Write the Damn Book Already

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Anna Dorn’s debut novel, Vagablonde, came out in May 2020, which was a spectacular moment to launch a book (hear the sarcasm). Her tour was obviously cancelled, which she was fine with since she prefers doing things online anyway.

The paperback version came out October 6, 2026 from Simon & Schuster—six years later, which is not the typical order of operations and also a decent reminder that even traditional publishing doesn’t always follow the script people assume it does.

The main character, Prue, is a 30-year-old attorney who wants two things: to live without psychotropic medication and to experience success as a rap artist. Anna was also once a lawyer who wanted to be a rapper, so we know where some of this came from!

The six-year gap between hardback and paperback versions gifted her something most authors never get, which is five years of distance before re-editing her own book, which she ended up liking far more than she expected to.

We get into:

• How distance let her read her own novel almost like someone else wrote it
• What she updated, and which dated references didn’t survive
• Why law school prepared her for editorial notes better than anything in publishing did
• How she decides whether a Goodreads consensus is worth acting on
• Why she’d rather read for a few minutes at someone else’s event than host a launch
• What happened to the five novels she’s abandoned

On the business side, Anna is cheerfully hands-off. Her take is that if she were business minded she’d be doing something more lucrative, which is exactly why agents exist. She went to law school and still doesn’t want to read her own contracts!

Her next novel is slated for January 2028. In the meantime she freelance edits and writes a Substack with a friend about perfume titled...wait for it...Sample Sluts, where they pair scents with pop music and Bravo shows. I came away with a reading list, a watch list, and a renewed interest in Salt and Stone.

🧭 BACK COVER BLUEPRINT

Get back cover templates for nonfiction, memoir, and fiction; real-world examples; a polishing checklist; and a guide for turning it into an optimized online description that attracts the right readers. 

🔗 https://www.publishaprofitablebook.com/blueprint

WONDERING EXACTLY HOW TO SELF-PUBLISH SO YOU CAN STOP GUESSING?

Grab the action plan and finally feel confident you’re doing this the right way.

👉 PublishAProfitableBook.com/actionplan

READY TO FINALLY BE IN THAT "CAN'T STOP WRITING" FLOW?

Grab the free nonfiction or memoir kickstart that's helped hundreds of authors get out of their heads and into the flow: 

👉 PublishAProfitableBook.com/chapterone

Support the show

******

Write the Damn Book Already is a weekly podcast featuring interviews with authors as well as updates and insights on writing craft and the publishing industry. 

Available wherever podcasts are available:
Apple Podcasts
Spotify
YouTube

Let's Connect!
Instagram
Website

Email the show: elizabeth [at] elizabethlyons [dot] com

The podcast is a proud affiliate partner of Bookshop, working to support local, independent bookstores.

To see all the ways we can work together to get your book written and published, visit publishaprofitablebook.com/work-with-elizabeth

Click Here to ask your book writing and publishing questions!

Jane Bitomsky’s debut novel, Death by Misadventure, came out October 1, 2026 from Lake Union. It opens in the 1500s with a naked dead man found under a waterwheel, missing a certain piece of his anatomy, and a coroner who has to work out whether it was an accident or something considerably worse.

Jane has a PhD in early modern English history. Her dissertation covered pregnancy and crime, which means part of it dealt with women pleading their bellies to delay execution. She assumed that background meant the research for the novel would be minimal. It wasn’t. 

Legal records are formulaic and tell you almost nothing about how people actually spoke to each other, so she ended up reading literature from the period, digging into historical societies to find real parishioner names and local occupations, and learning a truly impressive number of Elizabethan euphemisms.

Then there’s the road to publication. We discuss: 

• Ninety rejections before her first agent said yes
• Three rounds of edits over a year, then nine rejections from publishers on submission
• A second manuscript her agent read and declined to take out
• A parting of ways in January 2025, followed by thirty more rejections
• Two offers by March, a new agent, submission in April, and an acceptance in June
• A hundred and twenty rejections total, by her count

When I asked how the agent split felt, Jane called it "slightly dispiriting," which might be the most restrained response I've heard. She also pointed out that rejection doesn’t stop once you’re published. Her first review was two stars and came with a full essay on everything that's wrong with the book. We had a good time talking about clicking into a reviewer’s history and finding their other three-paragraph takedowns of peanut butter and wallpaper.

