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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, obviously, I'm a 20-year writer at this point, but it was your use of the word power.
I have not seen another writing book that says Write for Money and Power: The Anti-Starving Artist's Guide to Becoming a Seven-Figure Writer. And again, the subtitle, other people have done that.
Let's talk about power because why did you use that word, and what kind of power are you talking about?
Amy: So when I was coming up in Hollywood, a lot of the writers around me, we were all being funnelled into the gatekeepers' world for us, and the vision that other people had for us. That meant that we were giving up our power.
So when I went on this journey of being able to travel the world, and ghostwrite memoirs, and being able to write my own novels and connect with readers directly, I discovered my own sense of power.
I think that for writers, you're not really allowed to want to be able to have power over your career because it's so discouraged by gatekeepers and society. You're supposed to be a starving artist who is grateful for anything that comes your way because you get to make your art.
So I think that there's a shift happening in culture where writers are being treated not just as artists that are expected to starve, but also as creative entrepreneurs, where we're learning how to own all parts of our creative journey.
Both the creation of our books artistically, but also the marketing of them, and how we get them out into the world, and treating that like one whole entity.
I think that there's a shift happening where writers are no longer wanting to write what gatekeepers tell them to, and are wanting to be able to have unburdened creative freedom.
That's why so many authors like Brandon Sanderson end up self-publishing or independently publishing, because they want that creative power to be able to serve their fans and their readers better.
That's so cool, and it also proves the fact that even with people like Taylor Swift buying back her masters, so many people who are at the top of their game are outgrowing the gatekeepers. If they're not finding use for these older systems, then that also brings them into question for the rest of us.
Jo: I love that. Coming back to the book, so you mentioned the starving artist mindset, and in the book you also talk about the creator CEO, and I love that. I feel like I can claim those words, but I know some people listening will just find that pretty intimidating, I think.
So what do you think the process is for moving from scarcity to the more empowered author mindset?
Amy: When I first was starting my career as a writer, I never wanted to be a business person. I didn't want to look at spreadsheets, I didn't want to deal with accounting.
The thing is, if you want power over things like what does your book cover look like, or how is your book marketed, or how does your book enter the world, and even just what are the contents of what you're writing, what are the subject matters, what is actually something that gets to reach your readers?
If you want that power, then it does come with some of the other elements of being an entrepreneur, which is understanding how to price your book. There are so many interesting mechanics of bookselling, which is what I really love that you've been covering on The Creative Penn Podcast and on your blog, Joanna.
It's just so beautiful to see writers talking about the entrepreneurial side of what does it mean to sell books? How do you do it? What are the mechanics of that?
Today, with different types of technology, it's gotten easier than ever for writers to be able to do a lot of things themselves, which can feel intimidating, but then you realise how much it unlocks.
Even something as simple as, if you sell one book to a reader who likes your work, your royalty percentage can go from 10, 20, 30% to up to 70%, because you've made that switch of being able to take on the cap of CEO and being able to own a little bit more responsibility.
With that, the number of books that you need to sell to have a beautiful life as a writer immediately drops. So for me, the added responsibility was worth it because I was able to have all this freedom, being able to write on my own schedule and set my own publish dates, and not have to wait two years for a book to come out.
I could wait instead six months and pick exactly how I wanted the book to come out.
So I think it's reframing this step into becoming a creator CEO, not as a burden, but as an opportunity to flex your creative muscles in different ways, and to be able to have more flexibility in your own life on how your creative work comes out and is distributed.
Jo: Absolutely. It's so great to hear. I just feel like so much of what you say is what I've been saying for years. When I started saying it back in 2008, this was not popular, and we were considered the early indie authors.
It was considered vanity. It was considered the worst form of publishing. You were not good enough to get published. hat's not how you're talking about it, is it?
Amy: No, and I think that—
A lot of people are shifting what it means to be “self-published.”
