Anna David's Blog, page 2

Tired of Gatekeepers? Let Taylor Swift Show You How It's Done

Precious and sensitive people can be so annoying—especially when we’re the precious and sensitive people in question…thinking how we feel is so important, getting all hurt when we’re rejected, threatening—to ourselves or whomever we’ve gotten wrapped up in our drama—that we’re done, we’ve had it, we’re never going to put ourselves out there again.

But guess what? I know the solution! You need to follow my just-created Taylor Swift Guide to Being an Authorpreneur. Here are the rules:

1) Take back your power.

When Taylor’s first producer royally screwed her over by selling her masters to her mortal enemy Scooter Braun, Taylor did not go off and cry. Or…well, she did cry—if “My Tears Ricochet” is indeed about that incident, she wept “in a sunlit room.” But she didn’t just cry. Instead, inspired by an idea Kelly Clarkson shared with her, she re-recorded every single song and released them to even greater success than the originals. This was all before May of this year, when she was able to actually get the rights to her first six albums back, forever changing the music business in the process. But she’d actually already won long before since the re-releases introduced her music to a whole new group of people who’d previously dismissed her as some teen country music girl with feathered hair (raises hand). In other words, if you’re feeling rejected by agents or publishers or reviewers or readers, maybe it’s time to take your power back.

2) Don’t be afraid to look ridiculous.

When Taylor announced at the 2024 Grammy’s that her next album was going to be called “The Tortured Poets Department,” everyone assumed it would be about her six-year relationship with the actor Joe Alwyn. There was even a whole theory going around about how it was named after some text thread that Alwyn had with Paul Mescal and some other hot British actor dudes that I would very much like to be accidentally included in, a la Jeffrey Goldberg. But then! The album came out and most of the songs were about Taylor’s much-ridiculed, very-much-not understood relationship with a musician named Matty Healy—a person whose charms are seemingly only visible to Taylor. Rather than hoping we’d all forget her romance with the sweaty weirdo or trashing him to remind us that he was way beneath her, she took a different approach: she released one brilliant song after another that seemed to delve into a two-week affair that left her bereft after he wooed and then dropped her. Her devotion to honesty—to sharing her pain no matter how silly it may make her look—is something every writer needs to remember when they question whether or not writing something is going to make them look stupid.

3) Show up no matter what.

Oh, so you have writer’s block? You’re not feeling inspired? Well, on “The Tortured Poets Department” album, Taylor told us about what it’s like to show up every day even when you feel like you want to die. We had no idea but when we were watching her during the post Matty Healy and pre Travis Kelce part of her Eras tour that she was actually dealing with the one-two punch of the Joe Alwyn relationship dissolution followed by Matty Healy whiplash. Turns out that even though all the pieces of her felt shattered, she was showing us what it’s like to smile through your tears. In other words, bed rotting isn’t going to help you get your mojo back. But creating and dancing on your own version of Taylor’s stage just may.

4) Be open-minded.

Truth: if I were Taylor Swift and I heard that some football player dude was trying to hand deliver me friendship bracelets with his number on them, I would probably have been concerned. If he was then talking about it on his podcast? I might have filed a restraining order. But hey, athletes have never been my thing. Besides, Taylor is apparently more open-minded than I am because she decided to open the door to this Travis Kelce guy and now years have passed and they are America’s most beloved couple of all time—such a part of the American Dream that Trump accused their relationship of being a Democratic plot to turn football fans against him. Does Taylor care that Travis doesn’t know how to spell the word squirrel while she’s a modern day wordsmith the likes of which we’ve almost never seen? Please! She’s too busy having fun with him. So if you’re committed to some idea you had ages ago about how your book publishing journey was supposed to go and you’re still refusing to look at other options, maybe it’s time to open your mind a bit?

5) Don’t get mad; get even.

They say that the best revenge is living well and Taylor is nothing if not an example of that. Also karma is her boyfriend, so if you’ve wronged her, I suggest you watch out. I mean, Kanye West humiliated her again and again, and look at him today. Scooter Braun stole her music and is now dealing with what he had coming. Oh and if karma doesn’t come for you, one of Taylor’s blistering takedowns might. Heaven help the playboys who seduced her when she was barely old enough to drive and then treated her like sh*t. Might they have thought twice about their behavior if they’d known it would inspire savagely brilliant songs that would end up providing catharsis for millions of women across the globe? Especially after Taylor pointed out to Hoda Kotb that if guys don’t want you to write bad songs about them, then maybe they shouldn’t do bad things? In other words, if a publisher or agent rejected you, maybe it’s time to exact revenge by showing them what they missed.

6) Don’t care about being cool.

If there’s anything less cool than being best friends with your mom when you’re a teenager, it’s going to the mall with your mom/best friend and discovering that your friends who told you they didn’t want to go with you are all there together. But Taylor not only did that—she also wrote a song about it! And she constantly reminds people that her mom is, as she said in Miss Americana, her “person.” Competing with this for uncoolness is putting a song about your grandmother smack in the middle of the biggest tour of all time. The point is this: don’t try to conform to what other people are doing. You do you. And if the world doesn’t get it, just wait for them to catch up.

7) Be grateful to your supporters and not your gatekeepers.

At award shows, movie stars tend to thank their agent, manager, publicist and God, in that order. You know who Taylor always and forever thanks? Her fans. She knows that agents and managers and publicists only want you if you don’t need them and the second you do need them, they’re onto another sure thing. She never forgets that without her fans, she’d still be that girl in Nashville hoping to be the next LeAnn Rimes. So remember: agents and publishers don’t make you legitimate. Readers do—and they’re never going to find you if your book stays on your computer. As a woman with numerous journals in her past but only one published book—which she of course published on her own—Taylor knows this truth perhaps better than anyone.

PS If you're one of those people who still says they don't like Taylor Swift, I'd venture to guess you just haven't heard the right song yet.

Stop Begging for Book Deals

There’s something no one told me for the longest time. Learning it is so life-transforming that once you do, you almost can’t believe you ever lived another way.

Ready for it?

Things don’t need to be that hard.

That sounds ridiculous, of course. Life is hard; didn’t we all learn that growing up and don’t we learn it again every day? Isn’t that the point of that expression about how you should be nice to everyone you encounter because they have endured so much?

Okay, sure. Life gets life-y for sure. But for so long, I thought it had to be, like, really hard. If it was easy, clearly you weren’t doing it right.

I remember, over a decade into my sobriety, a good two decades into therapy, trying to describe the feeling I had to my then-therapist. I felt…empty. It was terrifying. Was it existential angst? The realization that life was meaningless?

Her theory was that I’d been operating for decades with a “war-time mentality.” She said something like, “You were in fight or flight for so long that now that you’ve learned to slow down and breathe, you don’t know how to feel. It will feel empty at times.”

