Transcript
Speaker: Hey, we're getting down to it. Saturday, October 24th at Gratitude Brewing, 1 p.m. Chuck Klosterman, bestselling author, is coming downtown to Eugene, Oregon for a live recording of this year's podcast.
Speaker: We'll be talking about his new book, Rock. a mainstream alternative history of alternative mainstream music in his book football and writing and voice and style he is singular and you can see him in person ah rsvp with a free ticket at the link in my newsletters or the instagram profile at creative nonfiction podcast the place will be packed so come on down it's free and open to the public well it should be packed if it's not packed i I'm going to be I'm going to be sad. I can't have Chuck Klosterman looking out in the audience and seeing five people. That'll be the end.
Speaker: That'll be the end of me as you know it. Every time somebody passes away, it's like a library burning to the ground.
Speaker: Oh, hi, CNF. It's the Creative Nonfiction Podcast, a show where i speak to tellers of true tales about the true tales they tell, and I got an email out of the blue, wouldn't you know, and it was from this writer person called Amy Sudo.
Speaker: That's what she is called. Ha, ha, ha. who wanted to come on and talk about ghostwriting and stuff of that nature. She's very clearly someone who doesn't need the attention. She's doing, let's just say, quite well for herself. She has a $250,000 plus substack annualized revenue and is the author of the book Write for Money and Power, the anti-starving artist's guide to becoming a seven-figure writer.
Speaker: I'll take five, thank you. Maybe I should read that book. Amy is a story factory of sorts. She's a ghostwriter to many high-end folks. She runs online courses through her Substack, like Make Your Substack Your Job and the Six-Week Substack Sprint Workshop. Her Substack is her ecosystem, and she has mastered it.
Speaker: a little bit more on Amy, and a little bit show notes to this episode more at brendanamera.com. Hey, there you can get access to the vast archive of the show and blog posts. My website is pretty old school and I love it.
Speaker: You may also sign up for Pitch Club. If you want to get better at selling stories or the Rage Against the Algorithm newsletter, which might get a rebrand to This American Life or not. I don't know. I'm losing more subscribers every month and gaining on that one.
Speaker: Man, I've never quite recovered from that one month and like a couple years ago that I changed it to a weekly newsletter to come coincide with the podcast. I've never seen such a mass exodus of subscribers, and it's never quite rebounded, which kind of bums me out.
Speaker: There's also patreon.com slash cnfpod, and we have two new paying patrons to shout out. Thank you to Dennis Davidson and Catherine Walsh for stepping up and helping support the podcast. I don't take ads. This podcast is listener and host supported.
Speaker: That might not make business sense, but I'd rather put the power in your hands and mine. This is our show. I never want to be handcuffed and worried about offending an advertiser. Now, sometimes I take promotional swaps, but that's different. We keep it punk rock, man.
Speaker: Amy Sudo is based in San Francisco. She used to be a TV writer, but eventually wanted more agency in her writing life. She serializes fiction from her Substack and offers tutorials and classes and a hub for sharing writing opportunities.
Speaker: I'm always a bit weary when you put all your eggs in the basket of a social media platform, like a Substack, but I'm not the guy you want to take money advice from. Look at what I do, then I would advise, do the opposite. But better yet, look at what Amy does.
Speaker: You can find her online at pseudoscience, S-U-T-O, o science, on Instagram, amysudo.com, or pseudoscience.com, and that brings you to her Substack portal.
Speaker: little more about her. She's devoted her life to the art of storytelling. She graduated from USC's prestigious film school with a BFA in writing for screen and television. She worked her way up the ranks from agency assistant to being able to write her own episode of TV, fully immersing herself and the art and writing fast-paced thrillers for global audiences. In her spare time, she also created live events and stuff.
Speaker: Wow, that's nice. We like live events. Chuck Holsterman event, October 24th, 1 p.m., Gratitude Brewing. She's published four books so far. How-to book, Six-Figure Freelance Writer, A Holistic Guide to Finding Freedom in Freelancing, The Nomad Detective, Volume 1, and her debut romantic-y novel, The Ash Trials, And write for Money and Power, which I previously mentioned. Her next novel is Let Me Be Your Ghost. It's a romantic thriller about a ghostwriter.
Speaker: She had some experience there. Undercover in a billionaire's estate. And that comes out next month, November 18th. You can pre-order it now.
Speaker: Go to amysudo.com and learn more about that, okay? Okay? In this episode, we talk about TV writing, ghostwriting is flying the wall, inhabiting the client's voice, memoir touch points, needing to like the client or not, battling voices, charging what you're worth so you don't get burned out, branding, conflicting memories, creative boundaries, building a substack to $260,000 in revenue, asking the best questions, volume over everything, and the great talk by Mark Duplass.
Speaker: about the cavalry not coming. If you ask me, this episode will pair well with Jane Friedman's appearance, any of Jen Miller's appearances, as well as Jennifer Goforth-Gregory.
Speaker: Parting shot on some book progress, but for now, let's cue up that amazing montage. Riff.
Speaker: This is the question of my life. What are you doing? Look at yourself. Look at what you're doing. Definitely louder than whatever dumb fuck question is that you want to ask. it This is going to have to interest somebody somewhere other than me.
Speaker: Yeah, followed all of the advice everyone gave me. I was a very good student. I went to USC. I graduated from their screenwriting program, immediately started working in Hollywood, climbed Hollywood, climbed my way up the assisted ladder, you know, worked for an agent and then showrunners and finally got to write my first episode of TV for a spy show where I got to work with a retired CIA agent who had just very recently retired. And he got to like spill all these crazy conspiracies that I knew had been true. And so i after hearing all that, I was like, oh, this is awesome. I love this. But then what kind of started to happen in Hollywood is that I started to realize that I was going to be stuck in this tunnel of working on other people's things because even the pattern that I saw for a lot of the people around me, accomplished showrunners and other writers, is that they were kind of getting stuck and being shuffled around to other projects like Avengers 36. And I had no interest in just working on big franchises or other people's shows. I wanted to write my own things. And so when the pandemic hit and then everything kind of shut down for 2020 and then the writers room I was in went to a Zoom room. I was like, okay, this is a perfect moment to reconsider my entire life and every choice that I've made up until this point. And so at that point, I decided to start traveling the world with friends. We started quarantined together and did a road trip around the US. s And then from there, we just went to Europe when that one opened. And then I started ghostwriting memoirs and writing novels. And that just completely changed the trajectory of my life. And I found myself much happier to be in control of my destiny. Yeah. Well, it's it's funny you say like, you know, trying to take back some ah some agency and autonomy, ah but at the same time doing ghostwriting stuff is still, it's still somebody else's story that you're helping, you know, steward, if you will. So, I don't just kind of take us to that, how you grew comfortable doing that, i you know, lack of a better term, sort of like hiding behind that person that you're writing for.
Speaker: Yeah, I think I i really love ghostwriting, especially memoir ghostwriting, because these are stories that I could never write in a million years, but I get to be a fly in the wall on somebody else's story. a really good example of this is one of my first books that I was on. The client had me come out to their family reunion at this big, beautiful Southern California winery. And she had just brought in her family. And then she said, surprise family.
