What if writing didn’t have to mean struggling, waiting for permission, or giving away your best work to gatekeepers?
In this episode of The Writing Coach Podcast, I sit down with writer, freelancer, novelist, and creator of multiple six-figure writing businesses, Amy Suto, to talk honestly about what it means to write for money and power in today’s creator economy.
Amy’s career started in Hollywood, where she followed the traditional path many writers are told is the dream… and then walked away from it. What she built instead is a writing career rooted in autonomy, audience ownership, and creative control through freelancing, paid newsletters, self-publishing, and smart focus.
In this conversation, we talk about:
- How writers can escape the “starving artist” myth
- Freelancing without burning out or underpricing yourself
- Why focus beats doing “all the things”
- How AI actually affects writers (and where it doesn’t)
- Writing as deep thinking not content churn
- Charging more so you can do better work
- Building sustainable income without selling your soul
This is a wide-ranging, grounded conversation for writers who want to take their craft seriously and build a life that works—whether you’re a novelist, freelancer, editor, coach, or somewhere in between.
Check out the episode now!
Audio:
Video:
The Writing Coach Episode #219 Show Notes
Get Amy’s new book: Write for Money and Power
Find Amy at: https://amysuto.com/power
Join her writing community: https://makewritingyourjob.com
Get a FREE copy of Kevin’s book: The Science (and Magic) of Writing Retreats.
Buy a copy of Kevin’s new book: The Frustrated Writer’s Colouring Book.
Enroll now in the February 2026 edition of Story Plan Intensive:
The Writing Coach Episode #219 Transcript
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: RSS
Today on the podcast, I have Amy Suto. Amy, welcome to the show.
Thanks so much for having me, Kevin.
I feel like, for most people I interview, Hollywood would be the end of their story. That’s the goal they’re all working toward—I made it to Hollywood.
But with you, it feels like Hollywood was actually the beginning. So tell us how this adventure that is your writing career over the last while actually started there.
Yeah, I thought that too—end goal: Hollywood. I wanted to be a TV writer. I love long-form television. I grew up in the golden age of TV.
So I went to USC, studied screenwriting, followed that whole path, got into the industry, started working as an agency assistant, worked my way up to showrunner’s assistant, finally got my episode of TV—and then realized it wasn’t what I wanted.
What really showed me there was another path was that, while I was coming up as a TV writer, I was also moonlighting as a memoir ghostwriter. At the same time I was being yanked around by Hollywood, my ghostwriting clients were flying me out to write their stories—and paying me ten times more than I was making in the industry.
That’s when I saw my skills were valued far more on the open freelance market than in a gatekeeper-driven system that wasn’t making me happy.
You talk a lot about this in your blogging and your books, but that’s a risky perspective for many people. A lot of folks are in corporate jobs with steady paychecks and predictability. Maybe they want to freelance—or are doing it as a side hustle.
What do you say to people who are facing that leap from safety into freelancing?
The biggest thing is diversifying your income in a way that’s smart and interconnected, without splitting your focus.
If you have any writing bone in your body, I recommend three things.
First: immediately start building a paid newsletter. My platform of choice is Substack.
Second: use that newsletter to develop content for a book, if that interests you—so you can sell that book to your paid audience.
Third: use both the newsletter and that book draft as your portfolio for freelancing, which then funds everything.
Those three pieces make modern writers recession-proof—or AI-proof. If you lose a corporate job, that’s one income stream gone. But if you have thousands of paid subscribers, nobody can take that away—especially if you own your email list, which you do on platforms like Substack or Beehiiv.
You end up building something more stable than any corporate job could offer.
I think a lot of freelancers struggle with pricing themselves. How do you help people get over the psychological block of asking, Am I really worth $750 an hour?
It’s a mindset game. In the book I have coming out—Write for Money and Power—I spend the first third just on mindset.
You have to believe your skills are valuable and that your time is valuable. Charging professional rates—even early in your career—is about identity.
You have to step into the identity first: I am a successful professional writer. If that’s true, then you charge professional rates and show up like a professional.
It’s the same idea a fitness coach teaches—you adopt the identity of a fit person before you become one. You show up as that person first.
You mentioned starting ghostwriting while still working in Hollywood. How did that begin? What was your first gig?
