Anna David's Blog, page 3

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.

Keep Working That Book. (Not "Working on" It. "Working" It.)

When I decided to write a new, tamer version of a book I first wrote in 2004, a part of me worried what people would think. Can’t she just let that f-ing book go? I imagined someone saying to another someone who wouldn’t care or know who “she” was or what “f-ing book” She 1 was talking about.

But I only gave that a few seconds of thought because the truth is: no. No she can’t let it go. Not because she’s clinging to the past but because even though it was her first book, she thinks it may be her life’s work. And she also thinks may be the most pretentious person alive for using the phrase “life’s work” while talking about herself in the third person.

I could, of course, count on my former email list—a list that I’ve explained included some bizarrely combative assholes1—to assure me that I wasn’t being entirely paranoid about being judged. Several responded to the newsletter where I told them about the PG version of Party Girl that the book didn’t sound like it was their kind of thing, PG or not.

One subscriber took it a step further, asking me why I couldn’t just come up with a new idea. She even had suggestions: a cookbook, for instance! I wrote her back thanking her for her creative suggestion.

This woman seemed to believe that the only reason one would go back to an earlier book would be because one lacked new ideas. That is certainly not the case for me. I have 16 ideas by breakfast, 14 of them usually bad and 12 of them often forgotten by lunch. I don’t lack ideas and I don’t lack motivation.

Here’s the marvelous thing about publishing a book you love: you never have to let it go if you don’t want to. If our work means something to us (and we own the rights)2, we can all do our own version of Taylor’s Version any time we want.

I’ve made Party Girl into a journal, a clothing line, a podcast3 and a screenplay.4 I even talked a guy who owns a sober bar into making it into a mocktail. (I don’t think he did it in the end, though I stand behind the belief that it would be a hit.)

The idea to do a PG version of the book came to me a few months after my son was born. Because becoming a mom made me insantly5 more conservative/boring than I’d been my entire life, I suddenly couldn’t believe there was a novel sitting in our house that opened with a threesome. The fact that I’d written said novel—and had been all over TV telling people it was loosely based on my own experiences—left me almost speechless6.

I’m an act first, think-later type of person, which has served me as many times as it hasn’t. In my 20s and 30s, I did all kinds of things—posed for Playboy, answered sex questions on TV, dated men that could generously be described as losers—without thinking. I smoked two packs of a cigarettes a day until I was 31, let a French photographer take nudes of me, told bosses to f*ck off…you get it. Not thinking.

That doesn’t mean I regret writing Party Girl. Not at all. In fact, it was the purest book I’ll ever write.

I wrote it before I knew anything about the book business, let alone agents and publishers. I didn’t know there was such a thing as the “Big Five” or that even when your book is acquired by one of them, it’s more a nightmare than a dream. I didn’t know what it was like to spend every bit of your book writing energy obsessing over the book “hitting” or making you your publisher’s favorite or getting Oprah’s attention or inspiring a Times review. I was a naif who wrote from my heart, and while, yes the writing included threesomes and all sorts of other salacious things, the book was completely untainted. Writing Party Girl was like emptying my veins onto the page and having it be bizarrely pleasant.

The four books I wrote after Party Girl were tainted. I wanted to please GoodReads readers who could never be pleased, make my publisher and agent into my mom and dad and finally get the attention I felt I deserved or just MAKE MY DREAMS COME TRUE, DAMNIT, even though by then I’d forgotten what the dreams were. By my fifth published book, I concluded that I hated writing. It took me years to see that I didn’t hate writing at all; I hated what I’d allowed the publishing business to do to me.

Even though I escaped traditional publishing, the books I’ve written since—Make Your Mess Your Memoir and On Good Authority—had motives behind them. I wanted them to attract clients—and they have. I love them, and worked hard on them, and am proud of them, but they are not as pure as Party Girl. (Being pure and attracting clients are NOT mutually exclusive; the majority of the books we publish at Legacy Launch Pad are both.)

My point is that your book can live for as long as you want it to. I meet people all the time who talk about how they just want to have a #1 bestseller or their book doesn’t need to be good because they’re just using it as a lead magnet or “who cares what’s in it because no one even read anymore, right?”

