Anna David's Blog, page 3

Let's Be Tacky and Talk Money.

I hate how crass I feel talking about money and writing.

Somehow, it’s okay to talk about it when it comes to investment banking or accounting but not with writing. It’s fine for the guy at the deli to say, “That will be $12” when handing you a sandwich but it’s not fine to say you want to make money from your book.

But that’s crazy. We all need money and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with wanting more of it.

Even if we’re writers.

When I tell people it’s far better to write a book that will build their authority because bringing in millions is far better than bringing in hundreds through their book sales, often they’ll look at me like I’m the tackiest person alive. They want to be creative and write from their heart so how dare I sully their pure goals with my foul talk of dollars? The thought bubble above their head reads: I will not sell out the way this woman has.

But I don’t think wanting to be compensated for your work means you’re a sell-out; I think it means you value yourself. Unless you’re financially set and know what you’re getting into, a book should be more than volunteer work.

“But I want to help people,” some will say, as if helping people and making money are somehow mutually exclusive.

One of my first clients, Chris Joseph, looked at me like I was crazy when I told him this. We were publishing his first book, Life is a Ride—a memoir about how his experience finding an alternative treatment for pancreatic cancer. I told him I thought he should become a cancer coach and use the book to attract people to hire him.

I don’t know for a fact that he thought I was being tacky but I do know he was against the idea.

And yet just this week, he wrote in his Substack about his journey to becoming a cancer coach.

My point is: never say never.

And my second point is you may be in the Pre Book Blur.

What is the Pre Book Blur?

Well, if you’ve been writing a book—which can mean anything from handwriting you can barely read on a napkin to 500+ pages—and have a sinking feeling you’re not going in the right direction, you have some of the the symptoms.

If you been talking about writing a book for anywhere between one month and 30+ years, you have some the symptoms.

If you’ve been told you need to write a book and it rang true but you’ve made no movement to start, you have some the symptoms.

And I’m here to offer you a treatment.

Maybe you’ll feel relieved the way I did when I got a diagnosis for the batshit behavior I’d been up to (alcoholism). Like with alcoholism, the Pre-Book Blur is a self-diagnosed condition. And if you haven’t heard of it before, that’s not weird because I just coined it.

I meet more people who are suffering from this condition than not. And I believe there are one of six potential reasons why some suffer for so long:

They don’t know who to ask for advice

They’ve asked too many people already and received conflicting or confusing information

They’ve convinced themselves that despite no professional book writing or publishing experience, they don’t need help

They’ve convinced themselves, despite the nagging voice inside them, that publishing a book isn’t a priority so they can focus on it later, only half understanding that later may never come

They’ve convinced themselves that their idea is SO good that a traditional publisher will acquire their book, despite the fact that they don’t have a big audience so it’s a lost cause since traditional publishers don’t care about how good an idea is; they care about how well a book will sell

They’re scared (although number 6 is probably sprinkled throughout the other reasons)

These people remind me a bit of the alcoholics who are always going to get sober tomorrow. They know they could change their lives but they simply don’t. And I get it. Change is uncomfortable. It’s easier to stay where you are than to step into your greatness.

And if you’re not writing the right book, I promise it’s way better to stop now and get started on the right now. You can probably use at least some of what you’ve already written in the wrong book and just altering the angle so that it helps build your authority can mean it works for you for the rest of your instead of just sitting on a shelf collecting dust.

So if you’re in the blur, I have some medicine for you. And it’s free.

While not everyone can afford Legacy Launch Pad writing, editing and publish services, anyone can use our free Unique Authority Book Concept Generator.

Here’s what can happen if you get out of the blur and into creation:

In the last few weeks…

I’ve watched one client hit the top of Amazon, land feature stories in top magazines and tour the country.

Another has appeared on Sherri Shepherd’s show and gathered hordes of folks at his events.

Another was featured in Entrepreneur and Los Angeles magazines.

Previous clients have, respectively, added half a million dollars to their annual bottom line within a few months of the book release, appeared in the New York Times, launched $10k-a-gig speaking careers and so much more.

 

I promise you that your biggest block is you.

Oh, and the blur. The pre-book blur sucks. Too bad there’s no solution.

Oh, whoops. I already told you one.

If I’m wrong about you, please tell me in the comments!

Oh and that Unique Authority Book Concept Generator is here.

Maybe You Need to Dig That Old Idea Out of the Trash?

Back when I was a delusional youth, living in Manhattan under the mistaken belief that a writer should live near her publisher and agent, I was working on what I imagined would be my third novel.

While I looked successful on the outside—I was regularly shuttled in Town Cars to the Fox News building to give my not-that-interesting take on many things1—the reality was pretty bleak. The publishing industry was just beginning to fall apart: publications that had recently paid me $2 a word were now asking me to write for free, my second book deal was for half the amount of money as my first and I’d been replaced by an alcoholic mannequin on the TV show where I’d been doling out advice for three years.

Also, it turned out my agent and publisher couldn’t have cared less that I was nearby—this wasn’t Sex and the City and I wasn’t Carrie Bradshaw. Also, it occurred to me too late, Carrie’s publisher and agent weren’t characters on the show—probably because they don’t need to interact with their clients in person.

My agent was a straight shooter. She’d found me when I was a magazine columnist and cold emailed me to tell me she loved my voice and that I should let her know if I ever wanted to write a book. I had just finished writing Party Girl that week so I sent it to her and she sold it the next week. She was so good to me—before I lived in New York, when she was going on her honeymoon, she let me stay in her apartment2—but I blamed her for the fact that my career wasn’t going the way I thought it should.

One night a few months after I’d moved to New York and some time before my second novel was released, she asked if we could go to dinner. Finally, the Down with Love sort of scene I’d been waiting for! I pictured (sober) cheers-ing and general ebullience, but instead she wanted to share a thought she’d been having about me: would I be interested in writing under a pen name?

A pen name? I spit out. But why?

“It’s a way to get around disappointing sales of a first book,” she responded, not at all unkindly. “Being an unknown can be better.”

I don’t remember exactly what I said but I’m going to guess that it wasn’t enthusiastic. I probably blustered on about how Party Girl had gotten more media attention than I could have even imagined and didn’t she remember the intense bidding war over the movie rights and did she not understand that I’d spent years building up my name and the thought that she considered it a hindrance was insulting?!!! What I know for sure is that this was the last time she and I broke bread.