We also got into the marketing side, which looks different when you’re a debut author in New Zealand with an Amazon imprint. There’s real anti-Amazon sentiment there, her publisher’s focus is digital and audio, and when she called a local publicist, she was told plainly that they couldn’t help. She did find her book in Wellington’s biggest independent bookstore, however!

Her plan for a launch party is one I’ve never heard and immediately loved. She’s waiting until November or December so people have had time to read it, and she’s giving copies to friends ahead of time so there are actual questions from the room instead of her being alone on a stage wondering if anyone cares what she has to say.

Jane isn’t a social media person, which she declares without apology. She bought a dagger to open her author copies on camera, and now that it lives locked in her desk, she’s planning to use it on a cake with an edible version of her book cover on top and something resembling blood inside.

Her next book is with her agent now. She’s deciding between Death by the Angel and Death by Harlotry. I of course have strong feelings about which one it should be.

🧭 BACK COVER BLUEPRINT

Get back cover templates for nonfiction, memoir, and fiction; real-world examples; a polishing checklist; and a guide for turning it into an optimized online description that attracts the right readers. 

🔗 https://www.publishaprofitablebook.com/blueprint

WONDERING EXACTLY HOW TO SELF-PUBLISH SO YOU CAN STOP GUESSING?

Grab the action plan and finally feel confident you’re doing this the right way.

👉 PublishAProfitableBook.com/actionplan

READY TO FINALLY BE IN THAT "CAN'T STOP WRITING" FLOW?

Grab the free nonfiction or memoir kickstart that's helped hundreds of authors get out of their heads and into the flow: 

👉 PublishAProfitableBook.com/chapterone

Support the show

******

Write the Damn Book Already is a weekly podcast featuring interviews with authors as well as updates and insights on writing craft and the publishing industry. 

Available wherever podcasts are available:
Apple Podcasts
Spotify
YouTube

Let's Connect!
Instagram
Website

Email the show: elizabeth [at] elizabethlyons [dot] com

The podcast is a proud affiliate partner of Bookshop, working to support local, independent bookstores.

To see all the ways we can work together to get your book written and published, visit publishaprofitablebook.com/work-with-elizabeth

Click Here to ask your book writing and publishing questions!

I have a complicated relationship with 30 Under 30 lists. I'm genuinely happy for everyone on them, and I'm also in my fifties and have not done most of those things, so there's a part of me that reads those lists and feels like I missed the boat and the train. 

Turns out, David Galef and Beth Weinhouse had the same reaction back in their late thirties when they saw an anthology titled 30 Under 30. So they created 20 Over 40 instead, and when the call went out, writers wrote in saying some version of "Where have you been all my life?" Now, twenty years later, they've put together 20 Over 60, a collection of short stories (fictional) written by authors over the age of sixty about being over the age of sixty. 

David is a fiction writer and lit professor who directs the creative writing program at Montclair State, has published around 200 short stories, and edits Vestal Review, the longest-running flash fiction magazine around, where the limit is 500 words. Beth is a journalist and magazine editor. They are also married, which made for a fun recording setup!

We got into:

• Why they refused to make an anthology about disease, decline, and death, and what they looked for instead
• The stories that surprised them, including a kleptomaniac with a pepper mill problem and a woman visiting her husband and her ex-husband in the same hospital
• How they handled permissions, payment, and the contributors you've likely never heard of alongside Joyce Carol Oates and Paul Theroux
• What every agent and press told them before Beth built a presentation out of statistics (and sold the book almost immediately)
• Why David thinks a good plot gets you on the bestseller list and a memorable character gets you remembered
• How they're marketing to a demographic that reads more, spends more, and belongs to more book clubs than anyone else

David said something about the unknown writers in the collection that I've repeated twice since. Most of us haven't heard of 90 percent of the authors out there, if not 99 percent, and a lot of them are tremendously accomplished. I used to feel embarrassed when a guest turned out to have written 185 books I'd never encountered (hello, Debra Webb). Now, I think, "If everyone already knew everyone, nobody would ever discover anything!"

We also talked about book tours being largely a thing of the past, and how the ones still happening are often financed by the authors themselves. Their contributors are doing local events around the country instead, which means nobody is getting shipped off on a ten-city tour.

