💡 Sutoscience by Amy Suto: 🍵 Sunday Tea

💡 sunday tea: my novel is finished (and you can request it on NetGalley)

Amy Suto — Sun, 11 Oct 2026 15:53:39 GMT

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

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

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

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

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

👻 request it on NetGalley!

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

🎁 claim your pre-order gift!

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

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

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

🎟️ save your free spot!

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

creating

Verity Ending Explained by a Real Ghostwriter on the blog. The manuscript, the letter, who killed Verity, and what the new movie keeps from the book, from someone who actually writes other people’s memoirs for a living. Full spoilers, so finish the book first. I haven’t seen the movie yet, and my take goes in the post once I do.
270+ Grants, Contests, & Residencies for Writers at Make Writing Your Job. This is the past week’s edition of the opportunities list: a $25,000 poetry prize, an $80,000 writing fellowship with editor support, and a residency with a $1,100/month stipend.
50+ Calls for Pitches We’re Loving, also at Make Writing Your Job, where a major romance publisher is offering $5,000 to $8,000 advances and a science publication is paying $1,500 for reported essays.

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Three of the Big Five publishers are using AI behind the scenes, and their own staff are pushing back. WIRED’s Adam Morgan talked to more than two dozen workers at HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, and Hachette, who say tools like Claude and ChatGPT are writing publicity and back-cover copy, emails to literary agents, and marketing materials, often at an executive’s request. HarperCollins drafted dozens of staffers into monthly AI Champions brainstorms, Simon & Schuster employees are gathering signatures against a workflow-tracking tool called Skan AI, and agents are adding contract clauses that bar running their authors’ manuscripts through an LLM. Even Meg Reid, publisher of the independent Hub City Press, told WIRED that AI-written marketing “feels pretty inevitable” for the big houses. I agree with her — AI is kind of an inevitability, because it’s cost-cutting, cost-saving, and efficient, and I think we’re about to see it sweep through publishing, especially on the business side, where so many of the tasks are rote. Here’s the part I keep coming back to: the tools these publishers are using are the same ones you have access to. You could use them yourself for the marketing and outreach side of publishing your own book. I think this is definitely a reckoning of sorts, but I’m curious to hear what you think in the comments.
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Substack is rolling out new sponsorships, including one where a brand pays for your free readers to try your paid tier. Substack announced three formats at Advertising Week on October 8: the Upgrade (a brand gifts your free subscribers a month of paid access), the Unlock (a brand sponsors one paid post so anyone can read it), and the Masthead (a brand-curated zine of writers on one theme). Earlier tests ran with Balenciaga, Uber, and T-Mobile, and for now it’s opt-in for small groups of Substack bestsellers through their Creator Kits. Substack’s pitch: “a world where ads work for writers instead of writers working for ads.” The Upgrade is the clever one. It’s basically a free trial of your paid posts with someone else covering the bill.
Simon & Schuster launched an imprint just for self-published authors, and it pays no advance. Publishers Weekly’s Natasha Poliszczuk reports that Simon Stream releases its first titles this month in e-book, print-on-demand paperback, and audio all at once, with 50% net royalties on e-books paid monthly plus S&S marketing and publicity. It’s acquiring psychological thrillers, cozy mysteries, and romance, and it’s led by Victoria Pepe, who came over from Amazon Publishing: “The indie market has matured enormously over the last few years.” A Big Five house building an imprint around indie authors tells you how much power self-published writers have now. Still, run the numbers against what you already earn on KDP before you sign anything.
Goodreads finally lets you give a book 3.5 stars (or 3.75). Goodreads announced on October 5 that ratings now run from 0.25 to 5 in quarter-star steps. The histogram still shows five bars, your old whole-star ratings stay put, and book averages “may shift.” Good e-Reader reports readers added 3.5 million ratings in under two days, and 3.5, 4.5, 3.75, and 4.25 were the most popular new values. As someone who scores every book on my blog out of 5, I’m thrilled. Some books are just a 3.5!
A 200-page story collection just had the biggest debut of the year. Rebecca Yarros’s Threshing Day, 13 stories set in her Empyrean romantasy world, sold 857,802 print copies in its first week, per Circana BookScan, which makes it the third-bestselling book of 2026 so far, behind two books that have been on sale all year. Publishers Weekly’s bestseller column called it “a snack before the fourth novel arrives.” (I gave Fourth Wing 4 stars, so I understand the appetite.) If you write a series, this is your sign that readers will pay for the stories in between, too.
Indie authors can now take preorders for audiobooks on ACX. ACX announced on October 6 that rights holders can set up audiobook preorders, verified audiobooks can now run Sponsored Products ads on Amazon in the US, and free promo cards live at audible.com/promocards. Dale L. Roberts broke it down at Self-Publishing with Dale here on Substack. ACX’s case for it: “Pre-orders give you a way to build anticipation.” I’ve been running a preorder campaign for Let Me Be Your Ghost since August, so I love seeing audio get the same tools.
MacKenzie Scott published her third novel as a Substack serial. The New Yorker’s Rhoda Feng reviews Last Days in Two Nations, which Scott released in installments on Substack in August: a near-future, divided America, eighteen characters, one week. Her first two novels came from Big Five houses, and her 2005 debut won an American Book Award. One self-published writer told The Wall Street Journal that serializing fiction online “is a risk only a billionaire can feel comfortable making.” I’d gently disagree, since chapters of Let Me Be Your Ghost have been dropping here every Friday (and I am very much not a billionaire).