In Hollywood, you’d have a show that got canceled, or a writers’ room that ended. There were lots of gaps to fill.
Many of my friends bartended or picked up side jobs. I found freelancing. I started with copywriting and content writing just to fill the gaps—and ended up loving it.
My first ghostwriting client actually came from copywriting. I was writing blog posts for someone, and he asked, “Do you want to turn this into a book?”
Freelancing isn’t complicated. It’s putting yourself out there, trying niches, and building piece by piece.
I’ve done ghostwriting too, and there are so many misconceptions. What do you think people misunderstand most about that work?
Quick question—what niche were you in?
Leadership and entrepreneurship. Mostly people later in their careers who wanted to share what they’d learned.
Nice.
I think people forget that CEOs don’t do everything themselves. If they’re writing a book, they’re not going on a retreat and reading Bird by Bird. They need someone trained to do that work.
Ghostwriting is just a professional trade. If an architect designs your house, they don’t own it. Same thing.
Exactly. They’re their ideas. We’re organizing and facilitating their narrative.
Totally. I mostly do memoir ghostwriting, and I see it like journalism inside someone’s life—working within their version of reality.
You’re part detective, part therapist. And you get access to insights from people you’d otherwise have to pay just to talk to.
A life story is an heirloom. That’s why this niche isn’t going away.
I learned so much doing that work. One client grew up on a dairy farm. He said his dad milked the cows every morning—snowstorms, sickness, tornadoes—because if he didn’t, the cows suffered.
That mindset is missing for so many writers. You don’t wait to feel inspired. You milk the cows.
I love that. Freelancing teaches that discipline. Deadlines, clients, responsibility.
Once you learn that rhythm, applying it to your own work becomes second nature.
At what point did you realize you could teach this?
I’ve always shared what I was learning. When I made my first $10,000 freelancing while still an assistant, I told everyone.
I helped friends build Upwork profiles, write cover letters—just showing them what worked.
Later, when I built my Substack—now over $180,000 in annual recurring revenue—I documented it publicly. I posted monthly YouTube videos saying, “I don’t know what I’m doing, but here’s what I’m learning.”
I like teaching by building in public. Do interesting things first, then share the process.
Doesn’t that ever feel risky—saying I don’t know what I’m doing publicly? Does it affect your authority?
Yeah, I think it actually gives me credibility—because I’m willing to go on the internet and be like, “Hey, I don’t know what’s happening.”
I had a video in that Substack growth series where I literally got on camera and said, “I’m failing. My annual recurring revenue dropped, and I don’t know why.” But then I shared what I was learning: here are the mistakes, here’s the experiment I tried, it didn’t work, I don’t think I picked the right niche.
Looking back at those videos—which are still online for anyone to see—I think they show the lessons I didn’t know yet, and what I was learning in real time. And I think my audience sees that over nearly three years, I made all these mistakes and learned all these lessons… and eventually ended up with a top 25 bestselling Substack newsletter: Make Writing Your Job, which now makes nearly $200,000 a year. But that came from experimentation.
Now I help other people grow on Substack through my other publication, Pseudoscience. And I can say, “Hey, it took me three years to get here, but I can help you avoid a lot of the nonsense I went through so you don’t have to.”
If you want, you can DIY it: watch my videos, see how I got here. Or I can help you through it—give you what actually worked, basically the post-mortem—so you can skip the heartache.
That’s what I’m always trying to do: save people time and help them avoid the pitfalls I fell into.
So many times you’ve mentioned that you saw a friend having success with blogging, and that inspired you. And obviously, ten years ago, blogging was the thing—every entrepreneur had a blog, it was where everything happened.
Now it feels like content has shifted so much to video. So what’s your response to people saying, “Writing is dead. Blogging is dead. Everything needs to be on YouTube or TikTok”?
I think Substack is a great place to see where writing is absolutely alive. If you look at the bestseller lists, a lot of the publications—like position 50 and above—are near, if not all, six or seven figures. That’s people paying for writing.
There’s a publication that’s top three on the literature list that’s basically astrology and poetry, and people pay like $10 a month for it—to the point where it’s making six, maybe seven figures.
