📝 New on the The Pitch List

• A European literary publisher is seeking original, previously unpublished non-fiction such as personal essays, memoir, reportage, travel writing, and auto-fiction, between 1,000 and 3,000 words. Pay is €600 flat per accepted piece, paid before publication.

• A new Canadian digital genre magazine is seeking original short stories in science fiction, fantasy, speculative, thriller/mystery, and historical fiction, between 1,500 and 6,000 words. Pay is 11 cents CAD per word, up to a maximum of $400 CAD.

• An independent fiction outlet is seeking general literary short fiction of up to 8,000 words, excluding science fiction, erotica, westerns, horror, romance, and children’s stories. Pay is $100-$300.

Scroll for today’s 50+ hand-picked calls for pitches and submissions ↓

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Here are some of the highlights of today’s writing job board:

• A popular gaming production channel is hiring a freelance scriptwriter to produce feature-length, adventure-style video scripts. Pay is $2,500/project.

• A tech and AI publication is seeking a satirical staff writer to pitch and author deadpan news parodies and short news-desk videos. Pay is $600/month.

• A global digital agency is hiring a Creative Director to oversee brand voice systems, visual direction, and multi-channel campaigns for a flagship account. Pay is $144,200–$210,000/year.

Scroll for today’s 35+ hand-picked remote writing jobs ↓

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Role: Freelance Creative Writers and Storytellers

Rate: $30-$70/hour

To apply

Apply below:

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For 17 more days, you can get a book of mine that isn’t for sale anywhere.

It’s called How to Write a Memoir, and it’s everything I know about writing memoirs, your own or someone else’s. I’ve never published it. The only way to get it is to preorder my novel, Let Me Be Your Ghost, before it comes out on November 18.

Preorder one copy, in any format, from any retailer. Upload your receipt on my site, and the memoir book lands in your inbox in PDF and EPUB, usually within minutes. Buy one book, get two.

✍️ Preorder and get the memoir book free

🌁 The novel, in case you missed it

Let Me Be Your Ghost is a romantic thriller about my actual day job, with a lot more espionage. Lola Whitman ghostwrites memoirs for powerful men and feeds their secrets to the FBI. One last book buys her freedom. Then her final target, billionaire Ezekiel Crane, finds her first. If you loved Verity or First Lie Wins, this one’s for you.

🔎 What’s inside the book I never published

I started How to Write a Memoir in 2021 and rewrote the whole draft in Athens coffee shops on way too many Freddo espressos. It’s the process I take my ghostwriting clients through, written down so you can use it on your own life. Then it sat in a folder for years as my private playbook.

• 16 chapters that take a memoir from a drawer of old photos to launch day: your theme, your cast of characters, your outline, a writing habit you can keep, the first draft, and four whole chapters on rewriting (yes, four)

• 11 Case Files, with names and identifying details changed. A few of the titles: “The Family Reunion Gone Wrong,” “The Chef’s Tasting Menu” and “Nobody Likes Notes.”

• 15 sets of writing prompts I call Open Cases, plus a questionnaire for your early readers and a checklist for your rewrites

💻 pre-order to get your free book

👻 For the ghosts in the room

The book has two audiences on purpose. If you want to write your own memoir, it walks you through it. If you want to get paid to write other people’s, 13 of the chapters include an “If You’re the Ghost” section on what changes when the life on the page isn’t yours.

Chapter 15 is the job itself: how to ghostwrite someone else’s memoir. It starts from the two skills I think the career comes down to, the ability to vanish and the ability to embody. Chapter 16 flips the desk to cover how to hire a ghostwriter and be a great client, which is the fastest way I know to learn what your future clients are nervous about.

Memoir work is a real writing job, and it shows up on our job board. In September, one of our featured listings was a client looking for a line editor for a memoir manuscript and book proposal. And if you caught my Live with Katie Ludlow Rich, you heard how a historian went from “essentially a free freelancer” to building a six-figure ghostwriting and developmental editing business.

🎁 Every gift, and how to claim it

Buy one copy of Let Me Be Your Ghost, any format, and get a free copy of How to Write a Memoir. That’s the buy one, get one.

Ten print copies (about $220 in paperbacks) also gets you a year of Founding membership to 💡 Sutoscience, my personal Substack, which normally costs $550. That comes with our monthly Substack Lab calls and the 6 Week Substack Sprint. If your writing group or book club needs its next read, this is a very good excuse.