💡 sunday tea: the best book I read all year has the worst cover

Amy Suto — Sun, 04 Oct 2026 11:35:35 GMT

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

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

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

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

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

🎟️ save your free spot!

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

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

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

👻 apply to be an ARC reader!

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

🎁 claim your pre-order gift!

the best book I read all year has the worst cover

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

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

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

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

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

Subscribe now

creating

How 55,000+ Readers Found My Substacks Without a Single Paid Ad. The six doors behind my subscribers, from social media and my YouTube channel to Substack’s own discovery, collaborations, and Substack Lives.
Beta Readers vs. ARC Readers: How I Find Both. My Self-Publishing Secrets episode on early readers, including where I find beta readers (Facebook groups, of all places), what a NetGalley listing costs (about $500), and when to send ARCs. The most surprising part: a big share of my preorders come from beta and ARC readers, who already get the book free.
How I Got 1,000,000 Social Views in 30 Days With 2 Tools. My SocialBu and Claude tutorial, video plus written steps with prices, if you want to try the system before the class on the 13th.
How I traveled the world on a writer’s income at Make Writing Your Job, with photos from Vienna, Singapore, and Tuscany. And on Friday I went live with Brooke Warner, publisher and co-founder of She Writes Press, on publishing your book: hybrid publishing math, alternatives to querying agents, writing about real people in memoir, and how to spot a fraudulent book marketer.
230+ Grants, Contests, & Residencies for Writers at Make Writing Your Job. This is the past week’s edition of the opportunities list: $500 to $5,000 for professional development from a state arts council, $15,000 for excellence in American literature, and research library fellowships at $5,000 a month for 4 to 9 months.
New reading lists on the blog: Enemies to Lovers Books (12 of them, ranked, Fourth Wing and Phantasma included), Dark Romance Books (from a reluctant convert, with spice levels and the ones I quit), Books Like Throne of Glass, Hockey Romance Books, and INTJ Characters, where Amy Dunne, Kaz Brekker, Xaden, and Rhysand get ranked by an actual INTJ.
For the working writers: NetGalley: How to Get ARCs, from an author who sends them, and Substack vs Ghost, from someone who did the fee math and stayed on Substack anyway.
For the San Francisco readers: The Best Coffee Shops in San Francisco (for working, meeting someone, or a 6am start) and The Best Desserts in San Francisco, from Naya’s Mango Tango to warm fortune cookies in Ross Alley, each with a map card for every spot.

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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.

💡 sunday tea: wide awake, with cinnamon rolls

Amy Suto — Sun, 20 Sep 2026 11:34:11 GMT

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 ~.

I made these incredible puff pastry cinnamon rolls I found on the Vegan Scratch Kitchen here on Substack!

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?

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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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.

💡 sunday tea: what to watch, read, and more this week

Amy Suto — Sun, 06 Sep 2026 10:22:35 GMT

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.

💡 sunday tea: the importance of getting feedback from early readers for your novel

Amy Suto — Sun, 23 Aug 2026 10:27:39 GMT

A few days ago, I shared with you that I had completed the full draft of LET ME BE YOUR GHOST and was looking for some beta readers to give feedback on the current draft.

