✍️ The Lie Keeping Writers Broke: The Opening Chapter of Write for Money and Power

A sneak peek from my upcoming book, out January 12, 2026.

If you’ve been hanging out with me lately, you know that I recently finished my new book (!!!) out January 12th, 2026. You can pre-order and claim a special gift here.

You can also grab it straight from one of your favorite retailers below:

• Pre-order from Amazon, Bookshop, Barnes & Noble, or if you’re ordering from the UK you can grab it from Amazon UK here.

Enjoy the excerpt below :)

Chapter One: The Lie That Keeps Writers Broke

Picture this: Rome, 1508. The Sistine Chapel is a dusty construction zone. Fresco pigment thickens the air. Scaffolds groan. And Michelangelo, paint-streaked, exhausted, allegedly cranky as hell, isn’t there working because of divine inspiration. He’s there because the Pope backed up a (proverbial) Brinks truck.

He didn’t work for “exposure.” He wasn’t “grateful just to be chosen.” The Vatican paid him 3,000 ducats, the modern equivalent of hundreds of thousands of dollars, and he negotiated every damn detail.¹ Payment schedules. Assistants. Materials. Timeline. The man even submitted line-item receipts.

Now stop and let that sink in: the artist we’ve been told was perpetually starving was operating as a contractor, not a beggar.

By the time he died, Michelangelo had accumulated a fortune that, by some conservative reconstructions, would be worth more than £30 million (over $35 million USD) in today’s money.² That number doesn’t square with the image you’ve been sold of the tortured genius eating stale bread in a rundown candlelit room. Instead of being a beggar, Michelangelo was stacking gold like a Medici side hustle, using his image to his advantage.

The starving artist narrative didn’t start in the Bohemian cafés of Paris. It was PR, and you were never the customer. You’ve always been the product.

How I Got Suckered Into the Lie

I was twenty-two, underpaid, triple-shot latte in hand, working phones at a rising literary agency in Hollywood—headset on, heart cracked open with ambition. This was supposed to be the first rung of the ladder on the way to my dream. I had done everything right: graduated from USC’s screenwriting program, landed an assistant job inside the system, and spent my days juggling call sheets and lunch orders for the power players who made the dreams happen.

From the outside, I looked “in.” From the inside, I saw the rot. Even as I moved on from that job and got deeper into the industry, I saw established writers unable to pay their credit cards. Some lost their homes in the turmoil of industry politics and show cancellations, even if they had storied credits and had contributed to fancy shows that raked in money for the executives running the show.

The strategy was simple: keep writers dazzled by proximity to power. Give them a backlot badge, a fancy title, a tiny windowless office with a named parking spot as a consolation prize. Dangle the illusion of prestige just long enough to keep them broke, grateful, and obedient.

It worked, and now the income of writers in Hollywood is crumbling with the outdated system. According to the Writers Guild of America, screenwriter earnings and employment declined by 6% during the first three quarters of 2024, and the number of working screenwriters decreased by 15%, compared to 2022.³

I had a front-row seat to the collapse long before the trades caught up. One of the most surreal moments came while I was working on a glossy, high-profile series. Our writers’ room was in a mansion in the Hollywood Hills with marble countertops, panoramic views of Los Angeles, and catered lunches on the patio. It felt like we’d all made it.

And then the show got canceled.

Just like that, the illusion cracked. The contracts ended. The emails stopped. And every writer in that room—people with real credits, real talent, years in the game—began scrambling to figure out how they were going to make rent, pay for health insurance, keep their kids in daycare. The despair hit fast and quiet. We threw some big parties on our way out of that mansion, but I saw the fear underneath the champagne toasts.

Because when you don’t control distribution, you don’t control your livelihood. That wasn’t a bug in the system. That was the system working exactly as designed.

You can have the Hollywood Hills zip code, the buzzy show, the glittering IMDb page—and still lose everything overnight. The dream isn’t real if you can’t own it. And what most writers think is power is just rented status. Real power is building something that doesn’t disappear when the mansion empties out.