As time went on and my second book was released to more oh-so-dreaded disappointing sales, I warmed to the idea of a pen name. I even started to think that I could go full JT Leroy and write under a male pen name. In college, I’d been a Catcher in the Rye obsessive who wrote all her stories from the point of view of a cynical male youth. And when I was on contract at magazines and therefore not allowed to write for any publication that would be considered a competitor (but I still needed money), I would write under the name Benjamin Fairway (my middle name and the name of the street I grew up on).

And so, shortly after that final dinner that I didn’t know would be a final dinner with my agent, I started channeling my inner male to write my third novel. Sexual Healing was about a suave, wealthy dude in New York who becomes obsessed with the one girl who won’t sleep with him. Then he finds out she’s going to a rehab in Arizona for sex addicts and is convinced this is why she won’t have sex with him—that she’s an addict and is scared she might become addicted to him. So he shows up at the rehab, pretending to be a sex addict himself (the irony being that he pretty much is one), only to discover she’s a sexual “anorexic” who also happens to be seriously pissed off that he’s followed her there.

Writing the plot out now, I can see why I abandoned the book. It’s not that captivating a story. I was trying to do a send-up of the ridiculous world of people who take their recovery a bit too seriously and it was based on this wacky experience I’d had when I went to a workshop at a place called the Meadows in 2005 (an experience I still resent, which is perhaps an excellent example of me trying to punish through the pen and realizing it doesn’t produce great results).

I will stand by the fact that the book was very funny, though a bit crude (there’s a scene where the protagonist Will jerks off to a picture of the woman he’s obsessed with but the computer freezes on a picture of her with her dad and he ends up destroying his computer—a scene I read aloud at one of Rachel Kramer Bussel’s In the Flesh nights at the Happy Ending Lounge; if you were in New York in the aughts, you know the significance of this). The characters were well developed, especially my favorite, Will’s assistant Molly, who had a penchant for caftans and a Dutch pot dealer boyfriend.

And I meticulously plotted this book out. My first two books, Party Girl and Bought, I’d written without outlines. There’s a word for this kind of writer that I didn’t know (being a pantser and not a plotter) but I was essentially someone who wrote books, assuming I’d figure them out as I went. With Sexual Healing, however, I wrote out elaborate notes for each scene.

I also joined a writing workshop run by a woman who’d written a hilarious first book—a book that had actually made me want to be a writer. Her book had attracted such a cult following that she drew in a steady stream of aspiring writers to her Washington Square apartment for writing workshops.

I’m sure I had major attitude in that workshop. I was the only member of the group who’d had a book published and another coming out—both from HarperCollins. I remember thinking this group was beneath me…wanna-be’s who wanted to debate every comma. And so when I shared my precious pages, I probably only wanted to hear how brilliant I was and how my writing couldn’t possibly be improved.

Still, I remember feeling like the workshop leader was harder on me than she was on the other people and everyone kind of worshipped her so she would say something and then they would all just kind of parrot it. Eventually the feedback and the sycophantism got to be too much for me and even though I was more than halfway done, I walked out of that workshop and away from the book. Benjamin Fairway was not, as it turned out, going to get his debut.

Now and again, I’d take a look at Sexual Healing. When I moved back to LA and signed with a manager in 2010, I told him the plot and he said it would make a great movie and so we worked on the script version. But the script was bad so I abandoned that, too. Occasionally, I’d think, Just finish it. It’s probably 75% done so why let it go to waste? But then what? I’d think. Go through the hell of having my agent submit it to publishers only to hear that I didn’t have enough Instagram followers to warrant a book deal?

Also, in the 15 years since I’d started writing the book, I’d realized not only that traditional publishing was dead but also that novel-writing was not a practical pursuit. I love reading novels—I review them on TV and occasionally write about them for LA Magazine—but the simple fact is that they’re creative volunteer work since they can’ help you build your career as an authority and thus won’t earn you money. At Legacy Launch Pad, we’ve turned down every novelist who’s ever wanted to work with us because I don’t want to take money from someone I don’t think can earn back 10-100 times what they pay us.

But now that LLP is established and I have the luxury of remebering that I can write for fun and for free, I decided I wanted to try doing a novel again. I told you guys about the novel that I asked Chat GPT to help me brainstorm ideas for but what I didn’t tell you is that the characters are Will, Alison and Molly—those same fabulous folks I created back in New York in 2009. I remembered them and loved them and though they now have different jobs and different relationships with each other, they are them. And they’re them in a much better plot.

I had no idea in 2009 when I wanted to murder the people giving me the useless feedback at the writing workshop, or when I decided to abandon the book, or when I was working on the script with the manager whose name I can’t even remember anymore, that I would end up using these characters one day. I hadn’t thought about them in years and if I had, I would have assumed they were lost to the ether. But they’re back and I didn’t even need to re-read an old draft of Sexual Healing to remember them; I’d created something that had lasted inside of me and so they’re as familiar to me now as they were 15 years ago. Bringing them into this new book makes me realize I never left them.

Maybe you have something you abandoned long ago that’s just waiting for you to breathe new life into it, too. And maybe, just maybe, this post is a sign that you should.

If Anyone's Going to be an A-hole in Your Book, Let it be You

Writers love to punish through the pen.

It makes sense. When we’ve been wronged, we’re desperate for people to know. We want to be able to share our what happened with people who will listen and be on our side.

And who better to tell than readers? We’re talking to a group of people who are (hopefully) on our side. Keeping all this in mind (as well as the fact there are three sides to every story—your side, their side and the truth), let me share about what happened to me in the past week.

My boyfriend, son and I moved into our new, dream home and in the process, our heretofore lovely relationship with our realtor devolved into a (text) screaming match. It ended with him telling us he had no respect for us and repeatedly saying he couldn’t believe how awful we were being “after all I’ve done for you.”

This was all because he had mistakenly (and repetaedly) told us we were moving on a Tuesday and we only found out about his mistake midday Monday.

The reason the last minute news was a big deal was not only because we had movers scheduled and were ready to get the F out of our house to begin our new adventure but because I’d arranged a trip around our moving date. And when you have a toddler, plans changing at the last minute always makes the volume, in Spinal Tap parlance, go up to 11.

