Good morning!

At 1pm EST today, I’ll be interviewing Stefanie Lieberman, Senior Counsel and Senior Literary Agent at Janklow & Nesbit. As an agent, Stefanie focuses primarily on upmarket fiction with commercial appeal.

She is looking for love stories, literary thrillers, quick-witted beach and book club reads, and anything plot-driven with a distinctive voice and a smart, high-concept hook. Stefanie also gravitates towards novels with a strong sense of time and place, a unique atmosphere, or gripping, edge-of-the-seat suspense. She loves books with spooky undertones and magical elements, and she’s always on the hunt for writers who make her laugh.

Stefanie represents Fiona Davis, Laura Hankin, Sarah Penner, and K.T. Nguyen.

I’ll ask Stefanie:

- How her legal experience informs her career as an agent

- Her wishlist: How does she define “upmarket”? What distinguishes it from literary fiction? What does she wish she was seeing more of in her inbox? Has she ever worked on a legal thriller (would she want to?)

- High concept novels: How she defines the term “high concept.” Does an author have to come to her with a fully formed high concept premise, or has she ever worked to hone a concept with a novelist client?

- Indie to Big 5: What are publishers looking for, in terms of successful indie books like The Unselected Journals of Emma M. Lion? And how are agents scouting these titles?

- Trends in fiction: On her MSWL, she mentions wanting to see more epistolary novels such as The Correspondent. What other trends is she noticing in fiction? Any predictions about what feels done or is on the decline in 2026? Anything she thinks we’ll see more of in 2027?

- Platform for novelists: Has she ever discovered a novelist via their online presence? Does platform make any difference when she’s considering signing a new novelist? Or does the strength of the writing and the concept matter more than anything?

- AI: What are the biggest risks or threats to the writers she represents, as AI gets adopted by publishers? What power do writers have in their contractual agreements with publishers?

I will interview Stefanie for about 30 minutes and then open it up to your questions! This is a rare opportunity to speak directly to a literary agent who represents upmarket fiction.

If you can’t attend live, there will be a recording available to watch for 7 days.

As a reminder, this is a private, off-the-record conversation, exclusively available to my diamond medallion members. You may not post quotes from the conversation anywhere on the internet, or create content out of my events. Keeping the Chat Room series private allows both me and my guests to speak candidly.

How to Watch the Recording

Read more

I’m writing to you from Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, the “Newport of the Midwest,” where wealthy Chicagoans of the Gilded Age built their summer mansions. Here’s one, now called Stone Manor, built by a German immigrant who saw opportunity after the Chicago fire of 1871, buying up property in what became the “Loop” while others fled the city, not sure it would ever be rebuilt. The Wrigley estate includes six properties.

You can take a boat to a beer baron’s Victorian summer cottage, as I did yesterday, and think about how many men it took to build all this: Conrad Seipp, the ambitious German immigrant who founded one of the most successful breweries1 of the late nineteenth century; the 100 men who worked at his brewery; all the men who drove the horses and worked in the stables; the men who captained the boats that took all the family’s furnishings across the lake.

This is not to forget, or discount, all the women’s labor, paid and unpaid, during the late nineteenth century—the caretaking, the cooking, the housekeeping, the laundry.

Domestic labor has evolved through technology, but it remains largely women’s work. You clean your house or you pay another woman to clean your house. You stay home with the baby or you hire a nanny or you send the baby to daycare.

What about men’s work?

What are the men up to, now that the American economy is no longer built upon physical manufacturing but instead upon information, technology, and services?

“Ever since we moved to upstate New York in 2017 I’ve been noticing that a lot of men don’t seem to be working,” Jon Ronson writes in The Castle, the most entertaining book of 2026.

“When I visit supermarkets in the afternoons, the people trudging up and down the aisles tend mostly to be men. The ones with the especially vacant stares remind me of those women from Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, the 1950s housewives traipsing through their homes with a strange sense of desperation, sewing and baking but feeling like they just weren’t alive. Men and women separate in their alienation, but each unmoored from their worlds.”

Driven by his own fears of becoming useless and irrelevant, in the wake of having colon surgery, Ronson sets off on a strange adventure into the forbidden territory of male alienation, through a prismatic cast of characters that trace America’s economic history from the Gilded Age of industry to the creator economy of the 21st century.

Ronson and I have both discovered that there’s no better setting for a book about what the internet is doing to us than a Gothic mansion.

Gabi Demartino is a YouTuber who filmed a music video for her song, “Immaculate,” inside a Gothic castle that represents the cursed hallways of the internet, where she has faced public scrutiny and ridicule as a content creator.

This Gothic castle is owned by Chris Mark, a descendant of Clayton Mark, one of those Gilded Age Chicago industrialists, who planned a community called Marktown in Northwest Indiana for his steel mill workers.

Ronson stumbles upon Chris Mark after his son attends a party at the castle that is not so much a party as much as a ruse to lure young women to the castle to star in a made-up reality show where they will compete to become one of Chris’s “princesses”?

“On the surface, Chris Mark’s story was not something many people might relate to, being a tale about the complexities of luring women to a harem in your castle during the post-#MeToo age,” Ronson writes. “Chris was trying to be Hugh Hefner during surely the worst period in human history to be Hugh Hefner.”

I lost count of how many times I laughed out loud reading this book.

At times, Chris is a menacing Bluebeard figure, threatening Jon after he refuses to sign an NDA at the castle (“I’m going to be sending you some of my fiends that were in prison for killing somebody,” Chris texts Jon. “Maybe you could help them write something good so they can turn their lives around… To be honest I’m even a little bit afraid of some of these people… Carlos and Brandon are on their way to New York right now.”) At other times, he is a pathetic figure, an angry beast in a castle who can’t find a woman to love him for who he really is, so he can turn back into a prince.

As I was reading The Castle, I kept thinking about something that happened to me on the internet at the end of 2022. It’s a story I could have told during media interviews for If You’re Seeing This, It’s Meant for You, but the story is an embarrassing one. It makes me look like an easy mark.

The story begins in the haunted halls of TikTok, where I received a DM from a young man named Josh.

One hundred and fifty years ago, entrepreneurial Josh could have been a scrappy hustler on the streets of Chicago, trying to sell me a watch out of his coat. In 2022, he wanted me to schedule a “Free 1:1 Strategy Session which will help you discover where you are, where you want to go, and map out a clear plan to get there.”

I was writing a novel set in a TikTok hype house and I wanted to grow my TikTok audience, so the free call seemed harmless enough. I thought this was an informational meeting where I could find out how much their coaching services cost (I offer free consultations for my own clients).

I didn’t understand that with every link I clicked, every form I filled out (“I have/am willing to get the financial resources of $700-$1000 to invest in my guaranteed success in TikTok growth!”), I was entering deeper and deeper into the most aggressive sales funnel I had ever experienced in my life.

My Free 1:1 Strategy Session was with Josh’s colleague Akash on December 22, 2022. I had an ear infection and a fever. I say this in my defense. I remember very little of that meeting. All I remember is coming out of the Zoom in a daze and telling my husband that I had just agreed to pay $3,800 for an 8-week TikTok accelerator program that promised to get me 10,000 followers.

Akash said it was fine if I wanted time to consider, but if I didn’t sign up right then, on the call, the price would go up to $5,000.

This was Josh’s 21st century factory. According to his LinkedIn, which I found today (and which you may or may not find credible), he scaled this business to $100k/a month in revenue using this sales funnel. He had a team of four.

But was it a scam?

Was there really an 8-week program to help me get my first 10,000 followers?

Yes, there was. I joined a Discord with many other students, including at least one other author. I learned in the first week what their methodology was for virality. We were taught to “emulate” other videos. This meant copying them, word for word, shot for shot. Every week, we would be sent specific viral videos to copy.

The reasoning was simple: your identical content tricks the algorithm into showing it to exactly the same users who viewed the original content.

I felt sick to my stomach. This was plagiarism. If anyone in the publishing industry found out I was growing my audience by just copying other people’s videos… there would be egg on my face. I felt humiliated for paying so much money to these young hustlers.

I could have quit right then. But I decided to stay and learn. I wouldn’t copy the viral videos exactly. I would imitate but not steal. (After all, imitating is how I learned to write.)

My TikTok coach Kyle sent me a viral video of a white Billy bookcase, set to a viral Gilmore Girls audio clip, ending on an image of The Fault in Our Stars. It had 53,000 views and 278 comments.

I knew what to do. I had the same white bookshelf. I used the same audio clip. But instead of ending on The Fault in Our Stars, I held up my copy of Bluets, because I was trying to draw an audience of readers of literary fiction and nonfiction.

Kyle noticed I hadn’t copied the original video precisely and tried to get through to me by explaining the popularity of The Fault in Our Stars, a book he assumed that I, an aging woman, had never heard of:

the context of this doing well was the book chosen as which was also made into a movie and had the cultural significance that a lot of people grew up with this book

i’ve never read the book or seen the movie but i know the author and people were reading this while i was in school so that’s the context

Kyle underestimated the Bluets fandom. My Bluets video received 364,000 views, 46,000 likes, and 65 comments.

I did, eventually, reach 10,000 followers on TikTok. I also realized that if this method of emulating viral content was how some creators were growing huge audiences on TikTok, then this was vital research for my novel. I included the method in the book.

Josh did not invent this method. It comes from YouTube, where Greg Chism, the most endearing character in The Castle, was making content while Josh was still a child.

Greg is from Granite City, Illinois. His father worked in a factory making car frames until the plant moved to Mexico. In his senior year of high school, Greg was working at Taco Bell when he had a cardiac event that nearly killed him. Without his dad’s factory job, he had no health insurance, and when he left the hospital after six months in the ICU, he had $200,000 in medical debt.

Greg became a single father of two girls and built a surprisingly large following on YouTube by becoming the top lawn care influencer. He also posted about his journey as an adult braces wearer. Then he started posting entertaining content with his daughters and his account really took off.

And that’s when the emulators—from all over the world—started copying Greg’s content, trying to get the algorithm to show their derivative content to the same viewers who loved Greg’s content.

Greg’s story is so funny and weird and tragic that I won’t give any more of it away here—to find out what happened to him, you’ll have to pick up a copy of The Castle.

This book is for fans of So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed. This book is for anyone who loved that section of Wellness where the dad gets radicalized on Facebook. This book is for anyone who loves the kind of weird internet rabbit hole stories that PJ Vogt tells on Search Engine. This book is for you if you watched Louis Theroux’s manosphere doc on Netflix. This book is for you if you watched a man in your life struggle to find meaningful work. This book is for anyone who has lost a friend to a hardcore belief system that the algorithm reinforced over and over again.

You can order it today from Amazon, Bookshop.org, or Barnes & Noble.

Take a personal essay writing class with bestselling memoirist Sarah Hepola

Sarah Hepola, New York Times bestselling author of Blackout, is publishing her first new memoir in eleven years, titled The Only Thing There Is to Want: A Memoir in Three Loves. I’ve read it, I’m obsessed with it (watch out, Strangers), and I’m honored (and delighted) to be working with Sarah on her social media for her launch (subscribe to her Substack!)

I wanted to share two upcoming Sarah events with my Attention Economy subscribers:

• This coming Saturday, September 26, Sarah is teaching a special writing class, for anyone who wants to write about a lost love. This is a generative writing class, meaning Sarah will give you a prompt that you write to in class! You won’t have to read or give notes on anyone else’s work. Sarah hardly ever teaches writing workshops, so this is a rare opportunity to inhale some of her genius. She’ll also share the 5 things that make her want to read a memoir and the 5 things that make her want to throw a memoir across the room. Here’s how to register

• On Tuesday, September 29, I’ll be moderating Sarah’s launch event at The Strand (the Upper West Side location). Steve Kornacki will also be there and will surely upstage me. Click here to get a ticket before it sells out!

Good morning!

At 1pm EST today, I’ll be interviewing René Kooiker, a Junior Literary Agent at Dystel, Goderich & Bourret. When I saw his manuscript wishlist, I knew I wanted to invite him to Chat Room, because so many Attention Economy subscribers are working on literary fiction and nonfiction!

I’ll ask René:

- His fiction wishlist: How does he differentiate between upmarket and literary fiction? What trends has he seen in literary fiction with genre elements? What does he wish he was seeing more of in his inbox?

