#AmWriting

STOP. Do not think to yourself, well, I don’t want to write Erotica—why is this podcast/book for me? This conversation, and the book, How to Write Erotica, that inspires it, goes far beyond any pre-imagined specifics you have about writing scenes, stories and books focused on which bit of bodily anatomy goes where—because to write good erotica, you have to come back to the heart of writing any story (fiction, memoir, what-have-you: why this story, why this character, why now? Guest Rachel Kramer Bussel knows what makes good story, and this conversation is applicable to any writing that appeals to our senses (as all writing should) and challenges our ability to tell our truths (ditto).

Links from the Pod

Starr**cker Magazine on Twitter

Take Me There anthology

Fetlife.com

Addition, Toni Jordan

A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers by Xiaolu Guo

Cheesy Boots in Dirty Girls: Erotica for Women

#AmReading

City of Likes, Jenny Mollen

Spoiler Alert & Ship Wrecked, Olivia Dade

Rachelkramerbussel.com

eroticawriting101.com

@raquelita on Twitter

Is 2023 going to be the year you finally click through and start exploring the idea of becoming a book coach? If you’ve been intrigued by all the conversations we’ve had about book coaching over the years here at #Amwriting, maybe this is your year to make it happen. Author Accelerator’s Book Coach certification program teaches you the key editorial, project management, client intaking, and emotional skills necessary to launch your own book coaching business. I’ve done it, and even after years as an editor for the New York Times, I expanded my skills dramatically, and my approach to helping others with their books, and writing my own, is so much better.

The best part: no publishing experience is necessary to be good at this work.

Are you curious to see if you have what it takes? Head to bookcoaches.com/podcasts now to take Author Accelerator’s free quiz to find out if you have the skills and characteristics needed to launch your own book coaching business and get paid to read books all day!

Take the Book Coach Quiz

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Calling all freelancers! On March 9 and 10, the Institute for Independent Journalists is offering an online freelance journalism conference with 12 information-packed interactive sessions on everything from pitching, negotiations, and contracts to podcasting and developing new revenue streams. Speakers include editors for The Atlantic, The Guardian, The New York Times, Wired, The Verge, The Emancipator, and more.

Registration costs $69 for 12 live, interactive sessions, delivering 15 hours of learning. For more information and to register, see: theiij.com All sessions will be recorded and available to view for one month after the conference.

The IIJ is a new organization whose mission is the financial and emotional sustainability of journalists of color. Everyone is welcome at the IIJ’s public programs, like the conference, although some future opportunities will be limited to BIPOC freelancers.

Your query letter—or your jacket copy—KNOWS. It knows if you’ve got a whole story in there, if there’s an arc of change, if there are stakes, if there’s a why now and a why this and a why her/him.

You just have to be willing to listen. Julie Artz, query coach extraordinaire, and KJ talk about mistakes writers make in our queries—and more importantly, the problems queries can reveal about our stories.

DOWNLOAD JULIE’s 5 STEP QUERY LETTER AUDIT!

Julie's 5 Step Query Audit

Links from the Pod

Podcast: The Shit No One Tells You About Writing

Blog: Jet Reid’s The Query Shark

Podcast: Queries Qualms and Quirks

Previous episodes:

Ep 343: Friends Don’t Let Friends Write Books Without Hooks

Summer Blueprint Step 4: Your Jacket Copy is Your Promise to the Reader

#AmReading

Julie: The Book of Delights, Ross Gay

Demon Copperhead, Barbara Kingsolver

KJ: Inciting Joy, Ross Gay

“You Just Need to Lose Weight” and 19 Other Myths about Fat People, Aubrey Gordon

(also mentioned— Maintenance Phase Podcast)

Julie Artz @julieartz on twitter and Instagram

Is 2023 going to be the year you finally click through and start exploring the idea of becoming a book coach? If you’ve been intrigued by all the conversations we’ve had about book coaching over the years here at #Amwriting, maybe this is your year to make it happen. Author Accelerator’s Book Coach certification program teaches you the key editorial, project management, client intaking, and emotional skills necessary to launch your own book coaching business. I’ve done it, and even after years as an editor for the New York Times, I expanded my skills dramatically, and my approach to helping others with their books, and writing my own, is so much better.

