wasn’t drinking.

Eze was dressed for the city—charcoal trousers, white shirt open at the collar, no tie yet—but his hair hadn’t gotten the memo, standing ungoverned like he’d been dragging his hands through it since dawn, and the shadows under his eyes were the same gray as the marine layer. The dahlias were still beaded with fog. Bees moved through the rosemary slow and heavy, drunk on the cold. Somewhere below the cliffs, the ocean kept working.

I’d dressed for a writing day—black jeans, an oversized black sweater with the sleeves shoved to my elbows, boots gone dark at the toes from the wet lawn. A strand of black hair had already worked loose from my bun, in keeping with tradition. I’d carried my coffee out with me because my hands had wanted something to do since breakfast.

I held out the envelope to him.

“This came at breakfast,” I said. “Technically it’s addressed to you, but it looks like whoever sent it wanted me to see it as well. Tini crossed herself with a spatula before she’d hand it over, and Tini has stared down health inspectors.”

Eze set his cup on the low stone wall and took the card. His eyes went down it once, fast, and stopped where I’d known they would—on the looping afterthought at the bottom, the plus one the whole valley is whispering about. The muscle in his jaw ticked.

“Dorian Ashcroft,” he said, and nothing else for a moment.

“Tell me about him.”

“Walk with me.” He took the path toward the greenhouse and I fell in step beside him, gravel crunching, our breath showing in the cold Bay Area morning. “He founded a company called Solace. An AI companion—a friend in your pocket. Someone who always picks up at three in the morning when no one else in your life does. Forty million subscribers.” He paused. “Most of them lonely. A lot of them young. Dorian is very good at being needed.”

“That’s either sweet or horrifying.”

“He’s been trying to worm his way into getting streams of our data for two years. Location data, specifically. He wants to know where his users are, who they’re with, how long they’ve been alone.” The gravel kept time under our feet. “My father told him no. Three times.”

“Did your father tell people no?”

“Almost never. Not people with checkbooks.” His eyes stayed on the path ahead. “Which is the part I keep coming back to.”

“So decline the dinner invite. Tell him the memoir has you busy.”

“I can’t.” Eze’s tone was clipped, his gaze stormy. “Eighteen months ago he bought four percent of the company and two board seats that vote the way he votes. I can refuse his data requests all year—I do. But I can’t keep refusing his dinners without handing him a grievance to perform for the other directors.” A breath that wasn’t quite a laugh. “It’s politics. I hate politics. That’s what hurts me in all this, and Dorian knows that better than anyone.”

The path narrowed at the corner of the greenhouse and our knuckles brushed—an accident of closeness, nothing more. He moved his hand away. Not fast. Just final. And put an inch of fog between us that hadn’t been there before. I sucked in a breath, trying to size up this mystery that was Eze.

Was Eze… afraid of Dorian?

“And me?” I asked, hating how careful my voice came out. “Why does he want me at that table?”

Eze stopped walking. “I don’t know.” The words landed one at a time. “I’ve been turning it over all morning, and I don’t know, and I don’t like not knowing.”

“Okay. So I’ll smile and pass the salt and—”

“Rules for Thursday.” He turned to me, and the CEO was all the way on, the warmth gone somewhere I couldn’t track. “You don’t go anywhere in that house alone. You stay by my side. You don’t eat or drink anything that didn’t come from a dish we’re sharing. And whatever he offers you—money, flattery, a story about me—you look bored. Boredom is the only thing men like Dorian can’t buy.”

I stopped walking. “Hold on. What do you mean, nothing that didn’t come from a shared dish?” The edge in my voice arrived before I could file it down. “What’s he going to do, drug me at his own dinner party—”

“Lola.”

“What do I need to know about him, Eze? What has he done?”

“Just trust me.” Eze’s tone was quiet. The kind of tone that ended meetings.

The bees went on with their slow work. I wrapped both hands around my mug like it was a lifeline in the stormy sea of Eze’s emotions. The coffee had gone cold without consulting me, and I drank some anyway, because my body needed a job that wasn’t shaking.

Eze looked down at the invitation still in his hand. Then he folded it once and his fist closed around it—slow, deliberate, until the heavy cream stock gave. When his hand opened, the invitation was a tight crumpled knot, the watermark eye crushed blind, and I understood, finally, that the cold demeanor he wore this morning had never been for me.

“I’ve been bored by richer men than Dorian Ashcroft,” I said, aiming for flippant to fill the silence and landing somewhere just south of it.

He looked at me then—really looked, for the first time since the garden gate—and something raw moved behind the green before he shut it away.

“No,” he said quietly. “You haven’t.”

He tossed the ruined card into a nearby trash bin, picked his coffee up off the wall, and walked toward the drive, where Xavier already had the car idling.

I stood in the fog with my cold coffee, listening to the gravel give under his shoes, and wondered what the fuck I’d just been invited to.

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I’m speaking at the virtual 10x Your Freelancing Summit about how to AI-proof your freelancing career!

You can RSVP to hear me and other amazing speakers talk about how to grow your freelancing career on August 25-27.