Fifty or more print copies adds a private session with me, either one-on-one coaching on writing, Substack or book marketing, or a talk for your team, institution or organization.

To claim, preorder from any retailer (Amazon, Bookshop.org, Barnes & Noble, or The Ripped Bodice if you shop indie), then upload your receipt on the claim page. Already preordered and never claimed? Go upload it now. The free book comes with preorders only right now, and preorders end November 18.

✍️ Claim your free memoir book

Set the timer, write down where your spotlight was, and if you want the other 14 sets of prompts, you know where to find them.

-Amy

🎯 Founding Members Only: This job is exclusively open to you for the first 24 hours. Upgrade to Founding Member to get early access to all Featured Jobs.

Role: Freelance Creative Writers and Storytellers

Rate: $30-$70/hour

To apply

Founding Members of our Job Board get 24 hours early access to apply below:

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When I hit what I thought was the peak of my Hollywood career, I was working with a CIA agent on a spy show. It was literally my dream. I got to pick his brain about the conspiracies that were actually true and write TV around them. And I was disillusioned anyway, because I wanted to spend my time on my own original work instead of being work for hire on other people’s shows.

I told Joanna Penn that story on The Creative Penn Podcast. She’d read Write for Money and Power before we recorded, and she wanted to know how you walk away from a dream like that, and what you walk toward. The episode is out now:

✍️ Listen on Apple Podcasts

It’s also on Spotify, and Joanna’s show notes and a full transcript are on her site.

🎬 Dreams in the hands of gatekeepers

Here’s what I was running into. I had put my dreams in the hands of gatekeepers, and when you hand over that power, you’re left without agency. You find yourself working for free, or doing work for producers that you never signed up for. People dangle your dreams in front of you to get you to do what they want. I saw it happening to me, and to the writers around me.

So when 2020 shut everything down and the writers’ room I was in moved to Zoom, I took it as the opening I’d been waiting for. I traveled the world, ghostwrote memoirs for Olympians and CEOs, and had the kind of experiences that became my first novel, The Nomad Detective.

🗝️ Why the word “power”

Joanna told me that one word in the title was what caught her eye, and she asked me why I chose it. Writers get told we’re not allowed to want power over our careers. Gatekeepers discourage it, and so does the culture. We’re supposed to be starving artists who are grateful for anything that comes our way, because we get to make our art. I wrote the book to argue the opposite.

Something is shifting, though. Writers are starting to be treated as creative entrepreneurs who own the whole thing, the writing and the marketing and how the book meets the world. It’s why authors like Brandon Sanderson publish independently, and why Taylor Swift bought back her masters. When the people at the top of their game outgrow the gatekeepers, the old systems come into question for the rest of us.

🌍 How ghostwriting fed my fiction

So many novelists started out as journalists, because some of the best inspiration for fiction lives in nonfiction. Memoir ghostwriting turned out to be the perfect primer for me. I never would have been flown to Vienna to sit down with an entrepreneur who changed the direction of his whole industry and ask him what it was like to grow up in Austria, or to live a life that size. I got to understand people through a completely different lens, and pay the bills while I did it.

That’s also where Let Me Be Your Ghost came from. When I tell my nonfiction readers I have a romantic thriller coming out, I can tell them it’s inspired by my memoir ghostwriting work, and the bridge between the two makes sense.

🖋️ Start with the thing you’re most excited about

Joanna asked where a multi-passionate writer should start on Substack. The best advice I’ve gotten, and the advice I’ve watched work for other writers: start with the thing you could write about forever. For some writers, that’s what it’s like to get up and write before work. For one sci-fi author, it was an incredibly detailed piece on fountain pens, which ones write best on which paper, and which ones leak on an airplane.

In the niche comes the universal. Write what you love, then package it so a reader knows what to expect from your headline and your About page. You can contain multitudes. You just have to walk people through them.

🧰 Also in the episode

• Why Kyle and I run Make Writing Your Job as a community: the job board, the grants, contests and residencies list, the author interviews, and perks like our Scrivener discount

• The 3 income streams in Write for Money and Power, and why each one feeds the next

• Why self-publishing shed the vanity-press label for good

• The line I keep coming back to: we are writers, and we should be writing first. Everything else is noise.

Let Me Be Your Ghost, the romantic thriller that came out of those ghostwriting years, comes out November 18. Preorder it in any format and I’ll send you How to Write a Memoir, the guide I wrote as a ghostwriter and have never published, for free.

✍️ Preorder and get the memoir guide

Thank you to Joanna for having me, and for reading the book so closely. If you write books, her podcast is where the mechanics of selling them get talked about openly, which I told her on air I love.

-Amy

Here are some of the highlights of today’s writing job board:

• A Portland design studio is seeking a freelance creative copywriter to develop its brand narrative, rewrite website copy,and detail the story behind its projects. Pay is $45–$60/hour.

• A popular educational media company is hiring a freelance writer to script 10 video episodes covering critical thinking across the sciences and humanities. Pay is $800/script.

• A major professional basketball league is hiring a temporary social content publisher to write live copy and publish coverage across key platforms. Pay is $2,307/biweekly.

Scroll for today’s 30+ hand-picked remote writing jobs ↓

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Here are some of the highlights of today’s writing job board:

• A major digital publisher is hiring a full-time content specialist to report, pitch, and fact-check true crime stories,podcasts, and documentaries. Pay is $60,000–$90,000/year.

• A global professional services firm is hiring a contract comedy copywriter to write TV, radio, and digital scripts for a state lottery campaign. Pay is $50–$75/hour.

• A creative staffing agency is seeking a freelance social media creator to turn subject matter expert insights into LinkedIn, newsletter, Bluesky, and Reddit posts. Pay is $40–$50/hour.

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✍️ New Opportunities for Writers

• A major publication is awarding $3,000 for a short story.

• A respected arts-writing institution in the United States is awarding a $10,000 prize to the author of an outstanding nonfiction book about the visual, literary, media, or performing arts, plus an expenses-paid residency and public reading in Washington, DC.

• A prestigious Canadian poetry foundation is awarding a $10,000 prize to an established poet for an outstanding book of poetry published in the previous calendar year.

Apply to these 290+ premium grants, contests, and residencies listings below ↓

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Here are some of the highlights of today’s writing job board:

• A women’s lifestyle news site is hiring freelance writers to cover beauty, fashion, relationships, wellness, and pop culture, requiring at least one year of editorial experience. Pay is $21-$25/hour.

• A nonprofit is hiring a part-time temporary editor to own one or two books from manuscript through finished publication, with the potential to become full time. Pay is $60-$100/hour.

• A healthcare advertising agency is hiring a creative director of copy to lead brand groups, guide creative teams, and own all work produced for healthcare clients. Pay is $200,000-$220,000/year.

Scroll for today’s 20+ hand-picked remote writing jobs ↓

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Here are some of the highlights of today’s writing job board:

• A major game studio is hiring a senior writer to craft characters, branching dialogue, and interactive quests. Pay is $80,000–$100,000 CAD/year.

• A specialized communications agency is seeking a contract clinical medical writer to draft high-level regulatory documents. Pay is $120–$180/hour.

• A cinematic video essay channel is hiring a documentary scriptwriter to break down movie scene technicalities. Pay is $300–$450/project.

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📝 New on the The Pitch List

• A prestigious poetry platform backed by a major London publisher and a literary foundation is seeking unpublished poems from English-language poets over 18 who have not yet released a full-length collection, with three poets featured each spring and autumn. Pay is £300 per featured poet.

• A long-running literary magazine is seeking contemporary short stories of roughly 15 to 25 manuscript pages, excluding flash fiction and genre work, from writers familiar with its previously published fiction. Pay is $300.

• An architecture journal with an open issue is seeking essays of 200 to 4,000 words and brief one-page observations of 100 to 300 words paired with an image, on contemporary architecture topics. Pay is $75-$250 per piece.

Scroll for today’s 60+ hand-picked calls for pitches and submissions ↓

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Here are some of the highlights of today’s writing job board:

• A major food publisher’s branded-content studio is hiring freelance food writers for quick-turn branded assignments across recipe and lifestyle titles.

• A tech-focused content agency is hiring part-time technical writers to produce engineering blogs and go-to-market content for AI, devtools, data, and security clients. Pay is $90-$125/hour.

• A life sciences services organization is hiring a senior principal medical writer to lead global regulatory submission documents and mentor junior writers. Pay is $114,000-$210,900/year.

Scroll for today’s 40+ hand-picked remote writing jobs ↓

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One of my first memoir clients invited me to her family reunion at a winery in Southern California. She had taken a DNA test, found out her father was not her biological father, and brought her newly found family to meet everyone. There were tears. There was some fighting. And in the middle of it all she turned to her relatives and said, “Oh, by the way, this is Amy, my ghostwriter. Go talk to her.”

I told that story to Brendan O’Meara on The Creative Nonfiction Podcast, where he has been interviewing nonfiction writers since 2013. He’d talked with co-writers before but never a true ghost, so we spent most of an hour on the craft of memoir ghostwriting. Episode 550 is out now.

✍️ Listen on Apple Podcasts

It’s also on Spotify, and Brendan’s show notes are on his site.

✍️ How I learn a client’s voice

I record hours of conversation with my clients, then I go back and listen to the tapes to hear how they would actually say something. Their voice on the page should be a slightly elevated version of the way they talk, with their phrases and quirks still in it. You can always tell when a celebrity memoir had a heavy-handed ghost. Three chapters in, you think, wow, I had no idea this person was so articulate.

I also read pages out loud, a habit from my old writers’ groups in LA. And when I can, I ask a client’s partner or best friend to read along. More than once someone has told me a joke sounds wrong, that their person would tell it a different way.

✍️ Memory works like a spotlight

At a magic lecture in San Francisco, the magician explained that we don’t take in the world like a video camera. We see it like a spotlight, and we miss everything outside the beam. That’s why sleight of hand works.

It’s also why memoir is hard. When I interview a client’s family, everyone’s spotlight is pointed somewhere different, and sometimes a relative remembers a painful moment completely differently than my client does. Then I go back to my client, very gently, and ask how they want to handle it on the page.

On one book the family material was so sensitive that we turned the memoir into a novel inspired by a true story. Even swapping in placeholder names for a first draft can give a client enough distance to open up.

✍️ The essay that got me a book

Before I had a single full book to show anyone, I pitched myself as a ghostwriter with my short stories and my Hollywood experience. Then I wrote a deeply personal essay for the LA Times. A client read it and told me that if I had the courage to publish something like that, I could handle their story.

So if you want to write other people’s memoirs, publish something personal of your own first. Clients want proof you can handle the hard parts.

✍️ Also in the episode

• Why I have to like a client before I’ll write their book

• The early client who sat me down and said, “Amy, you are undercharging,” and why charging more keeps you from burning out

• The NaNoWriMo trick I still use: when you’re stuck, have your characters sing song lyrics until you remember what they were going to say

• What I learned when my TV show got canceled in the middle of the writers’ room, and Mark Duplass’s talk “The Cavalry Is Not Coming”

• My recommendation, The Prisoner, the 1960s spy show that inspired Lost

Brendan opened the episode with a line of mine: every time somebody passes away, it’s like a library burning to the ground. It’s the reason I love this work.

If you want to write your own memoir, or a parent’s or grandparent’s, I put everything I’ve learned as a ghostwriter into a guide called How to Write a Memoir. I’ve never published it. You get it free when you preorder my novel Let Me Be Your Ghost, a romantic thriller about a memoir ghostwriter, out November 18.

✍️ Preorder and get the memoir guide

Big thanks to Brendan for having me. If you pitch magazines, his Substack Welcome to Pitch Club is for writers who want to get better at selling their stories.

-Amy

I was visiting Paris when my inbox got out of hand. People kept emailing me to ghostwrite their memoirs or edit their books, I was fully booked, and so were the writers I’d normally pass them to. So I put all of those leads in one email, added a handful of good gigs I’d spotted on LinkedIn, and sent it to all of you.

You were obsessed with it. That email became the Make Writing Your Job job board.

I told that story to Simon Owens on his podcast, The Business of Content, where he interviews media entrepreneurs about how they build their businesses. The episode is out now:

✍️ Listen on Apple Podcasts

It’s also on Spotify, and Simon writes about the media business on his Substack.

💵 How we pick what goes on the board

We still run the board on the idea behind that first email. We don’t list every job on the planet. We do the first round of filtering so you don’t lose an afternoon to content mills, and we hunt for the oddly specific gigs that only exist for a day, like a LinkedIn post from someone hiring a video game writer that’s gone by the next morning.

Applying was half my job back when I freelanced full-time, so the least we can do is make the hunting faster.

Some of my favorite stories come from clients who hire from the board again and again. One of them brought the developmental editor they found through us out to their place in Portugal to work on the book together.

🎥 Why I stepped off the Hollywood ladder

TV seasons used to run 22 episodes. Then 10. One of the last shows I worked on was 5 episodes, and it’s hard to justify a whole room of writers for 5 scripts.

