Do you want a Waiting for Tom Hanks bonus chapter?

Then you're in luck: It's going out to all paid subscribers, AND I'm running a sale!

I’ve mentioned this so many times that you’re probably sick of it, but I really struggle with how much to put behind a paywall here on No One Asked. I should just ignore it, but it does get to me when people bemoan the deluge of Substacks or point out how expensive it can be to subscribe to them. To be fair, I have never (not even once!) held someone at gunpoint and forced them to click “Annual Subscription,” but all that aside! It’s a thing that makes me feel weird. I do, however, actually need to make money, especially right now as I’m between books. I’ve been making my entire income via writing for the past 15 years, so it isn’t exactly unheard of to be charging people. And I try my best to make my paid posts very interesting, funny, and LONG (they’re usually clocking in around a 20 minute read, according to Substack’s estimates).

But also, my goal isn’t to make money on Substack or grow my following on Substack. My goal is to make money and grow my entire career as a whole, which is primarily books. No One Asked really functions as an appetizer for the main course that is my novels (ew, that was a very gross comparison…wait, am I bad at this writing thing??). I want people to be able to discover my writing via this newsletter, and I can’t do that if half the posts are behind a paywall. I want people to think, “Wow, this lady is so funny and I would pay at least $19 to read her thoughts bound in a paperback book,” and then I want to earn back all the advances I haven’t earned back, and then I want to make money on every book I’ve ever written in perpetuity.¹ We all have to make our own decisions about paywall strategies, but I cringe when I see someone keep only their most recent few posts free and put all the older ones behind a paywall. How are people supposed to read your work to figure out if they like you? So I would never do things that way, but sometimes I worry I put too little behind a paywall, or I worry that people are rolling their eyes at me, thinking, “This loser thinks she’s gonna make money from her weirdo movie thoughts? I can cry about a Mike Mills film for free.”²

Also it’s worth noting that the main reason I write this newsletter is because it’s very, very fun for me and because I’ve been blogging in one form or another since high school. I just like writing a newsletter, and I would do it for free if I had to. Certainly no one was paying for my college Blogspot posts.

In one of my occasional mind wanderings where I was thinking about the newsletter, I remembered something: I once wrote a bonus chapter for Waiting for Tom Hanks. You know Waiting for Tom Hanks, my most popular book³, about a woman who’s obsessed with rom-coms to the point that she’s avoiding her own life and then she falls for an actor who’s in town to film a movie? Some call it the Ready Player One of rom-com references?⁴ In the lead up to putting out Faking Christmas, I wrote a bonus chapter detailing Annie and Drew’s engagement—we knew they got engaged between WFTH and Not Like the Movies, but it always bummed me out that I didn’t get to write that scene⁵. So…I did write that scene!

I intended for the chapter to be a preorder incentive, but things didn’t really go the way I wanted them to and honestly, I’m not sure anyone got the chapter⁶? Listen, sometimes things just don’t go the way you planned and you’ve gotta roll with it and then two years later remember that you wrote a bonus chapter, you know?

And then I realized that this very newsletter would be the perfect place to share that chapter. The idea of sending it out to every subscriber seemed so aggressive to me…like, here’s a chapter that you never even asked for, enjoy!!! So! What we’re doing is this: I will send it out near the end of the month to all paid No One Asked subscribers. If you want to read the chapter and you don’t want to pay for a year’s subscription, you can fully subscribe for a month. Do you think I, a woman trying to save money, am going to judge you? Of course not.

I wanted to lower my monthly rate, but I was already at the lowest price point ($5 a month). So I lowered my yearly rate even further ($45 a year) and I’m currently running a 15% off sale on annual subscriptions until the end of June. A steal! You should not need a special link—it should be available to everyone who subscribes.

I’ll send out the bonus chapter around the end of the month, although of course it will continue to be available to paid subscribers after that date if you visit the No One Asked page. Do you want to know a little of what it includes?

-a lot of You’ve Got Mail talk

-Gary is there. God, I miss Gary like a phantom limb.

-Tobin and his specific musical preferences

-Some Chloe/Nick pining

-Uncle Don’s D&D group

-allll the details of Annie and Drew’s engagement

I just read over the chapter, afraid that I would hate it. To be totally transparent with you, I wrote Waiting for Tom Hanks a long time ago (2017-ish) and my writing has changed a lot since then. I wrote this chapter in 2023, which isn’t all that long ago, but I still feel like a vastly different writer. So I wasn’t sure if I would even like it or want to share it with you…but (this is so embarrassing) I got goosebumps just from being back in that world. I miss it. WFTH and NLTM were kind of magical for me and it felt really nice to take a step back there. Maybe it will feel like that for you, too.

But you’ll never know…unless you subscribe!

Okay, that’s it. I shouldn’t be spending my only dedicated work time today writing, like, fifteen very stupid jokes in the footnotes of this post, but alas. That’s what I did. If you’re already a paid subscriber, thank you! I really, really appreciate you, and I hope you’ll enjoy this chapter as a thank you. I guess the alternative is that you can just go watch a Mike Mills film and ignore the chapter. Either way!

Next week, I’ll recap the great time I had being in conversation with Ashley Poston at Wild Geese in Franklin, Indiana. See you soon. xo

1. This absolutely will not happen, especially not for my deep cut YA novels, but this is the fantasy.

2. My imagined haters are huge Mike Mills fans. It’s why their critiques cut so deep…we have a lot in common!

3. I actually do make money if you buy this one.

4. No one has ever said this.

5. I say “didn’t get to” as if I wasn’t ultimately in charge of what I included in my own books.

6. Not getting into it here but I will if we’re out for matcha or something.