✍️ How I am Using my Substack to Finally Write My First Book

What finally made it feel possible, and what it might mean for yours

✍️ Welcome to Field Notes, a Creatorly series with behind-the-scenes reflections on sustainable writing and creator growth. I share what I know from 10+ years in communications and marketing, and what I’m learning here in real time, so that you can create with clarity and show up consistently.

I have stacks of notebooks. Years and years of them, going back further than I can remember, each one filled with ideas for books I’ve always meant to write. Not to mention all the notes I also have saved on my phone.

Actual book ideas, chapter outlines, descriptions, and titles I loved and never committed to using. They are full of paragraphs that felt promising at midnight and illegible by morning.

Those notebooks have followed me through more seasons of life than I can count. And for a long time, they stayed exactly where they started, full of ideas going nowhere.

I think I was always waiting for the right stretch of time, the right season, the right version of my life that had more time and less noise. That version kept getting pushed forward, the notebooks kept filling with more ideas, and somewhere along the way, I stopped opening them as often because opening them had started to feel like a reminder of something I hadn’t done yet.

What changed for me wasn’t a new approach to my mornings or a cleared calendar. It was learning about how Amy Suto was successfully building her two Substack newsletters and launching her new book, not sequentially, not when she had more time, but alongside each other, in the same creative space. She gave me the idea that I could treat my newsletter like the first draft of something larger.

I sat with that for a while. I’m a busy mom, raising two children with one on the way and building this newsletter in whatever margins remain in my day. My writing window is often 15 minutes in between daily activities or a short stretch after the kids go to bed. There are days I don’t find any time at all.

What I noticed, though, was that I was already writing consistently. Every week, I was showing up and putting something real on the page. I have built up this writing habit in a way that has allowed me to consistently post two newsletters a week for the last seven weeks. The writing was happening. What wasn’t happening was letting it become something bigger.

Learn How to Use Your Substack to Write Your Book

The rest of this post covers what I actually changed, how the newsletter feedback loop is shaping the book in real time, and something I've realized about platform building that quietly removed one more reason to wait. Founding members also get a section I don't share anywhere else, where I talk about where I really am with the book right now, the parts that are still being figured out. If that's the kind of thing you want to read alongside, I'd love to have you here.