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.

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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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The sickest I’ve ever been was in Athens, Greece: high fever, autoimmune flare-up, lying in bed watching Bachelor in Paradise with Kyle. I still published my newsletter that week, because I’d promised myself I would show up every single week. (At that point, I hadn’t missed one in almost three years. I would like a small trophy, please.)

Here’s the part that took me years to see: publishing every week keeps the readers you already have. Finding new ones is a completely different job. A post nobody sees is a diary entry with a subscribe button. Not a bad thing, just maybe not what this platform’s best used for!

So this post is about the second job. Over 3 years, ✍️ Make Writing Your Job grew to 55,000+ subscribers and multiple six figures per year in annual recurring revenue without a single paid ad, and when I look at where those readers came from, I see the same six doors over and over.

(Your group chat is door number zero. It’s a lovely door! But as my husband Kyle wrote in his guest post here, “Moms are not a scalable acquisition channel, unfortunately.”)

Here are the six doors that new subscribers walk through, in the order I’ll open for you:

1. Social media, the billboard that points home

2. Substack’s own discovery engine (Notes, recommendations, categories, leaderboards)

3. Collaborations with other writers, like co-hosted Lives and cross-posts

4. Search, meaning Google (and now AI answers) sending you strangers while you sleep

5. Other people’s microphones, like podcasts and IRL stages

6. Events and gifts that give a stranger a reason to subscribe today

For each one, you’ll get my real numbers and the posts where I’ve gone deeper. Let’s dive in.

📱 Door #1: Social Media (the Billboard That Points Home)

Social media is a rented billboard, and email is the deed to your own shop. You don’t own the billboard, and the landlord changes the rules whenever it wants. But a billboard is still how ~ lots ~ of strangers find out your shop exists, so the rent is worth paying as long as every post points home.

Between August 22 and September 20, I used two tools (SocialBu and Claude) to take a brand-new Instagram account to 1.1M views, 157.5K interactions, and 15.6K new followers, with $0 spent on ads. And when we first started using SocialBu for Make Writing Your Job, our Threads views went up by more than 200,000 in the first 30 days.

I filmed the whole setup, step by step:

▶️ Watch on YouTube: How I Got 1,000,000 Social Views in 30 Days With 2 Tools

Prefer reading? The written version is here, with the setup steps and prices.

Four rules I follow no matter which platform I’m posting on:

• Every post points home. Your Substack link goes in the first comment of social posts, and on LinkedIn it never goes in the body of the post.

• One Substack post becomes a week of social posts. Pull out the strongest line, the most useful list, the spiciest opinion, and the story, and each one becomes its own post.

• Batch it. I write and schedule a week of posts in one Sunday hour, and then I don’t touch them.

• Go where your reader already scrolls, even if it isn’t where you like to scroll. For me that’s LinkedIn, which sent me 7.38% of my new subscribers in January, more than any other social platform.

The catch? Views and subscribers are two different currencies. A new follower still has to make one more click to become a reader, which is why that link in the first comment matters so much.

🔎 Door #2: Substack’s Own Discovery Engine

This is the door I’d open next, and my dashboard makes the case better than I can. When I pulled my subscriber sources in January, Substack itself brought in 73.79% of my new subscribers. Direct traffic brought in 10.35%, LinkedIn 7.38%, my website 3.89%, and Google 1.19%.

Substack is a city with its own foot traffic. People wander in through Notes, through the recommendations they see right after subscribing to someone else, through category pages and leaderboards, and through the little subscribe button that sits beside every Note you post.

Kyle calls your category “the ‘street’ you’re setting up shop on,” and he’s right. You can write the best newsletter in the world, but if your shop sits on a street nobody walks down, the only people who find it are the ones you personally drag there.

I’ve audited dozens of Substacks, and this is the door most writers leave half-open. The writing is gorgeous. The settings, the category, and the recommendations are an afterthought.

It’s also a door I go into depth on in the 6 Week Substack Sprint, my workshop series for Founding Members of Sutoscience, where every replay, bonus tutorial, and the 50+ page workbook live in one place.

⚡️ Here’s What’s Behind the Paywall Today

Paid subscribers get the rest of the map:

• The 5-step Substack discovery checklist I’d run this week, including the category setting Kyle compares to a vestigial tail

• How collaborations put me in front of other writers’ readers (including a 12-hour launch livestream), plus the DM I’d send to invite a guest

• How my website earned 27M+ Google impressions in 12 months, and how to point search traffic at your Substack

• What a podcast tour looks like at 4:30 a.m., plus a podcast pitch you can steal

• How a date on the calendar turns strangers into subscribers

• Which door to open first, based on your time, your personality, and your feelings about cameras

If you’re ready to stop hoping readers find you and start building them a way in, this is your invitation to upgrade.

(Already a paid subscriber? Thank you! The rest is waiting for you right below.)

👇 The rest of the map starts right here:

✅ The Substack Discovery Checklist

Five things to check this week, in this order:

1. Your Category

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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

He didn’t speak to me for four days.

Not a freeze-out, nothing as warm as anger. He was simply gone—to the city before I woke, back after midnight, if he came back at all. The library stayed dark. The interviews came off the calendar without explanation, which meant with explanation, and Hayden’s voice when she called to cancel them had something new in it that was worse than the old frost. Caution. Even she could smell that the weather over the estate had changed, even if no one but Eze and I knew why.

I stayed. He hadn’t told me to go, and I understood, the way you understand a held breath, that leaving would answer a question he hadn’t finished asking.

So I lived inside the silence I had earned. I ate Tini’s food at the long table alone, and she occasionally came out to heap more onto my plate, which from Tini was a wellness check. I walked the cliff path where he had kissed me and closed my eyes, feeling the wind caress me the way he had that night. I slept two doors from an empty room—he wasn’t even sleeping at the house—on the floor again, because the bed had been a hypothesis and the hypothesis was suspended pending review.

And I wrote his book.

That was the perversity of those four days. With everything else stripped away—the cover blown, the wire dead, no more drops going to any blue mailbox, because I had stopped, I had simply stopped, let Matthew make of it what he would—the only thing left standing between me and the silence was the actual work. So I did the actual work. I wrote the chapter about a boy at a lake in Hokkaido being blamed for a tipped canoe. I wrote his mother’s funeral, and the friend who held him up through it, and I cried over my own legal pad like an amateur, and kept writing. Every page was an apology I didn’t have the standing to say out loud. I wrote forty of them, finishing them in the candlelit kitchen and forgetting my legal pad on the creaky old table there.

On the fourth night, at eleven, the library lights came on.

I stood in the library doorway for a long moment before he looked up. He was in the fireside chair with a folder on his knee and four days of the city on his face, and the fire was lit, and two glasses stood on the small table, one of them poured.

“I read your forty pages,” Eze said. “Tini pulled them off the kitchen table and had Xavier give them to me. She thought I should see what you were doing while I decided what to do with you.” He looked at the fire. “The funeral chapter. That’s her, Lola. That’s her, Lola, whole, and you never met her, and I don’t know what to do with the fact that the person who saw my mother clearest came here wearing a wire.”

“Eze—”

“Pack a bag.” He stood and handed me back my legal pad, and his eyes, when they finally landed on mine, had made some enormous decision I couldn’t read the terms of. “We fly at five. There’s something my father built that you need to see. And then we’re going to find out, once and for all, what side you’re on.”

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Beta readers are your army of early readers. They read your finished draft and help you shape your last round of rewrites before the book gets locked. ARC readers come after that: members of the press, podcast hosts, book reviewers, and retail reviewers who read an advance copy so they can review it and spread the word when the book goes live.

When I was starting out with The Nomad Detective, I’d heard both terms, but I had to figure out how to actually use these readers on my own. I wish I’d had a guide, because they are so helpful.

📖 Beta readers shape the rewrite

Beta readers come in once your book is finished. When Let Me Be Your Ghost went out to beta readers, it was a complete draft at about 60,000 words, built on material I’d been developing for almost 10 years.

Every author approaches this differently, but generally beta readers are unpaid. (If you need a very quick turnaround, a small payment is sometimes offered.) In exchange, they get a thank-you in the acknowledgments and a free copy of the finished ebook once you’re done editing. They’re people who want to support you: friends, family, fellow writers, your community.

A lot of my beta readers came from my Substacks, Make Writing Your Job and Sutoscience. For Write for Money and Power, I asked who wanted to be a beta reader, and over 90 people raised their hands. It was honestly life-changing. People saw things in that book that went right over my head, and some of the best notes came from readers who didn’t like it, because they showed me what was a taste thing and what I had poorly articulated.

Every reader enters your book with their own emotional landscape (their taste, their history, where they grew up), so beta readers work almost like market research. If all of them agree on something, you should probably listen. If one reader has a one-off note, you can often solve it in the draft, or hang a lantern on it.

Hanging a lantern means putting the reader’s question right into the story. Say a beta reader thinks your character sounds dumb for blurting out a secret. Have another character call it out (”Wasn’t that supposed to be a secret?”) and let your main character answer (”It was. I just had to tell you.”). Now the reader doesn’t bump on it, and keeping them reading all the way through is the goal of every rewrite.

🔍 Where to find beta readers

There aren’t many websites for beta readers. The biggest source is actually Facebook groups. Search “beta readers” on Facebook, answer the questions to get approved into a group, follow the group rules, then post a call for beta readers with a link to an application form.

I always use an application. It makes people feel like they’re getting exclusive access to your book, and it helps you find the serious readers who would also be open to leaving a review on Amazon or Goodreads when the book is out.

