Babe Cave

In this mini-episode, Amanda Polick shares updates on her debut novel, including how it's shifted over the last 9 years, why it's taken this long to nail the idea, and what's coming next.

Find Amanda: @amandapolick | amandapolick.com

Free 1-hour cookbook masterclass: Writing Gold

Babe Cave Book List

(By clicking the links above, at no cost to you, I may receive some $$$ in my pocket.)

The next Babe Cave book chat brings Amanda Polick and Crystal Marie together for a conversation about Kin by Tayari Jones, and the Southern places, family ties, and complicated histories that make the novel feel so real.

Crystal, a lifelong story enthusiast and host of Under Told by CM, shares how Kin helped her imagine her grandmother as a young woman, and why words like "trifling" and "no count" made the book feel instantly familiar.

They get into the novel's vivid settings, the communities that help raise children, and the search for maternal love and belonging. They also discuss the history behind the story—from travel in the Jim Crow South to reproductive rights—and why those themes still resonate today.

Also in this episode:

• Why the book's Southern details feel lived-in, not just described
• The power of "play cousins" and community care
• What letters allow Annie and Vernice to say that they might not say aloud
• The book's emotional impact, and why its story stays with you

If you read Kin and had feelings, this one's for you. If you haven't read it yet, consider this your sign.

Spoiler warning: This episode discusses major plot points from Kin.

Resources mentioned: Kin by Tayari Jones, The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson, An American Marriage by Tayari Jones, UnderTold by CM

Find Crystal: @crystalmariecom | crystalmarie.com | UnderTold by CM wherever you listen to podcasts; video episodes are on Spotify and YouTube.

Find Amanda: @amandapolick | amandapolick.com

Free 1-hour cookbook masterclass: Writing Gold

Babe Cave Book List

(By clicking the links above, at no cost to you, I may receive some $$$ in my pocket.)

AI is everywhere, and writers are being asked to figure out what it means for their work. So Amanda Polick brought in literary agent Lauren MacLeod for an honest conversation about AI and publishing, without pretending the answers are simple or settled.

They get into the risks writers should know about: copyright, reputation, accuracy, and the way AI can smooth the edges off a distinctive voice. Lauren explains why keeping drafts and notes matters, what to be cautious about with tools like Grammarly, and why AI detectors don't tell the whole story.

But this isn't an all-or-nothing conversation. Amanda and Lauren also talk about where AI can be useful—from brainstorming and transcribing to handling tedious business tasks—and how to use it without letting it take over the creative work. They discuss the Anthropic lawsuit and settlement involving books used to train Claude, the need for more transparency from publishers, and the possibility of a future where creators are paid when their work is used to train AI.

Also in this episode:

• Why AI-generated work raises copyright concerns for writers
• The difference between using AI to spark ideas and letting it rewrite your prose
• Why saving messy drafts and timestamped versions can help show your creative process
• How publishers are using AI behind the scenes and where more transparency is needed
• Why it's okay to change your mind as the technology and conversation evolve

Perfect for writers, readers, and anyone trying to make sense of AI's place in publishing.

Resources mentioned: The Anthropic lawsuit and settlement, Pangram, Grammarly, and Caribbean Cocktails by Chef Nelson German

Find Lauren: Instagram, Threads, and Bluesky

Find Amanda: @amandapolick | amandapolick.com

Free 1-hour cookbook masterclass: Writing Gold

Season five kicks off with Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke, and people are still mad about it. So, obviously, it had to be the first thing Amanda Polick talked about.

Amanda is joined by longtime friend of the show, Jacque, to talk about the novel that set the internet on fire this year. Natalie is a trad-wife influencer who wakes up in 1855 and has to actually live the life she's been selling online. It's weird, it's uncomfortable, and it made both of them furious in the best way.

They get into trad-wife culture, the manosphere, unlikable women, and why the people who hate this book might be proving its point. Amanda also shares what it was like to watch a real trad-wife speak at a conference this year, and how disorienting it was to not nod along with everyone else in the room.

