Meet the Author: Amelia Hruby

Today’s interview is a fun one—it’s our first repeat guest! Amelia Hruby joined me last year for an interview about her first book, Fifty Feminist Mantras (affiliate link*). Now, she’s on the cusp of releasing her next book, Your Attention is Sacred Except on Social Media, and I was thrilled to talk to her again about how she has approached writing, publishing, and marketing.

Amelia is also the host of the fabulous Off the Grid podcast, and she welcomed me onto the show today to talk about writing, editing, and publishing a book. Check out our conversation here!​

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​Amelia Hruby is a feminist writer, podcaster and producer with a PhD in philosophy. She is the founder of Softer Sounds, a feminist podcast studio for entrepreneurs and creatives. And she’s the host of Off the Grid, a podcast about leaving social media.

You can join the wait list to learn about her upcoming book, Your Attention is Sacred Except on Social Media.

In our first interview, you said there would probably be an Off the Grid-related book in 2025. Here we are, two weeks from the book coming out. What has that journey been like?

When I published Fifty Feminist Mantras, which happened shortly after finishing my dissertation and defending that, I was quite burnt out, and I wasn't sure if I wanted to write another book. The one-two punch of book edits and dissertation defense was just too much.

It definitely knocked me down, and I think that was partially why I went all in on podcasting, because it does feel easier to me to speak and then edit my speaking than to write and try to present my ideas as clearly and carefully as I like to when I speak.

That said, after three years of making Off the Grid, I realized that I had a very strong point of view about social media, specifically about the attention economy and the algorithm. I wanted to put it out there, not just in conversation with other thinkers, or even a sort of solo episode format.

I really felt like I had a persuasive, argumentative, five-paragraph essay in me, and that became the book. I was resistant to writing another book, because I knew what a big project it was, but it truly felt like I had to write this, and it kept showing up on the podcast anyway.

I would interview somebody, and notice I was shoehorning my point of view in. That's horrible interview practice, and not what I intended to do. But it was this sort of green flag to me, like, “Hey, you really have something to say and it wants to come out.”

What is the book about? Who it is for, and what do you hope they get out of it?

The book is called Your Attention is Sacred, Except on Social Media. I refer to it in two ways.

It's a book for anyone who is sick of liking, commenting, subscribing and scrolling. If you are a user of social media and you're over it with the platforms, this book is for you.

I also think that it is a rallying cry for all of the artists and creators and business owners and cool people and critical thinkers that I know who have a purpose that they're here to do or be in this lifetime, and are realizing that social media is keeping them from that.

The book is really about, how do you reclaim and redirect your attention? How do you re-center your own agency in your life so that you can do it in your creative practice, if you have one.

This book is truly for anyone who is using social media, or has used social media and is feeling the effects that social media has on your attention, on your behavior, on your relationships, and wants to make a shift by stepping back or away from the platforms.

The book will offer you a very clear, cogent analysis, a critical analysis, of what's wrong with the attention economy, what's wrong with the algorithm. Then, it offers five principles for cultivating your attention like a garden.

The shift I want to help us make is from an attention economy to an attentive ecology, and to think about our attention as a sacred, creative resource, not as a commodified currency.

What was your writing process like? You have written a dissertation; you have written and published another book. This is a third huge milestone project.

I brought the confidence of having completed those writing projects into my writing process for this book, which was very helpful.

I essentially wrote the whole first draft of the manuscript in four days. I checked into a hotel, did a mini writing retreat, and just wrote.

It's a relatively short book. The manuscript was 15,000 words, maybe 20,000 words. It was not very long, but it all came out kind of at once. I wrote one full chapter each day, and then edited for the fourth day, and that was the manuscript.

I think the reason it came together so swiftly was, one, because I brought that confidence with me. I was never questioning if I could do this. And two, because I had been speaking about these topics for three years. The ideas wanted to come out.

They were formulated. They were really top of mind, and I just had to write them down. That said, after I wrote the book, I did struggle with this sense of, “What is this hybrid format thing I'm doing?”

Previously, I had written a dissertation, as you mentioned, in philosophy and the humanities. So that’s very much about making a logical argument, having a clear and original thought and reading other texts. I had also published my first book, which was an illustrated journal.