🚩 The AI red flags

With Let Me Be Your Ghost, I started getting a strange kind of application answer: multi-paragraph, very polished, and missing anything specific. It didn’t mention the book by name, or it was vague about why, even though the question was literally “Why do you want to be a beta reader?”

Some of those applicants said yes to reading the book and then asked for payment. Others fed the book into AI and sent me an AI summary of “notes” (a 13-page document for the first two chapters), plus a price range for the rest of the book.

My beta reader role is unpaid, a trade, and I say so up front. Beta reading is a lovely way to hone your skills, get to know authors, and see how your feedback is received.

If you want to get paid to edit, though, apply to paid editing roles on Upwork, Contra, or our writing job board at Make Writing Your Job. Start your rate low and raise it from there.

✍️ My one ask: 3 things you liked, 3 you didn’t

Every time I post a call for beta readers, I ask the same thing: read the book, then send me 3 things you liked and 3 things you didn’t. Everyone gets their own Google Doc with their name on it. Highlights and margin notes are welcome, but totally optional. I keep the bar very, very low because this is unpaid.

In exchange, everyone gets the book for free and a thank-you in the acknowledgments. For Let Me Be Your Ghost and Write for Money and Power, I also offered testimonials to beta readers building an editing practice, and I offered to promote them. So many generous souls went line by line anyway, catching typos and inconsistencies, way above and beyond. I’m so grateful for them.

📚 ARC readers spread the word

Once you’ve worked your beta readers’ notes into the draft, it’s time for ARC readers. ARC stands for advance reader copy, and you send those copies to members of the press, book reviewers, podcast hosts, Substack writers, and retail reviewers (the amazing people who review on Amazon and Goodreads to help other readers decide).

An early copy isn’t a one-to-one transaction. You can’t tell someone who requested your book that they now owe you a review, and you never interfere with the review they leave, good or bad. That’s the integrity of the process. (Some of my favorite books have the most horrendous one-star reviews.)

🗓 NetGalley, and when to send ARCs

NetGalley is the best ARC reader website I’ve ever used (not sponsored). It’s also expensive: about $500 for a listing that runs, I think, around 6 months. You list your book once the EPUB is locked (plus a PDF, maybe), readers request it, and you approve, decline, or block people. You can see each reader’s average review rating, and NetGalley reports who downloaded the book, who started reading, and who left feedback.

When readers leave lovely feedback, I email them a thank-you and ask whether they’d post their review on Goodreads and Amazon once the book is live. You can follow up a few times (up to 5), and then you’re done. Don’t ask members of the press for retail reviews, because they review on their own platforms. And you can never incentivize reviews. “Leave me a review and I’ll give you a discount” is off the table.

Some authors send ARCs 6 months out so the press has time to read. I’d say at least a month and a half to two months before launch. I’m a little bit of a chaos agent here: my ARC readers for Let Me Be Your Ghost get the book about a month before it comes out on November 18.

It can take thousands of readers to get to 100 Amazon reviews. Which brings me to the part that makes all of this easier.

💌 Why it all comes back to your email list

Every time I look for beta readers or ARC readers, I send the call to my email list first. It lives right here on Substack, and there’s a QR code at the back of my books so readers can join. On social media, you can post to a huge audience and have only 300 people see it, because the algorithm decides who does. An email lands in the inbox most of the time.

Here’s what surprised me: a big share of my preorders come from the people who beta read or ARC read for me, even though they already get the book free. Kevin Kelly popularized the idea of 1,000 true fans. Run it for books and it’s 10,000 readers buying a book that earns you $7. Those true fans stick with you book after book, and they’re the reason I get to do this as my job.

👻 Read Let Me Be Your Ghost early

My romantic thriller Let Me Be Your Ghost comes out November 18, and I’m looking for ARC readers (free early ebook, no reading deadline).

👻 apply to be an ARC reader here!

You can also 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.

Tell me in the comments: are you self-publishing a book right now? I’d love to hear about it.

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See you around my creative lab this week,

-Amy

p.s. know an author who’s about to launch their book? feel free to share this with them!

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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, September 24th at 5:30pm PT/8:30pm 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

👇 The written version is below, setup steps and prices included. Let’s dive in.

I’ve hired agencies and individuals for social media (they were all great in their own way), but I know my own business best, and I want to batch it all at the start of the week and not touch it.

Here’s the thing: if people don’t know about your books or your Substack, they can’t buy any of it.

And I skip paid ads at the moment in most platforms, because I don’t want my business riding on the black box of whether an ad performs.

🧰 The stack, and what it costs

• SocialBu schedules your posts and plugs into Claude through a connector (the techy name is MCP) that comes with every paid plan. Starter is $29 a month, or $22 a month billed yearly, with a 7-day free trial.

• Claude Pro is $20 a month, or $17 a month billed yearly.

Together, that’s $49 a month, or $39 a month billed yearly, as of September 2026. Think of it as a social media intern you don’t have to pay (other than the subscription fees). It does the copy-pasting and trims each post to fit every platform’s character limit.

🔌 How do I connect SocialBu to Claude?

1. Create a SocialBu account on a paid plan (the free plan can’t connect to Claude) and connect your social accounts.

2. Upgrade to Claude Pro.

3. In Claude, open Customize, then Connectors. Click +, choose Add custom connector, name it SocialBu, and paste in https://socialbu.com/mcp

4. Click Add, then Connect, and authorize your SocialBu account.

5. In any chat, turn SocialBu on from the + menu (bottom left) under Connectors.

6. Create a Claude project and fill it with your material (your book, your Substack posts, your drafts), as much as you’re comfortable sharing.

☕ My Sunday Social Media Hour

On Sunday I give Claude the Substack post going out that week, plus any drafts or ideas, and ask it to write and schedule posts for LinkedIn, X, Threads, and Instagram for after the post goes live, with the link in the first comment. (On LinkedIn, never put a link in the body of a post.) Other schedulers make you add that comment by hand. Claude just does it. Prefer writing your own posts? Drop them in a doc for Claude to schedule.

Then I check SocialBu’s scheduled tab. If I don’t like a post’s wording, I screenshot it, give Claude the screenshot with my changes, and it fixes the post in the queue.

That’s an hour, maybe less, for a week of written posts. SocialBu also tracks what performs, down to the time of day on each platform (Threads is especially picky about timing). When we first started using SocialBu for Make Writing Your Job, we saw an increase of over 200,000 views on Threads within the first 30 days.

🎥 Next Up: Video

Video makes a lot of us writers a little anxious. During a book launch, you want your head in the podcasts you’re guesting on and the launch party — not in what to say in today’s TikTok about preorders.

So let Claude write your TikTok scripts in your voice (or write your own), and read them off the teleprompter in CapCut. Hand Claude the raw file, untouched, and ask it to edit in captions and a header. Then Claude hands it to SocialBu to schedule, and the analytics show which time of day and even which fonts perform best.

📈 What 30 days looked like

My Instagram dashboard for the brand-new account, August 22 to September 20:

• 1.1M views

• 157.5K interactions

• 15.6K new followers

One reel got 220% more plays than any of my last 5 reels. I spent $0 on ads — and very little time, relative to what it produced.

🎓 I’m teaching a workshop on this

There’s more nuance than I could fit in one video, so I’m teaching an upcoming workshop that goes deeper into:

• Creating viral videos with AI

• A content system that takes the busywork off your plate

• Getting the most views for the least amount of work

• Instagram trial reels, which drove ~ massive ~ amounts of traffic for me

• Hidden features I’m excited to share

If you’re interested in the longer workshop, feel free to fill out the form below:

✍️ fill out this interest form

Either way, hand Claude the busywork this Sunday and spend the rest of your week on the creative work only you can do. I’m rooting for you.

See you around my creative lab this week,

-Amy

p.s. know a writer who would rather be writing than posting? feel free to share this with them!

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

This Thursday, September 24 at 5:30pm PT (8:30pm ET), I’m hosting this month’s Substack Lab, a live Zoom session for Founding Members of Sutoscience.

Think open office hours meets writer’s workshop. Bring your Substack and one specific question (or the thing you’re stuck on), and you’ll get live feedback from me and a room full of brilliant, opinionated writers. Half-baked ideas and “is this too niche?” spirals are welcome. The Lab runs every month, so you can come back and keep the momentum going.

The Zoom link is in the invite post for Founding Members. Not a Founding Member yet? The monthly Labs are one of the perks, along with the 6 Week Substack Sprint.

🧪 get the Zoom link for Substack Lab!

I’m teaching a community sliding-scale Yin class at Arise Yoga in Pacific Heights every Tuesday at 3pm. Yin is the slow kind of yoga: long holds on the floor that get into the hips, spine, and shoulders a laptop spends all week compressing. No flexibility or experience required, and sliding scale means you pay what works for you. Arise asks you to register in advance (no walk-ins), and arriving 5 to 10 minutes early gives you time to get settled in.

Book my Yin class at Arise

If you’re not in San Francisco, send this to the friend who is. I’d love to see you on a mat.

Let Me Be Your Ghost is heading into its final rewrite. The manuscript has been with my trusty editor, Kyle Cords (who also happens to be my husband!), and we’ve been having lots of great story conversations as I get ready. This is the part of writing a book where you have done everything you can do — and someone with better story sense than you gets to tell you what you missed. It’s my favorite part and my least favorite part (usually in the same afternoon).

The book releases this November, and you can preorder it now 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. I’ve been so honored to see the 1, 10, and 50-book preorders roll in, so thank you.

Chapters keep dropping here every Friday for paid subscribers, and chapter sixteen went out this week.