The best part: no publishing experience is necessary to be good at this work. 

Are you curious to see if you have what it takes? Head to bookcoaches.com/podcasts now to take Author Accelerator’s free quiz to find out if you have the skills and characteristics needed to launch your own book coaching business and get paid to read books all day!

Take the Book Coach Quiz

Do you follow KJ’s Bookstagram?

Okay, some us (hand up here) start ALL THE THINGS. But some of us don’t like to start what we don’t think we will finish (and even those of us who start a lot sometimes beat ourselves up for that). 

But if you don’t start stuff you cannot finish stuff. So: here’s Becky Blades, author of Start More than You Can Finish (which—and this is a big deal—was recommended by the Next Big Idea Book Club — and you can listen to five ideas from the book by clicking that link) on why we should… start. More than we can finish. And HOW. And also, how to learn to love not finishing what we start.

Links from the pod:

Becky and her daughter in McSweeney’s: A GUIDE TO MIDWESTERN CONVERSATION: ELECTION EDITION

Becky’s daughter’s book (A Guide to Midwestern Conversation, Taylor Kay Phillips)


#AmReading

Becky: You’ll Never Believe What Happened to Lacey and The World Record Book of Racist Stories, Amber Ruffin, Lacey Lamar

Think Again, Adam Grant

The Science of Stuck, Britt Frank

KJ: The Real Work, Adam Gopnik

StARTistry, the newsletter

If you’ve been intrigued by all the talk you’ve heard about book coaching over the years here at #Amwriting, maybe this is your year to explore becoming a coach yourself. Author Accelerator’s Book Coach certification program teaches you the key editorial, project management, client intaking, and emotional skills necessary to launch your own book coaching business—and it’s so much more than an online course, as it comes with amazing opportunities for community and connection.

With more than 135 certified book coaches and counting, Author Accelerator is helping people around the world launch thriving book coaching businesses to guide writers through each step of the writing and publishing process. If you’re curious to see if you have what it takes? Head to bookcoaches.com/podcasts now to take Author Accelerator’s free quiz to find out if you have the skills and characteristics needed to launch your own book coaching business and—as Jennie likes to say-- get paid to read books all day!

Take the Book Coach Quiz

Have you followed Jess on TikTok yet?

On this week’s episode, Jess and KJ talk to Kristen Mei Chase, an OG mommy blogger, journalist, former professor, podcaster, CEO of the Cool Mom Picks Network, and now, novelist. Her book, Thousand Miles to Graceland comes out on January 24, 2002, and we discuss the long road to publication for her (very personal) story. 

#AmReading

Kristen: Celeste Ng’s Everything I Never Told You

KJ: Charmaine Wilkerson’s Black Cake

Jess: Reading has been all disappointment recently so she names no names, but she remains optimistic and just started The House in the Pines by Ana Reyes. 

Order signed copies of Kristen’s book here!

If you’ve been intrigued by all the talk you’ve heard about book coaching over the years here at #Amwriting, maybe this is your year to explore becoming a coach yourself. Author Accelerator’s Book Coach certification program teaches you the key editorial, project management, client intaking, and emotional skills necessary to launch your own book coaching business—and it’s so much more than an online course, as it comes with amazing opportunities for community and connection. 

With more than 135 certified book coaches and counting, Author Accelerator is helping people around the world launch thriving book coaching businesses to guide writers through each step of the writing and publishing process. If you’re curious to see if you have what it takes? Head to bookcoaches.com/podcasts now to take Author Accelerator’s free quiz to find out if you have the skills and characteristics needed to launch your own book coaching business and—as Jennie likes to say-- get paid to read books all day!