- Scouting nonfiction authors: As a former editor at the Yale Review, which journals does he currently read to find authors? Does he scout for authors on Substack?

- Essay collections and literary criticism: What would make a collection of essays, or literary criticism, stand out in his inbox?

- Book-to-screen pipeline: What are some of the different paths a book can take to getting adapted for the screen? What criteria does he use when he evaluates a novel for its potential as a screen adaptation?

- Grounded love stories vs. romance: What is he looking for in “grounded” love stories? As the modern romance genre explodes with the likes of Emily Henry and TV adaptations such as Heated Rivalry, Off Campus, etc., what does he predict for how this category will evolve?

- AI and manuscripts: Dystel has outlined a very clear no generative AI policy for any work that they represent. What conversations are he and his colleagues having about how the publishing industry is using AI?

I will interview René for about 30 minutes and then open it up to your questions! This is a rare opportunity to speak directly to a literary agent who represents fiction and nonfiction.

If you can’t attend live, there will be a recording available to watch for 7 days.

As a reminder, this is a private, off-the-record conversation, exclusively available to my diamond medallion members. You may not post quotes from the conversation anywhere on the internet, or create content out of my events. Keeping the Chat Room series private allows both me and my guests to speak candidly.

How to Watch the Video Recording

Read more

Click here to listen to “Dear Dealer,” the This American Life segment that evolved into a book-length memoir

You can also follow Nadia on Instagram

You can purchase your copy of Dear Dealer from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org, or your favorite indie

If you’re in Pasadena, Nadia will be at Vroman’s on September 24!

Upcoming Events

• Tomorrow at 1pm ET, I’ll be hosting a Chat Room conversation with René Kooiker, a literary agent at Dystel, Goderich & Bourret, for my diamond medallion subscribers. You will receive the Zoom link in the morning.

• On Thursday, September 24 at 1pm ET, I’ll be hosting another Chat Room with Stefanie Lieberman, a senior literary agent at Janklow & Nesbit.

I started reading books, and listening to podcasts, about time management and productivity when I was organizing two feminist writing conferences a year, and making so little money that I could have qualified for a scholarship to my own conference. At the recommendation of the attorney who advised our nonprofit, I read Getting Things Done and downloaded Evernote. I listened to the Asian Efficiency podcast, which taught me the Pareto principle. I read Cal Newport’s Deep Work and Charles Duhigg’s The Power of Habit and Greg McKeown’s Essentialism. I read Get Smart by Brian Tracy, the man who popularized the productivity hack “eat the frog,” attributing the expression to Mark Twain:

If it's your job to eat a frog, it's best to do it first thing in the morning.

Mark Twain never wrote this.

Unsurprisingly, no amount of time management literature aimed at McKinsey consultants helped solve my underlying problem, which was that I had willingly volunteered to become Mommy to 40,000 women. Forty years before I started BinderCon, Jo Freeman published “Trashing” in Ms.:

The values of the Movement favor women who are very supportive and self-effacing; those who are constantly attending to others' personal problems; the women who play the mother role very well. Yet a surprising number of such women have been trashed. Ironically their very ability to play this role is resented and creates an image of power which their associates find threatening…. No one can be "everything to everybody," so when these women find themselves having to say no in order to conserve a little of their own time and energy for themselves or to tend to the political business of a group, they are perceived as rejecting and treated with anger. Real mothers of course can afford some anger from their children because they maintain a high degree of physical and financial control over them. Even women in the "helping" professions occupying surrogate mother roles have resources with which to control their clients' anger. But when one is a "mother" to one's peers, this is not a possibility. If the demands become unrealistic, one either retreats, or is trashed.

Observing my mental breakdown, in response to the internecine warfare in private Facebook groups branded as “women supporting women,” my co-founder recommended that I start using the Headspace meditation app. I learned one night at dinner that she had no idea I was going into personal debt so that I could continue running the organization—because she assumed I’d gotten a $100,000 advance for my literary memoir (I’d told her no such thing). I read Jen Sincero’s You Are a Badass at Making Money. I listened to a podcast called Being Boss.

At the time, I believed I could optimize my way out of my problems by Being Boss. Maybe if I could just get better at time management, I could take on more freelance work, and if I got better at mindfulness, I wouldn’t feel so bad about women yelling at me on the internet?

One of the scenes readers tell me most often that they remember from Self Care is the fight between Maren, the workhorse, and Devin, the face of Richual, over whether Devin’s obsessive dedication to beauty and fitness should count as work.1 Maren believes her work is the only work that counts, and Devin says,

You’re the one who thinks she deserves a trophy for having no life. Good job, Maren, here’s a sticker for answering all your emails instead of sleeping. Congratulations on all the weekends you’ve spent at the office alone. It’s pathetic. You think everyone should feel sorry for you just because you don’t know how to take care of yourself.

Maren thinks:

She was wrong. I wanted so much more than a trophy or sympathy—I wanted damages. I wanted financial compensation for working the hardest and sacrificing the most to the cause: my own health and well-being. I wanted Devin to die and leave me her apartment in her will. No, that would take too long. I wanted her to Venmo me $10,000 right now. You deserve this. You’ve been a good girl. You’ve helped so many people. With more money, maybe I could be a beautiful, skinny bitch, too. What a luxury, to be able to devote so much time and attention to your body’s inputs and outputs, to be able to say your biggest flaw is your perfectionism.

It’s been nine years since I resigned from BinderCon, deactivated my Facebook account, and started writing a satire of girlboss feminism.

While writing Self Care, I applied everything I had learned about time management, accountability, habit building, and productivity.

In the spirit of back-to-school September, here are a few of the tricks I tried. I’ve kept up some of these habits to this day.

I track every single hour I work

I keep two calendars: a Google calendar and a paper calendar2 on my desk. The Google calendar is for keeping track of meetings with my clients, and a shared event calendar with my husband, and the paper calendar is where I track every single hour of work I do. Each X represents thirty minutes.

At the end of every month, I add up all my hours in a spreadsheet, sorted by category:

• Writing

• Teaching

• Coaching

• Career (lunch meetings, catching up with a former colleague, going to a literary event, weekly meeting with my assistant)

• Content (Instagram and TikTok)

• Substack

In the same spreadsheet, I track my income by category, so it automatically calculates how much I make an hour for my teaching, my coaching, and my Substack.

I’ve been doing this for eleven years, so I can see the growth of my business, but I can also see how long things actually take.

I can tell you how many hours it took to finish the draft of Self Care that my agent sent on submission in March 2019.

460 hours, over a period of 23 months.

That averages out to 20 hours a month, or 5 hours a week. Many writers complain that writing a book is sub-minimum-wage labor, but I made a lot more money writing a satire of girlboss feminism than I made as a feminist girlboss.

When I read this piece in The Cut about how much money fashion Substackers are making, I paused at this paragraph:

It’s also really time-consuming — it’s basically a second job. I spend probably about 20 hours a week on it. I wake up at 5 a.m. every morning and work on it until 7 a.m., and then I’m kind of adding things to my notes all day and sometimes on the weekends. I’ve only once taken a week off, when I was on vacation last summer, and I noticed a change in traffic and engagement and subscriptions, which made me paranoid enough that I don’t want to step back at all, ever.

Is this anonymous Substacker really spending 20 hours a week on her Substack? Is she tracking her time?

In the month of June, I hosted 3 Substack Lives, published one post for paid subscribers and two free posts. Including all the time I spent drafting interview questions and hosting the Lives, I spent a total of 17 hours on those six pieces of content that month, and made $3364.18, after fees. That’s about four hours a week.

Twenty hours a week is a ton of time. Unless they quit their day job, most people cannot find an extra twenty hours a week.

In my experience, writers tend to overestimate how much time something will take (e.g., creating content), as a way to avoid beginning.

No one has to adopt my elaborate time- and income-tracking methods, but the next time you catch yourself thinking, “I don’t have TIME to _____!,” ask yourself if this is true. Could you track how much time it actually takes to _____ on a weekly basis?

If you have a goal you’re working toward this fall (like finishing a manuscript draft, or growing your Substack audience), you can choose one metric to track and it doesn’t have to be time. It could be:

• time spent writing

• daily word count

• number of emails sent to potential Substack collaborators

• rejections

• number of books you’ve read related to your work-in-progress

• comments you’ve left on other people’s posts

Because I have this handwritten time-tracking system in place, combined with the monthly habit of auditing how I spend my time, I can easily start tracking another habit, depending on what season of life I’m in, and what my goals are.

My unicorn method

By September 2018, I had been working on Self Care for fifteen months. I’d written 39,265 words. I had fewer than 1,000 subscribers on MailChimp but I used my newsletter as a form of public accountability and announced that I would finish writing my novel in the month of September. I had to write 10,000 words.

Every week, I documented my progress.

You can use this same method of external accountability, but you can also try my “unicorn days” method:

I physically blocked off certain days in my paper calendar for writing using stickers, so I couldn’t schedule meetings during those days. To reserve this much time for myself, I gave notice at one of my freelancing gigs. You could try doing this ONE day a week. has written about taking off one day a week for “intuition days.”

At the end of September, I reached my goal:

I tracked my excuses

After I resigned from BinderCon, I made a spreadsheet called “You Can Write a Novel,” with columns for tracking words written and hours spent writing. I was underemployed, clinically depressed, and in thousands of dollars of credit card debt.

Freed from all the responsibilities of organizing conferences and moderating the Facebook community, I could have been writing eight hours a day! But of course I wasn’t.

I decided to track how I got in my own way. In Column E, I recorded my excuses on the days I wrote nothing.

For seven months, I tracked my progress. There were days when I prioritized freelance work over the unpaid labor of my imagination. There were other days when my entries in Column E were pitiful:

5/14/17: was in a bad mood
7/11/17: couldn’t get into it
7/16/17: didn’t make time for it
8/2/17: meetings in the city
8/3/17: so tired from meetings in the city
9/28/17: haircut

Haircut?

Tracking my excuses helped me see that there are no perfect days. The ideal conditions for completing any long-term project do not exist. I had to work around my weaknesses on a daily basis. Once I checked my email, I was faced with everyone else’s needs, so I shut down my phone the night before. I wrote first thing in the morning, coffee in hand.

In Column F, I watched my page count grow: 28 pages by the end of August, 69 by the end of November.

John Steinbeck wrote The Grapes of Wrath in 100 days. During that time, he was besieged by distractions and house guests (including Charlie Chaplin). His relationship with his wife Carol was tense and then she had to have tonsil surgery. His publisher went bankrupt. “Demoralization complete and seemingly unbeatable,” Steinbeck wrote in his diary in August 1938. “I’m not a writer. I’ve been fooling myself and other people.”

Illness, financial insecurity, marital strife, self-doubt—not only did Steinbeck have it all but he had it all at the same time he was trying to finish a 200,000-word manuscript.

It’s a seductive myth that the writers who came before us had it so much easier. But the most productive among us don’t have easier lives—or more time. They are only able to find creative workarounds for their best excuses.

Book Giveaway

In 2019, two-thirds of the people who filed bankruptcy petitions in America did so because of medical expenses that put them in a precarious financial situation. Medical debt and student loan debt affect so many Americans, and the bankruptcy laws evolved over the course of the 20th century to favor creditors over borrowers.

My former client Sarah Sharer Curley served for three decades as a U.S. bankruptcy judge in Arizona and her new nonfiction book, The Price of Forgiveness, reframes bankruptcy as a vital mechanism for fairness, renewal, and social stability.

I bought two copies—one to keep and one to give away to an Attention Economy subscriber. If you are interested in personal finance, the history of debt, or ideas for how to reform the current bankruptcy system, check out Sarah’s new book.

Comment FORGIVENESS to enter to win a free copy!

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Upcoming Events

• On Wednesday, September 16 at 1pm ET, I’ll be doing a Substack Live with Nadia Bower about her grief memoir Dear Dealer, which started as a This American Life Story. Click here to indicate you’re interested! (FREE AND OPEN TO ALL!)

• On Thursday, September 17 at 1pm ET, I’ll be hosting a Chat Room conversation with René Kooiker, a literary agent at Dystel, Goderich & Bourret, for my diamond medallion subscribers. You will receive the Zoom link the morning of the event.

• On Thursday, September 24 at 1pm ET, I’ll be hosting a Chat Room conversation with Stefanie Lieberman, a senior literary agent at Janklow & Nesbit, for my diamond medallion subscribers.

