Over two years ago, I started a google doc titled “Scattering Seeds: a Memoir from the Middle.” For about a week I feverishly typed and ended up with a word doc that was 12,000 words (one quarter of my first book!). I worked up a simple proposal and sent it to my agent and quickly heard back that she was not interested. I felt 10% annoyed and 90% relieved. It was late June 2023. I had recently announced that I was closing Get To Work Book and I had started to tell friends that I would be quitting the Internet at the end of the year. Behind the scenes, I think I was grasping for straws. I wanted a reason to stay online. If I had to promote a book I wouldn’t be able to quit the Internet! Surely I couldn’t leave if I was selling something!

I recently re-read some of my google doc and it’s a mess. I was deep into my burnout era and writing from a defensive crouch. It was shoulders hunched, guard up, brow-furrowed, caveat galore writing. It was absolutely terrible. I had to write it. I had to make an attempt to cling to the Internet. And then I had to let it go.

Two years later, in early June 2025, after a few months of writing The Offline Report and just before I sent my first Postcards from the Art House, I wrote in my journal “Charge for newsletter sub? Will keep offline report free. Paywall postcards, add more new series…call it ‘Scattering Seeds’…launch in fall.” I started a new google doc the next day to build out an editorial calendar and then as soon as my girls started school in August, I got to work.

And this work? It’s been the opposite of the defensive crouch. It’s dance break work. It’s face relaxed, fingers flying, heart open, exclamation points galore writing. It is absolutely what I am supposed to be doing in this life season.

So that’s how we got here. I want to talk today about where “here” is. Once I decided to turn Scattering Seeds into a paid newsletter subscription, how did I brand and build it out?