My God, no. Quality matters. Having your heart in it matters. Our books will outlive us so do it right. And if, like me, you don’t want to let go of a book you first published a decade-and-a-half ago, you don’t have to. Hold onto it as long as you want to.

Or you could just take the advice of my newsletter subscriber and write a cookbook.

1

Please explain to me the disorder that causes someone to sign up for a newsletter list and then send the person writing it passive aggressive covertly hostile correspondence under the guise of it being helpful feedback? Because a good 10% of my old subscribers could perhaps be helped by this diagnosis!

2

I had to get the rights to Party Girl back from HarperCollins, a process I talked about a little in this Wall Street Journal piece.

3

I had a podcast called AfterPartyPod in 2011. I’m relaunching a new version of it next month. See, I can’t let go!!

4

The book has been optioned for the umpteenth time. The current producers say we’ll go into production this year. I’ve heard that before.

5

Truly, though, isn’t all change sort of the Hemingway thing about going broke “gradually and then all at once”?

6

The PG version still has the threesome. It was too big a plot point (no pun intended, Jesus Christ, haven’t I told you how conservative I am now?) But it is significantly toned down.

Never Read the Comments (But You Can Read the Reviews)

Last Friday, I had a super awesome thing happen: The Wall Street Journal covered the relaunch of my first book, Party Girl, which I decided to PG-ify and re-release. (I also went on Access Hollywood to promote the relaunch, which was also fun.)

Anyway, I was very proud of the WSJ story—less proud to be written about than I was proud of how I handled it, which was with sheer appreciation.

As I wrote about last week, I have ruined so many gifts I’ve been granted. When I had an essay published as a New York Times “Modern Love,” I didn’t do a happy dance. Instead I read every single comment—and there were hundreds—that attacked the quality of the writing and me personally. I was in Idylwild with a friend the weekend the story came out but instead of exploring, I sat in a cabin with a sporadic wifi connection and obsessed about the comment someone made about how I had to be sleeping with someone at the New York Times for them to agree to publish my trash.

But for this WSJ story, I only focused on what a blessing it was that my book that I’ve loved so much got this attention. Not all aspects of the article were positive but I didn’t care. And when I saw the comments pile up—creeping into the hundreds and then the two hundreds—I didn’t glance at them. I mentioned that I wasn’t reading the comments to a friend who went and looked at them, smiled and supported me in my decision not to take a gander.

“Bad?” I asked.

He nodded.

“About me having been a ho?” I asked.

“That and about being self-absorbed.”

I swear to you, dear reader, I did not and do not care. Why yes, I am self-absorbed. Name a writer—nay, a human—who isn’t.

My point is this: if you’re lucky enough to have your book receive attention, you will attract negative comments. And I say that’s a sign that you’re doing something right: you’re triggering the shit out of someone. And I can guarantee that the someone you’re triggering is not living their best life. My guess is that a person compelled to criticize a stranger being written about would like to be putting themselves out there but is paralyzed by fear. Why else would they spew hatred on a stranger? Honestly, the writing part of writing a book is the easy part. It’s the willingness to put yourself in the line of fire that requires the real courage. It’s much easier to sit on a couch and write a nasty comment.

Now, when it comes to reviews, this is easier said than done. You can’t just not read your reviews. I mean, you could but it would be hard. Harsh commentary from strangers about something you killed yourself on sucks. But again, it goes back to their fear, best summarized by Jay Z in “Already Home”: And as for the critics, tell me I don't get it. Everybody can tell you how to do it, they never did it.

I’ve handled this better some times than I have others. When I released a children’s book I wrote about my son and it was mercilessly attacked by Amazon readers, I felt punched in the gut.

One woman wrote that she taught analysis of children’s books for a living and that made reading Bennie the Brute painful.1 Now, pain sucks but I have to say, her profession reminded me a bit of the joke in Airplane about the “magazine” on famous Jewish sports legends that was only a leaflet. While I have no idea who takes a class in the analysis of children’s books, my guess is that it’s not the masses.

So I say keep putting yourself out there and ignore the basement dwellers who want you to suffer for your courage. The more you ignore them, the more powerful you become.

  1

Lucky for her, the pain was ephemeral; it’s a very short book.

