#297: Joy Sullivan — How She Built A Living As A Writer On Instagram and Substack

Joy Sullivan [00:00:00]:
So if I'm always after more numbers, I actually think that's like a gamble that doesn't pay off. There is no amount of followers that would ever pay off the amount of sacrifice you'd have to make as an artist.

Jay Clouse [00:00:25]:
Hello, my friend. Welcome back to another episode of Creator Science. Today I'm speaking with Joy Sullivan. Joy is a Portland-based poet who quit her corporate job mid-pandemic to become a full-time artist and built a thriving creative business through Instagram, her Substack called Necessary Salt, and a paid writing community called Sustenance, which has around 250 members. Joy is also a former member of the Lab, and I crossed paths with Joy a few times when she lived here in Columbus, Ohio before she moved west. In 2024, she published a book of poetry, her first published work called Instructions for Traveling West, that is published with Dial Press, an imprint of Penguin Random House. And I wanted to talk to Joy for a couple of reasons. First of all, I absolutely love her style of writing.

Jay Clouse [00:01:14]:
I love her voice. She writes fearlessly, aggressively, and yet there's this warmth and relatability to it that I really resonate with. It's very unique, it's vulnerable, and it also makes the reader feel really seen. All the links to her work is in the show notes, by the way, so if you want to check it out, I recommend doing so. Second, she does Instagram so well, and she grew her Instagram predominantly through writing and sharing carousels. That's really interesting to me because Instagram, when you think about it, you think Reels, you think short-form vertical video. And third, she's writing on Substack, but monetizing with a Circle community outside of Substack, which I think is a really smart model. You take all this together and Joy is blazing a path of writing as a living, as a lucrative living, and leveraging discovery platforms, Instagram and Substack, without necessarily using those platforms the way they incentivize you to use them.

Jay Clouse [00:02:08]:
So in this episode, we talk about her approach to Instagram, her approach to Substack, what she likes and dislikes about both platforms, how you can succeed as a writer on these platforms, what she'd do differently for her second book, and a little bit of a pep talk for me as a writer too. If you enjoy this episode, tag @jklaus or @joysullivanpoet on Instagram and let us know. We want to hear that you're listening. We'll get to that full episode with Joy right after this. As a starting point, I'm curious how you would describe the landscape for writers today. What do you find writers wanting to do and what are opportunities available to them?

Joy Sullivan [00:02:49]:
Yeah, you know, my background's as a poet. That's primarily who I serve in my writing community, and that's also how I got my big break in the publishing world was as a poet. And I think that it's challenging as always. It's really challenging to both have the kind of endurance to bring a creative project into the world. And now writers are tasked with this additional question of how do I build a platform? How do I attract readers? As you probably know, publishers, especially Big Five, are looking for writers to kind of be this whole package. Not only do you have to have an amazing manuscript that lands you an agent if you want a Big Five deal, but then you also have to have a personality that feels really saleable. You have to be able to like show evidence that you can do book sales. And I think it's a really tough terrain.

Joy Sullivan [00:03:38]:
It's a lot to ask of a writer, especially those folks with a creative brain. So I, I am like full of empathy for writers who are embarking on this because it's intense out there.

Jay Clouse [00:03:48]:
Totally. From my perspective, my assumption is that most of the folks you work with are not nonfiction. I don't want to say fiction particularly, but I feel like, I don't know how you describe like poetry, you know?

Joy Sullivan [00:04:02]:
Yeah.

Jay Clouse [00:04:02]:
But I'm guessing it's not educational nonfiction that you're typically dealing in.

Joy Sullivan [00:04:07]:
Yeah. So I run a writing community, uh, called Sustenance, which serves what I, I say our target audience is poets and lyrical essayists. So yeah, we're not writing how-tos or tutorials. We're in that like really murky land of short form, but that's full of poetic and emotional depth. And then we're also trying to navigate how do we produce the best piece of writing from a craft perspective, but also have an audience for it, which I think is sometimes hard to know how to do.

Jay Clouse [00:04:37]:
What's really interesting to me is that in my world, most of the people who are drawn to writing, which again, this is mostly like educational, nonfiction-based writing, the obvious answer is, well, go to a text-based social media platform like X or Bluesky or Threads or LinkedIn. But I actually don't think those are the platforms that are most friendly to writers, especially lyrical essayists. It doesn't seem like that's the friendly place. It seems like the friendly place is Instagram. But Instagram is so inherently visual. Do you agree with that statement? And if so, how do we use Instagram as a writer?

Joy Sullivan [00:05:19]:
Totally. It's, God, this is a tricky question for me, Jay. I'm excited to get into it because I have such a weird relationship with Instagram and over like the last 5 years I've grown my platform to over 115K and that's been terrifying and exciting. But I got my start on Instagram during the pandemic. So it was sort of out of sheer loneliness when we were all isolating. I was writing poems. I finally had time to write again 'cause we were all working remotely and I was sharing my work online. And I was kind of surprised that there was even an interest in reading long form, sometimes like multiple slides that you'd have to scroll through.