There are only 12 spots left in my fall Hype House! Not sure if Hype House is for you? Hype House alum just published a post about her ongoing content experiments with other alumni. “Our working theory: the more digital everything becomes, the more valuable it might be to make someone feel like there’s an actual person on the other side.”

Good morning!

At 1pm EST today, I’ll be interviewing Batya Rosenblum, Senior Editor for Tarcher, an imprint of PRH. Batya has acquired and edited prescriptive nonfiction titles including How to Be a (Happy) Skeptic by Massimo Pigliucci, The Psychology of Luck by Min Ji Yoo, and the forthcoming What If I Succeed? by Heigi Jeong, as well as books on religion and spirituality by Rabbi Ari Berman and Rabbi Zvika Krieger.

In her past role as an editor at The Experiment, Batya edited Nearly Departed, the hilarious and deeply moving memoir by my friend, former client, and #1 subscriber of Attention Economy, .

I’ll ask Batya:

• What’s on her editorial wishlist right now? What does she wish she was seeing more of?

• Personal development/self-help: Why does she think readers are turning to self-help right now? What are the ingredients for a successful self-help pitch? How big of a platform is needed to sell into this category?

• Memoir: What advice she has, generally, for writers who are hoping to sell a memoir. What can help a memoir surpass the many hurdles standing in the way of publication?

• Religion/spirituality: Why is this category doing so well right now? What are readers looking for? What has been her experience acquiring books from Jewish authors in this category?

• Scouting vs. submissions. Is she scouting nonfiction authors by reading magazines (or Substacks)?

• Book proposals: What advice does she have for writers currently working on non-fiction book proposals? Does the quality of the writing matter more than anything else, or is it the Big Idea that counts? How does she evaluate a writer’s platform?

• Editing process: What is her editorial process like, after she’s acquired a proposal? And what would she say is her editorial superpower—the note she finds herself giving the most often, or the problem she’s helped multiple authors troubleshoot?

• Parenting Books: What’s the current state of the market for non-fiction books about parenting?

• Indie vs. Big Five: What are the main differences she’s noticed in publishing at one of the Big Five vs. an indie publisher?

I will interview Batya for about 30 minutes and then open it up to your questions! This is a rare opportunity to speak directly to an acquiring editor at a Big Five imprint.

If you can’t attend live, there will be a recording available to watch for 7 days.

As a reminder, this is a private, off-the-record conversation, exclusively available to my diamond medallion members. You may not post quotes from the conversation anywhere on the internet, or create content out of my events. Keeping the Chat Room series private allows both me and my guests to speak candidly.

How to Watch the Recording

Read more

In 2009, I put on a black leotard from American Apparel, fashioned a skirt from a purple cardigan, covered my head with a black scarf fastened with a gold butterfly brooch, and went as Little Edie to a Halloween party in Williamsburg, a scene I can best describe as proto-Girls.

Edith “Little Edie” Bouvier Beale, first cousin to Jackie Kennedy, lived with her mother Edith “Big Edie” Ewing Bouvier Beale in a decaying Hamptons estate called Grey Gardens. In January 1972, New York magazine made Little Edie their cover girl.

The accompanying profile by Gail Sheehy begins:

This is a tale of wealth and rebellion in one American Gothic family. It begins and ends at the juncture of Lily Pond Lane—the new Gold Coast—and West End Road, which is a dead end. There, in total seclusion, live two women, twelve cats, and occasional raccoons who drop through the roof of a house like no other in East Hampton.

“When am I going to get out of here?” Little Edie asks in the Albert and David Maysles documentary Grey Gardens (1975).

“She’s always talking like that,” Big Edie quips.

Little Edie, by then in her late fifties, flirts with the filmmakers; she twirls her baton. Once a greater beauty than Jackie, she now covers her head to hide her lost hair. She’s desperate to escape and incapable of leaving.

I have a longtime fascination with stories of girls and women confined to houses. Little girls can’t travel far alone—so they explore interiors (think of Lucy Pevensie discovering the portal in the wardrobe). In Shirley Jackson’s novel We Have Always Lived in the Castle, eighteen-year-old Merricat obsessively protects her agoraphobic older sister and their family home from encroaching outsiders. In Jane Eyre and Rebecca, young women arrive at isolated manors, owned by brooding heroes who are keeping dark secrets from them. One literary ancestor of these novels is the seventeenth-century French fairy tale “Bluebeard,” about an aristocrat who forbids his young wife from entering one room in his castle (where he keeps all the corpses of his previous wives)—the story is about how her curiosity catalyzes her to disobey him.

The home, a place of safety and familiarity, can take on a malevolent spirit in gothic fiction. “124 was spiteful,” Beloved begins. Shelley Duvall told The Hollywood Reporter that Stanley Kubrick filmed the scene in The Shining of her backing up the staircase, weakly holding a baseball bat, weeping as Jack mocks and berates her, 127 times over the course of three weeks.

Duvall, then seventy-one, started crying in front of The Hollywood Reporter as she rewatched the scene. “Jack [Nicholson] was so good — so damn scary. I can only imagine how many women go through this kind of thing,” she said.

Women read gothic suspense because the terror is recognizable: what if the person you followed to the isolated dream house turns out to be the person most capable of destroying you?

When I think of the contemporary gothic, I think of the controlling behavior of Brittany Murphy’s husband Simon Monjack, and her dramatic physical decline, in the final months of her life. But the villains in these stories aren’t always men. I also think of Shari Franke, growing up on YouTube, weakly smiling for the camera with mono and a 102-degree fever when her mom Ruby hit her first million followers. The income from their YouTube channel enabled the Frankes to buy their dream house in idyllic Springville, Utah, but the fame made Ruby monstrous (or the fame drew out the monster that was inside her all along). She is now serving thirty years in prison, after being convicted of four counts of aggravated child abuse.

In her introduction to Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, the literary critic Laura Miller writes, “Eleanor may be the target of the haunting of Hill House, or she may be the one doing the haunting.”

When I think of the contemporary gothic, I think of the internet: the haunted house we all inhabit. The internet is alive; it feeds on us. It’s a decadent manor, filled with rooms we know better than to enter.

Like Little Edie, twirling her baton, losing her hair, we’re desperate to escape and incapable of leaving.

My Gothic mystery If You’re Seeing This, It’s Meant for You came out one year ago today!

I started writing this novel in my late thirties, anxious about becoming irrelevant in my field, as I watched people I was close to suffer layoff after layoff in the media industry. I’m deeply grateful to everyone who has bought and read and recommended and shared and reviewed my book. I think I’ve managed to stay relevant (for at least another five minutes).

If you have not read If You’re Seeing This, It’s Meant for You, today is the perfect day to pick up a copy: the Kindle edition is on sale for $1.99.

“Here you’ll find that gothic horror, so often lurking in the dingy dark, can manifest also in the fluorescent world of the terminally online. . . . Stein knows more about the internet than I do. (Probably more than you too, dear reader, but I don’t want to presume.) Makes sense, then, that the versatile writer has found the gothic possibilities in a house full of social media influencers.”—NPR

“Wildly entertaining and whip-smart.”—Katie Couric Media

“This is a smart, funny, and incisive novel about fading relevance, digital reinvention, and the people addicted to making content even as it consumes them.”—Andrew Boryga, author of Victim

“A masterpiece and laugh-out-loud funny . . . the first novel about TikTok that takes it seriously . . . I’m obsessed with the fusion of Gothic creeping dread and the seductive allure of the algorithm. I loved this!”—Josh Lora (@tellthebeees)

You can order If You’re Seeing This, It’s Meant for You from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org, or your local independent bookstore! You can listen on Audible or Libro.fm.

Further Reading

• I wrote about why I wrote a mystery without a murder in it here

• I wrote about Bluebeard in my review of Lindy West’s memoir Adult Braces

• I wrote about Rebecca and the conventions of gothic fiction here

• I interviewed Alex Clark about her debut Gothic novel Dovecombe here

• For my diamond medallion members, I published a list of 25 prompts for Substack content you can post to promote your writing

Upcoming Events

• On Wednesday, September 2 at 1pm ET, I’ll be hosting a Chat Room with editor Batya Rosenblum, who acquires personal development, parenting books, and non-fiction about religion and spirituality, for Tarcher, an imprint of PRH. Paid subscribers will receive the Zoom link the morning of the chat!

• On Wednesday, September 16 at 1pm ET, I’ll be doing a Substack Live with Nadia Bower about her grief memoir Dear Dealer, which started as a This American Life Story. Click here to indicate you’re interested! (FREE AND OPEN TO ALL!)

• On Thursday, September 17 at 1pm ET, I’ll be hosting a Chat Room conversation with René Kooiker, a literary agent at Dystel, Goderich & Bourret.

• On Thursday, September 24 at 1pm ET, I’ll be hosting a Chat Room conversation with Stefanie Lieberman, a senior literary agent at Janklow & Nesbit.

The video from yesterday’s Chat Room with Norton editor Nneoma Amadi-obi is here.

There are only 16 spots left in my fall Hype House! Kayla Kleinman, a content creator with 15 years of experience, and the former social media manager for Bookshop.org, will be helping me facilitate the workshop this fall. Kayla will offer insight as a book influencer who receives pitches from authors and publishers (among other topics)!

Good morning!

At 1pm EST today, I’ll be interviewing Nneoma Amadi-obi, Associate Editor at Norton. Nneoma has acquired and edited literary novels including Dovecombe by Alex Clark and Terrestrial History by Joe Mungo Read, 'Pemi Aguda’s short story collection Ghostroots, and a forthcoming biography by Eric Darnell Pritchard about Patrick Kelly, “the Jackie Robinson of fashion.”

I’ll ask Nneoma:

• What makes Norton special? What does Norton have in common with Big Five imprints, and what makes it a special place to work? What makes a Norton title

• Literary fiction: How would she describe her literary taste and what she’s looking for in submissions? Is there anything she wishes she were seeing more of? Less of? What makes a short story collection stand out?

• Biographies: What makes a proposal stand out? Is it the author’s platform? A unique angle on a known figure? The strength of the writing?

• Scouting vs. submissions: Is she scouting nonfiction authors by reading magazines (or Substacks)?

• AI: What kind of conversations is she having with her colleagues at Norton about AI? What does she think should become industry norms and standards?

• Editing fiction: What editorial process does she go through with her authors? What editorial advice does she give often?

• The editorial workload: What does she wish writers (and agents) knew about her editorial workload? How would she describe the current state of the publishing industry?

I will interview Nneoma for about 30 minutes and then open it up to your questions! This is a rare opportunity to speak directly to an editor at a literary imprint.

If you can’t attend live, there will be a recording available to watch for 7 days.

As a reminder, this is a private, off-the-record conversation, exclusively available to my diamond medallion members. You may not post quotes from the conversation anywhere on the internet, or create content out of my events. Keeping the Chat Room series private allows both me and my guests to speak candidly.

How to Watch

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Watch the video Stacey made about her query letter

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I also loved this interview did with Stacey about her taste and her reading habits

Kitten hangs out with The Idiot, Th…

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When I first started writing about Jason, he was still alive.

I was twenty-four years old, working as the assistant to Françoise Mouly, the cover editor of the New Yorker. My friend Julia, whom I’d met as a teenager on Livejournal, had gotten me the job, because she thought I’d be good at it, and because she thought it would put 800 miles between me and Jason.

My take home pay was about $800, every other week. To make extra money, I worked for Françoise’s independent children’s book publishing company, and I taught musical theater classes to kids every Saturday morning in Park Slope. Sometimes I worked toddler birthday parties, leading scarf dances to “Orinoco Flow,” which paid more by the hour than teaching. At night, I took undergraduate classes at the New School, because Condé Nast had a tuition reimbursement program.

In a non-fiction writing workshop, I wrote nine versions of an essay that would grow up to become Land of Enchantment. Reading it back now, so many years later, I can watch myself learning where to start a story.

Version 1:

Version 9:

By the ninth draft, I had figured out that the story starts when you give the reader something worth their attention. The voice is assured. I knew how to set the thermostat to “dread.”

The gun in the opening never goes off, but the essay is filled with references to women driven insane by betrayal (Medea, la llorona), ghosts, and violence.

Jason died in a motorcycle accident two years after I wrote this. When his brother called me from Jason’s phone, to give me the news, I didn’t answer. I had just seen him six weeks earlier, in a reunion that was so dramatic and crazy-making that I told myself I would never answer his calls again.

