Amy Suto – The Three-Pillar System for Making Six Figures as a Self-Published Author

Amy Suto is a seven-figure freelance writer, memoir ghostwriter, bestselling author, and founder of the top Substack newsletter Make Writing Your Job. Starting as a Hollywood TV writer working for minimum wage as an assistant, Amy discovered that freelancing could outpace traditional entertainment industry earnings. She's flown to countries like Austria to work with clients on their memoirs, ghostwritten for Olympians and NBA players, and built a thriving writing business with three income pillars: self-publishing, paid newsletters, and freelance writing. Her upcoming book Write for Money and Power (launching January 12, 2026) provides the mindset operating system writers need to build six and seven-figure writing careers.

In this episode:

• Rejecting the starving artist myth and rewriting limited beliefs about writer income
• The three-pillar system: self-publishing, paid newsletters, and freelancing
• Why freelancing with multiple clients is more secure than one full-time job
• Escaping 10 cents per word work by pricing for outcomes instead of effort
• How copywriting jobs paying $8,000/month are dominating Make Writing Your Job
• Why memoir ghostwriting is the highest-paying freelance niche
• Getting flown to Austria to interview clients and capture their life stories
• The mindset shift that lets you quote rates without fear
• Negotiating triple client budgets by educating them on writing value
• Why Anthropic hiring writers proves AI can't replace storytelling
• Using ChatGPT for research, text-to-speech dictation, and routine work
• Google Notebook LM for querying your own novel content
• Substack's unique organic traffic and onboarding flow advantages
• Putting up paywalls early to trigger Substack's promotional algorithm
• Emailing only free subscribers with upgrade sequences and discounts
• How all three pillars dovetail: Substack becomes portfolio and book content
• The 12-month roadmap to earning seven figures with three writing pillars
• Systems that let you take six weeks off while your business runs
• Pre-order benefits including founding memberships and Notion templates

Resources mentioned:

• Make Writing Your Job Substack: https://www.makewritingyourjob.com/
• Amy Suto's personal Substack: https://www.sutoscience.com/
• Write for Money and Power by Amy Suto (pre-order at amysuto.com/power)
• ChatGPT 
• Google Notebook LM
• Upwork for early freelancing
• Substack Notes (Twitter-like feature)

Book Recommendations:

• Write for Money and Power by Amy Suto (releasing January 12, 2026)

Connect with Amy Suto:

• Website: https://www.amysuto.com/
• Make Writing Your Job Substack: https://www.makewritingyourjob.com/
• Personal Substack: https://www.sutoscience.com/
• Tiktok: https://www.tiktok.com/@sutoscience
• Instagram: http://www.instagram.com/sutoscience
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/sutoscience
• Pre-order book with benefits: amysuto.com/power

Connect with Teddy Smith:

• @teddyagsmith
• Website: https://publishingperformance.com/?ref=ywm3mtc
• Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/publishingperformance/
• Pinterest - https://nz.pinterest.com/publishingperformance/
• Instagram - https://instagram.com/publishingperformanceinsta
• Youtube -https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCHV6ltaUB4SULkU6JEMhFSw
• Linkedin - https://www.linkedin.com/company/publishing-performance/

Transcript

Teddy Smith (00:05.954)
Welcome to the Publishing Format Show, the podcast that helps self-published authors turn their passion into a profit. Now I'm your host Teddy Smith, and if you're serious about building a sustainable business, then you're in the right place. Every week I sit down with successful authors, industry experts, and publishing professionals who share their exact strategies they use right now to how they've grown their business, grow their readership, increase their book sales, and essentially to make a bit more money. Now, whether you're just starting out or you're looking to scale your existing publishing business,

walk away from every episode with actionable insights you can implement immediately. Now if you're new here it would really really help me out if you could subscribe either on Apple or Spotify or YouTube or wherever you are just simply hit the subscribe button it really helps the show to get more reach which means we can get better guests for you and we can help you out in more ways. All right let's dive into this episode. Hi everyone and welcome to the Publishing Informant Show. Today I'm really happy to be joined by Amy Souto who's a seven figure freelance writer

memoir writer. She's a bestselling author and she's also the founder of the sub stack, the, well, the top sub stack, Make Writing Your Job. So thank you for joining us, Amy. Yeah. Thank you so much for having me, Teddy. I'm so excited to be here. Yeah, no, it's great to have you on. I've been sort of following your blog and you're, not a member of your sub stack yet, but I've seen all your writing online. So it's great to see you come on to the show. So thank you very much. Now, one of the things that I you talk about a lot the most is obviously this whole process about becoming a seven figure writer.