And because this is apparently where my brain lives now, we spent a few minutes chatting about whether we could get a tracking device into every book, which led to a conversation about the inventory robot at my grocery store. Her name is Tally. She is six feet tall and very friendly.

🧭 BACK COVER BLUEPRINT

Get back cover templates for nonfiction, memoir, and fiction; real-world examples; a polishing checklist; and a guide for turning it into an optimized online description that attracts the right readers. 

🔗 https://www.publishaprofitablebook.com/blueprint

WONDERING EXACTLY HOW TO SELF-PUBLISH SO YOU CAN STOP GUESSING?

Grab the action plan and finally feel confident you’re doing this the right way.

👉 PublishAProfitableBook.com/actionplan

READY TO FINALLY BE IN THAT "CAN'T STOP WRITING" FLOW?

Grab the free nonfiction or memoir kickstart that's helped hundreds of authors get out of their heads and into the flow: 

👉 PublishAProfitableBook.com/chapterone

Support the show

******

Write the Damn Book Already is a weekly podcast featuring interviews with authors as well as updates and insights on writing craft and the publishing industry. 

Available wherever podcasts are available:
Apple Podcasts
Spotify
YouTube

Let's Connect!
Instagram
Website

Email the show: elizabeth [at] elizabethlyons [dot] com

The podcast is a proud affiliate partner of Bookshop, working to support local, independent bookstores.

To see all the ways we can work together to get your book written and published, visit publishaprofitablebook.com/work-with-elizabeth

Click Here to ask your book writing and publishing questions!

Anna Pitoniak spent years as a senior editor at Random House, wrote her first two novels in the hours before and after work, and has now published five books of her own. Her newest, The Swiss Agent, comes out December 1, 2026 from Simon & Schuster. It showed up on my doorstep and I got unreasonably excited, because I am fully in my espionage era right now.

Anna is one of the few authors I've spoken with who has sat on both sides of this business at the same time, so I had a lot of questions for her. 

We picked up the marketing and publicity conversation I've been having across several recent episodes, and Anna gave me her definitions of each: Publicity is earned media, meaning coverage nobody paid for. Marketing has a paid component, like ads and giveaways. Then we got stuck on the same blurry spot Cassie Miller and I landed on a few weeks ago, which is where influencer and bookstagram outreach falls. Neither of us has a perfect answer.

We also got into:

• Why she didn't submit her first novel to her own imprint, and what her boss said when she brought it up
• What having BookScan access did to her head, and why losing it was a relief
• Why it's so hard to connect cause and effect with book sales, even when something big happens
• The question she asks herself about a big first week versus slow steady growth over years
• Why she used to warn authors away from fall publication, and what changed her mind
• How The Swiss Agent took close to three years to write/rewrite, and why returning characters made it harder rather than easier

Anna is candid about the comedown after her first novel came out. She'd built up so much adrenaline expecting fireworks on publication day (don't we all?), and what she got instead was the ordinary quiet of a Tuesday when other books also come out and everyone moves on. 

That book has since earned out and sends her royalties twice a year, which she notes is enough to at least cover the oat milk in her latte. 

🧭 BACK COVER BLUEPRINT

Get back cover templates for nonfiction, memoir, and fiction; real-world examples; a polishing checklist; and a guide for turning it into an optimized online description that attracts the right readers. 

🔗 https://www.publishaprofitablebook.com/blueprint

WONDERING EXACTLY HOW TO SELF-PUBLISH SO YOU CAN STOP GUESSING?

Grab the action plan and finally feel confident you’re doing this the right way.

👉 PublishAProfitableBook.com/actionplan

WANT TO SELL MORE BOOKS (WITHOUT THE SELF-PROMO CRINGE)?

The Author Visibility Bundle gives you 200+ done-for-you email templates, social media graphics, and other book promo tools designed to help authors build buzz and drive sales, without feeling pushy. 

👉  PublishAProfitableBook.com/visibility

READY TO FINALLY BE IN THAT "CAN'T STOP WRITING" FLOW?

Grab the free nonfiction or memoir kickstart that's helped hundreds of authors get out of their heads and into the flow: 

👉 PublishAProfitableBook.com/chapterone

Support the show

******

Write the Damn Book Already is a weekly podcast featuring interviews with authors as well as updates and insights on writing craft and the publishing industry. 