🎁 claim your pre-order gift here!

wide awake, with cinnamon rolls

Since getting back from Tahoe earlier this month, I have been cooking up a storm. Last Sunday’s farmers market run (my rankings of the Sunday circuit, if you want them) turned into a Mediterranean frittata and a batch of puff pastry apple cinnamon rolls. September in San Francisco is technically our summer, but the cinnamon rolls don’t know that, and I have decided it’s ~ fall ~.

The bigger news is where the energy is coming from. This month I finally got an IV iron infusion, and I wrote the whole story in this week’s essay. My ferritin was 8 at its lowest, a doctor refused to order the test the first two times I asked, and it took five years to climb from 8 to 25 before the infusion took it the rest of the way. Colors look different now. I wake up alert, without having to manufacture it out of highly caffeinated beverages. If you live with brain fog or exhaustion and your bloodwork “looks normal,” the essay explains how to ask for a ferritin test by name (not medical advice, just a novelist who reads her own lab results).

I’m also doing more coverage and reporting around San Francisco events and things to do, and this week it paid off in a fun way: The New Fillmore excerpted my guide to the best places to play tennis in San Francisco in its story about Alta Plaza’s freshly resurfaced courts (my home courts!). The neighborhood is dedicating them this Sunday, September 20, from 10am to noon, with a plaque honoring tennis legend Helen Wills Moody, who picked Alta Plaza for a 1929 photo shoot because, she said, “it’s pretty up there.” If you’re local, everything I’m covering lives on my San Francisco page. I’ll also be creating a San Francisco section of this newsletter that you can opt out of if you’d like to skip news about the city :) I’ll update my Start Here video with how to do this.

In between story conversations about the book, I’m treating this stretch as a maintenance week instead of a growth week, and pointing the new energy at my inbox, which is still a frightening place.

Cooking, it turns out, is a very good companion to a rewrite. The novel has been with me since 2017, when it was a TV pilot, and even now it’s asking me for things. The cinnamon rolls asked for an oven and some patience — and then they were done.

So something to meditate on this week: what have you been powering through on caffeine and willpower that you could actually fix? And what would you make with the energy you got back?

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creating

• i disappeared to fix my health and write a book. missions accomplished. This week’s essay, in case you skipped straight to the links: the infusion clinic, the Inca Trail on a ferritin under 20, and who my editor turned out to be.

• 210+ Grants, Contests, & Residencies for Writers at Make Writing Your Job. This is the past week’s edition of the opportunities list: a $25,000 nonfiction prize, investigative grants up to $40,000, and a 3 to 6 month paid residency at EUR 6,000 a month for science journalists.

• New reading lists on the blog: ACOTAR Books in Order (with the novella you can skip and where the two new Valkyrie Cycle books slot in), Best Romantasy Books 2026 (10 of them, ranked, with spice levels), Jennifer Armentrout Books in Order, and The Best Blake Crouch Books, Ranked.

• For the working writers: The 10 Best Books for Writers, The 11 Best Business Books for Creatives and Writers, and INTJ Careers, from an actual INTJ who has been a TV writer, a freelancer, an author, and a job-board founder.

• For the San Francisco readers: my Mamahuhu review is up (Brandon Jew’s fast-casual Chinese-American spot on Clement Street, and the $16 sweet and sour chicken rice plate), and it’s now in my Richmond District restaurant guide, which has a map card for every spot.

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reading

• Romance is thriving because dating is dead, according to InStyle. Emily Kelleher’s piece has the numbers: romance book sales rose 24% last year, the biggest jump of any genre in print per Circana, and more than 200 specialty romance bookstores have opened since 2023. Meanwhile demographers expect 45% of women ages 25 to 44 to be single by 2030, and Tinx, who has fielded dating calls on her radio show twice a week for four years, says: “We are living through an extremely painful paradigm shift with hetero dating.” The line I’d tape above every romance writer’s desk comes from Lissa Bak, who runs the sold-out Happily Ever After book club at Book Club Bar in the East Village. She never worries about selling the books at a romance event: “I just worry that there aren’t enough.” There aren’t enough. You should write yours!

• A small Utah press just landed a national bestseller with the novel New York wanted to fix. Eli McCann’s debut Stitched, about a group of older women quilters who take in two young gay men on the way to a national quilting championship, debuted at No. 3 on Publishers Weekly’s trade paperback list with 20,535 copies and is already in its third printing, 108,000 copies in all. Torrey House Press usually calls 5,000 copies a success. Publisher Will Neville-Rehbehn says the big houses loved the voice and kept sending the same notes: make the women thirtysomethings, and “Don’t set it in Utah. Add a romance.” McCann said no, built a following of tens of thousands on Instagram and TikTok, and the preorders did the rest. To be fair to New York, “add a romance” is rarely bad advice (see above). But an author with an audience gets to say no to notes, and that’s the real story here.

• A New York Times rave sold out Marlon James’s new novel in a day, which publicists will tell you doesn’t happen anymore. Dwight Garner called The Disappearers “the novel of the decade and possibly of the century thus far,” the 37,000-copy first printing sold out on Amazon the day after its September 1 release, and Riverhead ordered 50,000 more. Jasmine Vojdani at Book Gossip asked around, and one Big Five publicity director told her that Times reviews of their own books have had no impact at all for two to three years. The follow-up is just as interesting: on Thursday the book made the National Book Award fiction longlist, and the same week it dropped out of Publishers Weekly’s top 25 after debuting at No. 7 with 11,919 copies. So the lever still works — once every few years, for one book, for about a week. Everyone else needs a Jack Edwards or a list of their own.

• A formerly self-published romantasy series has the No. 1 hardcover novel in America. Penn Cole’s Burn of the Everflame sold 33,742 copies in its first full week, and Publishers Weekly notes it’s the first Kindred’s Curse book to originate with a traditional publisher. The No. 1 book overall is Theo of Golden, self-published in 2023, at 1.69 million copies for the year. The week before, Rachel Gillig’s The Knave and the Moon opened at No. 1 with 104,183 copies (“book two bested its first-week print unit sales by 36K”), and its officially licensed talking gargoyle figurine sold 6,400 units on its own. R.F. Kuang’s Taipei Story debuted at No. 5 with 21,373, and the MrBeast and James Patterson novel slid from No. 3 to No. 13 in its second week. Self-published to bestseller used to be the exception. Now it’s the top of the list, and romantasy sells merch on the bestseller page.

• June was the biggest June on record for trade publishers, $703 million, with adult fiction up 19%. AAP’s StatShot numbers, via Jim Milliot at PW: first-half revenue is up 3.9% across 1,416 publishers, adult fiction is up 8.2% for the half and 19.3% in June (Theo of Golden alone sold more than 55,000 copies that month), and digital audio grew 14.7% to $530.9 million, well ahead of e-books at $444.2 million. E-books are down 2.5%, trade paperbacks are up 8.4%, hardcovers are down 2.6%. Most of you will buy Let Me Be Your Ghost as an ebook in November, so I am choosing to find this motivating.

• Tara Westover’s second memoir is about what happened after the first one. Brothers and Sisters comes out April 13 from Random House, nearly ten years after Educated became a million-seller and spent more than two years on the New York Times list. According to the AP, it covers her parents disputing her memories and siblings denying events they had previously confirmed, and the publisher frames it around one question: “Who gets to say what happened?” As a memoir ghostwriter, I can tell you that question sits under every project I take. I gave Educated 5 out of 5, so this one goes straight to the top of my list.

• Annie Dillard died on Tuesday at 81. She won the Pulitzer for Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, and The Writing Life, one of her best-known books, runs barely over 100 pages. NPR’s obituary has my favorite story about her: when the press called to ask what she was doing as she learned she’d won the Pulitzer, she said, “I’m washing spinach,” and she went right on washing it for the rest of her life, because she loved to cook. She also told NPR in 2016 that once you write about something you’ve destroyed it, and all you keep is the memory of what you wrote. Every memoirist should sit with that one. Go reread The Writing Life this week.

• Leigh Bardugo says this is her last tour “for a good long while,” and she’s blaming the algorithm for eating her taste. With three books out this year (Better Pets, Six of Crows: A Darker Shore, and Dead Beat soon), she told her subscribers there will be no new releases next year and no tour. The reason is the good part. She argues we’ve outsourced our taste to algorithms in everything from music to clothing to fiction, and says she is “deeply afraid” of what social media is doing to her own creative judgment. This is a strong argument for reading 80-plus books a year and posting a lot less than that. The scroll is not reading, and it has opinions about what you should write next.

• Substack is hosting its first breakfast for literary agents this fall. The Bookseller reports the book trade is increasingly keen on Substack writers, and the platform is starting a series of events to introduce them, beginning in November with agents. Head of International Farrah Storr says writers need a place that offers more creative and financial opportunities, and the Alliance of Independent Authors notes she pointed to fiction writers serializing books there, not only essayists. (Hi.) Substack also recently opened ad partnerships to writers with at least 100 paying subscribers. A paid list used to be the consolation prize for not getting a book deal. Now it’s the thing agents come to breakfast for — and a reason you may not need them.

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“I’m going to pass out,” I choked out as they lowered my bed flat and one strapped a blood pressure cuff around my arm.

“Get me a liter of saline!” the charge nurse called out. He turned back to me with a calming smile. “Are you feeling shortness of breath?”

“I’m going to pass out—” was all I could say as my hands went clammy, heat and cold both coursing through my veins as consciousness started to slip.

“Do you have the rescue meds ready?” Another nurse asked the charge nurse.

“She doesn’t need them,” he said, confident.