So were there any real levers that you moved to go from just being relatively successful to actually really starting to push on and become a sort of seven figure or really successful writer? Yeah. So the first thing that I write about in my upcoming book, Write for Money and Power, and the thing that I talk about the most on my sub stack is kind of like, it feels a little woo woo, but it's the mindset. And I think that when we talk about mindset, it can be like,

that kind of like feel like a little soft. It feels like it like more philosophical, but in reality, when we think about how writers have been treated in society, we've all kind of internalized this idea of like, if you want to be a writer, you're opting into being broke, you're opting into starving and being a starving artist. And we've all heard that, we've all, know, if anyone has like grown up wanting to become a writer when you were a kid, jokes would always come like at you being like, oh yeah, well, you're gonna be a starving artist. I hope you enjoy.

Teddy Smith (02:23.96)
you know, eating tofu in a studio apartment for your entire life. And so I think that for me, the thing that really shifted me out of this mentality of like, I have to hustle and work really hard and like just like grind to even just make a living to wait a minute, I actually can use some elements of like marketing and positioning to position myself as a seven figure writer and a writer who can solve certain problems for clients who can write things on sub stack that audiences want to read. And I can also reposition myself published books.

in order to hit my sales targets and also to kind of like create the financial stability that I need to be wildly creative. And so it does start with that mindset piece and rejecting the starving artist myth. Yeah. I love that starving artist myth. Like you have to sort of sit there writing by candle night with a glass of red wine at night. know, it's like one of the things I found most interesting about you is, you know, lot of the audience that I speak to, they want to make most of their money from writing books, which I know that totally makes sense, but

your business has like lots of different aspects to it and it's more of a proper business rather than just you being a writer, I would say. So why don't you tell us about those different aspects of writing that you did in order to become more successful and to get that financial stability you're talking about. Yeah. And I think that I want to preface and say that some writers like will only want to do one thing and then that's totally fine too. I like kind of the multi-pronged approach of having a few different things because I think that they all feed into each other. And so I have three pillars of self-publishing.

a paid newsletter and I choose Substack as my platform and freelancing. I think those three dovetail really well because if you want to be a successful self-published author, you need an audience to read your books who can be in your orbit for a long period of time. Having a successful Substack for a newsletter where you can share updates on your book and things like that really helps dovetail that. Then freelancing can help you have the capital to be able to fund that initial time to write that first book.

and then also help you cover publishing costs if you're self-publishing, which is what I recommend and what I see so many authors do so much better at. I do interviews on my sub stack with authors who are successfully self-publishing to inspire people and show people what's possible. I think that in terms of approaching what is going to be best for someone's career, think that having a three-pronged approach really helps. I'm a big proponent of

Teddy Smith (04:47.544)
trying to think about like as a writer, what are the things that you have control over? have control over not a lot, but you do have control over a lot of things that you can do. And so when I came up in Hollywood as a TV writer, I didn't have control over anything. I was just like part of the machine. I was just kind of operating in these TV writers rooms. I had my marching instructions. I went to go like write an episode and a TV and then it got taken away and put into space and then that's it.

And so as a freelance writer, when I started moonlighting as a memoir ghostwriter in Hollywood, and my clients started flying me out to interview them. And I was like, whoa, whoa, whoa, wait a minute. I can set my race. I can tell them, you know, when I'm available, when I'm not available, this is crazy. And so it kind of allowed me to carve a new path for myself with autonomy. And then what I'm seeing now is that that's, that's the future. It's like kind of the, for writers, we, we're kind of slower to embrace this idea of a creator economy.

And the creator economy has been here for so long for influencers and for social media personalities. But for writers, we're I think a little bit more allergic to social media and a little bit more allergic to putting a price tag on our skills and our work. But if we embrace that, then we're able to have more financial stability and also make more space for creativity, which I think is the end game there. Yeah, that's amazing. When you decided you were going to go onto Substack and do freelancing, I think you kind of touched on it then by being, because you're in Hollywood, it kind of

happens. But how did you decide that those were the ways you were going to do the writing and start making your money? Yeah, so I kind of fell into it when I was starting in Hollywood. was working as an assistant just kind of working away from the ladder before I finally got to write my first episode of TV. And so as an assistant, you don't make very much money. You make minimum wage, you're getting people coffee, you're like, you know, surviving on like desk lunches that are gifted to you by the production.

It's definitely a very challenging environment to succeed in. Especially when shows get canceled or you have these gaps in between shows, a lot of other assistants would bartend and things like that. But I knew that I wanted to get my writing skills sharper and hone them. In between writers rooms, I just started freelancing. I really started to enjoy it because I started to see pretty quickly that the money that I was earning from freelancing was outpacing the money that I was making.