Solidgigs, Preston Lee, and the whole team over there are awesome, and I know this is going to be an epic few days of talks and virtual Q&As and events.

Lots of cool stuff, check out the full listing of events below:

👋 come to the summit!

see you there!

-Amy

Subscribe now

“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

-William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun

previous: about | chapter one | chapter two | chapter three | chapter four | chapter five | chapter six | chapter seven | chapter eight | chapter nine

We did the interviews in the evenings now, after the demands of Crane Industries unhooked its claws from him, in the main house library with the fog pressing up against the glass like an audience.

It was my favorite room on the property and I resented that I had a favorite room on the property. Two walls of books that had clearly been read, not decorated with. A fireplace that burned real wood, piñon and oak, the smoke sweet at the edges. Eze would shed the CEO in stages—jacket over a chair, cufflinks in a stone dish if he was coming from an event where he was required to dress up, and his sleeves rolled—and somewhere in the process the man underneath came up like a diver surfacing, and that was the man I interviewed.

That was the man I was supposed to be sinking. The man the FBI wanted behind bars. I put the thought where I put everything now—in the drawer inside me that was getting hard to close.

“Tell me about the trips,” I said.

Tonight he was on the floor, of all places—back against the couch, forearms on his knees, a glass of something amber abandoned on the rug beside him. My recorder sat on the coffee table between us, spool turning, and next to it the week’s crop of his father’s files, which he kept handing me like a man dealing out his own tarot. I faced him, my left arm on the sofa, a mug of tea to keep my head clear steaming by my stacked knees.

“Which trips?”

“Every year, before your birthday. You mentioned it twice and changed the subject twice. Third time’s the charm.”

Eze looked at the fire for a while. The light moved on his face and found the tiredness under the polished exterior, and I made myself keep my eyes on my notebook.

“My father didn’t believe in birthdays,” he said. “Cake, parties—‘sentimental infrastructure’, he called it. But every year, the week before mine, he’d pull me out of school, out of the company, out of whatever mattered, and we’d go somewhere with bad cell coverage. Iceland once. The Atacama. A lake in Hokkaido where the fog came down so thick you couldn’t see your own canoe.” A muscle in his jaw moved. “No staff. No security, which for him was like traveling without skin. Seven days a year, I had a father instead of a founder.”

“What did you do?”

“Nothing. That was the point. We fished badly. He lectured me about empires and I pretended not to listen. He measured himself two fingers of whiskey every night, never a third, and told me the truth about one thing—that was the ritual, though he never called it out. One true thing a year.” Eze picked up his glass and didn’t drink from it, watching the flickering fireplace through the glass with those entrancing emerald eyes of his. “Some years it was about the company. Once it was about my mother. The last trip—” he stopped.

The fire ticked. I kept still, the way you keep still when a wild thing walks into a clearing.

“The last trip, he told me he’d built the machine wrong,” Eze said. “Those words. Wrong from the foundation, he said, because he’d built it assuming he would always be the one holding it. He said the worst thing a powerful man can believe is that he’ll be alive tomorrow.” A breath, half a laugh, no humor anywhere in it. “Three weeks later he was dead, and I was left with his kingdom of secrets.”

The fog leaned on the windows. I wrote nothing, because some things you don’t make a subject watch you write.

“Your birthday’s in nineteen days,” I said softly. It was in his file. The first birthday of his life with no trip with his father on the other side of it.

“Is it,” Eze said, flat as slate, and knocked back the two fingers of whiskey in one motion, and I understood that he had done the math long before I had.

“For what it’s worth,” I said, “he doesn’t sound kind. Or patient. He sounds like a man I’d have hated interviewing.”

Eze laughed—startled, real. “He was neither. Not once, not ever. He was exacting and cold and he kept score of everything. And he was still my father. That’s the sentence no one is allowed to finish about difficult men. Everyone wants the first half or the second.”

“I write memoirs,” I said. “I only deal in whole sentences.”

His eyes came up from the fire to me, green gone dark in the low light, and stayed. The room got smaller the way it kept doing lately, the air developing a texture, and the recorder turned and turned on the table like a small chaperone.

“I know,” he said. “It’s why you’re here.”

Both meanings arrived at once, the way he liked to deliver them. I looked down at my notebook first. I always broke his gaze first.

I didn’t know what would happen if I didn’t look away.

A small part of me, growing larger by the day, yearned to find out.

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Just wanted to hop into your inbox and let you know I’ve had to reschedule tonight’s Substack Lab to next Thursday, 8/13 at noon PT as I’m feeling a bit under the weather today.

You can RSVP with the Luma link for updates if you’d like: https://luma.com/lhdygn46

Thanks for your patience and see you next week!

-Amy

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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: TONIGHT, Thursday, August 6th at 5pm PT/8pm 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

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

It’s a Wednesday, and I’m biking through the sunny wetlands of Reno with family, stopping for a beautiful breakfast bowl before finishing our ride. The marshland birds fly over the shimmering water with towering weeds, the Tahoe mountains in the background.