I met the writers I thought I wanted to become. Quietly, behind closed doors, they told me what it actually cost. The medical debt. The NDAs. The creative compromises. The ten years it took to get one pilot made, and then how the network buried it.

Meanwhile, your team all takes a cut of your earnings, even if you get a job yourself. Studios and publishers are constantly looking to trim budgets, and writers are the easiest line item to squeeze because of the damaging starving artist lie you’ve accepted. They’ll steer you toward the project with the widest audience appeal, not the one that actually lights you up. Because their incentives aren’t yours.

Some of the highest-paid creatives in Hollywood can’t get their own projects made. Francis Ford Coppola reportedly had to borrow over $100 million against his own wine business to fund his movie Megalopolis.⁴ If he has to mortgage his wine empire to chase autonomy, what does that say about the rest of us?

Meanwhile, the studios run Hollywood accounting so a blockbuster that grosses hundreds of millions can legally post a loss, stiffing the creatives on net-profit bonuses.⁵

No More Waiting

You’re told to wait patiently for a book deal, a staff job, a producer who finally “gets it.” And in that waiting room, your audience is slipping through your fingers. Your best work collects dust in a sad file on your computer while you hope someone on a studio lot returns your email.

I’ve been inside the machine you think you want to be part of. And I’m telling you: it’s not built for you. It’s not here to serve you. The people within it might be kind, even brilliant—but the system itself is not designed to make you rich, powerful, or free. It’s meant to benefit the people at the top.

It’s designed to keep you grateful. It’s designed to keep you waiting.

And if you think it’ll all be worth it once your show gets made or your book hits shelves, remember that traditional publishing often takes two to three years to launch a manuscript. Screenwriting timelines are worse. You could sell a pilot tomorrow and wait five years for it to air, if it ever does. 99.9% of purchased scripts are killed before they reach a film set. Sometimes your story might even be taken away from you and given to another creator to make instead.

If you want money and power, you cannot afford to give your voice, your future, and your platform to people who see you as a line on a spreadsheet.

And if you’re still not convinced, that’s okay. You may need to walk the road and see for yourself if it’s worth it. Who knows? Maybe the slot machine will turn in your favor. Maybe you’ll get the big deal, the dream job, the New Yorker review (which, by the way, you can still get if you self-publish your book). But even if you win, you still don’t own your audience.

And when the machine gets tired of you, or the project tanks, or your name gets overwritten, what’s left? You’ve bought lottery tickets with your precious time and energy, and if the odds aren’t in your favor you have nothing to show for it.

No email list. No reader connection. No platform you control.

I’ve seen it happen. I’ve lived it up close. And I’m here writing this because I don’t want that fate for you. You don’t need to beg the machine to feed you anymore.

You can build something of your own. You can own both your words and the revenue, reach, and resonance they create.

You just have to stop seeking approval from gatekeepers and start building.

The Middleman Math

Let’s talk about the math they hope you never run. Because once you do, the whole house of cards starts to wobble.

Middlemen aren’t just gatekeepers. They’re margin-thieves dressed like opportunity. And they count on your creative dream blurring your financial vision.

Time to fix that.

TV Staffing: The Mirage of Momentum

Staff writer on a hit show? Sounds glamorous. And for a few months, it might be.

Minimum pay on a WGA contract (as of 2025) starts around $5,069 a week. Not bad, until you realize:

• You’re only paid during the room’s duration (maybe 10 weeks, but the actual length of a writers’ room has shrunk in recent years due to cost-cutting measures at studios).

• You’ll owe 10% to your agent, 5% to your lawyer, and maybe another 10-15% to your manager, which comes off your gross earnings (aka: your pre-tax cash).

• Your checks can be delayed months while your agency assistant fires off endless “just checking on status” emails to business affairs.

• Your intellectual property, otherwise known as IP? Gone. You don’t own what you write, the network does.

• Oh, and that deal you signed? It likely includes exclusivity or a first-position clause, meaning if another show wants to hire you, you can’t say yes unless the scheduling aligns perfectly—or unless the original show releases you, which they often won’t.