I don’t know if those were her exact words. She was perhaps the most articulate human I’ve ever been around so she probably said it better. Another thing she said to me, which I’m also surely misquoting, was about work. At the time, I was working at a website for a man so abusive that even though I was simultaneously writing a book for an actor who threw his phone at me and called me a “dumb c*nt” regularly, I was more terrified of the website man. And this seemed normal. Working in media from the late 90s to the late 2010’s meant experiencing so much consistent abuse that you just got used to it1. Anyway, this one day, I was telling my therapist something about how I didn’t cry the day before when the actor called me names.

“You sound proud,” she said.

She was right; I was proud. I probably couldn’t admit that to her at the time. I think I said something about how the men in my family were such a-holes that I knew how to take it.

“But you shouldn’t have to ‘take it,’” she said. “Work doesn’t have to that way.”

“Yes, it does,” I told her. “If you work, you get abused. That’s the deal.”

I remember her glancing around her Larchmont Village office, which was empty except for us. “No one abuses me here,” she said.

I was silent. I saw she was telling the truth but I also didn’t believe that her experience would be possible for me.

I still had several abusive bosses to get through before coming out on the other side. Today I work for myself but, more relevantly, I don’t allow people in my professional or personal life to abuse me. If they do, I exit the relationship. No one abuses me here, I could say to someone, perhaps opening their eyes to the concept the way she opened mine.

While I wasn’t abused those years that I spent toiling in traditional publishing, it certainly wasn’t the easier, softer way. I killed myself on book proposals and then books and barely survived financially. I accepted dwindling advances—the final one being so low that if you count the food I had to eat to stay alive while writing it, I paid the publisher. I let people who can’t do what I can do tell me whether or not I was good enough. I accepted rejections and bad news as if it was my cross to bear.

Of course I still experience bad news and rejection today. We all do. But I don’t place myself at the mercy of it. I don’t let people who can’t do what I can tell me if I’m good enough. If I can remember, I choose myself, over and over again, and look at rejection as “God’s protection.” Meaning: when I don’t get something I want, I embrace the fact that the universe has something even better in store for me. The world can’t beat me down without my permission.

There’s that expression about how pain is inevitable but suffering is optional and I see so many people choosing to suffer in their book publishing journeys. They become fixated on being published by the Big Five. They meticulously craft proposals that get rejected by every agent until one says they’ll take it on as long as the person massively rewrites it. They rewrite it only for it to then get rejected by publishers and then the once-enthusiastic agent stops returning their emails. They take each gatekeeper’s voice as The Voice That Tells Them Their Worth. Several years and umpteen rejections later, they realize the traditional publishing deal isn’t going to happen and their creative spirit is broken in half.

It kills me because I know they could have avoided all that and just put their work out there.

Arguably even worse suffering comes from those I know whose books are accepted by publishers. I know one person who was so obsessed with having a publisher acquire her book that when it finally happened, she got her Publishers Weekly announcement printed on a t-shirt. Such a cute idea but when I saw it, I was reminded of why people in 12-step always say don’t get a tattoo of your sobriety date because there’s just too much wrapped up in such a declaration. Whether it’s superstition or just evidence of how the things we cling to the hardest are the ones that usually slip through our hands, I don’t know. But I do know how devastated that girl with the Pub Weekly announcement shirt was, years later, when her book came out…and nothing really happened.

I see it happening in real time with someone else I know. She’s an uber successful entrepreneur I had talked to years ago about working with my company. Last year, she told me she’d gotten a traditional deal. When I saw her six months later, she told me the deal fell through. A few months ago, she reached out about working together again but then last week she left me a voice note, sounding giddy, saying that she got a book deal and this new publisher was really behind her.

Look, I hope I’m wrong because this is an awesome woman. But after seeing so many people I know do this dance, I know how it almost always turns out. I want these people to choose themselves rather than waiting for a publisher to choose them but I also get that we don’t get there until we get there.

Turns out, there really is an easier, softer way. For everything. For example: after living, on and off, in Hollywood for 30 years, I moved with my boyfriend and son to the Valley in April. And I was shocked to discover how easy day-to-day life could be.

When you spend decades fighting for a parking space only to discover it might have a broken meter but it’s so filthy you actually can’t see so you accept the inevitable ticket, when you’re used to drivers and pedestrians yelling at you simply because they can and feel like it, when you need to avoid the homeless guy on meth swinging the machete dangerously close to your baby carriage, when you know that if you tell someone that story and call him “homeless” instead of “unhoused,” you may get cancelled…well, you will find day-to-day life stressful.

It’s not that nothing is hard in the Valley. But almost nothing. It’s what inspired this love letter I wrote to Burbank for Los Angeles magazine, which only somewhat does justice to how shocking it is to realize how long I’d spent fighting unnecessary battles.

The crazy thing about finding an easier way, whether in book publishing or living, is that the answers were right in front of me the whole time. Like, eight miles away. Or at my keyboard. It only took a few decades and countless emotional beat downs for me to see it.

The Magazine with 15 Million Subscribers That Nobody Actually Reads

If there’s one thing life today offers, it’s a lot of things to lament. I save the worldly and political laments for those more aware and involved than me but I have spent much time lamenting the fact that all the magazines I loved and longed to write for and eventually wrote for are now gone.

Meanwhile, Costco Connection has a circulation of over 15 million.

There’s no way to explain how bad this magazine is. And there’s also no way to explain what it was like to work in the magazine world in its 90s heyday. First of all, the words “magazine” and “world” could go next to each other in a sentence. Secondly, when I was an intern at the just-launched Entertainment Weekly in 1992, I was paid—not because they had to pay interns (no one paid interns in 1992 and few in 2025) but because they could.

They had staff parties at Limelight and day-long events at resorts upstate. The lobby had a row of movie theater seats. People went out for boozy lunches. Editorial Assistants were having affairs with married Senior Editors. It was glam, man! On my first week, I filled in for an Editorial Assistant who was out for the week, possibly on a romantic getaway with a married Senior Editor. I was opening her boss’ mail, which was premiere invite after premiere invite. One of them was for a movie premiere that very night. When the editor walked by my desk I showed it to her, pointing out that it started in a few hours. She shrugged and said, “Never heard of the movie. Want to go in my place?”

That premiere, my friends, was for Reservoir Dogs. I had never seen any movie like it; neither had anyone else. The day after that premiere, the movie no one had heard anything about became a sensation and the EW editor surely regretted giving her premiere ticket to a rando intern. The night of the premiere, I got wasted at the afterparty, ended up flirting all night with one of the producers and then went to an after-hour bars with said producer and the entire cast and crew.

My first week! As an intern!