His brother tried again, from his own number, and this time I answered. After we hung up, I googled Jason’s name, looking for his obituary to prove this wasn’t one of his stunts, and instead found a local news story: “Man accused of stabbing another in a brawl.”

At first, I thought I was writing about New Mexico. Then I thought I was writing about Jason; after all, he was the most interesting character in my life. Finally, I came to the revelation that sounds obvious but is discomfiting to most memoirists: I was writing about myself. What kind of woman was I, if I loved and missed a man who hurt me? What made me want that? How do you grieve someone who wasn’t always good to you?

I was twenty-seven when I started working on the answers to these questions. At parties in New York, strangers would laugh when I said I was writing a memoir. It didn’t matter that I’d just published my first two books in a single year. Proving I could write (and publish) a book didn’t seem to qualify me for writing a memoir—age was the qualification. You had to be old enough to have had something worth writing about happen to you, and you had to be old enough to prove—to your elders—that you were capable of reflecting on that experience.

Even Mary Karr, who teaches memoir writing to students at Syracuse, writes in The Art of Memoir that “if you’re young, you might wanna wait. Most of us are still soft as clay before thirty-five. (I know, Dave Eggers was about twelve when he wrote his wildly successful Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, but he’s an exception.)”

Luckily, I’ve always been extremely motivated by being underestimated. I would be the exception.

I read fifty memoirs while writing my own, to learn the form. I got into the Tin House writing workshop, where I studied with Karen Karbo, who taught me the A/B/C/D memoir structure I still teach today. I went to the Key West Literary Seminar, where I studied with Beverly Lowry, who recognized how seriously I took my writing. She found the opening line for the book:

I wrote an essay about grief and digital mourning that Kiese Laymon published when he was editing personal essays for Gawker. And then Doree Shafrir messaged me on my Tumblr, to tell me she was trying to publish more personal essays at BuzzFeed. Did I have any ideas?

I pitched her the idea of writing about the last summer of Jason’s life. The essay went viral and for the first time, I received messages from women about their own “Jason.”

One woman told me she had left her abuser the night before, after ten years. Another told me she had to move four states away to escape the man who broke her ribs and splintered her eye socket. Yet another told me I was the only person who could understand her:

Because I don’t know anybody else who identifies like that, and my friends (the ones who still speak to me) think of me as a victim which I certainly don’t, so it’s hard to speak to them, let alone therapists, and it’s so hard to explain to them that I wanted to be in that situation more than anything, I felt more alive than ever before, and although the lows were the worst feeling in the world, the highs we had were absolute perfection.

An editor emailed my literary agent and asked to see the memoir, when we were ready to go out on submission.

By this time, I’d been working on the memoir for two years. I had started BinderCon, a conference for women writers, inspired by a Facebook group with 30,000 members. The Washington Post had named me a “leading feminist.” I had 35,000 words (a “partial”) and a book proposal.

My agent took the book out on sub but it was not an easy sell, even with my viral essay and my platform. For multiple reasons, I’d lost faith in my agent, and I turned to friends to give me tougher feedback on my proposal, so I could revise it before she went on another submission round. Finally, she sold the book in the winter of 2015.

I’d done it. I’d proven I could write a memoir worthy of the attention of strangers. I was thirty years old.

I wanted to be a writer’s writer. You can see how desperately I wanted this in the first line of my undergrad essay—I’m name-dropping Lydia Davis, trying to prove my literary bona fides. I wanted to write a memoir like Bluets—a sad, beautiful book you want to underline in dark ink.

Running BinderCon helped me get amazing blurbs for the book, from memoirists I admired, including Domenica Ruta1, Melissa Febos, Leslie Jamison, and Claire Bidwell Smith.

Land of Enchantment came out ten years ago, in August of 2016, during the election season that broke America. My new literary agent (my first agent left the industry after she sold my book) pitched an NPR producer she knew personally, who flat-out told her they weren’t covering books. Just the election. Election election election election election election election.

I just assumed that writers would buy my sad literary book. After all, I’d sold the memoir in part on the strength of my platform: I organized two conferences a year, for hundreds of women writers. I moderated the Facebook community that had grown under my tenure to 40,000 members. These writers wanted my help with their careers—they wanted what I’d built for them—but they didn’t want my book.

There was another way to market my memoir, I was learning, by talking about it as an “abuse memoir” and myself as a “survivor of abuse.” Choose your keywords for SEO: intimate partner violence, domestic violence, psychological abuse, victim.

Living with Jason was uncomfortable, writing about Jason was uncomfortable, telling people I was writing an entire memoir about living with Jason was uncomfortable, but branding myself as a survivor of abuse, to sell a memoir about abuse—this is what broke me. I couldn’t do it.

I wanted to be known for my work, not for what was done to me.

What that anonymous stranger had written to me in the night—it’s so hard to explain to them that I wanted to be in that situation more than anything, I felt more alive than ever before, and although the lows were the worst feeling in the world, the highs we had were absolute perfection—that’s what I’d tried to write a book about.

How do you market that?

I wrote an essay for the New York Times Book Review in defense of young memoirists. The publisher of my imprint was disappointed; it came out five months before pub date and he said it wouldn’t move the needle.

Undaunted, I managed to place an essay on psychological abuse in the Washington Post, to come out two weeks before my pub date. Perfect timing. It even went viral. I was flooded with comments about how I wasn’t a “real” victim of domestic violence, plus anti-Semitic tweets, as a bonus.

The essay had gone through so many drafts, and revisions, that I didn’t realize until after it was published that my editor had cut the paragraph about Jason throwing me against the refrigerator, without telling me. When I emailed her about maybe putting that back in, she replied that she was at a baseball game with her family. It was too late.

Now, I recognize this as a sign of my ambivalence: I wanted my pain to be taken seriously, but I also didn’t want what I’d suffered to become my identity.

On book tour, I woke up one morning to a google alert, with my name, about the murder of a woman named Megan Short. Before her husband took her life, and the lives of their three children, and their dog, and finally his own, Megan had sent a friend a link to my Washington Post article on Facebook messenger that said: This is why I’m leaving my marriage.

A British tabloid reached out because they wanted to publish an excerpt from my memoir and connect it to Megan’s murder. I said no.

Every August, I think of Megan. I remain haunted by what happened to her, at the moment she finally felt ready to leave.

Land of Enchantment never sold as many copies as I’d dreamed and hoped for, but I remain proud of the work, and I was very moved by the response to my Bluebeard's Castle essay—the third time something I’ve written about Jason has gone viral on the internet.

When I started writing about Jason, in that undergrad writing workshop seventeen years ago, I was so young I thought I was the only one. I thought I was special. If I hadn’t practiced my craft, gotten better at telling the story, and published my work, I would never have reached all the readers who thought they were alone.

Last year, I visited an undergraduate class at Stanford, to talk about pitching, and one of the students said she was writing a memoir. I did not say, “you are too young to write a memoir,” but I reflexively thought it—and later had to laugh at myself. Now who’s the elder?

If my face showed a flicker of incredulity or amusement, I hope the student turned it into fuel. I hope she writes her memoir to spite me.

Upcoming Events

• Tomorrow, August 19th, at 1pm ET, on Substack Live, I’m interviewing debut novelist about creating content on TikTok to build a platform and publishing her debut novel Kitten with Random House. Click here to be notified when it starts!

• On Tuesday, August 25 at 1pm ET, I’ll be hosting a Chat Room event with Nneoma Amadi-obi, an editor at Norton. My Chat Room conversations with book publishing professionals are available to paying subscribers of Attention Economy. I’ll interview Nneoma for thirty minutes, and then open it up to audience questions.

• On Wednesday, September 2 at 1pm ET, I’ll be hosting a Chat Room with editor Batya Rosenblum, who acquires personal development, parenting books, and non-fiction about religion and spirituality, for Tarcher, an imprint of PRH.

• On Wednesday, September 16 at 1pm ET, I’ll be doing a Substack Live with Nadia Bower about her grief memoir Dear Dealer, which started as a This American Life Story. Click here to indicate you’re interested!

• On Thursday, September 17 at 1pm ET, I’ll be hosting a Chat Room conversation with René Kooiker, a literary agent at Dystel, Goderich & Bourret.

• On Thursday, September 24 at 1pm ET, I’ll be hosting a Chat Room conversation with Stefanie Lieberman, a senior literary agent at Janklow & Nesbit.

In March, I received a blurb request that was written in my love language:

Dear Leigh,

Some time last year, I heard you say on a podcast that you loved stories of dark romance and people who are driven to do deranged things by their obsession, and I made a note that the things you loved sounded very like my debut novel, Dovecombe.

The author, Alex Clark, a former stonemason and archaeologist, had written a Gothic mystery loosely inspired by the unsolved arson that gutted the centuries-old Parnham House in Dorset. Instead of ending with a fire, this Gothic novel begins with one.

I read and loved Dovecombe—it has everything I want from a Gothic novel: a mystery, a dreadful atmosphere, obsessive yearning, the creepy imprint left by coercive control, women behaving badly, somnambulism, and an amazing house.

Dovecombe will be released on January 5, 2027, by Norton, and I’m delighted that Norton said yes to my idea to reveal the cover in Attention Economy—along with an interview with Alex about architectural history, the unsolved arson at Parnham House, and the ways in which she subverts gender (and genre) expectations in Dovecombe!

After studying archaeology and medieval architecture at university, Alex worked as an historic buildings archaeologist, drawing and researching industrial buildings in Sheffield and in London. She retrained as an heritage stonemason in 2010 and worked for four years at Gloucester Cathedral, where she learned traditional stone-cutting and conservation skills.

Your main character Dorrie is a stonemason, which makes her incredibly useful to the matriarch of Dovecombe Manor, who is trying to restore the family property to its former grandeur after a devastating fire. How did your own experience working as a stonemason inspire the novel?

What I love about architectural history, and about history and archaeology in general, is that the past still exists in the present. In the village where I live, the fields behind my house are striped with long hummocks formed by medieval strip-farming. I go running across them, adjusting my gait for the rise and fall, and I know that under my feet is a landscape formed by the labour of people who lived five hundred years ago, who mounded the earth to manage soil depth and drainage. In the summer, when the wild plants are tall and flowering, I can see that even today the species that grow on the high ground are different to those which grow in the low. It’s the same with old buildings. When you know how to cut stone by hand, the marks it makes, you can look at ashlar on a medieval church and read from the toolmarks on the surface that the person who cut it used an axe, and they shifted position halfway across the surface. When I was a buildings archaeologist, I remember climbing a staircase in a Victorian factory where each stone tread was dished in a particular spot, and watching my own feet automatically hit the same spots.

What is all of this if not a haunting? The people who laboured and cut and climbed are gone, but the landscape and the buildings they have left behind are still here, still speaking, still conforming us to long-dead patterns. And there are works that we leave behind that will last long into an unimaginable future. As a mason, I cut pieces of stone that will sit in the fabric of Gloucester Cathedral for perhaps the next two, three, four hundred years. I’ll be soil, and no one will remember me, but the marks my hands made will still be there. I’m dizzied by that. It gives me a kind of vertigo to think of it.

That perspective is one that leads you towards the Gothic. I have a Gothic mindset, I think: I don’t trust shiny classical ideas about human rationality and control. We are deeply weird creatures, and we know so little. I am a tiny speck in an incomprehensibly vast picture which I have as much hope of understanding as a medieval peasant. Lean in to the mystery, I say.

What was the first Gothic novel you ever fell in love with?

I’ve always been drawn to Gothic stories. I remember my mum being exasperated at me for reading the Ladybird Horror Classics in my primary school’s library when I knew they gave me nightmares. They were just irresistible. From there I went to The Canterville Ghost, The Hound of the Baskervilles and the Sherlock Holmes stories, and eventually to MR James and the Victorian classics. I devoured anything creepy, but I don’t think you could say I fell in love with a Gothic novel until I got to Sarah Waters’ The Little Stranger.

For a while, at the very start of my writing career, I wasn’t sure how to reconcile being a ‘literary’ writer with wanting to write about ghosts. Literary writers, I thought, wrote about things like divorce and the state of the nation, whereas my short stories constantly veered into the weird. I was pretty sure this wasn’t allowed. Then I read The Little Stranger, and found a beautiful literary ghost story in which the haunting is inextricably linked to the characters’ own grief, fears, and destructive desires.

