#AmWriting KJ

The Blueprint is a process of inquiry that ideally happens before you start to write a book, but is also incredibly effective before you start to revise a manuscript or if you happen to be stuck writing chapter three, or thirteen, or thirty-three over and over again.
Jennie created the Blueprint and KJ is both a fan and a book coach who is certified to teach it. In this short episode, we chat about why the Blueprint is so great and why it would be great for you to do it with us this summer!
Do The Blueprint With Us This Summer!
Starting July 2, we’ll be walking you through the 14 steps of the Blueprint over 10 weeks. Some of the steps are very short and we combined them into one episode.
Every episode speaks to fiction writers, memoir writers, and nonfiction writers. There are workbooks, and you will get a link to the digital download of the Blueprint book of your choice.
We’ve also invited four Author Accelerator coaches to host weekly AMAs (ask me anything) and write-alongs so you can ask questions, block off time to write, and meet other #amwriting listeners who are working on their projects, too. You can meet Amy Bernstein, Candace Coakley, Sara Gentry, and Stuart Wakefield in this post.
If you finish your Blueprint over the summer, you will be eligible to win a review from either me or KJ. (If you missed the #AmWriting Success Story about the writer who won the Blueprint Sprint grand prize in 2022, give it a listen. It’s very inspiring! It’s right HERE.)
To play along, you must be a paid subscriber.
Once you pay, opt-in and set up your podcast feed. Don’t worry, it’s simple!
Click here to go to your #AmWriting account, and when you see this screen, do two things:
* Toggle “Blueprint for a Book” from “off” (grey) to “on” (green).
* Click “set up podcast” next to Blueprint for a Book and follow the easy instructions.
Once you set those things up, you’ll get all the future Blueprint emails and podcasts (and if you’re joining the party a bit late, that’s fine — just head to our website and click on Blueprint for a Book in the top menu).

I want to join the Summer Blueprint Sprint!

I want to invite all my writer friends to join me!


This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit amwriting.substack.com/subscribe

The #AmWriting team is so excited to present this interview with Dr. Barb Mayes Boustead – because it’s an #AmWriting success story!
Barb was the random winner of The Summer Blueprint Challenge we ran in the summer of 2022. She won a Blueprint review with Jennie Nash – and the book proposal that came out of that work recently landed Barb a book deal. (Want a chance at something like that for yourself? Keep reading—we’re hosting a new Blueprint Sprint!)
Her book, WILDER WEATHER: What Laura Ingalls Wilder Can Teach Us About Watching the Weather, Understanding Our Climate, and Protecting What We Cherish, will be published by the South Dakota Historical Society Press in 2025 — a perfect match of topic and publisher, as you will hear in this episode.
We are offering this challenge again this summer — and this same prize. Anyone who finishes the Blueprint this summer is eligible to enter the drawing to win a Blueprint review. You can read all about the Blueprint challenge HERE — and you can join us at anytime this summer. We’d love to have you for the podcasts (there are ten in the series), the AMAs, and the write-alongs! Any paid subscriber is welcome.
To learn more about Dr. Barb Mayes Boustead’s work, check out her Substack here:
You can also visit her author website and find her on Instagram at @windbarb
You can download a draft of her book proposal HERE.
The Laura Ingalls Wilder conference she mentions in the show is Laurapalooza
The Blueprint Barb did is from Jennie Nash’s Blueprint for a Nonfiction Book: Plan and Pitch Your Big Idea
Are you a “sticker”?
Regular listeners know that whenever we meet our writing goals around here, we text each other one word: STICKER. (and then we add a cute sticker to our calendar, because we’re fun like that).
We call supporters of the #AmWriting podcast “stickers” too—and while our regular podcasts and shownotes go out to all of our listeners, we have created a few things just for stickers. First, there’s the Summer Blueprint for a Book Sprint—10 weeks dedicated to working with coaches and a community to figure out how to turn your next idea—or your struggling draft—into the book you want to write. You can join it anytime (the how-to is below).
Stickers can also submit the first page of their WIP to the Booklab First Pages podcast, where we might choose it to discuss, review and offer ideas for persuading agents, editors and readers that they want to turn that page and see what happens next. (Find the link to submit a first page HERE.)
I’m a sticker! Give it all to me now.

