How to Become a Full-Time Substack Writer (What My Weeks Really Look Like)

Last week, I had a sold-out talk as part of the Big Brain Lecture Series. (Thank you to Emily and Gold Palm in Oakland for hosting me, to all the Big Brain staff who kept the night running, and to everyone who came out.)

The talk was based on my book Write for Money and Power. The short version: artists like Michelangelo were never actually starving, they were entrepreneurial, and we’ve been sold the wrong origin story about creative careers.

But the coolest part of the night wasn’t the lecture. It was who showed up. Person after person introduced themselves as subscribers: people who found my Substack, became part of my online world, and then walked into my offline one. Some of them had already been to the class I taught at The Love Potion Library a bit ago. The internet, materializing in a room.

Which brings me to the actual subject of this post: becoming a full-time Substack writer means building a career where the newsletter is the hub and everything else — books, lectures, classes, community — spokes off of it. Here’s what that looks like from the inside, and how to build toward it.

The Hub Problem Every Creative Has

If you’re a writer or creative putting yourself out there (doing events, teaching classes, giving talks) but you don’t have a hub to bring people back to, every room you win evaporates the moment it empties. Nobody knows when you’re doing another talk. Nobody hears about the next book. You start from zero at every door.

A Substack solves the hub problem. Someone hears you speak in Oakland, subscribes on their phone before they’ve left the venue, and now they’re there for the next launch, the next class, the next essay. That’s not marketing theory; that’s literally what happened at Big Brain, and it’s why some of those same faces had already found my bookstore class. The hub compounds.

What a Full-Time Substack Writer Actually Does All Week

This upcoming week is a fair sample: I’m teaching a run of classes for my subscribers across Make Writing Your Job and Sutoscience. The Big Brain lecture becomes a class in my Class Stack series, taught over Substack Live. The Love Potion Library class (how to use TV screenwriting techniques to write your romance novel) gets taught again for subscribers who couldn’t make it to a bookstore in person.

The rest of the week: writing my newsletters, working on book projects, and meeting people in person. That’s the job. The lecture feeds the newsletter, the newsletter fills the classes, the classes sell the books, the books book the lectures. When people ask what a full-time Substack writer does, the honest answer is: I run the flywheel.

You’re Also a Community Leader (This Part Surprised Me)

When you identify as a full-time Substack writer, you’re creating a community, which makes you a community leader, whether you meant to sign up for that or not. I love being part of other people’s Substack communities, and I love hosting my own, because it’s an extra layer of glue in a very digital world. The subscribers who showed up in Oakland weren’t an audience. They were regulars.

The Perks Nobody Puts on the Job Description

Being a full-time Substack writer means being your own boss, and the flexibility is not theoretical. I teach yoga here in San Francisco. I take hikes in the middle of the day. I spend the occasional full day in bed reading romance novels and call it market research (it is). I go on adventures with my husband Kyle, and we can pick up and travel whenever the itch hits. The receipts from our Oregon road trip and two LA weeks are all over this blog.

I don’t take any of it for granted. It took three years to build my main newsletter to 42,000+ subscribers, and the income part came in a concentrated sprint after years of weekly consistency. Which is exactly why the how matters:

How to Actually Become a Full-Time Substack Writer

• Start with growth: my full guide to growing a Substack is the pillar: positioning, cadence, and the compounding that makes everything else possible.
• Turn readers into revenue: getting paid subscribers and the full money-on-Substack breakdown cover the business model with real numbers.
• Decide with clear eyes: my honest take on whether Substack is worth it, including who it’s wrong for.
• Give it a hub job: every event, book, and class should point people to one subscribe button. That’s the whole trick, and it starts on day one.

Want to Build a Substack That Can Carry a Career?

Going full-time on Substack is a strategy question before it’s a courage question, and strategy is the part I can hand you: my Two-Week Substack Intensive is hands-on consulting where we position, launch, or revive your newsletter together — the same playbook behind everything in this post.

Tell me about your newsletter below — this form lands straight in my inbox — or read more about Substack consulting first. Either way it starts with a free discovery call. No pitch decks, no weirdness. Just two writers talking about your thing.