I'm always on a quest to make additional income from my writing, so when I came across this title, I knew I had to read it! Suto’s book is informative and left me feeling inspired. I know it takes effort and skill to write well, but Suto’s guide puts it all together for you. Thanks to NetGalley for the ARC.

If you’re a writer who’s ever felt trapped by the “starving artist” stereotype then Write for Money and Power just might be the book you’ve been waiting for. Amy Suto doesn’t offer gentle encouragement, but she gives you a game plan that you can actually use.

From the first page I was invested. Instead of being just a “chase your dreams” pep talk, Suto draws on her own experience, going from minimum-wage Hollywood jobs to a seven-figure writing income. She strips down exactly how she built a writing career that pays the bills and more, from stints in ghostwriting to newsletters to self-publishing.

What really sets this book apart is that it doesn’t leave you hanging. You get concrete, tactical advice, including pricing, pitching, building an audience, protecting your creative energy, and structuring your business so writing becomes not just passion or hobby, and instead becomes profit. Suddenly the idea of charging what you’re worth, and getting clients who pay it, doesn’t feel audacious - it feels right. I highly recommended this for any writer ready to step up, claim their value, and make writing their job.

Thank you so much to the author, NetGalley and Sutoscience LLC for the eARC of this book!

Write for Money and Power is equal parts memoir and life/business advice. Amy Suto shares her early experiences trying to make it as a script writer in Hollywood in a system where the odds are stacked against creatives and very much in favour of management. She shares her story in a way that is honest, vivid and very relatable. As a teacher keen to do some more writing, much of Amy’s advice can also be applied to schools.

Most of us know theoretically we should not undersell ourselves or give away our power too easily. When careers are presented as ‘dreams’ rather than professions, it is very easy to fall into these self-sacrificing traps. What this book offers is the steady reminder of why we shouldn't do that, and how to change it.

Amy writes from lived experience rather than theory. She traces her path from insecure, sporadically paid Hollywood work to a writing career that pays well and pays reliably. Seeing writing as a business is key as is valuing yourself as a professional.

For me this is a message that landed in a timely way. It might speak to you too!

With thanks to Amy Suto and Netgalley for the arc copy.

Thank you, Amy! As soon as I finished reading the book, I started my first newsletter on Beehiiv, and I wrote and scheduled my first issue.

This book is a two-in-one actionable roadmap and a therapy session for both working and aspiring writers.

I haven't yet read Amy's first book on freelance writing, but now I'm going to.

Finally, a book that speaks directly to writers and will help them to see what is really possible with their writing careers.

"Write for art. Write for fun. Write for rage. But don't be ashamed to write for money and power".

And what a powerful book this has been. So empowering and inspirational and talking the real talk. Part manifestation, part strategy manual, it is filled with strength and realness. The perfect pep talk + tools to really do the work.

I am grateful to have received this in order to share my view on it and I recommend it to anyone who it's on this path and maybe feel a bit comfortable by these two words: money and power. Just read it.

Do you believe in the myth of the starving artist? Amy Suto sure doesn’t, and in her new book, Write for Money & Power, she delivers a 12-month guide on how to you can go about making real money from your writing. Inspiring and informative, this book may just be the kick in the pants you need to jumpstart a successful writing career. This is definitely a book I’ll be reading more than once. Thanks so much to the publisher for an ARC.

This is a sharp, practical guide for writers who want more control over their careers. Suto’s focus on IP ownership, strategic positioning, and treating writing like a business feels both refreshing and necessary. The frameworks—like alternating growth and maintenance weeks and defining your promise, audience, and stance—offer concrete steps rather than vague motivation. The tone is candid and confidently pushes writers to think beyond the “starving artist” mindset and into a Creative CEO model. For anyone serious about building a sustainable writing career, this is worth reading

I will admit, I am NOT a writer, I am a wannabe blogger though. I was excited to read this book to see if there were some ideas on how I can turn my dreams into reality. I was blown away by this book. I love that it wasn't just a bunch of "how to write" advice but instead focused on mindset and strategies to help you turn your writing into a profitable business. It shares multiple income stream options and how you don't need to be a "starving artist" in order to make writing your full-time career. I haven't started implementing much yet but I have been able to start exploring some of the concepts in the book and have found them really helpful.

* I received this book at no cost in exchange for my honest review. All opinions are my own.

“Write for Money and Power” and the End of the Starving-Artist Myth: A Review of Amy Suto’s Playbook for Writers Who Want Leverage, Not Martyrdom
By Demetris Papadimitropoulos | February 4th, 2025

In “Write for Money and Power,” Amy Suto arrives wearing two outfits at once: the silk robe of the artist and the tactical vest of the operator. She is here to romance you out of your shame about wanting money, then hand you a clipboard. She is here to seduce the starving artist myth into a dark alley and leave it there, blinking. She is here, most of all, to tell you that the modern writer’s problem is not talent. It’s architecture.