 

The Secret to Having an Amazing Book Launch

I’ve had miserable book launches and joyous ones. And the amount of misery or joy had nothing to do with how well the book did.

It had to do with making the decision to enjoy it, rather than to try to control it.

It took me six books, and an escape from traditional publishing, to finally understand this.

There’s a lot out there about post-launch depression. Story after story after story. And for good reason: it’s real! I know that all too well.

The first time I experienced it was, of course, on my first book, Party Girl. No matter how many times I heard that it was incredibly rare for a book to be a breakout success, I put my figurative fingers in my ears and ignored it. Sure, that was true for most, I figured, but not for me. My book had sold to the biggest publisher in the world. Producers were after the film rights before the book even came out. The guy who started GoodReads, when he was asked what book had the most buzz at the time that GoodReads launched, said “Party Girl by Anna David.”

And then, well…it got TONS of press but due to the fact that my publisher was fired a few months before its release in the biggest scandal to hit publishing1, weak sales. No one explained to me, when Regan Books evaporated, that It was Over. Party Girl was not going to be the monstrous hit we’d all hoped. There was no company to support it. Instead, I was told, I was lucky that the book was getting released and wow, look how much press it’s getting!

And then, well, nothing. Press is great but if you don’t know how to capitalize on it by selling a service, it doesn’t do much of anything. And so, despite the fact that I had hundreds of people at my LA book party, I was miserable. I kept waiting for something to happen but nothing did. I felt like a filmmaker who’d had a studio hire them to write, produce, direct and star in a movie and were behind me the whole way, until it came out. And then they disconnected their phones. People would ask me how the book was doing and I wouldn’t know what to say, but I knew the honest answer would have to be something along the lines of: “Not all that great.”

But hope springs eternal and when my editor at HarperCollins told me they felt terrible about how I’d been caught in the Regan cross fires on Party Girl, they would make it up to me on book two. So they gave me a (much smaller) deal to write my second novel, Bought. They were very encouraging—up until the time it came for launch.

“Unfortunately, because Party Girl didn’t sell as well as we’d hoped, bookstores aren’t as interested in Bought,” my editor told me. (This was 2008; bookstores mattered more than Amazon.)

“But you told me it wasn’t my fault that Party Girl didn’t sell as well as we’d hoped and you’d make it up to me on this book,” I reminded him.

He shrugged.

But still, I thought, I will be the exception. I’d seen Down With Love and every episode of Sex and the City. It would all work out. How could it not?

Anyway, you get it. I went through this six times with HarperCollins, before eventually doing a book with Simon & Schuster that became a New York Times bestseller.

I have now seen the “I will be the exception” look on the faces of approximately 99,9999 people since then. I’ve tried to share my experience. I’ve explained that more often than not, we’re not the exception; that’s why it’s called “exception.” I’ve said that most of us don’t buy lottery tickets and insist, when people explain that it’s a lottery, that sure, yes, but don’t they understand that I have the winning ticket?

Every one of those Harper launches, no matter what I got, I wanted more. I got on The Talk but why not The View? My friend’s book got reviewed in the New York Times. Why not mine? I never took a second to enjoy and appreciate what I was getting. And I got desperate; I’m not going to say my publisher made me feel desperate because no one can make us feel anything but they sure did always remind me that my book wasn’t selling very well so anything I could do sure would be great. I remember, for my fifth book, Falling for Me, being on the phone with a producer at Anderson Cooper’s then talk show. My friend worked there and he said they could do a segment about my book IF I WOULD COME ON THE SHOW WITH AN EX-BOYFRIEND AND DISCUSS GETTING BACK TOGETHER. It shows just how desperate I was that I called several men I hadn’t spoken to in years, and had no interest in getting back together with, to see if they’d join me in this televised conversation. The fact that I couldn’t get any of them to agree is only, of course, Desperation Frosting.

My point is this: my launches were miserable because I thought I could make them successful in exactly the way I wanted to. But since I can’t—since none of us can, except, I guess Glennon Doyle—now I just focus on what I can control.

Say, making it the best possible book it can be—from the writing to the editing to the cover.

Say, reviews. I can ask people to review my book on Amazon.

Say, media attention. But rather than looking at it from a who-can-have-me-on-their-show-or-write-about-my-book perspective, to look at it from the point of view of how could I (or my book) serve their audience?