Teddy Smith (07:05.39)
Hollywood. And that felt so backwards because everyone told me, if you just stick it out and like, I had like come like I went to USC and I went to film school there. And so everybody was just telling us graduates, like, you just got to work in the industry, you got to pay your dues, you got to climb the ladder. And then eventually, you'll hit a point where you'll be compensated for your talent, you'll have the opportunities that you want. And I it took me a while to realize that that was kind of like a road to nowhere where it's like

even after I wrote my first episode of TV, people were still trying to get me back into assistant jobs. And I'm like, whoa, whoa, whoa, this shouldn't be, the ladder shouldn't be me going back down. It should be continuing to go back up. And so, and that's when I realized that there was a bigger industry problem happening. And then when COVID hit, I'm like, okay, my writer's room went to a Zoom room and then it ended. I'm like, all right, I'm starting from scratch. I'm starting over. I'm going to go full into freelancing.

and just kind of like take a leap of faith. And it was very scary because it's like, I had only known like the structured life of, you know, education and being in school and then being in these really kind of like, fast-paced writers rooms. And then when that all ended, just like, okay, I'm working for myself now. And it's kind of this abyss that's really scary. But the thing that made it less scary is that when I actually committed and put my whole heart into it, it ended up working out better than I could have ever imagined and just completely taking off.

And so I think that when a lot of people are approaching freelancing, there's that fear that is like, I'm never going to make enough money to live. I'm never going to figure it out. But then what I think people don't understand is that with freelancing, it's so much more secure and stable than a full-time job. A full-time job can lay you off. Like I was on shows that were canceled. Like things can just disappear and be taken from you in an instant. But with freelancing, you have three, four or five clients. And if you lose one of them, you can just go replace them. But that doesn't mean you're losing all of your income.

And so that was kind of one piece that I thought was really, really kind of interesting for freelancing is that you also are like honing your skills and working for clients who are really accomplished and interesting. I've done a lot of different types of freelance writing in my career from memoir, ghost writing, to copywriting. And I've been able to work with incredible founders, incredible different types of like Olympians and NBA players and just creative people who have incredible stories to tell. And I keep a lot of their stories like with me, like I feel like that.

Teddy Smith (09:23.016)
my freelance work, not only became a better writer, but also a better person. Yeah, that's incredible. mean, to jump into freelancing, one of the concepts you talked about in your book was going from like being in the 10 cents words trenches to moving up to doing that those more luxury jobs like you just mentioned. What was there like a mind shift set, like reset that you needed to do in order to go from going for those 10 cents words kind of clients into really going for those bigger clients? Yes. So when it comes to

freelance writing, one part of it is being a good writer and understanding what makes a good deliverable. And then the other, I would almost say like 60 % of it is like being reliable, communicating well with your client, and then marketing yourself and learning just a little bit of sales to be dangerous. I think that like when it comes to writers, those parts of the business side are things that we don't really think about. When I finally kind of like stumbled into learning more about the business side.

I it unlocked so much more for me. And when we're thinking about business, it's just simply figuring out as a writer, how can you communicate to your client what your deliverable will do for them? What will them investing money in you do for their business, for their image, for their brand? And for me specifically with Namar Goose writing, people see the benefit of writing a book as like so many different things come from it.

When you write a book, you're able to step on a TED Talk stage and talk about it. You're able to have influence from things that you talk about. You're able to do podcast tours and press tours and journalists are interesting. They're hearing what you have to say. And so when my clients, some of them already have some level of like social capital of some kind, when they think about writing a book, kind of adds that like layer of storytelling and prestige that allows them to then leverage that into

speaking opportunities into new business ventures, things like that. And it really does then ripple effect into everything. And so when I'm sharing with my clients, a lot of them already know this, how a book can change their life and how a book can change their business, then for them as a no brainer, it's like, okay, well, not only am I preserving my story and sharing my legacy, but I'm also investing in my business and my personal brand. And then one thing that we're seeing right now, because everyone's like...

Teddy Smith (11:39.454)
well, what about AI? What about all of that? I think that what's really telling right now is that companies like Anthropic and other prominent AI companies are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to hire storytellers for their companies and writers for their companies. Like there was a recent job posting for like, you know, in the six figures for Anthropic and they're hiring a writer and everyone was joking because Anthropic created Claude and they're like, because Claude can't do it for you. And so the whole point of the kind of the writers

who are able to really leverage their skills for clients. If you're able to learn storytelling and leverage that for clients, that's transformational and you can price for that. And so in my book, Bright for Money and Power, I kind of talk about like how to really price for the outcome, not I'm going to work really hard for you on your book, but this book is going to help you achieve ABC XYZ. Yeah, I think that you basically described that whole aspect of turning becoming a former economy writer into becoming a business.

basically just in one sentence, by being able to sell the outcome to people, that is where you're going to make the money because you see so many non-fiction books where people just put the title as one of the features of the book, but actually it's where you want the reader to get to. That's going to sell way more than a book that is just saying one thing that the book's about. I really think you've hit the nail on the head with that part. Thank you. Yeah, I think that there's just so many pieces of, as writers, we already have so many of the intuitive pieces that

that businesses and individuals need from us. Like we're able to bring our empathy and our storytelling skills and our way that we frame stories to other people. The only thing that we need to do is turn that back on ourselves and understand how we can tell the story of how our skills will help other people. And that that can power everything from freelancing to our self-published books and, and Substack. Now it must be a bit of a journey to get obviously up to charging a hundred thousand dollars or whatever for one particular job.