Even book sales have increased in the last few years in certain demographics. We’re seeing a resurgence of Barnes & Noble. They were about to crash and burn, but their sales have actually increased.
So I think the written word is always going to flourish in certain areas. With younger generations, I can’t speak for everyone, but I do think there’s a hunger for offline time—and we’re already seeing that. People want to get away from screens they’re realizing are rotting their brains.
There’s nothing wrong with video. Video is great. I love video—I’ve been doing Substack Live interviews with authors. It’s a great way to share ideas.
But even great videos need an underpinning: a script, an idea, something written or at least developed through journaling. Writing will never disappear because good writing is good thinking.
When you say good writing is good thinking, how does that show up in your process? What does that look like?
That’s a Paul Graham quote I love. He’s a technologist, and I love it because it captures this idea: to write something great, you have to think deeply enough to write it.
For me, whether I’m writing books for myself or clients, it’s about protecting space to think deeply—journaling, offline time, walks. I live in San Francisco, and I love walking through the parks and unplugging.
That’s what separates writers who can AI-proof their business from writers who can’t. If you’re just putting words on a page without thinking, you can be replaced by a machine. But if you think deeply and add a creative layer, you won’t have to worry about your job going away—because thinking is hard to—
All right. Let’s dig into it. Let’s talk AI. How does someone AI-proof themselves as a writer? And what role do you see AI playing in supporting writers and authors—if any?
AI is genuinely misunderstood. It’s a tool that will help us in certain ways, but it’s also going to challenge how we’ve worked.
Early in my copywriting career, I did a lot of monotonous work—“Write three versions of this ad,” or “We need 100 variations for the same image.” Stuff that made me want to tear my hair out. N o person should be doing that. That’s prime territory for AI-generated content.
But the work I’ve loved most—memoirs, and creative projects—AI can’t really do. I was a fiction writer for this immersive show in Vegas, and I’ve worked on a lot of creative projects where cohesion matters. AI can generate things, but it often can’t keep a longer project cohesive. It runs out of context. It starts hallucinating.
With memoir, that’s a huge problem.
In addition to being a ghostwriter and nonfiction writer and running your Substack, you’re also a novelist. Tell us about when you decided to take on fiction writing and novels as part of your career.
I’ve written novels since I was a kid. Coming up in Hollywood as a TV writer, I loved long-form storytelling. That’s what I loved about writers’ rooms—thinking about how a character arc changes over 20 episodes, four seasons, whatever.
Returning to novel writing in the last year, year and a half has been pure joy. It’s been so much fun.
I’ve published two fiction books. The first is The Nomad Detective, a short story collection inspired by my travels as a digital nomad—and all the true crime I ran into, thinking, “This would be prime material for a detective.”
The second is my romantasy book, The Ash Trials, which came out earlier this year.
I’ve been blown away by the reader reactions—especially because I did next to no marketing. I feel really grateful. And I’m working on sequels for both.
It’s so fun—and such a privilege—when readers bug you about sequels.
And I think every fiction writer, every freelance writer who wants to write fiction, should carve out the space. It’s not optional. It’s not just a fun extra. If you have that urge, it’s part of your soul. You have to make time for it.
You often recommend writers adopt more of an entrepreneurial mindset. And romantasy is huge right now—so I’m curious: was writing romantasy partly writing to market? Was it a business decision?
No. In March of last year, I was on a flight to Seoul, South Korea to see friends, and my partner, Kyle, gave me the first ACOTAR book to read.
I was like, “I’m not reading this. I write thrillers about spies. I’m not a fantasy girl—let alone romance. Ew. Get out of here.”
Then I read it and I was like, “Kyle, I’m going to be up for the next three days reading all of these books. I’m not stopping. I’m not sleeping. You enjoy South Korea without me—goodbye.”
Something changed. For the first time, I saw a genre that took women’s stories seriously—where falling in love wasn’t a subplot, but the main plot. It explored complex emotions: who’s right for you, abusive relationships versus healthy ones… and it did it in a fantasy world.
I read like 80 romantasy books in three months and then I was like, “I’m writing one.”
So it came from love. And I think if you’re only writing to market, you strip the joy out of it—and readers feel that. Not to say it can’t work, but you have to love what you’re writing first.