I really think this book is an integration and merging of those forms. It's quite philosophical, and I felt a little nervous about that. This is not a self-help book. It's not a business book, and it's also not personal essays and memoir.

It's doing something else, and I wanted it to be practical and applicable for people. I didn't just want to present ideas and then leave people to think about it. I wanted to offer them some ways to implement them in their life.

I wrote the book very fast, but I think it has taken me a while to feel comfortable with the way that I'm writing and putting ideas together. I see some models for it out there, but not a ton of other books that feel like this to me.

How have you navigated putting that together? You’re self-publishing, so the decisions about how this is going to look all fall on you.

I'm not going to lie. It's been challenging. I don't even quite know how to describe it.

I self-published in the past. The illustrated journal that I published with Andrews McMeel in 2020, I had self-published in 2018, I believe. At that point, I used KDP, and a friend made the cover for me, and I uploaded the cover PDF and a Word doc. The book was made and then Amazon printed and sold it.

So back then, I took the path of least resistance toward publishing, and I had a very small audience. I wasn't really invested in selling a ton of books. I just thought it was a fun project.

Now, I no longer use Amazon. I have a much larger audience than I did at the time, although it's still small in the scope of internet audience sizes, and this time, I really wanted my book to sell copies.

I felt so proud of the original ideas and what I was communicating, and I feel like it's a very strong and important message. My dreams were a lot bigger, and the process has been more challenging, because I was determined to not have this book on Amazon in any way, which meant I had to find my own path through publishing.

I had some missteps along the way, some big questions. For instance, I had to take the book to my last publisher because I had a right of first refusal clause in my contract.

That created this whole crisis of, “Oh, wait, am I going to sell it to them? Am I really committed to self-publishing?” I had to navigate that.

Then, I hired a designer to work with, and we had very different visions for the book, and it didn't work out. I had to figure out, okay, what am I doing with the design? How much money do I want to spend?

I ended up doing it myself. I designed the cover in Canva. I built the book in Ingram Spark’s book builder. I had to choose who I was going to publish the book with. I chose Ingram Spark based on recommendations from friends.

Every step of the way felt like this big decision about what the book was going to be and what path I wanted to pave and take through self-publishing as someone who is critical of social media, critical of Amazon, critical of Google.

A lot of the companies that make self-publishing easier, I won't work with, so it was challenging. I'm very happy to be two weeks from shipping books. I need the payoff of the book being out there and people enjoying it, and also the literal cash infusion of sales.

I need that to start coming in, because at this point, it's been nine months of a lot of hard work, and I'm ready for this flow to start. I'm ready for the energy to start coming back to me instead of just going out into the project.

How did you navigate the decision to self-publish when you had another traditional publishing opportunity?

For anyone who's unfamiliar with a right of first refusal clause: Essentially, when you sell a book to a publisher, they might include this clause in your contract, which says that for your next work, typically of the same category—mine was for my next nonfiction book-length project—I had to take it to them so they could make an offer on it.

I don't have to accept that offer, but I have to give them the opportunity to buy the book. With my first book, I had already self-published it. I wasn't even selling it anymore. I wasn't making more money off of it.

It was this project that was on my website, and suddenly someone was like, “But we'll give you more money for this. We want to buy it. We want to make it an even bigger deal.” So it felt like a real elevation of that project, and I was happy to go on that journey.

Getting a book deal is a dream, and I'm so grateful to have had that experience. But this time, I really felt like this book was going to be self-published, because so much of my work now is about independent media.

That felt important to me, but I had to live out the contract, so I took it to them. In full transparency, they offered me the same contract I got last time. The same advance, the same royalties, everything was the same. That offer, if I'm remembering correctly, was $7,500 for my advance.

I knew from last time that even if I sold thousands of copies of my book, I would never earn out that advance, based on how money works with royalties and in publishing. I really believed that I could make more than that amount of money selling my book myself.

With that $7,500 I have to pay my agent, and then there are always other costs. If I want to do a book tour, I have to pay for that. If I want really good publicity photos of me in the book, I have to pay for that. All these things I would still accrue costs for.

I spent my entire first book advance on book-related things. I didn't keep any of that money.

I felt like I could make more money doing it myself, even though it would also be more work. There were two decision points. One was this internal clarity that I wanted selling a few thousand copies of my book to be a success, not a failure.