So yes, $50,000 for 10 weeks might hit your account. And then? You could go 12, 18, even 24 months (or longer!) without another staff job. You still don’t own your rights, your audience, or control over your destiny.

That’s not a business model. That’s a very fancy cage. Power lies with the person who holds the keys to your dream, and if you don’t take them back, you’ll be begging for every step in your writing career journey.

Book Deals? More Like Book Debt

Meanwhile, the publisher owns your copyright and decides whether your book gets a paperback, an audiobook, or a pulse. (Spoiler alert: just because your book is being published with a big imprint does not mean you’ll ever see it in hardcover!)

I know what you’re thinking: book deals are heralded as the goal of many writers. A six-figure advance feels like champagne money. Pop the cork, right? Slow down: that check isn’t a paycheck. It’s a liability stamped “recoupable,” which is industry speak for debt. Until your royalty statements claw back every dollar, you’re working off the balance like a junior associate pulling all-nighters for the partners upstairs. Not to mention that a big book deal trumpeted as seven figures can dribble out in five installments over four years while 15% flies to the agent before your taxes hit.⁶ ⁷

Even with a $50,000 advance, which sounds great on paper, you might end up with less than $30,000 after your agent and taxes. Then subtract your launch budget, because you’ll be footing the bill for personal publicity and extra book marketing unless you’re a marquee name.

And if that book doesn’t “earn out”? Good luck getting a bigger advance next time.

Think of the book deal contract as a bank note with your talent as collateral. The publisher takes a mortgage out on your future pages. In return, you get a lump sum now, but they now own the house. Miss a deadline or ask for a structural rewrite and they can hold the next payment hostage. They can even call in the loan by demanding repayment if you walk away. That’s not freedom. That’s indenture wrapped in a congratulatory email.

The recoupment math rarely lands in the author’s favor. Most books never “earn out.” Returns, discounts, and confusing royalty math drain your momentum before the book even breaks even. If the book falls short, you may keep the advance, but good luck negotiating a higher one next time. Your sales track record is tattooed on your ISBN for every editor to see.

Meanwhile, you’ve traded your autonomy for the privilege of being someone else’s employee. Cover design you hate? Tough. Marketing plan that consists of a single post from the publishing house account? Smile and reshare. Launch date shoved a year and a half out because a celebrity memoir cut the line? Send another grateful email and shuffle your PR roadmap.

Contrast that with self-publishing. Upfront costs are yours, but so are the royalties, the rights, and the timeline. You decide whether to price your book at $4.99 or $24.99. You choose the audiobook narrator. You pivot on a Tuesday because the market shifts. No overpaid executive can kick your work into oblivion.

Understand that a book deal is book debt, just an unsecured loan with creative strings and a velvet-lined cage. If you’re chasing wealth and freedom, independent publishing (otherwise known as self-publishing) is the way to go, but we’ll cover how to approach publishing like a creative entrepreneur later in this book. This is the path where you—not an overworked publishing exec in Midtown decrying the downfall of the martini lunch—hold the deed to your writing life.

The Indie Path: Where the Math Actually Works

Let’s look at the flipside: the ownership path. This is a trio of creative, profitable business models that let you take full control. Self-publishing. Paid newsletters. Freelancing. Each one gives you leverage, speed, and ownership in a way traditional systems simply don’t. We’ll go deeper into all three later in this book—but for now, here’s a quick overview of how they work and why they’re worth building your creative business around.

Self-Published Book

You keep the copyright. You decide the timeline, price point, cover, and content.

Print-on-demand platforms like Amazon KDP or IngramSpark take approximately 30% and in exchange, they:

• Print and ship your book.

• Handle returns.

• Deliver global distribution on major book buying platforms.

• Offer distribution to libraries, bookstores, and universities.

• Allow you to see your sales in real-time.