Amazing. Someone writing fiction, nonfiction, memoir ghostwriting, online, blogging, magazines, YouTube scripts—what does an average writing day look like for you?
I batch things by project. Depending on my client workload, I’ll set aside time for developmental editing clients, ghostwriting clients—I batch those first.
Then I decide if I’m working on my own book. Right now I’m in a stage where I’m talking about the book I wrote, not writing it—so less writing time, more time having conversations with people like you, Kevin.
It ebbs and flows: am I preparing for a launch, writing my own book, dealing with client deadlines?
And I’ve been lucky. A few months ago I took six weeks off to hang out in China, let everything go, then came back and picked up where I left off.
I prioritize a flexible schedule, and you can build that with the model I talk about in Write for Money and Power: paid newsletter, self-published book, and freelance career.
Let’s dig into the book. We’re going to be releasing this interview right as the book is coming out—super exciting. Congratulations.
Thank you.
First off, it’s a pretty provocative title. Tell us about the title of the book.
Yeah—so the title is Write for Money and Power. I wrote it because I wanted to show people that, as a writer, you can step away from the starving artist myth and learn how to make seven figures without being submissive to gatekeepers who want to take all your ideas, hold you hostage, and slap you with golden handcuffs.
And I love the title—especially coming from me—because I’m not someone who likes power in the traditional sense. I like power in the sense of having a schedule where I can choose what I do—travel, spend time with people I love, take a day off, whatever I want.
And I really want writers to know they can have the lives they’ve only dreamed of. They can make it possible through writing, with smart business decisions that cradle their creative soul.
You mentioned the first part of the book is mindset-focused, right?
Yes.
What are some of the big pieces of advice from that section? Or maybe your favorite?
One of my favorites is an entire chapter about haters. As a writer, critics are going to come for you—whether you’re self-published, traditionally published, whether there are gatekeepers or not.
With a lot of my clients—memoir ghostwriting clients and developmental editing clients—we have to talk about this upfront: the book is going to come out, you’re going to get one-star reviews, and family members might have things to say about your memoir or your novel.
Here’s what you have to know: throughout history there have been famous artists and musicians who were ridiculed in their time—and now they’re the curriculum.
It’s not the critics whose voices echo through the centuries. It’s the artists doing the bold work. So you have to reframe it: yes, the critics will come, but their criticism doesn’t matter. The boldness and authenticity of your work matters.
That mindset shift helps when you hit publish and you’re like, Oh man, are people going to like what I’m writing? I feel that all the time. Impostor syndrome comes for all of us. But if you can set aside the critics and understand they’re going to show up—and it doesn’t matter—it’s life-changing. It lets you be free as a writer.
An analogy I often use—which you might appreciate, since you work with athletes—is this: there are people on the field of life, or the rink, or the NBA court… and then there are people in the stands cheering or booing.
Who do you want to be? I want to be on the court. I want to be the person trying to catch the ball. I don’t care what they’re saying in the stands. They can boo, they can cheer—but that’s not who I want to be.
I want to be the creator. The person putting stuff out there. Not the person on the sidelines watching other people do things.
Amy Suto
I love that, Kevin. That’s great. You’ve got some great metaphors today. You’re on fire—milking cows, the stands…
We dug into the first part of the book—the mindset side. What do the other sections look like?
The rest of the book covers the three pillars: how to build your paid newsletter, your freelancing career, and your self-published book in tandem.
It’s not this huge thing where it’s like, “Oh, now I have to write a book. Now I have to do this. Now I have to do that.” It’s step by step—how to scaffold them so they all support each other. You can do all three, but you’re reusing pieces across everything.
A lot of the work I do with memoir ghostwriting clients is: “Hey, if you have a book coming out, why not start a Substack or a paid newsletter where you release snippets?” One, you build your audience. Two, your true fans start paying for your work. They pay monthly for the newsletter, and then they also buy the book.
When people think about being a writer, they usually focus on one piece—freelancing, or the book, or the newsletter. They don’t combine them. This book is about scaffolding it into a truly sustainable career where you write what you love—and you have the money and power to build a life you love.
I think that blog-to-book framework can be really helpful for writers who feel overwhelmed by the idea of writing a book. A book feels enormous. But writing a chapter a week—or a month—and letting the book grow that way makes it manageable. Is that what you’ve found?
