Write For Money And Power: Becoming A Creator CEO With Amy Suto

How can you move from the starving artist mindset to becoming a creator CEO with multiple streams of income? And how can you get traction on Substack if you're starting from zero? Amy Suto shares her tips as a former Hollywood TV writer turned author, Substack creator, and ghostwriter.

In the intro, Novel November with ProWritingAid; Book Marketing in a Changing World [ALLi Podcast with me and Orna Ross]; Navigating tough times in indie publishing [Wish I'd Known Then]; watch out for fake agent emails [Write Beware]; AI-Assisted Artisan Author webinars for beginners and advanced.

Today's show is sponsored by ProWritingAid, writing and editing software that goes way beyond just grammar and typo checking. With its detailed reports on how to improve your writing and integration with writing software, ProWritingAid will help you improve your book before you send it to an editor, agent or publisher. Check it out for free or get 15% off the premium edition at www.ProWritingAid.com/joanna

This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn

Amy Suto is a former Hollywood TV writer and the bestselling author of books around freelance writing, as well as romance, fantasy, and detective fiction. She's also a ghostwriter and a top 25 ranked Substack creator. Her books include Write for Money and Power.

You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below.

Show Notes

• How to take back power when your dreams are in the hands of gatekeepers
• Moving from the starving artist mindset to creator CEO
• The income flywheel of freelancing, a paid newsletter, and book royalties
• How serialising fiction on Substack can build true fans and supercharge pre-orders
• Getting traction on Substack, and how to manage comments and Notes
• Using AI tools like a scalpel, and how to move past the fear of backlash

You can find Amy on her Sunstacks, Make Writing Your Job and Sutoscience.

Transcript of the interview with Amy Suto

Jo: Amy Suto is a former Hollywood TV writer and the bestselling author of books around freelance writing, as well as romance, fantasy, and detective fiction. She's also a ghostwriter and a top 25 ranked Substack creator. So welcome to the show, Amy.

Amy: Thank you so much for having me. I'm so excited to be here.

Jo: Yes, lots to talk about. First up—

Tell us a bit more about you and how you got into writing and publishing.

Amy: So I came up in Hollywood as a TV writer, and I was climbing my way up the ladder, starting as an assistant, working in Los Angeles, and then eventually, finally got to start to write episodes of TV.

When I hit what I thought was my peak, I was working with a CIA agent on a spy show. It was literally my dream, to be able to pick his brain about all the conspiracies that were actually true and be able to write TV around that.

I found myself a little bit disillusioned with the way the system was running. I found that I really wanted to spend more time writing my own original work instead of being work for hire on other people's shows.

So when 2020 happened and everything shut down, I ended up being able to travel the world, ghostwrite memoirs for Olympians and CEOs, and have some crazy experiences as a digital nomad, which then inspired my first fiction book, The Nomad Detective.

From there I continued writing novels and also non-fiction books about my experience as a freelance writer, to help other authors and writers figure out how to have this balance of both being able to pay the bills as a writer while also having creative freedom to put together your own work.

Jo: I love that. I guess just to address the dream—so you hit this dream of Hollywood TV writing, which of course for some people, that's their dream and they never got there, and then you left it all.

I mean, the strength to walk away from that. So if people have that dream, or there's the dream of the eight-figure movie deal for a novelist and all this.

So can dreams end up not be the thing we really want, I guess?

Amy: This is a great question, and I think that the thing that I was running into is that I was putting my dreams in the hands of gatekeepers.

I think that when you hand over that power, then suddenly you are left without agency and you are finding yourself working for free or doing work for producers that maybe you didn't sign up for.

People are dangling your dreams in front of you to get you to do what they want you to do.

That was a little bit of what I was beginning to experience, and seeing in other writers that I was talking to in the industry. So I knew that I wanted to take back that power for myself.

I also love books. Writing novels is something that is very close to my heart and part of my own dream as a writer as well.

So when 2020 was happening and everything was shutting down and the writers' room that I was in went to a Zoom room, I thought, “This is a perfect opportunity for me to explore some of these other areas of writing.”

So basically there is this experience that I was having of remembering all of these novelists who started off as journalists, and they started off as journalists because some of the best inspiration for fiction is actually in non-fiction.

When I was starting to moonlight as a memoir ghostwriter in between projects in Hollywood, I found myself completely captivated by working with these incredible clients who've had lives that were beyond anything I could have ever imagined.

So my work as a memoir ghostwriter ended up feeding my creative work, not only being able to pay the bills with these really cool projects, but also being able to interview people about their lives and being able to understand humanity through a completely different lens.

I never would have had the experience to get flown out to Vienna and sit down with an entrepreneur who had changed the direction of the way that technology had been built in his industry, and be able to ask questions about what it was really like to be these types of people and to be in their lives and to grow up in Austria or Singapore.

So I think that memoir ghostwriting ended up being the perfect primer for me to continue to develop my work as a fiction writer, because I was able to meet so many different people I never would have had the opportunity to meet or work with or ask questions of before.

Jo: Yes, I love this empowered attitude to making your own career.

In fact, when you pitched me—and I've told you this, but for people listening—I had already bought your book, Write for Money and Power, and the reason I had bought it is, obvious...