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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

📝 A short quiz before we start

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Two things got me off the board:

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

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

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

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

🏃‍♀️ Mistake 2: You’re an intensity person

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

🔐 Okay, watch what I do here

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

Here’s what’s behind the paywall today:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

💡 Upgrade to read the rest

Read more

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

This is that room.

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

💡 become a founding member

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

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

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

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

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

Here’s how it works:

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

• 💬 Get live feedback from me and the group

• 🔁 Come back every month and keep the momentum going

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

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

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

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

Read more

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

This is that room.

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

💡 become a founding member

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

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

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

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

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

Here’s how it works:

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

• 💬 Get live feedback from me and the group

• 🔁 Come back every month and keep the momentum going

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

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

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

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

Read more

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

This is that room.

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

💡 become a founding member

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

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

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

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

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

Here’s how it works:

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

• 💬 Get live feedback from me and the group

• 🔁 Come back every month and keep the momentum going

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

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

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

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

Read more

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

This is that room.

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

💡 become a founding member

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

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

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

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

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

Here’s how it works:

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

• 💬 Get live feedback from me and the group

• 🔁 Come back every month and keep the momentum going

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

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

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

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

Read more

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

Read more

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

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

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

This is that room.

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

💡 become a founding member

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

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

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

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

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

Here’s how it works:

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

• 💬 Get live feedback from me and the group

• 🔁 Come back every month and keep the momentum going

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

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

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

Read more

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

This is that room.

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

💡 become a founding member

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

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

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

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

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

Here’s how it works:

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

• 💬 Get live feedback from me and the group

• 🔁 Come back every month and keep the momentum going

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

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

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

Read more

Subscribe now

💡 Introducing: The 6-Week Substack Sprint Companion Workbook

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

Inside the 50+ pages of this workbook:

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

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

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

💡 get the workbook

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

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

💡 become a founding member

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

Leave a comment

sending you good writing vibes,

-Amy

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

This is that room.

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

💡 become a founding member

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

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

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

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

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

Here’s how it works:

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

• 💬 Get live feedback from me and the group

• 🔁 Come back every month and keep the momentum going

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

Founding Members get exclusive access to monthly Labs, the 6 Week Substack Sprint, a 1:1 60 minute Substack Audit with me (this perk ends tomorrow!), and everything I’m building out for the writers who are serious about making this work.

You can unlock your Founding Member perks here on my perks page.

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

Read more

Hi writers,

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

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

• your goals on Substack

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

• how to use Substack as your creative business hub

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

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

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

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

Read more

Hi writers,

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

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

• your goals on Substack

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

• how to use Substack as your creative business hub

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

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

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

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

Read more

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: TODAY, Sunday, July 12th from 2pm PT/5pm ET - 3:30pm PT/6:30pm 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

💬 Get live feedback from me and the group

🔁 Come back every month and keep the momentum going

Not a founding member yet? ✨ The Substack Lab is just one of the perks waiting for you on the other side of an upgrade. Founding Members get exclusive access to monthly Labs, the 6 Week Substack Sprint, a 1:1 60 minute Substack Audit with me, and everything I’m building out for the writers who are serious about making this work.

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

Read more

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, July 12th from 2pm PT/5pm ET - 3:30pm PT/6:30pm 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

💬 Get live feedback from me and the group

🔁 Come back every month and keep the momentum going

Not a founding member yet? ✨ The Substack Lab is just one of the perks waiting for you on the other side of an upgrade. Founding Members get exclusive access to monthly Labs, the 6 Week Substack Sprint, a 1:1 60 minute Substack Audit with me, and everything I’m building out for the writers who are serious about making this work.

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

Read more

Week two of serializing Let Me Be Your Ghost is in the books (pun intended), and this week looked really different from week one.

If week one was all about the launch — the announcement, the first chapter, the flurry of “okay, I’m actually doing this” vibes — week two was a heads-down writing week.

I spent most of my time deep in the outline and making sure the chapters coming down the pipeline are actually good, because all the marketing in the world doesn’t matter if the book itself doesn’t deliver.

By the way, if you’re curious what a day in the life of writing a serialized novel looks like while also running two Substacks and everything else, I occasionally film and share them:

But here’s the thing: even in a week where I barely marketed at all, the numbers kept moving.

Total subscribers have noticeably accelerated since I started serializing this novel, and I have real data now on what’s converting readers into subscribers — and what’s getting views but doing absolutely nothing.

I’m going to break down my exact stats below the paywall when it comes to:

• my revenue

• paid subscriber growth

• which posts converted

• and the one marketing effort I’m officially throwing out after two weeks of testing it.

👇 If you’re serializing fiction (or thinking about it), this is the stuff I wish someone had shown me before I started.

Read more

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, July 12th from 2pm PT/5pm ET - 3:30pm PT/6:30pm 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

💬 Get live feedback from me and the group

🔁 Come back every month and keep the momentum going

Not a founding member yet? ✨ The Substack Lab is just one of the perks waiting for you on the other side of an upgrade. Founding Members get exclusive access to monthly Labs, the 6 Week Substack Sprint, a 1:1 60 minute Substack Audit with me, and everything I’m building out for the writers who are serious about making this work.

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

Read more

This tutorial/video walkthrough is for…

• Anyone starting a brand-new Substack

• People unfamiliar with the Substack platform — or if you want a deeper understand of the different settings and features

• Those who are looking to understand how to set up different features such as articles, podcasts, videos, etc.

I also have video tutorials for…

Also mentioned in this video:

If you found this tutorial helpful, please share :)

Wishing you a week ahead of creative momentum,

-Amy