The book’s central argument is both blunt and strangely tender: money is not a moral compromise, it is “creative oxygen.” Power is not celebrity or domination, it’s freedom – the right to choose your work, your pace, your health, your life. If that sounds like a slogan, Suto anticipates the eye-roll and barrels through it anyway, because she writes like someone who has already lived through the alternative. Her pages are full of hard-won urgency, the kind you get after your body mutinies or your bank account does. She wants writers to stop treating their ambition as a guilty pleasure and start treating it as a business plan.

This is not a book about writing sentences so much as it is a book about writing as leverage. Suto’s true subject is the writer as a small, self-contained company – a “creator CEO” – building an engine that can generate income without requiring martyrdom. The prose comes with an espresso-shot tempo: short paragraphs, sharp pivots, a fondness for swaggering imperatives (“raise your rates,” “ship the draft,” “stop undercharging”), and metaphors that turn anxiety into a toy you can throw across the room. The vibe is equal parts confession and pep talk, with a San Francisco sheen: Substack subscriptions, remote workflows, high-end clients, the occasional rooftop bar, a sense that you are always one good system away from getting your life back.

Suto is also a reliable narrator of her own obsession: she likes frameworks the way some writers like sonnets. You can feel her pleasure in naming the parts. “Three pillars.” “Roadmaps.” “Laser protocols.” “Safety nets.” “Lean dream teams.” “Freedom seasons.” She writes in the gospel cadence of contemporary self-help – brisk, motivational, a little profane – yet she’s at her best when she lets the seams show: the moments when the book admits how fragile the whole enterprise can feel, especially for the kind of person who makes things out of language and then has to invoice for it.

The book is divided like a business blueprint with a novelist’s sense of momentum. Early chapters perform an exorcism: the inherited scripts about art, suffering, gatekeepers, and virtue. Suto positions traditional institutions – publishing, Hollywood, legacy media – less as villains than as collapsing infrastructures. She gestures at labor unrest and the shrinking middle of creative careers, at how the old ladder has missing rungs. In this landscape, her thesis isn’t merely aspirational; it’s an adaptive strategy. When she writes about “Wi-Fi and weaponized words,” she is naming a real shift in the culture: the way distribution has decoupled from permission. The writer with an email list and a payment link is no longer a quaint internet curiosity. They’re an economic unit.

Part Two of the book becomes a practical catechism: three income pillars (paid newsletter, self-published books, and luxury freelancing/ghostwriting) designed to reinforce one another. The logic is modern and slightly ruthless. You build recurring revenue (subscriptions) while you build assets (books) while you fund everything with high-ticket cashflow (services). This is, in essence, the creator economy’s answer to the old patronage system, updated for the era of platforms. If “The 4-Hour Workweek” sold a dream of escape through automation, Suto offers something more grounded: not escape, but control. She is less interested in vanishing to a beach than in waking up in your own life without dread.

Her most compelling practical chapter, “Your Roadmap From Zero to Seven-Figure Writer in 12 Months,” reads like a cinematic montage, all sprint and sweat and calendar blocks. It’s audacious on purpose, a kind of productive dare: if you aim at a million and land at half, you’ve still built a life. The month-by-month structure is a familiar self-help device, but Suto gives it bite by pairing it with a psychological argument about belief: “realistic” is not a neutral category, it’s a ceiling your nervous system enforces. The roadmap’s true function is less forecasting than permission-making. It asks the reader to behave like a professional before they feel like one – to publish before they’re “ready,” to pitch with imperfect confidence, to treat consistency as a moat.

The book’s best pages are the ones that understand how much of a writing career is actually mood management. Suto has a novelist’s instinct for the villain that lives inside the house. Perfectionism is “procrastination wearing Prada.” Catastrophic thinking is “misplaced imagination.” The enemy is rarely craft alone; it is the spiraling story the writer tells themselves about what they deserve. There are echoes here of “The War of Art” and “The Practice,” though Suto’s tone is less monkish and more boardroom-with-a-ring-light. Her spirituality is systems.

And then, in Part Three, she becomes something like a pragmatic maternal figure for the overworked freelancer: build the safety net, protect the body, hire help, stop trying to be the entire supply chain. In “Creating Your Safety Net,” she is notably clear-eyed about the fragility of being a one-person enterprise. The advice is “boring” by design: emergency funds, legal templates, insurance, sleep. But she writes about those fundamentals with the intensity most people reserve for plot twists, because she knows what it costs when they’re absent. It’s one of the book’s most convincing sections precisely because it is not glamorous. It is the anti-highlight reel.

“Build Your Lean Dream Team” continues this anti-fantasy: scaling doesn’t have to mean building an agency that eats your life. Suto favors specialists over bureaucracy, partnerships over payroll, small teams over sprawling structures. She cites research on small teams and makes it feel like commonsense: fewer moving parts, less overhead, more speed. Here the book quietly aligns with a broader cultural mood: the post-ZIRP hangover, the era in which “growth at all costs” looks like a hangover rather than a virtue. Suto’s ideal business is a well-tuned machine, not a kingdom.

