Anna David's Blog, page 4

The Jury's In...

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

I’ll admit that I didn’t get one.

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

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

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

THE RESULTS

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

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

Some of the comments include:

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

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

Then again…

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

So what does this tell us?

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

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

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

From Claude:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And my money is still on Claude.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

OPTION 1:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

OPTION 2: 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I'm not lying!"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

OPTION 3:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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