The outpouring has been enormous — thank you! — and I’ve been busy sending out the draft and also beginning to work on some of the notes that have started coming in.

This is one of the many reasons why serializing your fiction on Substack is helpful. Getting feedback from early readers is essential, and having a way to bring your readers together and share some behind-the-scenes helps to deepen your relationship with your people.

So thank you — I’m excited for you to read what I’ve been creating for you.

And if you missed the first call but still want to apply? I’ll be sending out the draft on a rolling basis in the next few days before I close the form. Feel free to apply below:

apply to be a beta reader

🍵 let’s catch up over tea: taking a bit of a break

I took several days off this week to get away from my desk. I went to museums, hiked above the marine layer to get some sunshine (rare in San Francisco), and have been teaching and taking lots of yoga classes at my local studio.

When I finish big milestones (like a draft edit or finalizing a manuscript!) I like to get some new inputs and take some time to rest and reset. As writers, I think it’s important to consider what’s feeding you, what’s bringing your words to life.

So something to meditate on this week: what’s something new or interesting you can experience to help your work feel more layered? Or what kind of fun can you weave into your day that will make things feel fresh?

💌 what I’m watching, reading, and creating

creating

✍️ What should you actually charge? (we built you a rate calculator) at CozyJobs — you can find the rate calculator here. If you’re a freelancer, deciding what to charge is a huge part of the strategy when it comes to deciding what types of clients to work with. Our rate calculator not only helps you determine what you should charge, but it also surfaces jobs at that rate.
From First Draft to Final Polish: Editing Your Book Like a Pro with ProWritingAid over at Make Writing Your Job. I ran a self-editing workshop in collaboration with ProWritingAid, and if you’ve got a draft of a novel or memoir you’re editing, I think you’ll find this workshop useful!
✍️ Make Writing Your Job
📚 From First Draft to Final Polish: Edit Your Book Like a Pro with ProWritingAid [Workshop]
This email is sponsored by ProWritingAid. I only partner with tools I actually use…
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2 months ago · 3 likes · Amy Suto
The Forever Freelancer with Author Satta Sarmah Hightower at Make Writing Your Job. This conversation with 7-figure freelancer Satta Sarmah Hightower was filled with great, actionable advice. Satta is a former journalist, and her new book The Forever Freelancer is a great roadmap for building a sustainable career.
✍️ Make Writing Your Job
✍️ The Forever Freelancer with Author Satta Sarmah Hightower
Satta Sarmah Hightower is a journalist-turned-content marketer who has been a full-time freelancer since 2014, when a second layoff pushed her into self-employment by accident. Through her consultancy, Talented Tenth Media, she’s spent more than a decade writing and building content for brands like Adobe, Microsoft, Google, Morgan Stanley, and Capital One — after starting ou…
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2 months ago · 16 likes · 2 comments · Amy Suto and Satta Sarmah Hightower

reading

The Magic Tricks I Use to Get My Way by Courtney Cho. “Under enough pressure, appetite finds the sides of your fingers.” Courtney is one of the best writers on Substack — especially if you read manifestation/spirituality content. Even if you don’t, I find the depth of her research and the beauty of some of her prose to be incredible — even as she delivers it in a “girly pop” kinda way. Her voice always feels refreshing in my inbox.

💡 sunday tea: slow writing rituals

Amy Suto — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 11:59:04 GMT

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

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

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

Here’s how it’s been going so far:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

💌 what I’m watching, reading, and creating

creating: we just launched our free quizzes on CozyJobs, and our Cosmic Career Quiz has been described as “scarily accurate” and has even been endorsed by a professional astrologer!
- I also got really into astrocartography during my time as a digital nomad, and if you’re curious where the luckiest place in the world are for you to find success across many aspects of your life, I think you’ll dig this quiz also.
creating: I’ve been using ProWritingAid to help me edit some of my novel, and it’s given me some really interesting notes to work with during this process. if you’re a paid subscriber of Make Writing Your Job, ProWritingAid is giving our subscribers 20% off if you missed the announcement!

💡 sunday tea: substack's anti-AI detector sparks a witchhunt + how to serialize your memoir

Amy Suto — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 11:05:11 GMT

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

The Substack Post

Against Claudefishing

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

3 months ago · 6336 likes · 1402 comments · Chris Best

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

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

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

Also — love this video breakdown on it:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

👋 come to the summit!