But for people who are just starting out, where do you recommend they try and find those initial writing jobs to help supplement their income? Yeah, I think that everyone has to start somewhere. And I think that first initial job may not be, is not going to be probably in the six figures unless you've built up a substantial career in another way. But I run this up stack writing your job where we try to solve for that.

Teddy Smith (13:56.43)
problem. I initiated, I basically created that writing job board a year ago, because I was getting in too much work from clients through my own personal website that I couldn't take to the point where I was just having to turn clients away. And I felt bad because I wasn't able to help them. So I created the writing job board on my sub stack, Big Writing Your Job to help connect the writers in my community to those clients who wanted to hire high end ghost writers, copywriters, YouTube script writers, creative writers for their projects. And so we've created that hub to help

connect people. And then we also have a team of curators that scoured the entire internet and pulled the best writing contest, grants, residencies. One of our curators actually found the current residency that she's on through through our job board. And she is like on the East Coast, like writing her novel in a cabin in the woods. And so we've seen a lot of people land really cool opportunities from

full-on memoir ghostwriting projects to book editing jobs to romance-proof reading jobs. It's just been such a lovely experience. I even just got an email yesterday from another writer who landed up a ghostwriting client from our job board. It's just a happy dance, run around my apartment just being really excited for writers. So I started this up stack to help inspire and educate people to get those first few freelancing jobs that can then create the domino effect.

And that's kind of like why we curate the high paying writing jobs in one place to help our community make that leap into full-time freelance. What sorts of jobs do you see mostly on your job plot? Is there like a trend with which ones you see more often? Yeah. So we have like a weekly meeting with our curator team where we talk about like, what are the most clicked on jobs? Like what are people most excited by?

And even in the last week, we had like one of the highest kind of categories is copywriting. And that surprised me a little bit because we have a lot of creative jobs. We have like a lot of proofreading jobs for novelists, but the copywriting jobs have been popular lately because they pay super well. So some of these jobs pay like $8,000 a month for

Teddy Smith (15:57.678)
somebody to write copy. And again, in the age of AI, you'd think, why aren't these companies just using AI to bash out their copy? But in reality, copy is also storytelling. And I did copywriting for the beginning of my career. I think that's a great way in because you're having to distill a company's story and a message and be creative about it and understand sales at the level of writing. And I think that it's such a cool skill. And I think it's such a great foot in the door of freelancing if you're just getting started.

And then from there, you can also scale a copywriting job into a book ghostwriting job. If you're working with a client and if you're starting with writing their landing page, then their newsletters, sometimes they just bring you on to write the full book. And that's how I started in ghostwriting specifically. there any jobs or sectors within ghostwriting that you find pays more than others in case people were just wondering where's best place to start? Yes. So copywriting pays really well, but if people are able to make the jump into book

ghostwriting, would say memoir ghostwriting. very biased. Memoir ghostwriting is my favorite. I absolutely love working one-on-one with clients. And the thing with memoirs is that they're very bespoke. Somebody is only going to write their life story once. And when they do it, when they finally decide to write that life story, they're going to spend quite a bit of money on it. I've been flown out to countries like Austria and worked with a founder in Vienna to really kind of dig into their life story where I met their families and they showed me Austrian culture.

food, so that I can have those details help them accurately capture their life story. So I think when it comes to somebody's memoir, when they're at the end of their life, or even kind of in the middle reflecting on it, there's so much that comes with that exercise of writing a memoir. think it's not for everybody, because it is such a like a, an all encompassing deliverable, but it is one of the ones that you can charge the most for as a writer. And it's something that that

measurably kind of helps people's lives and is something that can also help their business as well. Yeah, definitely. One of the concepts, again, you talk about in your book is that the book is not like a guide to becoming a freelancer or if it's not a freelancing guide, it's more of an operating system to run your writing business. When you've written about that in the book, what are those steps that people should follow in order to essentially be more organized and have that operating system running in their business?