Then, after an afternoon of cooking corn on the cob and lunch on the grill, I sit outside in the shade to get some writing time for my new novel, let me be your ghost.

The progress has been steady. I’ve been writing chunks of the book on calm afternoons just like these, an iced green tea sweating on a side table while I write away. And — most recently! — I’ve just completed the full first draft and have been doing an edit pass as I’ve been queuing up chapters.

Here’s how it’s been going so far:

🍵 let’s catch up over tea: the writing process for my new (serialized!) romantic thriller novel

I’ve been working on this current version of let me be your ghost since early May of this year, although the concept itself was adapted from a screenplay I wrote back when I worked in Hollywood. It’s very different now, in ways I think make the story more interesting (you can read chapters 1-4 for free to judge for yourself!)

Every novel seems to have its own writing process, and let me be your ghost as a draft came together in a much more seamless way when I figured out some major story engines. These engines were notably lacking in previous drafts, which is why I kept writing flashbacks previously (gratuitous flashbacks is a sure sign of author in distress!)

Story structure is what determines if rewrites will take you months or years, and I’m so grateful to have basically been put through “story structure bootcamp” during my past experience of being a TV writer.

I taught a class on this for Founding Members about how to use TV structure to improve your romance novel’s pacing, and I’ve used all of these tricks in the outlining and preparation of let me be your ghost so far:

In terms of draft progress, since I recently finished writing the entire draft, I’ve been doing revisions on earlier chapters ahead of scheduling them. I’m a few chapters ahead of what’s hitting your inbox each week, which has been ~ so important ~ for building some more cushion for me to strengthen story components.

I’m also going to be diving back into more of the week-to-week marketing of each chapter, and will share what’s moving the needle there soon.

Thanks to everyone who has been reading and also sharing feedback on the draft so far! I’ve been enjoying reading your emails and I’m glad you’re digging the story so far :)

💌 what I’m watching, reading, and creating

• creating: we just launched our free quizzes on CozyJobs, and our Cosmic Career Quiz has been described as “scarily accurate” and has even been endorsed by a professional astrologer!

  • I also got really into astrocartography during my time as a digital nomad, and if you’re curious where the luckiest place in the world are for you to find success across many aspects of your life, I think you’ll dig this quiz also.

• creating: I’ve been using ProWritingAid to help me edit some of my novel, and it’s given me some really interesting notes to work with during this process. if you’re a paid subscriber of Make Writing Your Job, ProWritingAid is giving our subscribers 20% off if you missed the announcement!

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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: THIS WEEK, Thursday, August 6th at 5pm PT/8pm 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

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

“Everyone sees what you appear to be, few experience what you really are.”

-Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince

previous: about | chapter one | chapter two | chapter three | chapter four | chapter five | chapter six | chapter seven | chapter eight

Kira interviewed the way rich men golfed—as a game she intended to enjoy whether or not she let you win.

We set up on the cliff terrace off the west wing of the property. The sun deck was a slab of warm stone hanging over the Pacific with two loungers, a bottle of something sparkling in a sweating bucket, and a wheel of cheese Tini had sent out like a dowry. The afternoon smelled of salt and cut grass and the cold mineral breath that came off the water when the wind turned.

Kira was wearing a flowing emerald sun dress with a black cardigan to ward against the cool afternoon breeze, her blond hair whisked up into a properly messy chignon with strands of hair kissing her face. Her effortless grace contrasted against my grey cable knit sweater and Blundstone boots. It was as if she was the sun and I was a dark stormcloud.

I set my recorder on the low table where Kira could watch it work, and clicked it on.

Kira looked at it like it was a cute dog. “You use tape. That’s either very charming or very sinister.”

“It can’t be both?”

“Everything I love is both.” She poured two glasses of the sparkling liquid into waiting glasses without asking and folded herself on her side onto the lounger, sunglasses up in her blonde hair, and aimed her whole attention at me. It was a physical thing, her attention, a warmth like standing in a window. I understood in the first thirty seconds why crisis-struck famous people paid her fortunes—being looked at by Kira felt like being forgiven.

“So,” she said. “Ask me things.”

I started easy, the way I always did—the on-ramp questions, the ones that let a subject hear their own voice being interesting. How she met Eze (a Berkeley party neither of them was invited to, both of them hiding from it in the same stairwell). What he was like at twenty (“a haunted house with good manners”). The early Crane Industries years, Magnus in his terrible prime, the parties, the boats, the paranoia growing up around the family like ivy that eventually held the wall together.

She was a great interview. Publicists always are—they know where the story’s joints are, how to hand you a quote with the handle facing out. For an hour I filled tape with usable, glittering material and waited, patient as a fisherman, for the water under all that charm.

The wine helped. The second glass helped more.

“Can I ask the impolite version now?” I said.

Kira’s smile shifted—didn’t drop, shifted—like a boat’s motor kicking into gear. “Finally. Yes.”

“You and Eze.” I kept my voice at professional cadence. “Every photo I found, you’re on his arm. The tabloids ran you as the girlfriend at least twice. For the book—what are you to each other?”