Even though we’d confirmed that Tuesday was the day in every form of writing short of a carrier pigeon, his mistake itself wouldn’t have been a big deal if he’d handled it differently.

See, we kept asking him and his office what time we’d get the keys on Tuesday and his office kept saying they’d check. That Monday, when we emailed and said we really needed to know what time and how we’d be getting the keys the next morning, the realtor’s assistant responded that we’d be getting them on Wednesday. We panicked because of all the aforementioned reasons. Then we saw the email trail she forwarded, which showed she’d only asked the owner’s realtor for the keys that morning. My boyfriend called her, asking what had happened, and she burst into tears, saying she’d screwed up. I grabbed the phone and when I realized she was crying, I told her it was okay, it wasn’t her fault, we’d work it out. Then we called our realtor on his cell.

This was a man who, during the entire process of selling our home and purchasing the new one, picked up on the first ring, ever delighted to hear from us. But his (exorbitant) commissions on the two houses had gone through the week before, and the previously charming, delightful man was replaced by an ogre.

The Ogre said he was busy tending to his other “rolodex” of clients and how dare we think we were the only ones. Also, we’d made his assistant cry and that was not okay with him. I admit that we lashed back at him, saying he’d told us the wrong day and I now had to change my trip and we had to pay the movers to change days and switch childcare and blah blah blah. That’s when he started in on how much he’d done for us and how he had no respect for us.

I texted him screenshots of him confirming that Tuesday would be our move in date and his only response was, “You can stop sending me screenshots.” Furthermore, he explained, everyone knows that when a realtor says you get keys on a certain day, that realtor means 5 pm and he didn’t know he had to explain such a basic thing to us. (I’ve checked with a few realtor friends and turns out that’s not a thing.)

Anyway, it was ugly, made all the uglier when it turned out the previous owners had not moved out when we showed up on Wednesday with our belongings. It was all very surreal—them moving their things out while we were moving ours in—and we’re still finding drawers filled with their mail, boxes of their things and tons of broken items. It was also filthy when we’d been assured by The Ogre that it would be clean.

Can you imagine if, instead of the scene I described, The Ogre had just responded, “Oy, I screwed up. Also, the owners haven’t moved out yet. I know it’s not great but can we just switch your move to the next day?”

Instead, a man whose entire business is based on relationships and reputation lost what would have been a lifelong client (I bought my previous house through him). Also, I know the head of his agency since I interviewed him for an article. And I write for a lot of publications where I could share this experience. I could also pull the trigger at any time on a review for him on any one of the sites where he can be reviewed. His behavior just doesn’t seem like good business.

Now. Do you see how I told that story? He’s a monster, I’m an innocent victim. While at this point in time, I truly believe both of those things, I also know that 1) He was just reacting from fear and that’s something I could have sympathy for, 2) Jim and I could have responded calmly to the situation, since in the scheme of things it’s not a big deal and 3) Because we’ve had a relationship with him for years and he’s always been great before, we could just assume he was having a bad day.

Instead I’m swearing vengeance, fantasizing about conversations with his boss and articles/reviews I could write.

So here’s what I’m getting at: this resentment is fresh and so now would not be the time to write the scene for a book. We’re talking, after all, about something that happened a few days ago. So if I I wanted to include this in a book, I would wait until I’d processed the resentment more. Also, I would show rather than tell by creating the scene rather than telling you about it. But perhaps most importantly, I would let you come to the decision that the realtor is an a-hole without me shoving it down your throat.

Why? Because in the process of trying to garner sympathy, writers become annoying. Somehow, trying to get sympathy gives you the opposite. I guarantee that you’ve read books where the writer was still mad at someone they were writing about and so, while writing about the terrible thing the person did to them, they were filled with righteous self-indignation. And I guarantee that you were turned off. Maybe you didn’t know why you didn’t like the writer but you didn’t.

My point is: process first. Then pen. Paint the person who did the terrible thing or things as a full person, not just an ogre. If I were putting the Real Estate Ogre anecdote in a book, I would show all the lovely things he did before Ogre day, how genuinely happy he was for us when we got the house and how funny he can be. Then, when I wrote the Ogre scene, you’d feel my genuine surprise at his behavior. You’d be on my side because I wouldn’t be working overtime to try to show you how wrong he was and how right I was. I’d also share more less-than-lovely behavior on my part during the interaction, maybe even some of my a-hole responses back to him.

Doing fourth steps in 12-step programs teaches you something it’s hard to forget and it’s oh so useful to know when writing about a-holes: when we’re mad at someone, our egos go into overdrive, trying to convince us of how right we are. In its take-all-prisoners mode, the ego ignores the way we contributed to the situation—it literally erases our bad behavior from our memory. It’s only when forced to write out exactly what happened that we see the part we played. (This isn’t true is, of course, in cases of abuse when someone is truly powerless and an innocent victim.)

My point is this: even though it can feel incredibly satisfying, don’t do what I did here and write a scene while the resentment is still fresh. Instead, work out what really happened and the part you played with a sponsor or therapist or friend. Unless you’re writing about outright abuse at a time when you were fully powerless, keep working on it until you see the part you played.

Then start your writing for the general public. Or don’t wait and bust out with it while you’re still pissed.

But you may risk coming off like the a-hole, which would really suck since it was actually them.

(Speaking of being an a-hole, I would be one if I didn’t mention that the title of this post is a quote attributed to Mary Karr.) 

 

I Feel Like I Need to Apologize for My Age (And That's Crazy)

Aging can feel so embarrassing. You get to the point sometimes where you feel like, by agreeing to the process, you’re participating in something terribly inappropriate. Surely this is exacerbated when you live in LA. And I’m certainly not the first to point this out but it truly is mind-blowing that there are protests and coalitions and marches for every marginalized community in the world—except for the one we will all one day join (if we’re lucky).

I’ve always looked young for my age and these days, if I announce my age and am not met with a shocked face or an immediate demand for my skincare regimen, I am violently offended and swear immediate vengeance. I actually resent my Oura ring for daring to tell me that my biological age corresponds with my cardiovascular age. Recount! I want to shriek at the app. A few months ago, I told my trainer I wanted to be in better shape and he responded with something like, “Well, you’re probably in the top 95th perecentile for your age.”

Did I focus on “top 95th percentile”? Hell, no. All I heard was “for your age,” which sounds especially galling when uttered by a fresh-faced young man.