Joy Sullivan [00:06:02]:
I never had much interest in Instagram because I'm not like a super visual person. So I think I was pleasantly surprised that the platform really supported that kind of interesting inquiry into language. You know, now I publish my Substack essays, 7 slides on Instagram, and people read it and people share it and sometimes it goes viral. So I was pleasantly surprised that there is an interest in that, but I think we often begin to talk about these platforms that sometimes we don't consider like just the heft of emotional, or it almost feels like spiritual struggle that happens from having to be a person invested in telling the truth, having a deep love of craft, really wanting to produce the strongest work possible, and also serve the masses, and also grow, and also build a platform. And, you know, I tell my writers a lot, I think for a while those things are sadly pretty antithetical. I think it's really hard to truly know yourself as a poet and a writer or an essayist and also be sort of serving what gets likes, right? And pandering to like what people want. And I think for me, I've had to really reframe my own relationship with Instagram. You know, I used to like sell a course on how to, an Instagram strategy.

Joy Sullivan [00:07:27]:
And a couple years ago I took it down because I felt that it was unethical to ask artists to approach their craft and their own visibility that way.

Jay Clouse [00:07:37]:
Yeah, I'd love to try and eavesdrop on your inner monologue a little bit. This is a line of inquiry that I've been going down a lot with creators all over the place, but I think it's particularly interesting when somebody is so focused on craft versus distribution, let's call it, because a lot of folks in my world They are creating for social media platforms for the purpose of finding distribution and building an audience. And I get the sense from a lot of your writing that is not where it's coming from, but I, I have to think you're also aware of it. So what is that tension like? How do you think through it, reason through it, approach your work? What's your relationship to that?

Joy Sullivan [00:08:21]:
So I have a couple of mantras that I tell myself and that I tell my writers when it comes to like becoming visible online, because really regardless of what direction you go unless you self-publish, which in that case, it's also part of the conversation. You really do have to have some kind of platform. So it's a real catch-22. But a couple of things that I tell myself, the first is be a poet, not a preacher. Those of us who have marketing backgrounds, it was really drilled into our head that every time you get on social, you have to offer value. So you become very didactic. You're always teaching, you're, you're always giving tips, you're always the expert. And I think there's a real fatigue.

Joy Sullivan [00:08:59]:
Around that on social now. I don't think people are that interested in how-tos. I think they're interested, at least from a poet's perspective, in how to talk about this wild, terrifying, glorious moment that we're in and really having the phraseology to understand that, to understand nuance and complexity. So be a poet, not a preacher is the first thing. The other that I tell myself and my students is my vulnerability is not social currency. So a lot of times when I was first building my platform and I had poems starting to take off, there was just like, oh, I have to keep building this momentum. And I found that when I shared very vulnerable content, very emotional content, I got big reactions. I got lots of follows, I got lots of engagement.

Joy Sullivan [00:09:46]:
And I think that some of that is always part of the game, right? People always wanna eavesdrop. We're all a little voyeuristic, right? That's why social media works. And that's also the gift of poetry is vulnerability and insight into the human experience. But I really had to find that boundary for myself on what things am I gonna keep private, what are my boundaries around social media, and what things am I comfortable sharing for some kind of universal understanding of what it means to be alive in this particular moment in time. And I also am very protective of people in my life, so not wanting to expose them also, you know, without consent to my audience. So that was another big consideration.

Jay Clouse [00:10:27]:
Is everything you create for the purpose of expression and you're kind of divorced from the performance, or do you find yourself creating things for the purpose of social media performance?

Joy Sullivan [00:10:40]:
Yeah, I would say I've had to rewire my brain around this because I think it's really tough to get out of that idea of like, oh, I know this is gonna perform, or I know people will like this, but I'm just As I've evolved as an artist and a writer, I'm so much less interested in that. So I've got another thing I say is I wanna be memorable, not marketable. So, and I, I don't believe that it's like you have to pick between having no following and only producing, you know, slop content. I don't think those are the two options. I think thankfully people are really hungry for deeply considered, thoughtful, slow and chewy art that isn't AI driven. You know, right? We're in this AI, I know Jay, you talk a lot about and think a lot about how AI is reshaping the creator landscape, but I think it's actually like, it's about who are the people you wanna attract. And I think sometimes the reframe, we're so hungry when we come to social media of like, please, I need to get followers. I wanna appeal to everyone.

Joy Sullivan [00:11:38]:
And I don't think we have enough conversation about who do I actually wanna bring into my inner world? Who do I wanna attract as my audience? Because it's gonna fundamentally on a soul level It's gonna shape me as an artist. So if I'm always after more numbers, I actually think that's like a gamble that doesn't pay off. There is no amount of followers that would ever pay off the amount of sacrifice you'd have to make as an artist.

Jay Clouse [00:12:04]:
So do you think in 2026, the approach of creating considered chewy art that you enjoy and tickles you Is that a privilege that you have grown into because of your platform, or is that a strategy for somebody who is at the ground level today?