She laughed, a real one, head back, loud enough that the nearby gulls eyeing our cheese wheel took off.

“God. Girlfriend.” She wiped an eye with the heel of her hand. “Lola. I have been on that man’s arm at a hundred parties because a beautiful woman on his arm answers questions before they’re asked, and answering questions before they’re asked is literally my profession.” She sipped from her glass, her French manicured fingertips making gentle tapping noises. “Also because his exes were mostly actresses, and actresses—” she made a gesture like a chef’s kiss with her whole hand, wistful and unrepentant. “I was significantly more interested in the starlets than in Eze. Significantly. Two of them I still see whenever we end up in the same city, and one keeps a drawer open for me in Paris.” Kira winked at me.

The relief that went through me was so fast and so total that it embarrassed me before it finished arriving. It must have crossed my face at speed, because Kira’s eyes—big, blue, professionally trained to read rooms for a living—caught it, held it, and understood it in one second flat.

She lowered her glass.

“Oh,” she said softly. Delighted. “Oh no. You should have seen what your face just did.”

“Don’t,” I said.

“I didn’t say anything.”

“You said ‘oh no.’”

“Those are barely words.” She leaned in over the cheese, conspiratorial, sunglasses sliding down into place like she was giving me privacy. “One question, off all the records, woman to woman. Does he know you feel like that?”

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For those of who you haven’t seen yet, Substack is rolling out an AI detector for posts, partnering with Pangram.

The Substack Post

Against Claudefishing

It’s getting harder to tell what’s real on the internet…

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a month ago · 6336 likes · 1402 comments · Chris Best

While I’m supportive of cutting down on low-quality “slop” (both human- and AI-generated) across platforms, I have to say this is a major hit for Substack as it’s ignited a witchhunt across the platform — because Pangram’s AI detector is faulty most of the time.

I know this because I ran some quick tests: stuff I’d written by hand in a coffeeshop was flagged as AI generated, whereas something I had Claude write for me as a test ended up being analyzed as 100% human-written when it was in fact 100% AI generated.

I was honestly shocked how wrong the detector was within the first 5 tests I ran on it! And this is coming from a company who says their error rate is insignificant.

Also — love this video breakdown on it:

So what feels like a good problem to solve — let’s cut down on slop on feeds! — is “solved” instead with shaming of people who are perceived use AI tools (even if they didn’t!), and the discourse around this has heated up as more people are finding out that these AI detection tools (and particularly Pangram’s tool embedded in Substack) aren’t accurate. Not by a long shot, as other writers are pointing out.

I wish the platform wasn’t feeding into the moral panic about AI (to be clear, as a San Francisco-based author I am not anti-AI), and instead focusing on lifting up good quality publications — independent of what tools writers and publishers choose to use.

An easy way to do this? Substack could continue to see what publications people are reading and paying for, and continue to incentivize top performing publications just like they do with their bestseller leaderboards, and their rising leaderboards (especially the new publications category, to help bring discovery to new writers!)

I’d be curious of your thoughts if you want to share in the comments:

Leave a comment

💡 you’re invited to the 10x Your Freelancing virtual summit hosted by solidgigs on August 25-27!

I’m speaking at the virtual 10x Your Freelancing Summit about how to AI-proof your freelancing career! You can RSVP to hear me and other amazing speakers talk on August 25-27.

Solidgigs, Preston Lee, and the whole team over there are awesome, and I know this is going to be an epic few days of talks and virtual Q&As and evenets.

Lots of cool stuff, check out the full listing of events below:

👋 come to the summit!

🍵 let’s catch up over tea: serializing memoirs on substack, preparing for your book launch

If you didn’t catch my interviews on Make Writing Your Job this week, you can catch up below!

The below chats are especially relevant if you’re curious about serializing your memoir on Substack or if you’re gearing up for a book launch of your own:

✍️ Make Writing Your Job

✍️ How to Serialize Your Memoir on Substack with Author Jessy Easton

Jessy Easton is a writer from the Mojave Desert of California, now living in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, whose essays have appeared in numerous literary journals and earned nominations for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net award. She’s the author of…

Listen now

a month ago · 25 likes · 3 comments · Amy Suto and Jessy Easton

✍️ Make Writing Your Job

✍️ How to Launch Your Book This Fall with PR Expert Haley Raymond

Haley Raymond is a PR and communications consultant who helps entrepreneurs, creatives, and small business owners get press without a big-agency budget. She started out as a magazine editor before cutting her teeth at two PR agencies in Belfast, where she ran campaigns for local and global brands — including a Belgian microbrewery launch that landed coverage on CNN…

Listen now

a month ago · 22 likes · 2 comments · Amy Suto and Haley Raymond

Do you have a book coming out that you’d like to share with our 44,000+ email subscribers at Make Writing Your Job? I’ve just created a guest application form below if you’d like to be considered for an upcoming interview. As a heads up, I’m prioritizing fiction authors for the next round of interviews!

✍️ apply to be a guest

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“The lady doth protest too much, methinks.”