Teddy Smith (18:13.782)
Yeah, so I kind of like my book and my sub stack as like two pieces of a whole. If you're looking for like tactical, how do I make a portfolio, how to kind of like have the basics of having a freelance business on make writing your job, we have classes, we do live classes, and we have a lot of information for people who are just getting started as freelancers and who want the nuts and bolts. But my upcoming book, Write for Money and Power

is truly about that mindset that I was talking about, which is rewiring these limited beliefs that are holding you back from making six, seven figures from your writing, even if you really want to. But maybe you have a limiting belief that is preventing you from hopping on a Zoom call and quoting the highest number that you've ever quoted for someone to pay you for your writing. And that's the problem. When I got started as a freelance writer, I was too afraid to quote high enough for to really kind of accurately capture the value of what I was giving to

clients to the point where one of my early clients, when I quoted her my rate, like stopped me. I was like, no, you need to be, you need to be charging double this for what you're doing. And I'll never forget her because, you know, first of all, she was negotiating against her own interests. But second, I just thought that that was so kind for somebody to point out that I was undercharging. And that's happened multiple times in my career. And anytime that you, if you can't, don't feel a little bit of fear.

sharing your rate with a client, then you're not turning high enough. And that's just something that is really good advice for people. that's all mindset. That's all in the process of understanding what are you worth? What are your words worth? And it runs parallel with your craft because if you're a writer, and even if you're a newer writer, the value that you bring to a project with your creativity and your artistry and being able to allocate your brainpower to helping a client reach a goal,

That is valuable, that is inherently valuable. And I think that a lot of us writers have been hammered into this idea of we are going to be starving artists and that 10 cents a word is all that we're worth. And I think that that is something that we have to undo at the mindset level first. And that's why I spend so much, big portion of the book in the beginning, trying to rewrite that mental operating system to prime writers to skip a big section of the career that I had that was spent not really charging enough.

Teddy Smith (20:29.742)
to really value my skills. And so I'm trying to help people accelerate their journey to blow past where I was so that they can get to those higher earning years faster so that they can then have more time to be able to travel or spend time with their families. And so that's kind of like the whole point of Right for Money and Power is not just for money and power, but the power to decide how you spend your life. If you see writers that are still charging, you know, 10 cents per word or

still working that sort of freelance method. How do you recommend they approach that conversation with people to go to an output type, as you mentioned, like charging per job rather than just charging per letter? Yeah, people can charge per word if they want to, but the whole point is that the thing that will solve most writers problems is if you raise your rates. And I think that a lot of people are afraid to raise their rates or they see a job listed at a certain rate and think that that's all that they can get from the job. A good example of this is when like

I used to spend a lot of time freelancing on Upwork before I had my own client flow coming directly from my website. And there'd be jobs listed at like $500 for tons of deliverables for that job. And so eventually I just got to a point where I started reaching out to those clients and being like, hey, you've listed this job at $500. But this would actually cost $12,000 to get the quality you're looking for. If you're interested, we can talk. And to my surprise, I booked those jobs at the rate that I quoted. And I think a lot of writers don't realize that

everything is negotiable. And I tell them this about the job board as well, is that clients are putting out a rate that they think that they want to pay. But it's your job as a freelancer to educate them on what the value of high quality writing is actually worth. And this might not be something that everybody is able to do at the beginning stage of their career, but the faster you can get to that point where you are reaching out to a client, pitching them on your services, and then setting the rate that you believe your writing is worth, that will change everything. And I think that

There's so many times where I've done that and then like, there's no way they're going to come up to this rate. This is like triple what they posted and then they do. And so I think that you never know until you try. And I think a lot of people out there, there's just not enough good talent who are reaching these clients. And there's just so much fan out there on the internet and it's so hard to hire people because I've hired people for my own business and to find high quality freelancers that are reliable and creative, it's a challenge.

Teddy Smith (22:52.174)
And so people think it's like a red ocean and really hard to get hired as a freelance writer, but great writers are still scarce. And I think that for us, for us, like there's so much like potential to land such amazing jobs with cool clients at a rate that is going to compensate us for our creative energy that we're pouring into it. definitely. Now, one of the things we've sort of touched on a few times throughout this conversation, but never really dug deep into is AI and the writing. Now I've seen you've written about AI writing quite a lot. Is it something you use in your business?

Yeah, so I think that one of the things that I chose to do with Make Right or with Right for Money and Power is the last chapter of the book, I, spoiler, share how the book itself was in part written with AI. And that is something that some of my early beta readers were like very shocked by. They're like, I felt like that this book was so personal and so detailed, and I didn't believe it. And I think that a lot of people when they think about AI, they think it's this one to one tool that will just replace us.