Joy Sullivan [00:12:25]:
It's a really good question. It's hard to say, right? Because I, I built my following and I've also then translated it to Substack. So I've got readers when I need them, or when I need to approach a publisher, I've got evidence that my books can sell. But you know, I got my, I got my publisher, I think when I had 40K. Instagram followers, which I still recognize as a decent-sized platform, but I think we sometimes over-index numbers. And like when I really pushed my agent on why she picked me up, she was like, honestly, there was just a vibe. She was like, I could tell you were really smart. I could tell you were really thoughtful, and I could tell that people really wanted to listen to what you had to say.

Joy Sullivan [00:13:10]:
So I, again, I think we make these gambles. I think we end up sacrificing a lot of media, mediocre work and kind of like regurgitated content that we know performs to get eyeballs. But that, I don't think that's that meaningful. And, and the book deals that come from those kinds of platforms are flashes in the pan. And you know, my challenge for my next book is like, I wanna get like a 2.5 on Goodreads. Like I want it to be so polarizing. I want it to be so controversial. I want people to be like arguing in the comment sections.

Joy Sullivan [00:13:47]:
I want it to be really meaty. I want it to challenge people. I don't want it to be palatable art anymore because that's just not interesting. And I think if you're really in it for art's sake, you just like have a fundamental different interest in who is reading you and what their appetite is for, you know?

Jay Clouse [00:14:06]:
Yeah, I think if I would've asked you that question 2 years ago, the voice in my head would've been saying, I think it's a privilege to get to a point to just make what you wanna make. And know that people will like to consume it. But I think in 2026, it might be the other direction. I really do think that it just really stands out when you're making something that's kind of divorced from what you think will perform. And I even see, I've kind of struggled over the last 18 months with my relationship to content because if I'm honest, I think I had a biological hard reset when we had our daughter. And to continue the business as it has been feels a little bit like I'm cosplaying as a version of myself that no longer exists. And so recently I've started doing some, some writing on Substack as well, which I'm sure we'll talk about. And I've noticed that when I share that writing, I don't care at all how it goes.

Jay Clouse [00:15:03]:
It was the experience of making it The pride I felt doing so and sharing it and everything else is a bonus. But when I'm not coming from that place, then I feel like my emotions are so tethered to how something performs. So I am finding that I'm being pulled towards the lighthouse of make something you want to make and, and the pride is enough.

Joy Sullivan [00:15:27]:
Totally. And I don't think that it's mutually exclusive. I think that we just have to almost retrain. I think literally the gap or the opportunity in social media right now is to kind of be going in the opposite direction, to just be kind of doing, you know, a middle finger to what's popular content. I actually think that's what people are very hungry for. And you might not get the incredible viral numbers that you see of other people who are hopping on trends, but I just think the quality of your audience improves and that's gonna save your life as an artist who has to be so visible. And I think the other really hard thing about making and sharing art and writing authentically online is that, you know, we're so afraid of being canceled for really any transgression, you know? So like I've had people angry for me for like posting that I've, I'm eating oysters, right? Or riding a horse, you know, 'cause someone said that was animal cruelty. Or, you know, posting a picture of me and my boyfriend.

Joy Sullivan [00:16:27]:
It really doesn't matter. People are always in that space gonna look for something to criticize. And I think that that's pretty terminal to a young artist is that kind of visibility that early on. And if you have a mass platform that's just attracting anyone from the internet, I think that that, like, again, on a soul level can really degrade your ability to produce work that you are proud of. So I would say, and I tell my writers, grow slowly. And I, I know that that might cost you money and time, but energetically I think it's a much healthier place. I'm doing some research right now for my second book, and it's all about sort of my relationship in many ways with social media. It's all about watching.

Joy Sullivan [00:17:10]:
And visibility and eyes. And I am doing all this research into Greek mythology and looking about the story of Medusa, you know, literally if you look upon her and her hair is snakes and that's instant death. And I think about that as an artist and a writer. Like, I don't know that we are meant to withstand the level of visibility that these platforms require of us, and they are toxic systems that are designed to keep us plugged in and addicted. So again, I do have the privilege of already having built a platform, but I think that has to be part, part of the conversation is how as an artist are you gonna survive the Medusa that is social media and to some degree that is Substack and how, you know, I have Instagram bricked on my phone now. 24/7. I get on it on my desktop and I get on it to post when I feel like I have something that is worth sharing with the world. But I, I can't make good art if I'm constantly worrying about how I'm gonna be perceived.

Joy Sullivan [00:18:15]:
And you know, Ellen Bass, who's a very famous poet, she says, in order to write poem, you cannot be the hero of your poem. Mm-hmm. And I think we are terrified of not being the hero on social media. And my God, what boring writing. We're producing as a result.

Jay Clouse [00:18:32]:
I've heard people talk about comedy through the lens of most comedians position themselves in a low-status light, and that's part of the reason why comedy is so relatable and it travels so far. And I think sounds like you're saying poetry is similar in that way.

Joy Sullivan [00:18:50]:
Yeah. You know, people come to poets and poems to unlock something true about human nature. And when you are always posturing, when you're always being the preacher and not the poet, you're not saying anything new, and that you're not really doing the job. That's the task of the poet. And again, I think if you're a writer that's looking to get started on Instagram, I think a couple things can help you. I think slowing down, writing work that you're proud of is key. I think also letting people get to know you as a person, especially in the way that AI is driving everything now. It will never have humanity.

