Hi writers,
I was visiting Paris when my inbox got out of hand. People kept emailing me to ghostwrite their memoirs or edit their books, I was fully booked, and so were the writers I’d normally pass them to. So I put all of those leads in one email, added a handful of good gigs I’d spotted on LinkedIn, and sent it to all of you.
You were obsessed with it. That email became the Make Writing Your Job job board.
I told that story to Simon Owens on his podcast, The Business of Content, where he interviews media entrepreneurs about how they build their businesses. The episode is out now:
It’s also on Spotify, and Simon writes about the media business on his Substack.
💵 How we pick what goes on the board
We still run the board on the idea behind that first email. We don’t list every job on the planet. We do the first round of filtering so you don’t lose an afternoon to content mills, and we hunt for the oddly specific gigs that only exist for a day, like a LinkedIn post from someone hiring a video game writer that’s gone by the next morning.
Applying was half my job back when I freelanced full-time, so the least we can do is make the hunting faster.
Some of my favorite stories come from clients who hire from the board again and again. One of them brought the developmental editor they found through us out to their place in Portugal to work on the book together.
🎥 Why I stepped off the Hollywood ladder
TV seasons used to run 22 episodes. Then 10. One of the last shows I worked on was 5 episodes, and it’s hard to justify a whole room of writers for 5 scripts.
When I told my managers I wanted to write a novel, the first thing out of their mouths was that novels take too long. Meanwhile, between shows, I was moonlighting as a memoir ghostwriter for NBA players and Olympians, who flew me out to work on their books and paid me far better than Hollywood did.
I didn’t want to be a writer in my 30s working as another writer’s assistant. So I went where I got to pick my clients and write my own books.
📕 The short story that got me a memoir client
I got my first memoir job before I had a TV credit, off a short story I’d posted on Medium. I didn’t have a published book or a finished manuscript. From then on, people would read my pieces, see themselves in them, and ask if I could write their books in that voice.
Around the time I made my first $10,000 freelancing, I wrote a blog post for my friends in Hollywood who were assistants. The gist: we don’t have to be bartenders between shows. We can use the skills we already have and get paid better, without braving LA traffic. That post is still the thread running through everything we do here.
💻 Also in the episode
How 6 years of NaNoWriMo taught me to sit down and write in a 10-minute gap
Why I plan my year in seasons and protect 4 to 6 hour blocks for deep work
Why I’m serializing my upcoming romantic thriller novel Let Me Be Your Ghost chapter by chapter before it comes out November 18
My take on personal brand, which I described to Simon as “not as a kaleidoscope of many different things but a singular perspective”
If that first Paris email sounds like something you’d want in your inbox every week, the job board comes with a paid subscription, along with our grants, contests and residencies list and our calls for pitches.
Thank you to Simon for having me. If you’re curious how media businesses make money, his newsletter is worth a follow.
-Amy