OMG I write things like fresh-faced young man. Do you see what I mean?

For a while, I kept wishing that there were planets for various age groups: the 20-30-somethings go to one, 30-40-somethings to another. You get the idea. That way, you can forget in your 50s what 20-year-old skin looks like, or what it was like to subsist on pizza and beer and still have a flat stomach. On my 50-something planet, I would never hear a 20-something young man say the words “for your age” because everyone would be my age.

Of course with youth comes a lot of idiocy—or at least it did in my case. I truly believed, in my 20s and 30s and let’s be honest probably 40s too, that getting the writing career I wanted would bring me happiness. Have you ever heard of something so ridiculous? Oh yeah…you probably have because you probably once believed something like that, too?

I remember when my first book, Party Girl, was out for submission and my top choice publisher—Regan Books—was considering it. My agent told me on a Friday that offers, if there were any offers, would be in on Monday. I spent that weekend telling myself that if in fact my book sold to Regan Books, I would be happy for the rest of my life.

And guess what? It did sell to Regan Books and I kept my promise—for at least a week. And then I had the horrifying, stupefying, ridiculous realization that nothing—that is, no thing—would ever make me happy forever and that the only thing worse than not getting what you want is getting what you want and realizing it doesn’t fill you.

Much has been written about the depression that sets in once you release your book but mine was especially sharp because between acquistion and release, Judith Regan was fired and Regan Books dissolved. Nobody explained to me that my dream had officially died because there was nobody there to explain it. My book was released to, as they say in the business, disappointing sales.

Many books and disappointments later, I can relish in a truly wonderful part of aging: understanding, and not just giving lip service to, the fact that no amount of literary success (or sample sale clothes) (or love) (or sugar-free mini Hershey’s bars) can bring happiness.

The good part of that (because let’s be honest, that first part is not wonderful) is this: those experiences can bring me happiness…if I’ve already have found it somewhere else first (that is, inside or through a spiritual connection, which I kind of consider the same thing). I had so many years of feeling disappointed by alleged successes that I had started to assume that having dreams come true meant misery.

Turns out that’s not the case. But kind of like how the people who can afford whatever they want are the only ones given free clothes, having a great thing happen in your career can only make you happy if you’ve done the internal work necessary to not need to have “great” things happen in order for you to feel good.

This year, getting featured in the Wall Street Journal and then, separately, having a bunch of new people find this Substack because of the post I wrote about AI did make me happy. And that’s because I’m old enough to know I can’t rely on those things for happiness—that if I’m already full, I don’t need anything to fill me up. You don’t need to grasp at good news like it’s the life raft that will save you if you’re already already walking on land. I spent so many years looking for those rafts rather than getting out of the water.

My point with all of this is: why not write the damn thing, whatever the thing is? Why not publish the damn thing? Why not do that again and again and again? It’s not too late. Mike White is writing and directing every episode of the TV show everyone is obsessed with at 54. This woman’s 80-something mom just released a book on Jane Austen. Doing it isn’t going to make you happy anyway, unless you’re already happy, so what’s the risk?

Of course, when you have that kind of attitude, the result can’t help but be successful. The universe does its best work when we let it.

AI: The Plot Thickens (And So Does Its Intelligence)

When I wrote last week’s Substack about AI, I expected the same sort of response I usually get: a few likes, maybe a comment or two and then the occasional incredibly kind email from a reader telling me how much they like this Substack.

I had not been expecting (as of now):

102 likes

38 comments

12 restacks

Nearly 100 new subscibers

The topic touched a nerve and that’s awesome. Of course, touching a nerve comes with some hits and I first got wind of the fact that nerves were being touched when I randomly signed onto Facebook1 and realized that when I posted about a link to my Substack on Instagram, it also went on Facebook. Instagram had a lukewarm response. On Facebook, however, I was being called stupid and accused of not having experienced having my work stolen by AI (if they’d read the piece, they’d have known that wasn’t true).

But the comments on the actual post are astoundingly nice. I didn’t realize how many people there were who agreed with me about AI but who didn’t feel like they were allowed to express it. And the people who disagreed had such clear, salient points. To be clear, I 100% understand the risks, both for our children and for humanity. My point was that those risks are here but so are many benefits so why not enjoy the benefits rather than just lament the risks?

Also, yes we can make predictions but we cannot see the future. Heavily anticipated horrors often never arrive (Y2K survivors, raise your hands) while horrors we never expected can subsume us (insert your own parenthetical). So doomsday propheciers seem to only succeed in making the time before the anticipated horrible thing miserable. Life seems hard enough without that, no?

For anyone wanting to explore the AI world more, here’s a (partial) list of the way I’ve used Claude in the past month: 

I uploaded a client’s book and asked for it to take the best 20 quotes to make into social media posts.

I took a friend’s (way too long) book and asked Claude for suggestions for cuts. My friend and his cowriter had planned to go and ask dozens of people for feedback to figure out what to cut. Can you imagine how long it would take 12 people to provide feedback on 700 pages? I can barely get feedback on seven words! Anyway, they’re now rewriting the book based on Claude’s feedback.

I asked it for clever names for a podcast I’m considering starting.

I asked it to convert a book into a PowerPoint presentation.

I asked it to help me shorten a client’s bio.

I asked it to help me write a client’s book description, incorporating in keywords I wanted it to have.

I asked it to give me potential chapter titles for the novel I’m writing.

I asked it for some “elegant” last names because there’s a very wealthy family in the novel and the only last name that was coming to mind was Ratliff2

I asked it for recommendations for podcasts we could pitch a client to.

I asked it for help coming up with social media posts congratulating clients on their book launches.

I asked it to explain why the layout of a certain book wasn’t working and how to make a certain page end up on the left and another on the right.

I asked it for five facts about Garcelle Beauvais, since I was going to be introducing her at my client Christos Garkinos’ launch

That is just the proverbial tip of the iceberg. And please note: not one of these things infringed on my creativity at all. It just saved me from having to spend the time I would spend being creative on things I don’t like doing.

Writers Are Getting AI All Wrong

Since the day Chat GPT arrived on our shores, we’ve been told we have to worry.

AI was, we were informed, the death knell. Creative people were finished. Also non creatives. Also everyone else. Every headline screamed the same. The robots weren’t just coming for us; they were here.