Speaker: Here is my new family because my father was not my biological father. And I took a DNA test and welcome, meet everyone. And everyone was shocked. And I was there while there were tears, people were fighting. And then she was like, oh, by the way, this is Amy, my ghostwriter. Go talk to her. Yeah. So suddenly I was like in the middle of this incredible moment of beautiful reunion, but also like all of the family stuff bubbling up. And I got to listen to everything. And I am a little bit of a nosy person and I enjoy being an ear to to kind of hear what people are going through. I think in another life, I could have been a therapist, but this is almost more fun because then i got to help her process all of this and then put it in a book and understand, okay, well, what is the story of what this means for my life of finding this family and kind of recognizing what I've gone through? And so for me, there's such satisfaction in being able to use my storytelling skills to help people go through this catharsis and to shape their story while also kind of like getting an insight into people's lives that I never would have met in any other capacity. Yeah.
Speaker: Even piggybacking on what you said um a moment ago about doing your script with the the retired CIA agent, like there's an element of that ghostwriter-iness and the the inhabiting of another person's skin to tell an evocative story. So even going back to your TV days, things are rhyming there from from that time to this time, it would it would appear.
Speaker: Yeah, but I think the difference is that as a memoir ghostwriter, I was able to pick all of the clients that I work with and to be able to also get a sense of the lives of people that are kind of previously off limits. So I've done books for Olympians and NBA plowout players and Silicon Valley CEOs. I've been flown out to Vienna and visited my clients in Singapore and Athens, Greece. And so I get to kind of slip into their lives and meet their family and, you know, get a tour of the Austrian countryside as part of my job and get paid to do that. And that's something that I was able to pick and choose rather than a studio being like, this is your next assignment and you're on the show for the next three years, whether you like it or not. And so that autonomy of being able to choose my clients is really helpful. And then the extra bonus is that the work that I do in working with different clients inspired my fiction work and and creative work as well. Are you seeking out certain people to write about or are they coming to you?
Speaker: Yeah. So at this point in my career, they come to me and that's kind of the the joy of having built this career so far. But in the beginning, i kind of stumbled into freelancing assignments. One of my first ones was a book for somebody who had me writing blogs about his life story. And I was just kind of putting things together. and then he was like, do you want to just write my book? And so i kind of started off with those piecemeal assignments that got me bigger and bigger clients. And then from there, my clients would refer me, they'd find my website, things like that. So as a ghostwriter, because you're not allowed to talk about anyone you write for, it is kind of this weird, like you have to ah kind of build versus like on, you know, your reputation and what people know about you. And because I was also publishing my own work and sharing my own books and creative work during this whole time period, I could point to that as portfolio items or sometimes get like approval from past clients to be able to share chapters of their work with future clients. So it is kind of this like dance to be a deep ghost where your name isn't on the cover of the book. You're kind of operating in shadows, kind of like a spy, but helping people tell their stories.
Speaker: ah So just how did you grow comfortable, you know, inhabiting other people's voices and stories and cultivating that skill to do that? Yeah, I think the best ghost writers, especially for memoir, are fiction writers, because this is the work that we already do in our own fiction work of thinking about who is this character? How do I step into their voice? And so it was very easy to move from fiction to memoir, because in a lot of ways, memoir is also people trying to make sense of their life through their memories. And memories are so fallible. There's a lot of studies showing that, you know, our memories are sometimes closer to fiction than we'd like to think. Mm-hmm. Or in the same way that we'll talk to somebody about a memoir or a memory that we both live the same moment but have completely different viewpoints. I was at this magic show lecture here in San Francisco last week and the magician was giving a lecture about, you know, what makes magic work. And he's like, the reason that magic works is because our, how we perceive the world is not like a video camera. We're not all recording everything in our field of vision. It's like a spotlight. We shine a spotlight on one thing and then we are ignoring everything else. That's why sleight of hand tricks work. And in memoir, that's exactly the same thing. It's like my client has one spotlight on the world. So when I talk to them about their book and then they have me interview their family, everyone's spotlights are in a completely different direction. And that's the beautiful part about... You know, trying to capture your life story is that if you get your family and friends involved, you'll kind of hear some slightly different variations or different perspectives. And that can kind of fill out the story and put in some missing pieces that maybe you had forgotten about.
Speaker: Yeah, and you ah before we hit record, you had brought up Jeremy X. Wagner, and he co-wrote Chef Curtis Duffy's latest book. And ah and and so a lot of us in the writing world, we read other people that we admire and try to ah emulate them as best we can. And ah and a yeah he is someone who's done that kind of ghostwriting work. It's similar to you. is Are you looking for ghostwritten things and being like, oh yeah.
Speaker: how are they doing it that, uh, that maybe I can get better at when for my clients? Yeah, I think, I think the thing that is most helpful is reading memoirs that I can then kind of see what my clients like in terms of being able to reference and being like, Hey, do you want a memoir that tells a story through, you know, flashbacks through a traumatic time, kind of like educated by Tara Westover? Do you want your book to have more of a travel kind of centered theme? Like you pray love And so being able to have a little bit of touch points in terms of the structure of memoir, to be able to go to my client and be like, were you thinking something like this or something like this and kind of help understand story structure? Because I think that that's the hardest thing as a ghostwriter is to walk into somebody's life and basically start rearranging furniture being like, okay, I think this needs to go here. What do you think? What about this over here? And so sometimes clients will want, you know, things, rearranged a certain way. And so understanding the story structure and kind of getting on the same page with that is very helpful. But it is kind of interesting. One thing that I notice a lot as a ghostwriter is when I'm reading celebrity memoirs that I can tell a million percent are ghostwritten. And you can tell it because, and I'm sure you have seen this too if you've read of a celebrity memoir and being like, wow, I didn't know that this celebrity was so articulate. And their voice is just so different from the way that they talk on you know on camera or in their in the worlds that they're in. And so i've've I've definitely tried to like when I'm working with clients to, I do a lot of voice recordings with them and then I listen back to the audio recordings to try to understand and like, how would my clients say this? Like try to inhabit their voice more because when somebody is talking that that is their, their true voice and their written voice is kind of a slightly of elevated version of that, but you still want their isms in the way that they describe things to be on the page. And so that's kind of the thing that you can kind of tell when you're reading a book that's like, obviously somebody else had a very heavy hand in this versus, Oh, this sounds like them just on paper.
Speaker: Yeah, that's really good point. I like that idea of you going back to the tapes too to get there the cadences of their the rhythm of their speech into your head so then you can better translate that into that elevated version you know on the page, which does have to be like you know cleaned up a bit so it's easy to read. But I really love that degree of putting on that that that turtle shell and like, okay, this is how we're goingnna this is how I'm going to embody this person authentically.
Speaker: Yeah. And I think that, I think that everybody goes about it a different way. And, ah some clients, their voices are much stronger than others. And in the same way that when we're all, you know, trying to capture like, who are we on the page that is its own kind of journey journey that you have to have a level of self, uh, examination in. And I think that that is kind of the most exciting thing. Because the worst thing that a memoir can be is boring. And you really do want the book to kind of have some interesting lift to it. And so trying to kind of understand what is the unique element of the the client's voice, or if anyone else is writing a memoir in general, of your voice. And I think that that is sometimes a big challenge to kind of figure out that that texture.