When in reality, AI is just like spell check or grammarly or the typewriter, there's so many kind of like things that have changed what it means to be a writer. And I think that AI is something that can help with research. AI is something that can help with revisions and editing. And it can help with so many parts of the creative process. And it can help reduce the time that us writers spend thinking about, okay, how many times have you repeated this word in this book? Like how many times have I like said the same thing twice?

how many times like, or how can I take this really long rambling section and kind of shorten it? And so I think that AI is something that all writers should get acquainted with and see how it operates in their process, but it is not a replacement for our process. And there's so many instances where AI can be just super dumb and not actually give us what we need. So I think it's just something that can be an additive tool that we should look at as a tool in our business and not be afraid of. We shouldn't be moralizing against it. Like it should be something that we should

we should really approach with open eyes. And I know I say that as a writer in San Francisco, so I am in like the heart of the crazy AI boom, but I do think that a lot of writers are very scared of AI and they shouldn't be because it's something that even these big AI companies are hiring writers to help them. So there's still so much of a need for that storytelling. And if everybody is using AI, the differentiator are going to be the companies that are hiring humans. Yeah. You know, the AI can only ever tell someone else's story. can't.

Teddy Smith (25:16.718)
create its own. So it's, you know, every human has their own aspects they bring to it. So I think that is really interesting. What does your workflow look like with AI? Do you use particular tools that you found really helpful or has it been more just generally I'm just using everything? Yeah, I think I use ChatGBT. think that, but I use the 4.0. I hate 5. So I think every writer's got to figure out their model or the thing that they use. And I think that the best way to look at like workflow with AI, because every writer is so different, is to understand like how

What part of the process is the most annoying and how can you have AI help with that? So one of the things that I use AI for in this book was I was trying to track down a source that I had for one of the pieces of research that I had done and I had like lost a link. I was trying to find like this obscure like kind of like article that would back up one of my points.

And Google was doing nothing for me. And so I put ChatGPT on deep research and it was able to not only unearth the link that I was looking for, but also unearth a primary source of another kind of piece of information that would help me with the book. So I think that there's a lot of pieces of very boring, mundane, routine work that ChatGPT and these other AI tools are going to be able to do for us to free up writers to be able to be more in the higher level thinking pieces of what it means to be a writer and write a book, which is such a huge endeavor.

and just take so much time. So I think that to help us be able to be more prolific, we'll also dig deeper into our work. I think that is the best use case of AI, not just being like, generate me a book, please, because that will never end well. Have you tried Google's Notebook LM? It's definitely my favorite tool at the moment where you can put all your own content into it and start asking questions of your own content. Have you tried that one? No, I haven't done that one yet, but I'll definitely give it a try.

Yeah, it's amazing. So if you're writing things yourself, for example, you can take your own work, put it into Google notebook LM and it just uses that content as the content that it draws information from. say you're writing another one, you're like, was this character drinking Coke or was it drinking Pepsi? You can sort of ask questions like that and it can bring that information back forward. Like it's one I've been recommending the most. The moment is so clever.

Teddy Smith (27:23.03)
I love that. No, I think that's great. The other one, the other way that I like to use AI is text to speech. And I love using ChatDBT as dictation tool to be able to like just brain dump a lot of information and be like, okay, here's all of the things I'm thinking about now, please generate me an outline so that I can go write this. And so I think that it's really helpful to just be able to sometimes talk at the AI because it kind of serves as like a collector of your ideas and organizer of ideas to then help you.

really see it on the page without having to sit there and manually type it all. So I think that that like the voice to the voice to text dictation tools, I think are really good with some of these AI tools. Yeah. I'm kind of hoping for day when someone creates like an AI coworker. So you can basically just have someone sitting next to you that you chat to and it gives your ideas back to you. I love that. Yeah. I'm sure that's already on the way. Yeah. One of the last things I want to talk about was paid newsletters because I know you've got your sub stack and you

sort of had the free version and the paid version. A lot of writers, I've got news editor and it's free, so I'm actually interested in myself. What did you need to do in order to go from making it free into making it paid? What was the extra value that you felt you had to provide? Yeah, for make writing your job, would say that most of our 99 % of our content is underneath the paywall just because it just takes us so long to curate the jobs. But I have a personal sub stack.

called the pseudoscience. And on that one is all essays. And I think that when it comes to figuring out the paywall, and I've worked with some clients on building their sub stack as well. And when it comes to thinking about like, what are you sharing for free? And what are you putting under the paywall? You have to give enough to people that they can get a real flavor of your writing and your essays or your articles. And then you hit them with a paywall, like right at the juicy part. And just because like that way they can get an understanding of the points that you're making or the things that you're saying and the ideas that you're sharing.