I’m not exaggerating when I say I still think of its ending, and the hinted mechanics of its haunting, regularly. The idea of a part of a self, all the repressed desire and jealousy and anger, splintering off and walking the world: incredible. Hundreds Hall, too, is realised in such rich detail that it is practically a character in its own right. I feel like I have been there and dug acorns from its mouldings myself. It’s one of those books I constantly recommend to people, and my own faded copy lives on the shelf of books that never get cleared out, between The Turn of the Screw and Peter Ackroyd’s The English Ghost. It was a decade after reading The Little Stranger that I wrote Dovecombe, but you don’t have to look to deeply to see its influence. It showed me what modern literary Gothic could do, and it helped to set me free as a writer.

I love how you’ve taken classic Gothic tropes and playfully subverted them—when the main character arrives at the Gothic manor, it has already burned in a fire. The chilly coercive control and gaslighting that the reader would expect from a Max de Winter type comes instead from the narrator’s abusive wife (from whom she escapes, early in the novel). Can you talk about the ways in which you wanted to stay faithful to the genre you were working in, while also disrupting some reader expectations?

One of the major themes of the Gothic is the breakthrough of the dark, primal and powerful into the orderly daylight world. Often that dark intrusion is something from the past: something the characters have tried to bury, but which won’t stay in its grave. Its return shatters the characters’ illusions of control, the just-so story they’ve told themselves about their identity, their history, and their destiny, and makes them face the fact that they’re driven by forces they don’t understand and can’t master. This makes the Gothic an excellent genre in which to explore the long tail of psychological damage.

Traditionally, in the ‘female Gothic’ (as in Rebecca), there’ll be a vulnerable young woman trapped by an attractive but sinister man in the Gothic house. She’ll discover the terrible truth about him, his past, and the house, and we’ll hold our breath as she tries desperately to escape its grip. I love this format, but as a writer who is perennially, incurably obsessed with the deep psychological drivers behind people’s actions, my mind wanders to the wider picture: what happened before, and what happens after? What caused Rebecca to behave like that? What was Mrs Danvers’ childhood like? If the unnamed heroine of Rebecca has kids with Max, what are they going to carry with them?

Recurrence of darkness is built into the Gothic. Rebecca opens post-disaster with the couple in the South of France, but it’s clear there is no peace between them. They are still haunted. You could take the frame of the novel and move it decades before or after the events at Manderley and still find a terrible Gothic tale. So I think that although Dovecombe does move the frame slightly, does play with the traditional format, it’s very faithful to the heart of its genre: it’s about the way that the unresolved past intrudes into the present, warping and poisoning it. There’s a supernatural curse in the book, but arguably the real curse, the bigger sinister threat, is the burden of unhealed damage that’s passed down through the bloodline of every character. There’s no one in the book that isn’t haunted by their history, or driven by an unholy appetite. And that is the Gothic.

Dovecombe does also mess around a bit with Gothic gender norms. While there are a couple of sinister men in play, women are the main Gothic threat as well as the Gothic victims. I wanted to portray the kind of coercive control and manipulation that can be exerted by women over other women, whether that’s within families, friendships, or romantic relationships. Dovecombe’s Gothic is very female, but none of its women are innocent heroines, not even its protagonist Dorrie. She’s vulnerable, and she’s also dangerous; capable of great and terrible things. I loved writing her.

If you’re struck by this gorgeous cover, leave a comment!

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Every Gothic novel needs a great house. Can you tell us about the history of the real Parnham House and what most excited you about it as a setting for Dovecombe?

The story of the fire at Parnham House is incredible. In short, Parnham House is a sixteenth-century manor house in Dorset, UK, which was bought by an Austrian millionaire named Michael Treichl in 2001. He refurbished it in incredibly lavish style to the tune of $14 million, which among many other things bought a private cinema, a theatre, a full staff, a string of polo ponies, and an interior by the designer who fitted out Clarence House for Prince (now King) Charles. Treichl and his wife, a former model, hosted lavish shooting parties for European aristocrats and came and went from the house by helicopter.

On April 17, 2017, when no one was in residence at the house, it caught fire and burned out in a spectacular blaze that lasted for five days. There were rumours of suspicious circumstances: people said that the polo ponies had been let out of their stable before the fire, possibly to save them from it. Fire investigators struggled to find a cause and origin point because of the blaze’s ferocity and the total destruction of the interiors. A few days later, Treichl was arrested and then released, and then, in mid-June, his body was found in a Swiss lake.

Treichl’s wife put in an insurance claim for £38 million, and the house’s insurers called in a firm called Burgoynes, forensic investigators specialising in arson, to try and find out whether the fire had been foul play or not. According to newspaper reports, in 2019—two years after she began the claim—she admitted that her husband had confessed to her shortly after the fire that he was the arsonist. The insurers rejected the claim, and she took them to the High Court to dispute it. It wasn’t paid.

In 2020 the entire estate, with the burned-out shell of the house, was bought by a former ’90s rave promoter for £2.5 million. Much to the horror of local residents, he applied for an events licence allowing 24-hour alcohol sale and announced that he proposed to turn the shell into a ‘Batman house’ with secret doors, for people to visit on adventure weekends. I actually went down to Dorset and tried to get a look at the house around this time. I had a friend who had introduced me to the whole story and also knew where the house was, and how to get close to it on a public footpath. We crept through the trees to get a glimpse of its skeletal blackened rafters. It was thrilling.

There were so many things that grabbed me about this story when I heard it. Firstly, the fire was absolutely spectacular. The pictures are both terrible and incredible: a giant inferno consuming a beautiful, five-hundred-year-old house and all its lavish contents. Secondly, it’s still a mystery. Although there are glimpses of the truth, no one know fully why or how the fire happened. Thirdly, there are all those machinations: the fire investigators, the forensic specialists, the insurance claim, the rumours. Who knows what? Who is telling the truth?

I felt compelled to write a book that used some of those elements. Dovecombe isn’t based on the story of Parnham House or its owners, but it picks up some of its components: a beautiful sixteenth-century manor house in the West Country, a spectacular blaze, an arson investigation that becomes a cold case, a family in limbo over unpaid insurance, and a tangled mystery about who started the fire, how, and why. Dovecombe does reveal the solution to its arson in the end—though I won’t say what it is!

Can you tell us about the biggest challenge you had in writing this novel, and what you did to solve it? (Without spoiling the plot, of course!)

Honestly, there were so many! If I had to choose one, I’d say I learned a lot about writing dialogue. I wrote short stories for a long time before novels, and in my short stories the dialogue was pretty sparse. When I came to novels (I wrote two before I wrote Dovecombe), I at first tended to write dialogue as realistic conversation and/or information exchange. I learned through critique and through being edited that a scene of dialogue must be as sharp, as pared-back, as essential, as a scene of action. It should involve force. Each character is trying to achieve something in the exchange. Maybe they’re trying to hide their feelings, to protect someone, to signal status, to extract information, to flirt, to seem unaffected, to impress. Now when I write dialogue I read it back and check that I know what everyone in the conversation wants and what they’re driving at, and I check it rises to a climax, just like an action scene.

Dovecombe is available for preorder now from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Bookshop.org!

Follow Alex Clark on Instagram.

Upcoming Events

• On Tuesday, August 25 at 1pm ET, I’ll be hosting a Chat Room event with Nneoma Amadi-obi, who acquired Dovecombe for Norton. My Chat Room conversations with book publishing professionals are available to paying subscribers of Attention Economy. I’ll interview Nneoma for thirty minutes, and then open it up to audience questions.

• On Wednesday, August 19 at 1pm ET, I’ll be hosting a Substack Live conversation with BookTok creator and debut novelist Stacey Yu, about publishing Kitten with Random House! This is a public event, open to everyone. Click here to save the date!

• On Wednesday, September 2 at 1pm ET, I’ll be hosting another Chat Room with editor Batya Rosenblum, who acquires personal development, parenting books, and non-fiction about religion and spirituality, for Tarcher, an imprint of PRH.

• On Thursday, September 24 at 1pm ET, I’ll be hosting a Chat Room conversation with Stefanie Lieberman, a senior literary agent at Janklow & Nesbit.

Hype House Update 🏰

I turned my Substack post on my book sales into an Instagram carousel that’s been viewed almost 60,000 times and now 70% of the spots in my upcoming Hype House are taken. In Hype House, you’ll learn how to repurpose your Substack posts into Instagram content that actually gets engagement and grows your audience. (Hype House alum Mikala Jamison is a great example.)

Register here before it sells out!

Joanna MacKenzie is one of the literary agents who reads my Substack and when she saw that I had moved to Chicago, she reached out and asked if I wanted to meet in person. On January 20th, we met for coffee. That same day, I received this email from Joanna’s client through my website:

Gina was inspired by the pitch deck—similar to a non-fiction book proposal—I created to help me sell my Gothic mystery If You’re Seeing This, It’s Meant for You to Ballantine in 2024. I shared pages from my actual pitch deck here. Jane Friedman interviewed me about my pitch deck, in reporting on the trend.

Six months after my coffee with Joanna, and that email from Gina, I’m delighted and excited to share that not only did Gina sell her novel in a two-book deal at auction—she also generously offered to share slides from her deck with Attention Economy subscribers, so that more authors and literary agents can learn this strategy for getting attention in a crowded market!

As Gina shares below in our interview, this was her third novel on submission—and the first one that sold.

Q&A with Gina and Joanna 🚀

What inspired you to make a pitch deck for Houston, We Have So Many Problems?

GINA: This was my third time on submission, and I knew from experience how crowded the marketplace is for fiction right now. Some of my earlier rejections were variations on “I don’t know how to break this out” or “it’s not expectation-defining enough in a crowded marketplace.” Creating a pitch deck with a clear vision for the book’s audience and comps felt like something tangible I could do to help editors have a vision for how to position my book. My hope was that once an acquiring editor was interested in Houston that the deck would help them sell it internally. This definitely seemed to be the case.

What did you prepare in advance for the graphic designer of your pitch deck? What tips or ideas did you take from my pitch deck post?

GINA: I created a Pinterest board with images and ideas for the pitch deck and used a Google Doc for the text of each slide. I followed roughly the same outline as your deck for If You’re Seeing This It’s Meant for You focusing on story, comps, audience, publicity, and partnerships. I cannot recommend my friend (and fellow romance author) Cara Calloway enough. She absolutely nailed the vibes of my book and added so many details that delighted me like the name badge for Mikayla Morgan (my protagonist) at Interstellar, the SpaceX-like private space company where she works in Houston.

How did you collaborate on the synopsis, elevator pitch, and comp titles?

GINA: I wrote the (dreaded) synopsis and determined the comp titles. Atmosphere was released while I was revising my book and while they are both about female astronauts, Houston is a contemporary romance with open door sex scenes. To indicate the difference in tone, I added “Atmosphere if written by Ali Hazelwood.” For the elevator pitch, I usually draft the text and then Joanna edits it before sending it out to editors. Similar to querying, you want to hook the reader (whether it’s an agent or an editor) but not give away too much information. When I feel stuck on how to frame a story, I look at the back covers of the comp titles to see how other authors described their stories in a curiosity-inducing way.

JOANNA: Gina came up with the brilliant “The Martian, but with kissing” tag line. I added “which leads to more than kissing” to really drive home the spiciness for editors. 😉 The last thing we wanted was for anyone to be surprised by the sex. Gina is such a pro that all the pitch documents were stellar! One thing we did talk a lot about and ended up switching was the background or thematic color of the deck. Initially it was (my favorite) bubblegum pink, but I thought it was important that we underscored that there was more to this story and these characters than bubblegum.

I’m really impressed with your audience slide because, in my experience, novelists have a really hard time with identifying who their audience is. I love how you’re thinking of their reading HABITS—moms listening to audiobooks while being their kids’ chauffeur. Why do you think authors should define their target audiences themselves, even before their book sells? How does this help during the acquisition process?