Speaker: And I know I traffic in narrative biography primarily and narrative journalism like that. And I i tend to like, I want to like who I'm writing about for the most part because I'm going to be spending a lot of time with them, you know, be it in the archives or actually physically, you know, speaking to them. For you when you're with a, you know, ghostwriting client, like to what extent do you feel like you have to like this person?
Speaker: Yeah, quite a bit because often I'm meeting them in person, spending a lot of time with them and their families, visiting their hometowns with them, visiting their business partners. And so I want to be able to respect the journey that they've been on and respect what they've built and also just want them to be a good person. And so those are some of the things that to kind of make me decide whether or not I want to work with someone because it is such an intimate process to write someone's book. and to be in their lives. And I've heard things that they've never told their spouses or their friends or like secrets that are very, very much locked inside and they're trying to sift through them and decide what ends up on the page and what doesn't. And so I think that that is such a, ah again, it kind of is similar to therapy, but you get a book out of it and you get a catharsis of emotion to go through it. And so I do take the role that I have very seriously, but it is ultimately the end of the day, an art piece as well. It's it's like a collection a collection of their memories, but it's also something for a reader to enjoy, whether that reader is just their family in the future or a more commercial audience. and so But it is something that there has to be chemistry between you and the ghostwriter where it's going to be a good working partnership and a good kind of professional relationship.
Speaker: How do you cultivate a sense of your own written voice and not be sort of co-opted by others, ah your clients? Yeah. So when it comes to writing my projects outside of ghostwriting, I have just a very different, um most of my works that I do on my own are very, have, you know, I write romanticcy and I have a book coming out this fall that is very much a romantic thriller. So I have a very heightened style of writing that I've always kind of cultivated. But when I'm writing for my clients and kind of trying to figure out how to differentiate my voice from their voice, It's always about trying to understand like how, how it sounds both in my head and reading it aloud. And I think that reading aloud pages is so helpful. And it's what I used to do in all of my writers groups back in l LA when I lived there is just kind of understanding, okay, is this my voice fighting with my clients to try to like say something a way that I would say it, or does this sound like them? And so sometimes pulling back certain things to try to figure out what makes sense for them.
Speaker: Yeah, well, that that would be the the real, i would think the real challenge and in the rewriting, too, is like you you have a tendency to, when you go to self-edit, you're going to self-edit through your own experience and your own taste. But then you have to put a governor on that, so to speak. I'm yeah I got to their their voice and their presence, and I can't trespass on that. So that's an incredibly challenging skill ah to that you have to develop over time, I imagine.
Speaker: Yeah. One thing that really helps is having my client's family and friends read the draft, or sometimes they'll give them chapters while they're reading it so that I can get feedback on the voice as I'm going, because sometimes it's helpful. I've had people's, you know, significant other or their friends being like,
Speaker: I think that you're leaving out a part of this story or this joke feels like you would tell it a different way. And so it's helpful to get that, that extra feedback. And so that's why i love working on projects where there's kind of ah a group of people involved around the client as well, because sometimes it can be tough to be in a silo and be like, yeah, I think that voice sounds like me on the page and then have, you know, someone close to you being like, no, it doesn't. So it's it's helpful to have that support um unless you know they are kind of like decided on what they want. And some people just know exactly what they want to have a very clear vision.
Speaker: Yeah. Well, and I love in looking at the totality of what you bring ah to the writer sphere, if you want to call it that. ah I think a lot of people who are freelancers or independent contractors, however you want to phrase it, ah there's often this entrepreneurial nature that is often um siloed in a way or put tucked into a corner that's very hard to touch because you just want to do the writing. You want to do the art part, but you're not like you're pushing that thing over there. yeah Just for you, for for people you counsel, people you coach, even from your own experience, how did you learn to integrate the two so you can have like a satisfying go out go of it?
Speaker: Yeah, I think it's just you learn little by little how all the business stuff works. And I think that a lot of us creatives just want to hand the business stuff to an agent or to someone else. But I think that you always lose something when you start to give up that control over your career and over your money. And I think that it's actually more effective for you to do the, uh, the negotiations with the client financially and to set down ah a number rather than hand it off to an agent. And at first I know a lot of writers would be like, I don't want to talk money stuff with the client, but that's when you're also creating the boundaries and you're also setting forth like what you're, you know, you'll accept for the project and what it you're, you know, what it'll be. And you can practice scripts and kind of write down like how you articulate your price and, There's a lot of great sales education out there. But if you're able to stand in your power of talking about your value as a writer and what you bring to a project and then ask for what you believe that you should get for a project, the confidence will carry over to so much more. And you won't feel like somebody who's just like, I'm just an artist. I'm just over here. You'll feel like by integrating two parts of your identity, <unk>ll it'll bring you so much more confidence and peace of mind that you can go into any conversation, talk about anything. Nothing is off limits. and have your client leave that interaction feeling good about what you talked about. And it takes practice, especially in the early days of my freelancing career. I had one client in particular, like sit me down and be like, Amy, you are undercharging. You need to change this right now. And so I'm so grateful to have had those interactions with people who told me flat out that I wasn't charging enough so that I could then have the confidence to start raising my rates more aggressively. And I think that So often we just want to do art for the sake of it because that's what we love to do. But you also have to understand that the more that you charge, the more peace of mind and time that you'll be able to give to a project to make it even better with that additional time and peace of mind. So charging a higher rate is better for both you and the client because the product will be better if you're not stressed about paying rent.
Speaker: There's the element too of burnout. If you charge too low, you try you end up churning much and that just will fry your mainframe. And I think you know part out part of your website too you wrote, oh, writing should give you freedom and not burnout. And I think that comes with knowing your worth and knowing how to charge. if you As Seth Godin would say, like pick your clients wisely, basically, if you're a freelancer. So if you can go higher, you can do fewer projects for more money and not get that that burnout. that ah that so many freelance writers suffer from.
Speaker: Yeah. And I think it's, and I burned out quite badly to the point where I developed an autoimmune disease that I had to go travel around the world and, you know, figure out how to solve and put into remission. And it would just completely derailed a lot of my time to go and fix that. And so it's easier, better, cheaper to just not burn out in the first place. And so that means kind of trying to figure out what are those guardrails and to sometimes, you know, be more firm with boundaries, even if it makes you feel a little uncomfortable, because the more that you state your boundaries, the more that you ask for for more to kind of like set yourself up so for success for the project, the better that you'll feel. And then the clients will feel that energy. And that's why I also teach yoga here in San Francisco is because I think that your energy and how you appear to the world and to your clients is very important. And so I am just like constantly in the yoga studio when I'm not writing because I think that that helps me get settled. So I can go into any client call, any scenario, any, you know, trip. I can like hop off a plane and go immediately into a meeting with my client and not feel frazzled. And I think that those kind of practices are very much underlooked for writers. We're we're kind of like, there's all these jokes about how like we don't work out or we're just like, we just put on the glasses and just kind of, you know, the That kind of thing, but the mind-body connection is something that I had to really learn and lean into more to be able to do what I do at a higher level. Especially as ah independent artists or freelancers, there's ah an element of branding you have to consider, like the the posture you take and what people think of when they hear your name, when they hear Amy Suda. It's like, okay, that is a certain...
Speaker: Stance in the creative world. So how long did it take you? What was the process by which you established that degree of, I hate the word branding, but that is that that sense of branding that people know kind of what they're getting when they and kind of hear your name right off the bat?