And then right when they're like at the point where they'll get something like really kind of like interesting from you going from the paywall. And then from there, think running a lot of seven day free trials. One thing that we've been doing a lot with make writing your job is like trying different like discounts and like a piece of advice that I've gotten from another sub stacker was to just email your free subscribers and try to figure out how to get them to upgrade to paid. So don't email your whole list. Just email the people who haven't yet upgraded and be like, Hey,

Teddy Smith (29:41.964)
Why haven't you upgraded? What could I offer you that would create what have you upgrade? By the way, here's a discount. By the way, here's some more free information. And so it's like trying to create those email sequences just for your free readers with the intent purpose to have them upgrade. And I think that that is something that is often overlooked where people will be like, well, I'm only going to email everybody or I'm only going to email my paid subscribers. But free subscribers are people who kind of need to understand the value that you're offering. And that's why they haven't...

upgraded or they're price sensitive and you need to offer discounts. And so think there's a lot of strategy around that that has helped immensely with the growth of of make writing your job. And I think it's something that's often overlooked with people who are running paid newsletters. because I'm trying to think how I can do a new paid newsletters myself because at the moment I'm sending out loads of value, but I'm wondering how I can make that extra step. So maybe something I just need to give a little thought to. Yeah, and I also think that there's so much that is like

In terms of platforms, there's always this arbitrage moment at the beginning of a new platform, like when YouTube was new, that if you were early to YouTube or early to TikTok, you were able to get a foot hold and get a ton of traction by getting into that platform early. Substack is at that stage right now where it's still a very early platform and you can get a lot of organic traffic and a lot of organic discovery.

from Substack itself. We get thousands of dollars of traffic from Substack to our paid subscriber list each week. And I think that that is like, it's just coming from people subscribing to our newsletter to say, subscribe to someone else's newsletter or because Substack recommended us to them. And so I do think that taking advantage of that organic traffic, we've never had that in the newsletter space. We've never been able to run a newsletter on any other platform and get that of organic traffic of somebody getting it being recommended our newsletters. I think that that's unique about Substack.

And I like their platforms specifically because their incentives are aligned. They take a percentage of your earnings, whereas like other paid newsletter platforms just charge you monthly. And so Substack doesn't earn anything unless you earn something. So all their features are built around discovery and converting people to paid and finding different ways to like add value to people who are price sensitive. Yeah. How does your Substack work? How does it work like pricing Substack? it just because a lot of people don't know what Substack is?

Teddy Smith (31:56.172)
Is it like a social media where you have all of your feed seeing other people's sub stack on there as well? Or is it more, you just go to someone's specific page like yours? Yeah. So they have sub stack notes, which is their version of Twitter, which I think is like very charming and very lovely. then they have some people discover sub stacks through there, but the cool features are actually on like the backend.

of everybody has their own sub stack page and you operate as like both a website and your post to email to people. But the thing is when people go and sign up as a paid subscriber to somebody else, there's an onboarding page that pops up where they're like, well, you just paid for this subscription. Do you want to get 50 % off these 15 different other newsletters that are popular and related to this one? And that's when people are like, yeah, I'll spend $4 a month for this one and this one and this one. And that onboarding flow where they're recommending other sub stacks to you,

is kind of where you can get a lot of brand new subscribers that have never met you and come into your universe as a paid subscriber. And I think that that workflow is very smart. And Substack has a bunch of other auto features where they'll upsell subscribers before they cancel or they'll try to like email your engaged subscribers and get them to upgrade. There's so many little neat tips and tricks that Substack has that will really kind of supercharge your writing. as long as you just have... And this is the thing that most people

get wrong. They basically post their sub stacks for free and then never put up a paywall, never turn on paid or they turn on paid too late. But the thing is, stack is not going to promote your sub stack until you turn on paid subscriptions and connect to Stripe. And the moment you do that and put a paywall, then they're going to start sending people your way. And so if anybody is moving to sub stack, that's going to be the first thing that you do. Almost before you fill out your about page, you just turn on paid subscriptions and just start to see strangers

find your writing and pay for it. And that was like, honestly, the craziest feeling to like get those first like two or three page subscribers when I started and being like, wait a minute, I don't know these people. This isn't my mom. Like who's subscribing to me and paying like money every month to like read my writing. And it was such a lovely experience to be able to write for those early subscribers. And I think that like, like, I just think that there's such a cool kind of opportunity right now with Substance and they just raised like $10 million. So they're here to stay as a platform and

Teddy Smith (34:14.594)
And think that they're kind of like an interesting way for writers to take a slice out of the creator economy pie. Sounds like if you are thinking about going freelance, then sub stack is probably one of the first things you should start writing on. sounds like maybe that's tip number one for everyone. Yeah. Especially because like once again, these three pillars all dovetail. You're writing on sub stack can then serve as a portfolio item for your freelancing clients. You're writing on sub stack can also eventually be put together in a book if you're writing all about one topic.