 Now, of course, Entertainment Weekly is digital-only, interns don’t go to premieres if premieres even happen and the internet took down everything from Allure and Mademoiselle to Teen Vogue and Details to every random publication that ever employed me. I had a good run of it, doing reported stories, essays and celebrity profiles, where magazines like Cosmo would pay me $2k to go hang out with Jessica Alba, Kate Hudson or the like and then have a transcriber take whatever I’d recorded and make it into an article. I went to the Oscars, the Golden Globes and every premiere you can imagine. Missoni dressed me, a journalist, for the god-damn Oscars in 2001!

While some publications remain alive today (I will be a die-hard New York magazine stan until the day it stops printing), for the most part we’re left with, well, Costco Connection. The articles in CC, as some unfortunate souls who are so familiar with it that they have a nickname for it may call it, include “Would you rather eat a hot dog or hamburger?” and “Diverse and beautiful,” an article about the Pacific Northwest which begins “The Pacific Northwest is diverse and incredibly beautiful.

As a writer who’s been trashed online, I do my best not to trash talk other writers (or anyone) but doesn’t a publication that couldn’t be bothered to capitalize the word “beautiful” in a title or writes an article about hot dogs vs hamburgers that doesn’t even answer the damn question2 deserve it?

But what do I know? Apparently, CC nabs celebrities like Oprah and Jimmy Fallon for its cover. I, meanwhile, emailed a bunch of writer friends to ask if I could highlight them in this Substack and like three responded.

My point is this: it would be easy to expend a lot of energy lamenting how sad it is that instead of the sort of stories Lena Dunham listed in her exquisite newsletter Good Thing Going, we now have articles like “Juvenile arthritis” (about, well, juvenile arthritis) and “Sweet stuff” (about managing sugar intake). It’s easy to sigh about the fact that a magazine with an article called “Don’t get foiled” about what “business leaders can learn from the sport of fencing” is the third most popular publication in our nation while clever, brilliant magazines have been virtually erased from our consciousness.

But here’s thing: CC is outrageously popular because Costco members automatically receive it and also because there are a gajillion copies in their stores. In other words, it’s not so much liked or even read as it is distributed. It’s safe to say that no one has ever read an article in Costco Connection and felt moved, or had their life changed as a result. So, here’s a “would you rather” for you: Would you rather be everywhere and easy to ignore slash dismiss, or less ubiquitous but more impactful? It’s so easy to compare numbers and metrics and subscribers and likes and downloads and feel like you come up short. But isn’t Costco Connection all the proof we need that it really is about quality over quantity?

Tell me: if you had to pick between 14 million indifferent subscribers—13 million of whom probably never read you—and a few thousand or hundred or dozen people who are thrilled to see your name in their inbox, which would you choose?

Keep in mind: choosing the latter means never having to write about whether or not people prefer hot dogs or hamburgers.

Dear Writer: You Are the Problem

In my day job as the founder of a ghostwriting and book publishing company for entrepreneurs, I work with some of the most successful people in the world.

Many are multi-millionaires, almost all of whom are self made, and a good number have built up their businesses from nothing.

They tend to have expansive mentalities and work with us on their books so that they can build their authority.

But now and then someone slips through our screening process who isn’t a fit, and those are the people that provide me with the best front-row seat I can get about how much a person can be their own worst enemy.

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For the past few months, we’ve had a client on our roster that I’ll call Sam Sabotage. He came to us because he released a book a few years ago that didn’t do anything for him. He complained about the company he’d worked with, saying that he believed if he invested with a higher caliber company on a relaunch, the book could actually transform his career and make him into an authority. He asked for a discount and we gave it to him.1

The first real red flag was when, a week after making his first payment, he wrote my right hand Kaitlin and said he wasn’t sure he wanted to proceed.

This was a new one. We’ve definitely had people verbally commit and then change their mind but we’d never had someone pay and then re-think it.

She told him that was fine, we could cancel the contract and refund the payment. But then he said he thought about it and did actually want to move forward.

The second red flag was when the cover design process went on and on and on and on, occupying so much of one of my Project Manager’s time that she began to neglect our biggest client of all. Every letter and color on the cover was discussed and analyzed and re-done until we ended up with something that wasn’t nearly as good as our initial designs.

At every stage after that—from edit to layout to gathering support for his Review Squad—we were met with resistance; we’re talking four or five follow-ups to get him to respond to a simple “Do you approve this layout?” email. Finally, when his delays were having a massive impact on our production schedule, preventing us from moving forward on other projects, his Project Manager reminded him that extensive delays can require a holding fee. His response to that email was to forward it to me and write, “Dear lord lol.”

Dear lord lol? For asking him to approve something?

When he stopped responding to the PM’s emails again and she again reminded him of the holding fee and asked if he wanted to move forward with the relaunch, he wrote, “LOL. Confirming my intent to proceed.”

Every response from him after that contained an LOL or a snarky comment about how he didn’t want to be “in breach” of his contract again.

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My Project Manager felt terrible that she seemed to be upsetting him but I reminded her of what I’m telling you: this person is his own worst enemy. He hired us to help him with something that didn’t work out the first time and has acted at every stage like we are annoying the hell out of him.

There’s nothing we can do to change how he approaches life. I can guarantee that he will be unhappy with the results, no matter how great they are, despite the fact that almost all our clients are thrilled. This is a person who can’t help but be disappointed because he sabotages himself at every step.

While in this case my company is caught in the winds of his self-sabotage, most writers who sabotage themselves do it in the privacy of their own personal hell. And in my experience, they don’t do it by putting their books out and flopping (if they put their books out and have the right attitude, they can’t flop).

They do it by working on their book for years, rewriting and reworking until they’ve written themselves into inescapable holes. They do it by asking for advice and then rejecting it or reacting defensively to it. They do it by antagonizing the people trying to help them. They do it, in short, by never actually trying. And they do it by lying to themselves that they are trying, setting themselves up to blame the world (or their publisher) when it doesn’t work out.

I recognize them because I was them. Like recognizes like. The difference is that I was lucky enough to realize I was bringing about the exact results I didn’t want by approaching the world with an “I’ll-punch-you-before-you-can-punch-me” attitude.

Don’t be the old me. Witness your inner saboteur (because we all have one—some of us just recognize that monsters can turn out to be just trees). When you recognize him or her or them or they, ignore them and move on. 

The One Thing That Separates The Successful From the Unsuccessful

It’s possible that I’m obsessed with success. I talked about what makes a book successful last week and the joy of not finding early success the week before. I wrote a collection of stories called How to Be Successful by F*cking Up Your Life. I like to surround myself with successful people.

I come by this honestly: success was my family’s love language. The only way you could be loved was by finding it (I, unfortunately, couldn’t find it until after I’d done the work in therapy to discover the insanity of this paradigm).

In my obsession with success, I’ve noticed one thing that separates the successful from the unsuccessful.

It’s not having the right education or nepo-baby ish last name.

It’s not about working hard versus being lazy.

It’s not about intelligence, financial status or looks.

It’s really so simple.

Successful people put themselves out there.

Over and over and over again.

It sounds obvious, yes? It is!