Take the book coach quiz!

Hello #AmWriters! Someone in the #AmWriting Facebook group asked about the best ways to connect and build relationships with bookstores, so we decided to revisit this older episode with bestselling author and Emmy-winning television host Mary Laura Philpott. Drawing on her many years working at Parnassus Books and launching her own books into the world, we talk about the benefits of working with your local bookseller in time for publication day. 

Got a writer-dilemma we could help with? Wanna come on the pod and talk it through? Hey, there’s a goal! Whatever you’re trying to do, maybe we can help you find the action items to get you there. Email us—[email protected]—and let’s talk.

HEY NOVELISTS—Did you finish NaNoWriMo? Would you like to know what to do next with that pile of words you worked so hard to create? 

Here’s a group of Author Accelerator certified book coaches dedicated to walking you through the process of finishing your draft or tackling revision—and they have put together a host of free resources to get you started.

Check out  www.nanonowwhat.com to learn more about these fantastic book coaches and how they can get you from NaNo success to a draft that’s ready to pitch or publish.

Writers, I’ve got exciting news from Author Accelerator. Applications for Author Accelerator's new 2-year scholarship program for Black, Indigenous, Latinx, and other people of color opens this month! The Author Accelerator team developed this scholarship as a way to amplify diverse voices and perspectives that are under-recognized in the publishing world.

The newly launched Author Accelerator Book Coach Certification Scholarship provides one year of professional mentorship and feedback for up to three students of color as they complete the Book Coach Certification program and one subsequent year of career coaching and mentorship as they launch their business.  If you’re Interested in Applying,  the scholarship window opens November 15th and will close January 15, 2023. The program will kick off in March 2023.  To learn more, visit bookcoaches.com/equity.

A few assorted 2023 goals that I have no doubt I can achieve:

Hey, look at that. Already I can check off #1. Jess, Sarina and I just aren’t feeling the goals this year. Oh, we have them. But they’re mostly “do that again” or “yeah, stick with that” kinda things. . I’m gonna write another book. Jess is going to promote her speaking and work on her fiction. Sarina is going to write… four books. I think. Don’t hold her to that, it’s just what I remember. More than me, anyway, but happily it’s not a competition. 

And then we have dreams for the ways all of that will be received, which we know aren’t goals because they’re out of our control. We’ve figured out that part—good goals have action items, are achievable and can be checked off. You either wrote a book or you didn’t. You either pitched 60 agents or you didn’t, completed the online French course or not, went to the art class or stayed home. Did you “draw more” or “become a writer” or ““watch less Netflix”? Who the heck knows?

But did you write 500 words, or spend 30 minutes researching agents, or read a chapter or sign up for a class? That you can check off. Want to hear more about that? Here are a couple of tools we’ve come up with over the years.

Goal Setting Pdf
101KB ∙ PDF File Download

#amwriting Writer Goals Worksheet
132KB ∙ PDF File Download

So, we’ve got that. And we set those. But as it turned out, none of us is aiming for the moon this year, or even forming a team for future moon launches. We’re kind of just all trying to hold tight and enjoy the ride.

So my question is—is that just us? Because we’re a bit settled, and have family things to cope with, and need to recover from the recent whirlwinds? Or is no one feeling big goal energy this year? Spill, kids, and if you ARE swinging for the stars, we will cheer you on. 

5. Buy more Wheat Thins.



Got a writer-dilemma we could help with? Wanna come on the pod and talk it through? Hey, there’s a goal! Whatever you’re trying to do, maybe we can help you find the action items to get you there. Email us—[email protected]—and let’s talk.

HEY NOVELISTS—Did you finish NaNoWriMo? Would you like to know what to do next with that pile of words you worked so hard to create? 