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

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

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

✍️ Make Writing Your Job

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

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

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3 months ago · 25 likes · 3 comments · Amy Suto and Jessy Easton

✍️ Make Writing Your Job

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

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

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3 months ago · 22 likes · 2 comments · Amy Suto and Haley Raymond

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

✍️ apply to be a guest

💡 sunday tea: anti-reading hysteria + stuff for people who read :)

Amy Suto — Sun, 19 Jul 2026 11:07:12 GMT

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

💡 RSVP here!

See you in class 👋

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

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

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

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

👋 come to the summit!

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

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

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

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

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

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

✍️ Make Writing Your Job

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

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

Listen now

3 months ago · 3 likes · 5 comments · Amy Suto

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

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

great fiction makes the reader worry.

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

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

💌 I’m reading…

It’s so vulnerable to talk about money as a writer, and I’m impressed by ’s breakdown of how she spent $44,000+ on her book launch. Book launches are expensive (even for those authors who are traditionally published!) and most people just don’t talk about this! She also shared a cool resource for getting ARC readers/readers who leave Amazon reviews through Hidden Gems.
’s incredible memoir, THE ONE WHO LEAVES, which she serialized on Substack. She depicts what it was like to grow up in a Mojave desert in a meth lab, and her writing is propulsive and so visual. I’m honored to be interviewing Jessy on Substack Live this Tuesday at 1pm PT to talk about how to serialize memoir on Substack — RSVP with this link to be notified when we go live!
wrote a great piece on how to Petsit Your Way Around the World. When I was a digital nomad, I met lots of women who used petsitting as a way to get free accommodation while traveling, and Stephanie’s guide is really actionable on how to do this. Highly recommend checking it out if you’re curious about traveling for free!

💡 sunday tea: breaking the starving artist myth

Amy Suto — Sun, 12 Jul 2026 11:37:07 GMT

I’ve been in your inbox this week reminiscing about my recent wedding, sharing the latest chapter of my San Francisco romantic thriller following a memoir ghostwriter who gets in too deep with her billionaire client, and reminding you that our “writer’s group for Substack” AKA our monthly Substack Lab is happening later today for Founding Members of 💡 Sutoscience :)

I also gave a sold-out lecture as part of the Bay Area’s Big Brain Lecture Series — thanks to Emily, the Big Brain team, and the Gold Palm Oakland for hosting me! 🙏 And I appreciate everyone who showed up — it was great busting the starving artist myth with you.

thanks for everyone who came out for the lecture!

If you missed the talk but want to check it out, I’m giving it again here on on Substack Live, details below!

✍️ Breaking the Starving Artist Myth: What William Shakespeare Knew About Business (Live Class!)

✍️ The starving artist myth was a lie to keep you broke and trapped.

Learn how artists and writers like Michelangelo and Shakespeare created like artists and built their careers like entrepreneurs — and how you can make the modern day creator economy work for you while staying connected to the heart of your writing.

👇 RSVP to attend this lecture live this Wednesday, July 15th at noon PT or be sure to subscribe to my Substack ✍️ Make Writing Your Job to get the copy of the replay!

This is the lecture I recently gave in-person at a Bay Area lecture series (mentioned above!), based on the concepts of my bestselling book Write for Money and Power. I’ll leave some space for Q&A at the end as well!

✍️ RSVP to attend for free!

See you there!

💡 Another Upcoming Class I’m Teaching: Pilot to Page: Writing Your Romance Novel Using TV Storytelling Techniques

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

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

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

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

💡 RSVP here!

See you in class 👋

🍵 let’s catch up over tea: the benefits of putting yourself out there as a creative

In the past year, I’ve really put my foot on the gas of “being out in the world.”

As an introvert and homebody, it’s easy for me to be a bit of a hermit and spend my days writing and reading at home rather than putting myself out there.

But every time I do something bold (and a little uncomfortable) like giving a talk to a room full of people or doing a 12-hour book launch, I find that the payoff is huge.

I get to connect with other creatives, share my ideas, and grow as a person.

Life, truly, is only lived outside of our comfort zone.

So what’s one thing you can do to live outside of your comfort zone this week?