It's not a vanity press thing. We're just seeing so many examples of people using the internet to take their work and bring it directly to fans, and understanding that there are fewer barriers than ever to getting your books into your readers' hands.
Actually working with a bunch of bureaucracy of a larger publishing house can slow you down, can dilute your ideas, and can potentially keep you from being the kind of author that has the career that you've always wanted.
So I think it's an empowerment of the creator age and the creator economy, and this ability to publish more, to publish faster, to publish more creatively, to put out bolder ideas.
So, yes, I think that you are definitely a trendsetter, and I think that that's so incredible, the trend that you were riding the wave of, and that you were originating, coming to fruition. I think that just proves that you were ahead of the curve.
Jo: Oh, well, thank you for that. I feel like one wave crested, and now we're in another wave, and we're going to circle back to technology. But just so people get a sense of your creator CEO self, what are your multiple streams of income?
How are you making your income with all these different ways of writing?
Amy: The income streams that I cover in Write for Money and Power are my own income streams as well as what I recommend for other authors, and it's a trifecta of freelancing, a paid newsletter, such as a newsletter hosted on Substack, and also income from your books and royalties related to your work as an author.
These three income streams have helped me balance this side of both creativity and also commerce and the needs of being able to pay bills, so that I can travel the world and live in beautiful cities like San Francisco, where I get to call home. These three pillars are really great because they also support each other.
If you have an audience that subscribes to your Substack or your other paid newsletter, regardless of what platform you're on, that audience can pay a subscription fee to access certain types of content, similar to platforms like Patreon.
Then you can not only get revenue from that, but that paid newsletter audience can then buy your book when your book comes out and become early readers of your book.
From there, the audience that buys your book on Substack can also serve as a point of proof for your freelancing.
So if you offer any services, like so many novelists I know offer developmental editing and things like that, then you can use the proof point of a community to become a freelancer and then sell your services that way.
So the three of them feed into each other, because then the money that you make from freelancing can fund your next book launch, or it can fund more time for you to go and write on Substack.
That flywheel is something that can help writers, and it is an alternative to what we've thought about in the past about a traditional day job, about going and working as a barista or a coffee shop worker.
There are so many other different careers that you could do, but these are nice because these three pillars feed into your future book launches and your writing as a whole, to create this holistic flywheel of income.
Jo: Yes.
I definitely think having another stream of income other than just book sales is important.
Obviously, this podcast, for example, has sponsors, and I also have a Patreon, although it's not a paid newsletter.
I think what you mean is a subscription, some kind of subscription where you have,—not guaranteed income every month—but at least more regular income every month rather than the up-and-downiness, which books are so much so.
Amy: Definitely. There are so many different models, and the paid newsletter is one that I think is becoming more attractive right now because you are able to keep all of the email addresses of everybody who signs up, and you're able to email them directly.
So compared to building an audience on Instagram or TikTok, you're able to own your email list and take that email list with you from platform to platform, so you're not dependent on these platforms.
I like the paid newsletter as a format for authors because you're able to keep people in the loop about every book and your writing process, and give them a behind-the-scenes look.
It's also just such a great format that's built for writers. On platforms like Substack, the people who are doing the best are novelists and authors and writers.
So I think it's also trying to look at the places where you already have the skill set to thrive versus having to build an entire audience on YouTube or TikTok. Some authors really take to that, but I know a lot of writers who are introverts and prefer to thrive in the written form.
So putting out a paid newsletter allows them to connect and build that fan base with their readers, and also thrive in the medium that they're already in.
Jo: Fantastic. Well, let's talk about Substack then, because you have two. I have two author names, and I know how hard it is to maintain two lots of everything.
So you've got Make Writing Your Job and Sutoscience.
So tell us about those Substacks—why two—and a bit more about using Substack in general.
Amy: Make Writing Your Job is our community for writers. We host a job board. We list different grants, contests, and residency opportunities.