I get to decide if a launch party would be fun for me. For my last book, On Good Authority, I had an amazing opportunity to do an event at Book Soup. But then I thought about recruiting people to go there. It was the same week as my baby shower and I was already getting all my friends to show up for that. So I assessed what the event would take out of me vs what it would give me and was proud of myself for passing.

So it’s really that simple. You can have a great book launch simply by deciding to and remembering you can’t control any of it so just appreciate every single moment in the sun your book gets. Publishing a book is an amazing accomplishment and too many of us have managed to take this amazing accomplishment and make it into something terrible.

If you have a service you sell that your book is going to attract clients to, then the launch really doesn’t matter anyway, because the book is going to be serving you for the rest of your life.

So You Want Your Book Made Into a Movie or TV Show.

Let’s start with the bad news: your chances aren’t great.

Let’s move to the good news: it IS possible.

Books are made into TV shows and movies so often that this New York magazine story lists over 115 adaptations that came out in 2024 alone.

They included Nightbitch starring Amy Adams, Here starring Tom Hanks, Disclaimer starring Cate Blanchett, The Perfect Couple starring Nicole Kidman and Lady in the Lake starring Natalie Portman. Then there was the Blake Lively movie It Ends with Us, which got more PR for the drama around it than the actual movie but was based on one of Colleen Hoover’s many tomes.

Oh and who remembers that Bridgerton was a book before it was a Shonda Rhimes show? Also, anyone else lose 90 minutes of their life they’ll never get back watching The Idea of You, which was originally a piece of Harry Styles fan fiction? (Just me? Ugh.)

Point is: books are made into movies and TV shows all the time.

They are also optioned about a million times more often than they are made.

So how does this work? The best way I can explain it is through the journey I’ve gone on with Party Girl, which has been optioned half a dozen times.

My Magic/Tragic Hollywood Story 

The first time it was optioned, right as the book came out in 2007, I was naive enough to think I had it made/it would just get made. I was represented by CAA and my agent fielded a bunch of offers. One of them was from Melanie Griffith, who was then married to Antonio Banderas. They had me over to their mansion and treated me like I was one of them. Antonio told me in his lovely accent that he was “jealous” of me, since I could create art and have full control over it, the way someone working on a movie never could.

A maid walked in and announced that Jeffrey Katzenberg was on the phone for Antonio. As he left to take the call, Melanie yelled after him, “Tell him about Party Girl!”

But then their offer came in and it was very low and I was broke so I met with a mother-daughter production team my agent told me would really pony up.

The mother and daughter took me to lunch at Michael’s, then the chicest publishing restaurant in Manhattan. Tina Brown was at one table, Anna Wintour at another. (I may be making that up. It’s how it seems in my memory.) The mother and daughter had a deal with Sony and they told me that if I went with them, I could pick any screenwriter I wanted.

As a staunch member of Gen-X, I knew there was only one answer: Helen Childress, the woman who wrote Reality Bites.

Mother and daughter said they’d make it happen. I cashed their $20k option money and believed them when they told me they’d circle back.

Months passed. I called them. (This was pre texting days, when I actually called people.) They never returned the message. I emailed them. No response. This could seem odd only to someone unfamiliar with the ways of Hollywood, the town that invented professional ghosting.

Some time later I received an email from CAA: Congratulations, it read. Your book rights have reverted back to you!

I responded, “What does this mean?”

I received no response and then slowly wised up to the fact that this meant It Was Over. The mother-daughter production team never got back to me. I had no idea if they’d ever gotten my beloved Reality Bites screenwriter involved.1 

Second Time’s a Charm?

My fourth book, Falling for Me, also attracted interest. By then, I was at WME (then still just William Morris) and my agent told me the producers of Community wanted to make it into a TV show. By this time, option money had dried up. In other words, no one else wanted the rights so they didn’t have to pay me.

I met with one of the producers and a female writer he wanted to create the show. I sat in on a bunch of meetings where the writer explained her concept, which was the same as the book but different. I didn’t understand what she was bringing aside from changing someone’s gender or job. The producer explained when I asked that she was a big name and TV networks wanted to work with her. (I have no memory of her [big] name, not to mention the name of the Community producer or the name of the mother-daughter team. Repression or early-on set senility? You tell me.)