To join the Blueprint for a Book Summer Sprint, you must be a paid subscriber. Then, opt-in and set up your podcast feed. Don’t worry, it’s simple! Click here to go to your #AmWriting account, and when you see this screen, do two things:
* Toggle “Blueprint for a Book” from “off” (grey) to “on” (green).
* Click “set up podcast” next to Blueprint for a Book and follow the easy instructions.
Once you set those things up, you’ll get all the future Blueprint emails and podcasts (and if you’re joining the party a bit late, just head to our website and click on Blueprint for a Book in the top menu).


This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit amwriting.substack.com/subscribe

Hello #AmWriters, Jess here. When Rosalie Haizlett emailed to introduce me to her work, I was intrigued. At the time, I was working on the marketing section of a book proposal, trying to thick- and thin-slice the book’s potential audience and explain why my fanbase as well as new readers might purchase this particular book I was describing. So when Rosalie emailed to tell me about her forthcoming book, Tiny Worlds of the Appalachian Mountains: An Artist’s Journey my head exploded. How do you convince a publisher to let you write about such tiny worlds, no matter how beautiful your art and eloquent your writing? Rosalie generously answered my questions in the spirit they were asked: with a genuine love for small presses, books about very specific subjects, and wonder for her process and her end product.
As a bonus, I found out about some of the most incredible fellowship opportunities for writers and illustrators, ones I’m tempted to apply for myself! I hope you enjoy this episode as much I did.
Rosalie’s website

Rosalie’s #AmReading suggestions:
Farmhouse by Sophie Blackall and Sophie’s website because it’s gorgeous
Rare Air: Endangered Birds, Bats, Butterflies and Bees by Sarah Kaizar

Jess’ #AmReading suggestion:
The Five Year Lie by Sarina Bowen, duh.


This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit amwriting.substack.com/subscribe

Let me start by answering the question posed in the title: very bad. Very very bad. Terrible, even. Plotless meandering senseless drivel involving two-dimensional characters continually lifting cups of coffee to their lips and then never putting them down and suddenly, without warning, pumping gas instead. Although, to be honest, that last is never my personal problem. My (incoherent, emotion-less, inconsistent) characters tend to meticulously move around a reasonably clear, if poorly described, landscape. They speak in full, grammatically correct sentences. They even banter and they’re often quite entertaining as they go about doing completely the wrong things for the wrong reasons.
And this was my problem. I heard the phrase “shitty first draft” (as you no doubt have) many times, and I thought, well, but it’s not. It’s not unreadable, or incomprehensible. If you picked it up and read just one paragraph you’d mistake it for a real book. Pull any single paragraph out of any draft I’ve ever written and you’d go, yeah, okay. That’s a book by a writer! Not a great writer or anything. My point is that the writing is always fine. Good, even. Sometimes better than good.
So when the drafts themselves turn out to be pretty shitty, I tend to be way more crushed than I should be—because “shitty” doesn’t mean what I thought it did. It’s taken me far longer than it probably should have to figure that out. Maybe everyone else is way ahead of me here. But the thing that makes a shitty first draft “shitty” isn’t that the writing is bad.
It’s that it’s a terrible book.
When I first started writing fiction, I had only my own early drafts to compare things to. They weren’t (aren’t) good—they lacked structure, were too complicated, explained some things too much and other things not at all. There’s no interiority, emotion or description. I write around the plot, or include too much plot, or try to attach a plot that’s not thematically integrated with the story. The bones are soft floppy poorly formed and malleable—but if I, say, burn down a barn, the scene itself will be exciting and consistent. That often fooled (fools) me into thinking my draft is further along than it is. And then I thought it was just me—other people probably wrote pretty good book drafts that then needed revision in different ways. Other people started with good bones and worked out from there. Only I, special stupid snowflake that I was, kept writing all the skin and clothing and hair and sometimes organs to go on wrong or non-existent skeletons.
I’ve since read a lot of other first drafts and I’ve realized: I was totally wrong.
This is how lots of people do it.
This IS what “shitty first draft” means. (Or it can be, it probably means lots of other things too). Most of us (honestly, even if we blueprint and outline and all the things) are going to end up with someone telling us that the book has no middle, that we need to cut the first 2/3, that our protagonist isn’t unlikeable per se, but rather that there is nothing on the page to like or dislike. Someone will say, he has no agency. She’s too passive. There’s nothing at stake in the first third of the book, why on earth would she take this job/go to this party/answer that phone call, why this, why him, why now. And they will be right (although they might not be right about how to fix it).
Whether it’s a freelance editor, a good beta reader or the hosts of TSNOTYAW who tells you that your draft, be it first or second or fifth, is still firmly mired in “shitty” territory, the most common reaction is something along the lines of:
This is too bad. It’s too awful, if I’ve come this far and I still don’t have this or that fundamental thing in place—if there is somehow no climax or no reason to relate to the character or no clear arc or evolution, if somehow this is 80K words but it is still not a book…
Yeah. Turns out that’s the way it wor