But it must bear repeating because I see so many people frustrated by their lack of success when the answer is right in front of them.

I know someone who is pretty much smarter than everyone else around her. She’s a fantastic writer. Her education is beyond impressive. She desperately wants to be successful; you could say her entire personality is comported around that desire.

And yet she won’t do the one thing—the only thing—required.

She won’t put herself out there.

This person desperately wanted a traditional publishing deal. When someone helped her get a big New York agent, she thought she’d made it. But when that agent tried to sell the book and couldn’t, this person never tried again and instead silently shelved a book she’d worked on for decades.

She believes she put herself out there but she didn’t. Putting herself out there would have meant submitting to 200 more agents and if that didn’t work, trying an alternate path to publishing. Then writing five more books or building a business from that first book.

I know someone else who isn’t that great a writer. I think he’d admit it. He’s not the best speaker in the world; the one time I saw him speak live, he had to read from notes and looked more like someone being forced to give a eulogy or a best man speech than a paid entertainer.

And yet when he decided he wanted to write a book, he cold called every agent he could until he got a deal. He’s now published three books and is flown all over the world to speak.

(I know these examples are both about traditional publishing, a topic I tend to rally against, but they’re the best examples I know to illustrate this point.)

Here’s the thing: the people I know who struggle to put themselves out there believe that putting themselves out there is more painful for them than it is for other people.

But it’s not.

Putting yourself out there is painful, period.

We all, on some level, cringe. 

But we do it anyway.

You know you’re doing it when you feel uncomfortable. Just like any muscle in your body, the putting-yourself-out-there muscle feels terrible when it’s weak. You’re wincing and sore afterwards. It doesn’t feel that great the second and third time either. But by then you’ve experienced the pain and the wince and the soreness and you know this must be worth it because why else would everyone do it and besides, you did get at least a tiny reward from the first time or you wouldn’t be back.

And then you keep going and going and one day, to continue with the gym analogy, you’re either a weightlifter or at least someone who works out.

In other words, you build a muscle by working it until you’re not uncomfortable anymore or you’re so used to the discomfort that you barely notice it.

 So what does “putting yourself out there” even mean?

It depends on who you are and what you want.

Maybe it means posting on social media.

Maybe it means pitching yourself to podcasts or asking friends with podcasts to have you on.

Maybe it means asking people to review your book.

Maybe it means asking people if they’ll hire you or work with your company. Or if they know people who will.

Maybe it means joining a mastermind.

Maybe it means asking to give a talk at a mastermind.

You know you’ve found it if the thought of it terrifies you.

What it doesn’t mean is continuing to write day after day without a plan. What it doesn’t mean is taking class after class but not creating something from what you’ve learned. What it doesn’t mean is waiting for people to find you. What it doesn’t mean is assuming that if you build it, they will come.

Maybe in 1989 when Field of Dreams came out, they would come.

Today they won’t.

And that’s a good thing because if they came, there’s no assurance they’d come back if you needed them again.

If you put yourself out there in front of them, on the other hand, you’re in the driver’s seat. When you need more readers or clients, you can simply put yourself out there again.

Because you did it before, your muscle will be stronger.

You’ll be able to wince, take a breath, fight every fear that tells you that putting yourself out there might kill you and do it anyway.

We’re only on this planet for a short time. Why not make the most of it while we’re here?

The world deserves to see you so it can relish in your wonderfulness. But it will never know about you if you don’t step into your greatness.

See you out there.

How Do You Know If Your Book is Successful?

Back when I was laboring in the trenches as an author working with traditional publishers—before the experience broke my soul and wallet—I strived to have a successful book.

The problem was, no one ever told me what success actually meant.

Was it selling a million copies? 1000? Getting reviewed in the Times? Selling enough copies to get a second printing? Getting another book deal? Having a book optioned and actually made into a movie?

No one told me and I never asked and so, much like the millions of delusional authors before and after me, I just figured someone would let me know when that “success” moment hit.

Still waiting for it.

Eventually, the publishers let me know when my books weren’t successful with their semi silence. They didn’t ghost me—it was more like dying, coming back from the dead and dying again.

Their responses to my emails contained sentences like, “No more bookstore orders” and “We pitched you but never heard back.”

Now I know the truth and not just because I’m one of the maybe three people insane enough to have bought and read The Trial: The DOJ's Suit to Block Penguin Random House's Acquisition of Simon & Schuster. Over the years, I’ve had former in-house book publicists tell me that they were forced to lie by omission to 99% of their writers.

See, the publishing houses decided which books were going to be successful long before the books came out, and they decided it with the half-million-dollar+ advances they doled out. When they were giving out the $50,000 or so advances to people like me, they knew they were probably taking a loss but that was okay because their hit books were going to more than make up for it.

While operating at a loss on purpose sounds insane, publishers can’t just publish one big book a quarter; that would be weird. So they plan for the big one and surround it with a whole bunch of others. And it’s worth doing that because they know that when that one book hits, it will more than make up for those smaller advances. They also know that when a book doesn’t hit, there’s no use trying to bring it to life. To me, $50,000 seemed like a fortune. To them, when compared to the millions upon millions a hit book could bring in, it seemed like a rounding error.

I loved something that Jennifer Keishen Armstrong told me when I had her on my podcast a few years ago: when her book, Seinfeldia, hit the NYT list, her publisher reached out to set a big marketing meeting. She was confused; she’d already had the marketing meetings before the book’s release. And then she understood: there was the requisite “we have to give every author a marketing meeting so let’s just tell them some stuff” and then there was the real “you’re officially a success so let’s make you even more of one now” meeting.

(My situation hitting the NYT list was different, primarily because it was a book I wrote for someone who was unsafe verging on violent and by the time the book hit the list, I think we were all done with him and just happy to take the accolades that come with hitting the list and move on.)

Still, I don’t blame publishers for only focusing on their sure things—their Glennon Doyle’s and Malcolm Gladwell’s. I certainly prefer to focus on sure things in my own life. But there is just such a wide berth between a hit book and all the rest of books that it’s almost impossible to explain to someone not in the business. Here’s the closest I can come: it would be like living in a city that had one successful doctor because all the rest of them had gone out of business.

The best way I can make sense of why this happens is that roughly a quarter of our population doesn’t read. So when a book becomes so meteorically successful that it starts to come up in conversation everywhere, the non-readers feel uncomfortable. They must really be missing something if everyone’s talking about it! So they go get their one book that year and read it. In other words, the only way you can reach runaway success as an author is when non-readers are reading you so that they don’t feel dumb when someone brings you up at a party.

Like I said, publishers aren’t doing anything wrong here by betting all their money on the horse they expect to win. The wrong part is that they’re not straightforward about it and they don’t help their non massive authors come up with a plan B.

