Hi writers,
In 2024, a client flew me to Vienna to work on their book. I stayed in a gorgeous rooftop flat and ate schnitzel with my client’s family. And yes, I have the obligatory photo in front of the State Opera.
That same year, I had lunch with a client in Singapore. I wandered Gardens by the Bay and paid $9 for a pour-over (Singapore is just as expensive as SF, it turns out!)
The next spring, I went to a writing retreat in a hundred-year-old farmhouse in Tuscany. Olive trees, fresh honey on the breakfast table, long walks between writing sessions. The air smelled like lavender and wood smoke.
I get to live like this on a writer’s income.
Here’s how: I delegated.
I hired people to handle the parts of my business that weren’t writing. I brought on assistants and and social media managers. They cost a lot. But they bought back the hours I wanted for my own creative projects.
I wrote a whole chapter about buying back your time in Write for Money and Power, my book which I keep priced at 99 cents on purpose.
These days I spend most of my time here at home in San Francisco. Morning light hits Sutro Tower through the bay windows of our old Victorian, and I can walk to a national park with an insanely good Yuzu matcha latte in hand.
I take tennis lessons at my home courts in the Golden Gate Park. I read 80+ books a year. On Tuesday afternoons, I teach a Yin yoga class priced at a sliding scale to make yoga accessible for my local community. And my next novel, Let Me Be Your Ghost, comes out November 18.
That’s what my virtual business buys me: an abundance of time for analog things.
✍️ You don’t need to hire a team anymore
I know a lot of you are tired of posting on social media to sell your books or bring readers to your Substack. You’d rather be writing. (Same.)
Marketing still has to happen, because people have to find your work before they can read and love it. But if you can’t hire help, you can now do a lot of it with a few tools and automations, for less than $100 a month.
I tested it this summer. My husband Kyle Cords and I launched a brand-new Instagram account for CozyJobs, the jobs platform we built together. It reached 1.1 million views in its first 30 days, and the weekly routine now takes me about an hour.
🤫 The part I saved for last
Yes, some of those tools are AI. I know how some of you feel about that.
When these tools first showed up, I wrote a whole newsletter essay making fun of them. (”These tech bros think they can replace us? Idiots.”) So I understand the anger.
Using them for a few years changed my mind, with one rule. The ideas, the stories, and the final yes stay mine. The tools handle the chores around them, like editing videos, captions, scheduling, and reading the numbers — I would have already outsourced these tasks to others, so I don’t mind AI handling them instead.
Let the robot schedule the posts. You write the book only you can write.
🗓️ Come to my free class on October 13
On Tuesday, October 13 at 9 AM PT (12 PM ET), I’m teaching a free 45-minute Lightning Lesson on Maven: How I Turned Instagram Views Into Customers With AI. It’s for writers who want to sell books, grow a Substack, or build a creative business without living on social media.
I’ll show you:
What gets views, and what actually brings in readers and customers
How to keep your posts sounding like you
My whole tool stack, what each tool costs, and where I still make every call
Can’t make it live? Register anyway. Maven sends the recording to everyone who signs up.
See you on the 13th. Bring your hardest marketing question (and your coffee).
-Amy
P.S. You can keep AI tools out of your writing completely. Draft by hand, on a typewriter, however your process works. But let the tools take the boring, rote stuff off your plate, so you have more time for the creative work itself.