Speaker: Yeah, I think I had always kind of been, you know, cause I'd come up in USC and the film industry and that they're always talking about branding and you gotta, you know, you have to be sellable and marketable and all that stuff. So i already had a good kind of baseline coming from that world, but really and investing in spending time on my website and and figuring out what writing samples were going to be in my portfolio. Those are the things that helped the most. I had a number of short stories that were things that helped me get my initial clients before I had any full book samples to share whatsoever, which was wild. But it kind of showed that you don't need a huge, long book sample to put yourself as a memoir ghostwriter, even though that's that's good to have. But um I was able to pitch myself off of some short stories and the experience that I had had working in Hollywood, and and that was it. And i had, you know, so it is about kind of curating what people are seeing from you because the short stories that I had shared with people were very emotional and vulnerable and almost written from a memoir kind of place. And so trying to pick the the samples that are going to attract your ideal clients and really thinking about like, who is your ideal client? Who do you want to work for? And then how do you position yourself that way? And trying to pick the one, two, three samples that are exactly for that client is really, really helpful. And if you don't have those samples, going and pitching you know magazines and newspapers to go write those things. So I wrote um an op-ed in the LA Times that got me a book. and And there's like a few things like that, like these personal essay projects and can help you write things and get that social proof before you have that social proof for an entire book project.
Speaker: When you say that op-ed got you a book, what was the topic of that column? Yeah, so it was a personal essay that I had written about how I was involved in kind of the pole dancing scene in Los Angeles. And I came out as bisexual with that article in the LA Times. And I had to make a lot of phone calls to my family before that. um And it was ah it was a piece that was dear to my heart because I was talking about kind of my identity and what it meant in these spaces that were inhabited by women and kind of separate of the male gaze. And I got so many really lovely emails after publishing that piece by people who were you know also
Speaker: coming out and kind of figuring out what spaces that they should be in and how to kind of find those those allies and and friends. And that was such a kind of like a personal piece, but kind of talking a lot about the things that i was going through. And one of my clients, when they read that, they're like, oh, you can definitely handle my story if you can write something like this and have the courage to publish it. And so that's kind of the the goal here is to have pieces that kind of feel vulnerable and open and being able to share pieces of yourself, then allow you to kind of create that comfortability with your client where they're like, oh, okay, you understand what it means to take something personal and share it with the world.
Speaker: What have been some difficult conversations you have with a client who might not be as forthcoming as you want them to be? Yes. So this is something that is very tough for people who are one of the biggest struggles that I had with one of my clients was trying to figure out how to talk about a lot of sensitive family struggles because your family, especially if you're writing them in your book, they' it's not their not it's not their memoir and they're not public figures. So anytime you're navigating that stuff, you kind of have two options. One, you can kind of skirt around it or two, you can just write about it. But we went with a third option where we ended up fictionalizing the book. So we ended up saying, this is a memoir. This is a novel inspired by a true story. And so that helped a lot because we were able to change all the names to kind of have everybody be a little bit more anonymous and then kind of approach it more as like a fiction novel. And so that helped a lot because then she had the deniability of like, oh, I just wrote a fiction novel. It just happens to resemble my life. Um, and so that things like that are tools that we can use. Oftentimes my clients will feel a lot better when we just change all of the names in a draft and whether or not we change them back or not later is something we decide down the road, but it helps to kind of create that distance when you're trying to figure out how you're writing about people close to you that you're maybe worried about what they'll say or when they read the book. So to create that distance, even if you just change the names temporarily, it kind of helps to unlock some things. And then from there, I can kind of ask questions around different subjects and kind of figure out where we can zoom in. And I found that when it comes to difficult topics, asking like asking about a very like specific moment um or what was it like when you started high school and had to move or what was it like here kind of can then spiral into like bigger stories as well, even if I'm asking questions along or around something a little bit more traumatic or challenging. Yeah, and you don't have to name names, but what have been some of your more difficult experiences and tough nuts to crack to in the course of you know writing someone's book?
Speaker: Yeah, I think the most difficult thing is when I'm interviewing family and or friends and they have a very different opinion about a memory than my client. Because this is something that I then have to bring up to my client and be like, hey, I know this very traumatic moment. You told me that it happened this way. I'm hearing about this from your very close family and friends who were also there.
Speaker: do we do you want to kind of discuss or see if this is something that like you want to change how it's represented in the book? We could write it this way or we could have omit this detail. And then from there, having to just very tread very lightly and and understanding the different perspectives. And I've also kind of been put in the middle of some situations where someone's family will come to me when they find out I'm writing their their family member's book and be like, can you tell this family member this, is and this? Can you try to get this anecdote out of them? Because I never knew like what they thought about that. And I'm like, listen, I'm not i'm not here to help any family agendas. I'm here to write a book. Yeah. So trying to also create those professional boundaries with family members to be like, I'm not working as a family psychologist. I'm here to simply kind of capture this story and interview and ask questions. But um I definitely think that the family situations can be the most charged and most challenging But they're also the most rewarding to get to the other side of because ideally a book brings a family together because you're able to kind of examine things that happened with this kind of excuse of of like, oh, we're writing a book like we should talk about this stuff and when reminisce and. I have seen it bring a lot of family members together that were estranged. and And I do think that it's kind of like a really beautiful activity to do, especially as you're getting to the end of your life. And I write a lot of books for people who are kind of getting into advanced years and they want to capture something beautiful and they don't want it to slip through their fingers. Because I think the most you know disappointing, sad thing is that every time somebody passes away, it's like a library burning to the ground. Every experience and memory they have burns with them. And so if they don't capture that into a book, it just all kind of turns to ash.
Speaker: Yeah, that's a and that's a nice way of putting it. it it kind of gets me to the next question that kind of pops into my head about you know the expectations you set with your clients about what why they're even writing a book in the first place and like what their expectations are for the project ah like at large. you know what are What are those conversations like where you're yeah you're feeling each other out a little bit?
Speaker: Yeah, every every project is so different and the publishing industry is all over the place. And so some of my clients who are you know on the more notable side, it's a little bit more clear the pathway for them. But even in today's publishing landscape, I've seen a lot of my clients choose self-publishing, even if they are a bigger name or have been in a lot of news stories, because what they're wanting is more control over their book and publishing process. And as a self-published author myself, I love self-publishing. I love being able to, you know, refresh my royalty dashboards and to pick my cover and, you know, work directly with readers and bookstores myself. But everybody's bit different and expectations about a book are tough to set because so much relies on what is the market, you know, what are you doing for your marketing? And i think that everybody has a different reason for publishing a book. Some people, I've worked with several entrepreneurs who want the book to be a launch pad for a business or something that is a combination of memoir and how-to. And I think that that's a really strong category that has a lot of potential of not just book sales, but other things as well. But there's ah also the other group of clients that I work with. It's a family story. It's an heirloom. So it's quite different. And therefore, pressure is not really on publishing. It's on making sure that the finished product feels special. Yeah. And I know a lot of people who listen to this show, ah among other writing podcasts, too. They you know they have their sub stacks and they got on the sub stack train, but they don't necessarily know how to leverage it or build it. And that's something you've done with aplomb. I think your annualized revenue is like north of $260,000 and tens of thousands of paid subscribers and who knows how how many ah you know unpaid Two. So for people who might be spinning their tires in the mud of the subsac world, ah how do you counsel people to to get a start and then to get altitude?