-William Shakespeare, Hamlet

previous: about | chapter one | chapter two | chapter three | chapter four | chapter five | chapter six | chapter seven

I woke at dawn out of habit and spite, and that was how I saw her.

The fog had pulled back overnight, leaving the main house sharp-edged in the gray-gold light, and through my panoramic windows I could see straight down the hill into the kitchen’s wall of glass. A woman stood at the counter. Blonde, barefoot, hair loose and sleep-wrecked, wearing a man’s white dress shirt that hit her mid-thigh and nothing else that I could identify from four hundred yards.

She was drinking coffee out of a hand-thrown blue mug the size of a soup bowl, the kind potters sell at coastal art fairs. Comfortable. Easy in her skin. Standing in Ezekiel Crane’s kitchen at six in the morning like she lived there.

Like she’d come in late last night.

My stomach did something ugly and fast, like a fish flipped onto a dock.

The telescope stood in the corner of my room where I’d left it, pointed at the stars, all brass and patience. It would take three seconds to swing it down. Three seconds to know whose shirt that was, whose smile she was wearing over the rim of that cup.

I stood in the middle of my round room in my sleep shirt with my hands in fists, and I did not touch the telescope. Barely. The not-touching took actual muscle, like holding a door shut against wind.

It’s none of your business, I told myself. He’s your work. Your assignment. Assignments are allowed to have houseguests, and you are allowed to feel nothing about it.

I got dressed with the focus of a soldier and went down to breakfast to feel nothing about it up close.

…

The kitchen smelled like heaven had a griddle—browned butter, fried dough, dulce de leche warming in a pot. Tini was flipping something at the stove, and the blonde woman sat on the counter beside her—on the counter, in Tini’s kitchen, a territorial violation I’d have bet my Jeep was punishable by knife—swinging her bare legs and laughing at something with her whole chest.

Tini was laughing too. Tini, who had granted me, after a week of tribute and one felony, the right to stand near the doorway.

“—and he still has the scar,” the blonde was saying, “so no, he does not get to tell the story like he won—” She saw me and lit up like I was the person she’d come to see. “Oh my god. You’re the writer.”

“I’m the writer,” I said.

“Kira.” She hopped off the counter and crossed the stone floor barefoot, hand out. Up close she was worse—my age, maybe a couple years older, with an easy warmth that rich people almost never have, and big blue eyes—the same eyes from the museum staircase, the yacht, the midnight-blue tux photos I had spent a large number of unbillable hours not caring about. Her handshake was dry and certain. She smelled like sunscreen and vanilla and someone else’s vacation.

“Lola,” I said. “I thought you were in London.”

“I was. My client apologized his way off the front pages, so I caught the red-eye and came straight here to sleep in a real bed. London’s a panic attack with pubs—do you know what Whitechapel does to a person on a work night? I billed the hangover as a travel expense.” She stole a piece of fried dough off Tini’s plate and got her hand slapped, and grinned about it. “I hear I owe you an interview.”

“Your office keeps rescheduling me. I was starting to develop a complex.”

“My office thinks everyone’s a subpoena.” She bit the dough, studying me with cheerful directness over it. “So you’re the one writing him down. How’s he behaving? Actual answer.”

“He’s a dream client,” I said. “Punctual. Forthcoming. An open book.”

Kira barked a laugh loud enough to startle the pot lids. “God. You’re funny. He didn’t say funny.” She said it—he didn’t say funny—like there had been a briefing, like I’d been discussed over drinks in some warm room I’d never see, and my stomach tumbled again. In one sentence she’d told me she and Eze talked about me, and that she knew him well enough to receive his reports, and I hated the math I was doing—six in the morning, his shirt, a real bed. Whose bed?

“Sit,” Tini commanded me, sliding a plate onto the island. “Both of you. Eat before it’s sad.”

So I ate torta frita with warm dulce de leche across from the woman I’d spent a week resenting from photographs, and here was the problem, the real structural problem, which I identified somewhere around the third bite—Kira was impossible to hate.

She asked questions like she wanted the answers. She talked to Tini in half-decent Spanish and lost an argument about soccer on purpose. She had a crisis publicist’s gift for making a kitchen feel like a conspiracy of three, and when she mentioned Eze it was with the specific exasperated tenderness of someone who had known a man since before he was interesting—stories about a nineteen-year-old who read Rilke at parties, a twenty-five-year-old who bought a boat because a broker was rude to him and then gave the boat away.

Vacationing in someone’s affection. That’s what it felt like at that table. I understood, watching her butter Tini into a second round of tortas, that this was a professional charmer of a rank I had rarely encountered, and that I couldn’t tell where the charm stopped and the person began.

Neither could a killer, I noted, and the thought arrived like cold water down my back. Everybody likes Kira was a fact with two faces too.

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Welcome to 📚 From Pilot to Page: Writing Your Romance Novel Using TV Storytelling Techniques.

This is the class I taught at the Love Potion Library bookstore here in San Francisco, and I draw from my experience as a TV writer and share the story and structure tips that help me write my romance novels!