Yeah—and it’s also a great distribution model. Andy Weir wrote The Martian chapter by chapter. And even historically, authors serialized stories in newspapers.
Serializing for an audience is nothing new—distribution has just changed. And now we have bigger access to larger audiences because of the internet and these platforms.
I actually think this is a golden age for writers—the way we can distribute our work and become part of the creator economy.
So the book focuses on: how do you join the creator economy, hold on to your IP and your rights, monetize with an audience, find your 1,000—or 10,000 or 100,000—true fans, and not have to give huge chunks of your earnings to agents, managers, and lawyers.
In Hollywood, I found it wild that lawyers take a percentage of your work. They don’t work the whole project—they come in, do the contract, peace out—and still take a cut. Pre-tax. It’s crazy. Same with agents and managers.
Instead of giving up so much money pre-tax, you can keep it and invest in writing directly to your audience. That’s the future.
When huge authors like Brandon Sanderson are self-publishing on Kickstarter and earning tens of millions of dollars, and Taylor Swift self-published her tour book—if people at that level are subverting gatekeepers, what does that say about the rest of us?
What’s the big promise of the book? What are people going to take away from it?
If you’re a beginner writer or an expert writer, it doesn’t matter where you are on the journey—we all deal with the same demons.
The book meets you where you are and helps you build the scaffolding for a successful, sustainable career as a writer—where you don’t need a corporate job, you don’t have to work for someone else, and you have the money and power to live the life you want.
Did you publish portions of the book on Substack before releasing it?
Yeah, I did. I was workshopping bits and pieces.
But I also move quickly, so I don’t need as much workshopping as some people. Originally, I thought I was just going to add a few chapters to my last book, Six-Figure Freelance Writer, which I published a few years ago. I was like, “I’ll just add some chapters.”
Then I realized, nope—this is a whole new book. So I move fast. I love writing fast, adding, and coming up with things as I’m seeing them.
But yes, I did workshop some of it on Substack.
Fantastic—so you’re doing what the book recommends.
Yes.
You mentioned you move fast, and you’re juggling a ton. Two questions: how do you move so fast, and how do you avoid burnout?
I’m really lucky—I don’t work by myself.
I work with my partner—now my fiancé. We’re getting married this year.
Congratulations.
Thank you.
We’ve been business partners forever. We were business partners before we started dating. So we run our Substacks—Make Writing Your Job and Pseudoscience—together.
And I also have a team: an assistant, a wonderful publicist helping with the book launch.
You don’t need a team to scale a writing career, but where I’m at, it helps because I’m doing a bunch of different projects.
For someone who’s not at that stage yet—who doesn’t have a million-dollar writing business—how do they mimic your level of output across platforms? Where do they start, if their goal is to get where you are?
I don’t think it’s about mimicking productivity. It’s about the power of focus.
I didn’t do this early on, and it really hurt me. It took me longer to get where I am today. Instead of doing ten different projects, focus on one at a time.
In the words of James Clear: unfinished projects don’t compound. Your focus needs to go from a lamp to a laser.
Another book I love on this is Essentialism by Greg McKeown. You have to put your energy into one thing at a time and really crush it—not let fear pull you into another direction.
As writers, fear can be a huge wave: Oh no, what if this doesn’t work? What if I’m doing something wrong?
If you focus on building the scaffolding one piece at a time—for your paid newsletter—and then once it hits a certain point, you weave in self-publishing… keeping everything small and focused… you make progress.
Given you’re speaking to creative writers, you seem very comfortable talking about the financial side of things. A lot of artists feel uncomfortable with that. Can you speak to your comfort talking about money and the business side of the creative economy?
I started freelancing after reading The Freelancer’s Year by Lindy Alexander. She’s an Australian travel writer. This was back in 2012 or 2013, and she used to post monthly income statements.
Seeing those numbers—and what she could do with travel writing—made me think, “Oh, if she can do that, I can do that too.”
I honestly don’t think I would’ve started freelancing if I hadn’t seen someone share real numbers. It helped me conceptualize what was possible—both the ceiling and the average. When you Google “How much does a freelancer make?” you don’t really know what’s real.