Also in this episode:

• Why Natalie not having a redemption arc is actually the whole point
• The misinformation and performance baked into influencer culture — on and off the page
• The twist, the ending, and Caro's response to a very unhappy reader in her Instagram comments
• Jacque's wild plot theory that sends Amanda screaming

If you read it and had feelings, this one's for you. If you haven't read it yet, consider this your sign.

Spoiler warning: this episode discusses major plot points and the ending of Yesteryear.

Resources mentioned: Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke, Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn, James by Percival Everett, A Modest Proposal by Jonathan Swift, The End of the Story by Lydia Davis, House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski, Caro Claire Burke's Marie Claire Australia interview

Find Amanda: @amandapolick | amandapolick.com

Free 1-hour cookbook masterclass: Writing Gold

Season four is a wrap, and Amanda is taking the summer to go analog.

After eight months of taking on too much and being chronically online — including a day job that is literally social media marketing — she is ready to step back, create some white space, and remember what life felt like before the algorithm. This episode is part season finale, part personal manifesto, part permission slip.

In this episode:

• Why she's calling it an analog summer and what that has everything to do with becoming a better writer
• The advice Brand Builders Group gave to one of their clients about splitting attention across too many channels — and why it landed so hard
• What she wants season five to look like, including bringing back the book club and having the audacity to invite more guests
• The Annie F. Downs book that might be her whole summer reading plan
• Disposable cameras, needlepoint, a record player she needs to replace, and the whimsy she's been missing in her own home
• Why being present, having real conversations, and actually living your life is research — whether you know it or not

She's not disappearing. She's just going to be where her feet are for a while.

See you in season five.

Perfect for: anyone who's been a little too online lately and needed someone to say it out loud.

Find Amanda: @amandapolick | amandapolick.com

Books are having a moment on screen, and Amanda has thoughts — including that Greta Gerwig is going to direct her novel someday. Greta doesn't know this yet.

Hollywood has spent years refusing to greenlight anything without existing IP, which sounds like bad news until you realize that existing IP is exactly what a published book is. This episode is about why that matters for writers right now, and what it actually looks like when a book becomes a film.

In this episode:

• The Yesteryear deal: four studios bidding, 15 publishers competing, Anne Hathaway attached — and why that kind of buzz starts with the book
• What the self-described Book Whisperer of Hollywood says changed after Harry Potter and Twilight, including her advice to screenwriters to write the book first
• How options work, why most of them never become movies, and why that's not necessarily the tragedy it sounds like
• What you're actually giving up when you sign those rights over, and why having a good agent in the room matters more than people think
• Why the size of your fictional world determines whether it's a film or a TV series
• What Claire Cook said about showing up on the Must Love Dogs set to cheer, not to give notes — and why letting go of the book is part of the deal

The thing she keeps coming back to: AI can't write from the depths you can. Hollywood needs original stories. So does everyone else.

Perfect for: fiction writers who've pictured their book on a screen and wanted to know how that actually happens.

Find Amanda: @amandapolick | amandapolick.com

No gatekeeping allowed — and that includes yourself.

After leaving Jubilee feeling like the real conversations were happening somewhere else, Amanda found them at Copper Books' Book Fair in Nashville. One day, one room, and editors, agents, marketers, and publicists actually telling the truth about what's happening in publishing right now. She's bringing it back to you here, along with a moment of self-reckoning she didn't see coming.

In this episode:

• The honest state of nonfiction publishing right now: who's buying, who isn't, and where cookbooks actually land in that conversation
• Why a Simon & Schuster editor said one Substack subscriber is worth five to ten Instagram followers to a publisher, and what Amanda actually thinks about that
• What three publicity powerhouses said about in-house pub teams, and why authors who were promised the moon are learning the hard way to be their own best advocate
• Allison Trowbridge's reminder that if you have a book idea, you really have a business idea
• The moment she realized she'd been gatekeeping her own process, and why she's done with that
• Why the mysterious writer who disappears and reappears with a bestseller is almost never the rule

The finger, she admits, was pointing right back at her.