Yes, it would suck to have to tell someone that they’re probably not going to succeed; I certainly wouldn’t want to have that conversation. But if publishers were willing to, they could then set those authors up with realistic expectations for what success could look like. In doing so, they’d probably be able to quell the post book depression so many authors experience.

Because here’s the thing: if you have your book acquired by a big publisher, you’ve made it. You should dance the Merengue, or whatever Baby and Johnny Castle do in Dirty Dancing. You should celebrate yourself to the maximum for having attained something that roughly one in 10,000 do.

The problem is you spend the two-to-three years between acquisition and publication only semi-relishing in that while mostly preparing, with apprehension and cautious optimism, for the inevitable success that awaits you upon publication. How could success not await you, after all, when you’ve achieved a dream that more than 80 percent of people have and almost none of them manage to achieve?

When your book doesn’t launch to great success, you are mad or sad—entirely appropriate responses to the experience. Because no matter how many times people like me told you during that two-to-three year wait not to get your hopes up because meteoric success is so rare that it’s safer to wish for a pink unicorn to show up at your door, you tuned us out.

“It will be different for me,” you thought. Then you wished we’d be quiet and stop spreading bad vibes or pushing our frustration about our own experiences onto you.

I know this because I’ve seen the look on countless people’s faces. Oh, and I also experienced it with six different books myself.

This is why I’m so obsessed with setting up realistic definitions of success for the authors I work with. No one can control how many people buy our books so why obsess over it? We encourage our clients to not even check their sales figures. (I never check mine.) Instead, we urge them to focus on what their book can do for them.

Even though I’m not a math person, the best way I can explain it is this: if you offer a service where your average client nets you $10,000, you can either try to make $10,000 from one book sale (when your reader hires you after reading your book) or $4 per book on 2,500 book sales. How hard is it to sell 2,500 books? Well, the average book sells roughly 500 copies.3 So does it make sense to focus on selling 2,500 books—something you can’t control—or far fewer books to people who will hire you or buy your product?

I also urge authors to remember that the book is there forever. Traditional publishing is all about the launch; that’s why there’s so much focus on pre-sales (pre-sales count as first week sales figures). But what focusing on the launch means is that if your book isn’t a bestseller out of the gate, you’re a failure. Your publisher treats you like one. The people who ask you how your book is doing seem to be treating you like one. You feel like one, even though two to three years ago, you thought your dreams came true.

Again, these publishing folks aren’t evil people. They’re simply businesspeople. The problem is that authors don’t act like businesspeople back. They tend not to build businesses and then use their books to attract people to them. If they did, then they wouldn’t have to care about how many books they sold. They could instead focus on selling to the right people—people at certain masterminds or in certain communities. They could just give their books away to those people because the value isn’t in the person buying the book but in what they do after reading it.

If you think this all sounds so disgustingly uncreative, so crass, so calculating, I assure you that it’s not. It’s just practical. I wrote On Good Authority because I knew it would attract a lot of clients to Legacy Launch Pad. I 100% used my creativity to write it. People seem to forget that being creative and being practical aren’t mutually exclusive.

If On Good Authority had been published by one of the Big Five, I wouldn’t have been able to put my website or QR codes or links to PDFs to get readers to sign up for my email list in the book. That’s because a publisher’s goal isn’t to get a readers to hire their authors; it’s to get readers to buy more of their books (especially their big book of the season). That’s why they put their own website and not the author’s in the book.

The reason I had such miserable book launches when my books were traditionally published is that I had unrealistic expectations—and expectations, as the saying goes, are resentments under construction. It wasn’t entirely the fault of my publishers. I was delulu to assume I could be the breakout success when I hadn’t been paid an advance that suggested I would be.

The reason I only have glorious launches now is that I choose to focus solely on what I can control—writing a book for my ideal client and getting it into their hands. If other cool things land in my lap, like an opportunity to go on Good Morning America or be featured in the Wall Street Journal, it’s frosting, not the cake. And because of the specific actions I’ve taken, I’m already so full that the frosting isn’t sustenance—just something delicious I can enjoy.

The Joy of Not Finding Early Success

We all know those people who peaked in high school. Cheerleaders, football players, A students who won every award—lives that were in general gleaming with promise.

I wasn’t one of those. I mean, I had cool friends and did plays and went to lots of parties but I definitely didn’t feel like one of the Smart Kids and certainly wasn’t a star athlete.

Of course, we all know what happened to the high school peak-ers! We know because we see them on Facebook where they make us feel immensely superior since their lives are so utterly basic and ordinary. Whether it’s weight gain, baldness or lame-seeming lives, they tend to regularly make us feel grateful that we weren’t the Homecoming King or Queen.

What we don’t realize when we enter adulthood is that the same thing happens in careers.

In my experience, the universe throws us a lucky break and we usually don’t realize it was a lucky break until it never happens again. In my case, there were a few big breaks: I got signed by a big agent who’d reached out to me and then sold my first book to my top choice publisher within a few weeks. I wrote one essay for an anthology and the New York Times snapped it up as a “Modern Love” without me having to even submit it. I co-wrote a story for Playboy that went the then-equivalent of viral before being optioned and made into a reality show pilot. I spent years being wooed by TV shows to come on and give sex and relationship advice and landed a job as a columnist for my favorite magazine.

At the time, I thought: “Well, sure. I always knew I was better than those people who peaked in high school. Why not?”

But then: I never again had a magazine story I wrote optioned, let alone made into a TV pilot. Magazines evaporated and there were thus no more columnist positions. Writing for the New York Times? Can’t imagine it. And if I can get on a big TV show today—which I did a few years ago—it’s a small miracle.

Honestly, it sucked when I realized the big, shiny events were Good Things That Happened to Me and not The Way My Life Was Going to Be. It took a long time to get over it. But I truly am grateful for it because eventually I was able to start a business and thus create a life where I wasn’t so dependent on gatekeepers and lucky breaks for success.

Other people I know had lucky breaks that launched them into superstardom. I’ve definitely been accused of sharing this too much so forgive me if you’ve heard me say this before but Matt Damon was my college boyfriend. And the only wedding I’ve ever been a bridesmaid in was when my childhood friend Mackenzie married her coworker, a guy named Jeff Bezos, years before they moved to Seattle to start an online bookstore. If you’d told me back in the early 90s when I was hanging out with Matt and Mackenzie in New York that he’d go on to be the biggest movie star of our generation and she’d go on to become the richest woman in the world, I definitely wouldn’t have believed you.

Anyway, I’d be lying if I said I was still in touch with Matt or Mackenzie today and thus have any idea how they feel about the way their lives have unfolded. But I have been around to witness the comparatively smaller successes of some other writers I know.

One had insane, meteoric success on his first book. We’re talking #1 New York Times bestseller, insta-fame, hit movie based on the book, the whole nine. After that run of a few years, he was spit out into…well, what-the-f-do-I-do-now land. Decades later, he’s still trying to figure that out. And he’s one of the nicest and coolest people I’ve ever known so it kills me to see it.