Read more

Subscribe now

💡 Introducing: The 6-Week Substack Sprint Companion Workbook

If you took the sprint live, you know the deal: six weeks, six classes, and homework every single week. This workbook pulls every framework, checklist, and assignment out of the replays and expands them into worksheets you can finish in one sitting — because you didn’t join this sprint to nod along to six classes.

Inside the 50+ pages of this workbook:

• Week-by-week pages for all six classes — Architecture, the Content Engine, the Growth Engine, Conversion & Monetization, Retention & the Leaky Bucket, and the Creator CEO 12-month roadmap

• The Toolkit — the Post-Publish Ritual, the Weekly Sprint Check-In, the Growth & Churn Tracker, a Headline Bank, and a Wins Log to read back on the hard days

• The Sprint Contract — sign it, mean it, and circle your Day One

💡 get the workbook

It’s designed for pen and paper: print it (US Letter, single- or double-sided), keep it next to your laptop like a co-pilot, and do the pages right after watching each class while the ideas are still warm.

The workbook — along with on-demand replays of all six sprint classes — is yours as a Founding Member of 💡 Sutoscience:

💡 become a founding member

Already a Founding Member? Go grab it, print it, and tell me in the comments which week’s homework you’re starting with.

Leave a comment

sending you good writing vibes,

-Amy

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“Every murderer is probably somebody’s old friend.” -Agatha Christie, The Mysterious Affair at Styles

previous: about | chapter one | chapter two | chapter three | chapter four | chapter five | chapter six

Kira canceled on me before I ever met her.

“Postponed, not canceled—there’s a difference, and apparently the difference is my job,” Hayden said over the phone, in the crisp tone of a woman who ran her mornings on cold brew, reformer Pilates, and an org chart. “Her office says she’s in London handling a client thing. Some actor said something on a podcast, you know how it goes. So we’re flipping the order. Conrad’s thrilled to be your first official interview for the book. His word. Thrilled.”

“I bet he is,” I said.

I hung up and stared at the fog pressing against the lighthouse glass, dreading it already. I had spent nine years being talked at by men like Conrad Doherty—the back-slappers, the too-tight handshakes, the ones who called you sweetheart in the first five minutes to put you in your place and remind you of his. I could handle him. That wasn’t the question. The question I kept turning over was what a man like Eze, who noticed everything, saw in a man like that. Loyalty, maybe. Or a habit. Twenty-six years is a long time to keep a friend.

Either way, Conrad had known Magnus Crane better than almost anyone alive, and the book needed him. Both books. The real one and the one under it.

Which is how I found myself that same afternoon—the storm blown out, the power back on, my knuckles still humming from the heavy bag—in a glass conference room on the forty-something floor of Crane Industries, watching Conrad Doherty choose his seat the way generals choose high ground.

He’d picked the room, Hayden told me on the walk over. Of course he had. The conference room hung off the side of the silo like a display case, glass on five of six surfaces, visible to three floors of employees who could watch us the whole hour without hearing a word. An interview conducted inside an aquarium. Whatever happened in here, there would be witnesses to the fact of it and none to the content—which told me Conrad understood surveillance the way the rest of this building did. As a thing you aimed at other people.

“Lola!” He came at me with both arms open like we were old war buddies, and I got my first real look at him in daylight. Conrad Doherty was built like the linebacker he must have been thirty pounds and twenty-six years ago—six-four at least, shoulders straining a salmon dress shirt, the heavy muscle of a college athlete now enjoying the spoils of a good living. Blond buzzcut going silver at the crown. A class ring he still wore. A face made for boat ads, gone a little pink around the collar. I braced for the hug and got a handshake instead, his grip recalibrated from our first meeting—gentler now, almost courtly. That worried me more than the crushing version. Men like Conrad didn’t soften. They simply adjusted their sights.

“Thanks for making time,” I said, setting my recorder on the table between us and pressing record where he could see me do it. The spool turned. He watched it turn.

“For the book? Anything.” He dropped into his chair and kicked back, boots nearly on the table, a man performing relaxation to an audience of Crane Industry employees looking in curiously from where they walked past the conference room. “Eze’s story deserves telling right. And nobody knows that story like me. Not the board, not the lawyers.” A pause, a grin. “Not even the pretty ghostwriter.”

“That’s why I’m here.” I opened my notebook, clicked my pen, and put on the expression that was my disguise. Of someone harmless. Wide-eyed. A woman who lived in other people’s sentences. “Let’s start at the beginning. You met him when you were, what, eight?”

“Seven. Summer camp in North Carolina, the kind rich fathers send their sons to so somebody else can teach them to be men.” He laced his fingers behind his buzzcut. “Eze was this skinny European kid who didn’t know poison ivy from poison oak, and I was the scholarship case with the wrong accent. Camp food chain had us both marked for the bottom. So we made an alliance.” He smiled at something far away. “Twenty-six years ago, and I’ve been watching his back ever since.”

“What was he like then?”

“Same as now. Watchful. He’d let you run your whole mouth, and then he’d ask the one question you’d been praying nobody would ask.” Conrad shook his head fondly. “Eleven years old, and he ran better interviews than the counselors.” “His daddy loved that about him. The old man used to say Eze was born knowing what everybody wanted. Just took him thirty years to admit that’s a weapon.”