Here’s a group of Author Accelerator certified book coaches dedicated to walking you through the process of finishing your draft or tackling revision—and they have put together a host of free resources to get you started.

Check out  www.nanonowwhat.com to learn more about these fantastic book coaches and how they can get you from NaNo success to a draft that’s ready to pitch or publish.

Writers, I’ve got exciting news from Author Accelerator. Applications for Author Accelerator's new 2-year scholarship program for Black, Indigenous, Latinx, and other people of color opens this month! The Author Accelerator team developed this scholarship as a way to amplify diverse voices and perspectives that are under-recognized in the publishing world.

The newly launched Author Accelerator Book Coach Certification Scholarship provides one year of professional mentorship and feedback for up to three students of color as they complete the Book Coach Certification program and one subsequent year of career coaching and mentorship as they launch their business.  If you’re Interested in Applying,  the scholarship window opens November 15th and will close January 15, 2023. The program will kick off in March 2023.  To learn more, visit bookcoaches.com/equity.

We make a point of setting goals every year—and, even more importantly, actually looking back to see whether we achieved them, and why. We’ve talked a lot in past years about the importance of setting the right kind of goals (you can get a short PDF on goal-setting and a worksheet below)—by which we mean goals you can control. You can’t sell your book to a publisher—that’s not a goal within your control. Get an agent, make a best-seller list, same. But you can finish the book, get help with the query, revise, edit, spend X time, write X words, write the proposal—without anyone else having to make a choice that fulfills your dreams.

Goal Setting Pdf
101KB ∙ PDF FileDownload
Download

#amwriting Writer Goals Worksheet
132KB ∙ PDF FileDownload
Download
We try to make our goals mostly dreams we can fulfill ourselves, and then add in the big, out-of-control payoffs in sort of a different section. 

But even given that, we make mistakes. My goals last year were weirdly TOO specific (a more usual problem is that they be too vague) and as it turned out, in several cases although I still wanted to achieve the overarching goal, the specific goal I set didn’t interest me any more. This year I plan to give myself a little more leeway.

Jess’s WOTY (word of the year) last year was Evaluate. Mine was Play. Sarina’s was WIP. Jess and Sarina nailed theirs. I… kind of forgot mine. But looking back, I lived up to it. I traveled more for fun than I have in many many years—partly because post-Covid and older kids, but still, it would have been easy to just go no, that’s TOO MUCH WORK. But I didn’t, I got out there, and I have the memories of the camel ride, the vintage shopping trip, the hike outside San Fransisco, the baths in Asturias, the road trip down the East Coast, the heat in Austin and the crowds watching the World Cup in the plaza in Marrakech to prove it. Thinking of it all makes me think of the new rule form fave guest Laura Vanderkam’s Tranquility By Tuesday: Effortful before Effortless. Sometimes “Play” is also kind of hard work. But it’s worth it.

I’m sending out a discussion thread for next year’s WOTYs. You’ll get a preview of mine there (I’m already living by it) and hear from Jess and Sarina on the next episode! Or come chat—details below.

Links from the Pod

Gifts for Writers

Epic (short story by Sarina and Elle Kennedy)

Jezebel’s Creepy Stories for Halloween

Rachael Herron’s 90 Days to Done Masterclass

@katherineroystudio’s reel on how picture books are made

#AmReading

Sarina: Every Last Fear, Alex Finlay

Jess: Desert Star, Michael Connelly

KJ: A Letter to Three Witches, Elizabeth Bass



Join KJ’s subscriber chat
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Join chat
HEY NOVELISTS—Did you finish NaNoWriMo? Would you like to know what to do next with that pile of words you worked so hard to create? 

Here’s a group of Author Accelerator certified book coaches dedicated to walking you through the process of finishing your draft or tackling revision—and they have put together a host of free resources to get you started.

Check out  www.nanonowwhat.com to learn more about these fantastic book coaches and how they can get you from NaNo success to a draft that’s ready to pitch or publish.

