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

About this episode

Joy Sullivan discusses her journey of building a creative business as a poet through Instagram and Substack.

Joy Sullivan is a Portland-based poet who quit her corporate job mid-pandemic and built a thriving creative business through writing carousels on Instagram (115K followers), her Substack "Necessary Salt" (23K subscribers), and a 250-member paid writing community called Sustenance on Circle. She's a former Lab member, and in 2024, she published her first book, Instructions for Traveling West, with Dial Press, an imprint of Penguin Random House. What makes her path genuinely unusual: she grew her Instagram predominantly through writing, not video, and she's proof that you can build a real creative business around poetry, which almost nobody does. In this conversation, we get into the tension between craft and platform—her two mantras ("be a poet, not a preacher" and "my vulnerability is not social currency"), her exact Instagram carousel workflow using Canva and ManyChat, why she deliberately walked away from $60K/year in Substack revenue to protect her second book, her controversial take on growing slowly, and what she'd do differently with her first published collection. Plus my own honest reflection on the creative reset I've been living through since my daughter was born. Joy…

People in this episode

Guest: Joy Sullivan

Topics covered

• writing
• Instagram
• Substack
• poetry
• creative business

Keywords

• Instagram carousels
• writing community
• creative reset
• vulnerability

Mentioned in this episode

Products: Substack, Canva, ManyChat

Books & works: Instructions for Traveling West, Poet Necessary Salt on Substack Sustenance

Places: Portland

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