Joy Sullivan [00:19:28]:
So I think people also got very attached to me as a person. So I did let people early on, I really shared the process of getting published. I shared the terror of growing visibility. I talked very openly about getting nightmares that I still have every night about being watched online, of just the terror of being visible. I talked and wrote on Instagram and Substack of like when people first started recognizing me on the street and how uncomfortable that was from a place of someone who's fairly introverted and private. And so I think that in some ways like was also like trying to reinforce my humanity as I grew on these platforms. It's a sticky thing that everyone's gonna navigate a little differently.

Jay Clouse [00:20:13]:
When you have this mantra of be a poet and not a preacher, but you also have a business model that asks you to be a teacher and a model for people who want you to be that. How do you reconcile those things? How do you inhabit that role for people?

Joy Sullivan [00:20:30]:
I think it's reducing our chokehold on absolute truth and the models of how we gain wisdom as a collective. You know, I think people want so much certainty. You know, they really do. That's what sells. Is tell me the— everyone's got a framework, Jay. Everyone's got a blueprint, everyone's got a trajectory. And the reality is, is that like a poem, if you have a blueprint for a poem, you're gonna write a terrible poem. Poems are fueled by uncertainty.

Joy Sullivan [00:21:01]:
If you know where you are going at the beginning of the poem and you end up in that place at the end of the poem, you've written a terrible, predictable, gross poem that's never gonna move anybody. And so in a weird way, that's also my business model. Not that I don't promise outcomes, but to suggest that like collectively we're gonna figure out a way forward. And even as a facilitator and a teacher, I very rarely try and say, this is the way forward, I'm your ultimate guide. Even the way that I built Sustenance is very much of a community model where the collective is sort of bringing in real time insights and wisdom to this process of being a creative person in the world. And so I think that helps a little bit, you know, and I think that's also like maybe maybe in some ways a matriarchal idea. My father was a surgeon and he grew up his whole life saying he felt this tremendous amount of pressure as a leader in a hospital to immediately have the answer and to tell people what the answer was. And we were talking about it one day and I said, Dad, my secret power as a leader and a community builder is that I get to say, I don't know, all the time.

Joy Sullivan [00:22:12]:
And I just remember seeing like, relief flood over his body and be like, I had never imagined I could just admit I don't know. And to me, that's the beauty of being a poet. We never answer a goddamn question in a poem. And also in community, it's very much about arriving at truth together versus setting myself up as some kind of cult leader. Even with this long hair now, I, I, I'm looking a little cultish these days, but I'm just very wary. Even on Instagram, I'm very wary of acting like I'm some kind of, like, hovering deity that has a lot of answers. That's terrifying to me.

Jay Clouse [00:22:53]:
This is the way the lab has evolved as well. It's like, as I have learned more, I am increasingly certain that I know absolutely nothing. Like, my certainty has dropped so far. The paradox is, because people want certainty so badly, people want to put me, and I'm sure you as well, on a little bit of a pedestal. And when I try to collapse that pedestal, I also find that sometimes it does them a disservice because they want me to give them at least a direction to head. And I can do that if I'm on the pedestal. But if I have collapsed that, they no longer give that the weight that could push them in the direction they need to go. So it's, it's very conflicting because— and then there's obviously the sales implications where the more certain you are that you have the answer, the easier it is to sell anything.

Jay Clouse [00:23:48]:
But I'm viewing certainty these days as an absolute red flag.

Joy Sullivan [00:23:53]:
Certainty collapses our ability to be nuanced, and I actually think that that's what, you know, our world needs the most right now, is to be able to hold and tolerate our capacity for complexity, because we're always attracted to such a binary, and it's so easy to say what's in and what's out, who's good and who's bad, and my moral superiority is greater than yours. That's another huge pitfall of social media that silos us, right, into like very separate camps. And so yeah, I think just expanding our capacity for discomfort, and really I feel like my work is expanding people's ability to grow, and that I can only do via being able to model it myself.

Jay Clouse [00:24:37]:
How do you define the word poet?

Joy Sullivan [00:24:40]:
There's—

Jay Clouse [00:24:40]:
I think people hearing this, they're probably thinking like certain cadence or rhyme scheme, but I don't think that's necessarily true. Do you have a working definition that you like for this?

Joy Sullivan [00:24:52]:
I should have like a really poetic definition of a poem. You know, I, I talk a lot about, you know, walking into a poem and then leaping off a cliff. That's where, you know, you've gotten something somewhere interesting. And kind of the, like, shorthand for a poem is a container to hold the unsayable. It's a place to put that which could not be held by any other form. That gets to be what exists in a poem. Some people define it as a bird. Some people define it as an ocean.

Joy Sullivan [00:25:24]:
But it is this kind of mysterious, esoteric thing that allows us to process some part of being alive that we just don't have a form for. And that's why I think it's so resistant to easy answers. You know, when I started posting on Instagram and building my following, I was a copywriter at a branding agency, right? And I would, you know, I literally hung up a plaque, a piece of paper above my desk that says, are you a copywriter? Are you a goddamn poet? You know, be a poet. Which one are you?

