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.
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.
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.
the best book I read all year has the worst cover
Don’t look at the cover of The Spymaster’s Lady by Joanna Bourne. It’s the cheapest dime-store romance cover you’ve ever seen: some dude’s abs, a shirt that has given up, a manor house in the background. Just download it to your Kindle (it’s $0.99 as I write this) and read it anyway, because it’s the best book I’ve read all year. I read it in 2 days. I gasped at the plot twists. It’s so beautiful and intricately plotted, and it felt like a true romance novel.
Historical romance isn’t usually my cup of tea, but I love spy thrillers, and this turned out to be an incredible, completely underrated one. The spies operate as a unit, reading each other’s micro expressions, all ten steps ahead of each other. There are scenes where people at war with each other end up in the same room, and it’s not guns blazing — it’s social politicking (and yes, okay, guns are blazing too!). I love James Bond and Jason Bourne, but I miss this kind of nuance, and my jaw was on the floor.
It also made me realize I’ve felt a little starved for this kind of book. My gripe with a lot of current romance is that the sex gets pushed to the forefront and the books end up feeling like cheap fanfiction instead of a true romance novel. There’s nothing wrong with books that lean harder on the spice, and there’s room for every kind of reader. But there has to be a level of artistry, because that’s what art should be. The Spymaster’s Lady is a romance novel, and it’s also the story of a woman growing into herself, and the love story lives inside that instead of replacing it. I ~ loved ~ that.
I gave it 5 stars, which shocked me, and I wrote up my full review on the blog (spoiler-free, I promise).
Also this week: Business Insider ran an essay on how my husband Kyle and I built Make Writing Your Job, as told to Kaila Yu. It traces the idea back to a café in Paris, where I was turning down client work and running out of writers to refer it to, and follows it to where our job board for writers is today: more than 58,000 subscribers and more than $263,000 in annual gross recurring revenue. What I’m proudest of is that we built it almost entirely without paid ads, and most of our paid subscribers found us through Substack itself. One caveat, because I always give you the real math: that’s revenue, before Substack’s cut, Stripe fees, and our own expenses. My advice in the piece is the same advice I’d give you here. Write about the thing you can’t stop talking about.
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How 55,000+ Readers Found My Substacks Without a Single Paid Ad. The six doors behind my subscribers, from social media and my YouTube channel to Substack’s own discovery, collaborations, and Substack Lives.
Beta Readers vs. ARC Readers: How I Find Both. My Self-Publishing Secrets episode on early readers, including where I find beta readers (Facebook groups, of all places), what a NetGalley listing costs (about $500), and when to send ARCs. The most surprising part: a big share of my preorders come from beta and ARC readers, who already get the book free.
How I Got 1,000,000 Social Views in 30 Days With 2 Tools. My SocialBu and Claude tutorial, video plus written steps with prices, if you want to try the system before the class on the 13th.
How I traveled the world on a writer’s income at Make Writing Your Job, with photos from Vienna, Singapore, and Tuscany. And on Friday I went live with Brooke Warner, publisher and co-founder of She Writes Press, on publishing your book: hybrid publishing math, alternatives to querying agents, writing about real people in memoir, and how to spot a fraudulent book marketer.
230+ Grants, Contests, & Residencies for Writers at Make Writing Your Job. This is the past week’s edition of the opportunities list: $500 to $5,000 for professional development from a state arts council, $15,000 for excellence in American literature, and research library fellowships at $5,000 a month for 4 to 9 months.
New reading lists on the blog: Enemies to Lovers Books (12 of them, ranked, Fourth Wing and Phantasma included), Dark Romance Books (from a reluctant convert, with spice levels and the ones I quit), Books Like Throne of Glass, Hockey Romance Books, and INTJ Characters, where Amy Dunne, Kaz Brekker, Xaden, and Rhysand get ranked by an actual INTJ.
For the working writers: NetGalley: How to Get ARCs, from an author who sends them, and Substack vs Ghost, from someone who did the fee math and stayed on Substack anyway.
For the San Francisco readers: The Best Coffee Shops in San Francisco (for working, meeting someone, or a 6am start) and The Best Desserts in San Francisco, from Naya’s Mango Tango to warm fortune cookies in Ross Alley, each with a map card for every spot.
reading
The pumpkin muffins I can’t stop making are made in a blender, with oats instead of flour. Tim Laielli’s Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Blender Muffins are in his September 18 meal plan at the bare minimum here on Substack: pumpkin, Greek yogurt, rolled oats, eggs, maple syrup, and chocolate chips, all thrown in the blender, 12 muffins, and they freeze well. I’ve been in a gluten-free baking phase lately, making healthy-ish baked goods (use certified gluten-free oats if that’s you too!), and these were so good. They taste like fall.
Amazon KDP now caps you at 2 new books a week per format, down from 10. The Alliance of Independent Authors reports that the limit took effect September 21. It applies to ebooks, paperbacks, and hardcovers separately, resets every Sunday at midnight UTC, and doesn’t touch books you’ve already published. Amazon’s own notice says it’s “to help maintain a positive publishing experience for all authors.” For almost every author I know, this changes nothing. If you were planning to drop a whole series in one week, though, stagger the launch.
Reese’s Book Club now shows its paid Substack members the pick before anyone else. October’s pick is Meg Mason’s Sophie, Standing There, about a book-festival worker who gets obsessed with an author, and paid members got the reveal early on September 29 (“Dive into our October pick before the rest of the world”). The top tier sends the book as a gift, and the free post carries a Target tote sponsorship. Early access, a physical gift, and a sponsor, all in one post. Reese Witherspoon’s team is running the small-creator playbook, and it works for them for the same reasons it works for you.
The Universal executive who bought Dungeon Crawler Carl while it was still self-published wants more self-published books. Publishers Weekly profiles Jordan Moblo, EVP of creative acquisitions at Universal, who runs a book Instagram with nearly half a million followers and picked up Dungeon Crawler Carl in 2023. He has a first-look deal with Kennedy Ryan, partly so she can introduce him to self-published romance authors, and her Before I Let Go was just greenlit at Peacock. On romantasy: “a lot of them have been acquired and are in various stages of development.” From my Hollywood days, I can tell you this is new. Studios used to wait for a Big Five deal. Now they’re reading self-published books.
