Hey creatives! Lots to share this week, up first —
📝 the 8 Substack mistakes you’re probably making (I made all 8)
On Friday I published The 8 Substack Mistakes You’re Probably Making (I Made Them Too), and it’s a wake-up call. A cozy one. (I brought matcha.)
Between audits, our monthly Substack Lab calls, and the occasional 2-week sprint with a client, I spend a lot of my week inside other people’s Substacks. After enough of them, I can usually tell what’s wrong by the second scroll, because it’s one of the same 8 things. I know, because I’ve personally done all 8.
Click any mistake to jump straight to it:
Mistake 1: You’re still on the diving board. Fear in a few different outfits, and the 2 things that got me off the board.
Mistake 2: You’re an intensity person. Why consistency beats a sprint, as told by my very slow half marathon.
Mistake 3: You don’t know whose pain you’re solving. Writing to one reader, and why pain points are what turn free readers into paid ones.
Mistake 4: Your headline is a diary entry. A before-and-after cheat sheet, plus the Substack tool that A/B tests your titles for you.
Mistake 5: You’re sending an essay to someone who wanted a list. Including the email I sent from Paris that accidentally became a business.
Mistake 6: Your post won’t let people’s eyes keep going. The phone test I run on every draft before it goes out.
Mistake 7: Your paywall is a wall. How to turn the 200 words above it into a tiny landing page.
Mistake 8: Nobody can find you (the big one). Distribution, the one I’d fix first, and the full version of my hot take.
The hot take, if you want it now: there are writers who are not as good as you who are earning more than you on this platform. They market better — and marketing is a creative skill, which means you can learn it.
🎥 3 new Substack Lives, now on my YouTube
This week I hosted 3 Substack Lives over on Make Writing Your Job, with 3 writers who made it work in 3 completely different ways. All 3 are up on my YouTube now, so grab a coffee (or a matcha) and pick the one you need most.
Olivia Wickstrom writes Petal + Hearth from the south of France. She started it in early 2025 with zero subscribers, thinking Substack was a blogging platform (she had no idea it sent emails!), and today it’s a Substack bestseller with more than 27,000 subscribers. We talked about how she took it full-time, when to turn on paid, and the Notes and Pinterest engine that keeps new readers coming.
Short on time? Start with these 2 clips: her rule for when to turn on paid subscriptions, and the 1-year deadline she gave her Substack. (Month 9 is when it took off. If you’re in the crickets era, this one’s for you.) A new clip from our Live goes up on my YouTube every day through November 8.
Mady is a journalist here in Los Angeles. After her master’s in journalism, she spent almost a year and a half job searching, and then she found the job she’d been hoping for on the Make Writing Your Job job board. She posted about it in our community chat (“I wouldn’t have found it without this job board!”) and I asked her to come on and tell everyone how she did it. If you’re in a long search right now, start here.
Katie Ludlow Rich is an award-winning historian who planned to get a PhD. Instead, one proposal, sent before she even had a website, launched her ghostwriting and developmental editing business. Her proposal even linked to my website to show the client how ghostwriting projects get priced! She messaged me on Instagram that my work helped her go from “essentially a free freelancer” to a six-figure business, and as a fellow ghostwriter, this one was such a joy to host.
Prefer to watch on Substack? The replays also live on Make Writing Your Job: Olivia, Madelyn, and Katie. And if you want the next ones as they come out, subscribe to my YouTube.
🗺️ I’m going on book tour (and I need your favorite bookstore)
For most of my career, I assumed book tours happened to other authors. Then I started pitching bookstores for Let Me Be Your Ghost, and a lot of them said yes. So I filmed a behind-the-scenes video diary about planning my own book tour as a self-published author: no publisher, no team this time, just me and a lot of spreadsheets. (The written version is here on Sutoscience, with a few things I didn’t say on camera.)
One date is confirmed! I’m bringing Let Me Be Your Ghost to The Love Potion Library in San Francisco (284 Noe St.) on Tuesday, December 15, from 6 to 7:30pm. It’s a bookstore built entirely for romance, I taught a sold-out class there when it opened in June, and I can’t wait to go back with my own romantic thriller. Bay Area friends, I’d love to see you there. ❤️
I’m putting the rest of the tour together right now: a West Coast run, maybe a little of the Southwest, and possibly an East Coast leg, depending on whether I can brave New York in the cold. Every date goes out here on Sutoscience first, as soon as it’s confirmed. And if you come, I’ll have some surprises for you. 🎁
Now I need your help. Is there a bookstore you love that I should reach out to, or one you’d come see me at? Drop it in the comments with your city:
🎁 your last few weeks to get How to Write a Memoir free
Quick reminder, because it’s coming up fast: the buy-one-get-one-free preorder ends in a few weeks. Preorder Let Me Be Your Ghost in any format and you get my unreleased craft book, How to Write a Memoir, free. November 17 is the last day to claim it, since the novel comes out November 18.
I don’t know yet when I’ll put How to Write a Memoir up for sale on its own, so after launch day it’s disappearing for a bit. This is your last chance to get it — and you get 2 books for the price of one.
Hardcover, paperback, or Kindle all count, and you can order Let Me Be Your Ghost from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop, or anywhere else you buy books. Upload your receipt on the claim page and How to Write a Memoir lands in your inbox right away.
If you’ve already preordered (thank you!!), send this to the friend who has been “meaning to write a memoir” for 5 years.