They don’t own your work. They don’t touch your ownership. And if you want to scale up later and print in bulk with your own fulfillment setup? You can, and you’ll reduce your per-unit costs, write those expenses off, and keep even more margin. Yes, they take somewhere around 30% depending on your setup with them. But they do the heavy lifting, and they don’t sit on your rights. In this case, you’re outsourcing logistics without sacrificing ownership.

Paid Newsletter

• You own your audience and your email list is yours forever.

• You control cadence, topic, offer, and pricing.

• Fees range from 2.9% to approximately 10% depending on the hosting and payment platform, and you get paid fast. Sometimes on the same day.

No agent. No exec. No delay. Just value, offered directly, and money in your account before the espresso finishes dripping.

Freelance Writing

Unlike Hollywood or trad-pub contracts, you write the terms.

• Want 80% upfront? Ask for it.

• Want a kill fee and two-round revision limit? Add it.

• Want to work async from a yacht off the coast of Croatia? Cool—it’s your contract.

Freelancing lets you:

• Set your own rates.

• Choose your clients.

• Scale based on your bandwidth, not a studio’s budget.

• Cancel or renegotiate terms on your schedule.

When you understand the value you bring, you can build a career around non-refundable deposits and flexible deliverables—not begging a studio for the rest of your check 18 months after you turned in a script they never shot.

Why the Lie Persists

The starving artist myth survives because it benefits the middlemen. Here’s how:

• Scarcity Economics. If writers believe income is about “luck,” they undercharge on principle. They work for “exposure.” They treat pay as a bonus, not a baseline.

• Romance of Suffering. Starvation is rebranded as purity. Poverty becomes a badge of honor. As if your rent is supposed to be paid in vibes. Why do you think Hollywood and the publishing industry portray so many writers as broke and starving in a way that paints the suffering as romantic?

• Institutional Bloat. Layers of agents, assistants, retreats, and catered lunches have to get paid. Guess who absorbs the cost of your agent’s $100 lunch with one of a hundred network execs they might meet with that year? Or a quarterly retreat for the office? (Spoiler: it’s you.)

Michelangelo laughs from his marble tub.

Your Wake-Up Call

It took me years to realize that words are leverage. Writing is capital. Your stories are real business assets. And when you treat your career like you’re the CEO of your destiny, the whole damn game flips.

• You can self-publish your next book and grow a reader base so loyal they sell it for you, one ecstatic review and social post at a time.

• You can start a paid newsletter about the topics you never shut up about and turn it into a six-figure subscription business just by being yourself.

• You can ghostwrite a memoir for a high-profile founder and earn more from one book than most authors see in a decade, allowing you to fund your freedom and creative projects.

But only if you let go of the discount-dance mentality.

You are not a typist. You are not a starving poet waiting for a call from an agent who stopped reading slush piles a decade ago.

You’re a strategist. A tastemaker. A founder of a one-person writing empire if you choose to be. More on this in Chapter Eight: “Becoming a Creator CEO.”

What Comes Next

In the chapters ahead, we’re going to torch every leftover scarcity script they slipped into your head and replace it with systems, strategies, and numbers that build real wealth.

We’ll build a money engine that pays your rent, your private chef, and your month in Tuscany. I’ll teach you how to build writing-based revenue engines that let you eat croissants in Paris at noon on a Tuesday without scrounging for time off.

We’ll define what power means—not in fake titles, but in time freedom. Creative power. The ability to live, work, and thrive on your own terms.

Because the scandal isn’t that writers want money and power.

The scandal is how long we’ve been told that we don’t deserve them.

Power Move: Your Myth Detox Starts Now

Right now, write down the biggest number you’ve ever allowed yourself to imagine earning in a year from your writing.

Got it?

Now triple it.

That tight feeling in your chest? That’s the myth leaving your body.

The rest of this book is about how to make that number feel like a warm-up.

Let’s begin.

Amy’s Field Notes: A Few Words from My Brownstone Era

In November of 2024, I spent most of the month in New York City living in a brownstone in Chelsea, right across the street from Brooklyn Bagel, which is home of (and this is not up for debate) the best bagel I’ve ever had in my life.