JOANNA: I’ve always believed that it’s the job of the agent to make the path as clear as possible for editors to take a project to acquisitions. Sometimes that’s identifying the right comps, sometimes that’s showcasing an author’s platform and sometimes that is identifying all possible audiences. I also think that authors need to know where their book will live when published, so having a sense of audience is really important. It’s a little of the wild, wild west in publishing right now as everyone tries to figure out what readers want and how to break books out, so the more information we can gather and provide to editors the better. In my many years doing this job I have been surprised by publisher’s narrow-mindedness in terms of potential audience as well as surprised by authors who got their comps completely wrong, so do want to underscore that this isn’t a perfect science—and it’s one that depends on collaboration.

Gina, are you thinking of your audience, even when you’re drafting?

GINA: I don’t usually think of my audience as I draft, especially not while I write the first, very shitty draft because my only goal is to get to the end and figure out what story I’m actually trying to tell. That said, more than any of my other books, the audience for Houston was clear to me as the story took shape. The protagonist is a millennial single mother to a five-year-old, and I knew that issues about motherhood and ambition would resonate with readers. There has also been a lot of discourse in the romance community about too many books feeling the same. I thought that my “out-of-this-world” romance would be perfect for readers who want escapism, but something they haven’t read a hundred times before. In terms of reader habits, friends have told me that audiobooks are one of their favorite ways to read because they can fit it in during errands, picking up the kids, etc. I’m a huge fan of Jane Friedman’s newsletter—she has such great data—and there has also been a marked upswing in audiobook sales in recent years.

Joanna, did you send the deck with your submission letter? Or did you send it when editors requested the manuscript?

JOANNA: I only sent the deck once editors requested to read the manuscript. No sneak peaks 😉 Across the board, everyone loved the deck—even those who didn’t think the project was right for them.

How would you measure, or describe, the impact that having this pitch deck made in the book’s acquisition, compared to a standard novel submission?

GINA: During calls with interested editors, several of them referenced the pitch deck and how much they loved it. When we went to auction, one of the imprints even created their own pitch deck in response and included several of my ideas in how they would position the book. It seemed like the pitch deck helped to get the sales/marketing folks on board and also the publisher and others higher up the food chain who wouldn’t have time to read the entire book.

JOANNA: The impact of this pitch deck for this book was incredible. As Gina mentioned, we received pitch decks in response, which was a first for me and so fun to see.

Joanna, how does having a pitch deck help make an editor’s job easier? Do you think pitch decks work better for specific genres? Would you try this tactic with another author in the future? Do you see any downsides to an author packaging their book this way on submission?

JOANNA: A pitch deck makes the editor’s job easier by anticipating and answering all the points about audience, market, vibe, etc., that an editor will have to address during the acquisitions process and in so doing can speed up that process as well. We’re trying to say this is how the book will work in the market and this is why it will be successful and make it an obvious yes. We’re giving them the tools to get as many people on board as fast as possible, which hopefully means a faster and more enthusiastic sale.

This wasn’t my first pitch deck. And I’ve had various levels of success with them overall. Gina is spot-on when she says that it helped Houston stand out in a crowded marketplace and that’s really how I think about it when I consider adding one to the submission package. In the past, I’ve created a deck that I’ve sent out as part of a follow-up to a submission; a review highlights package; or a deck featuring a collection of articles that showcases why a particular project is of the moment. The thing I can’t control is if an editor will open any of these. We can’t know if every editor who considered Houston opened the deck for example. Editors have a lot on their plates so when we’re asking them to open one more thing, to read one more thing, it has to be worth their time—it has to be entertaining, exciting and make their job easier.

I do think pitch decks work for certain genres better than others. I don’t know that I’d see one for a literary project as those are so craft dependent, for example.

Joanna, would you like to see queries in your inbox with a pitch deck like this, or is it overkill for queries? Would any kind of visual moodboard in a query pique your interest?

JOANNA: I think it is overkill for queries. At that stage in the game, I’m looking to connect with an author’s writing and truthfully, with the volume of queries I receive, I don’t have time to peruse extra materials. I’m sure somewhere out there there is an author who has a success story of sending some kind of supporting deck, or mood board, or playlist, and that made all the difference, but I’d say that would be an outlier situation.

Follow Houston, We Have So Many Problems to the moon by following Gina on Instagram and Substack.

Further Reading & Watching

• I interviewed this week about how a viral Substack Note helped her sell her second non-fiction book

• My working theory of novel marketing

• Pitch decks for novels

Upcoming Events

• On Tuesday, August 25 at 1pm ET, I’ll be hosting a Chat Room event with editor Nneoma Amadi-obi, who acquires literary fiction and nonfiction for Norton. My Chat Room conversations with book publishing professionals are available to diamond medallion members of Attention Economy.

• On Wednesday, September 2 at 1pm ET, I’ll be hosting another Chat Room with editor Batya Rosenblum, who acquires personal development, parenting books, and non-fiction about religion and spirituality, for Tarcher, an imprint of PRH. Save the date!

Paid subscribers to Attention Economy will receive the Zoom link by email on the morning of the event.

Click here to subscribe to Cat’s Substack and follow her on Instagram here

Further Reading & Links

• Check out Cat’s first book Poe for Your Problems: Uncommon Advice from History’s Least Likely Self-Help Guru

• The obscure academic discipline that could help you land a book deal

• Here’s her advice on doing a Reddit AMA

• Here’s the story of how her viral Substack Note led to a book deal

• George RR Martin Summer Intensive Writing Workshop

If you want to feel more confident creating content on Substack or Instagram

The next session of Hype House begins on September 13th!

Hype House includes:

• Weekly classes on how to identify your audience, build your content pillars, learn new content formats, find your author comps, revamp your social media bio, and get more engagement on your posts

• Live Office Hours every Friday, so you can get personal feedback on your content and troubleshoot problems as they come up

• A workbook

• A student directory so that you can meet other writers and find collaborators

• A detailed rundown of all the marketing and content strategies I used to hit spot #27 on the USA Today bestseller list, including my two pre-order campaigns, the three social media platforms I focused on and why, what I learned from doing live events in 2025, and how much I actually spent on marketing.

Amy Chan has a bigger platform than I do. She has 125,000 Instagram followers and 112,000 TikTok followers. She is pretty, charismatic, smart, and telegenic. She has found her niche in the self-help market, offering singles “research-backed tools to rewire old patterns, date smarter, and build healthy, lasting relationships.” Her first self-help book, Breakup Bootcamp, sold 33,000 copies. If I were an agent, I’d want to represent Amy, and if I were a book editor, I’d want to bid on her second book Unsingle.

Several of you have DM’d me a link to Amy’s post, about spending $44,000—the equivalent of an entry level publishing salary—on her book launch campaign, with suboptimal results.

I spent far less money on my own launch campaign1 for If You’re Seeing This, It’s Meant for You, and I hit the USA Today bestseller list for the first time in my career (it’s my sixth book), at spot #27. Sonia Feldman, my former Hype House student, hit the list with her debut novel. Sanibel is another incredible success story of a debut novelist who hit the list by posting content.

In her post, Amy says that if she’d have wanted to hit that list, she would have had to spend an additional $25,000, but that simply isn’t true. I hit the list by using a pre-order incentive strategy that I learned from self-help authors just like Amy.

One could argue it isn’t fair to compare my book sales to Amy’s, since we’re working in two different categories. But self-help is one of the top-performing categories in publishing right now; anyone who looked at Amy’s platform, and looked at mine, would expect her to sell many more books than me.

To sell books, you don’t just need a platform—you need a content strategy that converts your followers into book buyers.

The comments on Amy’s post depress me so much—writers are so demoralized, and believe nothing—not even $$$$$—works to sell books. They believe all publicists are “scammers” (not true!) They believe BookTok “is just empty hype.”

I want writers to feel more empowered in their careers and I share evidence of what does work to sell books with my clients, students, and subscribers, because I think we have enough content about what doesn’t work.

Here are 3 lessons I want my audience to take away from Amy’s expensive launch:

You have to convert your own fans first

Before you even think about spending money on a TikTok campaign, so creators will promote your book to their audiences, or hire PR to get you on podcasts and TV, do you know how to persuade your own fans to buy your new book?

One strategy I’ve used with my clients is to build a bridge between fans of your previous work and your new book.

In her post, Amy doesn’t share links to the kind of content she was posting during the pre-order window. The engagement on these posts is surprisingly low, for someone who is skilled at creating content (compared to most authors). When I read the comments on her content, I see fans rooting for her, and cheering on her successes, but I don’t see evidence that she’s helping her audience solve problems in their dating lives and feel better. To sell this kind of book, her job is to persuade her audience that the book will transform their life.

If she was tracking her pre-order numbers (either by asking her publisher for updates, or tracking link clicks), she would have gotten early signals that her pre-order incentive wasn’t working. She could have pivoted.

If I were Amy’s content strategist, I also would have worked with her on starting a signature series.

Sponsored content is going to perform worse than organic

Ted doesn’t understand TikTok and he shouldn’t opine on it. BookTok sells millions of books every year. At a time when everyone is panicking about young adults not being able to read, BookTok has turned many former readers, and non-readers, into readers. Barnes & Noble CEO James Daunt told Bloomberg last year that the bookstore’s “mid-single digits” growth is a result of its embrace of BookTok twenty-something readers.

I’m grateful to BookTok creators for doing so much to support authors, and for making reading, and cultivating a life of the mind, look cool.

Here are some books I’ve bought because of recommendations on BookTok: Hunchback by Saou Ichikawa, Private Rites by Julia Armfeld, I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman, The Wall by Marlen Haushofer, and Universality by Natasha Brown.

The reason Amy’s book only sold 3 copies because of influencer campaign is not because the “BookTok literary revival is just empty hype.”

It’s because sponsored posts always perform worse than organic content.

It’s more time consuming to actually make friends on the internet, as I have done, so that those friends share your work with their audience, but it is so much more effective (and less expensive!) than paying for ads that no one wants to watch.

Here’s the video that Amy says was the best one in the paid campaign; it has 813 likes, 15 comments, and 130 saves. Any sponsored post MUST, according to FCC rules, declare itself as sponsored. The algorithm downgrades sponsored content, which makes it less effective.

Compare the engagement on that one to this one my friend Josh made (142,000 likes; 1751 comments; 27,000 saves) after I sent him a copy of my client Jillian Turecki’s self-help book. Josh wasn’t paid by me, Jillian, or Jillian’s publisher. I just knew him well enough to think her book would interest him. A genuine mention, or recommendation, is going to outperform a paid ad, which is good news for all of us who can’t afford the PR investment that Amy made in her own launch.

It just isn’t true that BookTok is “empty hype.” I hit the USA Today list because I spent three years making friends with a community of readers on BookTok who I genuinely believed would love my new novel.

@wickedtongue.substack#booktok @Leigh Stein

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If you have money to invest in your book launch, spend it on learning new skills, not on publicity

When writers come to me for advice about whether to hire an independent publicist, because they’re worried their publisher won’t do anything for their book, I tell them not to spend the money on publicity. An independent publicist can cost $25,000 - $60,000 and do you know who those book publicists are pitching?

They’re pitching content creators—like me.

I get more book pitches than ever before in my career; it tells me a lot about the state of the media industry. Last week, I received a third “just checking in” email from a book publicist representing a literary book by an author who joined in a Twitter pile-on of me on Twitter in 2023, after I wrote a piece arguing that writers should pay more attention to BookTok. This isn’t the publicist’s fault! Surely she has no idea her author publicly shamed me. But I remember.

If you can afford to set aside a portion of your advance, to invest in promoting your own book, because you want to know you did everything you possibly could to set yourself up for success, I think that money is better spent learning skills that you can carry forward into the rest of your writing career. I did this in 2019, when I hired a marketing consultant (shout out Dan Blank!) for Self Care; I learned so much about marketing from Dan. I did it again in 2025, when I worked with Lexi Merritt on my pre-order incentives for If You’re Seeing This, It’s Meant for You. I learned TikTok in 2022 by hiring a Gen Z assistant to teach me.

I understand why outside publicity is so appealing to the authors who can afford it. They believe publicity absolves them of self-promotion. They don’t have to create content, and feel embarrassed in front of their friends and family. It makes you feel powerful to write “copying my publicist” in an email.

But publicity only happens once: at launch. A few weeks later, the window closes. And then what do you do? Post content about your disappointment?

Creating content is how I stay in conversation with my readers; it’s also how I market my backlist.

If you want to learn content strategy from me, this is your sign to sign up for Hype House.

I apologize to everyone about the bumpy start of my much-anticipated interview with documentary filmmaker —I have submitted feedback to the team at Substack about the issues we experienced!