Available wherever podcasts are available:
Apple Podcasts
Spotify
YouTube

Let's Connect!
Instagram
Website

Email the show: elizabeth [at] elizabethlyons [dot] com

The podcast is a proud affiliate partner of Bookshop, working to support local, independent bookstores.

To see all the ways we can work together to get your book written and published, visit publishaprofitablebook.com/work-with-elizabeth

Click Here to ask your book writing and publishing questions!

She's back! Cassie Miller joined me last spring to talk about her debut, Meet Me Under the Lights, and now she's here with book two, Meet Me on Mistletoe Lane, out October 6, 2026 from Penguin Teen. I somehow have three copies, one of which is the finished edition with glitter on the cover. Cassie, the actual author, has not yet seen the glitter. I felt terrible about this for almost a full minute.

This time we talked marketing, because I've been in a lot of marketing conversations lately and the same misconceptions keep coming up. Namely, that traditional publishers do nothing to market your book (which is sometimes somewhat true), and that marketing and selling are the same thing. 

Cassie was generous enough to walk us through what her experience has actually looked like, one book in and with a second about to launch.

We got into:

• Cassie's definition of marketing versus publicity, and why she thinks one has a face and the other happens behind the scenes
• The marketing campaign printed right on the back of her ARC, and what it  means in practice
• Why she's never been afraid to ask her publicist questions, and why she thanks her publishing team in nearly every email
• How she coordinated with her publicist to personally send ARCs to the bookstagrammers who championed her first book
• How a fellow author confessed that her gorgeous social media presence came courtesy of a publicist she hired herself
• Why a fall farmer's market book became a Christmas book during contract negotiations, and why Cassie said yes immediately
• Whether launching in a crowded holiday season makes you a needle in a haystack

Cassie describes herself as an introvert who can extrovert, and then describes unboxing her ARCs to the Sugar Plum Fairy while her son filmed and shook his head. She makes a really good case that authors, especially those writing for kids and teens, need to be willing to be a little silly.

We also debated the appeal of "It's a Wonderful Life." I will not be taking questions at this time regarding my position.

🧭 BACK COVER BLUEPRINT

Get back cover templates for nonfiction, memoir, and fiction; real-world examples; a polishing checklist; and a guide for turning it into an optimized online description that attracts the right readers. 

🔗 https://www.publishaprofitablebook.com/blueprint

WONDERING EXACTLY HOW TO SELF-PUBLISH SO YOU CAN STOP GUESSING?

Grab the action plan and finally feel confident you’re doing this the right way.

👉 PublishAProfitableBook.com/actionplan

WANT TO SELL MORE BOOKS (WITHOUT THE SELF-PROMO CRINGE)?

The Author Visibility Bundle gives you 200+ done-for-you email templates, social media graphics, and other book promo tools designed to help authors build buzz and drive sales, without feeling pushy. 

👉  PublishAProfitableBook.com/visibility

READY TO FINALLY BE IN THAT "CAN'T STOP WRITING" FLOW?

Grab the free nonfiction or memoir kickstart that's helped hundreds of authors get out of their heads and into the flow: 

👉 PublishAProfitableBook.com/chapterone

Support the show

******

Write the Damn Book Already is a weekly podcast featuring interviews with authors as well as updates and insights on writing craft and the publishing industry. 

Available wherever podcasts are available:
Apple Podcasts
Spotify
YouTube

Let's Connect!
Instagram
Website

Email the show: elizabeth [at] elizabethlyons [dot] com

The podcast is a proud affiliate partner of Bookshop, working to support local, independent bookstores.

To see all the ways we can work together to get your book written and published, visit publishaprofitablebook.com/work-with-elizabeth

Click Here to ask your book writing and publishing questions!

After writing 6 nonfiction books, I'm working on my first novel, which everyone who listens to this show is painfully aware of by now. So when Kim Purcell reached out about her new book, Write a Novel in 100 Days, the timing felt less like coincidence and more like the universe smacking me on the head. 

Kim is the author of Trafficked and This Is Not a Love Letter; she has an MFA; she's been teaching novel writing to kids, teens, and adults for about as long as I've been in this business; and her new guide comes out September 22 from Penguin Random House with a foreword by Donald Maass. It also took her longer to write than three of her novels, which made me feel enormously better about my own life.