That’s why, on Make Writing Your Job, we’re running what we hope will be the largest rate-transparency survey of the last year with 25,000 writers in our community—so we can get an accurate picture: what are people making, where is that money coming from, where are they finding jobs, are they doing grants, residencies, contests… what does it actually look like?
I think talking about money as creatives is important. It’s a public good. There isn’t a lot of trustworthy data on how to make a living as a writer, so we have to share it with each other.
Yeah, it’s such a great point—this idea of power being about autonomy, right? Power over your own life, and not giving away your creative power to others.
Within a corporate structure, it always serves the business to have people not talking about what anyone’s making. Whereas here, on this freelance platform you’ve built, it’s creatives helping each other, working together, and transparency only helps the average person—because there isn’t a CEO at the top hiding the real numbers.
Yeah. And that’s one of the coolest things about being a solopreneur or a freelancer—we’re all building our businesses together.
Talking about money, talking about what’s working—like, one of our writers recently started freelancing six months ago, and her career just took off. We were on a mastermind call through Make Writing Your Job, and she was telling everyone, “You guys need to triple your rates. You have no idea what you can make in developmental editing right now. It’s crazy. You’re charging way too little.”
And I love that. I love people hyping each other up—being like, “This niche pays more. This type of client pays more.”
We can only learn that from each other. The only way we help each other is by understanding the market and how quickly it’s changing—because writing and freelancing does change fast.
Having that information—and having a community around you—matters so much. It can be really lonely. I was lonely when I started freelancing, sitting in my apartment typing, thinking, I don’t know what anyone else is doing.
So it’s always been my goal—and I’m so grateful—to build communities around creating and writing, and to talk about these “taboo” topics.
A lot of writers listen to this show, obviously—but also writing coaches, editors, and people who work with authors. And I want to reiterate what you just said about raising rates and charging more.
Almost all the writing coaches I know are incredibly passionate about the work. They want to do the best work possible. And the reality is: higher rates give you the elbow room to do your best work.
It gives you the space for deep work—focusing on six clients instead of sixty, right? We do our best work when we have the financial stability to focus and not be pulled in a thousand different directions.
It’s taken me a decade to learn that—slowly inching my rates up, bit by bit. But hopefully someone listening can learn from our experiences and go, not only can you make a living, not only are you worth it, but you’re also going to do your best work when you’re financially stable.
Yeah. And I want to underscore the importance of coaches. I’ve hired coaches in the past and paid for education because I do think coaching is valuable. At the right stage in your journey, it can be a force multiplier.
Even if you’re a first-time writer working on your first book, having a writing coach is so valuable.
People say, “Oh, I can learn everything on the internet for free.” Totally—I’ve learned a lot for free too. But when you want to shortcut the pain of failure, or have somebody help you through something, it’s worth it.
And as a freelancer—whether you’re a developmental editor or in a supporting role—you’re not just the person they hired. You’re a sounding board. You’re a collaborator. Sometimes you’re a friend.
That human element is priceless. AI can’t do that. Software can’t handle that. People are craving that, especially now—loneliness is higher than ever. If you’re a creative doubting your work, having somebody in your corner matters. Absolutely.
Couldn’t have said it better.
The book is out now—people are hearing this right as it’s releasing. What have you got on the schedule? Is there a marketing launch campaign going on? Where can people find you—and where can they get the book?
They can find the book at amysuto.com/power, or on Amazon, Waterstones, Barnes & Noble—everywhere. The book is out everywhere.
People can also join our community of writers at makewritingyourjob.com, where we have the writing job board and do things like the rate transparency survey and report.
And I run my Substack, Pseudoscience—my last name, S-U-T-O, plus the word “science”—where I share creative experiments and talk about what I’ve learned growing on Substack.
I love it. Amy, you’re obviously a very busy person, so I really appreciate you taking the time to come on the show and share these lessons—and everything you’ve got on the go.
I can’t wait to pick up my copy of the book. I’m really looking forward to reading it, and I know the listeners will too.
Awesome. Thank you so much for having me, Kevin. It’s been wonderful.
Kevin T. Johns is a writing coach who helps authors stop struggling in isolation and start finishing books with clarity, confidence, and momentum. Book a consultation call with him here.