Each morning, I’d walk down my tree-lined street, order an everything bagel with egg, pepper jack cheese, and maybe avocado if I was feeling like it, then loop over to Starbucks for a hot chocolate. Then I’d return to the brownstone, sunlight pouring through the windows, vines curling up the brick, and I’d write.

That’s where most of my romantasy novel The Ash Trials came to life. It was a dream stretch of time—the kind of writing season I used to think only existed for people with book deals and calendar invites from Important People. But here I was, in a city that built its legacy on literary gatekeeping, writing on my own terms. No greenlight from anyone but myself. No advance check tied up in a contract. Just me, my words, and the revenue stream I’d built around them.

So when I got invited to a Substack party on the Upper East Side—one of those invite-only salons for “bestselling” writers on the platform with 100+ paid subscribers—I said yes. I showed up to a wood-paneled, old-money kind of venue with New Yorker profiles hanging on the walls and waiters with silver platters boasting tiny hors d’oeuvres. But what struck me wasn’t the setting. It was the energy.

Everyone in that room had figured out how to make writing their job. No one was waiting for a greenlight. These were writers with 100 or even 10,000 paid subscribers. These writers were making tens of thousands, even millions of dollars, because readers wanted to hear what they had to say—and were paying for the privilege.

There were no gatekeepers in that room. No one was simply handed their readership. Everyone there had built something. The gripes still existed, but under the jokes and the champagne flutes and the exchange of subplots and strategy was something far more powerful: personal power. These were self-made systems, self-decided paths. Everyone in that room had built their own version of literary success. For some, that was on top of past success, but there were many self-anointed writers in that room.

I left the event a little overstimulated, but buzzing with ideas. I hopped in a car and watched the Manhattan skyline pass by as I took stock of the writers I had engaged with that night. And I thought: This is it. This is the future.

Writers used to need publishers, producers, and institutions to validate them. Now we just need a laptop and the guts to hit “publish.”

That’s what this book is about. Not chasing crumbling institutions, but becoming undeniable without them.

You’ll read about how to attract your true fans. How to own your platform. How to step into a new mode of power. One bagel sandwich, one subscriber, one chapter at a time.

📕 Pre-Order Write for Money and Power Now and Claim Your Pre-Order Gift

You can pre-order and claim a special gift here.

You can also grab it straight from one of your favorite retailers below:

• Pre-order from Amazon, Bookshop, Barnes & Noble, or if you’re ordering from the UK you can grab it from Amazon UK here.

Thanks for your support. I can’t wait for you to read the book. 💕

-Amy

1. Gerry Martinez, “Did Michelangelo Get Paid to Paint the Sistine Chapel?” GerryMartinez.com, accessed September 30, 2025, https://www.gerrymartinez.com/did-michelangelo-get-paid-to-paint-the-sistine-chapel/

2. John Hooper, “Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel Paintings Were Work of Suffering Genius,” The Guardian, accessed 2025, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2002/nov/30/artsandhumanities.arts

3. Writers Guild of America West, Writer Employment Snapshot, accessed 2025, https://www.wga.org/uploadedfiles/the-guild/reports/WGA_Writer_Employment_Snapshot.pdf

4. Stephen Galloway, “Francis Ford Coppola Funded His $120 Million Film ‘Megalopolis’ with His Wine Business,” Business Insider, accessed 2025, https://www.businessinsider.com/francis-ford-coppola-funded-megalopolis-100-million-wine-business-2024-9

5. Wikipedia contributors, “Hollywood Accounting,” Wikipedia, accessed 2025, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting

6. Mary Adkins, “How Much Do Authors Make?” Mary Adkins Blog, accessed 2025, https://maryadkinswriter.com/blog/how-much-do-authors-make

7. PublishDrive, “What Are Book Advances? How Book Advances and Royalties Work,” PublishDrive Blog, accessed 2025, https://publishdrive.com/what-are-book-advances-how-book-advances-and-royalties-work.html