We covered a lot:

• Why the 100 days aren't consecutive, and what to do when life detonates in the middle of your draft
• The 15-minutes-a-day approach, and what counts as writing when you can't actually write
• "Method writing," and why becoming your character is where the scenes that make readers cry actually come from
• Why rewriting a scene from scratch is roughly ten times faster than fussing with the one you have
• The handful of plot points even devoted pantsers need to know before they start, and why the muddy middle is almost always a missing midpoint
• Kim's theory on asking for critical feedback before your first draft is finished 

Near the end, Kim gives some advice I'm putting into my own toolbox: Let go of it being good and entertain yourself instead. 

🧭 BACK COVER BLUEPRINT

Get back cover templates for nonfiction, memoir, and fiction; real-world examples; a polishing checklist; and a guide for turning it into an optimized online description that attracts the right readers. 

🔗 https://www.publishaprofitablebook.com/blueprint

WONDERING EXACTLY HOW TO SELF-PUBLISH SO YOU CAN STOP GUESSING?

Grab the action plan and finally feel confident you’re doing this the right way.

👉 PublishAProfitableBook.com/actionplan

WANT TO SELL MORE BOOKS (WITHOUT THE SELF-PROMO CRINGE)?

The Author Visibility Bundle gives you 200+ done-for-you email templates, social media graphics, and other book promo tools designed to help authors build buzz and drive sales, without feeling pushy. 

👉  PublishAProfitableBook.com/visibility

READY TO FINALLY BE IN THAT "CAN'T STOP WRITING" FLOW?

Grab the free nonfiction or memoir kickstart that's helped hundreds of authors get out of their heads and into the flow: 

👉 PublishAProfitableBook.com/chapterone

Support the show

******

Write the Damn Book Already is a weekly podcast featuring interviews with authors as well as updates and insights on writing craft and the publishing industry. 

Available wherever podcasts are available:
Apple Podcasts
Spotify
YouTube

Let's Connect!
Instagram
Website

Email the show: elizabeth [at] elizabethlyons [dot] com

The podcast is a proud affiliate partner of Bookshop, working to support local, independent bookstores.

To see all the ways we can work together to get your book written and published, visit publishaprofitablebook.com/work-with-elizabeth

Click Here to ask your book writing and publishing questions!

Katie Clapham didn't set out to build an author platform. (Anyone else tired of that word?) She had a week where she had nothing ready to publish, she was working her usual shift at the bookshop she runs with her mom, and she opened a draft and started writing down the day as it happened. She called it Receipt from the Bookshop, numbered it one on the off chance she'd do it again, and sent it to a couple hundred subscribers at the end of her shift.

Roughly 250 people read it. Nearly 12,000 read it every week now, and it's been turned into a book. Receipts from the Bookshop comes out in the US on September 8, 2026 from William Morrow, after publishing in the UK in June 2026.

Keep in mind, when the publishing offer came in, her subscriber number was sitting in the low 2,000s. The numbers arrived after the deal, not before.

In this episode, Katie and I get into what actually went into the pitch, since this was her first time writing a nonfiction proposal after years of children's and YA books. Sample pages, a short introduction, and about two months of work getting the voice right. 

We also talk about paid subscribers do to your Sunday-night brain. Why she keeps her best work free and prices her subscription as low as the platform allows. Why she has no website at all (and her publisher has never asked her to have one). And her honest fear going into launch, which was less about the marketing and more that this was the part where she'd find out the book isn't as good as she hopes it is.

If you've been circling Substack wondering whether it's the magic platform, or you're mid-manuscript and quietly convinced you need a bigger following before anyone will take you seriously, this episode is a great listen!

In this episode:

• Why Katie joined Substack in November 2022 and what she was actually looking for when she did
• How she splits free and paid posts so the pressure doesn't run her life
• What a nonfiction book proposal looks like when you don't have a finished book
• Why she disabled Substack's new AI detection scan (very on-trend topic, no?)
• How she defines success for this book

🧭 BACK COVER BLUEPRINT

Get back cover templates for nonfiction, memoir, and fiction; real-world examples; a polishing checklist; and a guide for turning it into an optimized online description that attracts the right readers. 

🔗 https://www.publishaprofitablebook.com/blueprint

WONDERING EXACTLY HOW TO SELF-PUBLISH SO YOU CAN STOP GUESSING?