The chapter that will likely provoke the most conversation is “Humans vs. AI: Win With Taste,” in which Suto discloses that she wrote this very book with AI assistance in 83 hours. This is both a marketing grenade and an argument in miniature. She frames AI not as replacement but as intern: summarizer, outliner, idea machine, proofreading assistant, a way to buy back thinking time. The rhetorical move is savvy. Instead of pretending purity, she admits the taboo and then attempts to control the moral framing. In the current climate – where generative tools are reshaping white-collar labor, where writers and artists are debating consent and compensation, where trust in “authentic” creation has become a consumer anxiety – her transparency is either refreshing or irritating, depending on your priors.

What Suto gets right is that AI accelerates the already-existing market pressure toward “serviceable” content. If the internet is about to drown in competent prose, the differentiator won’t be grammar. It will be judgment. Taste. Worldview. The particular scar tissue of a lived life. This is, arguably, the book’s most genuinely literary claim: that writing is not typing, it is thinking, and thinking is shaped by experience. AI can mimic structure; it can’t mint soul. Suto’s metaphor of the limited-edition press – the hand-bound object that survives mass production because it contains care – is one of her best images, and it reveals her true aesthetic: not maximal output, but signature perspective.

Still, the AI chapter also reveals one of the book’s tensions: Suto wants to argue for voice, but she often writes in the shared dialect of modern entrepreneurial self-help, a genre whose voice can become, ironically, serviceable. Her sentences move fast, her metaphors land cleanly, her advice is frequently useful – yet the book occasionally feels like it’s sprinting past its own complexities. The ethical questions around AI training data, compensation, and consent are acknowledged more as atmosphere than as a field of conflict. The labor politics of creative industries – the way power still concentrates even on “democratized” platforms – appear in the background, then recede. A more ambivalent, more searching version of this book might have lingered longer in those shadows.

There is also the question of audience. Suto writes as if her reader is ready to be converted into a high-functioning operator: someone who can pitch relentlessly, post consistently, build funnels, run audits, price confidently, and maintain a fitness regimen. For many writers, that is an exhilarating reframing; for others, it may feel like a new kind of pressure masquerading as liberation. The book argues, persuasively, that systems create oxygen. But systems also require a particular temperament. The most helpful pages are the ones that admit wobble, that treat iteration as the point, that allow for seasons. When Suto leans too hard into the “countdown clock” mentality, the book risks reproducing the very burnout culture it condemns, only in a cuter outfit.

And yet: for all its occasional over-caffeination, “Write for Money and Power” is hard to dismiss because it speaks to a real contemporary ache. We live in a moment when “making it” as a writer often means assembling income from scraps: freelance gigs, side hustles, content work, platform algorithms. The old dream – one big deal, one gatekeeper anointing – has become, for most, statistically remote. Meanwhile the new dream – direct-to-audience, community-backed, subscription-supported – is both plausible and precarious, dependent on attention economies that can shift overnight. Suto’s book is, at bottom, a survival manual for this era, dressed up as a manifesto so it can also be a spell.

Her strongest kinship is with a shelf of pragmatic inspiration: “Essentialism” in its insistence on focus; “Atomic Habits” in its love of small, compounding actions; “Deep Work” in its reverence for protected attention; “Show Your Work!” in its belief that visibility is part of the job; “Company of One” in its suspicion of bloated growth; “The $100M Offers” school of value-based packaging; even “Year of Yes” in its insistence that a new life begins with a series of uncomfortable decisions. Suto’s difference is that she speaks directly to writers – not founders who happen to write, but writers who have been taught to apologize for wanting stability. She doesn’t just tell you to monetize; she tells you to stop flinching when you do.

If I’m putting on my reviewer hat – the one that demands both appreciation and resistance – I’d say Suto’s book succeeds as a catalytic object. It is less a work of original theory than a high-voltage synthesis, delivered with enough charisma to make familiar ideas feel newly executable. It is also, unmistakably, a product of its time: an artifact of the creator economy’s coming-of-age, of post-pandemic remote normalization, of legacy media’s erosion, of AI’s sudden arrival at the writer’s desk like an uninvited assistant. Its limitations are those of the genre it inhabits: it can oversimplify, it can glamorize, it can talk like certainty is a personality trait. But its virtues are equally genre-native: it can propel, it can clarify, it can make action feel possible.

Suto’s most persuasive promise is not the seven figures. It’s the redefinition of what a writing life can be when it is built to sustain a body. The safety net chapter, the emphasis on sleep and nervous system care, the insistence that outsourcing is a life strategy – these are the book’s quiet moral center. If the earlier chapters are gasoline, these are the firebreaks.

By the end, you feel what Suto wants you to feel: that the gate is open, that the old shame is optional, that the “blinking cursor and a fully-charged laptop” is not just a cliché but a genuine tool of agency. You may not buy every claim. You may bristle at the swagger. You may want more nuance where the book chooses speed. But you will almost certainly finish with a sharper sense of the battlefield – and a clearer map of your own leverage.

I’d rate “Write for Money and Power” an 84 out of 100: an energetic, savvy, often genuinely useful manifesto that sometimes outruns its own complexity, but whose core insistence – that writers deserve money, systems, and freedom without self-betrayal – lands with the satisfying weight of something a little like truth.