Perfect for: writers who want the inside conversation without having to buy the conference ticket, and anyone who's been holding their process a little too close to share.

Find Amanda: @amandapolick | amandapolick.com

Writer's block is real. Amanda Polick believes in it, and she's in it right now.

She's deep in revisions on her novel: the one she's been writing for years, the one she wrote 30,000 words of in the wrong direction in 2024, the one she finished a rough draft of last year that she's now going back through with brain fatigue and a spring that got away from her. Instead of hiding from it, she brought it here.

In this episode:

• The one-page flash fiction exercise that gets her out of her own head when she's too stuck to touch the actual manuscript
• Why she thinks she's lost the habit of romanticizing her writing process — and why she wants it back
• Olafur Arnalds, instrumental music, and the case for being bored more often
• What she's noticing in the novel she's currently reading about backstory dumps, exposition monologues, and the things she's actively trying not to do in her own book
• Why consuming the same content over and over is part of what creates the block in the first place
• The honest truth about writer's block: sometimes it's real, sometimes it's procrastination, and sometimes you just have to sit down and do the work anyway

Perfect for: writers in the thick of a long project who need someone to say out loud that it's hard, and anyone who's been calling it writer's block when they might just need to sit back down.

Find Amanda: @amandapolick | amandapolick.com

Cherry Bombe's Jubilee is the conference in THE food world. Amanda Polick has been before, took a few years off, and went back this year with an actual game plan and a lot of thoughts she's whispering to her friends later.

This episode is her honest debrief: what worked, what left her wanting more, and what she walked away with that had nothing to do with any of the panels.

In this episode:

• Why going in with a loose schedule and a short list of people she wanted to meet changed everything
• Her real talk on conference programming that stays too surface when the room is full of people who came for the inside baseball
• The Levain Bakery founders, copycat recipes, and the conversations she wished had gone deeper
• Why she cried meeting Grace Young and has zero regrets about it
• The follow-up moves that actually matter after a conference ends

The best thing she got out of Jubilee wasn't from the talks. It was the face-to-face time, texting new connections already, and the moment she shared her novel idea and watched people get chills.

Perfect for: food writers and creatives weighing whether a conference is worth it, and anyone who's left a big event feeling like they missed something and wanted someone to just say it.

Find Amanda: @amandapolick | amandapolick.com

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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 inbox is more underrated than people think
• Why literary agents are now paying close attention to Substack — and why putting everything behind a paywall might be costing you more than it earns
• The Elizabeth Gilbert argument for not being afraid of people stealing your ideas (and Amanda's own version of it)
• How being a generous champion of other people's work is one of the highest-leverage things you can do for your career
• Lisa Kron, story consultants, and the reminder that you can just make up a job title and then do it

The through line: the best opportunities — the ones that actually move the needle — tend to happen in rooms, not on social media. And you have to be in the rooms first.

Perfect for: writers who are great at the craft and resistant to the business side of it, anyone trying to figure out how to package what they already do into something people will pay for, and creatives who know they need to be more visible but aren't quite sure where to start.

Find Amanda: @amandapolick | amandapolick.com

Here's your Apple Podcasts description:

If you have a book idea, you really have a business idea.

That line, from publisher Allison Trowbridge at a Paths to Publishing 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 inbox is more underrated than people think
• Why publishers are now paying close attention to Substack — and why putting everything behind a paywall might be costing you more than it earns
• The Elizabeth Gilbert argument for not being afraid of people stealing your ideas (and Amanda's own version of it)
• How being a generous champion of other people's work is one of the highest-leverage things you can do for your career
• Lisa Kron, story consultants, and the reminder that you can just make up a job title and then do it

The through line: the best opportunities — the ones that actually move the needle — tend to happen in rooms, not on social media. And you have to be in the rooms first.

Perfect for: writers who are great at the craft and resistant to the business side of it, anyone trying to figure out how to package what they already do into something people will pay for, and creatives who know they need to be more visible but aren't quite sure where to start.

Find Amanda: @amandapolick | amandapolick.com