Grab the action plan and finally feel confident you’re doing this the right way.

👉 PublishAProfitableBook.com/actionplan

WANT TO SELL MORE BOOKS (WITHOUT THE SELF-PROMO CRINGE)?

The Author Visibility Bundle gives you 200+ done-for-you email templates, social media graphics, and other book promo tools designed to help authors build buzz and drive sales, without feeling pushy. 

👉  PublishAProfitableBook.com/visibility

READY TO FINALLY BE IN THAT "CAN'T STOP WRITING" FLOW?

Grab the free nonfiction or memoir kickstart that's helped hundreds of authors get out of their heads and into the flow: 

👉 PublishAProfitableBook.com/chapterone

Support the show

******

Write the Damn Book Already is a weekly podcast featuring interviews with authors as well as updates and insights on writing craft and the publishing industry. 

Available wherever podcasts are available:
Apple Podcasts
Spotify
YouTube

Let's Connect!
Instagram
Website

Email the show: elizabeth [at] elizabethlyons [dot] com

The podcast is a proud affiliate partner of Bookshop, working to support local, independent bookstores.

To see all the ways we can work together to get your book written and published, visit publishaprofitablebook.com/work-with-elizabeth

Click Here to ask your book writing and publishing questions!

I have been quietly fangirling over Allison Buehner's editing tips on Instagram for months. I have so many of them saved that at this point she deserves her own folder. So I finally asked her to come on the show, and then discovered we had already sort of met years ago, when she emailed me to suggest I talk to another editor she admired. No pitch. Nothing in her it for herself. In twenty years of doing this, nobody had ever done that, and I've thought highly of her ever since.

Allison runs Golden Editorial out of Colorado and works mostly with indie and self-publishing authors. She started out in nonfiction and memoir before following her heart into fantasy, contemporary fiction, and, lately, a truly impressive amount of cowboy romance.

We got into the things first-time authors usually find out the expensive way:

• Why "I'll just hire a proofreader" is the priciest shortcut in self-publishing, and what has to happen before your manuscript ever reaches an editor
• The real difference between an alpha reader, a critique partner, and a beta reader, plus why handing the book to your best friend is a terrible plan
• What a developmental edit actually looks like, and why it can feel like you paid a lot of money for a document that says "go do more work"
• What good editors will and won't do, because fixing it for you crosses into co-authoring
• Breaking craft rules on purpose versus breaking them because you never learned them, and roughly how many you can get away with in one book
• The want-versus-need conflict Allison has been recommending to nearly every fiction author lately, and why it makes characters feel like people instead of plot delivery devices
• How to know you're genuinely ready to hand your manuscript to a professional

🧭 BACK COVER BLUEPRINT

Get back cover templates for nonfiction, memoir, and fiction; real-world examples; a polishing checklist; and a guide for turning it into an optimized online description that attracts the right readers. 

🔗 https://www.publishaprofitablebook.com/blueprint

WONDERING EXACTLY HOW TO SELF-PUBLISH SO YOU CAN STOP GUESSING?

Grab the action plan and finally feel confident you’re doing this the right way.

👉 PublishAProfitableBook.com/actionplan

WANT TO SELL MORE BOOKS (WITHOUT THE SELF-PROMO CRINGE)?

The Author Visibility Bundle gives you 200+ done-for-you email templates, social media graphics, and other book promo tools designed to help authors build buzz and drive sales, without feeling pushy. 

👉  PublishAProfitableBook.com/visibility

READY TO FINALLY BE IN THAT "CAN'T STOP WRITING" FLOW?

Grab the free nonfiction or memoir kickstart that's helped hundreds of authors get out of their heads and into the flow: 

👉 PublishAProfitableBook.com/chapterone

Support the show

******

Write the Damn Book Already is a weekly podcast featuring interviews with authors as well as updates and insights on writing craft and the publishing industry. 

Available wherever podcasts are available:
Apple Podcasts
Spotify
YouTube

Let's Connect!
Instagram
Website

Email the show: elizabeth [at] elizabethlyons [dot] com

The podcast is a proud affiliate partner of Bookshop, working to support local, independent bookstores.

To see all the ways we can work together to get your book written and published, visit publishaprofitablebook.com/work-with-elizabeth

Click Here to ask your book writing and publishing questions!