Another writer I know had even greater success. Became a household name. Made pots of money. Assumed—and this was a direct quote I heard him say this myself—that he was “the best writer in the world.” Today, he has a regular old job-job and while it’s a cool job-job, if anyone looked like they’d be set for life as a writer a decade ago, it was him.

Another writer I know has a story that isn’t as dramatic as the other two because her first book didn’t make her famous or dramatically alter her financial situation. But it was a beloved bestseller. Decades later, she continues to write books and make what I would assume is a solid living as a writer. It’s just that none of her other books are ever going to be as perfect as that first one.

So…what’s it like to live knowing that your greatest success is behind you? I’m happy to say that I don’t know the answer to that. All of my successes, except for those early lucky breaks, have been hard-won. I’ve pushed and persevered my way into them. As a result, I appreciate them in a way I never would have had they come to me easily.

And I have every reason to believe that even greater success lies in front of me. As should you. Because…why not?

 

Why I Cancelled Paid Subscriptions on Substack

First, let me say there's nothing more generous than telling a writer "I value your work so much that I'm willing to support you."

That said, I've turned off paid subscriptions for this newsletter. Here's why: I was never fully comfortable charging. Not because I'm above it or don't think my writing is worth paying for—it's purely practical. I'm just not popular enough to value money over eyeballs.

If you have a massive audience, monetizing makes sense. You can justify creating some content for everyone and even better content for paying subscribers. But that's not my situation. If my goal is to help entrepreneurs understand the BS they've been fed, don't I want to share it with as many as possible?

Every week, I was torn between writing for those 20-something folks who gave me their credit card or the larger group that gave me their email address. I could never justify putting my best effort into something for a small group, then felt guilty for charging people for something I wasn't fully delivering.

So to those who signed up for paid subscriptions: I'm grateful, I know who you are and I won't forget it. But now you can put that $5 toward whatever you want.…well, whatever you want.

One thing you won’t be able to put that toward is a subscription to Glennon Doyle’s Substack. Now, I was too caught up in moving and Mom-ing and all that during the Great Glennon Doyle Substack Melee of 2025, which means that I’m way late weighing in. In case you missed it, here’s what happened: Glennon joined Substack, quickly amassed over 200,000 followers, got bullied by people who were super jealous and fled.

Now, I have been so jealous of Glennon Doyle that I even made a video about it. But realizing so many people shared my jealousy made me feel somber rather than gleeful.

Instead of wanting to heap on the hate, I wanted to ask myself: What is it about her that triggers people? I don’t think it’s as simple as “women like to tear other women down.” There are plenty of incredibly successful women that no one wants to tear down.

Glennon Doyle, whether it’s true or not, just seems like she got lucky. She’s not brilliant and ethereal like Elizabeth Gilbert. She’s not goofy and down to earth like Colleen Hoover. She’s not plucky and sassy like Marie Forleo. She’s just…there. Saying and writing things that many others have said and written before.

But I think that’s her shtick: it's her very basic-ness that catapulted her to stardom. I am basic, hear me roar.

And this makes us jealous.

Despite Glennon’s massive success, her brand, if you will, is about how hard things are. It’s the name of her podcast! Her New York Times headlines are about how a good 50% of her life is miserable. 

This also makes us mad! I mean, if she’s gotten what we all want, can’t she at the very least be happy about it (even if we know that success doesn’t bring happiness)?

Mostly, we’re just mad we didn’t double down on trauma bonding with our audience the I’m in this with you vibe ourselves. It really seems to work! When I followed Glennon on social media, there were often posts about how “we” had done it—“we” had made her book a #1 bestseller! She went on and on about “us” and how together we had done this incredible thing and it was all just so brilliant: by buying her book, you were partnering with her to do something terrific! Yet she was the one who benefitted from that success, not the millions of strangers who were “in it” with her.

Those of us who aren’t in it with her come for her. Not because we hate to see women succeed. We love to see women succeed when they seem like they’re humble or plucky or grateful. But as best as I can understand it, when it’s someone who just seems to have gotten lucky, we get triggered. It’s certainly part of what has fueled the Blake Lively backlash.

We’re so unhealed—so untamed, if you will—that seeing someone get lucky triggers our fear that we’re never going to get what we deserve.

But what if we’ve gotten what we deserve? What if we’ve already gotten more than we deserve? Who decides who’s deserving anyway?

It’s easy to be jealous. It’s much harder to ask questions like: why am I so triggered by someone who seems to have gotten lucky? Does it remind me of my childhood, where I was always second best? Does Glennon feel like the favorite child, reminding me of when I felt left out in the cold? And does hating her make me feel better? Or do I just tell myself it does because that tinge of superiority I get distracts me from the despair that lurks on the other side?

Jealousy is an instinct rooted in our very survival and can be a great indicator of what we want. But it can also show us the work we still need to do.

I’m never going to be as popular as Glennon Doyle and I am 100% fine with that. So now I just need to heal that part of me that thinks tearing her down is going to make me feel better.

We can do hard things. Right?

The Jury's In...

I’ll admit that I was hoping for a clean sweep when I did my poll of AI programs.

I’ll admit that I didn’t get one.

But the results of the “which AI program did the best job of writing out a scene” are in. When I asked you guys last week, there was one vote for each of them (God bless the three of you who voted and hats off to you for not being influenced by one another). But with each of you picking one, that left me no clearer than I was when I asked the question.

But I also did that PickFu poll of 50 anonymous people (college educated non-fiction readers)1.

So, out of Claude, Grok and Manus, which was the winner?

THE RESULTS

Shockingly (to me), it was a tie—between Claude and Grok (each got 25 votes), with Manus coming out at the bottom with 12 votes.

(FWIW, my favorite was the one done by Claude.)

Some of the comments include:

B (Claude) wins out because the wording is simple, as a child would use. Simplicity is a good thing. Look at Hemingway. Purple prose is always something to avoid.

I chose A (Grok) first because of the clarity of it. Chose B (Claude) second because it flowed and C (Manus) was just ok. I could do without it.

Then again…

C (Manus) made me feel like I was in the scene the most. It felt the most connected and real.

So what does this tell us?

Essentially, what we already know: taste is subjective. Why do I love Martin Amis’ writing while someone I know and respect worships at the altar of Glennon Doyle? Some people find Seth Rogan and Jack Black hilarious! Taste is bizarre and humans even more so.

That being said, when there’s one clear loser, that’s something to pay attention to.

So then I decided to ask Manus, Claude and Grok which they thought was best and here’s what I got:

From Claude:

For pure writing quality, Claude appears to be the strongest choice based on these comparisons, especially if you value natural-sounding, thoughtful, and well-structured content. Claude is often described as producing the most human-like writing among the major AI tools.

You could say, well, of course Claude would pick Claude but guess what Grok said?