Jay Clouse [00:26:00]:
I love that. If I were to take away from you either Instagram or Substack, you can never leverage one of them ever again, which one would you have a harder time letting go of?

Joy Sullivan [00:26:13]:
Oh, that one's hard, Jay. Probably— well, I'm more, I'm more attached to Instagram, but I think it's worse for me. So I like it more just as a platform, and I'm more addicted to it. So I think for my health, I would say take away Instagram, leave me Substack, and let me write slow chewy art on Substack. But for a while I used to say that Instagram's my boyfriend. I had a very weird relationship in that, you know, I could kind of post and get immediate validation, immediate empathy, immediate controversy, whatever it is. I could always post and, you know, people loved watching my stories and loved talking to me in my stories. But I, I began to see that there was this like direct correlation between how fast I was growing on Instagram and how more and more unhappy I was becoming.

Joy Sullivan [00:27:08]:
So I think for a brain perspective, I think for an artist's brain perspective, Substack is a better and healthier platform.

Jay Clouse [00:27:16]:
What do you think about the Substack monetization model?

Joy Sullivan [00:27:22]:
I feel like I was really attracted to it when I first got on Substack and I started getting hundreds of paid subscribers. I was extremely motivated to write, and I did like a pretty successful series called Woman in the Fill in the Blank. Every month I'd take myself to a new location and be woman at the horse ranch, woman in the rage room, woman in the sex club. You know, I've been— it was interesting. I would like basically be a little detective and I would go to someplace that I was scared to go and I'd write about it. And people loved it. And then I would send people out on their own Woman in the World assignments. And so I was really pumped about it for about 2 years and I was making about $60K off of the platform.

Joy Sullivan [00:28:06]:
And then I just decided I wanted to write a book and I felt like my, a second book, and I felt like my best, most creative work was going to Substack and not to my book. I needed, for me as an artist at that point, I needed to recalibrate my metabolism around only being able to write when I was gonna have the immediate gratification of posting. And so now I'm posting very little to either platform, which again is a privilege 'cause I don't have to grow them. But I mean, I, I'm also making a decision not to grow them. I have like 23,000 subscribers on Substack, which is not, that's not wild. And I have 115K on Instagram, which it, I could get bigger, right? But I've decided that that's, That's plenty for me. And now I just want to focus on really my best, most creative work going to the manuscript.

Jay Clouse [00:29:01]:
We'll be right back to my conversation with Joy Sullivan after a quick break for our sponsors. And now back to the rest of my conversation with Joy Sullivan. When somebody comes to you and they want to be a full-time writer, that means that they're demanding income from somewhere. So what is your advice for how they fill the income bucket if they are writing on Substack, let's say?

Joy Sullivan [00:29:34]:
Yeah, I think you have to, I mean, you have to do a couple of things. For me, Substack is part copywriting because unfortunately, whether or not you want to admit it, like you're writing for an audience member and they are paying your bills at that point. So you are sort of. It's different than Instagram because if you're monetizing on Substack, they are still paying you. And I think it's something that if you're very motivated by deadlines, if you're very motivated by writing specifically to a target audience, if you feel that you have a lot to share, I think that makes a lot of sense. I'm also an advocate, and I know this is going to maybe dodge your question a little bit, but I'm an advocate for people having a really hard conversation with themselves and saying, do I wanna make what I love pay my bills?

Jay Clouse [00:30:21]:
Yeah, totally.

Joy Sullivan [00:30:22]:
Do I want to put that kind of pressure on my art? I don't put that kind of pressure on my art. A lot of people think that I make my money from books. I don't make my money from books. I make my money from a community and, you know, teaching full-time. So I'm actually not somebody who makes my living as a writer because I don't want to write a book every year and have to churn that out to get a payday. So I think there's this illusion that it's very sexy once you get into creative roles and it pays your bills, but I know that that's reasonable to expect.

Jay Clouse [00:30:54]:
That's kind of where I was coming from with the question, because you mentioned when you were doing paid subscribers on Substack, you were making about $60K a year from that, which is a good living as a writer, totally, but also requires a lot of subscribers. I think Substack kind of has a ceiling on what you can charge for a subscription, for the most part, because it's kind of like going to a bookstore. If I went to a bookstore and and I saw one of these books was $500, I'd be like, this is weird. This doesn't fit in the bookstore. All of these are $20 to $40. And I feel like you get the same experience when somebody has a Substack membership for several hundred dollars. It just, it feels off for that medium. It's easy to turn on Substack subscriptions and say you're charging $10 a month and maybe you have 1,000 readers, which is great.

Jay Clouse [00:31:45]:
And maybe 10% of them become subscribers. And now you, you have $1,000 a month that you have a lot of pressure to fulfill whatever you've promised to, which I think can be so antithetical to the craft.