Speaker: Yeah, it's all about consistency. And I know that that's most boring answer on the planet. And the answer I didn't want to hear when I started my Substack three years ago. um i just published every single week, trying out different niches, seeing what I could offer value in until I kind of got exactly what I kind of where I wanted to land with it. But one of the cool things about Substack is that for publishing books, it's kind of the new place to do a book tour. And, uh, everyone likes to point to like Lena Lena Dunham's most recent book. She utilized a lot of both very popular and also more niche sub stacks to launch her book and do interviews in. And that was really successful for getting her everything out there for her. So it's kind of there's It's kind of a cool platform because for me, I found a lot of community there. And if you're building your true fans for the books that you're writing, a lot of my beta readers, my ARC readers, my first readers that are pushing my books out there are from Substack. And then also offers kind of ah another piece of social proof for my clients who are ghostwriting clients that they see that I have an audience, like I know what I'm talking about. I'm not just some stranger on the internet. I'm somebody who talks about this stuff intentionally and they're able to kind of see my presence online before they hire me as well. So I think that it's such a great place to, even if you're not on SubSnack, even if you pick another platform, having a newsletter where you can collect emails and have readers and people interested in working with you is so important because with these algorithms, uh, as you know, ah it's like, are crazy. It's like, you don't know, some people get shadow banned overnight and their accounts get taken away or TikTok is goes, goes to nothing or disappears or whatever. Like, so I do think for writers, especially cause we are, you know, writers first, these, these newsletters are, are made for us to be able to do the thing that we love and share kind of bits and pieces of our, our, our writing with the world.
Speaker: Well, yeah. Well, in SubSec, starting a few years ago, started to have more in common with the the classic social media platforms in that they're kind of like a social media platform masquerading as a newsletter service. So they they have the capacity to change the rules too, which can be very frustrating. At least they still have the email component that you can export and at least have that list for you. um So for you, like how are you thinking of like if Substack changes the rules in the similar ways that like Instagram will change the algorithm, that ah that you can adapt and stay nimble?
Speaker: Yeah, i think I think it all comes down to just listening to your audience and to understanding like the changing ways, like if a platform changes, is it changing for the better or for the worse? Or do you still own your audience? do you have their email addresses? Could you move them to a different platform? As like things change, like where is the best place for you? And so I think it's about kind of trying to just keep an eye on everything and and not be attached to anything and not be like, this is the thing I'm going to be on forever. Because even, you know, a few years ago, all writers were on Medium and Medium was paying writers really well. And then Medium disappeared. But people couldn't take their email subscribers with them with Medium. So it's trying to think about what is resilient for your career long term. Instead of kind of just being sucked up by these algorithms that require you to put a lot of output into them and then maybe don't, you know, help you find your people. Because that's ultimately what social media and these newsletter platforms are for is there to help you find your people and find your true fans. Is there anything about Substack that gives you pause that makes you nervous long term?
Speaker: yes I mean, like, I think not to get into like the whole like AI jar of worms, but their new AI detector is just like, I'm not sure if you've seen all of the the posts about how the fact that it's like flagging things that are human written and kind of starting a little bit. of like witch hunts on the platform. so I'm not i'm not a fan of things like that. And I think that there's, I understand what what people are coming from of everyone hating, seeing all of like the AI slop that's on LinkedIn and things like that and and and not wanting there to be a lot of that pressure. But I think that turning it to a witch hunt is also not the move. And so i think that there's a lot of things that Substack is starting to do that i are not in the interest of writers, not in in the interest of people putting things out there. Because if publications are rising on the bestseller list and people are paying for them, that means they like them. And and how they're put together is not as important if people are willing to pay for them. and And that's kind of the indicator of quality. And some people like to say, well, it's not, what if this isn't human generated? It's like, well, do people like it? do people want to pay for it? Then that's different. And I think that there's like, you know, everyone is going to seek out the kinds of things that they want, but largely Substack is, you know, run and curated and written by humans. And and that's who you see on the bestseller list is predominantly people with names and photos kind of sharing their opinions. And some of them use these tools, some of them don't. And so I think that there's like a little bit of like, you know, drama with all of that stuff. And I think that these platforms will all come and go at any point in time. But the thing that is forever is our personal brands and the stories we want to tell and the books that we write and how we want to go about our writing careers.
Speaker: Yeah. And you talked to early on about, you know, SubSec kind of, you know, trying on different shoes, if you will, like trying to find, hit kind of hit um hit a mark that felt, you know, very true, something, a a lane you could lock into. um What were some of the, you know, those early, your your early experiences with SubSec as you were looking to cultivate the posture you wanted to embody on the platform?
Speaker: Yeah, I think it was at first I kind of wrote wrote it more as like a travel blog because I've been traveling the world for six years before I moved to San Francisco as a digital nomad. And so i was kind of like in that space and trying different things and kind of like constantly changing what I was writing about. But I think the thing that like I saw that I was trying to help people with the most that I kept getting more signals from my community that they wanted more with is trying to figure out like what, how to help people build their freelance writing careers. And Um, that's kind of what we've leaned the most into. We've worked with different partners and branded sponsorships on bringing in like different tools for writers and helping people learn how they can work better and more professionally with different tools. We have a writing job board and and things like that. So we've kind of brought in all of these elements that people were wanting the most from us and, Because as a memoir ghostwriter, I also have a lot of clients I can't take on. I was just kind of sending that to my community being like, hey, these people are looking for ghostwriters or romance writers. And and that was another way for me to kind of give back. So trying to think about like, what are the elements of value that you already have in your life that people are
Speaker: kind of curious about or responding to, or how can you give back to your community or kind of the things that like are unique to you that no one else has. and I think that that's kind of the way that like is the most helpful for, for kind of growing on Substack is trying to think about like, what do you have to offer that will help someone in their life? And whether that's even just a personal essay that is vulnerable and talking about something personal to you could inspire someone else. I found with some of the the talks I've given, be it for classes or conferences or anything, and I kind of stumbled upon this accidentally, but the minute I made things more tactical and practical, like people, the engagement with it was...
Speaker: astronomical in in a sense because because I would give them like template for spreadsheet of how I organize my research or like my book proposal for the front runner. I was just like, here, you can have this, like this, model this, keep it to yourself, but model it. You can have it if you want it. And when I offer stuff like that to people, it's like, oh, this is something I can apply to my own work. It's like being of service to that community. You know, how how have you found that to be true in your work?
Speaker: Yeah. I mean, so, so helpful. i think that anytime that I could kind of peel back the curtain. And so one thing that I've done a lot of is i did a post on my Substack pseudoscience where i was like, here is all of the money I spent on my self-published book launch. And here's exactly where each thing went. And I i i would love seeing posts like that because it helps me understand, okay, what are people spending money on? What did they feel like was worth it? And then not so worth it. And so trying to have transparency around things that are usually kind of hush hush, I think is really helpful. um I taught a six week Substack sprint workshop for my community at Pseudoscience where I went through kind of like the different formats of what I was seeing was working on the bestseller list for other writers and the different ways that they could kind of approach their own interests, kind of filter through things. um And then also just kind of, again, sharing the behind the scenes of what it means to be a freelance writer and teaching a bunch of workshops for our Substack Make Writing Your Job podcast. on how to create a portfolio is one of our most popular classes that's free on make writing your job, which is just like, how do you like decide how to put it together? Or even the most simple thing that I didn't learn until like five years into my career is having a PDF version of your portfolio. Because so many of the people that you work for want to print it out or send it to someone at their company or keep it on file and to think about it for later. And they might lose your website URL, but if you give them a file, then that actually helps a ton. And that got me rehired at a few different companies back when I was doing copywriting and content writing. And was like, oh, I should have done this earlier. And so...