It turns out the charge nurse was right. They pushed saline and my blood pressure — which had an extraordinary and precipitous drop — started to slowly return to normal.

Over the next half hour I was the most popular patient in the infusion clinic, all of the nurses rotating around to check on me as I slowly recovered.

“Ready to try again?” my lead nurse asked me with a grim smile.

Was I ready to risk another steep drop of my blood pressure and intense sensations from my body rejecting the IV?

“Hell yeah,” I said. There was zero chance that I was leaving that infusion room without my dose of IV iron.

The infusion started, and my life changed.

this is life with low iron

In 2023 I did the 26-mile hike to Machu Picchu with a ferritin level of under 20.

I do not recommend this, especially as ferritin represents your iron stores in your body and is partially responsible for oxygenation to important organs like, I don’t know, your brain!

The maximum altitude on the hike was 13,800 feet at Dead Woman’s Pass, an insane place with deep folklore that actually inspired a story in my detective short story anthology, The Nomad Detective.

During the hike, I almost passed out multiple times and my now-husband Kyle had to carry my backpack during the hours-long climb to the pass. I chewed coca leaf (basically unrefined cocaine) and that was the only thing that got me through.

In fact, stimulants in vibey drink form have been my crutch for years. Coffee, matcha, freddo espresso (Greece), Turkish coffee and tea (Turkey, obv), Blue Bottle NOLAs (first in Korea, now my obsession here in SF) have been the only way I can hit the goals I set for myself and be a functioning human. I’ve even quit caffeinated tea and coffee for 6-12 month stints at a time to see if getting off of them would help raise my iron stores or cut my dependency, but it turns out when your iron is low life is hard!

This month, the American Society of Hematology raised the bar for what counts as iron deficiency. The new cutoff is a ferritin of 30 ng/mL or lower for most adults, and 50 or lower for higher-risk groups like mine. At my lowest, my ferritin was 8!

If you feel brain fog, exhaustion, or “coat hanger pain” (pain of the shoulders and neck) it’s worth it to ask your doctor for a ferritin test to see if you’re low — EVEN if the rest of your bloodwork looks normal (mine does). Ferritin isn’t part of a standard blood draw, so you have to ask for it by name.

I literally had to fight my doctor in LA in 2021 to get me one and he straight up did not order it for me the first two times I asked. When I finally got the test results back my nutritionist told me “I’m sorry the medical system has failed you” because it was so low.

Low ferritin feels like your life force is struggling uphill to bring color to your cheeks and light to your eyes. Low ferritin means it’s a struggle to get out of bed or up a flight of stairs. Low ferritin is living with weights on.

Getting my ferritin from 8-25 over the last five years has been a challenging journey, but at every stage of improvement, I’ve felt better, happier, and more full of life. Things unlocked at every stage: I could tolerate caffeine better, I had less mysterious anxiety that seemed to come from nowhere, I could workout longer and harder.

And now, my ferritin is at a normal level.

life in full color

I had a feeling that an iron infusion would change my life, and I don’t think it’s too early to say that it has.

Immediately after the infusion, colors started looking different.

Colors.

The walls of the infusion clinic were warmer, softer, hues seemed deeper. Maybe it was a brush with death? No, because when Kyle and I got dinner at a great Burmese restaurant nearby, the colors there seemed more lush.

But the biggest change? Energy. I feel replenished. Almost as if the full night of sleep I have been chasing for years finally arrived.

It’s hard to not type this and start crying because since I put my autoimmune condition in remission a few years ago, I couldn’t have imagined how much better even from then I could continue to feel.

I’ve changed everything: I quit drinking, I’ve switched to a majority-plant-based diet, I’ve cut my caffeine way back, and I’ve worked with doctors to solve deficiencies in vitamin D and now ferritin.

I feel like a new person, and that’s from years of being persistent and doggedly chasing down doctors and telling them “I need this. Can you help me get this?”

Even AI has been incredibly helpful for picking apart my lab results and preparing me to ask my doctors better questions. If I’d had AI back when I was putting my rheumatoid arthritis into remission, I probably would have gotten there faster.

Regardless, I’m filled with gratitude. I have energy now??? I wake up feeling alert and excited about the day??? I used to have to manufacture all of that with highly caffeinated beverages, and now I feel like I’m walking into this next phase of life wide awake.

…all in time to finish my novel

I’m working with my talented editor Kyle Cords (who also happens to be my husband!) on finishing Let Me Be Your Ghost. Kyle’s story sense is unmatched (there’s a reason he worked for high-profile showrunners during his time in Hollywood as a TV writer) and we’ve been having lots of great story conversations as I prepare to do the final rewrite on the book.

Rewrites are always a highwire act of trying to please readers while keeping the book constructed in a form that will deliver the best story, and I’m excited to finish up this journey.

And thank you to everyone who has pre-ordered the book — I’ve been so honored to see the 1, 10, and 50-book pre-orders roll in, and if you haven’t already seen all of the gifts I have for you for your pre-orders, check them out below!

🎁 pre-order the book and get your gift

Wishing you all creativity and good health,

-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: Thursday, September 24th at 5:30pm PT/8:30pm 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

“Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? — Who will guard the guards themselves?”

-Juvenal, Satires

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

The night terror found me in the new room, two doors from his.

They always know when I’ve moved. Some old superstitious part of me believes they check the locks first, like anything else that hunts. This one was the usual repertoire with new staging—the office in New Haven, the brass owl, the desk corner—and I surfaced from it the way I always do, all at once, rigid, soaked, a scream held in my teeth like a bit.

The light under my door changed. A knock, one knuckle, soft.

“Lola.”

I hadn’t screamed. I was sure I hadn’t screamed. But the floor outside my door had a man on it who apparently didn’t sleep either, and when I opened it he stood there in a T-shirt and soft grey sweatpants with his hair wrecked, taking in the state of me—the shaking, the sweat, the blanket I’d dragged off the bed and wrapped around my shoulders like armor.

His eyes went past me. To the floor by the window, where I’d laid the duvet and one pillow in a neat rectangle, the way I had every night since I moved in.

“You sleep on the floor,” he said.

“The bed’s too soft.” It came out smaller than I meant it to. “Beds are—I don’t sleep in beds. It’s a whole thing.”

Eze looked at the sad rectangle of bedding for a long moment, and then at me, and something in his face went so gentle it was almost unbearable, and he said, “No. That’s not happening. Come on.”

He walked to me, a hand outstretched. I took it, stumbling, my legs giving out on me. Without hesitation, he swept his other arm behind my knees, lifting me with ease and holding me close to his strong, hard body. I let out a little squeak of surprise as he carried me out of the guest room…

…and into his room next door. He put me down at the entrance, stepping away to give me space I didn’t know I needed. His room smelled like him—eucalyptus, cedar, clean cotton—and his bed was the size of a small nation, and I stood at the edge of it in my oversized Yale T-shirt with my arms crossed, ready to fight.

“I don’t sleep in beds, Eze.”

“You don’t sleep alone in beds.” He pulled back the covers on one side, then walked around and got in the other, staying deliberate, staying slow, a man approaching something feral he had no intention of spooking. “Hypothesis. We’re testing it. Get in.”

I could throw a fit. Run back to my room, or all the way back to my lighthouse. But something was unfurling in my mind. Something curious and weak and I couldn’t find a reason to deny myself what I wanted in that moment.

I got in. The mattress was a betrayal of everything I stood for. He didn’t reach for me—just lay on his back, one arm up under his head, and started talking, low and even, about nothing. The lake in Hokkaido. The fog on it. The canoe his father tipped and blamed on him for fifteen years. His voice moved through the dark like the lighthouse beam, sweeping, regular, and somewhere in the third or fourth pass my body made a decision without consulting me and crossed the last foot of neutral territory.

He gathered me in like this was established procedure. My cheek on his chest. His heart under it, slow and enormous. His hand at the back of my head, in my hair, still.

“The dream,” he said. “Tell me or don’t.”

“Don’t,” I whispered.

“Okay.” His lips landed in my hair. Then, after a while, “I meant it, you know. Two doors is a stupid number. It should be zero.”

I laughed into his warm chest. And there in the dark, in the arms of the man I was betraying to the government of the United States, I slept the whole night through for the first time in nine years.

…

I woke at four, because I had planned to wake at four, even before the night terror rearranged the evening.

For a long minute I lay there in the gray dark with his heartbeat under my ear, and I let myself pretend—one minute exactly, timed on his breathing—that I was the woman he thought was in his arms. Then I did the worst thing I have ever done in a career of doing things like it. I slipped out of Ezekiel Crane’s bed while he slept, moved through his sleeping house with the chip I’d cut out of a woman who trusted a glass of wine, and went to rob his father’s archive.

I borrowed a different car this time—Xavier always kept the keys on top of the front left tires, not suspecting anyone on the property would run off with them—one of the three black Escalades that the staff used for routine errands.

As I drove through the early dark, I felt nausea roll in my stomach, and it wasn’t from the switchbacks.

The tower of Crane Industries never slept, but at four in the morning it dozed, and I had spent six weeks learning the rhythm of its breathing.

I drove myself in and rode up with the tail of the graveyard shift change, when the lobby arch processed a stream of blue jumpsuits and the bug-eyed guard was midway through his rounds. My cover, if I needed one, was thin but real—the insomniac ghostwriter, notorious by now among the night staff, coming in to use the archive room Hayden had badged me into a dozen daylight times. Nobody looked twice at me anymore. That was the whole strategy of my life, and tonight it had a borrowed chip riding in a gauze wrap around my palm like a blister pad.

Hayden’s chip worked at the parking level door.

It worked at the executive elevator.