We also do author interviews and try to find different ways to bring people cool resources on how to make writing their jobs, including some discounts on different products like Scrivener and things like that.
Make Writing Your Job was my first Substack that I built, and we have over 60,000 subscribers today, and we're in the top 25 of business on Substack.
I built it as a place to try to help everybody else with the concepts of my books, and then also to be connected to other freelance clients that I was too busy to work with.
So it came from a place of wanting to just empower people to make writing their job through a myriad of different ways. That's been a really exciting community to grow because it's truly become something that I'm just so proud of. We do in-person meetups in Los Angeles and other cities.
We have such a great group of people that we've been able to put together on that Substack that it became something that I'm just so grateful to have.
Then Sutoscience is my own personal Substack where I share all of the behind the scenes of what it means to be a writer and an entrepreneur, trying to figure out how to stay connected to my creativity while thinking strategically about how to grow on Substack and things like that.
So on Sutoscience, I write about the behind the scenes of everything I'm up to, and I also have a monthly mastermind group with my founding members where we all talk about this. We're basically a writers' group for what we're building on Substack and beyond with our books. So it's been fun.
The reason why I have two is because Make Writing Your Job is something I run with my husband. It's a community. It's something that I'm building in service of a larger group, whereas Sutoscience is more my personal behind the scenes.
Jo: What about serialising your fiction? Talk about that.
Amy: This is something that I was really excited to get working on this year, and it surprised me in so many different ways.
A lot of writers who have serialised fiction on Substack have promoted it as a way to just bring in tons of paid subscribers, and it's something that has unlocked so much for them.
I have found that the benefits of serialising fiction go even beyond paid subscribers. When you do the math on it, it makes a lot of sense.
When you sell a single book, then you are usually making around $6 to $7 of profit, depending on how you're publishing, who you're publishing with, if you're going direct.
If you have a Substack that's priced at around $8 a month, then if you have people sign up to read even the first few chapters, they'll read the chapters, and then if they stay subscribed, you've already out-earned what you would have made on a book.
So the math already makes a ton of sense, but the thing that really surprised me when I started serialising my novel, Let Me Be Your Ghost, on my Sutoscience Substack, was that the readers that joined me on the journey so far, because it's not completely out yet, the readers who have joined me are diehard fans.
I literally have had readers who have emailed me since the beginning when the chapters came out, telling me what they loved, telling me what they thought could be changed in the book.
Then they're promoting the book to other people, and helping me get other beta readers, and championing the book, and then being the first to pre-order it when I opened pre-orders.
So what I've built unintentionally with the serialisation is not only another audience and a different type of digital product along with the launch of the book, but I've built a way to supercharge pre-orders and also connect deeper with my true fans, with the readers who are really invested in helping me make this book the best that it can be.
Serialising fiction is also really fascinating because I'm serialising what is essentially a rough draft that will eventually morph into the final draft.
So similar to other authors that I've admired, I'm really trying to bring my community in and see what they think of this story. Does it feel like something that resonates with them?
To have people be so ardently helpful has been really incredible, and I've gotten thousands and thousands and thousands of views on the chapters. That's something that, as a fiction author, I'm so grateful for, to have those early readers, those early champions.
So far I've just been blown away by the reactions with the beta reader forms I put out. I'm going out to ARC readers this week, and my early readers have been driving that, as well as driving revenue to help me continue to spend more time on the book.
Jo: But then I guess I would argue that it doesn't matter what platform you use. If you have an audience then that process works, whatever platform you use.
At the moment, a lot of writers are jumping on Substack because they've heard that they can do things like what you're saying. But once again, they're arriving at what is now actually quite a crowded platform, and putting up some chapters of their book, whether it's fiction or non-fiction, and then they're like, “Well, nobody's here.”
So if someone is in that situation, if they're putting up their chapters or they're putting up articles or whatever, and they don't have any traction—
What are your tips for getting more traction on Substack?