Speaker: simple things like that, that actually do matter on the hiring side and trying to think more through that and figure out how I can give my communities ways to like figure out, okay, how do I bridge the gap from here to there? Or a big one for writers is that so many people don't realize that a lot of nonprofits and libraries have grants, contests, residencies, and fellowships that I'll pay them to, you know, go get flown out to Kyoto and write their novel from Kyoto for a month. And these nonprofits don't have a lot of money to kind of share these like different opportunities And so we're just started doing a weekly list every Wednesday of like, okay, here's all of the coolest grants, contests and residencies that want to give you money for your thing. And here's how to apply to them with the deadlines. And so absolutely insane that I couldn't find that anywhere on the internet. And so now we just spend like hours every week being like, okay, What are the coolest things? How going to present them? is this like a cool opportunity or not? What gets on the board? And so I think all that stuff is like very monotonous, boring work that no one wants to do. so we just were like, we'll do it. We'll do it because people should hear about these things.
Speaker: Nice. And you have a lot of yeah different you know wings to the building of your business, know different kind of writing, your own your own fiction and you know some prescriptive writing books of how to be a ghostwriter, to navigate freelancing in general. So how are you typically setting up your your days and your routines so nothing gets neglected, I guess?
Speaker: Yeah, I think it's more helpful to think about things through seasons. And so everything kind of is a different season. So right now I'm i'm gearing up for the launch of my next book, Let Me Be Your Ghost, which is about a memoir ghostwriter who's secretly working for the FBI and informing on her client while falling in love with him. And so it's a romantic thriller that's coming out this November.
Speaker: ah Very loosely, very loosely inspired by my life, loosely. And so right now I'm kind of working on all of the kind of the promo for that. i just did like pre-order page, Kate went up. So I'm kind of like in the season of working on on all of that launch. But when I'm not launching a book, I'm often kind of, you know, doing some things for my community. We just kind of put out some classes recently about how to edit your book on make writing your job that are free, that's free for everyone. So I'm trying to kind of figure out what are the things I'm most excited by. But during my days, I'm either taking yoga, teaching yoga, playing tennis, going on hikes, reading quite a bit and ah talking with other writers and, you know, trying to figure out how each day I can find the most exciting thing to work on and work on that. Well, if I'm not traveling for a client project or in the middle of a draft. And so everything kind of like ebbs and flows depending on the season.
Speaker: And you brought up the word excited. And I often ask people, you know, where they feel the most excited or most alive or engaged in the process, be it in the sort of the idea generation or the research or the writing, the reporting or the rewriting that part. So, you know, where where do you fit on that continuum?
Speaker: Yeah, i i love i love the drafting process. I love the molding the clay. i think the hardest part is when you have a bunch of clay and then you need to like shape it. So the editing stage is always the part where then you need to like really like lock in and ah make sure everything is consistent and that one detail here like pays off here. that you didn't change someone's hair color halfway through the draft or that the client's anecdote isn't duplicated in two spots. And so it's like it's more of the challenging work. But i love the being in flow of actually writing the draft because that feels like the pure generation. And I love that part.
Speaker: Yeah. And what what would you identify as things that you struggle with in the writing? Uh, I think it's the the thing that I think is hard on the memoir projects is trying to ask the best questions. And I think that's half of the battle. If I'm not asking good questions that I'm not going to get good, good material from my client. And I think that that's the hardest thing to do. And so I've spent a lot of different years just trying to figure out what is the most interesting question that I can ask, what will get them to the heart of something faster so we don't have to ask all of these kind of like small talk questions. And so it's trying to understand. And then when I can like, I'm hooking on to something where I'm getting a lot of good material for my clients, trying to figure out like, okay, well, what, how do I dig deeper here? And what kind of questions can I get to something maybe even below this that it is maybe below the surface? And then also trying to see how I can make um associations between, oh, this reminds me of the thing you told me about your childhood. Are these related? And trying to kind of figure out the theme, which often doesn't come until like midway through the book of trying to understand like, what is this book really about? Like underneath the story.
Speaker: Yeah. and Well, a lot of that, it it speaks to, it's very journalism adjacent in a sense, you know, trying to get to the right question to get them speaking freely, get them comfortable speaking in stories, speaking in anecdote and stuff. So ah how have you cultivated that, that very necessary interview muscle to, yeah, to get people comfortable and very forthright with you so you can write the most evocative story?
Speaker: Yeah, a lot of hours doing this. A lot of, lot of hours. I've been doing this for almost over a decade now. And so i think that I'm just naturally a curious person. I just love learning about people. i i just love asking questions. I'm i'm just particularly curious about like what, you know, what made this person kind of fall down the rabbit hole of this crazy government conspiracy that started with the murder and then like went to here. And I'm just like, what happened? Yeah. So I think it helps that I often am taking on really interesting stories, whether they're kind of like true crime or like business entrepreneurial that are, that are interesting or even just someone's life stories. Like there's so always something to learn. And I'm, I think that the cool thing about being a memoir ghostwriter and the benefit that nobody talks about is that you become a better person from learning from your clients because you understand and can learn from so many people's life experiences at such a deep level that you never learn from having a casual friendship with them. And you also kind of get to see their life from both the inside and the outside and how people see them and also understand, oh, I want something that is like not like this or like this, or i learned from this client because of the way that they approach this really traumatic thing, but still came out at the end of the day, smiling despite going through absolute hell and, you know, this crazy period of their life.
Speaker: When I'm writing profiles or or even book projects with central figures, there's usually something about them that is pretty universal that I'm drawn to. It tends to be people of singular focus and devotion because I sometimes find that I lack that in myself, singular focus and devotion, that kind of that rigor it takes. Some people might argue that, but there is an element of obsessiveness that I love in other people, and I'm drawn to that, and I find it fascinating. you know Just for you with the clients that you elect to take on, what elements in them do you recognize as something you're you might be particularly drawn to?
Speaker: Yeah, I like what you said, the the obsessiveness. I think people who have combination. I love hearing stories of people who have persevered and have gone through the absolute worst things that anyone could have already ever have gone through and then get to the other side and being like,
Speaker: I had to go through that to get to where I am today and I'm happy and better for it. I love clients that are able to look back on their lives and be grateful for the challenges because it makes me feel more resilient in my own life.
Speaker: Whenever I'm like having my own hard times in my own life and then I remember, oh but this client like, you know, was almost like sent to jail in a foreign country over something crazy that was not their fault. Like, whew, that's not me. I'm feeling good. Yeah. So I think it kind of gives me an element of gratitude, but also seeing how other people deal with struggles that are larger than life and how they get through it anyways. And I think that that's so cool to be able to just see, you know, the human condition and and to be inspired by that. And then I also love working for people who have a mission or goal. They want to make the world a better place. They want to help people. I've often taken on stories where somebody was an underdog trying to report something that had gone wrong. And then, you know, people came out of the woodwork to threaten them and crazy things happened. And and i I love writing for underdogs, too, as well as people who are successful. you As writers, we often have a lot of idiosyncrasies about, you know, our practice and processes. And just for you, Amy, what are what are some things that are kind of unique to you that are almost non-negotiables when you're sitting down to write or research or or interview?