It worked—and here my heart performed its entire percussion catalogue—at the smooth sandstone wall behind Hayden’s empty desk, the one Eze disappeared through on the nights he thought I’d gone home, the seam I was never badged for and had mapped anyway, because mapping the doors I’m not allowed through is the last hobby I have left.

The wall exhaled open. Full executive clearance, six years in the making. Thank you, Hayden.

Inside was a room I’d never seen and instantly understood—the archive under the archive. No windows, air gone cold and dustless, racks of cold storage humming in the dark like a hive wintering—and one terminal, old, air-gapped, physical media only, a machine built by a man who trusted nothing that touched a network. Magnus Crane’s memory palace. The place where the machine kept what the machine wasn’t supposed to have.

The drawers were indexed in his cramped handwriting. I’d been reading that handwriting for six weeks. I could follow it drunk, in the dark. GVA—the airport code did the confessing—GVA 11.14, a drawer of black cartridges, and one cartridge alone at the front, unlabeled except for a strip of red tape.

Forty minutes that didn’t exist. Everyone had told me so—the police, the papers, Eze himself—the logs have a gap, nothing survived—and I fed the cartridge into the terminal with hands I had to speak to, and the screen woke, and the gap opened up and let me in.

A hotel suite in Geneva, timestamped. High corner angle—Magnus’s personal security feed, the one that watched his own rooms, because of course the paranoid king watched himself—the only privacy he believed in was other people’s lack of it.

On the screen, I watched Magnus Crane alive. Observing the footage hit strangely—the man whose margins I lived in, whose handwriting I could forge by now, moving through the frame in a hotel robe, seventy and iron-straight, drinking his two fingers of whiskey. Reading a speech aloud to an empty room. I couldn’t hear it. The file carried no audio. But I could see the pages in his hand, the cramped ink, and I watched a dead man rehearse the keynote that Kira said would open a window into everything, pacing, cutting lines with a pen, a man editing himself toward Monday.

The door of the suite opened at 11:52 p.m., and my whole body went to glass.

Eze.

Not the Eze of the press line. Younger-looking somehow in the bad hotel light, in a sweater, carrying a folder—summoned, his posture said, the particular spine of a son called in past midnight. And for nine minutes I watched a silent argument I would have traded fingers to hear—Magnus stabbing the speech with one finger, Eze’s hands opening—slow down, think—Magnus slicing the air, imperial. The folder thrown on the bed. A word from the son that rocked the father back a half-step. Two men with one profile shouting at each other in a soundproof past.

As I stared at the screen, the revelation tumbled over me like a bag of bricks.

Eze was there. The night before the death, in the room, fighting with him. He lied to the police. He lied to the papers. He lied to me, fireside, with his sleeves rolled, with his eyes down—we never had that conversation—he told me they never spoke—

And then the timestamp rolled past midnight, and the argument broke off mid-gesture, because Magnus Crane’s hand went to his own chest like a man checking for his wallet.

The horror ran in two directions at once. I watched an old man lower himself onto a hotel bed the careful way people do when the pain arrives, and I watched his son cross the frame faster than any camera of mine had ever seen him move—catching him, lowering him, tearing the phone from the nightstand, shouting into it, shouting at the door. And then—while he still could, while his son knelt over him tearing at his own collar to start compressions—Magnus pulled Eze down by the shirt. The old man’s mouth moved against his son’s ear. Four seconds, maybe five. The last spending of a whole life, the ritual’s final installment, one true thing. I watched Eze go still to receive it, and then the old man’s grip let go, and everything after that was fighting.

Compressions. Real ones, sleeves shoved up, his whole weight through locked arms, thirty and two, thirty and two, a man doing CPR on his own father with the folder’s pages scattered under both of them like shot birds—for one minute, three, five—where was help, the finest hotel in Geneva, where was help—and the timestamp crawled and no one came and no one came and no one came, and I stood in a cold room with both hands over my mouth, watching the delay do its work, understanding at last what a made gap was for.

At 12:09, Magnus Crane stopped being anyone.

Help arrived at 12:14. Five minutes after it mattered. Twenty-two after the first call.

I played it again. I don’t know what that says about me and no longer much care—I played it again, watching Eze this time and not the death—the compressions, the shouting, the receiving—and I was leaning toward the screen in the dark, close enough to fog it, trying to read a dead man’s lips through tears I hadn’t noticed starting, when the lights came up.

“The word was Babylon,” Eze said, from the doorway. “Since you’re trying to read it.”

I didn’t move. There was no move to make. The cartridge turned, the screen glowed, the evidence of my evidence was everywhere—Hayden’s gauze on my palm, the drawer open, the dead emperor mid-frame—and Ezekiel Crane stood in the entrance to his father’s memory palace in a dark navy sweater and jeans, absolutely still, and I couldn’t read his face at all.

“Eze—”

“The question you rehearsed on the drive over,” he said, level, terrible, “was what did your father tell you before he died. So before you ask it, I want to know who it’s for.” He came forward one step, and the archive hummed around us, and his eyes in the terminal light were the coldest green on earth. “Is that you asking? Or your handler?”

The floor of my life opened neatly, like a page.

He knew. Not suspected—knew, and the knowledge was like a gun, loaded with handler, a word with a case file behind it, and I stood in the wreckage of nine years of cover doing the only math left—how long. The bookstore? The race? Had every fireside hour been him interviewing me?

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“One need not be a Chamber — to be Haunted —”

-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

Kira’s own firm handled the press for her death, and I couldn’t decide if that was the saddest thing I’d ever seen or precisely what she would have wanted, and then I realized it was both, and that she would have been the first to say so.

The statements went out in her house style—warm, deft, ahead of every question. A private service. A foundation announced before the news cycle could invent one. Somewhere in an office she’d built, people she’d trained were scrubbing the manner of her death down to tragic accident with the tools she’d given them, and the machine ran so beautifully without her that you could watch it and forget there was a body in it.

TRAGIC FALL AT TECH GALA, the acceptable outlets said. Homicide hadn’t closed anything—I knew that from Devi Raman, who now called me twice a day now, whether I picked up or not—but the investigation had gone quiet and internal in a way that smelled of budgets and reach. Nine minutes of missing footage from Crane hardware, and nobody in print had ever heard of it.

Dorian sent flowers to the funeral home. Of course he did—everyone did—but Dorian’s arrangement was the size of a door, white orchids and black ribbon, and the card read, in fountain ink, For the keeper of everyone’s secrets. May they keep her now. I stood in front of it for a long time. He hadn’t come. Men like Dorian never come. They send something expensive and unsettling and let you do the wondering, and I did the wondering, all through the service—about a man who collected vanished things, whose business deal had been refused by Eze, who had told me in a prison cellblock that he arranges things without trying. Kira had known something about the sale of the machine’s eyes. Dorian had bought the machine’s eyes. I built the case against him step by step through the eulogies, and it assembled so smoothly, so willingly, that some quiet professional voice in the back of me noted how much I wanted it to be him—because every road that led to Dorian was a road that led away from the people Eze loved.

The funeral was on a green hill in Marin, closed casket, two hundred people in beautiful black. Eze stood at the front with his jaw set to carry weight, and Conrad stood beside him with a hand on his shoulder the entire service, openly weeping, blowing his nose like a foghorn, grief pouring off him in sheets—and I stood three rows back doing the thing I hate myself for at funerals, which is watching the crowd. Everyone Kira had warned me about was there. The people here are not your friends had come to bury the woman who said it.

Afterward, in the receiving line, Conrad wrapped me in a bourbon-smelling bear hug I couldn’t escape and said, wetly, into my hair, “She liked you, you know. Told me at the party—came and found me by the bar, said, your boy’s writer sees everything, don’t let him scare her off. Last thing she ever said to me.” His voice broke on it, honestly and completely, and he held on to me the way big men hold on to furniture in an earthquake. “Take care of him. She’d want—” He couldn’t finish. He moved down the line and folded the next mourner into his grief, and I stood on the green hill in the wind, ashamed of every suspicious thought I’d ever filed under his name, and went back to building my case against Dorian, where suspicion felt clean.

…

The panic attack caught me that night, and it had been stalking me long enough to know my habits.

It waited until I was alone in the lighthouse with my armor in a pile—dress, shorthand notebook, the black heels of a funeral—and then it came up the well shaft all at once, the way it does—heart first, a fist opening and closing in my chest at some new tempo, then the air going thin, then the walls of my round cornerless room beginning, gently, to rotate with the beam.

Okafor asked questions and vanished. Kira knew things and died. I do both for a living.

And under the fear, turning like a second storm system, the question I couldn’t put down. Did I believe him? I had a client who had lied to the police, whose hardware went blind at fatal moments, whose grief read true in every light I’d tested it in. I had spent six weeks assembling reasons to trust Ezekiel Crane, and they were all—every one of them—things he had shown me on purpose. That was the fact I kept hitting in the dark. Everything I knew, he had chosen for me to know. And my tapes were already out there working against him, dressed up as a federal review, and if he was innocent, then I wasn’t just falling for my target. I was the only knife actually in him.

I know the protocol. I built the protocol, in motel bathrooms and safe houses, across three books and nine years, out of gin and physics. Flask from the suitcase—two swallows, the burn something to hold on to. Ice pack from the freezer I’d stocked my first week, because I always stock the freezer, the way other women stock pepper spray. Then down onto the rug, flat, the cold pressed to my breastbone like a hand from someone steadier, and count.

Freeze the panic before it freezes you.