Amy: The great thing about Substack—and I try to reveal these numbers as much as possible on Sutoscience—is that most of my paid subscribers, most of my total subscribers, are actually coming from Substack itself.
Substack has a lot of great built-in discovery tools, including recommendations, but also their algorithm that promotes you when somebody is signing up for someone else's Substack.
There are a lot of really clever tools that Substack has that have ended up driving a ton of readers who maybe never would have found me on any other platform. The cool thing is, I don't have to pay upfront to have those readers find me.
So a lot of the things that I break down on my Sutoscience Substack are how to make sure that your Substack is categorised correctly and shows up in discovery correctly, how to work with other Substackers on interviewing them or being interviewed on Substack Live, which then brings other people into your universe.
Substack just has all of these really cool creative tools that I haven't seen any other platform use to support writers, in part because their incentives are aligned. Substack makes a 10% cut of all paid subscriptions, and they handle so much more in the back end that you would have to pay for otherwise.
So it's really cool to be able to use their discovery tools to get in front of new readers, and the fiction category is something that is growing.
It is definitely a smaller category compared to the personal essay, how-to non-fiction categories. But I've seen that fiction has definitely been ticking up, including, most impressively, Jeff Bezos' ex-wife has been publishing her fiction on Substack.
Which I found just so interesting, that somebody who is basically a billionaire, if not a hundred-millionaire, and she has every resource on the planet to go through traditional publishing, she's picking Substack as a place to put out her work.
In part because the platform also has this brand of being very high-end, of having these journalists and these authors and these serious writers on the platform.
So you have this natural discovery of people who are coming to read War and Peace chapter by chapter on one Substack that's doing an analysis. They're reading journalists from these esteemed publications that have moved to Substack. Alongside those different incredible writers, they can discover your work as well.
So it's not going to be something that's easy to grow from zero, but I think it's really cool to be able to take your work to a platform where you already know there's an audience of really serious, interested readers that then will bring that energy to reading your work.
Jo: So if somebody does want to come over to Substack, I guess one of the things that puts me off another platform is that, for example, I don't like chatting in comments. Substack, I believe, has now got its own social network as much as anything else.
How are you managing comments on Substack versus other social media?
Amy: I feel like the common thread here, the thing that I feel as well, is that it can be overwhelming to be, “I need to be on all these social media platforms, and I have to be present. People have access to me.” That can be a lot.
So I think that Substack has to be one of those platforms where there needs to be a level of understanding what is right for you and what's not right for you.
For example, the subscriber chat feature is something that I think a lot of people would be better off just turning off and not having to worry about it.
The other feature is being able to have the comments on your posts be for paid subscribers only. So the only people that can comment on your posts are just people who have intentionally paid for your publication and want to be there.
I think that naturally gets rid of spam. It naturally gets rid of people who are lurking, or naysayers, or things like that, and it keeps it closer to a community.
The other piece of their social media platform, Substack Notes, while it can be helpful for growth, I think it doesn't have to be something you have to go all in on to see growth on Substack. I very rarely am on Substack Notes, and I'm often scheduling things ahead of time and not necessarily engaging a whole lot.
I do think that compared to other social media platforms and other places where discussions happen around writing, I've found Substack to have the most interesting conversations. Also, I've met the most fascinating people in real life from connections that I've made on Substack.
So there is this neat community and neat pool of people, but you have to be intentional about how you interact with it, in the same way you have to be intentional about how you interact with other social media platforms or other spaces online.
Jo: Yes, it's so funny, isn't it? I think it's also about what stage you are in your author career, because as you're talking there, I'm remembering the early days of Twitter. I got on Twitter in 2008, and that was the golden era of blogging and Twitter.
A lot of the friends I have in real life now, I met on Twitter, and it built my author platform in those early days. I connected with people who changed the way my career went.
That just sounds very similar, and it just feels like every couple of years, a new platform rises. And that might not be brand new. Obviously, Substack's not brand new. It's reasonably mature now. But over the last few years, I think really since the pandemic, it's grown. So I think maybe that's the tip for people.