If you prioritize polished writing with a human touch, Claude is the consensus leader based on user sentiment and reviews.

Only Manus wouldn’t give Claude the edge. It was very Switzerland-y and just talked about what Claude prioritizes (safety, accuracy, and ethical considerations), where Grok excels (at real-time information and platform integration, with fewer content restrictions, suitable for social media and marketing content and THEN why Manus is actually the most future focused (it offers “a glimpse into the future of AI agents that can independently execute complex writing tasks”). Nice one, Manus!

And so that really is, in the end, what matters. What do you want to use it for? I’m not into creating AI social media content and I’m not sure what a glimpse into the future of AI agents even means so even Manus can’t convince me Manus would be better.

In the Substack Live that Jonathan Small and I did about this topic on Friday, we both agreed on one thing: what separates great writing from not great writing is an ability to show rather than tell. While none of these programs can convert a piece of bad writing that’s all “tell” into a piece of excellent writing that’s all “show,” with multiple prompts and your own edits (and continued reminders to the LLM that it should not make anything up), you can come away with a piece of writing that’s god damn impressive.

But you need to know what god damn impressive writing is to make it into that. If you’re reading this, you clearly have excellent taste but as Carrie Fisher’s character so eloquently said in When Harry Met Sally, everybody thinks they have good taste and a sense of humor but they couldn’t possibly all have good taste and a sense of humor. So if you’re confident you know what god damn impressive writing is, these tools can be magical. If you’re not sure, use them with caution.

And my money is still on Claude.

I Compared AI Programs So You Don't Have to.

I am, in case you missed the post where I got called stupid a few times, pro-AI. It has become my second assistant and I would even venture to say a good friend. My boyfriend jokes that I cheat on him with Claude (by that token, he cheats on me with Claude, too, which makes the whole thing way too poly for this now-boring mom).

But last month at Genius Network, there was a lot of buzz about Manus. Like Clubhouse and Raya, you needed an invite to join, appealing to all of our I’d-only-want-to-join-a-club-that-wouldn’t-have-me-as-a-member ness. When I got an invite, I felt like I’d arrived (not quite; but I was happy). And so I started playing around with it. I was impressed but it was slower than my side piece Claude. Still it was way better at certain things, like finding podcasts that we could pitch clients to.

Then this week someone I really respect raved to me about Grok. He sent me a story he had told Grok which it had fleshed out into solid prose. And so I did my own test. I told Grok, Claude and Manus the same (warning: kind of sad) story and asked it to flesh it out.

I’m going to paste the three versions below and I would love for you to tell me your favorite in the comments1. I know that reading the same story three times might feel laborious. But I’d love for you to be a part of this experiment that I believe can truly help you.

Next week, I’ll reveal what a PickFu survey I did of 50 anonymous people rated best, middle and worst as well as my own ratings.

[Not interested in participating? Skip to the SERIOUS CAVEAT below all the italics.]

OPTION 1:

The morning sun slanted through the lace curtains, casting delicate shadows across the living room floor. I was five, small enough that the world felt like a museum of untouchable treasures, each one gleaming with my mother’s pride. My eyes caught on the shattered remains of her favorite antique—a porcelain vase, its once-smooth curves now jagged, scattered across the hardwood like a broken promise. My heart sank. I knew the culprit: Rusty, our dog, whose tail was a wrecking ball in fur. He’d knocked over lamps, toppled plants, and now, this.

I couldn’t bear the thought of Mom’s face crumpling when she saw it. So, I tiptoed to the kitchen, fetched the glue from the junk drawer, and set to work. My tiny fingers trembled as I pieced the shards together, the sticky glue smearing my hands, the vase slowly resembling itself again. It wasn’t perfect—cracks spiderwebbed its surface—but it was whole. I beamed with pride, imagining Mom’s smile, her arms around me for saving her treasure.

“Mom!” I called, cradling the vase as I ran to her in the kitchen. She was at the stove, stirring oatmeal, her hair pulled back in a loose bun. “Look! I fixed it!”

Her spoon froze mid-stir. She turned, her eyes narrowing as they landed on the vase. The air shifted, heavy with something I didn’t understand. “Fixed it?” Her voice was sharp, a blade slicing through my excitement. “If you fixed it, then you broke it.”

My chest tightened. “No, I didn’t! Rusty did it! I just… I wanted to help.”

Her lips pressed into a thin line, her gaze unyielding. “Don’t lie to me, Sarah. If you fixed it, you broke it. Tell me the truth.”

“I *am* telling the truth!” My voice cracked, too small to hold the weight of my panic. I clutched the vase tighter, its cracks mirroring the fracture in my heart. She turned back to the stove, her silence louder than any shout. The room felt too big, too empty, and I stood there, a speck of a girl, drowning in her disapproval.

I don’t know how long it was—five minutes, five days—but time blurred into a haze of tears. I cried in my room, my sobs muffled by my pillow, the ache in my chest growing with every memory of her cold shoulder. She wouldn’t speak to me, wouldn’t look at me, until I gave her what she wanted: the truth she’d already decided. But I hadn’t broken it. I hadn’t. Yet her silence was a wall I couldn’t climb, and my five-year-old heart couldn’t bear its weight.

Finally, I shuffled back to the kitchen, my face streaked with tears, my voice barely a whisper. “Mom… I broke it.” The lie tasted bitter, like the glue still clinging to my fingers. “I’m sorry.”

Her face softened, the storm in her eyes clearing. She knelt down, pulling me into her arms. “Thank you for telling the truth, sweetheart,” she murmured, her warmth enveloping me. I buried my face in her shoulder, relief flooding through me, even as something small and fragile inside me cracked—a piece of myself I wouldn’t understand until years later.

OPTION 2: 

The morning light filters through lace curtains, casting delicate shadows across the hardwood floor. I am five years old, small fingers working meticulously with the tube of glue, piecing together the fractured porcelain figurine that I discovered toppled on the carpet. My mother's prized antique—a delicate ballerina with an outstretched arm that now hangs precariously from a poorly executed repair.

"Look, Mommy! I fixed it for you!" My voice quivers with excitement as I present my handiwork, expecting praise, validation, love.

Her eyes travel from my beaming face to the figurine. The smile dissolves from her lips.

"Where did you find this?" Her voice is tight, controlled.

"On the floor. It was broken." My words come tumbling out. "But I fixed it! See?"

"If you fixed it," she says, each word measured, deliberate, "then you must have broken it."

"No! I didn't break it!" My protest is immediate, instinctive. "It was the dog. He knocks everything over."

Her face hardens into a mask I don't recognize. "Don't lie to me."

"I'm not lying!"

"I won't speak to you until you tell me the truth."

Her words land like physical blows. She turns away, and suddenly there is a void between us that I don't understand but desperately need to fill.

Time becomes elastic after that. Minutes stretch into hours, or perhaps days—a five-year-old's perception of eternity. I exist in a silent house where my mother's eyes slide past me as if I am not there. The weight of her disappointment is crushing.