Joy Sullivan [00:32:00]:
Well, sort of the wisdom of Substack is turn on your paid subscriptions immediately. Otherwise you're losing money. That's money on the table, right? And I didn't do that. I waited to see, because if you turn on paid subscriptions right away, you lose the ability to iterate and experiment in a really safe playing field. So I just messed around on Substack for like a year and a half, and that's how I found that my Woman in the World series was taking off. Then I turned on paid subscriptions. Then I came up with a paid model that included teaching quarterly workshops. I also think it's very hard to make a living if you're not doing some kind of teaching also via Substack.

Joy Sullivan [00:32:38]:
But I think if you're serious, this is another conversation, but I think if you're serious about community building. I wouldn't do it on Substack. I'd move it to something like Circle, which we both run communities on. But I think it's very hard to find a lucrative niche if you are trying to monetize it from the very beginning because you miss all of that time of experimentation. It's like, do you wanna leave good ideas on the table or do you wanna leave a little money on the table? And I think it would be better to leave money on the table when starting out.

Jay Clouse [00:33:09]:
Yeah, the drag of I need to deliver this because I have paid subscribers who I've promised it to can be such a drag depending on the cadence that you're promising, depending on just how much of an engine for creation you are. Some people just churn out writing like crazy and it's easy for them. And for me, every deadline I feel at like a deep physical level And there's a decent amount of dread in that feeling. And so I, I have found that I've, I've needed to leave a lot of money on the table to avoid constant feelings of dread in whatever format that it is.

Joy Sullivan [00:33:49]:
Yeah, and I would just say if someone's starting off on these platforms, just give yourself like maybe at minimum 6 months, but ideally a year to figure out who you are. You are in a public platform, what your voice is, why people are interested in listening to you, and experiment wildly. I mean, when I, I did that on Instagram, right? And I'm mortified at some of the poems I put out during my first couple of years building a platform. There are things that I would never sign my name to today, right? But I, I quickly learned when I was trying to generate viral content how awful it felt and how it made the kind of people who were attracted to that work weren't my longtime readers, were never gonna stay with me through the next 2, 3 books. So you have to give yourself a little runway on these platforms of being like, who am I in this space? Do I want this kind of pressure to write on a timetable? Do I wanna have that linked now to my livelihood? And you may very well find that that works for you, but I think you have to have some time of play first.

Jay Clouse [00:34:56]:
How much of a graphic designer do you consider yourself?

Joy Sullivan [00:34:59]:
I have an amazing community director and assistant who does all of my graphic design. I don't do any of it.

Jay Clouse [00:35:07]:
So you have somebody, you write on Substack, you send that to this person and they make what we see on Instagram.

Joy Sullivan [00:35:12]:
Yeah. And it's pretty, it's just Canva templates, right? You know, I sort of beta test a little bit from a strategic perspective, so I will publish first on Substack and I will see. Which areas people are restacking, what people are talking about in the comments, what they're resharing. And then I will highlight and pull out those sections and I will share them that to Instagram. It will pick up a lot faster. That also trains my Instagram audience that, you know, they're getting rewarded for probably the most interesting work from the long-form Substack piece, because I've already tested it.

Jay Clouse [00:35:51]:
How important is it to you to use Instagram as a discovery engine towards the Substack?

Joy Sullivan [00:35:57]:
It's definitely helped me. I mean, I think I grew like 8,000, 9,000 in my first year from Instagram to my Substack. So it definitely is helpful. I think people do Substack marketing on Instagram poorly. You know, if you just use the Substack templates, it's never gonna take off. People don't wanna read your whole title slide and then 5 carousels. They wanna be read the most interesting piece or excerpt, and then they're gonna keep going. I also write on Substack in a way that even though it's long form, I write in sort of brief segmented sections that are very easy to pull and truncate and put on Instagram.

Joy Sullivan [00:36:41]:
And I also think using tools like ManyChat can, you know, dropping the link directly for people tends to work pretty well.

Jay Clouse [00:36:50]:
Can you say more about how you think about the design of your carousels?

Joy Sullivan [00:36:53]:
Yeah, so I, I've experimented a couple different ways. If I have a really great, interesting title, like I wrote, uh, I wrote an essay last year called Woman and the Manic Pixie Fuckboys, and it was, you know, about dating in 2025. And that's a title that is gonna get some traction, right, on both Substack and Instagram. So for my Instagram carousel, I led with that slide, also pictures of you and a, you know, an interesting title that's gonna perform well on Instagram. And then we got into kind of the takeaways, the soundbites that had performed earlier on Substack, like 2 days earlier on Substack. So I probably will do 3 or 4 of those in the carousel. And then I always do a final slide at the very end that's like, read more, it's free on Substack. And then I point to Substack at the end.

Joy Sullivan [00:37:46]:
I reinforce that in the bio. In the bio also, and then I either direct them to Linktree or I do a ManyChat, but I let them know that, that there's like more to have. And especially the pieces that go viral on Instagram, I do get a nice little wave of people who will come to Substack. It isn't like insane, but it is enough that it's a good, good bump. And if it's a good piece of writing, it also helps my Instagram following.