I wrote it down because it was good, and because the book was real. That was the strange truth of my double life—the cover assignment and the actual assignment used the same pen, and lately I had stopped being able to tell which one I was working harder at.

“Tell me about Eze’s father,” I said. “Off the record if you want. I’m trying to understand him, not quote you.”

Conrad’s boots came off the table. A small thing, but I noted it.

“Magnus Crane was the smartest man I ever met and the coldest, and I loved him like my own father, which tells you what my own father was like.” He rolled his shoulders. “He built something nobody else could have built and he never once apologized for it. People want their geniuses cuddly now. Magnus wasn’t cuddly. He was right. There’s a difference, and this country used to know it.”

“You were close with him. Toward the end?”

“Close as anybody got.” Conrad’s eyes settled on me, friendly and flat at the same time, like a lake you’re warned not to swim in. “I know what you’re circling, by the way. You want to ask about Geneva.”

I kept my pen moving, casual. “I want to ask about a lot of things.”

“The week he died, I was in Huntsville. My mama’s knee replacement. Flew commercial, if you can believe it—Delta through Atlanta, five days, whole thing’s on my card statements.” He spread his hands. “In case the book needs it.”

The pen kept moving, but everything else in me went still.

I hadn’t asked. I hadn’t asked anything within a mile of it. I’d asked if he was close with a dead man he loved, and Conrad Doherty had handed me an alibi with flight routes attached, unprompted, wrapped in a joke, in a glass box he chose so the whole company could watch him give it.

Who volunteers an alibi nobody asked for? Eze had written that warning in fountain ink, on the list I still carried, and here was Conrad handing me an alibi I had not asked for, and it was gift-wrapped.

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There’s a piece that’s going around — The End of Reading is Here in The Atlantic — and it reminds me of the clickbait-y Buzzfeed headlines of years past.

It’s a piece that’s been widely spread and commented on, but in it the writer argues that America is becoming “postliterate.”

The core claim isn’t that people can’t decode words, but that sustained, deep reading — and with it the capacity for comprehension, synthesis, and critical thinking — is collapsing.

And yes some of the stats look bad (fewer than half of adults read any book in 2022 and daily reading-for-pleasure fell from 28% in 2004 to 16% in 2023) — fiction sales have actually surged in recent years, and there’s more fervor around book clubs and the art of reading than ever before (see: Dua Lipa’s partnership with the famed Portuguese bookstore Livraria Lello for her banned library selections.)

It’s also ironic that The End of Reading is Here is an 8,500-word article lamenting that no one reads long things.

People love to say “it’s the end of the world as we know it” but you know what? I feel fine.

💡 TODAY: Pilot to Page: Writing Your Romance Novel Using TV Storytelling Techniques

I learned so much about story structure from my time in Hollywood — and I’m bringing this class to you as well here on Substack Live!

✍️ Join me for my upcoming class, From Pilot to Page: Writing Your Romance Novel Using TV Storytelling Techniques today

This is the class I taught at the Love Potion Library bookstore here in SF, and I draw from my experience as a TV writer and share the story and structure tips that help me write my romance novels!

✨ This class is on Substack Live today, July 19th at 1:30pm PT for paid subscribers of my Substack Sutoscience only. The replay will only be available for Founding Members so be sure to RSVP below if you want to tune in live!

💡 RSVP here!

See you in class 👋

💡 also — come to the 10x Your Freelancing virtual summit hosted by solidgigs on August 25-27!

I’m speaking at the virtual 10x Your Freelancing Summit about how to AI-proof your freelancing career! You can RSVP to hear me and other amazing speakers talk on August 25-27.

Solidgigs, Preston Lee, and the whole team over there are awesome, and I know this is going to be an epic few days of talks and virtual Q&As and evenets.

Lots of cool stuff, check out the full listing of events below:

👋 come to the summit!

✍️ watch the replay: Breaking the Starving Artist Myth: What Shakespeare Knew About Business [Free Class]

I gave this lecture live as part of an in-person lecture series here in the Bay Area, and it was sold out with over 80+ tickets purchased.

Why? It’s because we’re all curious why “starving artist” has become such a cultural norm — especially because the great artists remembered by history were often not starving!

But the starving artist myth has been perpetuated by gatekeepers and institutions that want to keep us from reaching our potential — and often profit from the disenfranchisement of writers and creatives.

This is the basis of my bestselling book Write for Money and Power, which has sold thousands of copies and helped writers take control of their destinies and focus on the creative work they’re excited to do.

If you missed attending this class live, you can watch the replay below:

✍️ Make Writing Your Job

✍️ Breaking the Starving Artist Myth: What Shakespeare Knew About Business [Free Class]

I gave this lecture live as part of an in-person lecture series here in the Bay Area, and it was sold out with over 80+ tickets purchased…

Listen now

a month ago · 3 likes · 5 comments · Amy Suto

🍵 let’s catch up over tea: making your reader worry in fiction

I heard a great piece of fiction writing advice the other day:

great fiction makes the reader worry.

