Will you take the leap with me?

Oh god, not another author Substack...

Hello! You’re beautiful. I’m so glad you’re here.

You’re receiving this because you signed up for (or at least consented to receive?) my author newsletter. If you haven’t a clue who I am or why you’re here, fear not, I feel that way much of the time too. (It’s why I write psychological thrillers! My existential panic = your entertainment.)

By way of introduction, I’m the author of We Were Never Here, The Spare Room, and other novels, and I’m very excited to be connecting with you personally. We’re talking sustained eye contact. It’s thrilling, truly.

My old newsletter was an ugly, neon-colored thing with bright pink CLICK TO BUY buttons and janky GIFs. I hated putting it together in Mailchimp and was sort of only doing it because people told me I needed to.

But then I fell in love with others’ newsletters. They’re simple and writing-focused and feel like a direct pipeline from the sender to me. That’s what I hope to do here—I’ll share my sharpest writing and publication tips and insidery thoughts with creative folks who care about the same stuff.

To keep things simple (and avoid clogging up your inbox if all you want is a lil’ sleeve tug when, like, We Were Never Here is on sale for less than a Snickers bar), you can simply do nothing. You’re currently signed up as a free subscriber, and I’ll use this tier for the kind of updates I’ve already been sending: major announcements, limited-time-only ebook sales, etc. (Expect much less hideous graphic design, though.)

Paid subscribers will get…absolutely everything else. INTIMATE stuff, my personal thoughts and private exchanges with other authors (with their permission, ofc), my very best writing and publishing tips, insidery content like a scene before and after an edit, and more. Gird your loins because this stuff will be rough, raw, and—hopefully—quite juicy. (Did that sound sexual? That was not meant to sound sexual.)

You can browse some of the existing paywalled content by topic here:

Craft // Marketing // Publicity // Author life // Writing community // Examples // Publishing industry intel

I’m also pulling together a (public!) always-growing compendium of successful query letters (you can see some of the authors who generously shared theirs here) as well as Words With (Author) Friends, wherein I text/gchat/Slack/messenger/whatever with published writers about their latest projects and thoughts re: publishing and you get to see the unedited results, like a literary fly on the wall. Lots of goodies for writers, readers, and anyone who gives a damn about the literary world.

I’ve watched Twitter (no I will not call it X) and TikTok quietly sundown my posts. I can’t control the algorithm and I don’t know how long I’ve got before Instagram stops showing my stuff to my followers, too. That’s what I love about Substack: There’s no middleman.

I’m going to work hard to make this space valuable, and if you — like me — believe in paying people for their work, I hope you’ll consider a paid subscription. It’s about the cost of a latte, and hopefully at least as nourishing. Just click the button below to get started.

Thanks, friends! Let’s dance!!