Want to BE one of those book coaches? Our partners at Author Accelerator have super-fun BONUSES for anyone who signs up book coach training before the end of 2022. Learn more at bookcoaches.com to find out if 2023 will be the year you launch a book coaching business or level up the one you already have.

My motto for 2023 is “good writing comes last” but it might as well be “story first”, which is why we’re re-sharing this interview with Anna North, author of three novels, most recently Outlawed—the January 2021 Reese’s Book Club pick. Outlawed has a powerful theme and message and what we call, in the interview, a “poke-in-the-gut point”—but it also has, first and foremost, a can’t-put-it-down story. We recorded this in January 2021, and it deserves a listen any time.

Bummed that there’s not a fresh episode this week? We’ve got you! Hang tight until Tuesday for a bonus episode: NaNoNowWhat. If you finished NaNoWriMo—of have a draft desperately in need of completion or revision—this is the episode for you. 

KJ talks to a group of Author Accelerator certified book coaches about the process of finishing your draft or tackling revision. Can’t wait? They’ve also put together a host of free resources to get you started.

Check out  www.nanonowwhat.com to learn more about these fantastic book coaches and how they can get you from NaNo success to a draft that’s ready to pitch or publish.

Writers, I’ve got exciting news from Author Accelerator. Applications for Author Accelerator's new 2-year scholarship program for Black, Indigenous, Latinx, and other people of color opens this month! The Author Accelerator team developed this scholarship as a way to amplify diverse voices and perspectives that are under-recognized in the publishing world.

The newly launched Author Accelerator Book Coach Certification Scholarship provides one year of professional mentorship and feedback for up to three students of color as they complete the Book Coach Certification program and one subsequent year of career coaching and mentorship as they launch their business.  If you’re Interested in Applying,  the scholarship window opens November 15th and will close January 15, 2023. The program will kick off in March 2023.  To learn more, visit bookcoaches.com/equity.

Hooks, tropes, high concept. Comps. The publishing world tosses those phrases around like juggling balls, and I for one (as usual it’s KJ here) had a hard time understanding them for ages, especially the idea of a hook. 

But now I get it. A hook, in short, is the thing that gets someone—agent, editor, reader, movie-goer, etc—to say, following a one or two sentence description of the book: SOLD. Fiction, non-fiction: same deal. 

So a hook COULD be high-concept. (What if a kid wished to be Big? What if you woke up and discovered your whole life was a TV show with you as the unwitting star?). It could also be a mix-and-match situation with a pair of comps or a single comp (Cujo, but a cat). 

Or it can steal from something high concept: The Princess Diaries, but with the Japanese royal family (Tokyo Ever After). Groundhog Day, but in Brooklyn with a girl in the ‘80’s whose dad is now sick (This Time Tomorrow). 

Sometimes the hook is right there in the title. The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo. Dial A for Aunties. The Gift of Failure.

The thing about a hook is that it’s rarely the full story. It’s a “come for the X, stay for the Y situation”: you pick up the book because you love a good restaurant reality show family battle, but then it’s the small town story that keeps you reading. Or it’s just that there’s a lot more to the story—as Sarina says, the whole “but then what happens?” A hook does not make a book—and a lack of hook does not mean a bad book. It’s just a whole lot harder to tell you what a book without a hook is about, and therefore to sell it. It can be done. But I, for one, am not doing it again. 

Have you written a book with a hook—or without one? Wondering if you’ve got hold of a hook or a trope? Is there a particular hook (hello, “but in publishing”) that always gets you? We’re chatting in the comments—or head for the chat itself to see what else we’re talking about. You can also find us on Facebook.