You don't have to do all of these things, but there might be things that emerge at different points that work for you.
Amy: Definitely. I think that's a good way to think about it, because ultimately, and this is something that I'm always trying to keep track of, we are writers and we should be writing first.
All of these platforms, all these tools, they should be in service of us finding time to write creatively and write work that our readers will enjoy. Everything else is noise.
So it's trying to understand what is a distraction, what is actually getting you closer to your true fans, your true readers, and what platform features or things are just not worth it.
That, I think, is the question that we always have to ask ourselves, auditing. Is this actually useful, or is this going to be a huge time suck that I'm just going to spend doomscrolling or completely distracted from the actual core of the work that we're here to do?
Jo: Well, then I guess the question relates to what topic people should do. You're an interesting example because you have different fiction novels in different genres already. So you're obviously a multi-passionate creator, and you're not sticking with one genre. You also have this non-fiction content.
So if authors have lots of different genre books like you do, where should they start with their Substack?
What should they focus on in order to attract people who might be interested in their work?
Amy: The best advice that I have gotten, and that I've seen work for others as well, is to start with the thing that you're most excited about.
That might be, for some writers, writing about their day-to-day life. What is it like to get up and write either before work or as their full-time job? For other writers, it's writing an incredibly niche deep dive on Nicholas Sparks.
Everybody's going to have their own way into what it means to enter this space and write something for other people and to share the things that they're excited about.
There's one sci-fi author who wrote an incredibly detailed piece about the types of pens that he uses, and how different fountain pens write best on different types of paper, what type of paper, what to write with on an airplane, because with certain pens, the ink gets stuck on the airplane.
I love this idea of people coming to share the thing that they are so passionate about, and that they could write forever on.
In the niche comes the universal. So in writing about something very specific, suddenly you'll get other readers that are also fanatics of the types of pens, or different romance authors, or whatever it is.
I think that so often we try to mould ourselves to what we think people will like to read, but in reality, if we just write the things that we love, and then just tweak the framing so that it's accessible for readers, then we'll have made it, then we'll have gotten there, and our passion will shine through.
So I think that the hardest part about Substack is trying to figure out how to write the thing that you love and just package it in a way where the headline is something that will speak to the piece that you've written, and that readers will know what to expect when they land on your Substack's About page.
So you can have different multitudes. You just need to be able to walk people through it and frame it well.
That's the thing that, as somebody who's multi-passionate, who is writing all these different formats, I can come to my audience of people who are reading my non-fiction work and say, “Hey, I have a book coming out. It's called Let Me Be Your Ghost, and it's inspired by my memoir ghostwriting work.”
So I'm connecting my non-fiction work to the inspiration of my new romantic thriller book. I'm able to bridge across different audiences because I'm able to understand what they followed me for, and connect it to something that I'm doing next that I think they'll really love.
Jo: Yes, that's great. Again, it's so funny because it does resonate with the early days of blogging on WordPress and all the things we used to do, which I still do. It's really funny because it's exactly the same with the SEO structures. But yes, I love it.
Let's talk a bit more about technology. In the book, you do talk about AI. You say, “AI tools can be incredible amplifiers. They're not replacements, they're accelerators. I think that every serious writer who wants to stay competitive is going to use them in some way.”
Now, I agree with that, but of course, the author community is pretty split, and I think Substack has even incorporated Pangram or one of the anti-AI writing things.
So can you talk about your thoughts and use of AI and how you think it's changing things?
Amy: I think that the analogy that I really love to use to think about this is to think about how some of the most successful writers in Hollywood, and then also in traditional publishing, put together a book or a show.
In Hollywood, you are the showrunner, and it's your idea, and you bring together a room of five to eight really talented writers, and you bounce ideas off of them.
