I'm a Jordanian-American author and journalist with over two decades of experience.I help authors, both aspiring and established, publish their books through book coaching or memoir ghostwriting. I publish the weekly newsletter "The Storyteller Quest," offering tips on monetizing your writing and navigating the content-creation journey.
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This imprint is starting to feel real
Published about 1 hour ago • 5 min read
Hi Reader,
If you had told me a couple of years ago that I would be running my own publishing company, I would have thought you lost your mind.
Dr. Pickar spent decades at the front lines of schizophrenia research and treatment, and this book is his account of how psychiatry has changed, what it got wrong, and what it still owes patients and families.
Tim Shriver, Chairman of Special Olympics, put it best: "You'll laugh, cry, learn, and be challenged to change."
Congratulations, Dr. Pickar. Two books in, and this imprint is starting to feel real. Many thanks to the amazing team. I could not have done it without them.
If you are looking into publishing your book, DM me and let's chat.
Meanwhile, I'll soon be adding a third client book to my imprint, so watch this space for details.
The thrill of watching a manuscript stop being a Word file and start looking like a book has not worn off yet.
I also had a number of discovery calls this week with people who all described the same problem in different words. I just started working on a new memoir ghostwriting project set in Amman, Jordan, that I'm so excited about.
Busy week. In the flow. Grateful, as always.
Stay creative, Natasha
Sponsored by Imagine Art Films
Imagine Art Films turns books, manuscripts, and screenplays into cinematic AI-assisted trailers, scenes, and short films. Rather than asking readers, publishers, producers, or potential partners to imagine what a story might look like on screen, authors can actually show them.
One recent example is The Baker’s Wife, an eight-minute WWII short created without physical actors, sets, locations, costumes, or cameras. The visuals were AI-generated, while the writing, directing, shot design, editing, music, and sound design remained filmmaker-led.
We also create shorter 60–90-second proof-of-concept scenes built directly from an author’s pages, designed for book launches, pitches, social media, and adaptation conversations.
You are not slow. Your book just has nobody waiting on it.
Busy people finish things. You've closed deals, shipped products, run departments under pressure. Time was never your real constraint, whatever you've told yourself about it.
What stops you is that a book is the one project with no brief, no deadline, no client on the other end of it. Everything else in your calendar has a person waiting. This doesn't. So it slides, for years, and the sliding starts to feel like a character flaw when it's really just an absence of structure.
Here's what changes it: a date on the calendar, sessions that already exist, and someone whose job is to make sure you finish.
You don't even have to write it yourself, if that's the part that's stopping you. Plenty of the people I work with talk their book instead — I run the interviews, we build the structure, the manuscript comes back in their own voice.
Reply and tell me which part is actually stopping you. I'll tell you honestly what I'd do about it.
🖼️ Photo of the week
I had the honor of being invited to Bethesda Magazine | Bethesda Today's "Women Who Inspire" event. The evening celebrated the women featured in the magazine's Women Who Inspire section, which I co-wrote.
🎁 The Writer's Goody Bag
✍️ Must-Have Tool: I have been recently experimenting with Buffer for social media scheduling, and I love it. I tried so many scheduling tools, and I think I found the one that meets all my needs.
📖 What I'm Reading —What 7-Figure Authors Do Differently by Lisa Daily. It treats being an author like running a business instead of just finishing a manuscript, which is exactly the shift I keep pushing my own clients toward.
🌍 From My Little Corner of The World
I was the guest this time —on Authority On Demand. We got into They Called Me Wyatt, identity, writing from experience, and what actually builds authority as an author. Watch it below.
Recently on the Substack Writer’s Salon, I talked shop with ghostwriter and book coach Jonathan Jordan, founder of Forward Writers and author of Start With Story. I’ve followed his work for years, and I wanted the tactical stuff: what actually moved the needle from scraping together gigs to a six-figure writing business. Below is a clip from our interview.
P.S.: If you enjoy my podcast, you might want to keep me caffeinated, and maybe, maybe buy me a cup of coffee or two. I would really appreciate it.
📣 Featured this week: The Lonely Cucumber
He gets packed every morning.
He never gets eaten.
By lunchtime, he's back home, exactly where he started.
He doesn't understand why. He just knows it's happening again.
The Lonely Cucumber is my children's book — a multicultural story about healthy eating, told through the eyes of one very lonely cucumber. A small character with a big feeling that every kid (and most grown-ups) will recognize.
After a career of writing about murder, identity, and grief, this was my hardest, happiest detour in years. Hand-illustrated by Ahmed Elkhalidi, whose art makes the whole thing feel like a gift.
It's the kind of book you can read at bedtime, talk about at the dinner table, and hand to a teacher looking for a gentle way into a big conversation.
If you're stuck rewriting chapter one for the fifth time, you don't need more willpower. You need structure and someone in your corner. Here's what we do together:
Build a clear, chapter-by-chapter roadmap, so you always know what to write next
Set a realistic writing cadence and hold yourself accountable to it
Work through the stuck points — the messy middle, the opening you can't crack, the doubt
Get you to a finished draft you can actually publish
Here is what my client Noami, whose debut non-fiction book is coming in the fall, had to say about my coaching time with her.
I'm a Jordanian-American author and journalist with over two decades of experience.I help authors, both aspiring and established, publish their books through book coaching or memoir ghostwriting. I publish the weekly newsletter "The Storyteller Quest," offering tips on monetizing your writing and navigating the content-creation journey.
Hi Reader, Time for my weekly update, and it starts with something I've been sitting on for months. My Bethesda Magazine "Women Who Inspire" feature is out. I spent part of the summer interviewing three of this year's honorees —women working in journalism, the arts, and education— and those were the conversations that reminded me why I got into this in the first place. Go read them. They're better than anything I'd put in a newsletter. Meanwhile, on the production side: one of my client books...
Hi Reader, I was in my late thirties when I decided I was going to write a novel. Then I had two children under ten, a full-time job, and a house that never stopped needing something. I started, then stopped. Then I kept telling myself I'd finish when things calmed down. Things did not calm down. That is not what things do. In fact, they became more chaotic when I had a third child. And finally, it worked, and I finished my debut novel, They Called Me Wyatt, which wasn't a burst of...
Hi Reader, Time for my weekly update, and it starts with a confession. I moved the Book Finisher Lab writing community's first session to Wednesday, September 2. Here's why. When I asked what was keeping you from joining, the answer wasn't the idea, and it wasn't the time slot. It was the money — paid in one lump, in August, right when the camp invoices land. A lot of you said some version of I want this, I just can't do it this month. I could have opened on schedule to a half-empty room....