It’s EPISODE 401! That’s a lot of episodes. We’re proud. We’re also not done—and a couple weeks ago, a fellow writer decreed, in an email post that went rather viral, that No One Buys Books.
We disagree. Instead, we offer the following less bleak but not entirely rosy corollary: Nothing Sells Books. But Books Still Sell.
Coming at you in this episode are four somewhat cynical authors, one who spends her time now working with writers rather than writing herself. We’ve all had books hit various lists… and we’ve all had books that have not, have neither hit any lists or reached target numbers or earned out or anything of the sort. And we have thoughts. Listen for them… but meanwhile, here I am, KJ, with my very own soapbox bc I said “I’ll write the shownotes” and the others, spotting an opportunity to let someone else do a thing, semi-wisely agreed because now I get to tell you what I think.
I mostly think that we authors have bought into a story in which we have more control over our sales than we do. We believe—or want to—that we can TikTok hustle up readers, tweet our way to success, muster our many Facebook friends to buy three copies each (it’s not that much!), put some links in our Substacks and call on our Notes, Threads and Insta buds to click those links. And traditional publishers want so badly to believe that too—because if it’s not true, then we don’t know what is. Reviews MIGHT sell books. Ads sometimes work. Even celebrity book clubs, the last magic best-seller wand, only work when there is a match-up between readers and the book—some Reese, GMA and Jenna picks sell big while others don’t, and there is absolutely no way to beg, buy, or steal your way onto them anyway. (Maybe? Story idea, yours for the taking: author blackmails way onto celeb book list, things go terribly wrong.)
And I want to tell you that this is not true, because I don’t entirely want it to be true. It arguably hasn’t been true for me, and I’ve seen it not work for many if not most of other authors. To get more specific, I’ve had not one but TWO excerpts of a book in the NYT and had it not move the needle. I’ve had an essay in LitHub, ditto. I’ve been on many, many podcasts, I’ve sent emails, I’ve made TikToks and reels, and I’ve watched friends push these buttons hard and less hard to mixed results—but not NO results, and that’s an important distinction. Below, I’m offering a few success stories, all with massive caveats, the most important of which is this: I probably only see the successes.
The TL;DR is this: nothing easy sells books. There is no short cut or even a long cut. For most of us, nothing we ourselves are willing to do or are capable of doing in the short term is going to move enough titles to make a significant impact on our success. The second half of our koan is also true, though. Books still sell. But most book sales, especially those that lead to wild success, come from forces beyond our control. Word of mouth, a lucky media hit, a celebrity boost. A hit TV show that comes out of the blue years after a series is published (Bridgerton), or maybe after the author has died (The Queen’s Gambit). Or they come from enough people picking up the book and sharing it with enough others in ways that cannot be planned or gamed. You can’t count on those things, although one thing remains true: lightning can’t strike a book that hasn’t been written.
The most important thing to do is to write the books.
Sarina notes in the podcast that nothing sells (your) books like more books (by you)—witness, for example, Taylor Jenkins Reid. Daisy Jones and the Six was not her first book by any means—but its success brought her backlist roaring into prominence. I think about TJR a LOT, because she stuck to the thing I want to stick to—writing the books, not recording video confessionals about the writing process and setting them to the music du jour. But… that’s a thing

Today, I (Jennie) am excited to welcome novelist Caroline Leavitt to the show.  She's a very prolific author who's novels have landed on the New York Times bestseller list, the USA today bestseller list, and have been optioned for films, translated into many languages, contents for magazines, and won all kinds of awards.
Caroline is also the co-founder of A Mighty Blaze, an organization that began during the pandemic to promote independent bookstores and authors who lost their book tours.  It's since grown into an organization of 35 professional creative volunteers, connecting writers and readers online in a variety of ways, including a podcast.
Today, I'm talking with Caroline about her new novel Days of Wonder  and specifically about the dual timeline and how she learned to trust her gut to make the story work.
You can find her at CarolineLeavitt.com
Humans of New York



This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit amwriting.substack.com/subscribe