If I only sell a couple thousand copies of my book via the publisher, they're going to consider that kind of a failure. If I do it myself, that will be a great success. I really wanted to go down the path where I would feel successful, not the path where I would feel like a failure.

I also thought that down the path where I get to feel successful, I'd probably make more money. So that just felt clear.

The other thing that happened was the marketing team told my editor that they didn't really know how to sell my book since I wasn't on social media, and they couldn't raise my advance because they weren't sure about my audience size since I wasn't on social media.

That just felt like this huge misalignment and misunderstanding. They did not understand how much my audience had grown, how much my work had evolved, how amazing my podcast listeners/soon-to-be-readers are.

So they saw no more value in me now, and maybe even less value, because I wasn't on social media anymore. In that moment, I was like, “I cannot sell them this book. Obviously, I cannot give this book to them if they are thinking that way.”

How are you marketing this book sans social media? Hopefully somebody in a marketing department reads this and realizes, “Oh, look at all these other options we have.”

Oh, my gosh, truly. I'm marketing the book in many ways. I want to be nerdy about this for all of your readers who are writers and are self-publishing books, because we have to get creative, my friends.

I have really tried to create a book launch that's a bit different than most of what I'm seeing out there. Because I'm self-publishing every step of the way, I've tried to remind myself that I get to do whatever I want. As you heard earlier, that's been a little overwhelming, but with the launch, I think it can be exciting.

I created a wait list for the book and have had people signing up for that wait list for about two months now. About six weeks before the book is set to release, I started emailing that list with short essays and updates, things that are in the book, things it took me to write the book.

Soon, there will be some emails about what you can expect about the launch: Here are the bonuses, the logistics. The wait list is getting excited about the book. I think that's roughly 250 people.

Then, when the book goes on sale, I'm spending the entire first month promoting book bundles where you get all of the versions of the book. If you are in the US and you order a print copy, you get the paperback, the ebook, the audiobook, and a ticket to a retreat that I'm hosting about a month after the book comes out.

The idea is that I'm going to sell these bundles, and really promote the bundles to try to get people to come buy the book and come to the retreat. The only way you can come to the retreat is by buying the book. You cannot buy a ticket on its own, you have to buy the book.

For me, as a self-published writer, that means that I'm set for the first month the book is on sale. I'm selling bundles that are $40 or $50 as opposed to selling a book that's maybe $20.

It will be available for purchase by itself. But when you see the sales page, the bundles are at the forefront, and the book only is a little sentence underneath that.

That’s my business owner brain coming on and saying that when you have a small audience, you need to charge more for things to make the same amount of money that somebody with a big audience does with a book.

There are these pretty set price points in people's minds. People don't really want to pay more than $25 or $30 for a book. So how do you raise the value of your book? Well, you bundle it with these other things. You do an event, or you do all the copies, right?

I'm doing all the versions of the book together, things like that, so that I can make more money from the initial launch.

The other idea is, in that first month, I want every single person who's already heard my podcast, who knows about my work, who's already interested, I want them to buy that month. I want them to feel like, now is the time. I want them to be really incentivized to buy then.

After that period of the launch, I plan to move into more publicity and promotion to people who don't know me yet. I'll stop selling the bundles, because there's no more event.

The book will be available for purchase through all retailers except Amazon, and that way people can find the book. It moves from the book being for my fans and super fans to the book being for people who've never heard of me.

I will shift my strategy then. Instead of talking to people who already know me, I'm going to be guesting on other podcasts. I'm pitching press. I'm putting up a billboard. Fingers crossed, that should be happening.

I’ll move from secret marketing to mass marketing. We'll see if this works. Readers of this interview, you can follow along, because I'll be reporting on how it works on the podcast Off the Grid.

My hope is that by doing it this way, I can bring in the money at the beginning to then fund all this other stuff I want to do. I do want to go on a book tour, and I do want to have these opportunities.

For the marketers out there, the publishing companies who don't think you can market a book without social media, please, let me introduce you to podcast ads and newsletter ads.

I have had multiple publishers buy ads on Off the Grid for books, and those books sell so well through the podcast. We do an ad, we have the author on, and people love it, and if it's aligned, it's so successful. So that'd be my rec for them as well.

Doing things differently requires you to get creative. Not being on social media means you have to think in different ways. Given the topic of your book, and what you're doing with publishing, how do you think social media impacts our creativity?