Here’s where I agree: AI is here. Very much. And since that’s the case, doesn’t it make more sense to try to acclimate to this new reality so we don’t get left behind rather than freak out about how horrible it is?

I don’t know about you but when faced with something I don’t like, the times I’ve picked acclimation over freak out-imation, things have gone much better.

This week, the Society of Authors was out there protesting Meta’s use of AI. This protest will probably make as much of a difference as a wild boar fighting Zuckerberg’s bullets when he’s gunning for dinner. Zuckerberg was probably too busy picking up the keys for his new $23 million mansion to give this protest more than a second’s thought.

Last week’s New York Times story about my generation is as death knell-y as it gets. You could say I’m the target audience: it describes starry-eyed folks who set out to work at magazines in the early 90s. It quotes people I know and worked with, all of them lamenting about the fact that this world we came of age in no longer exists. They talk about how they’re going back to school to become therapists or submitting their resumes to companies already overstuffed with resumes of other fellow sad sack Gen-Xers or just sounding mystified by how the world has evolved.

If I’m going to be really honest, the article made me feel excellent.

See, I am remarkably unemployable, which means I had no choice but to have my come-to-Jesus before a lot of people in my industry. Also, my pain tolerance is just very low. What this means is that I realized around 2007 that publishing as I knew it was gone and I was royally screwed so I’d better figure something else out. It took time but I did. And running Legacy Launch Pad is infinitely better than trying to scrape by on magazine assignments, book deals, sure-to-fail publications and TV appearances, no matter how glamorous my life looked back then.

I now see that the seas parted in two directions for those of us raised on Rubik’s Cubes and Reality Bites: on one side are the people who accepted the big wave long ago and started building huts (or mansions) that could withstand the weather and on the other are people who just continued to fling themselves into the ocean pretending that even though they didn’t know how to swim, it would all work out, damn it!

My friend Richard Rushfield started The Ankler. My friend Vanessa Grigoriadis co-founded Campside Media. They didn’t sit back and polish their resume and complain and beg for scraps. They started their own things. They swam instead of sinking. They accepted that the future was here and embraced its options, rather than complaining and fear-mongering about Just How Different It Is!

If you find yourself swimming, it’s not too late to change your attitude. Really, we’re at the nascence of this new world. Looking back, if you got into the internet in 2000 instead of when email became a thing in ‘96, today you wouldn’t be considered behind at all.

There’s a newsletter I subscribe to that gathers all the most interesting stories about publishing. I used to love it so much that I actually wrote the creator a fan letter. But ever since Chat GPT emerged, it’s just become a list of scary stories about how much AI is ruining our lives. I read it now mostly to take the temperature of how terrified people seem to be.

Conversely, I spent a few days last week at Genius Network, which is made up of some of the most brilliant and successful people I’ve ever met. AI was a huge topic, as it’s been at every Genius Network meeting for years. But I’ve never once heard someone there embrace the “AI is coming for us” way of thinking; instead these are people who are embracing it—who see its dangers, yes, but who mostly focus on the opportunities it provides.

After having spent much of my life in fear (usually of the False Evidence Appearing Real variety), I choose, when I have the power of choice2, to not be scared. I’ve learned after spending too many years trying to control things, that I have no control, really. In my belief system, what’s happening is God’s will and I can go along and assume it’s for the best or get dragged.

In other words, I refuse to let my basest fears rule me. When I was dating—and I was dating for ages—I wouldn’t let it get me down. When you’re a single, straight woman in LA (or New York) (or probably any other city), other singles love to commiserate. They want to talk about how terrible the men are in fill-in-the-blank city, how miserable it is to get your hopes up only to find yourself across the table from a sad sack/douchebag/basement dweller/whatever. I made a conscious decision to not join that particular commiseration party because I knew that if I did, I would create a miserable reality rather than an optimistic one.

“Dating is fun!” was my mantra, even when it was the least fun thing in the world, even when I was sitting across the table from a man who managed to be a sad sack, douchebag and basement dweller all at once.

In other words, I am a self-willed optimist. And so I embraced AI from the moment I learned about it. When I first heard a few years ago that the Atlantic had published a piece that showed all the books that AI was being trained on and that the writers listed in that piece were gathering together to create class-action lawsuits, I had one thought and it wasn’t “I will join that suit if they dared to train the robots on my books.” No, my thought was, “They better have used my books or I will feel totally left out.” Good news; they did!

I know that I have railed against having AI write your books. And I still feel that way. But I am all for having AI help you with your books. I promise if you embrace what it’s good at while also remembering what you’re great at, it will allow you to lean all the more into your talent, your brain and your humanity.

Sure, you can press a button and let a plane itself. But do you really want to try that without a pilot? Similarly, an orchestra can play on its own but it sure may sound like shit if not for the conductor. (AI could come up with seven more excellent analogies.)

So when people tell you that writers are growing obsolete because of AI, I urge you to disagree: when everyone’s producing slop, I say, great writing only stands out more. But I believe it’s even more exciting than that: if you know both what you’re looking for and how to make it better—more you—you’re going to be miles ahead of the masses.

Last year, I decided I wanted to write a novel about using a surrogate or being a surrogate or something surrogate adjacent, since the experience was so incredible for us. I also knew that I wanted to write a novel that could be easily adapted into a movie. So I went to AI (I think it was ChatGPT; I actually don’t remember) and wrote something like, “I want to write a novel that has to do with a surrogate. I want it to be a story that can be adapted into a romantic comedy. Can you give me a plot?”

My robot spit out the following storyline: a man’s father is dying and he tells his son he’ll leave him everything if the son agrees to start a family. So the son hires a surrogate and they fall in love.

I’m sorry but is that not a storyline worthy of Nora Ephron? I asked what it should be called and my robot spit out: Labor of Love. Holy excellent title! It took my editor and me months to come up with titles like Bought and Falling for Me and they’re not even that great.

I realize there are people who would tell me NOT to share that idea because you could steal it, but I can’t worry about that. You won’t be able to do what I can do with it and vice versa. And I promise you that your time would be much better spent diving into AI and seeing how much simpler it can make your writing life.

Also, be forewarned: if you do steal my idea, I’ll send the robots after you. We’ve gotten pretty tight.

How NOT to Title Your Book

I am nothing if not a fan of reality shows.