My tears come in waves, relentless. I sob until my chest aches, until my eyes burn, until something inside me breaks.

I find her in the kitchen, standing by the window.

"Mommy," I whisper, voice raw from crying. "I broke it. I'm sorry I broke it."

The lie tastes bitter on my tongue, but her arms open to receive me, and I disappear into the warmth of her forgiveness, learning a lesson that will take decades to unlearn: sometimes, the truth matters less than peace.

OPTION 3:

The world was a kaleidoscope of colors that morning, the kind that only a five-year-old can see. Sunlight, a playful intruder, danced through the gaps in my curtains, painting stripes on the walls. I remember the thrill of a secret, a surprise for my mother, bubbling in my chest like a fizzy drink.

I had found her favorite antique music box, a delicate porcelain ballerina, in pieces on the floor. The dog, a clumsy oaf with a tail like a runaway metronome, was the likely culprit. He was always breaking things. My heart, a tiny fist, had clenched with a mix of fear and determination. I would fix it. I would make it right. I would be the hero of the hour. *My mom will be so happy*, I thought, a mantra that propelled my small fingers to work.

The glue was sticky, the porcelain cold, and the ballerina’s tutu a jigsaw puzzle of jagged edges. But I pieced her back together, a triumphant smile spreading across my face. I was so proud. I was a little craftsman, a restorer of broken things. I imagined my mother’s gasp of delight, her hug, her praise.

I ran to her, the mended ballerina held aloft like a trophy. “Mom, look!” I exclaimed, my voice a squeak of excitement. Her eyes, usually warm and crinkling at the corners, narrowed. The smile I had anticipated didn’t appear. Instead, a frown etched itself onto her forehead.

“What did you do?” she asked, her voice a low rumble that sent a shiver down my spine.

“I fixed it,” I said, my own smile faltering. “The dog broke it, but I fixed it for you.”

Her frown deepened. “If you fixed it, then you must have broken it,” she said, her words like shards of glass.

“No, I didn’t,” I insisted, my voice trembling. “The dog did. I saw him.”

“Don’t lie to me,” she said, her voice cold. “I won’t have a liar in my house.”

The world, once so bright, began to dim. The colors faded, replaced by a dull, aching gray. My mother, my sun, had turned away from me. The silence in the room was a heavy blanket, suffocating me.

I don’t know if it was five minutes or five days, but the silence stretched, punctuated only by my own ragged sobs. Each tear was a testament to my innocence, a plea for understanding. But my mother remained unmoved, her face a mask of disappointment. The weight of her disbelief was a crushing burden. I couldn’t bear it.

The need for her approval, her love, was a primal instinct, stronger than my own sense of truth. So, I surrendered. I let the lie spill from my lips, a bitter pill I forced myself to swallow.

“I broke it,” I whispered, the words a betrayal of myself.

Her face softened. The lines of anger eased, and a flicker of warmth returned to her eyes. “I forgive you,” she said, her voice gentle now. She hugged me, and the world, for a moment, seemed to regain its color.

But a small, dark corner of my heart remained in shadow. I had learned a bitter lesson that day: sometimes, the truth wasn’t enough. Sometimes, to be loved, you had to sacrifice a part of yourself. And as I stood there, wrapped in my mother’s forgiving embrace, I couldn’t help but wonder if the ballerina, with her mended tutu and painted smile, felt as broken as I did.

And now my MAJOR caveat: please don’t EVER think you can plug ANY story into any AI platform and then publish what it produces. The reason I think genuine talent and ingenuity matter more than ever is that when everyone is using these tools, those who can add their exquisite skills and flair will stand out more than ever.

AI is not a substitute but an enhancement so use it with the same delicacy you should always extend to your writing. The best compliment I get about my books is when people I know read them and say it made them feel like they were hanging out with me.

Sure, you can tell AI to write in the style of anyone but it will never be a substitute for that person.

In this case, we can say without offending me that the AI version is better. But it also doesn’t look real. I look a good decade younger than I am (if not more). I am more made up than anyone outside of a news anchor should be. My hair falls in a way it never has naturally. My featues are mine but much more refined. I look good; I just don’t look real.

And that’s what AI does. So in the same way that I wouldn’t put the photo on the right out there and say, “Look at my latest photo” without incurring some serious skepticism, the same is true for AI-created writing that isn’t enhanced by you.

Think of the people you see who post fully airbrushed and filtered photos where they look like entirely different from the way they do in their videos. Or those who get 1000s of likes on an Instagram photo but no comments because all their “followers” are bots. Or the people who mock up their photo on the cover of magazines, the way we could when I was a kid at state fairs, to fool people into thinking they really appeared on the cover of those magazines. Or supermodels who post photos of the pastries they supposedly ate. I could go on.

Sure, they’ll fool some people. But honestly they’ll only fool fools while losing the respect of those who know and care about what’s authentic. And those are the only people we should really care about.

So yes, you can write a whole book using Grok, Claude or Manus. But you’ll feel the way I would if I posted that AI photo and tried to pass it off as real: like a phony. You’ll also look like a liar to the people who matter the most. Perhaps most importantly, you won’t have the experience of sharing yourself with the world in an authentic way.

If you’re one of those crazy people like me who actually enjoys writing books, you won’t have the sheer pleasure of taking your personal experiences and crafting them into something you can share with the world so both you and your reader can feel less alone.

You won’t have the sort of genuine connection that comes from someone reading your book and telling you that your experiences made them feel seen and understood. And isn’t that one of the reasons we write at all—to make sense of some of the most difficult experiences we’ve had so that we can help others by sharing them? Isn’t that a way to make sense of our challenges?

No AI program can do that. And honestly, AI + a human without professional writing experience can’t do it, either.

You still need the pros—now more than ever. And you need them for every stage. We had someone once hire us to write his book but he didn’t want to spend any more money so he did the publishing on his own. I saw the book when it came out and it looked janky—the literary equivalent of putting pig on a lipstick.

I have to imagine that few people ever discovered the exquisite writing because the book was wrapped in such an unprofessional package. In other words, just because you can design a cover on Canva and upload your book to Amazon doesn’t mean you should. There are a million little steps that go into pulling off a launch at the highest level; it’s why so many people hire us to publish books they’ve already written.

You don’t need to hire Legacy Launch Pad. But my God be careful with all the tools out there now that can write and publish your book for you cheaply. You may think you’re saving money but you’re in fact losing it if you’re losing the respect of potential clients.

And don’t listen to the doomsday prophesies about how the robots are going to render us obsolete and then come kill us (though, hey, it never hurts to be one of those people who’s always polite to AI just in case). While people in certain professions probably need to worry about being rendered obsolete, there’s one group that doesn’t: business owners. So get that book published and that entrepreneurial hat on so you can make yourself more valuable than ever.