I had one request for the Falling For Me crew: don’t make me go to the pitch meetings. I had been depressed when Party Girl didn’t happen and I explained that I took rejection hard; also, since I wasn’t involved with the show beyond providing the source material, I probably didn’t need to be there and they could just call me with good news if there was good news?

They agreed but then, when they set up the pitches, they decided it would help to have me there: authenticity and all. So I went with them to meetings at ABC, NBC, CBS and Fox where the Writer with the Big Name pitched the story of my book but with characters with different genders and jobs. A few hours after each pitch meeting, the Community producer called and told me it was a pass.

While that was the end of Falling for Me’s Hollywood story, the Party Girl one continues and I have this bizarre faith that it will happen. At one point, Aaron Kaplan—then Darren Star’s producing partner—had the rights. During the pandemic I actually wrote the script and it’s actually good. (Not false modesty; I’ve tried writing scripts before and they weren’t good; this one is.) Last year, an actress who could have gotten in made wanted to star in it and the producers who had given her the script had the money to make it. We could have gone into production. But I didn’t think she was right so I passed.

Did I make a mistake? Maybe. I think the producers are now ghosting me.

I still think the movie will happen. Delusion or early onset senility? You tell me.

OMG Enough About Me

If you skipped ahead because you were like, “OMG I just want to know about my own book being made into a movie,” hi.

I actually happened to have interviewed two of the world’s leading experts on this topic: Warner Bros president Mike DeLuca (who’s been nominated for multiple Oscars for movies he’s made based on books) and Ben Mezrich (who’s had zillions2 of his own books made into movies). Because I know I’ve already gone on too long, I just asked my best friend Claude to summarize their points. Here they are:

Based on these fascinating interviews with Mike DeLuca and Ben Mezrich, here are the key insights for authors hoping to see their books adapted for the screen:

Reality Check:

- The vast majority of optioned books never become movies

- Options are often low-paying or free unless it's a major bestseller

- Without A-list talent attached (writer, director, actor), projects rarely move forward

- Movies can take many years to get made, even with strong backing

Paths to Hollywood:

- Some producers and executives specifically scout self-published/indie books

- Book scouts at studios are constantly looking for material

- Having a high-profile agent can help get your book in front of the right people

- Creating buzz through sales and press coverage can attract Hollywood attention

From both interviews, the key takeaway seems to be that success requires a combination of great material, strategic timing, right relationships, and often a good amount of luck. As Mike DeLuca says, writing something commercial with a clear target audience in mind can help, but ultimately the story needs to grab attention and have strong potential for visual storytelling.

So Will Your Book Get Made?
 

I’m not sure. I do know that it’s easy to watch a movie or TV show, particularly a bad one, and think that your book would be better than whatever you’re watching. It probably would be.

But there are so many factors at play. It’s really not about how great your story is. It’s about attaching movie stars who can get it made and/or knowing people who can finance it. Because my boyfriend is an indie movie producer, I’ve had a front-row seat seeing how it tends to work: there are a few people whose names mean so much overseas that if they’re in your movie, even briefly, you can get investors who know they’ll earn their money back. Think Anthony Hopkins, Nicolas Cage. You can pay them a sh*tload for a day’s work.

And look, any author can get an account to IMDBPro, which lists every actor’s rep. If there’s an actor that you think is both get-able and would be interested, reach out. If you have a connection to someone who can finance the movie (it’s a great business write off for someone with millions to spare), that means you can pay up front for that actor. Your chances just improved EXPONENTIALLY.

You just have to be realistic. Netflix probably isn’t going to make your book into a movie just because it’s a great idea.

But it can happen. I’ve seen it happen over and over and over again.

Though I still don’t know if Antonio told Jeffrey about Party Girl. I’m thinking not?

1

Crazily, years later, Helen Childress saw something I’d written about this, found my email address and emailed me out of the blue, asking if it was true that I’d never seen the script she wrote. IT EXISTS? I responded. She wrote back, attaching it. And so I had the surreal experience of reading the woman who’d written my then favorite movie doing a take on my book from half a decade before, which had been a take on my life from half a decade before that. Surreal, to say the least.

2

More like four but that’s still a lot