They shape the work, and then they often are the hands typing on the keyboard, and they bring work to you for you to review, and everything goes through your computer last.
Even in traditional publishing, even though you may be writing a book, your editor is going to give you tons of notes. Your agent is going to shape a lot of pieces of it. You're going to have the publisher giving you a lot of feedback on what it should look like. Even if you're self-published, you still need a lot of that support.
So the way that AI, I think, fits into a lot of this is that it helps with a lot of pieces of the process that are tedious and challenging, and that are not tied deeply to your creativity.
When I think about writing a book, especially a non-fiction book, it's not just about, “Here, let me put everything down on paper one way.”
It's about, “Oh, did I already use this anecdote before? Here is a 30-minute transcript of me talking through this chapter and how it should be laid out and all of the ideas in it. Can you help me shape this into something that I can then go and edit?”
For fiction, it's also about the things that we would have used Google for before. What is the list of baby names that I should look through online to try to find the perfect name for this character? Let me do a deep dive on the history of this name, this first name, last name.
I think that for us writers, AI can help accelerate parts of the research process. It can help us find things.
One thing that I always love using AI for is, how many times have I used this word or phrase in the book? And then it'll be like, “Oh, you used the word temperature 37 times in the last six chapters.”
So it surfaces the things that a good editor would surface, but it will absolutely not replace editors. I think that's the thing that's really helpful. I love the collaborative work of working with book editors on my projects.
AI helps me to get past some of the detail work, the cleanup of changing my word count or word changes, to make sure that I'm not repeating things. Then it also helps me do deep research on the locations and the places that I may have visited before, but I can't remember.
What is the name of that small town in wine country? I think that this type of tree is in this region, but I can't remember. Can you help me with that?
So much of the writing process is also fact-checking and researching and line editing, and AI can help with so many pieces of that, allowing us to think more freely about our characters and the people that we're putting into our worlds, and how we're constructing a non-fiction book.
Jo: Yes, I love that. It's so funny, isn't it? Some of us have incorporated AI tools into our work now in so many different ways.
There are literally tons and tons and tons of ways that we use AI tools, and we still know that we are using our creativity.
It just feels more fun as well. I use Claude mostly. I love brainstorming with my Claude around ideas for this, that, and the other, and as you say, at different points in the way we do stuff.
For example, Claude will be cleaning up our transcript here and putting it on the blog so people can read the transcript, making this accessible to everyone. So things like that, which, as you say, are not tied deeply to your creativity.
Amy: Yes, and I just put in a big order for red pens last night because I need a certain red pen. I'm planning on printing out the rest of my draft as soon as I finish, before it goes to ARC readers.
I know I'm going to need that analogue experience of sitting down with a red pen at a coffee shop somewhere in San Francisco, where I live, and just going through and having that tactile experience of writing in the margins of the paper and feeling the pen underneath my hand.
I think that those experiences are still going to be uniquely us. I think that there are some bad actors out there that are using AI to generate every single word of their book and not reading anything and leaving the prompts in and just publishing it as is. The slop epidemic is huge.
I think for us professional writers who come in and use these tools, we're wielding them like scalpels. We're coming in, and we're having it help with the pieces that we know need to change, that we know we need help on, that are often mundane and challenging.
Like, “Hey, can you track this character's eye colour across the whole book, because I know I changed it five times?”
So that stuff is really helpful, but at the end of the day, I think it's the author's responsibility to sit down with a draft and read and have their hands on every single word before it goes out.
Ultimately, we're writing for other humans, so it is the human touch that will make it special and beautiful and unique to our experience.
I do think that these tools can help be your writers' room in a lot of ways, just like you were describing. They can help with a lot of the different pieces.
Other professional writers throughout history have had whole teams around them, and therefore, like you were saying, it makes the writers' room model more accessible for writers who can't afford that.
Jo: Yes, or who just want to do it for fun. It's funny, you were talking there about the eye colour. It makes me laugh because I do that all the time.