One. Two. The ceiling turned. The beam swept. Five. Eight. Kira’s shoes, still on. Twelve. Two champagne glasses, one drinker. The fist in my chest opened, closed, stuttered—would it just—thirteen. Fourteen. The gin arrived, slow warmth spreading under the cold pack, the ancient stupid animal chemistry of it, and somewhere around forty the boulder rolling toward me in slow motion—Indiana Jones, every time, my whole personal cinema of dying—rolled past instead, and I lay on the rug sweat-soaked in the sweeping dark, alive again, furious again.

And there, flat on my back on the floor, with my heart still hiccuping and the ice going soft over my sternum, I finally let myself think the whole thought, the one I’d been keeping in the drawer:

I might be falling in love with a man I cannot rule out.

Because that was the fact under the fog. I had a client who knew about gaps before the gaps came for Kira. Who was provably capable of lying to police. Whose hardware kept going blind at fatal moments, whose hand had felt like certainty on a cliff path eleven seconds long. Everything I knew about his innocence, I knew from his mouth, his files, his jawline, his grief—all of it curated, all of it deliverable, and I of all women alive knew what a good man’s costume weighed, because I laundered them professionally.

I needed the forty minutes. Geneva. The footage everyone said didn’t exist—and if it existed anywhere on this planet, it existed in the sealed archive of the most paranoid building in California, behind walls that opened for embedded chips and nothing else.

If it exonerated him, I could love him with my eyes open.

If it didn’t, I’d hand Matthew his product, collect my freedom, and spend the rest of my life somewhere quiet, learning to live as the woman who kissed him back first.

I peeled the ice pack off my chest and got up off the floor to go commit some crimes.

…

Hayden had turned on me weeks ago—since the whisper campaign found the front office, and completely since the party, since the alibi made me somebody instead of staff. The sunshine was all for Eze now. What I got was the other channel, the one the org chart never sees—meetings that moved without notice, badge requests dying of clerical error, the sweet little “ask your boyfriend” filed where HR couldn’t subpoena it. She ran Eze’s doors the way Tini ran the kitchen—every wall in that tower opened for the chip in the back of her hand—and she had decided, in a hundred bloodless administrative ways, that I was the enemy.

Which, as of tonight, became mutually convenient. If anyone was going to get me through the sealed side of Crane Industries, it might as well be someone who’d enjoy hating me afterward.

I’d done my homework the way the Bureau taught me—Thursdays she drank at a wine bar in Redwood City with two friends from her spin studio, always the corner high-top, always three glasses of Sancerre across two hours, always the last to leave because she closed the tab to harvest the credit card points. And the chip rode in the back of her right hand—I’d watched her lay it against the sandstone walls a hundred times with the little flourish of the anointed.

I arrived at the wine bar looking like an accident—oh my god, Hayden? You’re here, too?—in my one good blazer. Hayden’s face when she saw me could have kept oysters fresh, but her spin friends lit up and squealed like I was an exhibit—the writer, the one from the tabloids, it’s you, please sit!—and there is no force on earth like a hostile woman’s friends deciding they adore you. I bought a round, told three stories about celebrity clients that were both true and legally fictional, apologized to Hayden—publicly, warmly, for “getting off on the wrong foot,” a masterpiece of vagueness her friends cooed over—and was begged to stay when the spin studio peeled off at ten.

“One more,” said Hayden, to her glass, not to me. Then, after a silence exactly as long as her pride, “You bought three rounds. Sit.”

“You don’t like me,” I said, sitting.

“I don’t like unvetted people,” Hayden said. “There’s a difference. Everything in that building gets vetted except whatever walks in on Eze’s arm, and my whole job is what happens when that goes wrong. And then you went and got alibied. Do you know what my inbox looks like since the party?” She drained half the glass. “Also the dress was Rodarte and nobody warned me, which I consider a workplace injury.”

“I’ll file the paperwork.”

“See, that.” She pointed at me, wobbling only slightly. “That’s the problem. You’re funny. It’s very hard to run a proper freeze-out on funny.”

Just us girls. Hayden thawed by the glass, and I hated the work tonight, hated it in a new way—because under the bitchiness was a grievance with real bones in it, and she showed it to me by glass four. Six years at Magnus Crane’s elbow, then Eze’s. Chief of staff dangled twice and given to men who lasted eight months. The whole life poured into that tower, you don’t understand what this job means to me, and the day they embedded the chip—it’s stupid, she said, laughing, but it felt like being chosen. And I sat there being chosen by her, nodding, warm, my client’s smile on, while the crushed half of a sleeping tablet dissolved in her Sancerre like a cloud dissipating in the night sky.

She got sleepy fast and gracefully. Everyone just assumed. I’m her friend from the tower, I’ve got her, I’m calling her sister. The bartender helped me pour her into a rented Jeep, wished us both well, comped the last round out of sympathy.

In the dark of the parking lot, with her snoring against the window like a woman finally getting the sleep that tower had been eating for six years, I held her manicured right hand in mine under the dome light, a scalpel I had found in one of the house’s large first aid kits sterilized in vodka, and I want it recorded somewhere that I hesitated—that even now, nine years and three monsters deep, there is a version of me that sat in that Jeep begging for any other door.

There wasn’t one. There was a chip the size of a grain of rice under the skin of a lonely woman’s hand, and a recently dead friend, and forty minutes of Geneva.

The cut was smaller than a paper cut. She didn’t stir. Butterfly bandage, antibiotic, her hand tucked back in her lap like a sleeping bird—she’d wake with a sting and a story about a wine glass, and I had, at a guess, one day, maybe two, before the sting became a question and the question reached Kessler’s desk and every door in that tower changed its mind about her chip at once.

I drove her home, walked her in, left water and aspirin by her bed like the world’s worst guardian angel. In my pocket, wrapped in gauze, the future ticked like a swallowed watch.

“I’m sorry, Hayden,” I said from her doorway, and meant it more than anything I’d said to her all month, and left.

…

The mountain tried to collect me on the way home.

I noticed it first as softness—the brake pedal on the 84 switchbacks going vague under my foot, a longer push for the same slowing, the specific mushy wrongness that anyone raised on Ohio winters and homestead trucks knows in her spine before her brain gets the memo. I was two turns into the descent, the dark coming down through the redwoods in walls, headlights carving twenty feet of tunnel out of a hundred feet of curve.

Third turn—the pedal went to the floor.

Nothing. A cable pulling on absence. My brakes were out. The Jeep gathered speed with the cheerful obedience of physics, forty into the curve, guardrail flashing silver, the black gap beyond it where the canyon breathed, and my hands did trained things while the animal in me screamed—downshift, second gear, engine howling, e-brake, easy, easy, don’t lock it—the rear stepping out, gravel spraying off the shoulder into the void—

Headlights filled my mirrors.

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

🧘 I’m teaching a weekly Yin yoga class in San Francisco

Starting Tuesday, September 15, I’m teaching a community sliding-scale Yin class at Arise Yoga in Pacific Heights, every Tuesday at 3pm.

Yin is the slow kind of yoga: a gentle warm-up, then long, quiet holds on the floor that work into the joints and connective tissue instead of chasing a sweat. If you sit at a laptop all day (hi, it’s me, the writer), it’s the hour that undoes it. You don’t need to be flexible or experienced, and sliding scale means you pay what works for you. Bring the friend who insists yoga is only for bendy people.

Two things to know before you come: Arise asks you to register in advance (no walk-ins), and arriving 5 to 10 minutes helps to give you time to get settled in.

book my yin class at Arise

If you’re not in San Francisco, send this to the friend who is. I’d love to see you on a mat.

👻 Let Me Be Your Ghost is up for preorder, and there’s a second book in it for you

If you missed last week’s announcement: my romantic thriller Let Me Be Your Ghost releases this November, and preorders are open on Amazon and other retailers. Lola Whitman ghostwrites memoirs for dangerous men. Ezekiel Crane is the billionaire she was sent to destroy. She fell in love with him instead.

Preorders are the single biggest gift a reader can give an author, because they decide how hard the bookstore algorithms work on launch day. So I wanted to give you something real in return. Preorder one copy, in any format from any retailer, and I’ll send you How to Write a Memoir (the book I rewrote in Athens coffee shops and never published) in PDF and EPUB. It’s everything I actually do on real memoir projects, start to finish. Screenshot your receipt, upload it on the claim page, and the files land in your inbox within minutes.

Preordering for a book club or a group? 10 print copies gets you a founding membership to this newsletter, and 50 gets you a private 1:1 consulting session with me on any topic of your choosing. The full breakdown lives on the claim page.

🎁 claim your pre-order gift here!

Thank you to everyone who has already preordered. Two books, one preorder. I am still ~ unreasonably ~ excited about this part.

🍵 let’s catch up over tea: beta reader season

When I put out the call for beta readers last month, the response was bigger than I expected, and the notes have been rolling in ever since. This week I started writing back to everyone, and I’ve begun working the feedback into the manuscript. If you sent notes and haven’t heard from me yet, you will.

Here’s how I’m handling it: I read every note in full before I change a single word. Then I sort — one reader is a taste, three readers is a pattern. When three people stumble in the same place, the chapter has a problem, and that’s the note I take into the draft first. The rest gets weighed against what the story is trying to do. Some of the best notes so far have been the ones that disagreed with each other, because they show me exactly where the book is asking readers to choose a side.

This is the whole reason I serialized the novel here in the first place. Getting feedback from early readers is essential, and I don’t think there’s a better way to write a book than with the people who are going to read it. Chapters keep dropping every Friday for paid subscribers (we just hit chapter fourteen).

So something to meditate on this week: what’s a piece of feedback you’ve been avoiding? Whose notes would make the thing better, if you actually let them in?

