Halfway through our conversation, Simon Owens asked me how I decide what goes behind the paywall. It’s one of the biggest decisions you’ll make on Substack, so here’s how I make it.
Most of the content that makes people smarter stays free. On Make Writing Your Job, that’s every author and writer interview, every class and every case study. What goes behind the paywall is the job board, the grants, contests and residencies list, and the calls for pitches. Those take hours of hunting every week, and they’re exactly the hours a working writer will happily pay to skip. Simon put it better than I did: the paid stuff is time-intensive, but it takes less creative energy.
Simon Owens hosts The Business of Content, a podcast about how publishers create, distribute and make money from their work, and our episode is out now:
It’s also on Spotify, and Simon writes about the media business on his Substack.
🥐 The Paris email that became a business
The job board started by accident. I was visiting Paris, buried in emails from people who wanted me to ghostwrite or edit their books, and I was too busy to take any of them. So were the writers I’d normally pass them to. I put the leads in one email, added a handful of good gigs I’d seen on LinkedIn, and sent it to my Substack.
People were obsessed with it. That email turned into the paid tier of Make Writing Your Job.
If you’re stuck on what to charge for, look at the work you already do that your readers would gladly pay you to do for them.
📚 How I sell the same book twice
I’ve been serializing Let Me Be Your Ghost here on Sutoscience. The first four chapters are free, then it’s $8 a month to keep reading. A self-published book nets me about $7 a copy. A serial reader pays $8 every month for months, and a lot of them preorder the finished book too, because what they’ve been reading is my rough draft.
It changed how I market, too. Instead of “buy my book, buy my book, buy my book,” every week is “here’s a new chapter, tell me what you think.” Most of my beta readers came from those subscribers.
The mistake I see is authors who serialize a book and never put it on Amazon. The serial is a workshop with your earliest readers. The launch reaches a completely different crowd, the people who will never read a novel on Substack.
💻 One brand, two Substacks
Simon asked how I hold a personal brand together across ghostwriting, a job board, freelance advice and novels. As I put it to him, “I look at personal brand not as a kaleidoscope of many different things but a singular perspective.”
That’s why I run two Substacks. ✍️ Make Writing Your Job stays on freelancing and writing careers. 💡 Sutoscience is where I bring the rest of me, the fiction, the travel and food lists, the personal essays. The real question is when to niche down and when to bring your whole self to the party.
💫 Also in the episode
How I fit all of this into mostly 20 to 40 hour weeks, with seasons instead of routines and protected deep-work blocks of 4 to 6 hours
Why Write for Money and Power is 99 cents on purpose
The 12-hour Substack Live launch that put that book in Amazon’s top 10 business books
How Kyle and I built CozyJobs from scratch (he vibe-coded it with Claude, then we spent 6 months testing it with our founding members)
Why I build things that compound, so every business could stand on its own someday
Thank you to Simon for such a sharp conversation. If you care about how media businesses make money, his newsletter is worth a follow.
-Amy
P.S. The finished book comes out November 18. Preorder a copy in any format and I’ll send you my unpublished guide, How to Write a Memoir, for free. Preorder here.