Speaker: Yeah, I think non-negotiables are you know, just having the computer open. I think that, and a good drink, a good beverage, like a good i tea or coffee or something like that. um Because I think i think that I've like just learned not to be too precious with the process. And I think that anytime that I was too precious with the process, hitting deadlines was too difficult. So knowing that like the magic is going to come when I just hit the keyboard and and not kind of overthink it too much. Because I think the moment I overthink it um or have too many non-negotiables, then it's very hard to get pen to paper and then it ah it's harder to write.
Speaker: Yeah, I like hearing you say, you know, just making it not feel precious because I think sometimes a lot of the – there are a lot of, like, images online of where people sometimes make it look like the writing is this idyllic thing and very precious when, in fact, it's just often just a lot of rigor, a lot of work, a lot of hours right at the computer just, like, looking like shit and – Breath is awful. It's just like, it doesn't matter. you just, look you look like you just, we're in a cave. And, um, and, uh, it's, it's good to hear that. Um, because I think sometimes when people don't associate their own practice and process with something they might see online, it stops them from continuing on that journey.
Speaker: Yeah, I think that there's, it's it's fun to romanticize our lives, but ultimately like I'm in sweatpants most of the time. Like my hair not brushed and just like typing away and like trying to just get things down before I forget them. And i yeah, I think that there is, I think that I used to do National Novel Writing Month growing up and and and that really helped with just like volume over anything. Like one of the tips that people used to give to each other in the forums to hit the 50,000 words is that If you run out of things to write, you to keep writing, just have your characters just start singing song lyrics and just keep on writing a song lyrics until you get back to the conversation and kind of realize what you want to say. And that ability of just like allowing yourself to write total nonsense, but keep yourself typing, I think kind of helped override the part of my brain that was like, but what if it's not good enough? What if it's not? It's like you can fix that in edits and that's ah that's a later problem.
Speaker: Yeah, ah Seth Godin talked about um Isaac Asimov's ah process, who someone who wrote like hundreds of novels. yeah But he his thing was he would sit down at whatever time it was, it doesn't matter, but he would just type for however many hours. And it didn't matter what it was. He just basically didn't stop typing for, let's just say, two to four hours. it was it was a long time. And he didn't pre-edit himself. He just let it roll out of his of his brain. And when you do that, 90% of it is probably garbage.
Speaker: But there's a good chance there's going to be something good. And then that's something good you can run with. and once people realize that, it's like, oh, yeah, to your point of volume. Right enough volume and enough bad stuff. Good stuff has almost no choice but to come out eventually. Yeah. And I love that you you keep bringing up Seth Godin. I used to read his books all the time. Not only is he a great marketer, and but he's also a great writer. and one of the things that I thought was really unique about him is that i remember he would just write and post like one blog every single day. And then he just accumulate those blogs and put them together in one of his books. And I'm like, that's genius. And that's kind of what I think is a good method for a lot of people on Substack. I know Jonathan Haidt does something slightly similar where he tests a lot of his work with his Substack audience before putting it into
Speaker: his books. And I think that there's so many reasons to not be precious and just publish stuff and just put things online. and That's how Andy Weir, you know, wrote the Martian and, you know, started his novel and careers. He just posting chapters online and scientists were giving him feedback. And so I think a lot of us are trying to be too precious or hide our work away when it's like, maybe you should just post every chapter online and then put it into a book.
Speaker: Yeah. And I love to getting a sense of how you get comfortable with your own path through this. And, you know, I know coming up in the the journalism circles that I came up in, there was there was a path that worked for the generation or two before me. And as I was spit out of college, that path really wasn't there. And it's like you're spinning your tires. You're very frustrated. And eventually you have to settle into your own path and not like kind of compare yourself to the people around you. um So similarly for you and your own journey, you know, how did you kind of do deal with maybe that compare and despair that we often wrestle with before electing to just kind of chart your own path?
Speaker: Yeah, I remember that I was asking for advice from this showrunner that I really respected. And ah the show we were working on had just gotten like canceled, like in the middle of the writer's room. And it was heartbreaking because it was such a cool show. And I loved everyone there. And and it just got like ripped away and so like unexpectedly, like before we had even really written very many scripts. and I remember talking to a showrunner. I'm like, what should I do? Like, cause it was kind of like, I was probably gonna have to find another job. And I was like, what, what, what do I do? Like, what advice would you have for me? And i just remember that he was like, he's like, i don't know, like you kind of, you have a very different industry in front of you than what I did. And, and, and, and essentially like he couldn't give me advice that I, that would be applicable to where I was then because he wasn't in the same industry that I was really. at the level that I was kind of coming up in. And so I think that that was kind of the beginning of me having to understand like, oh, no one's going to save me. Like nobody's going to just like give me the jobs that I want or like help me. And even when I like got my first manager and like started to like climb the ranks and got my first name on a script, like I was like, oh, surely this is the moment that people come and like like sweep me off my feet. And then I'm suddenly can like do stuff now. But I think that there's this great talk that Mark Duplass gave at South by Southwest many years ago where it was called The Calvary Is Not Coming. And it's a beautiful, beautiful ah talk where he basically says at every stage in his career, he kept expecting to get a call where suddenly like he wouldn't have to be an indie filmmaker anymore and people would just give him money to do his thing. But at every stage, he kept getting disappointed and was like, oh, wait, I have to do this myself. Never mind. I have to go do this myself. And when he was finally getting opportunities where people were coming to him, he realized, wait a minute, I don't want those opportunities. I want to make films with my friends that I'm funding now that I have the money to and I want to pick my own path. And so listening to that and kind of understanding that the best version of my creative destiny was one where I could write it myself with something that was very different from what I had been told, which is that you have to let the gatekeepers anoint you. And that getting away from that myth kind of helped unlock everything for me where I could have ah a world where i can travel the world, write whatever I want, work with incredible people and have the career of my dreams.
Speaker: Yeah, well, there's a ah certain surrendering of ego to that as well, because on some level we want to be chosen and we want to be picked by the gatekeeper because so that's very validating, right?
Speaker: Yeah, totally. Oh, absolutely. Like the chosen one myth, I think, is, you know, why everyone loves Harry Potter. And it's like we we just want to just be chosen. But I think that the most important thing is that you have to choose yourself first and then your readers have to choose you, especially as writers like writers. we have a direct line to our audience where we can publish things. The most easiest form distribution of, you know, centuries and it's the internet and we can just publish things and people can read it. And that's more interesting and will give you more leverage into the traditional gatekeeping world. If you want someone to anoint you, you just need to have readers first. and You need to have pictures, chosen yourself first. And I think that that's actually more beautiful than kind of being, you know, thrown into the spotlight by not your own making completely.
Speaker: Yeah. Well, well Amy, this this has been really fruitful and very fun. and um And as I bring these conversations down for a landing, I always love asking the guests, you in this case, for a like a fun recommendation for the listeners. could just be anything that you're excited about that you want to share with them.
