Babe Cave

If you have a book idea, you really have a business idea. That line — from publisher Allison Trowbridge at a Parnassus Books panel — is the jumping-off point for this episode. Amanda Polick gets into what it actually means to treat your writing life like a business: not in a hustle-culture, monetize-everything way, but in a packaging-yourself-correctly, knowing-what-you-bring-to-the-room way. She's been doing her own reckoning with this lately — restarting after a year heads-down on her novel, going back to conferences, cold-emailing people, and asking herself how to pull together all the scattered pieces of a writing career into something coherent. In this episode: Jane Friedman's The Business of Being a Writer and why Amanda tells every single client to get it Why writers being financially sustained by writing alone has always been the exception, not the rule — and what that actually frees you up to do The cold email formula that works almost every time, and why showing up in someone's inbo