#297: Joy Sullivan — How She Built A Living As A Writer On 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 Sullivan Poet
• Necessary Salt on Substack
• Sustenance Writing Community
• Instructions for Traveling West

Full transcript and show notes

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TIMESTAMPS

(00:00) Opening quote: “There is no amount of followers worth the sacrifice”

(02:08) How Jay describes Joy’s unique approach to building a creative business

(02:49) The landscape for writers today — platform pressure meets craft demands

(05:19) Why Instagram, not X or LinkedIn, is actually the friendliest platform for writers

(08:21) Joy’s two mantras: “Be a poet, not a preacher” + “My vulnerability is not social currency”

(11:38) Memorable vs. marketable — and why slow growth protects your art

(12:25) Is creating art divorced from performance a privilege or a strategy for newcomers?

(14:06) Jay’s biological hard reset after having a daughter — and cosplaying an old self

(17:10) The Medusa metaphor: artists weren’t built to withstand this level of visibility

(20:30) Reconciling “be a poet” with running a teaching business

(22:53) Why certainty is a red flag in 2026

(24:52) Defining “poet” — a container to hold the unsayable

(26:00) Instagram vs. Substack: which one she’d keep if forced to choose

(27:22) The $60K Substack year — and why she deliberately walked away from it

(29:34) How full-time writers actually pay their bills (hint: not book sales)

(32:00) Why you should NOT turn on paid Substack subscriptions immediately

(34:56) The Instagram carousel workflow: Substack → test → pull excerpts → Canva → ManyChat

(39:48) The cat synchronicity moment — and the “scars not scabs” philosophy

(44:50) What she’d do differently about her first book

(47:31) What she’d change about Substack if she could

(48:32) Final advice: fall in love with your craft before chasing an audience

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