Speaker: Yes, I have a recommendation for my favorite spy show of all time that you probably not have seen. It is Spired Lost. It's called The Prisoner. It's starring Patrick McGowan. And if you start watching the first few episodes, you'll find the inspiration for the smoke monster. i love it because not only is it unhinged and you cannot predict where it's going, but... The star, Patrick McGowan, during production had like a mental breakdown about halfway through the show to the point where he was like in the fight scenes, like actually punching the stuntman in a very messy like show. But that chaos comes off on screen in just an insane way. And if you haven't seen it, I highly recommend it. is my absolute favorite spy show that I sometimes return to and be like, man, this thing is crazy. Nobody makes things like this anymore. Oh, fantastic. Well, Amy, thank you so much for carving out time to do this and for reaching out so we could talk shop and get a sense of how you go about the work and giving other people out there a degree of agency for the options that are at their fingertips if they have the courage to go out and take it. So thank you for the time.
Speaker: Yeah. And thank you so much for hosting the show and thank you for, for platforming different writers. And it's so cool to hear from a journalist yourself, like the way that like you've kind of like gone through like your own career and how you approach things. And yeah, thank you for all of the the great work that you do.
Speaker: Awesome. Awesome. Thanks to Amy Sudo for reaching out and having a good old time. can learn more about her at amysudo.com and or pseudoscience.com on Substack.
Speaker: Pseudoscience.com on Substack. Hope you were inspired to maybe take up a little ghostwriting action or figure out your posture on Substack. I see a lot of frustrated people who write on Substack but don't know how to grow. they all There's like ah a legion of people who have like 21 subscribers or something.
Speaker: ah Which is not nothing, but it's also but that's probably your friend network and that's it. My advice always is twofold when it comes to these things, be it a podcast or a sub stack or a YouTube channel. I don't know. How can you help people get where they want to go?
Speaker: And how specific can you be? I think people just hope they'll get paid for writing blog posts. And I can hardly see the value add to the everyday writer and doing something like that. We're all being nickel and dime to death. So unless you're adding a superior amount of value,
Speaker: I can't see a lot of people ponying up a lot of money. And it takes a long time, especially if you're not famous. Famous people can get away with it. For the rest of us, my God, you better be adding a lot of value. That's a rant for another day, though.
Speaker: Maybe next week's parting shot. For a good many of you, it's no surprise that I'm working on a father-son biography of King Griffey Jr. and King Griffey Sr., or it's more of a King Griffey Jr. origin story, but there's no way to divorce or sort of split the two.
Speaker: yeah They're kind of one and the same. They kind of have to go together. I drew a lot of structural inspiration from Keith O'Brien's Larry Bird origin story, Heartland. And it makes more sense to approach the Griffey narrative more as an origin story of baseball's last true superstar. And most of the high drama of his life happened before the strike of 94. He had moments in 95 in the playoffs and certainly 97 when he won the MVP. And then in 1998 when he was in the home run chase with the juiced up McGuire and Sosa.
Speaker: But for as great as he was, the height of the drama and the most tension was before he could legally buy a beer. So that's where I'm settling my three-act structure is in the those years.
Speaker: And I finally tracked down his minor league manager, Rick Sweet. I had tracked him down over the summer and decided to go through the usual pipeline of PR people. And that guy said he was going to put me in touch with Rick and then proceeded to blow me off for many, many months.
Speaker: And about two weeks ago, i was like, I'm going over this fucking guy's head and straight to Rick. And it worked. We had an awesome phone call and he said the sweetest words any journalist loves to hear. Call me anytime you have my number.
Speaker: To that point, I'll add. And I got this a little bit ago with a Mark Johnson on the previous episode to this one.
Speaker: you know Just because you have the ability to circle back with a source or person, not don't rely on it. Go into an interview with a goal and don't leave until you've asked what you need to ask out of that one conversation.
Speaker: like Never assume you'll get a follow-up. Sources might get blocked by other people. Sources might get cold feet. Sources might die. ah Being able to circle back is ah is a gift.
Speaker: But I'll reiterate that never assume you'll ever get them back on the phone. So heading into those conversations with you know a goal or two in mind that if i once I hang up this phone, I'm like, yeah,
Speaker: at least I got a chance to ask that question. I might not have gotten the answer I wanted or the answer I thought I'd get, but at least we ticked that box. Rick didn't have any other numbers because that's the other thing you always have. like Who else should I reach out to? Who would you recommend? um But mentioned that one of his former players from that 1987 Bellingham team had reached out to him and he gave me his name and I looked him up and found his contact info on whitepages.com and set up a time to talk.
Speaker: Now with two, count them two people from that team, I can start name dropping as I look to speak with the entire team. It was about 40 people. You know, there's 20 position players and other 20 or so pitchers, give or take.
Speaker: This is how the momentum starts. And this is where I'm finding I'm most juiced. It's also where I'm most anxious. I don't like cold calling and stuff of that nature. But this is where I start to feel a a wave of energy coming up from the the depths of the ocean, the slow building of the roster of people, sharing stories and insights that have never been shared before. These are the people largely lost to the sands of time. When people think of Griffey, they immediately go to the Seattle Mariners, and why wouldn't they? And the stars he played with.
Speaker: And odds are, you're not going to be able to secure them. they've been They're media savvy. They've talked for years, if not decades. And they're well-insulated and hard to reach. ah But these other players, who more than likely flamed out in AA, maybe even in c single A...
Speaker: Nobody is talking to them, and they were just as close to the main figure as other famous people were. ah Jeff Perlman and Ian O'Connor, among others, have made a career of finding these people who are not famous, but they're in the meetings with the famous people.
Speaker: And they are usually not employed by the team and have no reason to stay quiet. They have no real bridges to burn. They're merely upfront and honest and are often flattered to be interviewed because they've so long been ignored. I experienced this quite a bit with the Prefontaine book.
Speaker: yeah They haven't recycled the same stories for decades like a lot of famous people have. like They have their canned responses. All this is to say, I've got what I think is a satisfying three-act structure now that effectively ends around 1990, just before Griffey breaks it becomes the sport's most famous player in the sport's Michael Jordan, and as I would argue, baseball's last superstar.
Speaker: the The epilogue, of course, would be a blitz of his career that made him a Hall of Famer. But the logical point of the story to end is when the father and son take the field together at the end of the 1990 season in Seattle.
Speaker: And based on what I'm digging up, that moment is really charged. And it's a far longer and more beleaguered road than the public has ever known. And it's taken me a long time to find what I feel is a satisfying shape. And now that I've made some extra contacts with more to come, I feel a sense of purpose coming back.
Speaker: That is surfacing me from the post-book malaise of of the frontrunner, of which is coming out in paperback in just two weeks. Pre-order if you can. Buy it when you see it.
Speaker: I feel like my boat just got a new rudder. Instead of bobbing along in the waves, I feel like I've got some ballast. I've got some direction in this uncertain ocean of bullshit.
Speaker: Now, if my agent will get back to me, maybe we'll have something to sell. But I don't know. We can always hope that the agent will get back to me. Am I even a ki client anymore?
Speaker: i don't know. Stay wild, C&Fers. And if you can't do interviews, see ya.
