Hungry Authors

It’s easier to believe you can when someone you trust believes for you. We’re in the middle of our series on building our self-efficacy to write a book, with input from the research of Albert Bandura. This week, we’re talking about the third way to build our self-efficacy (our belief in our own ability to accomplish a goal): verbal persuasion – that is, people actually telling us we can do it. But not just anyone can say that any time. We’ll only believe them if it comes from someone we trust. Not only that, but it has to be personalized, realistic, and verifiable by our own experience. Tune in to hear us break down this third component as we build our confidence to write a book.

Continuing in our short series on self-efficacy, today we’re talking about learning from the success of people who are – or who were once – just like you. Liz calls these our “mentors from afar”: the people we admire whom we choose as our writing mentors. We can follow in their footsteps and carve a pathway through the wilderness of writing to end up a little closer to where they are now. Albert Bandura called these “vicarious experiences,” and they are the second way (after our own mastery experiences) that we build our self-efficacy.

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Thank you to our sponsor, Goldshlag Design! Work with Michelle to get beautiful graphics for entrepreneurial women with busy lives.

Here at Hungry Authors, we ask you to have a lot of “gumption.” It takes a lot of persistence, daring, and “confidence” to put your writing out into the world. But how do you get all of that gumption? Today, Liz and Ariel are starting a little series on building self-efficacy. Self-efficacy is a term championed by the late great Albert Bandura, who researched how people build up their belief in their own ability to achieve certain goals. He discovered that there are four primary ways we build what he called our “self-efficacy.” The first way is through mastery experiences, and that’s what we’re talking about today.

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Our writing is a gift – both to ourselves and others. That’s what Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew teaches, and we loved getting to explore these ideas in this week’s episode! In this wide-ranging conversation about spiritual memoir, we cover:

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Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew is the author of Swinging on the Garden Gate: A Memoir of Bisexuality & Spirit, now in its second edition; the novel Hannah, Delivered; a collection of personal essays, On the Threshold:  Home, Hardwood, and Holiness; the chapbook, A Map to Mercy, due out in 2025; and three books on writing: Writing the Sacred Journey:  The Art and Practice of Spiritual Memoir; Living Revision: A Writer’s Craft as Spiritual Practice, winner of the silver Nautilus Award; and The Release: Finding Creativity and Freedom After the Writing is Done.  She is a founding member of The Eye of the Heart Center for Creative Contemplation, where she teaches writing as a transformational practice and hosts an online writing community.  She is a recipient of two Minnesota State Arts Board artists’ fellowships, the Loft Career Initiative Grant, and is a Minnesota Book Awards finalist.  She lives in Minneapolis with her wife, daughter, and two rambunctious cats.  You can learn more about Elizabeth at www.elizabethjarrettandrew.com and www.spiritualmemoir.com.

Nonfiction and fiction seem to exist in different worlds – but in this episode, we chat with fiction author and book coach Lauren Kay about all of the things they have in common! Like us, Lauren is a plotter, not a pantser, and she has built an incredible author community around her resources for fiction authors. She shares about: how and why she built an agency for helping aspiring fiction authors get published, how both nonfiction and fiction authors can think about platform for commercial success, how to develop characters for fiction, and the similarities between memoir and fiction. There’s lots to dig into this week!

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Lauren Kay is a Young Adult author, educator, and creator. Her debut Young Adult novel WE SHIP IT was published with HarperCollins in June 2023. Now, Lauren is dedicated to ending gatekeeping in publishing and helping aspiring writers achieve their publishing dreams. She provides writers with transparent and empathetic advice and support through weekly videos, free resources, curated communities, and 1-on-1 editing and coaching services.

If you’ve read Hungry Authors, then you know that we use James Clear’s Atomic Habits as a consistent example throughout the book, because it’s been one of the top selling books of the last decade and it so perfectly exemplifies many of the lessons we teach here. Well – today we have the honor of chatting with Blake Atwood, one of the editors who worked on an early draft of Atomic Habits! We ask him all of our questions about the book’s development: Was there a book map? Did James think about his Transformation Tale? What did the planning process look like?

Blake shares several fantastic lessons about James Clear’s writing journey that prescriptive nonfiction writers can apply to their own process, like:

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Blake Atwood partners with nonfiction authors to craft life-changing books. He was an early developmental editor on Atomic Habits. More recently, he worked with Jefferson Fisher as a book coach for his upcoming release with Penguin Random House. You may learn more—or inquire about working with him—at BlakeAtwood.com.

Jennifer Louden is a national bestselling author and writing coach who specializes in helping aspiring women writers claim their big ideas and put them into writing. In this episode, Jen helps us understand what makes a Big Idea “big” and how our ideas have to be shaped and honed with careful work and mining. Women especially often struggle to claim the fullness of their ideas. Jen is an expert in women’s empowerment and helping us all believe in our ideas while doing the necessary work to make them even better. In this conversation we also touch on platform and how to build an authentic community around your ideas.