Laurie Notaro has hit the New York Times bestseller list more times than she can pin down. She's also written so many books she can't tell you the number without checking. And she drives a 2008 Mini Cooper, lives in a 1,500 square foot house, and has earned out on exactly one of those books. If you've ever wondered what a long career in publishing actually looks like from the inside, start here.

We talk about I've Got a New Complaint, her new essay collection out September 8 from Little A, which is so hysterical I'll be giving it to everyone for the holidays. 

Laurie walks through her essay writing process, including the structural trick she wishes she'd figured out thirty years earlier. 

She's also as blunt as you'd expect about the parts nobody prints on a book jacket. Her first book, The Idiot Girls' Action-Adventure Club, was self-published after seven years of rejections, then picked up by Random House. Her career came apart twice. She was dropped by her agent over email while she was on tour. She spent three years living on credit cards. And she was told repeatedly that nobody wants to read about middle-aged women, which is a fascinating position to take on the largest book-buying demographic in the country.

We also get into why she left the Big Five for an Amazon imprint, plus her genuine affection for one-star reviews and why they may be the best free marketing a first-time author will ever receive. 

If you're writing a book and trying to figure out whether traditional publishing or self-publishing is the right road, this is a candid look at both from someone who has done all of it, more than once.

🧭 BACK COVER BLUEPRINT

Get back cover templates for nonfiction, memoir, and fiction; real-world examples; a polishing checklist; and a guide for turning it into an optimized online description that attracts the right readers. 

🔗 https://www.publishaprofitablebook.com/blueprint

WONDERING EXACTLY HOW TO SELF-PUBLISH SO YOU CAN STOP GUESSING?

Grab the action plan and finally feel confident you’re doing this the right way.

👉 PublishAProfitableBook.com/actionplan

WANT TO SELL MORE BOOKS (WITHOUT THE SELF-PROMO CRINGE)?

The Author Visibility Bundle gives you 200+ done-for-you email templates, social media graphics, and other book promo tools designed to help authors build buzz and drive sales, without feeling pushy. 

👉  PublishAProfitableBook.com/visibility

READY TO FINALLY BE IN THAT "CAN'T STOP WRITING" FLOW?

Grab the free nonfiction or memoir kickstart that's helped hundreds of authors get out of their heads and into the flow: 

👉 PublishAProfitableBook.com/chapterone

Support the show

******

Write the Damn Book Already is a weekly podcast featuring interviews with authors as well as updates and insights on writing craft and the publishing industry. 

Available wherever podcasts are available:
Apple Podcasts
Spotify
YouTube

Let's Connect!
Instagram
Website

Email the show: elizabeth [at] elizabethlyons [dot] com

The podcast is a proud affiliate partner of Bookshop, working to support local, independent bookstores.

To see all the ways we can work together to get your book written and published, visit publishaprofitablebook.com/work-with-elizabeth

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Joyce Maynard has been publishing books for fifty-three years. In Wonderland is her fourteenth novel, and it came out eight days before we recorded this. She still does not outline. She sits down knowing exactly who her characters are, what they want, what they're afraid of, what they can't stop thinking about, and then she lets them take her somewhere she didn't plan on going.

We talked about the year she rented a little house on the shores of Lake Atitlán, and then bought a piece of land, which now serves as a retreat center where she's hosted well over a thousand women for memoir workshops. The question she gets there, every single time, from women only: How do I tell an honest story about my life without hurting the people in it? 

Other things we covered:

• Why she doesn't consider writing to be therapy, and what she thinks needs to happen before your story is ready for the page
• The difference between resilience and reinvention (she has a great analogy involving an inflatable clown)
• Going back to Yale at sixty-five, and the D- on a French exam that led to a diagnosis at an age when nobody in her generation got one
• Her approach to writing as making a movie that plays inside the reader's head, and why she refuses to over-explain
• Write what you know, and also the case for writing what you don't know

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READY TO FINALLY BE IN THAT "CAN'T STOP WRITING" FLOW?

Grab the free nonfiction or memoir kickstart that's helped hundreds of authors get out of their heads and into the flow: 

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Write the Damn Book Already is a weekly podcast featuring interviews with authors as well as updates and insights on writing craft and the publishing industry. 

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Email the show: elizabeth [at] elizabethlyons [dot] com

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