Emotional attachment in fiction is challenging to pull off, but I’ve seen that when I’m worried about my favorite characters in a book, I know my sleep schedule is about to be wrecked.

I think this is better fiction writing advice compared to just “make it hard for your characters!” because it speaks to the reader’s emotional involvement — which is hard to do because making readers care means you’ve crafted characters they love.

💌 I’m reading…

• It’s so vulnerable to talk about money as a writer, and I’m impressed by ’s breakdown of how she spent $44,000+ on her book launch. Book launches are expensive (even for those authors who are traditionally published!) and most people just don’t talk about this! She also shared a cool resource for getting ARC readers/readers who leave Amazon reviews through Hidden Gems.

• ’s incredible memoir, THE ONE WHO LEAVES, which she serialized on Substack. She depicts what it was like to grow up in a Mojave desert in a meth lab, and her writing is propulsive and so visual. I’m honored to be interviewing Jessy on Substack Live this Tuesday at 1pm PT to talk about how to serialize memoir on Substack — RSVP with this link to be notified when we go live!

• wrote a great piece on how to Petsit Your Way Around the World. When I was a digital nomad, I met lots of women who used petsitting as a way to get free accommodation while traveling, and Stephanie’s guide is really actionable on how to do this. Highly recommend checking it out if you’re curious about traveling for free!

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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: Thursday, August 6th at 5pm PT/8pm 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

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, a 1:1 60 minute Substack Audit with me (this perk ends tomorrow!), 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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Hi writers,

If you’re thinking about becoming a Founding Member, I’ve extended the 1-on-1 Substack Audit bonus for signing up.

You have until this Friday, July 17th to upgrade to a Founding Membership if you’d like an hour-long call with me to break down things like…

• your goals on Substack

• how to convert more subscribers from free to paid by writing things you actually are excited about

• how to use Substack as your creative business hub

• …and anything else you’d like my help strategizing with you on!

You also get all of the other bonuses of being a Founding Member (access to my 6 Week Substack Sprint video series and our monthly Substack Lab mastermind group on Zoom that’s like a writer’s group for your Substack!)

I’m ending this bonus soon because I’m trying to create more space on my calendar for future workshops, classes, and more how-to guides about publishing your fiction on Substack. Look forward to seeing more of these in your inbox soon!

If you’re a Founding Member haven’t already had a 60-minute 1:1 Substack Audit with me in the last year, you can book it below the paywall:

Read more

This is so cool because it’s an easier delivery system for sending gifts, digital downloads, and discount codes to your paid and/or Founding subscribers.

Speaking of…

💡 Introducing: the Write for Money and Power Companion Workbook

To kick things off, I’m sharing something I’ve been working on since I started writing my book Write for Money and Power over a year ago — the companion workbook!

I had several beta readers ask me for a workbook version of Write for Money and Power in part because there are so many different exercises and journaling prompts inside.

I got to dreaming up the workbook as I was finishing up edits on the book at the end of last year, and now the workbook is yours along with all of the other perks of a Founding Membership here at 💡 Sutoscience.

💡 become a founding member

Also, just a reminder that this is the last week I’m offering 1:1 Substack Audits (60-minute work sessions with me about how to grow your Substack) for Founding Members who haven’t already had their Substack audits in the last year.

You’ll just need to upgrade by Friday if you’re interested in booking a time for the future 1:1 audit (and yes, you can also split up the 60-minute audit into two 30-minute session!)

💫 What Perks Will You Offer on Your Substack?

This is a great opportunity to also take a moment and think about the different types of perks you can offer to your paid + founding subscribers.

I’ve seen all sorts of different perks for discount codes, e-books, consulting sessions, and more — feel free to share some of your perks or link to your perk pages in the comments!

Leave a comment

sending you good writing vibes,

-Amy

Share

p.s. I’m going live on Substack Live later today at noon PT to give the sold-out lecture I gave in San Francisco recently about how the starving artist myth is a lie — and the historical examples of artists who thought like entrepreneurs. The replay is going to be available on Make Writing Your Job for free after the live if you miss it. See you there!

Hi writers,

If you’re thinking about becoming a Founding Member, I’ve extended the 1-on-1 Substack Audit bonus for signing up.

You have until this Friday, July 17th to upgrade to a Founding Membership if you’d like an hour-long call with me to break down things like…

• your goals on Substack

• how to convert more subscribers from free to paid by writing things you actually are excited about

• how to use Substack as your creative business hub

• …and anything else you’d like my help strategizing with you on!

You also get all of the other bonuses of being a Founding Member (access to my 6 Week Substack Sprint video series and our monthly Substack Lab mastermind group on Zoom that’s like a writer’s group for your Substack!)

I’m ending this bonus soon because I’m trying to create more space on my calendar for future workshops, classes, and more how-to guides about publishing your fiction on Substack. Look forward to seeing more of these in your inbox soon!

If you’re a Founding Member haven’t already had a 60-minute 1:1 Substack Audit with me in the last year, you can book it below the paywall:

Read more