Also, I'm now writing book 14 in my ARKANE thriller series, and the first book I started writing in, oh, it must have been 2009. So it's been a really long time, and—
I don't want to reread every single book every time I do the next one.
My main character, Morgan Sierra, has been through a heck of a lot of battles, and so the wounds on her body at this point, and her scars. So I was saying to Claude, “Can you please just update my character bio for Morgan, and where she might be hurting in this fight scene?”
Amy: I love that. That's so clever.
Jo: Which is just so fun. Oh, and also, “In all the fight scenes we've written for all the books, can we do something more original for the next one?”
Amy: Yes, and I think that this is such a great use case, because otherwise other authors have sometimes had teams that track their character bibles and things like that. Even when I was working in Hollywood, when I was getting started, I was the assistant helping my boss track those kinds of things.
I think that it's very manual and also sometimes inaccurate, so having machines do some of these jobs that it's more effective to use them for, I think, can then free you up to think about, what are the other ways to approach this fight scene?
You're still having to curate, even if AI gives you suggestions of, “Oh, you could do this, this, or this.” You have to be the one saying, “Oh, I know that this is going to be the best choice, but I'm going to combine it with this and change this to make it true to your story and your series.”
So that curation is one of the deepest parts of creativity, and that's even what James Patterson argued, because he's worked with ghostwriters his whole career.
His whole point was that the work that was the most creative was when he was writing the outlines and deciding how the story was going to be told.
When he handed it over to his ghostwriter, he's like, “The hardest part's been done. The ghostwriter's just going to carry out my vision, and I have already done the creative heavy lifting.” So a lot of writing is just making good creative decisions.
Jo: So then one reason that some writers are worried about this is because readers, or more likely other writers, are attacking them. As you said, there is a very literary community on Substack.
So for those writers who might feel afraid of using AI in any way—even with marketing tasks because they're worried about being attacked—
How can you encourage them?
Amy: I think that this is just another wave. Every time there's a new technology, there's always going to be that moment of fear around, “Is this going to take our jobs? Is this going to hurt us in some way? What is this?”
I think that wave is starting to pass. I've even seen it with a lot of my Hollywood friends that were very anti-AI, who are professional working writers now. They're starting to incorporate it into their process more.
I think that while there are still areas like traditional publishing where there's a lot of fear-mongering around that, if you're able to take your career into your own hands and have the power to be able to put out what you want, then you shouldn't fear that.
You shouldn't fear backlash because these tools have completely changed everything. You can't put them back in the box now. So many authors are either using them publicly or in secret, and this is something that is already coming to revolutionise everything.
I say that as somebody who is in San Francisco seeing the future of these tools, seeing how people are using them, and if you want to publicly not use them, that's totally okay.
But I think the writers who want to use them shouldn't feel shame around it, shouldn't feel like they're going to be attacked.
There are always going to be people, fans, writers, readers, who are going to attack other authors on a variety of different things. Internet hate has always been around, even before AI.
So I think, for me, if you're writing a good story that people love, they're not going to care that it's AI. They're going to feel invested in the characters.
So I think ultimately it's trying to stay away from all of those fights about what is good, what is bad, whether or not you should use it. Every author's going to have to make that decision for themselves.
If readers don't want to read certain things made with certain tools, that's okay, but I think that at the end of the day, we're all humans and we want to read good stories. I think that is going to win out over the purity battle of whether or not this has been used with AI. I think that is going to start to fade away.
Jo: Oh, thank goodness for that. I really, really hope so.
So where can people find you and your books and your Substacks and everything you do online?
Amy: So Sutoscience.com, spelled like my last name, S-U-T-O, and then the word science, is my personal Substack, and MakeWritingYourJob.com is our writing job board with resources for writers.
Also, I'm on every social media platform @sutoscience.
Jo: Fantastic. Well, thanks so much for your time, Amy. That was great.
Amy: Yes. Thank you so much for having me.