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Books and Links from the Pod:

The Shit No One Tells You About Writing Podcast

A Very Merry Meet Cute, Julie Murphy & Sierra Simone

The Bromance Book Club, Lyssa Kay Adams

In a Holidaze, Christina Lauren

Beach Read, Emily Henry

Pests: How Humans Create Animal Villains, Bethany Brookshire

Beaverland: How One Weird Rodent Made America, Leila Philip

Listen, World: How the Intrepid Elsie Robinson Became America’s Most-Read Woman, Julia Scheeres & Allison Gilbert

The Chain, Adrian McKinty

The Plot, Jean Hanff Korelitz

Karin Slaughter’s Pieces of Her, Girl, Forgotten

Episode 71 Building a Relationship with Your Bookstore

#AmReading

Jess: Beaverland: How One Weird Rodent Made America, Leila Philip

Pests: How Humans Create Animal Villains, Bethany Brookshire

Ghosts of the Orphanage (March 2023), Christine Kenneally

KJ: A Very Merry Bromance, Lyssa Kay Adams

All I Want for Christmas, Maggie Knox

Witchmark, C.L. Polk

Sarina: Pieces of Her, Karin Slaughter

The Night Shift, Alex Finlay

HEY NOVELISTS—Did you finish NaNoWriMo? Would you like to know what to do next with that pile of words you worked so hard to create? 

Here’s a group of Author Accelerator certified book coaches dedicated to walking you through the process of finishing your draft or tackling revision—and they have put together a host of free resources to get you started.

 Check out  www.nanonowwhat.com to learn more about these fantastic book coaches and how they can get you from NaNo success to a draft that’s ready to pitch or publish.

Want to BE one of those book coaches? Our partners at Author Accelerator have super-fun BONUSES for anyone who signs up book coach training before the end of 2022. Learn more at bookcoaches.com 

Sometimes you have to start with a memoir (that you never publish) to figure out who you are and where you’re going. Today’s guest has a nice impressive bio—but 8 years ago, she was just a writer staring at a screen and working on, as many of us do when we first start, a memoir. 

Emily Grosvenor is the editor of Oregon Home magazine, Willamette Week’s design publication Nester. She’s also written for The Atlantic, Salon, Good Housekeeping, and others. 

But ALSO like so many of us, she started as a generalist, freelancing from the familiar “write what you know” place. New place, children, parenthood, cooking, trying to navigate finding adult life or living with a partner? Write about it.

But a funny thing happened on the way to that memoir: She realized she didn’t want to keep living in that space. And when the memoir didn’t sell, Emily found the opportunity to write about something she really wanted to explore—and figured out how she fit into the market. 

Links from the pod

Foundry Media Literary Agency “exploded”

Sarah Susanka’s Your Not-So-Big Life

Seth Godin’s Purple Cow

Pia somebody, Badass Your Brand

Bonus: Rachael Herron’s Fast-Draft Your Memoir in 45 Hours (because that might be the way you plow your way through what you need to write to find out what you want to write)

Sign up for Emily’s Design Shift Newsletter HERE.

(Our episode on email lists 151: #StartHereforEmailLists)

Emily on Instagram @EmilyGrosvenor

Book: Find Yourself at Home: A Conscious Approach to Shaping Your Space and Your Life



#AmReading

Emily: Marie Kondo's Kurashi at Home

KJ: Start More than You Can Finish, Becky Blades



Join KJ’s subscriber chat
Available exclusively in the Substack app
Join chat

HEY NOVELISTS—Did you finish NaNoWriMo? Would you like to know what to do next with that pile of words you worked so hard to create? 

Here’s a group of Author Accelerator certified book coaches dedicated to walking you through the process of finishing your draft or tackling revision—and they have put together a host of free resources to get you started.

Check out  www.nanonowwhat.com to learn more about these fantastic book coaches and how they can get you from NaNo success to a draft that’s ready to pitch or publish.

Want to BE one of those book coaches? Our partners at Author Accelerator have super-fun BONUSES for anyone who signs up book coach training before the end of 2022. Learn more at bookcoaches.com to find out if 2023 will be the year you launch a book coaching business or level up the one you already have.