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

plus: I’m teaching a new weekly yoga class here in San Francisco!

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.

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.

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.