JENNIFER LOUDEN wanted to be Harriet the Spy when she was eight, an enlightened master when she was twelve, and a brilliant comedy writer when she was twenty-two. She penned her bestseller, The Woman’s Comfort Book, after her first why bother time. She’s the author of seven additional books including The Woman’s Retreat Book and The Life Organizer. She has inspired millions of women through her books, her retreats and workshops, and her blog, but probably not her fashion sense and certainly not her cooking. You can learn more about Jen and her work at https://jenniferlouden.com/.

Many thanks to our sponsor, Goldshlag Designs!

This episode is an absolute must-listen for those who want to write a must-read! Today, Liz & Ariel sit down (virtually) with AJ Harper to talk about how to design a book that engages readers from page one, leads them on an intuitive journey, and delivers a powerful transformation that’s even better than they imagined. The three of us share our best practices for thinking about who your reader is, mapping your book, and even editing the manuscript once your first draft is complete. It’s always a treat for us to meet like-minded book pros, and AJ is one of our absolute favorites!

Be sure to grab AJ’s book, Write a Must-Read: Craft a Book That Changes Lives – Including Your Own to find her pre-writing questions and the editing process she talks about in this episode.

AJ Harper is an editor and publishing strategist who helps authors write transformational books that enable them to build readership, grow their brand, and make a significant impact on the world. As ghostwriter and as developmental editor, she has worked with hundreds of authors,
from newbies to New York Times bestselling authors with millions of books sold. AJ teaches her method in Top Three Book Workshop and the Must-Read Editing Workshop. She is a Partner and Head Writing Coach for Heroic Public Speaking, the premier speaker training program created
by Michael and Amy Port. She is writing partner to business author, Mike Michalowicz. Together they’ve written ten books, including Profit First. AJ is the author of Write a Must-Read: Craft a Book That Changes Lives–Including Your Own. Connect with her at https://ajharper.com.

What exactly is “creative nonfiction”? Today we discuss this question with a writer who’s built his writing career on this sometimes debatable, somewhat elusive term: Brendan O’Meara, host of the Creative Nonfiction Podcast. Brendan says that “creative nonfiction” is a big umbrella, encompassing journalism, narrative nonfiction, personal essay, memoir, documentary films, and so much more. Brendan himself is in the process of writing a biography of legendary runner Steve Prefontaine, so he shares from his own experience about how (logistically) to do the massive amounts of research often required for creative nonfiction and how to build another world – even a past or present real one – for the reader. In creative nonfiction, the challenge is often finding or making meaning from true events, and Brendan shares the lessons he’s learned about Steve Prefontaine and about how we can all find lessons from the lives we witness.

Brendan O’Meara is a journalist and author and host of The Creative Nonfiction Podcast, the show where he speaks to writers, producers, and filmmakers about the art of telling true stories. Come 2025, his biography on the legendary Oregon runner Steve Prefontaine will be published by Mariner Books. He’s not on social media, so he encourages you to head over to brendanomeara.com and sign up for his Rage Against the Algorithm newsletter for creative insights, recommendations, and a way to find a more intentional life online.

A large part of what we do at Hungry Authors is help to set authors’ expectations around what it’s actually like to write and publish a book. That’s also what Terry Whalin does in his practical, candid book 10 Publishing Myths: Insights Every Author Needs to Succeed. In this episode, Terry shares the myths and misconceptions that many authors hold about publishing – like around what it’s like to market a book, and what a traditional publisher does for you – so that you can move forward with publishing your book feeling confident and knowledgeable throughout the process.

W. Terry Whalin understands both sides of the editorial desk–as an editor and a writer. He worked as a magazine editor and his magazine work has appeared in more than 50 publications. A former literary agent, Terry is an Acquisitions Editor at Morgan James Publishing.

He has written more than 60 books through traditional publishers in a wide range of topics from children’s books to biographies to co-authored books. Several of Terry’s books have sold over 100,000 copies. Terry’s book, 10 PUBLISHING MYTHS: INSIGHTS EVERY AUTHOR NEEDS TO SUCCEED (Morgan James Publishing) is his latest book. His one of his most recent books is BILLY GRAHAM, A BIOGRAPHY OF AMERICA’S GREATEST EVANGELIST (Morgan James Publishing). Also Terry has an innovative online training course to help authors effectively connect with literary agents and editors called Write A Book Proposal. Terry is a popular speaker and teacher at numerous writers’ conferences and an active member of the American Society of Journalists and Authors. He lives in Southern California and has an active following on twitter.

Thank you to our sponsor, Goldshlag Design! Work with Michelle to get beautiful graphics for entrepreneurial women with busy lives.

If you haven’t got your copy of Hungry Authors, pick it up wherever books are sold!