💌 I’m reading…

Justin Welsh’s great essay on how having fun is the new competitive advantage. I’ve found this to be so deeply true. If you’re doing something that’s fun, you’ll work harder and be better at it than other people because it’s play to you. So how can you do something that feels like play instead of work?

💡 sunday tea: just married 💕 + my SF lecture for Big Brain

Amy Suto — Sun, 28 Jun 2026 11:31:38 GMT

Since I wrote to you last, I’ve been ~ out in the world ~ doing things like teaching a romance novel writing workshop at San Francisco’s The Love Potion Library — one of the only romance bookstores in the city!

(I’ll be teaching this class for 💡 Sutoscience Founding Members over Zoom, so keep an eye out for that invite!)

If you’re based in San Francisco, I’d also love to invite you to the lecture I’m teaching on July 9th in Oakland with this great organization Big Brain. They bring together incredible minds to teach interesting topics in beautiful spaces, and my talk is going to be all about the topics in my book Write for Money and Power.

I may be giving away free signed copies of my book if time permits, so hope to see you there!

💡 RSVP here

Oh and also — I just got married!

I’ve been out for the past few weeks for my wedding and honeymoon with and it’s been lovely and magical and everything we hoped for.

Because of that I’ve been a bit MIA online as I took time to be present with friends and family, but you can watch a snapshot of my honeymoon below :)

🍵 let’s catch up over tea

🫖 tea I’m drinking today: nettle tea. It’s very earthy but really great for you!

✍️ a creative resource I want you to check out: the monthly Substack Lab writer’s group has been one of my favorite things to host. We’ve got such a wide array of Substackers in our community doing great things, and I love how supportive everyone is of each others’ work. It’s a really special group, and if it feels right I’d love for you to join us!

🌁 how it’s been going so far publishing fiction on Substack: I’ve been having so much fun, and it’s been cool to see the momentum so far. I will be honest that I haven’t set aside as much time for marketing as I should, but in the meantime you can read the current chapters here!

💌 I’m reading…

…how new graduates are getting advice to study philosophy if they want to be relevant in the AI era.

💡 sunday tea: publishing serialized fiction on substack, making time for ritual, get paid to write for other substacks

Amy Suto — Sun, 31 May 2026 11:18:24 GMT

If you’ve been here for a minute, you’ll know that I’ve been publishing a weekly creator news series on Sundays.

But I’ve decided to move back to my previous sunday tea series instead — essentially, a conversation with you over tea about writing, behind-the-scenes of my creative process, and other topics and resources I think you’ll find useful in your writing and creating journey.

I’m placing part of this sunday tea series under the paywall because it takes a bit of time to curate, and I want to say thank you to the paid subscribers that help make it possible to spend so much time crafting resources and articles for you here at 💡 Sutoscience. 🙏 Thank you!

🍵 let’s catch up over tea: get paid to write for other substacks, welcome to my journey publishing fiction on substack

🫖 tea I’m drinking today: ginger + lemon tea. I’ve been freezing ice cube trays of juiced ginger and lemon that I juice myself and make in big batches. It’s been a nice way to have daily fresh ginger and lemon tea with out having to juice and brew it from scratch every morning!

✍️ a creative resource I want you to check out: there’s been an embarrassment of riches on the ✍️ Make Writing Your Job writing job board which I curate alongside my partner Kyle and our team. There’s been several standout jobs this week I just wanted to flag:

first, there are lots of Substacks hiring culture writers + other types of writers at $30-$70/hour. I’ve said this before and will say it again — Substack is the new form of media! It’s a business model that makes so much sense, which is why we’re starting to see an uptick in people hiring writers/editors specifically for their Substacks. These opps are great to apply to if you are still figuring out your own Substack and want to gain some experience writing for others and get paid for it.
second, if you’re a big fan of the podcasts s-town and this american life, then there’s a story producer job for six-figures (it’s a 1099 role) on friday’s job board along with 30+ other opps we’ve curated for you I think you’ll dig. I spent a lot of time working in the podcast space and it still has a special place in my heart.

🌁 how it’s been going so far publishing fiction on Substack: so if you haven’t been seeing my posts on 💡 Sutoscience recently — I’m publishing my romantic thriller series! you can check out the update posts and read the first chapter of let me be your ghost below:

Publishing fiction on Substack has been something I’ve wanted to sink my teeth into in a deeper way, especially as I’ve helped clients do the same.

Here are some of the things I’ve learned so far: