📚 Editor’s Note: The Part Most Writers Miss

has spent more than two decades doing something a lot of writers avoid thinking about until it’s too late — figuring out how the work actually gets seen.

Fleur’s publication The Substack Bookstore sits right at that intersection between writing and visibility. And what she’s built with the Bookstore in particular isn’t just a newsletter, but a discovery engine that helps independent authors find real readers — and real sales.

In this conversation, Fleur breaks down a shift that changes everything once you see it: writing isn’t the hardest part. Distribution is. Audience alignment is. Knowing who something is for — and why they’ll care — is what turns writing into a business instead of a hobby.

She also shares a more personal layer here — writing and building through grief, through life as a solo parent, through the realities that don’t neatly fit into productivity advice. It’s a reminder that a writing career isn’t built in perfect conditions. It’s built in the middle of everything else.

If you’ve ever felt like you’re doing the work but not getting the traction, this one will sharpen how you think about what happens after you hit publish.

– Amy Suto

Editor & Curator of GuestStack

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✍️ From the Desk of Fleur Hull

1. Where’s your desk these days — and what does it look like?

I write from my study in the Western Suburbs of Perth, Western Australia, just 500m from the Indian Ocean. I write beneath Bush Medicine Dreaming by Australian Indigenous artist, Gloria Petyarre, which I bought years ago. It has this hypnotic, inward pull, like everything is in motion but also exactly where it needs to be. It’s a surprisingly good companion for writing.

2. Your publication and community, The Substack Bookstore, is such a special space for indie authors. Can you share a bit more about it and what inspired you to start it?

I had helped dozens of author clients get started on Substack and was very late to the party when I started my Book Marketing Substack, Author Growth in March 2025. As it grew I kept getting asked by indie authors about featuring their books, and so in July 2025, I launched The Substack Bookstore. I had been a long-time lurker on the self publishing sub-reddits and this helped me to see how hard it was for self-publishing authors to get eyes on their books. I wanted to create a community of authors and readers that supported each other, especially at launch time. The idea took off with 1600 free subscribers joining in the first three weeks. I became a Substack bestseller within seven weeks of the launch of the Bookstore and during that time we had three authors reach Amazon category bestseller thanks to the support of the Bookstore community.

3. What does “making writing your job” look like in your world right now?

I majored in Marketing in my Economics undergraduate degree and went on to do a Masters in Marketing, so I had always thought of myself as a marketer first and foremost. Once I started on Substack and reflected on my career, I realised I had been a writer and editor in all of my jobs since graduation; more than 25 years of writing experience and over $2m in earnings from my work during this time. I think that was the biggest surprise - realising that I’d been earning as an author for more than two decades.

Today I make money from my Substack publication subscriptions, from my consulting work helping authors and from royalties from the five non-fiction books I’ve published under various pen names.

4. What’s one lesson you wish someone had told you earlier about the business of writing and publishing?

That writing is not the hardest part - finding an audience and marketing it is. I spent a lot of time thinking about the craft of writing, which is important of course. And I always had my marketing brain on, but marketing creative work is very different from the work I did writing and marketing in not-for-profits and for startups.

I got caught up thinking that the size of the audience was the key to getting creative work seen and purchased. Now I see that it’s the quality of the audience that often plays a bigger part - the alignment between what they’re seeking from a book or an article and what one has to say.

5. What’s your writing or creative routine like — or do you even have one? How do you get inspired to work on your Substack or pursue other creative projects?

I’m diagnosed with inattentive ADHD and my medications kick in once my children leave for school each weekday. I do my best work between 9am and lunch time, then use the afternoons and some time on the weekend to expose myself to ideas through reading and listening to podcasts.

As a solo parent, I get three weeks away from my gorgeous (and AuDHD) kids each year, and try to use these weeks to work on any book projects I’m working on. It’s the only time I can really get into the deep work required to write a long piece of writing.

6. Was there a moment you realized, “Wait… I can actually do this”?

Getting my first book, Career after COVID-19, to Amazon bestseller within days of its release at the end of 2020, outselling Simon Sinek for a few days, was a definite turning point in my confidence about my writing.

In terms of Substack, reaching bestseller within seven months of starting, was another sign from the universe that I was on the right track with the publications I had started. When authors started getting visibility, subscribers, and sales through The Substack Bookstore, I realised I wasn’t just writing, I was building something that had leverage.

That’s when it shifted from “this might work” to “this is a model”.

7. What’s something you tried that didn’t work — and what did you learn from it?

Trying to scale too many offers at once. At one point I had seven Substacks, different pricing tiers, services layered on top of each other: all individually reasonable, but collectively confusing.

What I learned is that clarity converts more than optionality. Writers need a clear path: what do I do next, and why does it matter?

Now I build much more deliberately. Fewer offers, stronger positioning, and a clear role for each piece of the ecosystem.

8. How do you find or create opportunities for yourself as a writer/Substack creator?

When I started on Substack, I did all the usual things like engaging with other creators, commenting thoughtfully and so forth. I also helped authors out for free with simple things like cover or blurb feedback. They all kindly posted about what I’d done and tagged me, increasing my exposure across the platform. I still try to help out authors without charging, when I can.

My big break came when Kristina God, founder of The Online Writing Club, who I had been following, reached out to me for a collaboration in July 2025, which helped me get exposure to her 25k+ audience, and massive growth for my publication followed.

9. What’s the best investment you’ve made in your writing life (time, money, or energy)?

Learning how to think strategically about my (or my clients’) audience and their attention has been my best investment in my writing life. Knowing their pain points and motivations is key to communicating well, in my humble opinion.

10. The Substack Bookstore is a bestselling publication here on Substack — what were the ways you grew it? Anything out of the ordinary, or surprising to you?

Two things made the biggest difference:

1. Treating it as a discovery engine, not a newsletter
It’s structured for search, for sharing, for long-term visibility, not just for the next send.

2. Making it about the authors, not me
The more value it creates for other writers, the more it grows. That sounds obvious, but it’s surprisingly rare in practice.

As I mentioned above, collaboration opportunities also formed the basis of growth. Kristina God’s involvement was the key to the major early growth of The Substack Bookstore.

11. What’s something you’re currently obsessed with — and how is it influencing your writing or creative work?

Sadly, my mother died on 27 April and her decline from terminal mesothelioma and my desire to spend as much time with her as possible has been my obsession since January this year. I suppose I am currently fascinated by the process of grief - both anticipatory grief and the acute grief of the loss of someone as beloved as my mother. I’m finding that reading others’ stories of loss on r/griefsupport has been helping me with my early healing.

👋 About Fleur Hull, This Week’s Featured GuestStack Writer

Fleur Hull is the founder of The Substack Bookstore, a discovery network connecting hundreds of independent authors and books with thousands of readers. After 25 years in writing, marketing and publishing (and turning her own book into an Amazon bestseller) she now helps experts and authors build books that don’t just exist, but get discovered.

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Henry Weikel runs , an independent press that publishes out-of-print and archival fiction in beautifully designed, pocket-sized editions — their first book is a new collection of late Henry James ghost stories, and their next project is a sci-fi magazine currently open for submissions.

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He also runs writing education programs for students in the Bay Area and abroad, does consulting work with writer’s residency programs in Asia, and has built a devoted readership for his travel essays at Shore Leave, which he’s now adapting into a book. He’s exactly the kind of person who makes you think: oh, this is what it looks like to build a writing life on your own terms.

Where to find Henry Weikel and Dancing Star Press:

• Visit the Dancing Star Press website

• Dancing Star Press here on Substack

• Henry’s travel blog On Shore Leave

• And here’s the address of the Daylight Shop that we talked about on the call, the popup that’s happening with Kima Books in Los Angeles: 628 W College St Chinatown Los Angeles, happening May 30 & 31 12–6pm

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

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Allison Lau writes the Substack Monkey Girl, where she serializes her STEMinist romcom Love Letter to Wanderlust, chronicles her path to getting agented and published, and writes beautifully honest essays about reclaiming the pieces of yourself you thought you'd lost.

Another piece of this interview that’s exciting is that Allison found her path to freelancing in part through the ✍️ Make Writing Your Job community and has landed several featured jobs from our writing job board.

Find Allison…

• Allison’s Substack Monkey Girl (where you can read her serialized romcom Love Letter to Wanderlust)

• Allison’s website

Thank you , , , , , and many others for tuning into my live video with ! Join me for my next live video in the app.

📚 Editor’s Note: A Life That Becomes the Work

doesn’t just write about a creative life — she has built one that’s fully integrated into how she lives.

Her Substack, Letters from Maison Violette, feels less like a publication and more like stepping into a world full of color and beauty. Between her homes in Denmark and the south of France, her work blends writing, photography, retreats, and teaching into something that’s not neatly categorized — and that’s exactly the point.

In this conversation, Sif talks about moving from “balance” to orchestration, about building an ecosystem instead of a single income stream, and about the kind of honesty that actually grows an audience. She’s also honest about what works: consistency, depth, and treating readers like collaborators instead of consumers.

If you’ve ever felt like your creative life doesn’t fit into one box — or that you’re “too many things” to build something cohesive — this is a reminder that the overlap might be the strategy.

And that sometimes, the most powerful thing you can do is stop trying to separate your life from your work — and let it become the work.

– Amy Suto

Editor & Curator of GuestStack

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✍️ From the Desk of Sif Orellana

1. Where’s your desk these days — and what does it look like?

Right now I’m writing from an old merchant’s desk – heavy, worn, and with just enough gravitas to make you sit up a little straighter without quite knowing why. It lives in the kitchen of my old schoolhouse in Aarhus, built in 1840, where I’ve temporarily set up camp.

I live a cross-border, patchwork life between Denmark and the south of France, where my other desk waits in a centuries-old stone house in a small village in the Languedoc – thick walls, violet shutters, ivy climbing the facade, and a rooftop terrace with views that make you forget what you came upstairs for. I bought it two years ago, after the youngest of my three musketeers had flown the nest – and it turned out to be less of a midlife crisis and more of a midlife upgrade.

So these days, I move between the two. Denmark keeps me grounded. France keeps me dreaming. And somewhere in between, I try to remember where I left my favourite notebook.

Clark, my small four-legged companion, is usually nearby – either observing things with quiet authority or sleeping through them entirely.

2. You’re a Danish 7-time award-winning author, photographer, creative business strategist & founder of Sisterhood Retreats. How do you balance everything as a multihyphenate? What does a “day in the life” look like for you?

Haha, reading this question, I can’t help but laugh, because written out like that, it does sound rather impossible. And honestly? Some days it is. But here’s what I’ve learned:

I have stopped trying to balance everything and started trying to orchestrate it – which is a completely different thing. Balance implies that everything gets equal weight all the time. Orchestration means knowing which instrument leads today, and letting the others rest.

On any given day, I might be writing a letter to nearly ten thousand Substack readers, photographing a sunlit tarte tatin on my French kitchen counter, planning a retreat in an olive grove, or sitting with my mother over coffee in Denmark, talking about life. I don’t compartmentalise. I let it all be one thing – because it is one thing. It’s a life, and the life is the work. It has been that way for twenty-two years. So much of what I live, eat, think, and feel eventually finds its way into something I make. I stopped seeing that as a blurred boundary a long time ago – it simply is the shape of my creative life.

What makes it possible: a location-independent income built over decades, a deep trust in my own creative instincts, and having always known that being many things is simply who I am.

3. What does “making writing your job” look like in your world right now?

It looks like twenty published books, seven of them award-winning. It looks like a Substack publication that reached nearly 10,000 subscribers in its first year. It looks like Sisterhood Retreats in beautiful European locations where women come to write, create, photograph, and connect. It looks like food and travel features in International magazines, days in my Aarhus studio teaching writing, photography and the art of building a location-independent worklife, 1:1 coaching sessions, digital guides and masterclasses, and a paid inner circle of nearly 300 readers who trust me enough to invest in what I make.

It is never just one thing. It is always the whole ecosystem.

The surprising part? Writing is not one income stream among many – it is what flows through all of them. I am a storyteller by nature. Communication has always been my greatest passion. Ever since I was a little girl, my happy place has been with my fingers dancing on the keys.

I have a master’s in literature. I have worked as a journalist, hosted television shows, and spent years as head of marketing and press at one of Scandinavia’s largest cultural organisations. Writing has never been something I do – it is something I am. And everything I have ever built has been built on that foundation.

4. What’s one lesson you wish someone had told you earlier about the business of writing?

Your audience doesn’t want a polished version of you. They want the true one.

I spent years believing I needed to present a finished, complete, fully-arrived version of myself before I could be taken seriously. What I’ve learned – slowly, through much evidence – is that people don’t subscribe to expertise. They subscribe to honesty. The most-read letters I’ve ever written were the ones where I told the truth about something difficult. Not the ones where I demonstrated how much I knew.

And the thing nobody tells you – giving away your best thinking for free is not a loss. The more you give, the more people trust you. And trust is the only currency that truly compounds.

5. What’s your writing routine like if you have one?

I am a night owl by nature and a morning coffee ritualist by choice – which means I exist in a state of productive contradiction. I don’t do morning pages. I do morning coffee outside, birds as the only soundtrack, notebook nearby, but not mandatory.

I write when the words arrive – which is often late, often suddenly, and occasionally at inconvenient moments. I have learned to keep a notebook in every room and to trust the arrival rather than force the schedule. My strongest strength, confirmed by Martin Seligman’s VIA Character test, is love of learning, which means sitting down to write never requires discipline. It requires only the right question to begin pulling on.

6. Was there a moment you realized, “Wait… I can actually do this” in your career as a writer and creative?

My first book came out in 2004. I felt deeply vulnerable – not because I doubted my writing, but because I had done something that felt risky. I had reimagined what a cookbook could be. More storytelling, more layered, with lifestyle photography woven alongside the food images in a way that hadn’t really been done before. It was really a book about a way of living – about beauty, creativity, slowness, and the stories that gather around a table. The question that kept me up at night was not can I do this — it was is the world ready for this?

And yet – beneath all that noise – something quieter knew otherwise. My intuition told me this book would matter, would find the people who needed it. My publisher and I trusted that voice over the louder one, published anyway – and 115,000 people bought it, and something in me changed that has never changed back.

That was the moment. Not the contract, not the reviews. The moment I held a book that existed because I had refused to let fear make my decisions.

7. What’s something you tried that didn’t work — and what did you learn from it?

I once tried to be more strategic. I read all the right books, mapped all the right content pillars, and attempted to turn my creativity into a system. It produced perfectly adequate work that felt completely dead on arrival.

What I learned: I am not a system. I am a seeker, a storyteller, a dot-connector. The moment I stopped trying to architect my creativity and started trusting it, everything got better – including the results. Intuition, it turns out, is not the opposite of strategy. It is a faster, deeper version of it.

8. How do you find or create opportunities for yourself as a writer?

Mostly by showing up – fully, consistently, and as myself. Opportunities have rarely arrived because I pitched them. They have arrived because someone read something I wrote and felt something, and reached out. Which means the work itself is the pitch.

I also say yes before I feel ready. To the book. To the retreat. To the stone house in France. To the Substack. Every significant thing in my creative life began with a yes I wasn’t entirely sure I could honour – and then honouring it anyway.

9. What’s the best investment you’ve made in your writing life (time, money, or energy)?

Time spent alone in rooms that inspire me. This is not romantic advice – it is practical. My old schoolhouse in Denmark and my stone house in France are not just homes. They are creative infrastructure. The environments we inhabit shape the work we produce, and I have invested accordingly.

But it isn’t always solitude I seek – sometimes it is anonymity. Some of my best writing has happened in cafés, in my two hometowns and on travels. There is something deeply stimulating about sitting among people without having to be available to any of them. A good cup of coffee, a freshly baked something, and the quiet hum of life carrying on around you. Libraries, too – I am drawn to their atmosphere of immersion and collective devotion to the written word.

People come second: the writers, thinkers, photographers, and seekers who have crossed my path through retreats, correspondence, and the village that has grown up around my Substack. Community is not a soft investment. It is the whole game.

10. Letters from Maison Violette is a bestselling publication here on Substack — what were the ways you grew it? Anything out of the ordinary, or surprising to you?

I wrote naked. I showed up consistently. And I treated every reader as someone worth the full truth – not a curated version of it.

When I sit down to write, I forget the numbers entirely. I write to one person – a woman I know is out there, somewhere, who needs exactly this. Not the polished version. The real one. And when you write like that, something extraordinary happens: she feels it.

The surprising part: two Substack Notes brought in more than 6,300 new subscribers in January and half of February alone. One single note – a simple introduction to myself and my world – brought in 4,137 new readers. No ads. No launch strategy. Just a true story, told well, finding the people it was meant for.

But numbers only tell part of the story. What I have built is not a newsletter – it is a village. I reply to every comment. I ask my readers what moves them, what they are struggling with, and what they want more of. I let them shape the conversation. When you treat your readers as collaborators rather than an audience, something shifts – they stop consuming and start belonging.

The advice is simple, even if the doing isn’t: write the truest thing you can. Then write it again. Show up even when you feel you have nothing to say – because you always have something to say. The algorithm rewards consistency, but readers reward honesty. And honesty travels further than any strategy I have ever tried.

11. What’s something you’re currently obsessed with — and how is it influencing your writing?

The analogue. And the silence beneath it.

In December, I took a course in Transcendental Meditation – inspired, in part, by David Lynch, one of my great creative heroes. I wrote my final university thesis on Twin Peaks years ago, and Lynch has never stopped teaching me things. In his book Catching the Big Fish, he describes ideas as fish. The small ones swim near the surface. But the big, luminous, surprising ones live deeper down. And if you want to catch them, you have to be willing to go below the noise.

I think most of us skim the surface more than we realise.

So lately, I’ve been stepping away from the Internet and toward what I’ve started calling the Innernet – the quieter, slower place underneath it all. Knitting. Baking. Walking by the sea in the early mornings.

And I can feel it in my writing.

It’s becoming more sensory. More alive. Less about describing a moment – and more about letting someone step into it. That shift has shaped the way I write, but also the way I teach.

Because at its core, powerful writing isn’t just about choosing the right words. It begins with deeper noticing – using the senses to bring a moment to life, so the words carry something the reader can actually feel.

It’s something I explored in a small workshop in Paris a few years ago, and this June I’m turning it into an online masterclass:

Sensory Storytelling – A Masterclass in Bringing the Five Senses to the Page.

And because you’re here, I wanted to quietly extend an invitation – exclusively to Amy’s readers.

For 72 hours after this interview goes live, I’m offering you access to the masterclass as a complimentary gift when joining my yearly subscription, along with everything that’s inside the Inner Circle: essays on building a freedom-based creative business, midlife alchemy and becoming, the French art of slow living, photography and visual storytelling, and Substack growth for women with something real to say.

The annual subscription is €65 (and your price is locked in even if prices go up later), while the masterclass will otherwise be €67. You’ll receive a personal email with your access link as soon as it’s released.

If you feel drawn to writing – and living – in a way that is a little more present, a little more sensory, a little more alive… the door is open. You are very welcome inside.

https://maisonviolette.substack.com/amysuto

👋 About Sif Orellana, This Week’s Featured GuestStack Writer

Danish 7-time award-winning author, photographer, creative business strategist & founder of Sisterhood Retreats. I help female creators build freedom-based lives, turn their passions into a career, and make midlife the best plot twist yet.

✍️ Sisterhood Retreats

📚 Editor’s Note: Writing That Actually Helps

’s work sits at an intersection that a lot of writers talk about — but fewer actually execute on: writing that is both meaningful and genuinely useful.

His book, Talk To Your Boys, is exactly what it sounds like — practical, direct, and designed to help parents navigate the conversations that are often the hardest to have. What makes it work is the foundation behind it. Christopher isn’t writing from theory alone. He’s bringing in years of experience as a teacher, a facilitator of boys’ groups, and a parent himself. You can feel that lived perspective on every page.

In this conversation, he shares what it looks like to build a writing life alongside other work, rather than trying to force writing to carry everything financially from day one. He also gets specific about the business side — from the value of a strong book proposal to the often-overlooked opportunity in speaking.

If you’re someone who wants your writing to actually land — to be read, used, and returned to — there’s a lot here worth paying attention to.

– Amy Suto

Editor & Curator of GuestStack

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✍️ From the Desk of Christopher Pepper

1. Where’s your desk these days — and what does it look like?
   This is my favorite place to write - the big dining room table in my house in Berkeley. When I was writing Talk To Your Boys, I did a lot of the editing on paper, and it was nice to have the table space to spread out multiple pages and see it start to come together as a book. This room is also also where I like to set up for TV interviews.

2. Your book Talk to Your Boys was named a best book of 2025. What inspired you to write that book, and can you tell our readers a bit about it?
   Talk To Your Boys is designed to be a very practical, approachable book for parents who want help reaching their tween or teen boy, talking to him about tough topics, and guiding him on a path to becoming a caring, connected, and confident young man. It’s packed with helpful advice, scripts, and tips for how to have better conversations with boys.
   
   My co-author Joanna Schroeder saw how much interest there was in this topic when her New York Times essay “Racists Are Recruiting. Watch Your White Sons.” went viral, and soon after she approached me about working together on this book. I was able to bring in my experience as a father, a high school teacher, and a facilitator of boys’ groups that focus on sharing emotions and building connections. Writing together worked really well for us, helped keep our progress on track, and made the whole book stronger.

   

3. As a successful author and Substack creator, what does “making writing your job” look like in your world right now?
   I’ve seen my spouse, author Thea Hillman, find success as a writer and win awards while holding down a day job, and I’m very comfortable with that model. I love teaching and working with youth, and I also like being able to share ideas with the bigger world. I don’t feel like I have to make all of my income from writing to feel successful, but I’m thrilled to be bringing in real money from Substack subscriptions, book sales, and book-related speaking engagements.
   

4. What’s one lesson you wish someone had told you earlier about the business of writing?
   One lesson that I’ve learned is that there is a lot of money available in public speaking, so if you are publishing a book and want to make the most of those opportunities, developing an interesting, funny, polished 45 minute presentation before your book launch is really smart.
   

5. What’s your writing or creative routine like if you have one?
   I usually get up earlier than everyone else in my house, and for me that is a great time to get things done. I’m a lot more productive in the morning than I am if I try to stay up late.

   

6. Was there a moment you realized, “Wait… I can actually do this” as an author and creator?
   Signing a book contract with Hachette was when it really started to seem real, but I don’t think anything was as meaningful as when we started to get blurbs from incredible writers who genuinely liked our book.
   

7. What’s something you tried that didn’t work — and what did you learn from it?
   I graduated from college with a journalism degree in 1997, expecting to have a career writing for newspapers and magazines, only to see almost all of those jobs evaporate within a few years as the industry changed. I transitioned into teaching, thinking my writing days were probably over, but I now see that everything I learned from teaching made it possible for me to write with a level of knowledge, experience, and expertise I would never have had otherwise. Sometimes you have to do some living to have something to write about.
   

8. How do you find or create opportunities for yourself as an author and creative?
   I genuinely like to celebrate other writers’ work, and try to develop a sense of shared mission with writers who cover similar territory. I’ve found that people respond to warmth, generosity, and human connection.

9. What’s the best investment you’ve made in your writing life (time, money, or energy)?
   Joanna and I spent almost a year crafting a 60-page book proposal for Talk To Your Boys, and by the time we sent it off to editors it was really polished and strong. The book’s structure was clearly mapped out, with two chapters fully done. In addition to helping us sell the book, it also made it much easier to complete it.
   

10. Teen Health Today is a bestselling publication here on Substack — what were the ways you grew it? Anything out of the ordinary, or surprising to you?
    At first, I thought I would mostly be writing for other teachers, and called my newsletter “Teaching Health Today.” After a few months, I realized that I wanted to broaden the audience to include parents and other caring adults, and renamed it “Teen Health Today,” and it really started growing after that. My most popular pieces are often “how to” articles about things that people are struggling with, like “How To Talk To Kids About P-O-R-N” and “How To Help Boys Share Their Feelings.”

11. What’s something you’re currently obsessed with — and how is it influencing your writing?

    

    I’ve been doing talks for students of different ages - all the way from 5th grade to college - and I love thinking about the specific advice and messages I want to share with people at different stages of life. I also LOVE hearing their questions and learning about their lives.

👋 About Christopher Pepper, This Week’s Featured GuestStack Writer

Christopher Pepper is the co-author of the bestselling book TALK TO YOUR BOYS: 16 Conversations to Help Tweens and Teens Grow into Confident, Caring Young Men, which Dr. Lisa Damour says is “required reading for anyone who cares about raising boys to thrive emotionally, build strong relationships, and grow into healthy, whole adults.”

Pepper writes the popular newsletter Teen Health Today (TeenHealthToday.com), and his work has been featured in many media outlets, including The New York Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, ParentData, NPR and CNN.

He is also an award-winning educator who currently works as a “teacher on special assignment” in San Francisco public schools. In addition to supporting health teachers, he coordinates SFUSD’s Young Men’s Health Project, which brings middle and high school boys together to talk about their lives, relationships, emotions, and masculinity.

He is the father of two boys and lives in Berkeley, California.

✍️ Subscribe to Teen Health Today

In this Substack Live, we talk about…

• How Julie leveraged personal essays to get her work published in anthologies and in a book of her own

• How no sample is too outdated when it comes to personal essays — good writing always belongs in your portfolio

• Best practices when pitching personal essays to editors using the ✍️ Make Writing Your Job weekly pitch lists (which come out 2x per week)

• Why great writing comes from the heart, and how no one’s is too “small” to write about

Be sure to follow Julie here on Substack and on LinkedIn!

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

As an avid thriller and crime fiction reader, I can’t emphasize enough how much Jordan Harper’s books (particularly Everybody Knows and A Violent Masterpeice) feel like such a breath of fresh air in the genre. I couldn’t put these books down, and I want to run around in the streets handing out copies because of how much they’ve moved me.

But enough of my soapboxing — just trust me on this and grab a copy (or 5!) of Harper’s books :)

Buy Jordan Harper’s books now:

• A Violent Masterpiece

• Everybody Knows

• She Rides Shotgun

• The Last King of California

And follow Jordan Harper here on Substack and here on Instagram.

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

📚 Editor’s Note: Writing as a Service

Sean McNulty has built something unusually specific — and unusually disciplined — with his Substack, Auraist. Instead of chasing trends or broad appeal, he’s focused on one clear idea: finding and sharing the best-written books being published today.

That level of focus runs through everything in this conversation. Sean talks about writing as a service, not a performance — less about broadcasting your thoughts and more about offering something genuinely useful to readers. He also brings a refreshingly honest perspective on the realities of publishing online, from the dopamine loops of metrics to the importance of maintaining standards, both on the page and in how you show up professionally.

There’s a sharpness to his thinking that will land for writers who care deeply about craft. This is a conversation about taste, discipline, and building something that stands for something — even if it grows slower, and even if it’s a little out of step with the rest of the internet.

– Amy Suto

Editor & Curator of GuestStack

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✍️ From the Desk of Sean McNulty

1. Where’s your desk these days — and what does it look like?

Couch in Madrid. I have a bad back so for all computer work I sit here and work off a large screen.

Currently flashing outside my window are the lights from the latest ambulance called for someone wheeled out of the oldster disco Golden. This happens about five times per week, roughly one dancer taken off to hospital every night.

Going by the queues outside, Golden holds around 200. So when they enter, the punters are accepting a one-in-two-hundred chance of hospitalisation. The place must be fantastic.

2. What does “making writing your job” look like in your world right now?

I make money through subscriptions to Auraist. We pick the best-written books from US and UK recent releases and prize shortlists, and while almost all of these picks are sent out to free subscribers, we do also pick what we feel is the best-written book of the month, and that pick’s sent out to paid subscribers only.

My satirical series The Demon Inside David Lynch: TV Drama’s Worst Fiasco has brought in a good number of subscriptions, particularly around the time of Lynch’s death.

We’ve featured in-depth articles on prose style and AI writing by writers such as Samantha Harvey, Paul Lynch, Stephen Marche, Eimear McBride, Tom McCarthy, Francis Spufford, Anna Della Subin, Jonathan Meades, Stephen Graham Jones, Donal Ryan, Simon Critchley, and Nicholas Dames. Paid subscribers can access the full archive of these pieces.

We accept submissions from our paid subscribers, and if the prose is up to the standard of our others picks, we feature them on the site.

So that’s what Auraist offers to paid subscribers, and that’s how I get paid. The surprise has been that any of this has worked at all. When we started my greatest hope for this point was maybe a couple of thousand subscribers and followers, but the total’s over seventy thousand now, and what that says about readers’ hunger for the highest-quality prose has been both surprising and reassuring.

3. What’s one lesson you wish someone had told you earlier about the business of writing and creating online?

The lesson would be: read The Hacking of the American Mind much earlier than you did.

Publishing online is of course horribly dopaminergic, and for me the unhealthiest aspect of doing so. How many people opened that last email, how many of those are new readers? Etc. A dirty buzz and a fairly low state of being.

I’d stayed away from social media completely in the decade before setting up Auraist. So the unfortunate truth is that more than anything I needed knowledge and tools to try to keep my head straight, or straighter.

The Hacking of the American Mind provides the knowledge about how modern life has wrecked our brain chemistry, especially our dopamine receptors. (As a bonus it may also accidentally explain the deterioration of contemporary culture and politics).

The prose is sometimes unimpressive, and the author leans too hard into chemistry-teacher-with-a-guitar, but to avoid the dopamine traps of publishing online (or offline), that book’s a good place to start.

How’s that for counterintuitive?

4. What’s your writing or creative routine like if you have one?

I mix creative work in amongst more administrative stuff for Auraist and my other projects, and vice versa.

I do this so I don’t get bored by long stretches of admin, and also because I think that tidy, disciplined, Apollonian admin mindset can be helpful in creative work, especially if you’re exploring extreme subject matter and psychologies.

Switching back and forth between right-brain and left-brain work throughout the day makes things feel balanced and (that word again) healthy.

I don’t know anyone else who works like this. It’s been frowned at by several experienced writers.

5. Was there a moment you realized, “Wait… I can actually do this”?

When we were able to publish a piece by Paul Lynch on the prose style of Prophet Song a couple of days before it won the Booker.

We only had a few dozen subscribers at the time, and that piece was what really kicked things off for us. Lithub licensed it and within days a number of well-known stylists were in touch offering their support.

The support from writers whose prose we admire has been one of the most gratifying things about Auraist.

6. What’s something you tried that didn’t work — and what did you learn from it?

Some of worst blunders will never surface anywhere, I hope.

Actually, would you mind if I respond with a blunder that some writers make when submitting work? I think this might be more useful to your readers than, say, the email I sent to a literary legend that contained certain typos that still make me cringe two years on.

This advice will sound really obvious: don’t be rude. Have some manners in your covering email. Don’t just say ‘Everybody loves this. Read it.’ and then end the email there. I receive a couple of emails of this type per month, from one demographic in particular, and it seems the authors just feel they’re too cool for manners.

Nobody’s too cool for manners.

7. What’s the best investment you’ve made in your writing life (time, money, or energy)?

Obsession always helps.

8. Auraist is a bestselling publication here on Substack that explores the best-written books out there — what were the ways you grew it? Anything out of the ordinary, or surprising to you?

One of the things that’s helped most is viewing Auraist as a service.

It’s rewarding to think of some of the writers we’ve published, and to have an audience for my own writing. But the core of the thing is putting in the time to identify something that’s of actual use to our readers: identifying not the best books but the best-written ones.

Too many writers and Substackers seem to view writing like after-dinner speaking: Behold my latest thoughts, world. Might be better to think of it more like pouring people’s wine for them, or passing them the trifle.

9. What’s something you’re currently obsessed with — and how is it influencing your writing?

Praiseworthy by Alexis Wright, the best-written novel I’ve read since we started up, and also the best. Angry, savage, very witty, wise, won some big prizes, almost flawless at the sentence level, and totally lacking in artistic and thematic cowardice.

👋 About Sean McNulty, This Week’s Featured GuestStack Writer

Sean McNulty worked as a nightguard at St. Patrick’s psychiatric hospital in Dublin. He now lives in Madrid, right beside Golden, where he edits Auraist, which picks the best-written books from recent releases and prize shortlists.

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📚 Editor’s Note: Sarah Copeland on Sacred Spaces and Standing Up for Your Worth

This week’s GuestStack feature is a writer I’ve genuinely admired for a long time — and getting her words in your inbox feels like a real gift.

is an award-winning cookbook author, longtime contributor to the New York Times, Food & Wine, Food Network, Real Simple, and Martha Stewart Living, and the voice behind one of Substack’s most beloved food publications, Edible Living. She’s written four cookbooks, served as Food Director at Real Simple, spent seven years creating recipes at Food Network, and somehow also managed two summers as a private chef in St. Tropez. (Yes, really.) If you’re not already a subscriber to Edible Living, this is your sign — her tahini granola recipe alone is worth the subscription.

But what I love most about Sarah isn’t the résumé — it’s the way she writes about the whole life of a working creative. From her 250-year-old blacksmith’s barn studio in the Hudson Valley to her travels across Hungary, Sarah is radically honest about what it actually takes to build a writing career with longevity, intention, and joy. She writes about food the way the best writers write about anything: as a way of understanding how we live, and how we might live better.

In this interview, she gets into charging your worth without apology, carving out sacred space for your work, and why she believes the readers who need your voice will always find you. For those of you building writing careers of your own, her perspective is the kind of reminder that sticks.

– Amy Suto

Editor & Curator of GuestStack

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✍️ From the Desk of Sarah Copeland

1. Where’s your desk these days — and what does it look like?

I’m writing from my second-floor studio of our 250-year-old Blacksmith’s barn, 50 yards behind our house in the Hudson Valley. My actual desk is a 7-foot black walnut table my husband built me for our tenth wedding anniversary, with an arched frame and joined together with antique brass pins; it was originally intended to be our dining room table, but I’ve since adopted it as my desk. It’s beautiful and impractical (no drawers, etc). From my desk, I can see my house, my garden, our bunny’s little house, and the stop where my children get on and off the school bus; it’s my favorite place to be.

2. As an award-winning cookbook author and longtime contributor to top publications, you’ve got a lot on your plate — what inspired you to start your Substack Edible Living? And have you always taken such gorgeous food photography?

Because I had written almost exclusively for big brands like Real Simple, Food & Wine, and Food Network for the first decade plus of my career–either as a staff editor or on contract–it was hard to wrap my mind around writing a blog or a newsletter. A fellow food writer (Jenny Rosenstrach, a Substack OG) nudged me to get started on a low-stakes, low-lift effort about 4 years ago. But once I got started, I never wanted to stop. Working on my Substack quickly became where I spend 80% of my work week.

As for the photographs, thank you for the kind words! I was a dual major in magazine and photojournalism in college. Writing has always been my first love, and photography was my longtime side hustle, dating back to at least my mid-teens. But the two have become so intertwined in my work, art directing all my own cookbooks and often my work for brands, that I can no longer imagine one without the other.

3. What does “making writing your job” look like in your world right now?

I’m sorry to report that I used to make a lot more money as a writer than I do now. But that’s mostly because I stepped forward as the prominent/lead parent in my household (meaning full-time parenting without any paid or outside help), since COVID times, when my then-young kids were at home. In those days, I was writing or working as a writer 5 or more days a week, with overlap into nights and weekends. I had the best in-home childcare (full and later part-time babysitters) who helped me “do it all.”

These days, I write strictly while my kids are in school, and on the occasional late-night burst of energy. It means I make less (since it’s hard to scale your writing without actually writing more), but I’m grateful to have a really nice balance between my two worlds. I’m a better writer thanks to the complexities of my private life, and I’m certainly a better parent/partners/friend on days I’ve spent at least a few hours writing at my desk.

4. What’s one lesson you wish someone had told you earlier about the business of writing and creating recipes and food content?

To be absolutely shameless about charging for your worth. No one would dream of walking out of a salon without paying for their haircut, or walking out of a boutique with a new sweater without laying down their credit card or cash. And yet we continue, as writers, and as a culture, to undervalue the work, effort, and expertise of professional writers just because the market is saturated and the world is used to getting content (words, recipes, stories, listicles) for free.

Putting the writing aside, recipe creation and writing–and in particular the photography– is an expensive endeavor. High-quality work must be paid for, or we can’t expect quality at all.

5. What’s your writing routine like — or do you even have one?

I LOVED morning pages in my single days. That’s how I wrote my first book. Later, I did my best writing in cafes or on the subway, traveling to and from my desk jobs (usually as an editor).

Today, walking through my studio door is like jumping through a portal–I can leave family life behind and inhabit my writing brain fully. I sit and type at my desk for hours, skipping meals and bathroom breaks until I hear the brakes screech on the yellow bus, dropping my kids off from school. But then, as now, my absolute favorite time to write is on a weekend, when I notice that everyone is happily occupied and quietly tending to their own tasks/work/play. I grab my laptop and slip into the cozy chair in the corner of my bedroom–right by the window, in the late afternoon when the sun is streaming in, like a cat soaking in the sun. I love the feeling of my fingers racing across the keyboard–time slips away. It is then that I fully exhale, praying no one finds me until every thought is on the page, and yet accepting that it could be over at a moment’s notice. It’s like stolen time, one of life’s little gifts.

6. Was there a moment you realized, “Wait… I can actually do this” when it comes to being a food writer and author?

I have always believed in my writing–that writing, mine or anyone’s, is important. That words and stories are the great human connector. Since I studied Journalism, I was taught by multiple men/women who had ”made it,” who were actively working writers and (also, now, professors). One guest professor was a Pulitzer Prize winner, another wrote fabulous feminist pieces for Ms. magazine in the 70s and 80s, and had written several books about her own life. When I moved to New York City directly after these people were the biggest influence on my life, I had zero doubts about making a living as a writer. But I still thought I needed the big brands–the magazines and the editors and the big money men–to support me, to send me that paycheck, no matter how small.

The first time I realized I could really do it on my own terms happened much later. As I was turning the corner into my thirties, my oldest sister, a deft SVP, always said “the best investments you ever make are in yourself.” She encouraged me to attend the Greenbrier Food Writers’ Symposium, with an entry fee that was a massive splurge for me at the time. Once I got there, I had dinner every night with the top working writers and editors of the era: Russ Parsons (LA Times), Andrea Nguyen (a widely published food writer), Margo True (writer for Saveur and Sunset mags), Ann Taylor Pittman (then of Cooking Light), Bill LeBlonde (from Chronicle Books), Antonia Allegra (oft called the fairy Godmother of food writing), Don Fry (reveared writing coach and scholar). Sitting among people whose daily rhythm was writing (for money!!) renewed my confidence that I could do it too.

Don Fry made us read our writing aloud back to a room full of greats and never let us back down. He said I had a real “voice” and made me promise to stop apologizing for my opinions. He put us on the spot; he taught us to get out of our own way, and that we could survive saying what we were put on this earth to say, no matter who was in the room.

Not long after, Bill LeBlonde signed me as one of his authors; I wrote my first book the next year.

7. What’s something you tried that didn’t work — and what did you learn from it?

I recently went out to market with a Hungarian Cookbook proposal that I have spent well over a decade researching and writing. The investment has been massive: dozens of trips back and forth to Hungary, years of reading and researching, and tons of writing and rewriting. I have never worked harder on anything in my life. The book didn’t sell–even after publishing four books, with accolades like James Beard-nominated, and “Best of” lists from the New York Times, Bon Appétit next to my name.

This might have felt like a giant blow. Not only did my first four books sell quickly and easily, making this a harsh contrast, but this book felt deeply important to me–something I am uniquely qualified to write, something I feel needs to be written, and full of recipes and stories I have passionately wanted to tell for many, many years. But the timing wasn’t right for the marketplace. And if I were honest with myself, the timing wasn’t right for me either.

I thought it would crush me to have to put that to the side after so much love and work went into it. But I learned that I can handle rejection. And that not all rejection is personal. I know my work is respected, and that editors trust the integrity of my work, but no one wants to go to the market right now with a book that may not sell widely. There’s too much at stake for publishing houses right now. And I know there will be a right time for that book–somewhere in the future. If it’s meant to be, I will be the one to write it. And if not, I will do other great, valued work that the world needs from me even more.

8. How do you find or create opportunities for yourself as a writer and creator?

Much of my career has been based on word of mouth, recommendations, and serendipity. I keep good and strong ties with editors and peers in our industry. I am blessed to have been recruited into some of my most foundational roles, and two of my four books were commissioned from editors I love and trust.

That said, the market is more saturated than ever, and having to pitch (or deciding to pitch) does help you get very clear on what you most want to write and go after. I’ve done several projects in the last three to four years that, in retrospect, were a detour from the work that matters most to me. I’m grateful for those projects (and paychecks), and I always learn from new assignments and new editor relationships that help me stretch and grow, but I plan for this year to be a return to my core mission–what and who I hope to impact through my work.

9. What’s the best investment you’ve made in your writing life (time, money, or energy)?

As a parent, I have to say carving out a private place to write has been my best investment. Many years ago, when my kids were very young, a dear friend, a visual artist (her medium is mostly painting), came for a visit and saw my desk crammed against the wall in our then shared den/family room/toy room. Yes, I’d put up beautiful wallpaper and a pinboard with all my favorite tokens and talismans. The desk was roomy and well organized, and I had a nice big iMac computer to write on–but why wasn’t my desk facing out the window? she asked. And why didn’t I position the couch to partition off at least ⅓ if not more of that deep room just for myself? I had never considered it (after all, I did some of my best work on the subway, and on the kitchen counter in our tiny studio apartment in the years I’d lived in NYC. I was used to working in cramped spaces).

Naturally, I moved my desk shortly after that, and that change was good for me–and for my family, defining my work and my space as much as much of focus of our family life as anything else–not an afterthought. Not something to squeeze into the margins.

Soon after, I started dreaming of my own studio and began writing down specifically how I wanted it to look and feel, in great detail (colors, light, windows, and how I would feel in that space). That same year, I took on a commissioned book project with a strong advance that paid for us to fully renovate our barn into my studio (with enormous credit to my husband, who did the whole thing himself during COVID times). Now, it is my sacred space. No one enters without permission.

I think my sister and my friend were both saying the same thing: invest in yourself. People will only treat writing like it’s your hobby or your side hustle if you treat it that way. If you want this to be your career, treat it like your career. Honor the space, the time, and the tools you need to thrive as a writer.

10. Edible Living is a bestselling publication here on Substack — what were the ways you grew it? Anything out of the ordinary, or surprising to you?

I was not an OG blogger, and never really mastered the time to learn or understand SEO, so outside of Instagram, I had never grown any kind of a following or amassed a list on my own. Most of my work from the first decade and a half of my career is owned by a big brand, which made me feel limited, at best. So coming to Substack felt like I might just be whispering into a void. At first, I think I grew, because my readers could tell that I loved it. I was consistent, came to them enthusiastically with something new every week for four solid years. I was excited every time I sat down to write, whether it got one comment or twelve or none! I think my readers could feel that genuine joy. I believed in our connection, however small, it mattered to them and to me.

My growth has always been steady and slow. But there were definitely moments each year where bigger growth happened. In 2022, we moved to Hungary for 5 months, and my writing suddenly attracted multitudes of people with either a connection to Hungary (via family, or some who had lived there or married a Hungarian) or women who dreamed of living abroad with their own families and wanted to know how we did it.

The next year, back in the US, I was missing Europe, so I did a guest post series around Christmas, sharing the lives and holiday traditions of 6 women living/working abroad. The following year, it was twelve days of Christmas cookies (also heavily European-focused) that brought new readers in. Right now, I’m doing a Repertoire series, which is a practical guide for the home and kitchen of busy families like mine.

Of course, some readers may fall away as you evolve and tweak your content, as you move through different stages of your own life, but I (and we all) have to trust that the readers who need my voice will find me.

11. What’s something you’re currently obsessed with — and how is it influencing your writing or creating?

Paris! It sounds cliché, but I lived in Paris and later in St. Tropez in my early twenties, for three consecutive springs/summers, and it’s one of the places I felt most alive and myself, and the most brave. I really let my passion for Hungary usurp what a major part of my life France, French culture, cuisine, and language was. Right now, it’s bubbling back up for me strongly–an urge to reclaim a part of myself that was lost in motherhood and family life.

Substack has also brought me to a new love of fashion–I worked in fashion/women’s magazines earlier in my career before my food deep dive, but then I have never really followed fashion writers/or influencers for many, many years. I really love the way the writers on Substack approach fashion in a fresh, non-consumerist way. It’s so refreshing. I dream of being one of those completely chic older women who wear their clothes in an unapologetically confident way.

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👋 About Sarah Copeland, This Week’s Featured GuestStack Writer

Sarah Copeland is a writer, cook, and author of four beloved cookbooks—Every Day Is Saturday, Feast, Instant Family Meals, and The Newlywed Cookbook. She is the voice behind Edible Living on Substack, where she writes about building a repertoire for real life. Her recipes and essays have appeared in outlets including NYT Cooking, Food & Wine, Food Network, and Martha Stewart. Her work lives at the intersection of food, family, and intentional living.

From her home in the Hudson Valley, Sarah writes about the structure and meaning of daily life—marriage, motherhood, work, travel, and the practice of gathering. Her work examines how we live, and how we might live better.

Find Sarah on…

• Substack

• Instagram

• INTRO (where readers can hire Sarah for specific career coaching on food writing or writing a cookbook proposal)

📚 Editor’s Note: Building an Online Home From Scratch on Substack

has built a writing-led business the way many people wish they could — from zero, on her own terms, and without a pre-existing audience. A serial entrepreneur now living between Europe and Brazil, she uses Substack not just as a publishing platform, but as the foundation of a broader ecosystem that includes paid newsletters, services, partnerships, and community-driven products.

In this conversation, Claudia talks candidly about what it actually takes to make writing your job today — from the importance of visibility and self-promotion to why Substack works best as an online home rather than a single revenue stream. She shares lessons learned from failed products, the reality of slow organic growth, and the mindset shift required to design a life that prioritizes freedom, flexibility, and sustainability.

This is a grounded, encouraging look at how showing up consistently — even when it feels like you’re writing into the void — can compound into a business, a community, and a life that fits.

– Amy Suto

Editor & Curator of GuestStack

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✍️ From the Desk of Claudia Faith

1. Where’s your desk these days — and what does it look like?

Since yesterday, it’s actually an Airbnb desk in Florianópolis, Brazil. I’m writing from an outside table, looking at palm trees and sunshine, hearing the ocean — so it’s quite beautiful. Before that, it was Berlin in complete winter, so I’ve made an entire switch and I’m loving the possibility to work from both places. Europe and tropical Brazil.

A picture I took last year when I was here already on my way to the beach, which kind of gives you an idea of the vibe here. And one eating ice-cream here with my rescue doggo, Mambo.

2. You’re a serial entrepreneur who helps other writers and creatives — what’s one piece of business advice you think most creatives would benefit from knowing?

Don’t shy away from promoting yourself and being out there. In business, this is simply marketing. In the creative world, or as a solopreneur writer, it’s really about showing up, being consistent, and being authentic…letting people see you and what you have to offer without overwhelming them.

I know a lot of creators and writers are introverts. I am too, and it just doesn’t come naturally to us. But like with anything else, you need a good plan, a strategy, and a system in place that kind of forces you to do those promotional things.

3. What does “making writing your job” look like in your world right now in terms of the work you do on Substack and beyond?

One thing I’ve learned is that it’s actually not only about writing on Substack anymore. It can be, but then it’s a slower journey. It is about making Substack your online home, where you can write short-form content through Notes, longer blog posts, email marketing, LIVE videos and even podcasts.

In terms of how I actually make money: it’s a mix of paid subscriptions on my newsletters, 1:1 services helping people set up their Substacks, and Cozora — the live AI learning community I co-founded. I also do some brand partnerships and sponsorships. So it’s not just one income stream, it’s several smaller ones that add up.

A lesson I learned: It’s easier than you think to make your first dollar, but it’s harder than you think to make your first $10,000. It’s a long journey, but it is possible and so worth it.

4. What’s one lesson you wish someone had told you earlier about the business of writing?

Honestly, I didn’t have anybody tell me lessons on the business of writing, because I didn’t know I would go on this journey. I started on Substack from zero, really — without knowing what I was doing, without any experience. As I kept showing up, growing, and connecting with people, I learned step by step that I can make this my home, my online home, and my business. To be fair, it’s more than a writing business — it’s community, it’s product, it’s emails, it’s marketing.

What I’d tell people on the journey is: trust the process. I know that sounds vague, but what I mean is — you won’t see results for a while, and that’s normal. The strategy reveals itself as you go. You just have to keep showing up long enough to see what works for you. I recently saw this image that captures exactly how it feels though.

5. What’s your writing or creative routine like if you have one?

I love writing in cafés. But really, mostly in mornings — I’m not an evening person at all. I like to work a lot in the morning hours and then keep the afternoon free for a round of beach tennis, or just walking along the beach with my dog.

But I also like to keep it flexible and change things up. I feel like that’s the beauty of this work, you can be as flexible as you like. If you feel like writing on a couch in some random Airbnb, you can do that. Or if you want to go to the café around the corner, you can do that too. Whenever you feel like you can be creative.

6. Was there a moment you realized, “Wait… I can actually do this” in your career as a writer and entrepreneur?

I think a few months into my journey, I hit $1,000 a month for the first time, and that felt surreal. It wasn’t one specific thing I did — I just kept showing up.

There’s something to it, though. I’ve built companies, I’ve raised capital, I’ve had co-founders. But this is something I’ve done for the first time completely on my own, and it just feels different.

The first dollar wasn’t that spectacular — it came from a Medium article. But $1,000 showed me: hey, you can scale this. It really comes down to the strategies you have, the ideas you have. You don’t have to talk about them with anybody else if you don’t want to. You can just try things out and do whatever feels right to you.

7. What’s something you tried that didn’t work — and what did you learn from it?

I created a digital product completely from A to Z — an 80-page PDF document — without having any market demand. I was so convinced it was great that I spent a lot of time and effort on it. Then it sold maybe twice, and I realized: okay, this is a complete failure.

It taught me to really test the waters first. Does this solve a problem? Is it something people actually want? Also, build your audience and distribution channels first. Because even if you have the best product in the world, if nobody knows about it, it will also fail.

8. How do you find or create opportunities for yourself as a writer?

A lot of it comes through visibility and partnerships. I put CTAs in my newsletters, I collaborate with other creators, and I make it really easy for people to understand what I do and what I offer right away. If that’s clear and people believe in the value you provide, then opportunities start coming to you — the pitching becomes secondary.

For example, I found my two Cozora co-founders through my newsletter Level Up with AI. We connected on Substack and ended up building a live AI learning community together. That wasn’t something I pitched — it happened because I was visible and clear about what I was working on.

9. What’s the best investment you’ve made in your writing life (time, money, or energy)?

The best investment I’ve made is giving myself permission to be free — to live wherever I want while building my business. That might sound abstract, but it took real effort to break the mindset that I had to be in an office, that I had to do 9-to-5, that I had to follow a traditional path.

It’s funny — I actually took a certification in designing your life. And while I was doing the certification, I realized: I’m not even designing my own life. I was still following old rules that didn’t serve me anymore.

So the investment was less about money and more about energy — the energy it took to let go of limiting beliefs and actually build a life that fits how I want to work. That shift is what made everything else possible.

10. Wander Wealth is a bestselling publication here on Substack — what were the ways you grew it? Anything out of the ordinary, or surprising to you?

I 100% just grew it organically on Substack. I started here from zero in May 2024. I don’t have any other social media presence or funnels, I really started from nothing.

The way I grew it is just the normal ways: Substack Notes, Substack Lives, recommendations, and consistency. I think that’s the thing people would like to skip, because it really just means showing up every single day for months and months. Often you’re writing into the complete void — nobody is responding. That’s just something you have to go through.

One thing I wish I’d started earlier is the chat feature on Substack. I still write a DM to every new subscriber (I even developed my own tool for this that people can access). But the community chat is something I started too late, and now it’s actually one of my most loved features. People constantly tell me they’re so thankful to be part of my community because that’s how they find other great people on Substack. It’s really helping my audience find their own tribes. That’s something I didn’t expect, and it’s actually a really pleasant feeling — giving back to people who read my words.

11. What’s something you’re currently obsessed with — and how is it influencing your writing or creating?
    A book, show, Substack, city, idea — show us what’s lighting your brain up.

My obsession right now has nothing to do with writing — it’s beach tennis. It’s a little bit like padel, but on the beach, on a volleyball court setup. It’s so fun. Very easy to learn, you don’t need any special skills. You play with four people, and here in Florianópolis it’s absolutely magical because it’s also a way to meet great people, be outside, be active.

I feel like that’s what keeps my mind free so I can be more creative when it’s time to write. If you haven’t tried it, give it a try.

Wander Wealth

The exact playbook I used to build a $5K+/mo newsletter in 12 months. Every Tuesday, I share actionable strategies to grow your subscribers, build your community, and create income that scales. You won't be doing it alone 🚀

By Claudia Faith

👋 About Claudia Faith, This Week’s Featured GuestStack Writer

Claudia Faith is a serial entrepreneur. She started her Substack with 0 audience, scaled it 10K+ in 1 year. She helps writers and creators grow their audience, earn online, and build smarter with AI.

Her debut novel, Salomé, is out May 19th from Penguin Random House — a gothic, feminist reimagining of one of history’s most mythologized women.

I’m so thrilled to have her here today — especially because Leslie actually found her way to us through the ✍️ Make Writing Your Job job board, where she was hired for a freelance developmental editor role by a previous guest of ours, author and documentary producer Kristin Fellows.

• Order Salomé here

• Leslie’s website

Thanks for supporting our guests!

-Amy

Born in Italy and now based in Austin, Texas, Teo launched anana alongside co-founder Blake Takushi after recognizing that some of the most extraordinary food traditions in the world were quietly disappearing with the people who held them.

The platform has already documented 100+ recipes from 40+ grandmothers and grandfathers across Italy, and recently launched paid subscriptions on Substack — which we'll be talking about today. I've had the privilege of taking cooking lessons from older generations during my own travels in Italy, and I know firsthand how irreplaceable that experience is.

• Subscribe to anana on Substack

• Check out the anana platform

• Watch the anana documentary series on YouTube

Thanks for supporting our guests with all of the great work they’re doing!

-Amy

📚 Editor’s Note: Writing Around the Edges of Life

writes the way many people actually live — in fragments, in transit, between responsibilities, and with a sharp eye for the emotional texture of everyday moments. After more than a decade working as a lawyer in Dublin, she moved to New York with her family and, over time, found her way back to writing through Substack.

In this conversation, Aisling talks about letting go of rigid routines, fitting writing into the gaps of daily life, and why consistency and voice matter more than growth hacks or viral tactics. She shares how her Substack Notes from New York grew slowly and steadily without a pre-existing audience, why personal writing works best when you stop trying to please everyone, and how creative permission — sparked by The Artist’s Way — helped her start again.

This is a thoughtful, quietly powerful look at what it means to build a writing practice that adapts to life rather than competing with it — and a reminder that sometimes the most sustainable creative paths are the least engineered ones.

– Amy Suto

Editor & Curator of GuestStack

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✍️ From the Desk of Aisling Marron

1. Where’s your desk these days — and what does it look like?

I don’t have a designated writing desk. It’s something I’ve thought about getting but never got round to it so I was immensely jealous when my 6 year old daughter came home from school one day, said she’d like a desk “for writing and stuff” and immediately fashioned one out of a low shelf in her room. She pulled up a little chair and now sits at her desk after school to write in her journal, write songs and generally plot and plan. She loves spending time at her desk and has decorated it so nicely.

I usually write at the kitchen table, I’m at it right now. Here is a photo, complete with cup of tea and plate of snacks:

I sometimes head out to write in different parts of New York. It’s great to get a change of scenery and to get out into the energy of the city. But really, I probably get most actual work done at home. I’ve recently written in the lobby of Citizen M at Times Square, which is really well equipped for any writer with lots of tables, outlets, couches, free wifi. The coffee is also self service and refillable! The Rose Room at New York Public Library is obviously astounding and just…speaks for itself.

2. Your Substack Notes from New York is a clever look at life in NYC as someone who moved from Dublin, and the challenges associated with starting over. What does “making writing your job” look like in your world right now with your Substack and any other projects you’re up to?

Before I moved to New York, I was working in Dublin as a lawyer and had done so for over ten years. I had never planned on leaving law but when we moved to New York for my husband’s job, with our two small kids who were then 3 and 1, it didn’t make sense for our family, or for me, to work as a lawyer in New York. For many reasons, including: The New York Bar (Another exam? No thank you). “You could register as a foreign lawyer and work without taking the bar!” a friend of mine helpfully suggested. But as soon as she said it, I realised that she had quickly found a solution to a problem I had been quite happy with, because she actually liked her job as a lawyer and it was dawning on me that maybe I did not.

Settling us into a new country, furnishing an apartment and figuring out basic systems and knowledge you take for granted when living in a country you grew up in (like: How to make a doctor’s appointment! Or: where to buy underwear!) became my priority.

I didn’t make time for writing in that period but felt no inclination towards it either. Now that I have more space in my life - the kids are slightly older and we are on steadier ground with regards to routines and feeling settled - I picked my writing back up and found I wanted to write about my experience of New York. A friend suggested Substack and when I looked at it for the first time (Summer 2024), it seemed like such a great fit and natural home for what I had in mind. I pretty much dove straight in and haven’t looked back! I’ve published a weekly newsletter ever since.

3. What’s one lesson you wish someone had told you earlier about the business of writing, creating, and/or running a Substack?

“Writing personal emails has been one of your favourite things to do for 20 years. Don’t overthink it, just do it. You will enjoy it more than you imagine”

4. What’s your writing routine like — or do you even have one?

I really don’t have a routine. I know I don’t because when people ask me when I write, I struggle to think when I do. I don’t assign specific time to it. At this point in my life and writing career, I’m prioritising my life and I fit writing in the gaps and around the edges of that life. l’m writing the answer to this question on my phone while at the hairdresser’s. I write while on the Subway. I do a lot of writing in my head, as I go about my day, and largely trust it will all still be there when it comes to sitting down and getting it onto the page. I send myself voice notes to help with this, write short notes on the docs app on my phone. It’s an ad hoc process but it works for me. I enjoy it.

5. Was there a moment you realized, “Wait… I can actually do this” when it came to sharing your experiences on Substack and starting over in a new city?

I did the Artist’s Way, on the recommendation of someone I trusted and admired and even though I never completed more than 4 of the 12 weeks involved, it really was life changing. I’m evangelical about it. If I get even a whisper of anyone stuck in a career rut, or at any life point whatsoever, I will appear out of the woodwork to say “Have you heard of the Artist’s Way”?

It very quickly reignited in me a desire to write, something that had been completely missing for so long. It suddenly seemed easy and joyful. With some really simple and practical prompts, it just got me out of my own way. Stories I would tell myself about why I couldn’t be a writer, that sort of thing. But it also affected my entire outlook and energy more generally. It was noticeable! I felt lighter and dressed differently. People commented on it! I was like that meme:

“You look happier - ”

“Thanks, I’ve done 4 weeks of the Artist’s Way!”

6. What’s something you tried that didn’t work — and what did you learn from it?

Writing about what I want to write about always works better than writing about what I think people would like to hear.

7. How do you find or create opportunities for yourself as a writer or creator?

In all my life, I’ve found the best opportunities come from getting out and meeting people. Professionally and personally, I truly believe in networking. I don’t mean ‘networking’ in a corporate sense and I don’t mean it cynically. I mean you make connections with people and then you hear about things: opportunities, classes you might enjoy, a new childcare centre that might really suit you, the fact that your local bakery sells bread for half price after 7pm, a good podcast, new jobs, a gem of a hairdresser - you hear about these things from getting out and engaging with people.

Opportunities arise when you put yourself out there and that goes for online too. I credit my experience in an improv class with this, but it doesn’t cost me a thought to reach out to a publication to pitch a piece. The very worst they can do is not respond and yeah, you’ll probably get inside your head about how embarrassing it is that they didn’t respond but once you get over that, you probably have a great idea for a piece so write it anyway and put it out there. And who knows, they might just say yes?

On that - say yes if someone reaches out to you. You don’t have to say yes straight away and a good tip I use is to respond “Can I get back to you tomorrow?”. It’s helpful to buy a night’s sleep to try figure out if it’s actually your gut telling you to say no or if you are really just nervous and should do it anyway!

8. What’s the best investment you’ve made in your writing life (time, money, or energy)?

I’d have to say the Artist’s Way because it got me writing and excited to write again. I’ve bought multiple copies because I keep giving my own away!

9. Notes from New York is a bestselling publication here on Substack — what were the ways you grew it? Anything out of the ordinary, or surprising to you?

I came to Substack truly without any pre-existing following. My brain only has space for one social media platform at a time and having drifted from Twitter (RIP), I was posting on Instagram to my audience of a few hundred followers on a private account. When I started on Substack and announced it to my friends and family, I had an initial 200 subscribers. It really has been slow and steady since then. The biggest jumps in subscribers come from better writing, I find. There are no tricks. I’ve grown a following by trying to put out my best work every week.

I think what works for me is consistency: I promise a weekly post and I always show up for it. Subscribers tell me they look forward to it every Thursday.

My style of writing is uniquely my own voice. I know this because I met a subscriber who had never met me in person previously and they said it was unnerving how much I sounded like my writing when I spoke. I don’t have a huge following but I do have a very engaged one. I’ve a 60% open rate and 8% of my subscribers are paying Subscribers. I had an idea that I would turn on paid subscribers when I reached 1,000 subscribers but ended up doing it earlier for reasons I’ll explain below. I still remember who my first paid subscriber was and it was incredibly gratifying to think that someone would pay you for your words, simply because they enjoyed them. Though that initial feeling did briefly turn to a feeling of pressure as I thought: “Oh you can never give this up. This thing you were doing because you enjoyed it, you now have to do because people are paying you for it”. But do you know what? There is no pressure. The fact remains that I still enjoy it and if a day ever comes that I want to stop well then, I’ll simply hit the “pause payments” button which Substack has right there in the settings.

I strategically turned on paid subscriptions as a way to get onto the ‘Rising’ bestseller list. This is a trick I probably shouldn’t share but may be useful for anyone starting out: it is incredibly easy to get onto that list and it looks way more impressive than what it actually is. The list changes every three hours so if you gain even one or two paid subscribers, you will likely rank somewhere on the rising list in your designated category. With just one paid subscriber you can announce yourself as a rising bestseller!

After I made it into the rising bestseller list, I really focused on converting subscribers to paid subscribers. When you reach 100 paid subscribers, Substack awards you the bestseller badge which…looks good, it just does!

Paywalling posts has been the most effective way of converting paid subscribers. I also emailed my most engaged readers (which is information you can access easily in the Substack dashboard) offering a Cyber Monday discount on an annual subscription which had good uptake.

10. What’s something you’re currently obsessed with — and how is it influencing your writing?

I’m really enjoying Industry on HBO, which I saw recommended by Emily J. Smith in this post. It is about a new crop of graduate investment bankers working at a firm in the City in London and it was so similar to my and my husband’s experience as trainee lawyers in Dublin that my husband (who cannot bear cringe or awkwardness) was pausing it every few seconds because it was just too true-to-life. I’m always interested to see something I’ve experienced or something I considered maybe too ordinary to be entertaining, actually used as subject matter in storylines.

I really like Katie Clapham’s newsletter, Receipt from the Bookshop, for similar reasons: seeing the beauty and the humour in ordinary, everyday situations.

Notes from New York

Entertaining updates from life in New York

By Aisling Marron

👋 About Aisling Marron, This Week’s Featured GuestStack Writer

Aisling Marron is writer of the hilarious newsletter, Notes from New York, where she provides weekly updates on day-to-day life in Manhattan as a mother of two young kids and relative newcomer to the city.

What makes this conversation extra special for our community: Kristin hired her book editor right here from ✍️ Make Writing Your Job — and what started as a professional partnership turned into a genuine friendship.

• Buy Kristin’s book A Storyboard Life

• Subscribe to Kristin Fellows here on Substack

Also, if you’re looking for a developmental editor for your own book, you can post a job right here on our writing job board!

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

📚 Editor’s Note: Building a Writing Career Around Expertise

brings a rare combination of scientific depth, editorial clarity, and business pragmatism to his writing life. With a background in pharma, biotech, and life sciences, he has built a six-figure ghostwriting business while steadily growing bestselling Substack publications at the intersection of science, technology, and society.

In this conversation, Dr. Andrii Buvailo shares what it actually looks like to make writing your job when your work is rooted in technical expertise — from why generalist writing is increasingly hard to monetize, to how building an audience before quitting your day job can dramatically change your odds.

He also talks candidly about designing a digital-first career, why not all platforms are created equal for analytical thinkers, and how Substack fits into his long-term vision as he works toward writing a popular science book of his own.

This is a grounded, no-nonsense look at writing as a profession — especially for those who don’t only see themselves as “creative writers,” but who have deep knowledge, strong opinions, and a desire to build something sustainable with their words.

– Amy Suto

Editor & Curator of GuestStack

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✍️ From the Desk of Andrii Buvailo, PhD

1. Where’s your desk these days — and what does it look like?

These days I live in Valencia, the third largest city in Spain. Our apartment is right next to the City of Arts and Sciences, designed by famous Valencian architect and engineer Santiago Calatrava – it is visible from our living room window. I find it quite symbolic, considering my passion for science and writing!

At home I have a small but private office space to hide from the chaotic routines of parenting life, because I really need quiet space to focus. I don’t know how the concept of open space is so popular in the modern corporate world, I think it is a terrible idea!

2. You create at the intersection of science, technology, philosophy, and society on your Substack Where Tech Meets Bio and beyond. What is the most exciting thing you’re working on right now?

A bit funny to say that, but the entire Where Tech Meets Bio newsletter started accidentally, a couple years ago, I was just looking for a free and less cluttered alternative to my media company’s MailChimp account. So I registered with Substack and started sending our usual business intelligence reports about the biopharma industry via Substack. After a while of doing it, I realized, with surprise, that we are onto something bigger than the original goal of just running our usual email marketing routine! That’s when I started to actually think about it as an editorial project, brainstormed structure, paywalled content concepts, and other “Substack-native” features. However, much as I enjoy contributing to Where Tech Meets Bio (these days it is run by a company team, and I just occasionally write an article or two), my 2026 goal is actually shifted to a new idea, a “truly Substack native” project, it is called Molecules & Empires. The idea is to go beyond my first newsletter’s narrow focus on pharma and biotech business intelligence, and focus on broader and maybe even more philosophical questions about how science and technology really impacts and shapes our lives and the future – both the good and ugly sides of things. It is not limited to life sciences any longer, conceptually, and I am really excited how this project will go in 2026! Please, check it out :-)

2. What does “making writing your job” look like in your world right now?

Yes, I am quite proud to say that writing is literally my job and my career these days. I don’t have a job, I parted ways with my last corporate job more than two years ago and I’m not looking back! I make money for daily life mostly via my ghostwriting agency: AB Research & Media, it is a 6-figure business that I run as a solopreneur in Spain and I am helping C-suite folks in pharma and biotech industries or venture capital folks to build their presence on LinkedIn. It’s just less than two years old agency, but the traction was surprisingly good. I attribute it to two reasons. First, my established presence on LinkedIn (36k+ followers), and second, a laser focus on a very technical and high value niche. I work only with executives in a very specific industry segment (tech-enabled pharma/biotech, AI-driven drug discovery, chemistry). The work takes roughly 20-30% of my time per week, and I intentionally avoid filling all my time with ghostwriting, even though I sacrifice much higher revenue potential here. The reason is that it is really exhausting work and also it is work that does not scale. You sell your time without any upside growth potential, and if the market suddenly changes (e.g. AI-driven disruption), this revenue may change sharply. So I spend the rest 70-80% of my time experimenting with other things that can actually scale long term: Substack newsletters, occasional consulting, building a digital product, and also the early phase of writing my first book.

3. What’s one lesson you wish someone had told you earlier about the business of writing?

The lesson is a bit brutal: don’t listen to anyone telling you that you can make writing your job without two things being true:

1) you should have a specific and unique technical/scientific/professional knowledge to write about. For instance, It is unlikely to build a ghostwriting agency or a meaningful writing business focusing on just broad, vague topics, or “general purpose” copywriting services. AI tools (ChatGPT etc) can do general-purpose writing for anyone for like 25 bucks a month, including sales copy, social media posts etc. So no one would pay high ticket money for such work. On the other hand, if you are a financial expert, a scientist, a skilled worker in some industry – you can absolutely make writing your job, writing for the relevant audience who needs your skills and experience.

Now, this limitation has an exception: if you happen to be a genuinely ‘great’ writer, with a genuinely unique writing style, personal voice, you can probably make money writing about ‘anything’. I know such folks, they are ‘just great writers,’ and earn by writing without specific professional skills beyond writing itself. But it is way harder and rarer than people tend to think. Yes, everyone can write ‘something.’ But good luck trying to monetize ‘something’. In my experience, I am making decent money as a writer not because I am a great writer (I am certainly not), but because I have a unique technical skill-set and industry experience that I can write about.

2) You absolutely should build your audience before you can expect to make decent money as a writer. It can be anywhere: LinkedIn, Instagram, Tik Tok, Substack, X, whatever. It does not have to be millions, but it has to be meaningful, and relevant to your niche. I spend at least two years building my LinkedIn presence while working at a corporate job. And only after I had like 20k followers on LinkedIn, I dared to part ways with ‘9-5’ salary stability. When I announced my ghostwriting agency back in 2024, I got clients almost immediately, folks from my followers who wanted to have a similar LinkedIn presence as I did.

4. What’s your writing routine like when you’re creating pieces for your Substacks, if you have one?

I write during the day, after I take my kid to school and morning coffee with my wife at a nearby cafeteria, or light sport session every other day. Then I come home and hide in my small but private office space, and just disappear from the world for several hours. My “office life” revolves around a drawing board that I use to brainstorm stuff the old school way, rather than doing it on a piece of paper or, God forbid, on a computer… Standing near a drawing board is not only inspiring to me, but it is actually good for health to interrupt sitting in the chair for hours. People underestimate how sitting for hours slowly kills their health and ages them faster.

5. Was there a moment you realized, “Wait… I can actually do this” in your career?

My dream started feeling real when I got early traction on LinkedIn, with people citing my posts, with first viral posts (above 1k likes and hundreds of thousands of views) and so on. As I already told earlier, I think before you try to commit to writing as a real business, it is a very good idea to battle-test your writing ability somewhere in social media. You can do it while working a daily job, safely. You achieve two goals in parallel by doing it: 1) you get a real-life testing if you are able to write in a way that people follow you, a business idea test if you like, and 2) you build early audience that you can later talk to when you actually launch a ‘serious’ writing project (a book, a newsletter, a digital product, etc).

6. What’s something you tried that didn’t work — and what did you learn from it?

I tried writing on X (formerly Twitter) and it just didn’t work for me. The style of writing that gets traction on X is just not what I like to do. I mean, I can probably ‘hack’ my way there, engineering the type of tweets that go viral, but I just don’t like the idea of ‘hacking’ algorithms or attention. I write in a more analytical, editorial style, I think. So I gravitate to places like LinkedIn, Substack, writing guest features for various established media like Forbes Technology Council, or my company BiopharmaTrend, etc. By the way, I just started my Medium blog a couple weeks ago, and hope to get it going in 2026.

7. How do you find or create opportunities for yourself as a creator?

Mostly, it is serendipity and constant process of reading/curating on LinkedIn and a dozen media outlets I follow in my niche. I tend to find creative opportunities in the news about my industry. When something truly interesting emerges, I think about how I can relate it to what I know, to the past, to the future opportunities… How I can put the news into a broader perspective, make sense of what’s happening under the hood.

8. What’s the best investment you’ve made in your creative or intellectual life (time, money, or energy)?

My absolute favorites: LinkedIn presence. I already discussed why.

Second, digital-first career strategy (I realized early in my life I wanted to be place-independent with my life, so I prioritized developing skills in digital business, basics of programming and data operations, e-commerce, etc, way before I even thought about being 100% digital entrepreneur.

Later, it saved me and my family in a literal sense. I used to live in Ukraine, but moved to Europe shortly before the full-scale war in Ukraine started. My long-term focus on a digital-first career allowed me to accommodate real fast, I can serve clients from anywhere, I am flexible and place-agnostic. Now we live in Spain and we like it here, but I can choose to move anywhere in the world if I need to. It is one of the greatest perks of being a writer or digital entrepreneur, in our turbulent times.

9. Where Tech Meets Bio is a bestselling publication here on Substack — what were the ways you grew it? Anything out of the ordinary, or surprising to you?

I would say, we grew steadily, without shocks or sudden sparks of growth. Several articles went really well on the selling side of things, so the entire revenue is based on just a number of best-sellers which generated a lot of paid subs. And the rest is a long tale of articles with just a small number of subs. But it adds up with time.

I think what is interesting is that we are living proof that you don’t need to be a really creative, fun writer to grow on Substack. We are growing with a very down to earth content, business intelligence and occasional editorial takes, but all is quite technical, with minimal interaction with the reader. We don’t run Chats or community, we just ship high quality intelligence insight and it sells. Well, with Molecules & Empires I want to try a much more ‘Substak-ish’ approach: run monthly Chat and so on.

10. What’s something you’re currently obsessed with — and how is it influencing your creative work?

I am obsessed with popular science books these days, I listen to a lot of Audible, and several gems I can recommend are: ‘Caffeine: How Caffeine Created the Modern World’ by Michael Pollan (very entertaining read, just pure joy); ‘Lifespan’ by David Sinclair; and ‘Algorithms to Live By’, by Brian Christian, among many others. One of my favorite sci-fi books I recently finished is ‘Contact’ by Carl Sagan.

I am dreaming of writing a popular science book, and trying to get enough inspiration from great books in this or related genre.

Also, I absolutely love living in Valencia! Writer’s paradise :-)

Molecules & Empires

Notes on emerging ideas in science and technology and their implications for all of us.

By Andrii Buvailo, PhD

👋 About Andrii Buvailo, PhD, This Week’s Featured GuestStack Writer

Dr. Andrii Buvailo is a science and technology communicator, writer, and analyst with a focus on the life sciences and chemical industry. Co-founder of www.BiopharmaTrend.com, solopreneur at AB Research & Media. Traveler (20+ countries and counting).

Andi Utter is a storyteller, military brat, globe-trotting educator, and someone with, in her own words, lots of fires burning. She writes at Real Talk Traveler on Substack, bringing honesty, humor, and real depth to stories about bold, unconventional living.

Here’s why we’re especially excited to have her today: Andi landed a writing opportunity through the ✍️ Make Writing Your Job job board — and it led to her piece “Unspoken Kindness” being published in The Kindness of Strangers, a brand new travel anthology by Bradt Guides, compiled from their New Travel Writer of the Year competition by Bradt founder Hilary Bradt herself. Andi’s piece opens the collection. We love to see it.

And on top of all that, she’s been actively advocating for federal funding for study abroad programs — because for Andi, travel isn’t just something she writes about. It’s something she fights for.

• Purchase The Kindness of Strangers here (Andi’s story is the first one in the book!)

• Connect with on Substack below:

  Andi Utter

  I’m a storyteller with honesty, humor, and depth, inspiring fellow travelers and those carving paths beyond convention. Drawing on life as a military brat and globe-trotting educator, I share unfiltered stories that empower bold, resilient living.

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

And thank you to all of our subscribers here at ✍️ Make Writing Your Job — we love to hear about the work you’re doing and what you’re landing from the job board! Always feel free to email me at amy@makewritingyourjob.com with wins, new books you’re publishing, or any other writerly wins you’re celebrating.

Happy writing,

-Amy

📚 Editor’s Note: Writing Yourself Into the Life You Want

’s work sits at the intersection of curiosity, courage, and reinvention.

On her Substack, Unfiltered & Fed, Anela blends personal essays, travel writing, and cultural reflection in a way that feels deeply lived-in — the kind of writing that comes from someone who has taken risks, tried things that didn’t work, and kept going anyway. What stands out to me most about Anela is how clearly writing functions as connective tissue across everything she does, from her newsletter to her travel business to the way she shows up online.

In this conversation, Anela talks candidly about her journey as a writer, the power of short, earnest pieces, and how writing underpins everything she does — from personal essays and travel guides to her book, American Soul: The Black History of Food in the United States.

She reflects on using writing both as a creative practice and a business tool, offering a thoughtful look at what it means to build a writing life that’s flexible, multidimensional, and grounded in self-trust — even when the path looks different than you imagined.

– Amy Suto

Editor & Curator of GuestStack

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✍️ From the Desk of Anela Malik

1. Where’s your desk these days — and what does it look like?

My desk is wherever I am in the world. At home, I have a big, beautiful desk in my tiny studio apartment with my big screen; it’s so comfy. There’s always a huge stack of books—some more work-related or educational, and others romantic and steamy.

But often my desk is a hotel bed, hunched over, hurting my back with my laptop, trying to get things done while I’m fighting jet lag. The one thing I always have, no matter where I’m working, is beverages. I am a 3-4 beverage for a work session type of person. Something caffeinated, something sweet, water, maybe something bubbly. You never know what you’re gonna need.

2. You publish a great blend of personal essays and travel guides on your Substack Unfiltered & Fed. What ideas or types of articles or essays are you most excited about? And what was your favorite piece you’ve written lately?

In this new year, the things that I’m most excited to write about are personal interests that I haven’t had the freedom to explore because I was busy building a business, building a writing practice, and a company that could support me. Now that I’m in my 6th year of working for myself full-time and my 6th year of being a creator, I have the space to be a little bit more intentional.

For example, for the month of February, I’m going to Oman to be selfish. I’m going to do an Arabic refresher program to study something that I haven’t looked at intentionally in a few years, and I know from that experience I’m going to be inspired to write.

And I’d say my favorite piece I’ve written recently is called “A Dusty Could Never Compare To My Kindle” and it’s part of a series I wrote on Substack last year about life, love, and divorce. In it, I talk about the role reading has played in my life and what I learned from romance novels (so much but somehow not enough). I felt like it was just such a fun way to talk about something that is in the zeitgeist right now but we often don’t take very seriously.

3. What does “making writing your job” look like in your world right now?

So I never really thought of myself as a writer. I was a dabbler and then in 2020 I got offered a book deal to write a book about the Black History of American Cuisine (which just published in late 2025 and is now up for two NAACP awards this year!!!). So I’ve very recently come to terms with the fact that I really am a writer and writing is a core part of my job.

There are so many different ways that I’ve cobbled together making money while in denial over the years.

First through my newsletter where I share personal reflections, travel essays, and guides. Paid newsletter subscriptions are a key source of revenue for me. But also my writing supports my business in other ways beyond subscriptions. For example, some of my most intimate and personal travel essays have been included as part of sales launches for the group trips I organize and host. Writing well and being able to move people to action has helped me drive sales, selling those experiences out often within days.

And even as someone who at my core still considers herself an influencer, when I’m working on content, it always starts with writing: writing a script, writing an outline, writing a concept. From there, I get to the kind of social content that attracts viewers and earns me partnerships.

Now, I’m at a place in my journey where I’m just trying to be a better writer. I’m doing that in 2026 by trying to read something new and write something every day, whether that’s a longer, more thoughtful piece, or by responding to a creative writing prompt in my journal. I’m trying to just sit with the practice.

4. What’s one lesson you wish someone had told you earlier about the business of writing?

The pieces that people often respond to the most are often short and the ones that you didn’t spend a lot of time on. And I think that’s because those are often the most earnest. So don’t be afraid to let loose with a short little piece you wrote quickly and see how it goes

5. What’s your writing or creative routine like if you have one?

I write everywhere all the time. I have a lot of ideas and I feel like they’re always circling in my brain. So I’m always writing notes on my phone. I’m always writing in Google Docs. I’m writing at night. I’m writing in the morning. I’m writing on the bus. Some of them are just one-liner thoughts, and then I’ll be in the middle of dinner and have an idea for a piece that I want to write. Unfortunately for my friends when that happens I try to at least try to sketch it out quickly so that when I go back to it later the concept hasn’t escaped me.

6. Was there a moment you realized, “Wait… I can actually do this”?

Maybe this is the curse of being creative: I have never really felt like I have made it, right? There’s always something more to be done. There’s always another project to be tackled. But it was really in 2025 when my book debuted that I began to feel comfortable in my practice and my work. And so that’s when I said, “Oh, I can really do this. Even if it’s not what I imagined.”

7. What’s something you tried that didn’t work — and what did you learn from it?

I have tried so many things that didn’t work. In my entrepreneurship journey, I have launched products that failed. I have switched newsletter platforms three or four times because I’ve always felt like none of them really offered the tools that I need. However, I am quite enjoying Substack right now because it has more multimedia capability than others. I had a blog that I’m in the process of shutting down. The list goes on.

What I’ve learned from all of those failures is that there is value in trying. I wouldn’t be where I am today if I hadn’t tried multiple of those failed ventures. From each of them I learned a skill, I learned how to use an app, or I made a connection that I then needed later on.

8. How do you find or create opportunities for yourself as a writer?

I relentlessly self-promote which I know people hate, but who else is going to talk your shit if you don’t? I regularly pitch myself for opportunities and try to put myself in rooms that I probably have no business being in. But I also want to say that there’s a good amount of luck involved in success. I think for most people, even if we don’t acknowledge it. You have to be prepared and you have to do the work, but you do have to be in the right place at the right time

9. What’s the best investment you’ve made in your writing life (time, money, or energy)?

The best investment I’ve made in my writing life is a very cheap investment. It is an NFC tag and a free app called Foqos. Many folks have probably heard about Brick, which is the physical device that you tap that blocks you out of apps on your phone. Well, you can create a brick for yourself with an NFC tag and this app, and it’s nearly free. It’s so effective and really just calms the distractions in an increasingly distracted world.

10. Unfiltered & Fed is a bestselling publication here on Substack — what were the ways you grew it? Anything out of the ordinary, or surprising to you?

I have primarily grown my Substack following and my newsletter before that, through social media, because I am an influencer as well. I take snippets from my pieces that I think are provocative or emotional or just important to me, and I’ll record them talking to the camera. I’ll put a line at the end about how, if you want more of this conversation, you can find it on Substack. That’s been quite effective for me.

In some of the circles I have been engaged in, I’ve seen people scoff at social media and scoff at influencers and talk about how vapid the content creation space is. But it’s only as vapid as the content you’re engaging with. There is everything you would want to consume on social media and on the internet. You just have to find it. I’ve managed to curate an audience of people who are curious and who are readers. They love books. They probably subscribe to many Substacks. They love magazines. They love all of it.

11. What’s something you’re currently obsessed with — and how is it influencing your writing?

I read a romance book recently by Kennedy Ryan called “This Could Be Us,” and it’s about a divorcee finding herself again. She becomes an influencer. She has to learn how to trust herself again, and it chronicles her journey after her life fell apart. I really resonate with a lot of this book because that’s essentially what happened to me a few years ago. These ideas of rebirth and reinvention and self-trust and self-love have really stuck with me since. They’ve influenced the projects I’ve decided to take on for this year. They’ve made me more introspective, and will definitely show up in my writing in 2026.

Unfiltered & Fed

Unfiltered stories, unforgettable trips, and a community built around food, culture, and real connection.

By Anela Malik

👋 About Anela Malik, This Week’s Featured GuestStack Writer

Anela Malik is a creator, speaker, and the author of American Soul: The Black History of Food in the United States (National Geographic, 2025), a two-time NAACP Image Awards–nominated book and a love letter to the roots of American cuisine. On her platform, Anela explores identity, relationships, food, travel, and joy through accessible, authentic storytelling. She’s also the host of Our Block, a food and travel series she crowdfunded more than $65,000 for in 2025. A former U.S. diplomat turned creator, Anela bridges worlds, bringing cultural insight and bold perspective to the future of media.

You can find Anela on Instagram, buy her book, or subscribe to her Substack.

📚 Editor’s Note: Writing to Help Your Readers

is a great example of how service-driven writing actually works.

Through her bestselling Substack, Farmers Market Girl, Brick helps readers make the most of their farmers market hauls — turning seasonal produce into realistic weekly meal plans that reduce waste, support local farms, and make cooking feel more doable. It’s practical, repeatable, and genuinely useful, which is exactly why it resonates.

I love how clearly Brick thinks about structure and sustainability — from building repeatable formats to pairing income streams thoughtfully. This interview is a reminder that helping people solve a very specific, very real problem is still one of the strongest ways to build a writing career.

– Amy Suto

Editor & Curator of GuestStack

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✍️ From the Desk of Brick

1. Where’s your desk these days — and what does it look like?

I have a foldable office chair and tiny desk (actually tiny, unlike NPR…) in front of a large window in my Manhattan apartment. I mean it when I say tiny: It can only fit my Bluetooth keyboard and laptop, which means I have to keep my daily planner and trusty Muji gel ink pen on the windowsill next to me.

As with any typical NYC apartment, I don’t have much room for a large workspace, so a storageable at-home office is crucial for me, whether it’s comfortable or not.

2. How did you get the idea for your Substack “Farmers Market Girl”?

I’ve been a weekly NYC farmers market shopper for the last five years. However, I never found the time to post online about it — until the summer of 2025, when I began freelancing full-time. I first started with TikTok and Instagram videos about my farmers market hauls, and a few weeks in, I began receiving more comments requesting my meal plan breakdowns. And thus, my Substack was born.

The hope is that my Substack will teach people how to utilize local, seasonal produce, thereby encouraging them to shop with local farms, support small businesses, and reduce food waste.

3. What does “making writing your job” look like in your world right now?

In addition to running my Substack and other social media channels, I’m also a freelance (award-winning) travel reporter and a media/brand consultant. In my opinion, the key to being a successful freelancer is to diversify your income streams, especially amid the AI boom.

When I first started, I wrote down a list of all of my monthly expenses and streams of income. I then (somewhat) paired them up to make sure I had a clear understanding of what monthly work I needed to do to pay off my baseline expenses and contribute to my savings account.

4. What’s one lesson you wish someone had told you earlier about the business of writing?

When it comes to reporting, establish a line of communication with editors before you cold pitch. I’ve noticed higher response rates from editors whom I preemptively introduced myself to via email.

As for Substack, serviceability and consistency are key. Find a format that is easily repeatable (in my case, weekly meal plans) to prevent yourself from burning out. And make sure it offers information that your readers can learn from and integrate into their lives, ensuring they continue to come back to your Substack.

5. What’s your writing routine like — or do you even have one?

The more natural light I get during the workday, the more productive I am. As such, I churn out the bulk of my writing in the morning and early afternoon. The best part: My dog’s bed is right next to where I work.

6. Was there a moment you realized, “Wait… I can actually do this”?

When I got my first paid subscriber, just a few hours after I published my first Substack post. It was the moment I realized I was producing work that could actually help people — and that they’d be willing to pay for.

7. What’s something you tried that didn’t work — and what did you learn from it?

I tried cold pitching sponsored partnerships to companies before I had enough followers (as in, before I hit 10k followers on Instagram and TikTok). I rarely heard back, and it ended up being a waste of time.

In retrospect, I understand why: I was only reaching out to large companies that likely stood little to gain from working with an ultra-micro creator.

8. How do you find or create opportunities for yourself as a writer?

As a reporter, pitching editors is the best way to create your own opportunities. As a content creator, pitching sponsored content. In both fields, consistent outreach and relationship maintenance are critical.

9. What’s the best investment you’ve made in your writing life (time, money, or energy)?

Taking the time to establish and cultivate a group of freelance friends with whom I co-work with every week has been the best investment in my time and energy. Being a freelancer can be isolating — it’s important to build your own network of “coworkers” who can become a support system.

10. You run a bestselling publication here on Substack — what were the ways you grew it? Anything out of the ordinary, or surprising to you?

For better or for worse, building a social media presence was the key to becoming a bestselling publication. There is a direct correlation between the days I saw an uptick in views on Instagram and TikTok, and the days I received an influx of Substack subscribers.

My social media content generally offers a “sneak peek” of what’s available on my Substack, thereby driving a direct conversion.

11. What’s something you’re currently obsessed with — and how is it influencing your writing?

I’ve recently become obsessed with reading cookbooks as a nightly wind-down ritual and studying the menus of various restaurants around New York. Both provide a source of inspiration for diversifying my weekly meal plans.

The more I can learn about food, the better I can serve my readers.

Brick | farmers market girl

Farmers market recipes, meal planning, hauls, and tips.

👋 About Brick, This Week’s Featured GuestStack Writer

Brick, aka "the farmers market girl,” posts weekly Union Square Greenmarket hauls and meal plans. She helps demystify seasonal produce for home cooks with the goal of supporting local farms and small businesses.

You can find her on Instagram, TikTok, Substack, or by email at brickitybrick.cooks@gmail.com.

📚 Editor’s Note: You Have the Right to Write

is a true working writer.

For more than sixteen years — long before Substack made it fashionable — Milli showed up week after week to write honestly about women’s lives, bodies, and experiences. That commitment carried her from blogging to journalism, from columns to bestselling books, and eventually to her Substack, What About Women, where she’s finally able to monetize the kind of writing she’s been doing all along.

What I love about Milli’s story is its realism. There’s no overnight success myth here. There’s persistence. There’s doubt. There’s learning when to say no, when to focus, and when to trust that one strong voice is enough. Her reflections on time, permission, and creative guilt — especially for women — feel especially resonant.

This interview is a reminder that writing careers are built in steady increments. By showing up. By paying attention. And by giving yourself permission to face the desk fully — without apology.

– Amy Suto

Editor & Curator of GuestStack

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✍️ From the Desk of Milli Hill

1. Where’s your desk these days — and what does it look like?

I write on a laptop, either at my kitchen table or in bed, at my home in the middle of nowhere in Somerset, UK. I don’t have a designated writing space although I do fantasise about a lovely little hut in the woods at times! Or by the sea, that would be nice! On the other hand, my life with 3 kids and 2 dogs doesn’t really lend itself to isolation - if I did have a fancy cabin there would always be at least one of my entourage whining at the door to be let in. And in some ways I actually like writing under the pressure of a busy life - I find on those rare days when I finally do have acres of time for silent contemplation that I am actually capable of the most extravagant procrastination methods. I recently saw a cartoon that was advertising a Writer’s Cleaning Service with the concept that the client instructs you to write something and instead you clean their whole house from top to bottom. I’d be great at that.

2. What does “making writing your job” look like in your world right now, especially as it comes to making money as a writer?

Hahaha make money as a writer - oh, sorry! That was a serious question. OK! *clears throat nervously*

Well, I have been a writer for 16 years. Initially, I was a blogger, and made no money at all from it, then, I started doing freelance journalism and I’d get about £200 for an article, once or twice a month, if I was lucky. I could never figure out a way to monetise my blog, even though it had huge traffic and a great following.

One thing that I did do right - and this is basically my only piece of advice - is I kept showing up. Every week I wrote my blog. Every single week without fail. And then, once I got an ‘in’ with a newspaper - the women’s section of the Telegraph - I kept pitching and pitching, several mornings a week, until one day I noticed on their website I was listed as a columnist! I’ll never forget that moment, I was over the moon - even though it didn’t mean I was being paid more money, it still felt pretty cool. Then I did get a job as a columnist for over two years with an online magazine, and they paid me £250 a week, which was absolutely amazing. At the time I had very small children and that money was a lifeline. And that column eventually became my first book, The Positive Birth Book, and that book really WAS a game changer - it has sold over 100k copies, and I still get some royalties from it now, nearly a decade after it was published (2017).

A couple of years I got about 25k each year which, can you imagine, was the most exciting email to open, I nearly fell off my chair each time! Unfortunately, though, I think the success of that book gave me false hope, because that kind of sales / money from a book is unusual. And even though my subsequent books have all sold well, they have not got up into the same numbers. So the royalty statements for them are more like, ‘Yay we can have buns for tea”, rather than, “Yay I can pay my bills for a while”.

However, I am lucky that I have a great publisher in Harper Collins and they remain interested to hear new book ideas from me. What this means is that to keep making a living I have to keep coming up with new ideas, and pitching them, just like I do sometimes with newspaper or magazine articles. So making money as a writer means constantly keeping my finger on the pulse, listening in to the zeitgeist, and wondering if there’s an angle I can work with to bring my voice to a particular topic, whether that is for a book or an article.

This is where Substack has been a gamechanger, because finally, 16 years after starting my blog, I have found a way to monetise my blog, basically! The regular income I get from substack paid subs has completely changed my life, if I’m honest. I have about 350 paid subs now which is completely wonderful and amazing and I want to hug each and every one of them.

3. Your Substack What About Women advocates for women across a variety of issues. What inspired you to start your Substack, and what’s been the journey of writing for it so far?

Well in many ways I feel like I started my substack in 2010 on Blogger. And some readers have come with me from all the way back then, which is lovely. I think from back then to now, my blog / substack has always had a feminist element to it, advocacy for women, alongside pieces that are just really honest about what life as a woman is like. In 2010 those pieces were about early motherhood and toddlers, these days it’s more menopause and the invisibility of parenting teens - but the thread that runs through is summed up in the title, “What About Women?”. I try to centre women at all times. And what I love about blogging / Substack is the freedom to just get a fire in my belly about a topic and sit down straight away and write about it, uncensored, from the heart (and sometimes from the hip!).

4. You’re a bestselling author across multiple books on women’s health. What’s one lesson you wish someone had told you earlier about the business of writing?

That all writers doubt themselves and that doubt is a completely normal part of the writing process, whether fiction or non-fiction. If you know about the Grief Cycle (Denial - Anger - Depression - Bargaining - Acceptance) then you will already be familiar with the Writing Cycle: Inspiration (I have this great idea!) - Self-deprecation (I’m not a good enough writer to pull this off) - Procrastination (That cupboard needs organising) - Desperation (I am useless and this is doomed) - Celebration (I did it! What an absolute writing genius I am, hurrah) - and remember, it’s a cycle, so you will be going round and round this endlessly and forever if you choose writing as your job!

5. What’s your writing routine like — or do you even have one?

That depends what I have on my plate. When I was writing my most recent book, Ultra Processed Women, I was really up against the clock with a very tight deadline, so I literally wrote ‘every hour god sent’, from the moment I opened my eyes in the morning until the moment I closed them at night. My breaks were only for essentials like the school run, and I ate most of my meals at my laptop. Once I am into a topic like that, I have to do this, because the research is extensive, and it probably takes me about a fortnight or three weeks of intensely long days to produce about 5000 words. When I don’t have such a strict deadline I tend to just write when the inspiration strikes or a little bit each day. Writing for a job does sometimes mean writing when you really don’t have time or don’t feel like it, though. A deadline is a deadline.

I have recently been trying to turn my hand to fiction and I have been attending Writer’s Hour each morning from 8 til 9am, run by the London Writer’s Salon. I find this structure really helpful in making me show up to write, even when I feel lacking in inspiration or confidence. I do this from bed with a strong coffee, once all the kids are out of the door on their way to school and college! In a 50 minute session I can get about 500 to 800 words down, which isn’t much, but one thing I know from writing non fiction is that this does eventually add up to a book. How do you eat an elephant whole? In small chunks, basically!

6. Was there a moment you realized, “Wait… I can actually do this” in your career as an author and Substack writer?

I think the lovely thing about blogging - and now Substack - is that you get immediate feedback on your writing - and you can really see when a piece has resonated. So right at the start I would obsessively check my stats on Blogger and watch the number of views on a piece rising and rising - or not! Sometimes the pieces that you feel are a work of genius go absolutely nowhere, and the ones that you dash of with a glass of wine in less than an hour absolutely fly. But I don’t think there has been a singular moment when I’ve thought, “I can do this”. It’s just been a gradual process of getting positive feedback on my writing and that giving me the confidence to keep going.

Getting a book deal with Harper Collins was definitely a good moment though (and that was after a bidding war with Bloomsbury!). Those sorts of moments do give you a massive boost. But then, well in my case certainly, you tend to gravitate back to Imposter Syndrome!

7. What’s something you tried that didn’t work — and what did you learn from it?

Well, I set up a second Substack called Unprocess to write about all of the issues exposed by my most recent book about ultra processed food, and to help people with the practicalities of making food from scratch. I had an initial flurry of subscriptions but then that dried up, and I began to realise I had bitten off more than I could chew. I also realised that, whilst I loved writing that book, I wasn’t sure I was fully invested enough in the issue of food to commit to probably a few years of showing up to that substack every week. So - I hit pause on my paid subs and sent out an apology. That substack is still ‘mothballed’ and I need to make a decision about what to do about it. My hunch is that I probably shouldn’t have started it in the first place. And I think my instinct was telling me that at the time. But then I thought, maybe I am missing a trick here, maybe this could be really successful? And I still feel slightly conflicted over that because I can visualise Unprocess as a really successful substack. I’m just not sure I’ve got the time and the passion to take it to that place! And maybe I don’t have the skills either, because I really don’t like being on camera, making video, photos, reels etc.

So, what have I learnt? Well, you can’t do EVERYTHING. You are only one person. So it’s better to do one or two things really really well than to spread yourself too thin. I think that’s what I’ve learned?! I’m good at writing, and that’s enough.

8. How do you find or create opportunities for yourself as a writer?

In terms of journalism I still try to follow news stories and pitch when I have the time. If you stop doing this for a while - as I do when working intensely on a book, for example - you come back to find a lot of your contacts have moved on and you have to start over again building up those connections and relationships with editors. In terms of books, I have a good relationship with my agent and we talk fairly frequently about possible ideas for ‘the next book’. In terms of Substack, I just keep writing!

9. What’s the best investment you’ve made in your writing life (time, money, or energy)?

Time. 100%.

One day a long time ago when I was first blogging I noticed I was sitting at my desk slightly ‘twisted’, with half my torso facing the keyboard, and the other half still turned towards the room - kids, family, partner etc. And I corrected my position - by turning my body to the right to fully face my desk and my work. And I said to myself: You have the right, to write!

It’s really important, especially as women, I think, that we give ourselves permission to fully commit to our passions, our work, our talent, without feeling guilt, without feeling like we have to keep a part of ourselves twisted away from it and focused on other people’s needs.

Show up to the desk, to the keyboard, and keep showing up, without guilt or apology. Carve out that time for yourself. And you will get good at it. Simple!

10. What About Women is a bestselling publication here on Substack — what were the ways you grew it? Anything out of the ordinary, or surprising to you?

Well I think it’s grown partly from showing up and keeping at it here on substack for a few years, but also from the decade or so of showing up and keeping at it before that! As I’ve said, some readers have come with me to substack, or sought me out here because they’ve liked my work in the past. So, sixteen years of telling myself, ‘you have the right, to write!’, 16 years of showing up whether I felt like it or not, and then just trying to keep being creative and inventive and putting women first - and writing to the best of my ability. That’s not to say that you can’t come to substack fresh and grow something far more quickly, because that’s what originally happened with my blog. However long you have been writing, it’s simply a matter of deciding to write, making a plan and then sticking to it. Not really surprising I guess!

11. What’s something you’re currently obsessed with — and how is it influencing your writing?

Well I guess I am currently slightly obsessed with the idea of writing fiction, and I’m working on a novel for adults, and have a completed middle grade children’s book that I need to find time to work on some more and revise. So my ‘hobby’ if you like, is thinking about fiction and learning as much as I can about how to ‘do’ it. I’ve done a few courses, read a few books, joined a few groups etc! And I think I have learned a lot in the past few years of exploring fiction, although I still have no idea if I will ever be published in this genre. The positive effect is that when I return to my day job of non-fiction and journalism, it’s quite a relief to realise I do actually know what I’m doing!

WHAT ABOUT WOMEN

But what about women? Bestselling non-fiction author Milli Hill is here to ask that question.

By Milli Hill

👋 About Milli Hill, This Week’s Featured GuestStack Writer

Milli Hill is a writer and freelance journalist with a passion for reframing the narrative around women’s bodies. She is the author of the bestselling Positive Birth Book (2017), Give Birth like a Feminist (2019) and My Period (2021, for preteen girls). Her fourth book, Ultra Processed Women, was published by Harper Collins in July 2025, with a fifth book to follow in 2026. To date, her books have been translated into seven languages.

From 2012 to 2021 she founded and ran the Positive Birth Movement, a global network of antenatal discussion groups aimed at improving birth and giving women better access to support and information. Milli has spoken nationally and internationally about positive birth, obstetric violence and female autonomy in health.

As a journalist since 2013 she has been a columnist for the Telegraph women’s section and written for many publications including Mail, Guardian, Independent, ipaper and Mother&Baby, and has appeared on BBC Breakfast news, BBC Radio 4, BBC Radio 2, BBC 5 Live, talkradio, LBC and many leading podcasts.

She writes a bestselling substack, WHAT ABOUT WOMEN, and lives in rural Somerset with her partner, three children and two dogs.

📚 Buy Milli's Books Here

📚 Editor’s Note: From Attention to Intention

Dr. Shanté brings a depth to the internet that’s increasingly rare.

Through her bestselling Substack, Whole in Your Heart, she’s created a space grounded in emotional literacy, mental well-being, and the kind of reflective writing that asks readers to slow down and actually sit with their inner lives.

What makes this conversation especially compelling is Dr. Shanté’s clarity around ownership and intention. After years of building large audiences on social platforms, she made a deliberate shift toward a medium that allows for permanence, depth, and trust. Substack didn’t just give her a new distribution channel — it gave her a different relationship with her readers.

This interview is a masterclass in the difference between visibility and sustainability. It’s about treating writing as both service and strategy, honoring the process of becoming a writer, and understanding that attention alone is not the same thing as impact.

If you’re thinking about how to build something lasting — something that belongs to you — I think you’ll get a lot out of this.

– Amy Suto

Editor & Curator of GuestStack

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✍️ From the Desk of Dr. Shanté

1. Where’s your desk these days — and what does it look like?

My desk lives in my living room, which is large enough that I’ve divided it into distinct “live” and “work” zones. On one side of my desk is the part of life where I unwind… a (slightly oversized) modular couch, a bar cart, wall art, a mounted flatscreen, and a pair of mid-century modern buffet cabinets that I’ve repurposed as bookcases. On the other side is where I write.

My desk is a mahogany library desk with shelving on both sides. One set of shelves holds my collection of Funko Pop, Star Wars figurines (Grogu definitely appears more than once); the other shelves highlight my addiction to pocket journals, Post-it notes, index cards and highlighters. I’m fanatical about writing stuff down. Whatever makes it onto the screen has usually passed through my hands first.

During writing hours, my flat screen is my jukebox; I usually have YouTube playing Vince Guaraldi in the background. Jazz or Gershwin is my go-to for background noise. You’d be surprised what you can create with Rhapsody in Blue cranking in the background.

2. Your Substack readers get in touch with ways to better approach mental health. How did you get the idea to start it? What was that moment like?

My publication is called “Whole in Your Heart” and it is grounded in mental well-being and emotional literacy. I’ve been doing this work for over a decade. It started as a podcast, expanded into coaching, and grew into short form content. This work began because I noticed a disconnect between people’s intention to achieve goals and their subsequent inability to do so. My research led me to discover that the disconnect is often rooted in unhealed wounds, limiting beliefs, and unresolved trauma.

Two years ago, a video I posted went viral and my platform exploded with thousands of new followers. Then last year, a “funny” thing happened. TikTok went dark. It was a calculated, political move, and it reminded me how precarious it is to build on land you don’t own. In two years time, my social media following has gained over 200K followers, and in the blink of eye, a flip of a switch, it could all disappear… without warning, without any consideration of the work I’ve done to build that following.

That’s when I knew I needed to pivot. I started researching Medium and Substack and came across some solid YouTube reviews of the platform (thank you, Amy Suto). Substack offered three things I was actively seeking: portability, security, and credibility. My subscriber list belongs to me. I have a direct line to my readers. And it positioned my work in a different light, not as something to scroll past, but to sit with. It gave my audience a way to discover the depth of my work in written form. TikTok came back the next day, but by the following week, I had found a new home on Substack.

3. What does “making writing your job” look like in your world right now?

Writing isn’t my main profession, but I’m on my way. I’ve had book writing in my sights for a long time. I self-published a decade ago, but I’ve evolved so much since then. That experience taught me valuable lessons like how much it actually costs to get your work out there, and the sheer volume of marketing and selling required just to break even.

These days, writing as a job is two-fold.

First, I write as an act of service. It’s my “job” to show up even when it doesn’t pay the rent, because my work gives voice, language, and support to people who struggle to name their experiences, their hardships, and their truths.

Second, having paid subscribers is a completely novel experience for me. When the first few subscriptions came in, I felt like Sally Field: “You like me! You really like me!” But beyond that emotional validation, it serves a practical purpose; it’s proof of concept.

This year, I’ll be querying literary agents, and having a paying audience shows publishers that readers are invested in my work. I’d like to spend the balance of the year finishing the manuscript and securing my first traditional book deal.

4. What’s one lesson you wish someone had told you earlier about the business of writing?

Followers are not dollars, and readers aren’t necessarily buyers.

I have people come to me all the time like, “OMG! You have almost 300K followers!” And I guess I’m supposed to feel proud of that, but I’m actually intimidated by it. I’m an introvert. I don’t make viral content. I make content, and sometimes it goes viral, which is an unintended byproduct of consistently showing up and speaking truth.

Having a large following is as a vanity metric for many, but for me, it’s humbling. “Wow... you could have been anywhere in the world, and you chose to be here with me.” The world is incredibly noisy. There’s no shortage of content, voices, or opinions. To create something that cuts through and finds purchase is both incredible and improbable.

But having a message that lands is not the same as having a message that sells.

I’ve had to learn to gently weave in calls to action when I’m promoting something. You have to invite people to take the next step with you. I’ve seen writers complain that their publisher didn’t “push” their work hard enough, and I’ve seen publishers push back that the writer also has a role as a seller. Both are right.

Attention doesn’t automatically convert to action. Building an audience is one skill. Turning that audience into customers, subscribers, or book buyers? That’s a completely different muscle.

5. What’s your writing routine like — or do you even have one?

I am a scribbler, a jotter, a brainstormer. When I have a scrap of a thought, a word, a phrase, a fragment… I have to write it down. I keep a pocket journal. If you flipped through it, it would look completely nonsensical. There’s no key. No codex. It’s a physical representation of how my brain works: a cacophony of thought, everything, everywhere, all at once.

But when I sit with it, I start to make sense of it. Where was I going with this?

Having a routine is actually what intimidated me about launching a publication on Substack. A universal truth about content creation is that once you have an audience, you have to keep feeding the meter. I didn’t know if I had it in me to sit down every week and crank something out. But once I started, I realized I had a LOT to say, much more than I could express in the limited space of a 2-minute reel or YouTube short.

I schedule my writing around my teaching schedule at my college. I do my best work between 10 a.m. and 3 p.m. That’s when I have peak energy and creativity. And I do my best writing away from home. Even though I’m an empty nester, my desk at home isn’t just for writing; it’s also for my work as an educator and a coach. I need physical separation to shift into writer mode.

My favorite place to write is the library. There are some BEAUTIFUL libraries and Athenaeums in this country: Boston, Cincinnati, Providence. And I love to write in the rain. I’m a pluviophile. Rain begs for creation. After securing a book deal, I plan to schedule one weekend away per month to write in a beautiful space, ideally with a window, a storm, and nowhere else to be.

6. Was there a moment you realized, “Wait… I can actually do this”?

There’s a difference between viewers and readers. Just because I had a significant social media following, didn’t mean people wanted to read my work. Scrolling is passive and low stakes. Reading is an investment of time and focused attention. There was no guarantee that my followers would want to take that leap.

I posted my first Substack, on a Sunday night, January 26^th with no launch plan, no fanfare and nary a subscriber. Five days later, I had 300. I felt like Gerard Butler: This is Sparta!

I had zero frame of reference for how long it takes to grow on this platform. I didn’t know if my experience was typical or an anomaly, but it made me feel like, wait a minute… I might be on to something here. When I earned the bestseller badge eight months later, it felt like a fever dream. Oprah says, “your life is always speaking to you.” I feel like Substack is life’s way of saying that I’m doing exactly what I’m supposed to do and I’m right where I need to be.

7. What’s something you tried that didn’t work in your journey as a writer and educator — and what did you learn from it?

Two things stand out.

First, I can’t write prescriptively. I’d love to be that writer who has a content strategy with all my topics laid out on the calendar and scheduled for publication. But 2025 was a tough year for many people, for many reasons. My platform is about mental health, the bedrock of which is empathy. My work requires me to read the room. And I can’t show up like, “Hey! Let’s talk neuroscience...” when people are reeling from civil unrest, massive layoffs, and social discord. So, many times this year, I went “off script” and wrote what I knew many people were feeling. It may have cost me some subscribers. It may have gained me some. But it’s hard for me to stay “neutral” when I know there are elephants in the room.

Second, I’ve had to confront my own discomfort around charging for my writing. I’m still learning how to balance what’s offered freely with what lives behind a paywall. What additional benefits do I offer that won’t exhaust me, will add value, and are worth the investment?

I tried creating a podcast for paid subscribers using Substack’s podcast feature. The listening numbers weren’t great. It was a lot of extra work, and while valuable, I don’t think it was the best use of my time if people weren’t engaging with it. Listening is a different dynamic than reading; what works in one medium doesn’t automatically translate to another.

I also struggle with promoting my writing on social media. I’m still working on a seamless way to translate my long-form work into the short-form content I create. I wrestle with striking the balance between Shanté the Content Creator and Shanté the Writer, and how to best serve both audiences without burning out. But what’s absolutely working is authenticity; it is far more appreciated by my subscribers than a canned post that I scheduled two weeks ago.

8. How do you find or create opportunities for yourself as a writer and educator?

I’ve been a solo act for a really long time. And what that’s cost me is time to think strategically about alliances, partnerships, communities, or where I’d like my work to live. Writing as a vocation is a bit like entrepreneurship; you can spend so much time working in the business that you forget to work on the business. I’ve been building the plane while flying it, which has led to some great invitations like podcasts, sponsorships, speaking opportunities, but not always with intention. This year, I’m moving differently.

Instead of setting goals, I created a set of questions to guide my thinking. One of them is, “What connections would I like to make?” It prompts me to think about who I want to be in community with and who I want to learn from. This year, I’m being intentional about surrounding myself with other writers and thinkers, both as a consumer of their work and as a contributor to the conversation.

I’ve learned that opportunity doesn’t always have to be monetary. Sometimes it’s being invited into rooms or asked to sit at tables. Those invitations can pay dividends down the road: in relationships, in visibility, in doors that open because someone remembered your name at the right time.

9. What’s the best investment you’ve made in your writing life (time, money, or energy)?

Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott was a great read. Not only is she hilarious, but that book does a brilliant job of unpacking the difference between being a writer and being a published author. Some people are chasing the outcome and are less invested in the process of becoming a good writer. I’ve been teaching English composition for almost 20 years, and I know all too well the value and the arduousness of drafting. But there’s real value in that work.

1000 Words by Jami Attenberg was also transformative for me. I love processes and systems, and Jami’s approach, 1,000 words a day for two weeks, seemed challenging but doable. It put a framework around carving out the time and hitting the output needed to actually get a draft completed.

Beyond books, last year, I invested in a course from Luvvie Ajayi on how to write and structure your book proposal. I never thought of a book proposal as a business plan for your book, but that’s exactly what it is, and it was invaluable to see what that process looks like and how to present myself and my work to agents. This year, I signed up for a querying workshop with Eric Smith, author and founder of Neighborhood Literary. His workshop includes feedback on the first 10 pages of my query which is insanely valuable at this stage in my career.

10. Whole in Your Heart is a bestselling publication here on Substack — what were the ways you grew it? Anything out of the ordinary, or surprising to you?

Consistency is my superpower. Getting motivated to do something and staying motivated to do it are two separate things. When I was researching Substack, I saw a writer say, “Treat it like it’s your job.” And that shifted something for me. I’d never pull a “no call-no show” at work because I have a responsibility to the college. Likewise, I have a responsibility to the readers.

When relationships are new, they need the most attention because we’re establishing our rhythm, our chemistry, our ebb and flow—all the things that make us, us. And that’s how I treat my Substack, like it’s a new community.

Also, the Notes feature on Substack is my jam. It’s perfect for people like me who already have a ton of short-form content. It’s a way of introducing people to my work and giving them just enough to be curious. I’ve gotten hundreds of subscribers from posting a 2-minute video of me reading an excerpt of a recently published article or sharing a video on a socially relevant topic.

11. What’s something you’re currently obsessed with — and how is it influencing your writing?

I am falling back in love with analog. I spent last year building my library, reading physical books. This year, I subscribed to the print version of The New Yorker, to reacquaint myself with sitting down and enjoying the tactile pleasure of turning pages and spending longer periods of time away from a screen.

Whenever I visit a new city, I make a point to visit their libraries and independent bookstores. I always find inspiration there. Last year, I visited Toronto, and their public library has an entire dedicated room to the work of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. I have always loved Sherlock Holmes, and I got to hold an original copy of A Study in Scarlet. Are you kidding me?!

Being in community with books and readers reminds me that my ideas have a place on the shelf. Every time I visit a bookstore, I take a selfie in front of the section where I know my book will live. It’s a manifestation of sorts and a motivator to get back to it… to keep writing, to keep thinking, to keep being curious.

My favorite reads last year were:

• Six of Crows by Leigh Bardugo

• Crooked Kingdom by Leigh Bardugo

• Half a Soul by Olivia Atwater

• The Midnight Library by Matt Haig

• The Echo of Old Books by Barbara Davis

• Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt

Recently, I introduced the idea of SLOWBOARDING into the New Year. Slowboarding is resisting the pressure to set goals and metrics at the top of the year and instead focus on who we’re becoming instead of what we’re producing… an invitation to focus on feeling better instead of doing more.

I created a guided workbook to help people move with intention rather than urgency, and to cultivate practices that help them come back to themselves through six practices: Talking, Hobbies, Experiences, Body Movement, Arts, and Reading. It’s called THE BAR. People can download it here.

Use the Code: RAISETHEBAR for a discount

👋 About Dr. Shanté, This Week’s Featured GuestStack Writer

Dr. Shanté Holley is an English professor, writer, and cultural commentator whose work sits at the intersection of literature, mental health, and social change. With over 20 years of experience teaching literature, psychology, and sociology, she brings a rare ability to connect big ideas to everyday lives and spark conversations that transform.

A bestselling writer on Substack and a dynamic presence on social media with more than 350K followers, Dr. Shanté is known for turning complex topics like resilience, trauma, and healing into powerful storytelling. Her accessible, engaging insights have reached millions and resonate across diverse audiences.

She has partnered with national organizations including the American Red Cross, AARP, SAMHSA, the Ad Council, and the Immigrant Justice Corps on campaigns promoting mental wellness and community connection. Her commentary has been featured in Essence Magazine and by the NAACP, and she serves on the Board for Belonging Through Art, an organization dedicated to reducing loneliness and fostering positive social connections through art.

Dr. Shanté is also a prolific podcaster with three successful shows that collectively boast hundreds of thousands of downloads, offering valuable resources for individuals seeking guidance on personal growth, mindset, and healing. A sought-after speaker, she delivers high-value content on emotional resilience, trauma recovery, and self-care at engagements across the country.

Her commitment to mental wellness extends to her academic work, where she was a Fulbright Scholarship Finalist for her research on Blaxit: The Interconnectedness of Racial Trauma, Healing, and Black Immigration to Portugal; a groundbreaking project exploring the intersections of cultural identity, trauma, and healing.

Whether in the classroom, behind the mic, or on stage, Dr. Shanté brings intellectual depth, cultural fluency, and warmth to every dialogue. She is committed to helping individuals heal, grow, and thrive.

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