I not only made the midsguided decision to release a book about reality shows but I also used to be a regular on Fox Reality Channel (yes, Fox had a station just devoted to reality TV, which sort of feels like what every station is now, but they had a show called Reality Remix where “reality TV experts”1 came on and discussed reality shows every week).

Out of all the reality shows I allow to rot my precious brain cells, my favorite is surely Summer House. It’s just so wildly…happy. Delusionally happy. It doesn’t belong in the same world where people set fire to strangers’ Tesla’s because they don’t like what its CEO is doing (though it did take a stab at dealing with some race issues, that storyline was quickly dropped so we could get back to the issues Summer House excels at tackling: Hot People Partying). It’s “Who’s going out tonight”/Brunch in Montauk/non-sensical ball games on the beach/eating the most caloric foods on earth and remaining insanely thin. Summer House is essentially the closest you can get to living in the 90s today!

Carl Radke has been on Summer House from season one and we’ve watched him go from f-boy drunk to bottoming out addict to California sober to most miserable fiance to actually sober non alc entrepreneur. Carl 9.0, if you will. And now he’s publishing a book about it!

Here’s what he had to say on Instagram about the book: “I’m proud to announce that my book Cake Eater will be out on December 30, 2025. You may be asking—why Cake Eater? Being from the South Hills of Pittsburgh in Upper St. Clair and other locals will know that Cake Eater is a privileged upper middle-class person who is handed everything. While I was called this many times, that wasn’t my reality. My book dives into my childhood, my family, my life in the public eye, my recovery and how I’m here today.”

Now, there are four words you NEVER want ANYONE to say about your book title and those four words are “you may be asking.” No! The purpose of a book title is for people to NOT have to ask. You want people to hear your book title and go, “Ohhh, tell me more” and NOT “Ohhh, tell me what that means.” You want it to be a reference that means something to everyone and not just to some people in the South Hills of Pittsburgh.

Your book title exists to capture attention and intrigue a potential reader. Your subtitle exists to provide a few more details and keywords (it’s Amazon’s world and we’re just living in it; people forget that Amazon is the world’s third largest search engine and while most of us buy books because someone we trust recommended it, we also search for books on certain topics on Amazon).

If I wanted to read a book about a reality star’s experience bottoming out and getting sober, would I search the words “cake” or “eater”? No. While the subtitle—”A journey of self-discovery” helps a tiny bit, it’s pretty damn vague. Oh wait, there’s KIND of two subtitles? Which is weird? There’s Getting High, Hitting Low And Trying to Stay in the Middle and A journey of self-discovery? Both are both cliches and say nothing. One uses capital case and one doesn’t. Bizarre choices! The titling, honestly kind of feels like things Kyle on Summer House might have thought of some time between returning from the club and eating all the Cheetos in the house.

Think about some of the subtitles of great recovery memoirs: poetic subtitles like Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget (on Sarah Hepola’s exquisite Blackout) or even the subtitle of Eat Pray Love (One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia).

Because here’s the thing. We—readers—are smart. And we like to feel smart. We like to hear something and go, “Ohhh, I get it.” So when I heard the title Cake Eater, hoping to feel smart, I went, “Oh yes, cake eater…that means…um, nothing.” And I didn’t feel smart! I felt, actually, like someone who has watched so much reality TV she may not even be smart anymore.

It blew my mind when I was being published by Harper how wholly arbitrary the titling process was. There were no focus groups. There was no “We find that titling this way tends to work best” conversations. It was “What do you think of….?”

We take titles pretty seriously at Legacy Launch Pad. Unless we have a client who is wholly devoted to a title, we start by brainstorming a bunch, then we narrow it down to three options and then we run a title poll on PickFu, a software that allows you to run a poll of exactly the audience you’re marketing to so you can get their anonymous feedback on it.

Because here’s the dirty little secret about subtitles: no one even notices they’re there. Half the time authors can’t tell you what their subtitles are. They’re kind of like a plus one you bring to a party who gives you someone to walk in with but then lets you do your own thing all night without them weighing you down. But, in much the same way that you need to have the good party to bring the plus one to, you need to have a title for the subtitle to attach itself to.

Cake Eater is not it. I’m sorry, Carl. I enjoy watching you. I love great memoirs from reality stars and have even published a few.2 I’m psyched you’re sober. But if the professionals who are helping to shepherd this book into the world came up with (or couldn’t talk you out of) this title, I don’t have faith in their ability to craft an excellent book.

I’ll totally watch the book launch party episode on Summer House, though. Particularly if Lindsay torments you during it.

How to Handle Your Book Event (and How Not to)

Many of us have fantasies about our book parties. These fantasies usually involve delighting an audience of well-wishers before clutching a pen, opening up to a title page and writing some witty words worthy of Dorothy Parker before finishing the signing with our autograph.

But that’s only part of it. The other part—the big part—is about selling books.

If your event is at a book store, the book store has you there for one reason and one reason only: they believe you will sell books. They don’t care if your book is good. They don’t care if you have a charming personality that will be evident as you read aloud. They don’t care if you read aloud, are “in conversation with”1 another writer or stand on your head and screech your book title over and over again in Pig Latin.

If they’re willing to section off a corner of their book store and pay staff to be there, they have some reason to believe that customers will show up and purchase your book.

As an author, this puts you in an interesting position and by “interesting,” I mean less-than-ideal.

Because here’s the thing: you’re grateful that anyone showed up. If you’re in LA and the people battled rush hour traffic and probably had 16 other places they could be at that moment, you’re especially grateful.

But after you do your reading or your talk or your “in conversation with,” you start signing books and that’s when the math calculations and head drama starts.

You notice that your friend Felicity isn’t buying a copy of the book. You remember that you gave her a copy when you first got the box of books. But you wonder: couldn’t she buy it anyway? Is it rude to ask her to buy a copy when you already gave her one? Is she really your friend? Wouldn’t a friend know to buy it? Before you’ve figured out the answer, you see your college roommate wave from the door as she ducks out. She’d told you when she walked in that she’d have to leave early to pick her kid up from a play date but now you see that this means she didn’t have time to buy the book.

You start to stress. You’re sure the book store will know that having you here was a mistake. You see another friend drinking a Diet Coke near the cash register. She told you last week she can barely make rent; obviously she’s not going to buy the book.