Jay Clouse [00:38:14]:
And so do you think about each slide as it should be self-contained? That slide alone should be engaging and not necessitate the previous slide especially, or the next slide?

Joy Sullivan [00:38:27]:
Yeah, and it's kind of annoying because, you know, if you're trying to write this deeply thoughtful, complex piece that examines things from multiple angles, it's very irritating when people then don't go and read the free Substack essay and like want to argue with you in your comment section about about the one little snippet that they said. But absolutely, to your point, it's got to be self-contained or it's got to be interesting enough that people are going to keep swiping on your carousel. But I mean, you would be amazed. I think, I think people really think Instagram is one thing and that people do not have an appetite for interesting, complicated work on there, and they do. You just have to write it in short form. So like, I wrote an essay last year when my 15-year-old cat died, and it literally begins, this is an essay about my cat dying, which I recognize is a weird way to start an essay, but he did die and the house smelled like his dying for days. And that essay got almost 40,000 likes on Instagram. And it's, you know, 4 sections of that long.

Joy Sullivan [00:39:28]:
It also went viral on Substack. I've noticed that like people have an appetite regardless of the platform for some of the similar writing, but you just have to change the format. So it's gotta be short on Instagram. It's gotta have a pretty interesting hook, and then it has to be, to your point, self-contained, each slide.

Jay Clouse [00:39:48]:
Such weird synchronicity. Our 15-year-old cat died this weekend and—

Joy Sullivan [00:39:51]:
Oh, Jay.

Jay Clouse [00:39:53]:
I, I wrote a piece. Well, I'm halfway through the piece about it and I, I don't know if I'm gonna share that one. We shared a carousel, just 20 photos of him. The day that he passed, and it cross-posted to Facebook, and Facebook was like, hey, because you had a high-performing post, we're showing it to more people. I don't need strangers to see pictures of my cat and send me this. But I mean, this is vulnerability, and this is the reality of being vulnerable successfully, I suppose, on Instagram, is you're going to get a lot of strangers who see it, who comment, And I have to imagine that feels weird and uncomfortable.

Joy Sullivan [00:40:31]:
Yeah, you know, I felt comfortable doing that about my cat. I didn't feel like doing that when my relationship ended last year. So I'm like you, I'm always weighing what is something that I can handle going out online and having, again, that sort of Medusa lens of visibility on, and what do I deeply need to process myself, by myself, for myself? And, you know, it's made me a better writer in some ways, even if it's really painful to be like, I'm gonna sit on this insight, I'm gonna sit on this beautiful story idea that would've taken off on Instagram, and I'm gonna put it in a notebook and not share it. And give it time to mature into something that's really interesting instead of immediately getting the dopamine hit of sharing it.

Jay Clouse [00:41:27]:
How do you feel about the writing advice, share your scars but not your scabs?

Joy Sullivan [00:41:32]:
I think it's valid. I think that there's, you know, again, my poetry mentors always say there has to be some skin in the game, there has to be some blood on the page, but I don't think that any of us typically have the perspective or the mindset to write very well inside the wound. I will often write a lot from that place, and then I will set it down. And I think it's Maggie Smith who says, "Time rarely makes anything worse," right? And I think that that's true, that a lot of times, you know, again, it's like, what kind of writer do you wanna be? There is nothing wrong with being a content writer on Instagram. There's not. But if you truly wanna be an artist, it's a different game. And I, I wish I had a better answer for how to do both successfully, but I'm in real time sort of grappling with what is it gonna cost me to become a content writer? And I think that what that trains us to do on Instagram is not give anything the time and space. And the publishing industry doesn't help either cuz you know, I think a month after my book came out, And so my publisher was like, okay, what's next? What do you got? And I'm like, I'm taking a year, I'm taking 2 years now to come up with the most interesting ideas.

Joy Sullivan [00:42:49]:
And I have an idea, but it's the kind of idea that unless I give it a lot of time, and I tell my writers, slow and chewy art, man, slow and chewy art. Because I think a lot of ideas when shared early, they just, again, they're that flash in the pan. And that's great if that's what your ambition is. Is to have a big following. I'm not even disparaging it, but for me personally, I wanna have a really beautiful, meaty second book, and that's a long game.

Jay Clouse [00:43:17]:
You just said that you're struggling in real time with the idea of what am I gonna give up by being a content writer? Can you say more about that, what you're working through?

Joy Sullivan [00:43:26]:
Yeah, I think it's personal and professional, right? It's like what kind of writer, I'm thinking it's Lauren Groff, who wrote— she writes her book and then she throws it away and she rewrites it.

Jay Clouse [00:43:40]:
Oh, that feels so painful.

Joy Sullivan [00:43:43]:
Yeah. And she believes her philosophy is that anything that is supposed to stick will stay. I mean, I just get like a full body, but that is such a different philosophy. It's a different pace, man. Than this, you know, capture every good idea, monetize every good idea, expedite and make efficient every good idea. And it's been such a retraining of both my nervous system and also my creative practice to like lock an idea in and then not share it and not let anyone look at it. And months and months go by and I'm just adding to that good idea. And pretty soon I have a great idea.