I know one of the writers that I met in Florence for a writer's retreat earlier this year was doing just that. She actually lives in Portugal as well. And she has just been writing letters to Portugal in this small town that she lives in, and she is putting it all together in a book. And so I that there's so many kind of cool opportunities on Substack to serialize fiction, to put together memoirs, and to kind of like put your work out there, allow your early fans to pay for it, and then get a secondary kind of like income stream from then publishing your book.

and sharing that with your subscribers. So all of these three things, sometimes when I'm kind of sharing these three pillars, people are like, that's a lot. I had to write a book and start a sub-sector and freelance. But in reality, all three of them, you kind of have to do the work anyways. You're just getting, you're using every part of the buffalo when you start all three things almost simultaneously. And that's why I have my 12 month roadmap to how to earn seven figures with these three pillars in my book, Write for Money and Power, because I want to show people how all these things can dovetail.

and come together so you can have the most efficient path to your first million dollars as a writer with these three tellers. Yeah, that's amazing. I mean, you sound so busy. This is the last question, but I just wanted to go, what does your workday look like? How do you say organize with this? Because I know a lot of writers, they do really struggle to fit in their writing around their full-time work. What does your productive day look like? Yeah, I'm very lucky that I've created a lot of systems that help support me in my writing. Like I just spent

six weeks in China. And so I'm just basically been away from my desk, like occasionally writing some travel blogs, occasionally writing some sub stack posts, but everything has been able to kind of operate without me. And now I'm back to my desk and like working on client work again, and working on kind of like digging back in. But I think that the benefit of this work is if you build the systems around you correctly, then you can take, you know, for six weeks off and just go travel, you can go take time off and like,

Teddy Smith (36:31.754)
Or you can fly out to visit one of your clients and then make a whole vacation out of it. And so I think there's so many different ways to organize this. And so I think on my end, it's just a matter of like creating systems and understanding how to batch work with clients. And it's also just a matter of like simply raising your rates. Even when I did freelance coaching in the past with one-on-one clients and helped individual freelancers build their business, I really focused with them on just what is the fastest way that you can just raise your rates because that will create the breathing room that you need.

to be able to spend time working on your own product bags, to be able to take time off. And I think that that is kind of like the linchpin is like figuring out how quickly can you raise your rates. And if you can't raise your rates in the current niche you're in, how can you get into a niche that allows you to raise your rates and charge more? Yeah, incredible. Well, thank you so much for chatting. I I can't wait to join your subset now. I've got so many questions, which I feel like I need deeper answers to. Thank you so much.

Yeah, no problem. If people want to get in contact with you, especially your Substack and your website and things like that, where's the best place to do it? Yeah. So everyone can join the Substack at makewritingyourjob.com. And then I have a personal Substack at pseudoscience.com. And when it comes to just getting in touch with me, I'm on all social platforms at pseudoscience, so my last name S-U-T-O and then the word science.

But I'm just excited to be here I'm really excited that my book, Right for Money and Power is going to be out January 12th, 2026. And so it's available for pre-order now at just 99 cents. And I'm really excited to kind of share the frameworks that I've learned with writers and help them make a really good living from their writing and have the power to design the life of their dreams. fantastic. We'll put links to all that stuff in the show notes. What's your launch process look like for that book? Have you had done anything in order to do pre-selling apart from...

coming on my podcast. Yeah, no, definitely. It's been been quite a bunch of different things. Everyone can go to amysudo.com slash power to see all of the pre order benefits that you have. We're giving away notion templates that are based on the templates that I use for organizing my different work. We're also giving away founding level memberships for make writing your job and founding members get some extra perks and benefits on our sub stack. so

Teddy Smith (38:43.47)
Usually it's around $550 a year for that founding member subscription, but we're giving it away for people who pre-order 10 books. And so we have a lot of different benefits like that for people who are pre-ordering before the book comes out. And then we're also doing just like a ton of different types of events for people. I'm going to be doing a live reading for the first few chapters on my sub stack and, you know, just doing all different kinds of things to help educate people and share concepts of the book to have writers get to understand how to implement this in their workflow.

Well, thanks so much for coming on. I'm really looking forward to seeing all that stuff and good luck with the launch and we'll speak again soon. Awesome. Thanks so much, Teddy. Thank you so much for tuning in to the Publishing Informant Show. I really hope you found today's episode inspiring. I absolutely love chatting to authors, writers and people in the publishing world. Now, just before we wrap up, I want to tell you about our Publishing Informant Starter Packs. These are curated episodes and collections organized by topic that makes it super easy to find the exact content you're looking for. So whether you're wanting to deep dive into marketing strategies,

explore productivity techniques or focus on any specific area of publishing, we've organised our episodes into targeted playlists just for you. You can find these all at teddyeagsmith.com. And also whilst you're here, let me tell you about Publishing Formants. It's the number one platform for authors who want to increase Amazon book sales but aren't really sure where to start. Now this show is all about helping you to sell more books and if you're looking to boost your publishing game and to maximise your books' potential on Amazon, then Publishing Formants is designed to help authors just like you to grow your readership and to reach a much wider audience.

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