You wonder if you have any right to be mad at people who showed up for you. You don’t! You know you don’t! And yet you are!

You sign copies for the few people who shelled out for them. But you’re so focused on the sales you’re not making, and how that means the book store won’t ever have you back, that you forget the name of that girl you used to work with who shows up, clearly so excited for you. You try to cover forgetting her name by asking her if she knows the person behind her in line, hoping against hope that they won’t know each other so she’ll have to say her name. But they do know each other so no names are exchanged and how on earth can you ask this former coworker who showed up for you and who actually bought the book her name? You can’t! And yet you do!

To be fair, that’s not what every reading/signing is like. Sometimes no one shows up at all. And sometimes it’s really fun. My first book event ever—for Party Girl, at Book Soup—was magical. Over 100 people came. There was an after party at this restaurant, Mirabelle, that used to be next door. It was a blast.

For my next book, Bought, I did the same thing: reading at Book Soup, party at Mirabelle. It wasn’t fun. Who knows why? Maybe you’re not supposed to repeat the past, maybe people just aren’t as excited for you on your second book. Oh also, I hated that book. That was probably why.

For my third and fourth books, same thing. I did events—some of which even got a lot of press2—but they were disappointing and exhausting. Since then, I’ve mostly been relieved not to do in person book store events.

That’s why I always tell people: forget the book store, unless doing a reading in a book store has been your lifelong dream. Instead, do something creative. Host a picnic, throw an event at an escape room or just have people over.

The point is, especially if it’s your first book, celebrate the F out of yourself. Just know that it won’t contribute to book sales as much as other things that are far less effort—say, trying to find an institution to bulk order your book or paying to appear in the media and then sharing that appearance everywhere you can.

That doesn’t mean that selling books at your event is wrong. You just have to go about it the right way.

My client Christos Garkinos did something very savvy. For his book coming out on March 23rd, he sent out an invite to a very fabulous launch event and when you RSVP’d, it simply asked if you’d bought the book and had a link to where you could.

I was just invited to another book event and the email said that you had to purchase a ticket for $5 to attend but that could count toward a purchase of the book. I liked that, too.

On the other end of that: I was recently invited to a book party at the house of an author (a super nice person who isn’t subscribed to this so hopefully won’t see it) and the invite said that to come, you had to show proof of receipt of the book. If anything makes me not want to go to a friend’s house, it’s having to show a receipt to get in.

So forget about selling books at your book party. Instead, celebrate yourself. Maybe that means not doing anything public at all, but just eating a cupcake in the bath.

My point is that you deserve to enjoy it as much as you can and not spend your time counting book sales (or trying to remember the name of your sweet former coworker who showed up).3

The “in conversation with” thing is smart: it’s basically a chance for a book store to take advantage of two different people’s audiences. The ideal scenario is you ask a writer friend who’s more successful than you or has a bigger audience than you and the two of you chat. It’s also a million times more entertaining than listening to someone read.

2

For my anthology about reality shows, I got a whole bunch of reality stars to show up and one of them was from The Bachelor and it’s where he announced that he’d broken off his engagement. The story was everywhere and resulted in exactly 0 book sales.

3

It was probably Jennifer

You’re Already in Sales. Being the Authority Just Means Neing Able to Charge 10x More.

For much of my life, I thought wanting to make money made you evil. Or at least shallow. Or at least a person with misaligned priorities.

I got such bizarre and mixed messages from my family about money that it astounds me I can make sense of it at all, even after all the talk therapy and EMDR.

In short, it was a hot mess. And honestly it’s a mess that I never really share about but I think I would here in a future newsletter since for some reason this little Substack group feels like the most supportive “public” space I’ve encountered outside of 12-step rooms.1

Anyway, I went out into the world to become a writer, despite my dad insisting it would never work and I needed to instead get a JDA/MBA.2 While I resented the lack of family support—the articles my grandmother would clip and mail me about how no writers made a living, my dad’s insistence that my goal was ridiculous—at the same time, my dad paid for my college degree in writing and helped me financially when I needed it early on. Also, in retrospect (and with so much more knowledge about their mental and emotional issues), I now see that they were trying to be supportive the best they could. They weren’t doing it to make me feel bad; they thought they were helping.

While I never thought being a writer would make me a millionaire, I didn’t care. I’d learned growing up that money didn’t make you happy and so I went and did my thing.

For a while, it worked. I got paid $50,000 for Party Girl, sold the movie rights for another $20,000, was getting paid $1 a word for the magazine stories I wrote and had a paid gig on a TV show. All together, this made me comfortable.

Then, seemingly overnight, it all changed. My book deals dwindled to almost nothing, publications went from paying me to write to allowing me the opportunity to write for free and movie options were, well, zero dollars. Also, I got replaced by a mannequin on the TV show.

I was in my late 30s and living in New York when I realized I was screwed. What did people like me—people with nothing beyond writing skills—do when there was no way to make a living writing anymore? I thought of Augusten Burroughs, who’d written about working in advertising. So I asked my neighbor’s girlfriend, who worked at an ad agency, for advice. She suggested I apply for an internship at her company.

Looking back, I don’t know how I didn’t break down. But I muddled around. Mostly I worked for intensely abusive men—first at websites and then ghostwriting their books.

That’s when I woke up to the importance of marketing and sales. I met my mentor and took advantage of every opportunity he provided (I still do). And I realized I’d always been in sales: what else could you call trying get a publisher (or the public) to buy my book or a TV show to hire me? I had just been selling myself for pennies. A radical thought occurred to me: what if making money wasn’t evil? What if I could do it and not be like my family—not allow it to make me sick? What if I could enjoy it?

I studied marketing and tried all the things the marketing gurus suggested. I killed myself creating courses and workshops but they tended to attract people who were, well, like my former newsletter subscribers. They complained that my courses were too expensive or that my workshops were bad.3 There were, of course, exceptions and some are still in my orbit. One even writes books for Legacy Launch Pad. (Hi Samantha if you’re reading!)

But still, I was broke.

At the same time, I’d written this New York Times bestselling book for an actor and so people were asking me to write their books. But my ghostwriting experience had been so traumatic that I didn’t feel I had another one in me. I tell this story all the time but one person who continued to insist I should write his book even after I said no is the reason Legacy Launch Pad exists.