Joy Sullivan [00:44:26]:
I have, I have like the staying power. So again, it goes back to that idea. Do you wanna be memorable or do you wanna be highly marketable? And like, if you have a really great idea, in the end it will be marketable. But I think trying to build those things simultaneously, I haven't figured out how to do that fully.

Jay Clouse [00:44:45]:
Is there anything you would go back and do differently about your publishing experience?

Joy Sullivan [00:44:50]:
Um, I wrote a lot of poems for mass appeal that I don't love. You know, I'm not— I love my book Instructions for Traveling West. I've got it next to me right here on the table. Like, I'm proud of it. I stand by it. But I had a lot of pressure to make it a long book. I had to double it for my writing deadline. And, you know, there's a lot of poems that had done well on Instagram that I don't know that I felt like like we're the best craft perspective.

Joy Sullivan [00:45:19]:
So that's what I'm doing in my second book, which is gonna be more long form, more essays. I mean, I also noticed how like my poems in this first book are very, very short because that's the format that I had to use on social media. But now I'm like going in the opposite direction. What does it look like if I don't post and I have a lot of room to say a lot of interesting different things? So yeah, I think I would, make a shorter book, and I think I would be more mindful. I would recognize my vulnerability to social media and visibility a lot faster.

Jay Clouse [00:45:52]:
I feel like this is an unfair question to ask, but we'll see where we land anyway. Do you like working through traditional publishing?

Joy Sullivan [00:45:59]:
Yeah, like with a Big Five book deal?

Jay Clouse [00:46:01]:
Any book deal, any, anyone where it's like you have other cooks in the kitchen, you have other people involved versus just self-publishing.

Joy Sullivan [00:46:08]:
You know, it's a really good question and I often tell writers when they're first starting out, like, don't discount self-publishing. It's perfectly valid. You can also make more money potentially, but you do have to have a platform. For me, traditional publishing was great. My agent is fantastic. My publisher at Dial Press of Penguin Random House, absolutely wonderful, Whitney Frick. So I had a great team. They designed a beautiful cover.

Joy Sullivan [00:46:32]:
They were very supportive of me. They sent me on a book tour. So yes, it worked out out for me, but I don't think it's the only— there's a lot of great options for people who are starting off and maybe don't want to play the social media game. I think it's— if you're a poet specifically, platform's really important because it's not the same appetite for, let's say, a novel. So it's harder to sell a book of poetry. So agents and publishers will always want you to have a platform if you're a poet. But there's tons of academic presses. Um, there's Write Bloody Publishing.

Joy Sullivan [00:47:03]:
Which, you know, picks up a lot of fantastic poets and that who don't have huge followings. So you could absolutely do, uh, contests, university presses. You could do self-publishing. You could publish on Substack and serialize it. A lot of people have luck doing that. So there isn't one way and it isn't always tied to have to be a social media persona.

Jay Clouse [00:47:25]:
If you were given the power to change anything about Substack that you wanted, what would you change?

Joy Sullivan [00:47:31]:
Well, I would make them stop supporting white supremacists and Nazis by some of their very lax content guidelines. But out of that, the other thing I would probably change on Substack is I think it's, it's just going the same way of all the social media platforms. And it was such a haven back in the day. I was the biggest evangelist for Substack. I thought it was the future. And I'm a little worried that now we're getting the influx of video. Now we're seeing a ton of clickbait articles. Now we're seeing whole viral articles that are written by AI agents.

Joy Sullivan [00:48:10]:
So I think I would, I would ask Substack to reassert kind of the differentiator that it initially was, that it wasn't, it wasn't social media.

Jay Clouse [00:48:22]:
Last question, I guess then is, Somebody's listening to this, they aspire to be a writer. Is there anything that we didn't cover that you think they need to hear right now?

Joy Sullivan [00:48:32]:
The biggest piece of advice I'd give to a writer is before you worry about platforms, before you worry about visibility or readership, fall deeply in love with your own craft and develop an insatiable appetite for your own excellence. Sense on the page. Otherwise, just do copy, just do content, because that, as an artist, it's not worth it. It's too much of a spiritual sacrifice, energetic and emotional sacrifice, to write anything for other people that you don't love. It won't make you a happier person. As somebody who's tried and failed and had to come back to herself, like, the only thing that is interesting to you is your own evolution. And like pushing yourself to have more ecstatic experiences on the page and tell the truth even more fanatically and more in an interesting way. That's the thing that makes you wanna get up and write in the morning, you know, readers be damned.

Joy Sullivan [00:49:36]:
So that's what I would say.

Jay Clouse [00:49:44]:
If you enjoyed this episode with Joy, please consider leaving a rating or review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. We are so close to 500 on Apple Podcasts. We are so close to 300 on Spotify. I want to hit those numbers. Number go up is my happy place. Those reviews go a long way to helping us grow the show. So thank you for considering. If you want to learn more about Joy, visit her website at Joy Sullivan Poet or find her on Instagram at Joy Sullivan Poet.

Jay Clouse [00:50:07]:
There are links to all of this in the show notes per usual. Thank you for listening and I'll talk to you next time. Talk to you next week.