Oh, so many ways. I think that maybe there are two things I'll point to here. I think that social media impacts our creative energy and our creative output.

When we spend a lot of time scrolling, it drains us of our creative energy because it trains our attention to go into this sort of passive, responsive, consuming mode.

Creativity requires generative, expansive attention. Social media really takes away our creative energy, more than it gives us creative energy.

I also think that the algorithms on social media train us to be spotting trends and memes and seeing a lot of what's successful, and then they train us to do more of that.

So it impacts our creative output, because we are trained or coerced into doing what everyone else is doing. In my opinion, that is the fastest path to unoriginal work, to work that feels watered down or diluted from what everybody else is doing.

When we reclaim our creative energy, we can shift our creative output, and we can create things that are more in response to our inner voice and knowing and to the world that we live in off-screen.

I think it's fine if you create work in that way and then end up sharing it on screens. I mean, I love the internet, and I'm a big fan of sharing your work online, but I think that the work is better when it's created in our inner world and in response to our outer offline world,

If you had to give a writer a piece of advice on retraining their attention, reclaiming it, treating it like an attentive ecology, what would you want somebody to try?

My advice would be different depending on how they're feeling about social media.

So, if they're a writer who is very active on social media and feeling frustrated about that and struggling with that and feeling like their attention is diminished because of their social media use, I would really want to encourage you to step back or away from a platform.

I would want to encourage you to begin, perhaps, more mindful scrolling. I teach some practices—not in the book, but I talk about them on podcasts all the time—for having a small noticing note on your phone.

Every time you pick up your phone and you open social media, pause and go to that note and write down why you opened it. What was the feeling? What was the impulse? What was the thought there? Or was it mindless?

Can you start to notice how mindless it is also when you're on social media? I encourage you to perhaps set a five minute timer, get out a notebook, scroll, and just start noticing what you're seeing and how it's making you feel.

Those noticing practices become clues to how social media is impacting your creative energy and your writing process. If you're not sure if any of this applies to you, start there.

If you are sick of social media and you're like, “I don't want to do this anymore,” liberate yourself from the apps, my friends. Come listen to Off the Grid. Come get the free Leaving Social Media Toolkit, buy the book.

I don't mean to just promo my work, but so much of that is free and I like to grant this huge permission slip to all of us that we don't have to be there if we don't want to be there.

When you leave social media, almost every writer I have worked with experiences a surge of creative energy because they've been creating so much for these platforms. They've built these muscles of almost over-creating sometimes, and that energy wants to go somewhere.

You can direct it into your writing, or direct it into your email newsletter. That can be really generative and regenerative and healing for your attention and for your writing when you shift your focus, and then over time, rebuild different rhythms and habits for yourself.

My invitations are to begin these noticing practices, to tune in to your own social media use and learn how it's impacting your writing process, or to step away, channel that energy elsewhere, and then see what arises in your work as a result.

What is the best book you’ve read recently?

My favorite book of the year is The Light Pirate by Lily Brooks-Dalton (affiliate link*). It's a speculative cli-fi, climate fiction, novel set in Florida that plays out what happens as sea levels rise. It is beautifully written.

The first section is very sad, so just a warning about that, but it was such a gorgeous book. As someone who is invested in learning about collapse and ecological transition, I felt like it imagined that in a very human and embedded way.

For more fun, if you're not in the mood for a book that's going to wreck you, I just finished Dream On, Ramona Riley by Ashley Herring Blake, which is a very fun queer romance (affiliate link*). I also read The Darkest Part of the Forest by Holly Black, which is like a fairy mystery that came out 10 years ago now, which feels wild (affiliate link*).

Bailey’s note: In addition to Off the Grid, Amelia has a podcast called Pleasure Reading devoted entirely to—you guessed it—reading for pleasure! You can check out my conversation with Amelia on Pleasure Reading here!​

Meet the Author interviews are lightly edited for clarity.

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It was so much fun to revisit my conversation from last year with Amelia as she prepares to launch Your Attention is Sacred Except on Social Media. I learned so much about Amelia's approach to marketing this book—and I hope you got some interesting takeaways, as well!

​Hop on Amelia's wait list to learn more about the book and snag a bundle when the book is published.