💌 what I’m watching, reading, and creating

creating

• The Ghost Has a Book Cover, and Preorders Are LIVE. The full story of the cover vote, the preorder gifts, and the little receipt-reading machine I built to send them.

• 200+ Grants, Contests, & Residencies for Writers at Make Writing Your Job. This is the past week’s edition of the opportunities list, if you’ve got a project that needs funding or a deadline.

• Two new reading lists on the blog: Romantic Thriller Books: 10 Twisty Picks, Rated (the genre I’m writing in, so I have Opinions) and Books Like The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo.

reading

• Publishers are still paying for the front tables, and now they’re wining and dining BookTok too. John Self’s Guardian piece on how a bestseller actually gets made is the most useful thing I read this week. One publicist says the big influencer dinners happen “a year and a half ahead of publication,” some BookTokers now “expect to get paid to review books,” and those supermarket top 10s are “very much not earned positions. They’re paid for.” Jack Edwards pushed Dostoevsky’s White Nights past 100,000 copies with one video. My version of this machine is a Typeform for beta readers and a bonus book for anyone who preorders LET ME BE YOUR GHOST. No dinners. (Yet.)

• MrBeast has 500 million+ YouTube subscribers, and his novel with James Patterson reportedly preordered in the four digits. The Most Dangerous Games came out September 1 from HarperCollins with a real $1 million contest attached: the book is your entry ticket, weekly challenges start September 14, and ten finalists “face the Beast.” (His announcement video has 24 million views, which makes the preorder number even stranger.) Imogen West-Knights at Slate quotes a publishing colleague: “You get MrBeast for free, why would you pay $30 for this?” That’s the whole creator-economy lesson in 12 words. An audience for one thing is not automatically an audience for the thing you want to sell them, and a book buyer is a very different animal than a viewer. His stated goal is to “get a whole generation psyched about reading again” — and fine, I’ll root for that part.

• Emma Gannon didn’t get a US deal for her new book, so she’s publishing the American edition herself. Emma (whose Tuscany retreat I went to in spring 2025, and who I talked self-publishing with this past May) got the rejection at Gatwick, and her response was to put A Creative Compass out in the US through Whitefox and keep the royalties and the rights. More than half of her Substack audience is American. Her line: “All books will find the people they are meant to find.” My line, same as always: a book deal is book debt — and a publisher’s “no” is often the best financial decision anyone will make for you.

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“They were careless people… they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness… and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”

-F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

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

Nobody could leave the island.

That was the first thing the police did right—they froze the boats. Three hundred of the most flight-capable people in America stood corralled in a prison exercise yard with their phones lighting their faces like votive candles, watching SFPD string tape across their evening, and I stood among them cataloguing everything, because when I grieve, I watch. It’s the only prayer I know.

Kira was covered now. That was all the mercy the night had organized.

The facts assembled themselves in fragments, overheard and observed, and I strung them together in my shorthand on a cocktail napkin because my notebook was on the mainland. She’d gone toward the lighthouse around ten, during the laser tag—two waiters saw her, laughing, alone, carrying two glasses of champagne. Carrying two. Nobody saw who the second glass was for. At 10:19 the string lights on the north path browned out for a moment—generator hiccup, the event company said. And the service cameras on the north side, the ones covering the lighthouse approach and stairs, the ones that ran all night while every human eye was on the game—

“Nine minutes,” I heard a tech tell a detective, low, baffled, holding a tablet like it had personally betrayed him. “The feed just—there’s a gap. 10:14 to 10:23. It’s not cut, it’s not looped, it’s just gone. This is Crane hardware, this doesn’t happen—”

Gaps happen, said a voice in my memory, mine, weeks old, a different woman’s.

Not in my father’s world, answered his. In my father’s world, gaps are made.

The driveway fire—system dark, no prints, encryption defeated. Geneva—forty minutes of security logs, evaporated. And now nine minutes on an island, on the family’s own hardware, at the exact right time above the exact right stairs. Three gaps. One signature. The same hand had been turning off the world’s eyes for a year, and tonight it had turned them off above Kira, who had opened a vault and booked a meeting and told me the party would keep.

I looked across the yard at the people I had spent six weeks interviewing, and the case stopped being a cold case in a manila envelope. It was warm. It was here. It had shared canapés with all of us and was, statistically, still standing inside this tape.

The detectives found me on their own. I was always going to be found.

“Ma’am—you came with Mr. Crane? And how long have you known the deceased?” Notebook out, tone polite, eyes not. “And during the game portion of the evening, you were where, exactly?”

Alone in Block D, is where I’d been. Alone, out of sight, in the dark, a stranger with a sealed past standing fifty yards of open ground from the stairs. I watched the youngest detective do that math in real time, and the oldest fear I owned—the cuffs, the cell, the record with my name finally on it—came up the well shaft with its hands out.

It was Conrad, of all people, who waded in.

“Hey—hey, no. Not her.” He arrived like weather, gray-faced, bourbon gone from his hand, and put himself half between me and the cops with their notebooks. “She’s Eze’s. Been at the house six weeks, she’s the reason he’s eating dinner like a human being again, and if you make this night worse for that man by sweating his—his person—I will have your captain on the phone before your pen hits the period.” A heavy hand landed on my shoulder, warm, steadying, enormous. “She was with the party, fellas. Come on.”

Grief had made him kind, or kindness was useful tonight, and standing inside the shelter of it I honestly could not tell which, and that frightened me more than the detectives did.

But detectives keep lists, and I stayed on theirs. An hour later a different pair came back with harder questions—could anyone besides the deceased’s friends confirm my movements during the game, and would I mind coming to the mainland to make a formal statement—and the yard noticed, conversation dropping in a widening ring, three hundred careless people relieved to have somewhere to put the night’s horror that wasn’t themselves or anyone they summered with. The woman no one knew. The stranger in green silk.

“She was with me.”

Eze’s voice came from behind my left shoulder, aimed at the detectives and loud enough for the whole yard to bank on. He arrived beside me still in his ruined evening clothes, Kira’s blood dried on one cuff from where he’d knelt at the bottom of the stairs, and he put his arm around me where three hundred witnesses had watched it live all evening.

“From the game onward. We were together in Block D—it was my birthday, gentlemen, and I intended to spend a portion of it kissing someone, which I’d rather not diagram for the press.” His voice didn’t waver on kissing, didn’t waver on any of it, a man spending his own reputation with both hands. “We heard the scream together. Whoever was above those stairs, it wasn’t Lola Whitman, and the next person who wonders aloud can wonder to my attorneys.”

The detective’s eyebrow did what eyebrows do. Behind him I watched the story ignite and spread through the yard—Crane’s girl, they were together, mystery solved, of course—the alibi and the romance fusing into one fact, official now, on the record, in the notebooks. The cover story stopped being a costume in that moment. It grew a paper trail. Somewhere across the yard, a society reporter typed away on her phone with her thumbs, glowing.

“Don’t say anything else,” Eze murmured against my ear. “Not to police, not to anyone. Attorneys are on a boat already.”

“Eze—your cuff—” Kira’s blood, brown at his wrist.

His jaw moved. “I know,” he said, and his voice stayed level and his eyes, up close, were the worst thing I saw all night.

…

The feds landed at midnight.

They came off their launch in windbreakers, four of them, jurisdiction-flavored words moving ahead of them through the cops like a bow wave—high-profile, task force, we’ll take witness logistics—and the third one through the light of the generator lamps was Matthew.

The yard tilted. I put a hand on cold hundred-year-old stone.

He looked like himself, boyish and sandy and unremarkable, a man built to be forgotten by bartenders, and he clipboard-nodded his way along the witness rows like middle management, and I watched him clock me next to Ezekiel Crane—watched the flick of his eyes tally the silk, the arm around me, the blood on my client’s cuff—without one muscle of his face admitting we’d ever shared a time zone.

They processed the guests in batches, Eze floating around and discussing things in hushed tones with others. It was nearly two when a windbreaker collected me for “routine witness intake,” steering me into the old administration building, down a corridor of peeling federal paint, into a room with a folding table—and closed the door with Matthew already inside it.

“Ninety seconds,” Matthew said. He didn’t sit. “The locals think the Bureau’s taking routine witness statements. Don’t make it weird.”

“You flew here in three hours, Matthew. For routine statements?”

“A woman died fifty yards from my asset, so yes, Lola, the Bureau charters things.” Under the even voice, something I’d never heard in nine years of him. Speed. He was rattled. “Now you listen to me. Your tapes are working. Everything you’ve sent—his security gaps, his contract exposure, his own words about how his systems fail—that’s the spine of the NSA review right now. You did that. D.C. is very pleased with the product and very unhappy with the producer, because tonight their ghostwriter is in the society pages sleeping with the target—”

The floor moved. Your tapes are working. The review with the specific questions, phrased almost exactly the way he phrases it. Kessler thinks we have a leak. I had wondered, all evening, with a coldness I couldn’t place, and here was Matthew handing me the answer like a commendation. The knife in Eze’s back had my handwriting on it—

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First: thank you. When I put the cover options in front of you, I expected a handful of polite votes. What I got instead were capital-O Opinions — real ones, specific ones, the kind you give a friend who is about to get a very permanent tattoo.

So I took them seriously, and then I made the call. Here she is:

Lola in profile. The Golden Gate wrapped in fog inside her silhouette. Magenta light chewing the scenery. I can’t wait to hold the final copy in my hands — thank you for helping me pick!