Around then, I hired a coach who came highly recommended. She created complicated diagrams to show me that I needed to double down on course creation. So I did that. And then one day I was having coffee with a new friend (someone I met through a friend of someone my mentor had introduced me to; all roads lead back to Joe Polish). I explained my dilemma to him: I was creating courses for assholes and barely making a living.

He said: “Wait a minute…you’re creating courses for people who complain that $500 is too much and tell you that your courses suck while there are grateful people willing to pay you $50,000 to write and publish their book? What are you doing?”

From that moment on, things changed. I focused on getting book publishing clients. And it worked. Without doing any advertising, I attracted one client after another. They were thrilled with the results and recommended us to friends. I built up a team. And the business has continued to grow year after year.

It has not been without struggles. I’ve hired people who deliberately tried to sabotage the business so they could start competing ones. We’ve had clients get abusive, two of whom we had to fire.

But my point is that it’s worked…far better than I could have ever imagined. And it was sitting right in front of me for years.

Maybe that’s the case for you. Maybe you’re selling yourself for pennies when it could be for hundreds or thousands. Maybe you’ve believed that selling, and marketing, and money, is evil. I’m here to tell you it’s not. Marketing combines the same thing I love about writing: words and psychology. If I’ve learned anything in business, it’s these three things:

It’s far easier to sell an expensive product to fewer people than an inexpensive product to lots of people

People who buy expensive products want to work with authorities and the best way to showcase your authority is to publish an authority-building book

We’re all in sales, whether we think we are or not

This was a super long way of getting to my point: I can help you create your authority-building book for FREE! We’ve created the COOLEST tool that allows you to answer a few questions and be presented with three authority-building book ideas just for YOU based on your experience and expertise. My team and I have tested and tested it and the results are ASTOUNDING.

You can check it out here. If it doesn’t inspire you to get started on your authority-building book so you can get paid what you’re worth, I can’t imagine what will.

1

Seriously, so many of you have written me the most heartfelt notes or written such thoughtful comments or just shared with me how much you’re getting out of this Substack and it has MEANT SO MUCH. Some of you are people I haven’t spoken to in years, some I speak to regularly and some I don’t know but there’s been a consistent tone to your feedback that has inspired me more than you could know.

2

After my third book came out, I called my dad and said something along the lines of “Hey look, this writer thing worked out.” His response: “You would have made more money as a lawyer.”

3

The woman who sticks out is the one who yelled at me that my workshop sucked because it didn’t include mantras like the ones she got in the Hip Sobriety program.

Stop Listening to People Who Have No Experience with What They're Doing.

There’s that old expression “Those who can’t do teach,” which is of course insulting to teachers but there’s a scarier reality out there today which is “Those who know nothing do.” It’s the thorny thing about the authority people can earn on social media or just fake altogether: look like an expert and people will pay you money to help them with whatever you’re claiming to be an expert in.

Not to date myself but back in my day, you wouldn’t think to so much as exaggerate on a resume. I don’t know if we were more honest or just less industrious. Today I know people who have faked entire careers simply by putting BS on their LinkedIn. I know people who post on Instagram about how they felt when they made their first million when they have made nowhere near that number. Con artists are everywhere and why shouldn’t they be? We reward the biggest ones out there with book deals, TV shows, Dancing with the Stars appearances, People magazine cover appearances and lifelong fame.

I come from a family of less-than-honest people which I think has made me abnormally obsessed with con artists. I can listen to podcasts about them all day (I sometimes go to podcast apps and just search the word “con”). I’m sure I’ve had numerous less-than-honest moments in my life (I am in recovery from addiction, after all, and there is truth to that joke “How do you know an addict is lying?” with the punchline “Because their lips are moving.”) But I think it’s because of my family’s commitment to lying that my own personal rebellion has been to become very, very honest. I naively assume most people are as well and feel shocked and betrayed if I find out someone I know isn’t.

But while the cuter con artists become famous, many of the low-grade ones simply take your money.

I’m talking about “social media experts” who have zero social media following. Or “business strategists” who don’t actually have successful businesses. Or, yes, book publishers who have no experience with traditional publishing.

The truth is it takes a lot of time and effort to build legitimate authority out there. (This is why I’m obsessed with using a book to do it; it’s the fastest and most direct way to do it.) So many of the people who are out there posting and recording and telling the masses how to do something have been spending their time posting and recording and telling and not actually doing what they’re telling you they can do for you.

I know dozens of book publishers that have popped up over the past few years that offer what my company does. They say things like that they write and publish books that are indistinguishable from traditionally published New York Times bestsellers but they have no experience with traditional publishers, let alone New York Times bestsellers. They just discovered that many people want to publish books and that they could figure out Amazon and charge those people a lot of money. Maybe they even decided to start a publishing company because that’s the idea that popped up when they went and searched “how to make money online.”

 

The Mikkelsen twins taking a break from the publishing life

In the most egregious scenarios, the companies get busted. But even when their jig is up, they fight the good fight. Let’s say you’re twin brothers raking in $50 million a year with your publishing company and people are starting to find out. What do you do? Admit they’re right? Hell, no. You put a story on your site with the headline “The Mikkelsen Twins Reviews: Legit or Scam?”

By doing that, you attract people who are searching for info on whether or not you’re a scammer (helpful hint: if you need to search someone’s name followed by the words “legit or scam,” the jury is already out).

In the story, you blame the internet for the negative rumors by writing, “The internet has no shortage of opinions, that’s for sure, and you’ll be hard-pressed to find even one popular song, movie, or business leader who hasn’t experienced some doubt or criticism. It’s just how it is these days.”

You go on to subtly praise those brave enough to perservere in their quest for information about such infamous people by writing, “But the internet also gives us all the power to conduct our own research and make our own decisions, which is a blessing.”

You then explain how wrong the sh*t talkers are and suggests that anyone who believes the negative rumors may not be up for the “publishing life.”1

I’m certainly not saying that Legacy Launch Pad is the only legitimate book publishing company out there. I know of good ones that actually charge a lot less than we do. But there are so many bad actors out there professing to promise you success when they haven’t had it and sometimes they speak with so much confidence that I can fall for their schpiel even when I know for a fact it’s not true.

So do your due dilligence. Or go with your gut. If something sounds too good to be true—say, your life changed with a book that only costs you $5000—it is. If someone doesn’t have success with what you’re paying them to do for you, run in the other direction.