I do hope you will watch (or listen to) the recording of our conversation because it was lively, fun, fascinating, and genuinely inspiring! Penny and I discussed:

• the difference between an idea and a concept

• how to turn a topic you want to write about into a concept that only you can deliver

• Flaco the owl

• rejection

• how to deal with the embarrassment of making content as an artist

• the beginner tools she uses to create content

SUBSCRIBE TO PENNY'S SUBSTACK

Further reading

Penny’s framework for coming up with 10 ideas in 10 days

The difference between ideas and concepts

I didn’t get into Sundance (again)

commiseration content

Watch Penny’s films

RSVP for the free world premiere of Wild Inside in Central Park

Buy tickets to see Wild Inside at a theater near you! It’s showing in 50 cities.

You can find Listening to Kenny G (Richard Brody called it “an ironic masterpiece” in the New Yorker), Happy and You Know It (about kids’ music) and Hail, Satan? on HBO Max.

Confessions of a Good Samaritan, Penny’s film about altruistic kidney donation, is on Netflix. I interviewed Penny about making that film, which I’d call memoir+.

Check out more of Penny’s work here!

Join Hype House

My four-week content strategy workshop for writers in a love/hate relationship with the internet starts on September 13th! Here’s what Penny wrote about her experience in Hype House.

Click here for all the details.

Join us right now on Zoom!

https://us06web.zoom.us/j/89548544933?pwd=IFa0w7U3LVfCTPqLx2qPzj4u5FFWoO.1

I’ll publish the recording later. :)

In the summer of 2023, Patrick Radden Keefe had the opportunity to go to London to observe the production of the FX adaptation of his 2018 book Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Island. One morning in July, he was on set, at an office building on Chancery Lane that was made to look like Scotland Yard.

A sixty-something friend of the director, named Andrew Fingret, who was also visiting set that day, chatted with Keefe during a break. They spoke about the differences between New York and London, and Fingret, who is Jewish, told Keefe about how small and close-knit London’s Jewish community is. So small that you could play a game that Fingret called “Jewish Geography,” like Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, but for Jewish people to discover who they know in common.

Keefe isn’t Jewish, but he named a rabbi, an old friend of his parents, who lived in London: Julia Neuberger.

Neuberger, it turns out, had officiated the bar mitzvah of Zac Brettler, the son of one of Fingret’s friends from university.

“I may have a story for you,” Fingret said.

At 2:23 a.m. on November 29, 2019, nineteen-year-old Zac Brettler stood on the fifth-floor balcony of a luxury apartment complex on the Thames. On the other side of the river, security cameras at M16 headquarters captured “his slender silhouette against the brightly lit windows,” Keefe would later write. Zac “made his way to one corner of the balcony and seemed to peer over the ledge, before crossing to the other corner and briefly pausing there. Then, returning to the center of the balcony, he jumped.”

What made Zac jump?

This is the central question that haunts both the longform essay that Keefe published in the New Yorker, seven months after meeting Andrew Fingret, and his new narrative nonfiction book London Falling: A Mysterious Death in a Gilded City and a Family’s Search for Truth, which came out in April.

Order London Falling

Patrick Radden Keefe is one of the best storytellers working today. Reading his work is like going on a long hike with an experienced guide—I see things I never would have noticed on my own, and I never have to worry about getting lost.

When I think about good writing, I think of diction, style, voice, tone, atmosphere. If you gave me an unattributed paragraph or stanza from each of my favorite authors, I could identify them by voice. Good writing can be practiced at the level of a sentence, a paragraph, a page, a poem, a short story or an essay. In creative writing programs, writers are trained to write well by practicing on pieces that are short enough to be workshopped by their peers and instructors.

But good writing isn’t enough for a book with the scope of London Falling. We’ve all read “good writing” that is pretentious and boring. There are books with “good writing” on our shelves that we DNF’d.

This is because good longform storytelling—the controlled unfolding that’s necessary to hold a reader’s attention over the course of 300 pages—is much harder to teach within the constraints of the workshop model, and it’s one reason that books like London Falling are so rare.

I’ve pulled some storytelling lessons from the book, and from interviews with Keefe about his process, to help any writer working on a book-length work of nonfiction.

Know your turning points

A novelist has the challenge of inventing a plot. Beginning memoirists often believe they have it easier than novelists—they already know everything that happened!

But anyone who’s ever tried to write 80,000 words of a sustained nonfiction narrative, whether that narrative is personal or reported, knows how difficult it is to construct a story out of a chronology of true events.

You might think, I’ll just tell the story chronologically… But even that approach requires answering the question, “Starting where?”

Keefe told Harvard Law School students that his first outline for any book begins with “big hinge moments” for each character, written on an envelope. The limitation of the envelope forces him to be concise, before he drafts a more detailed outline.

These big hinge moments, or turning points, are moments when everything changed for your narrator, or character: they often include firsts and lasts (first time you ever met him; last time you ever saw him), moments when a character received life-altering news, life-changing events like births and deaths, relocations, accidents, crimes, miracles, and discoveries.

Your turning points are your map.

Once you have a list of your turning points, you can start to organize them into an outline for your book by asking yourself: What does the reader need to know when?

A good storyteller controls the pacing, and creates suspense, by making decisions about when to reveal what they know. What are you hiding from the reader initially? What would they be surprised to learn? In London Falling, Keefe is also using genre tropes, like red herrings, to create suspense.

As an opening, what turning point would hook your reader’s attention?

Keefe told ProPublica, “I’m always thinking about structure, and I’ve gotten better at that over the years having the confidence as I’m reporting to be thinking, ‘How am I going to tell this story?’ To me, an opening is like the top of the water slide. I just need to get you over there and get you going, and hopefully, once I have you there, the rest of it will fall into place.”

London Falling is a true crime book, so it starts in true crime fashion, with a description of Zac’s jump from the balcony. When I started writing this Substack post, I chose a different turning point, from page 271: when Keefe met Andrew Fingret. I transitioned from that turning point into the turning point of the jump, four years earlier.

Use your zoom lens

London Falling began as a conversation with Andrew Fingret, who introduced Keefe to Matthew and Rachelle Brettler, Zac’s parents. As Matthew and Rachelle share all the documentation they’ve collected, trying to solve the mystery of their son’s death with little help or engagement from law enforcement, Keefe zooms out from individual players in the story and gives the reader a sense of how large the canvas of this story truly is: from the history of the Thames and the urban development of London, to the influence of Russian money and power in the UK after the fall of the Soviet Union, to Idi Amin’s expulsion of Asians from Uganda in 1972.

The zoom lens in Keefe’s mind creates a transportive1 reading experience.

Many writers know they’d like to include history in their books, but they struggle to figure out when to zoom out to the bigger picture, because they fear losing their reader with a history lesson. After you’ve picked up a copy of London Falling, look at how Keefe leaves the reader on a cliffhanger in the crime story (the A story) on page 90, before taking us to Uganda in 1972 on the following page. Six paragraphs later, the reader finds out how this history lesson connects to the character we’ve just left on page 90.

Look for what rhymes

Like The Talented Mr. Ripley, London Falling is a book about deception. Before he jumped from the balcony, Zac Brettler was living a double life: in reality, he was the angsty teenage son of loving parents. The comfortable lifestyle they’d provided him was nothing compared to the ostentatious wealth he coveted, so he invented an alter ego, pretending to be the son of a Russian oligarch, about to inherit a great fortune. His bold lies helped him gain access to luxury apartments and nightclubs, and a network of influential, dangerous men.

As the book proceeds, the reader will not be surprised to learn that Zac is not the only character hiding behind a cloak of deception.

But Keefe finds narrative rhymes in unexpected places.

Rachelle Brettler, Zac’s mother, is the daughter of Hugo Gryn, a Holocaust survivor and prominent Reform rabbi in London.

One of the “big hinge moments” in Zac Brettler’s life happened almost sixty years before he was born:

The reader never wonders, why is Patrick Radden Keefe including Zac’s grandfather in this true crime book? Keefe is showing us another powerful illustration of the life and death stakes of maneuvering the truth.

If you feel like you have too much research, too much history, too many characters, too much story for your book, look for places where the material rhymes.

Make it pleasurable for the reader

London Falling is a tragedy, like all crime stories, and conveys the inexorable grief that Zac’s family will always carry. There is nothing pleasurable about what’s happened to these people.

Many writers (including yours truly) turn to memoir because they have experienced trauma and grief.

To alchemize the darkest thing that has ever happened to you into a book that will keep a reader up late into the night requires distance, self-awareness, skill, and practice—it also requires you to think about the story from the reader’s point of view.

One way to do that is to understand what delivers pleasure to our reader brains.

Dr. Jennifer Lynn Barnes, a novelist and former psychology professor, gave a lecture at the Romance Writers of America conference that I was able to listen to, about the six universal pleasure buttons that good stories hit. We love novels that hit all six buttons:

• Beauty

• Money & Wealth

• Status & Power

• Sex & Touch

• Competition

• Danger

Think Heart the Lover. Think Vladimir. Think The Compound. Think The Wedding People. Think… Love Island.

London Falling pushes at least three: Money & Wealth, Status & Power, and Danger.

How many of the six does your work-in-progress hit?

If you’re interested in this framework, read my former student on “reading kinks.”

Why can’t we have more London Falling?

Non-fiction sales have been declining for years, due to the proliferation of competing media (like podcasts), which creates a paradox. Publishers are not investing in time-intensive, investigative narrative nonfiction like London Falling because the sales numbers aren’t there to support them, but are readers not buying narrative nonfiction because publishers aren’t placing bets on books that could be every bit as compelling as London Falling?

In 2023, the books vertical at Esquire published an article asking if a book like Moneyball could be published today. (A year after publishing this, Esquire closed this vertical and laid off its editor.)

Most writers do not have the institutional support that Patrick Radden Keefe has, so they write nonfiction books that they can afford to write: memoirs, essay collections, and memoir+ with a research element that’s accessible from their laptops or local libraries.

Publishers would love to see “transportive” works of nonfiction with great storytelling, but will they fund them? Who can afford to do the level of investigative reporting that Keefe did for his extraordinary book?

What incredible stories are we missing?

Buy London Falling from Amazon, Bookshop.org, Barnes & Noble, or your local indie!

Upcoming Events

• On July 15 at 1pm ET, I’m speaking to award-winning documentary filmmaker Penny Lane about creating content as a filmmaker, and her forthcoming film Wild Inside, about Flaco the owl. The official trailer for the film has almost a million views on Instagram (!!) and Penny wrote about her experience in my winter Hype House here.

• On July 21 at 1pm ET, I’m speaking to literary self-help author Catherine Baab about how Substack helped her sell her second book, and how she’s used Reddit to promote her work.

Work with Me

Hype House, my four-week content strategy workshop for authors who want more attention for their writing, and more leverage in their careers, starts on September 13. One-third of the spots have sold out since I publicly announced, so register soon if you’re interested!

If you’re not sure if Hype House is for you, watch my Live with my former student, debut novelist Sonia Feldman, about how she created content on Instagram that helped her hit the USA Today bestseller list, or my Live with my former student Lu Chekowsky, who gained 15,000 followers on TikTok in the months leading up to her memoir launch.

I strongly recommend immediately picking up a copy of her memoir Don’t Buy What I’m Selling from your local bookstore, Bookshop.org, B&N, or Amazon! Hear Lu read her own memoir by ordering a copy on Libro.fm (shout out to ), Audible, or Spotify.

Don’t Buy What I’m Selling is a dishy peek behind the curtain of a billion-dollar industry, but it’s also the journey of one former ad executive who lived a life of contradictions—until she couldn’t anymore. With honesty and heart, interspersed with behind-the-scenes looks at the real-world tactics brands use to prey on consumers, it is perfect for readers of Roxane Gay, Aubrey Gordon, and Lori Gottlieb—and anyone who’s bought a product from an Instagram ad and instantly regretted it.

Follow Lu on Instagram and TikTok

Learn How to Talk about Your Book on the Internet

Join my Hype House this fall! Study social media with a great group of other memoirists and novelists who want to get more attention for their books.

In the first week, we’ll identify your primary audience and organize your unique obsessions into content pillars, so you know what to post—and for whom.

In the second week, we’ll study other creators—not to copy, but to analyze and understand what makes their content effective.