🎬 Tuesday’s workshop, plus a course that starts November 1st
If Mistake 8 stung a little, this is the fix I teach. On Tuesday, October 27 at 5:30pm PT (8:30pm ET), I’m teaching The Lean Content System, a 2-hour live workshop on Maven: how to write posts in your own voice with AI, make short videos without a video editor, and batch a whole week of posts and videos in about an hour.
It’s $280 with code GETSTARTED20 (instead of $350), and enrollment closes tomorrow, Monday, October 26.
If you want the whole system with my feedback on your work for a month, Build an Organic Content System With AI in 30 Days starts next Sunday, November 1, with live sessions Sundays at 3pm PT plus weekly office hours. It’s $1,200 with code LETSGO20 (instead of $1,500), and enrollment closes Saturday, October 31.
Founding Members, you get 50% off both, and your links are on the perks page. (Not a Founding Member? You can sign up here!) Can’t make a live time? Everyone who enrolls gets the recordings and all the handouts.
🍵 a weekend with my inbox, from Los Angeles
I’m writing to you from Los Angeles again this morning, and I have to say, I’m loving this month.
Launch season means my days are full of meetings, podcasts, bookstore pitches, and a camera pointed at my face, and I’ve been really enjoying digging into all of it. It’s the most fun kind of busy — the kind where every task is for a book I love.
The downside of the fun kind of busy is my inbox. So this weekend, I’m catching up on all of my emails, one by one. I’m getting close to a sweet, sweet inbox zero, and if you’ve ever watched that number tick down to single digits, you know it’s ~ a spiritual experience ~.
creating
Write For Money And Power: Becoming A Creator CEO on The Creative Penn Podcast. Joanna Penn had read Write for Money and Power before we recorded, and the first thing she wanted to talk about was one word in the title: power. From there we got into going from starving artist to creator CEO, the 3 income streams that feed each other, and the serial math behind Let Me Be Your Ghost. Her site has the full transcript if you’d rather read it.
How a freelance writer turned a job board into a thriving subscription business on Simon Owens The Business of Content, including the email I sent from Paris that became the paid tier of Make Writing Your Job. Over at Make Writing Your Job, We don’t have to be bartenders between shows tells the backstory: the blog post I wrote for my Hollywood assistant friends that turned into my freelance writing career.
The most boring Substack advice you’ll ever hear, from my episode of Brendan O'Meara’s Creative Nonfiction Podcast. The advice is consistency. I’m sorry. It works.
You Can See Everything Review: Nathan Fielder’s Holmes Doc on the blog. I don’t like cringe comedy, and I still gave Nathan Fielder’s Elizabeth Holmes documentary 5 out of 5 stars. It runs 174 minutes (pack snacks), and if you can, watch Nathan for You and The Rehearsal first.
The Best Gifts for Writers in 2026 (Only Things I’ve Used), also on the blog. My one rule: nothing goes on the list unless I’ve used it, owned it, or been given it, starting with the MacBook Air my dad gave me for Christmas. Bookmark it for the holidays.
Chapter twenty-one of Let Me Be Your Ghost, “because i could not stop,” is up for paid subscribers. The serial is still the rough draft, and the finished novel comes out November 18.
290+ Grants, Contests, & Residencies for Writers at Make Writing Your Job. This is the past week’s edition of the opportunities list: a $25,000 publishing deal for a horror novel, a $2,800 mentorship with 8 acclaimed authors, and up to $25,000 for playwrights adapting their work into audio drama.
50+ Calls for Pitches That Pay, also at Make Writing Your Job, where an established podcast is paying $3,000 per piece, a literary review is offering AU$3,000 for nonfiction, and a Scottish arts network is commissioning posts on monstrosity. (Very on theme for Halloween week!)
reading
South Pasadena finally has a bookstore, and opening day had a line out the door. LAist’s Laura Dux reports that Outpost Books opened in September on Fair Oaks Avenue: just under 1,000 square feet of new and used books with a trading-post, Route 66 theme. Owner Nicole Novembrino picked South Pasadena because it had no bookstore, and one local influencer’s post brought the opening-day line. Her take: “They’re just excited to have a bookstore. I wasn’t expecting that.” A brand-new LA indie, the same month I’m in LA pitching indie bookstores? I’m taking it as a sign, and it’s going on my list of places to wander into.
A Court of Thorns and Roses book 6 comes out Tuesday at 12:01am, and more than 500 Barnes & Noble stores are throwing midnight parties. AFP reports that’s roughly 70% of the chain, with about 250 Target stores holding countdowns and indies going all in: a costume contest at Moonlit Vine Bookstore in Indiana, faerie hairstyling and flash tattoos in Asheville, and a sold-out pajama party at Jupiter’s Eye Book Cafe in Washington state. A Court of Splintered Harmony is part one of a story so long that Sarah J. Maas split it across 3 books, and A Court of Forgotten Melody follows January 12. My favorite detail is buried in the middle: Maas started out posting early chapters of what became Throne of Glass online, years before Bloomsbury bought it in 2010. My ACOTAR books in order guide has both new books in it, if you need a refresher before Tuesday.
Colleen Hoover self-published Verity, and the movie has now made more than $122 million. Publishers Weekly’s Kerensa Cadenas profiles Heartbones Entertainment, the production company Hoover launched with producer Lauren Levine in 2023: 3 features from her books so far, a series in the works, It Ends With Us at $351 million worldwide on a $25 million budget, and Verity at more than 4.7 million copies sold since Grand Central published it in 2021. Hoover: “Lauren and I wanted to develop projects ourselves rather than only selling the rights.” I thought the movie was solid but a bit underwhelming (my Verity ending post has the whole take), but this part of the story I love. Self-published book, nine-figure movie — and the author kept her seat at the table.