When I told my managers I wanted to write a novel, the first thing out of their mouths was that novels take too long. Meanwhile, between shows, I was moonlighting as a memoir ghostwriter for NBA players and Olympians, who flew me out to work on their books and paid me far better than Hollywood did.

I didn’t want to be a writer in my 30s working as another writer’s assistant. So I went where I got to pick my clients and write my own books.

📕 The short story that got me a memoir client

I got my first memoir job before I had a TV credit, off a short story I’d posted on Medium. I didn’t have a published book or a finished manuscript. From then on, people would read my pieces, see themselves in them, and ask if I could write their books in that voice.

Around the time I made my first $10,000 freelancing, I wrote a blog post for my friends in Hollywood who were assistants. The gist: we don’t have to be bartenders between shows. We can use the skills we already have and get paid better, without braving LA traffic. That post is still the thread running through everything we do here.

💻 Also in the episode

• How 6 years of NaNoWriMo taught me to sit down and write in a 10-minute gap

• Why I plan my year in seasons and protect 4 to 6 hour blocks for deep work

• Why I’m serializing my upcoming romantic thriller novel Let Me Be Your Ghost chapter by chapter before it comes out November 18

• My take on personal brand, which I described to Simon as “not as a kaleidoscope of many different things but a singular perspective”

If that first Paris email sounds like something you’d want in your inbox every week, the job board comes with a paid subscription, along with our grants, contests and residencies list and our calls for pitches.

✍️ Get the job board

Thank you to Simon for having me. If you’re curious how media businesses make money, his newsletter is worth a follow.

-Amy

And the reason we’re all here today is a thank-you note Katie sent me on Instagram. She wrote that the work we do here on ✍️ Make Writing Your Job (and my books Six-Figure Freelance Writer and Write for Money and Power) helped her go from “essentially a free freelancer” to running a six-figure ghostwriting and developmental editing business, and she called it “truly life-changing.”

Be sure to subscribe to Katie to follow her work:

👋 Subscribe to Katie's Substack!

• Visit Katie’s website

• You can also find Katie on Instagram here.

Thank you , , , , , and many others for tuning into my live video with !

If you enjoyed this episode of our podcast, please share:

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And a huge thank you to our paid subscribers, who make this interview series and everything else we do here possible. 🙏

Here are some of the highlights of today’s writing job board:

• A freelance entertainment writer with an established track record is sought by a Ph.D. entertainment writer and editor for 5-10 TV and film listicles per month, with occasional editing work. Pay is $150/listicle.

• A virtual clinic for women and families is hiring a contract conversational AI UX writer to shape AI agent voice, tone, and in-product copy. Pay is $90-$100/hour.

• A major national news organization is hiring an Executive Editor to lead audience strategy and digital production across its platforms, reporting to the SVP. Pay is $163,000-$175,000/year.

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Here are some of the highlights of today’s writing job board:

• A global management consultancy is seeking a senior content strategist and copywriter for an open-ended engagement creating B2B thought leadership for Global 500 C-suite audiences. Pay is $135-$165/hour.

• A global professional services firm is hiring a B2B copywriter to write and refine email nurture journeys for small and medium-sized business audiences. Pay is $55-$65/hour.

• A national defense-focused services company is hiring a director of channels and content to lead enterprise content strategy and original publishing across articles, reports, video scripts, and social. Pay is $150,000-$165,000/year.

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And the reason we’re all here today is a message Madelyn posted in our ✍️ Make Writing Your Job chat: “After months I finally landed the job I wished for! I wouldn’t have found it without this job board!” Madelyn, congratulations.

✍️ subscribe to Madelyn

You can also follow Madelyn on social media @madelynalina

Thank you , , , , , and many others for tuning into my live video with ! If you enjoyed it, please share:

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Want to check out the same job board we post 5x a week that writers like Mady use to land their dream writing jobs? Check out our most recent job postings here.

✍️ go to the job board

p.s. a special thank you to all of our paid subscribers who make this interview series at ✍️ Make Writing Your Job possible!

Here are some of the highlights of today’s writing job board:

• A 1.4M-subscriber tech channel is hiring a researcher and story developer to uncover stories in AI, robotics, and biotech. Pay is $100–$300/project.

• A fully-remote advertising agency is hiring a senior copywriter to develop creative concepts and manuscripts for healthcare and biotech brands. Pay is $85,000–$110,000/year.

• A remote agency is hiring a B2B copywriter to craft email campaigns, landing pages, and thought leadership for beverage brands. Pay is $38–$40/hour.

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