In week three, we’ll practice optimization techniques for increasing views, subscriber counts, and any other metrics that matter to you.

In our fourth week of the Hype House, we’ll conduct a post-mortem, analyzing your experiments and figuring out the easiest way to turn what works into a series.

During our final meeting, I’ll offer a behind-the-scenes look at everything I did to hit #27 on the USA Today bestseller list. I’ll share which tactics drove the most pre-orders, what I learned about live events in 2025, and how much I actually spent on marketing.

Save $70 if you register by Saturday July 4th!

🇬🇧 If you are a student in the UK, Ireland, Australia, or New Zealand, you can register for the class by buying 10 copies of If You’re Seeing This, It’s Meant for You. All the details are here.

Follow Sonia on Instagram

Subscribe to her Poem of the Week newsletter

Buy a copy of Girl’s Girl, a “lustrous debut” and a sundrenched and dewy snapshot of modern girl culture set in the blaze of one suburban Midwest summer, from Bookshop.org, Barnes & Noble, or Amazon!

Sonia Recommends

• Year-long novel generator

• Literary Cleveland

• Lexi Merritt

Join Hype House 3.0

If you want to become more comfortable and confident sharing your writing on the internet, and building an audience for your work, join my fall Hype House, which starts September 13th! This is a four-week social media workshop designed for novelists, memoirists, journalists, non-fiction authors, essayists, and poets.

Hype House is for:

• Writers who want to build a platform so that they can sell a non-fiction book or memoir

• Novelists and non-fiction authors with a forthcoming book, who want to drive pre-order sales

• Authors who want to learn how to better market their backlist on social media

• Writers who are trying to understand what happened to the internet, because they used to be really good at Twitter

Early birds save $70 by registering before July 4th! Tuition goes up on July 5th.

Click here for all the details

“Everything is random in publishing. Success is random. Best sellers are random. So that is why we are the Random House!” Markus Doehle, then CEO of Penguin Random House, said in 2022, at the antitrust trial that prevented PRH from acquiring Simon & Schuster.

At the time, a lot of writers thought, Finally! Someone is saying the quiet part out loud!

Many writers identify as victims of a dysfunctional industry. The well educated, credentialed writers are dismayed to see writers with less talent, and less training, get bigger book deals. The published authors feel like jealous siblings when they see titles at their own imprint getting way more marketing and publicity support. They once believed they would be able to support themselves with writing—now their agent can’t even sell their fourth or fifth or sixth book, after one of their books underperformed. Should they switch categories? Write under a pen name? They see all the attention going to debuts by photogenic young women who are good at the internet.

There is a lot of commentary on Substack that encourages this victim mentality by reinforcing the belief Nothing works because it’s all random anyway.

There are no book reviews! / Book reviews don’t sell books anyway!

Podcast interviews are the only things that sell books! / Podcast interviews don’t even sell books anymore.

You don’t have to be online! You can do in-person events and build community. / Bookstore events don’t sell books.

I don’t believe “nothing works.” I don’t even believe “something works, but we don’t know what that thing is.”

Between 2020, when Self Care came out during the pandemic, and 2025, when I launched my sixth book If You’re Seeing This, It’s Meant for You, I watched the digital media industry transform into the “creator economy.”

I was so fascinated by this media revolution—in which consumers went from trusting institutional media to trusting individuals, whether that’s Ezra Klein or Heather Cox Richardson or a tarot card reader on TikTok—that I wrote a whole novel about this.

I joined TikTok in the spring of 2022 for two reasons: one was for novel research (I wanted to learn how to create video content, so I could believably write about it). The second reason was to learn BookTok, understand what books they liked to read, and meet the new literary tastemakers.

Four years later, I have evidence that creating content sells books. Instead of joining the chorus of “no one knows what works,” I’m going to show you—with data!—what works in 2026, by drawing a comparison between my own novels, which came out five years apart.

When Self Care came out in 2020, my biggest following was on Twitter (6,500 followers). (Twitter doesn’t sell books!) I also had 1,200 Instagram followers and 734 newsletter subscribers.

Four days before publication, my editor emailed me to say we had 430 pre-orders.

It was June 2020: we were three months into a global pandemic. Twitter was Cancelation City. The vaccine was almost a year away. I could not do any in-person events to promote the book.

Because the summer of 2020 was the summer all the girlbosses tumbled, I looked like an oracle. Everything I’d survived as a nonprofit girlboss proved prescient.

I wrote the very first “The End of the Girlboss Is Here” article (The Atlantic published their version 48 hours later). It went viral and was one of the Top 10 most read stories on Medium in 2020.

Self Care was reviewed in The New Republic, the LA Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, Vulture, Bitch, ELLE, VICE, Refinery29, AVClub, and Esquire. I don’t mean it was included in meaningless roundups of “200 books that ate this summer” that recycle the marketing copy on the back of the book—I mean it was reviewed.

“Self Care proves Leigh Stein’s status as a great ‘demolition expert’ (Kenneth Tynan’s term for Bernard Shaw) of the influencer era.”—The New Republic

New York mag put it in the “highbrow brilliant” quadrant of the approval matrix. I was interviewed by Fast Company and the New York Times. VOX’s book critic named it one of her Top 10 books of 2020. This was all accomplished by my in-house publicist.

Creating content (not that I would have called it this at the time!) on Twitter, and in my MailChimp newsletter, would not have been enough to make my book hit. It was traditional publicity, combined with genuine word-of-mouth marketing, that helped me sell almost 10,000 copies in the first month. Ninety-eight percent of new releases in 2020 sold fewer than 5,000 copies.

I got very lucky in 2020. Self Care was not my debut—it was my fourth book. It was the book that resurrected my career, after my third book was a commercial failure.

In the five years that followed, Bitch folded. VICE folded. GEN Mag, the Medium publication that had paid me $3,000 to write “The End of the Girlboss Is Here,” folded. The LA Times laid off 23% of its newsroom, including its books editor. The Chicago Sun-Times published a book listicle that was hallucinated by AI. The Associated Press stopped publishing book reviews, which were syndicated to local papers.

In February of this year, the Washington Post fired 30% of its employees as part of a “strategic reset” and shuttered its book section. Ron Charles joined Substack.

In June, Gilbert Cruz, the editor of the New York Times Book Review, took a new role called “Canon Editor,” which is a fancy way of saying that he will be leading a department creating content like the popular “100 Best Books of the 21st Century” package, which I covered two years ago.

It’s create content or perish in obscurity—even for the NYT.

Between 2021 and early 2024, as I wrote my Gothic mystery set in a TikTok hype house, I also upgraded my skillset as a content creator on TikTok, Substack, and Instagram. I started teaching classes on BookTok for writers. Through word-of-mouth, I became a sought-after consultant for writers who wanted to learn how to sell more books through content.

After all the publicity I’d gotten for Self Care, I naively thought If You’re Seeing This would be reviewed. Even though I closely follow changes in the media industry, and I KNEW what had happened to book coverage in the five years since I’d last published a novel, I thought someone? somewhere? would be interested in writing about what Leigh Stein published after Self Care?

If You’re Seeing This received trade reviews in Kirkus, Shelf Awareness, Booklist, and Publishers Weekly. It was included in multiple roundups from brand name media outlets: NPR, Town and Country, USA Today, Katie Couric Media, The Cut’s Book Gossip newsletter. But unlike Self Care, it was not widely reviewed, and the most media attention I did receive was from Jewish publications: my friend Phoebe very kindly reviewed the book for the Canadian Jewish News; Lilith magazine reviewed the novel four months after it came out, and Tablet interviewed me nine months after publication. And this is through no fault of my in-house publicist, who knocked on every door, and tried every angle.

So when I got my first royalty statement from PRH, I felt emotional. I may not have received the same level of critical attention that I received in the summer of 2020, when Self Care came out, but I can look at these sales numbers and know: I did this. This is the result of all the hard work I put into learning how to create content, and all the genuine connections I made by posting my ideas on the internet.

If You’re Seeing This sold 322 more copies month one, compared to Self Care. I also hit the USA Today bestseller list for the first time, at spot #27.

I have not only used the content strategy I’ve developed over the last four years with my frontlist—I have also used it with backlist. After my Bluebeard’s Castle essay went viral on Substack, I sold more copies of Land of Enchantment, published in 2016, in a single week than in the preceding year.

When If You’re Seeing This, It’s Meant for You went on sale over Memorial Day weekend, I posted content on Substack, TikTok, and Instagram that created this sales spike:

We are so beyond the conversation about whether or not authors have to have “platforms” (they do): we need to be teaching authors how to create content that converts.

Because you can have 60,000 followers on Instagram, or 10,000 Substack subscribers, and if you don’t know how to convert your audience into buyers of your book, you’re going to be disappointed, and become bitter about your own audience (!)

Book marketing departments are way too overwhelmed (they’re working on too many books at a time) to teach these skills to authors. A lot of publishers are still using the same Instagram playbook from 2019.

Hype House Returns September 13

If you are an author who would like to learn how to create content that helps you leverage your original ideas, unique perspective, and writerly instincts into a social media strategy that attracts readers (instead of other writers!)—without turning you into something (or someone) you hate, you can learn all my secrets by signing up for my Hype House.

Hype House is a four-week social media workshop for writers in a love/hate relationship with the internet. I’ll take you through the exact process I use with my one-on-one clients, and show you how to create a content strategy that doesn’t make you want to jump off a bridge.

(You don’t have to dance on TikTok.)

In my experience coaching writers with their content strategy, the biggest barrier is almost always a fear of embarrassment.

Your fear of being seen trying is what’s actually holding you back.

If that’s true for you, what I want you to know is that being a beginner a public is worth the risk.

The authors I’ve worked with who have pushed through that initial awkwardness are reaping the rewards: building audiences, landing career-changing opportunities, giving interviews to major outlets about their work—and selling books.

It’s uncomfortable to be seen trying in public. But it gets a lot easier when you’re in good company.

Save $70 if you register before July 4th!

ENROLL TODAY

Curriculum

All enrolled Hype House members will receive a digital workbook that includes the same activities and prompts I use with my clients, to help them get to know their audience, collect and organize the obsessions that drive their work, find their comps, create stronger hooks, and identify what would make a good recurring series.

Beginning Sunday September 13, we’ll meet every Sunday afternoon for a live Zoom workshop from 3—4:30pm EST. These will be recorded for anyone who can’t join live.

Every Friday from 1—2pm EST, I will lead a group coaching call on Zoom, where you can receive personalized feedback on what you’re struggling with that week: whether that’s writing a new social media bio, filming your first green screen video, or brainstorming how to recycle content from one platform to another. You’ll tap into the wisdom of the group, and have the opportunity to learn from the experiences of writers further ahead in their careers.

In our final class, I’ll share a detailed rundown of all the marketing and content strategies I used to hit spot #27 on the USA Today bestseller list with my novel If You’re Seeing This, It’s Meant for You, including my two pre-order campaigns, what I learned from doing live events in 2025, and how much I actually spent on marketing.

🇬🇧 Special Offer for UK Students

If you are an author residing in the UK, New Zealand, or Australia, you can register for Hype House by purchasing and distributing 10 copies of If You’re Seeing This, It’s Meant for You, instead of paying the tuition fee, which will save you several hundred pounds. Click here for all the details on how to take advantage on this offer.

Upcoming Events

Not sure if Hype House is for you? Come to one of my free Live events with Hype House alumni!

• For the novelists: On June 30 at 1pm ET, I’m speaking to Sonia Feldman about all the worldbuilding she did on Instagram for her debut novel Girl’s Girl, and the pre-order campaign that helped her hit the USA Today bestseller list. Save the date!

• For the memoirists: On July 1 at 1pm ET, I’m speaking to Lu Chekowsky, about promoting her memoir (plus) Don’t Buy What I’m Selling with video content on TikTok and Instagram, as a woman over the age of 35. Save the date!

• For the artists and multi-hyphenates: On July 15 at 1pm ET, I’m speaking to award-winning documentary filmmaker Penny Lane about creating content as a filmmaker, and her forthcoming film Wild Inside, about Flaco the owl. The official trailer for the film has almost a million views on Instagram (!!) and Penny wrote about her experience in my winter Hype House here.

• For the non-fiction authors: On July 21 at 1pm ET, I’m speaking to literary self-help author Catherine Baab about how Substack helped her sell her second book, and how she’s used Reddit to promote her work.