👻 Preorders are officially open

Let Me Be Your Ghost (the romantic thriller you’ve been reading here chapter by chapter every Friday) releases this November, and the book is available for pre-orders on Amazon and other retailers.

pre-order LMBYG on Amazon!

(You can purchase it on Kindle or Paperback. Hardcover coming soon!)

Here’s the truth about preorders: they decide how hard the bookstore algorithms work for a book on launch day, which makes them the single biggest gift a reader can give an author.

But I didn’t want to just ask you to help me get this book out there. I wanted to also give you some real gifts in exchange for your support!

🎁 The secret book I’ve been sitting on for years

In between ghostwriting memoirs for clients whose names I will take to my grave, I once wrote a book called How to Write a Memoir: a ghostwriter’s secrets for turning your life into a bestseller. Everything I actually do on real memoir projects, start to finish. Then I never published it. It has been my private playbook ever since.

Until now.

Preorder ONE copy of Let Me Be Your Ghost (any format, any retailer) and I’ll send How to Write a Memoir to you. The whole book, in PDF and EPUB. In the novel, Lola ghostwrites memoirs for dangerous men, and this is her tradecraft — except real, and mine.

Once you pre-order your copy, just go fill out the form on this page with your receipt!

Two books, one preorder. I am ~ unreasonably ~ excited about this part.

get your pre-order gift!

📚 For the ringleaders

Preordering for a book club, a team, or a whole org? The gifts scale with you.

Pre-ordering 10+ print copies runs about $200 in paperbacks and in exchange I’ll comp you a $550 annual founding membership to this very newsletter. This includes access to our monthly Substack Lab workshops, the 6 Week Substack Sprint, and more. The math is not subtle on purpose.

And 50+ print copies gets you a private session with me (consulting time I bill at $1,000 an hour) or a talk for your team or organization — over $1,500 in gifts before you count the books themselves. You also get access to the gifts in the previous tiers (including the $550/year Founding Membership here at Sutoscience!)

pre-order now!

🧾 Claiming takes one minute

Preorder anywhere. Screenshot your receipt. Upload it on the claim page, and the gifts go out automatically by email within minutes. (Yes, I built a little receipt-reading machine for this. Yes, I’m very proud of it.)

claim your pre-order gifts!

Serializing this novel with you, Friday by Friday, has been one of the great joys of my writing life. The book arrives in November. The gifts start today.

A book launch is a group project wearing one author’s name. Thank you for being mine.

-Amy

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“Hell is empty and all the devils are here.”

-William Shakespeare, The Tempest

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

Eze got back at five. I didn’t see him until six.

The light was going by then, the fog holding a mile offshore in a long gray wall like it was waiting to be invited in.

I came down the path from the lighthouse, and Eze was waiting by the car, in black again, no jacket. He heard me approach and turned around. The expression was fleeting, but I saw his eyes dip, widen, and I felt a bit of wickedness as I stopped before him and slowly did a 360-degree turn, showing off the drama of the green weapon in the shape of a dress.

For once, Eze was speechless.

“Like it?” I asked, finally.

“This is Kira’s doing,” he said, shaking his head as if trying to refocus.

“How can you tell?”

“Because I’d never have gotten away with buying you that.”

He held out his arm. “Ready?”

“Yes,” I said, and he led me to the car.

“Where were you all day?” I asked.

“Working.”

“All day.”

“All day,” he agreed, and opened my door, and neither of us went anywhere near what he’d shouted in a concrete garage on Thursday night, which was still down there in the dark waiting for somebody to come back for it.

…

Conrad threw Eze a birthday party in a prison. But not just any prison.

Alcatraz rose out of the black water strung with Edison bulbs, the old cellhouse glowing like a jack-o’-lantern, a band playing in the exercise yard while a fleet of chartered boats ferried Silicon Valley’s royalty across the chop. The city glittered behind us, indifferent.

Eze stood at the bow of our boat and watched the island come at him, and I sensed a bit of unease as I approached. The car ride had been quiet, and I had trouble getting a read on Eze.

“You could have said no,” I said.

“I said no four times, for the record. Conrad booked it on the fifth.” The wind pulled at his hair, and beneath the polish he looked tired in a way no amount of money has ever fixed. “He thinks I’ve been hiding. Months in the fog with a dead father and a book project, and my best friend has decided what I need is three hundred people and a cake shaped like the company logo.” A muscle ticked in his jaw. “He means it kindly. That’s the unbearable part.”

“And the part you’re not saying?”

He was quiet for a second, spray hitting the hull below us.

“Nineteen days,” he said. “This is the week we’d be at the lake. Him and me and the bad fishing.” He didn’t look at me. “Instead I get Alcatraz and a band. My father would have chartered a boat straight home.”

The island’s dock lights slid across his face, and I did something unprofessional. I put my hand over his on the railing. Just for a moment. His hand turned under mine, and for three seconds in the middle of the bay we held on, and neither of us said a word about it.

“There’s one more problem,” Eze said, as the dock came up. “Tonight you’re a story with no cover. Three hundred people, forty of them press-adjacent, all of whom will want to know what a beautiful unknown woman is doing at my birthday. And they’re not going to buy just the ghostwriter thing—the valley has already been talking. And Ashcroft RSVP’d yes to a party he wasn’t invited to.” His thumb moved once over my knuckles, deliberate, and my pulse went off like spilled marbles. “The safest thing you can be tonight is mine. On my arm, my hand where everyone can see it, boring and claimed and not worth a single question. Can you act that?”

Act. “I have range,” I said.

“I know,” said Eze, with a half-smile that meant more than one thing, and the boat touched the dock, and he took my hand like it had always been his, and we went up into the prison together.

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It’s happening!!! My novel LET ME BE YOUR GHOST is coming out in book form. Real paper, real spine, date announcement very soon.

Before it does, I need your help with the one thing I keep changing my mind about: the cover.

Here’s my problem. This novel follows a memoir ghostwriter who gets in way too deep with her Silicon Valley billionaire client — while informing on him to the FBI. So it’s a romance. It’s also a thriller. It’s also a murder mystery. Every cover I love leads hard with one of those and buries the other two.

I’ve narrowed it down to two finalists. Both feel like the book to me, depending on the day.

Below: both covers, what I’m weighing on each, and a poll for you to pick your favorite ❤️

📕 My Philosophy Behind Book Covers

Picking my book cover is one of my ~ favorite ~ parts of the process, because it feels like the story that has lived in my head is finally getting a visual representation.

If books have souls, then the cover is their aura.

So here are the two book covers I need your help choosing between…

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A client once brought me to a vineyard in California to attend a family reunion.

Except this was not a normal reunion. DNA evidence had revealed that my client’s father wasn’t her biological father, and that she had more family than they ever knew existed. So my client flew the new family in to meet the old one, all at once. A big surprise, the kind you would never dare put in fiction because no editor would believe it. And I was there when it happened for the reason I am ever anywhere: someone wanted the story written down, and they wanted me to be the one holding the pen.

This kind of work has been my job for a better part of a decade.

Put simply, I write books for rich people.

The fuller version: I’m a memoir ghostwriter. People hire me to live inside their memories for 8 to 12 months and come out the other side with a book that sounds so much like them that their own kids can’t tell where they end and I begin. Their name goes on the cover. My name goes on the invoice.

And before the headline gets me in trouble: not all of my clients are rich. Some are Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and NBA players, sure. Plenty are not wealthy at all. The thing every single one of them shares is that they put real value on the written word — enough to hire someone who has given her whole life to it.

📕Why Ghostwriting is Controversial

Publishing has a complicated relationship with my profession. Every time a famous memoir turns out to be ghostwritten, the internet performs its little ritual of shock. Is it real writing? Is it cheating? Shouldn’t an author write their own book?

Here’s my answer, a decade in: every book you have ever loved was co-created. The novel that rearranged your soul had an editor whose fingerprints are all over its pacing. It had an agent who redirected the premise, a copyeditor who saved the author from her own tics, and sometimes a book doctor no one will ever credit. Publishing runs on collaborative labor wearing a single name. The byline has always been a simplification.

Ghostwriting just says that part out loud, and prices the labor accordingly.

As for authenticity, the worry everyone reaches for first: I’d argue a good ghostwriter produces more of it, not less. Authenticity lives in the story, not in the typing. My entire job is pulling the truest version of a life out of a person (the version they’d tell you at midnight, not the version they perform at dinner parties) and then protecting it from cliché. When it works, readers meet the realest version of a human being that has ever existed on paper. It just happens to be typed by me.

I’ve written before about where ghostwriting sits in my income stack and what it pays, and the client-facing mechanics live on my blog: what a memoir ghostwriter actually does and my exact process.

Today is about everything that doesn’t fit on a services page: what this job is actually like from the inside, and how it handed me my new romantic thriller novel concept.

📧 What’s Behind the Paywall Today

Below the line, for paid subscribers:

• The rooms this job has unlocked: lunch with clients in Singapore, a private tour of the Austrian countryside, workshop trips to the Southwest with executive coaches.

• The interviews I can’t fully describe, including people caught up in actual government conspiracies.

• What the intimacy of this work really feels like — the trenches, the camaraderie, and the moment a client stops being a client.

• The $50,000 memoir job a newsletter editor swore was fake, and what that disbelief reveals about how writers price themselves.

• The full origin story of Let Me Be Your Ghost: the what-if that started as a joke (a ghostwriter working undercover for the FBI) and the second what-if that turned it into a love story.

• Why I set the book in San Francisco years before I even lived here.

If you’ve been reading free for a while, this is the kind of essay the paid tier exists for. Paid subscribers are also getting every new chapter of Let Me Be Your Ghost as it drops.

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