If You're Seeing This, It's Meant for You

I sold my novel

A few weeks ago, my husband and I were eating breakfast at our hotel in Barcelona when he saw that Paramount had removed the entire digital archive of MTV News; two decades of music journalism gone overnight. My husband had worked for years at MTV News, interviewing actors and musicians in the studio and at press junkets and on the red carpet. On the dating site where we met, the profile photo he used was of him and Vanilla Ice.

When MTV News launched, it was ahead of its time, as its founding editor Michael Alex writes:

I specified that we’d create an artist index linking to every report on every artist we ever covered. (This was in the days before search functions were available, so we did it alphabetically.) We launched in November of 1996, and also seeded the archive with transcripts from select old interviews pulled from our videotape library. Want to read MTV’s first interview with Nirvana? TLC? The Rolling Stones? Jay-Z? The Pixies? We have it for you.

Celebrity interviews and profiles still exist, but most of the celebrity news we get today comes directly from the celebrities’ social media. Social media has enabled celebrities (and writers) to be in relationship directly with their fans, without the press as intermediary. And this has led to a massive shift in the media industry, including tens of thousands of laid off journalists.

In October of 2021, I started writing a novel about an unemployed thirty-nine-year-old woman who has spent her whole career in entertainment journalism, nimbly pivoting from print to digital to podcasts to live events, only to be rewarded with more layoffs. When her boyfriend dumps her, and she has no place to live, she reluctantly accepts an unusual opportunity from a man she hasn’t seen in twenty years, managing a hype house of gen Z creators inside a crumbling gothic mansion in LA. One of the influencers has disappeared.

Four days before that breakfast in Barcelona, I sold this novel, titled If You’re Seeing This, It’s Meant for You, to Ballantine.

Publishers Weekly is announcing the deal in its roundup tomorrow.

It would be impossible to overstate how validating it is to sell my novel about the creator economy, when my work as a coach and a teacher and a Substacker is to show creative writers how they can use the internet to connect directly to readers and make a better living.

If you have come to trust me as a source on the book publishing industry, the creator economy, and how they intersect, I have another announcement to make, in what I believe is a Substack first.

At the same time I am publicly announcing my book deal, I am also launching a paid Substack.

For months, I have been asking myself what I have to offer my subscribers that isn’t already available from the many other excellent publishing newsletters.

Many newsletters have advice for writers who are querying agents, but a lot of my subscribers are established authors with two, three, or even four books published. They aren’t looking for Query 101. They’re hoping to revive their careers after one of their books underperformed, or they want to get better at marketing their books so they can hit the list, or they’re trying to figure out how to make a sustainable living in an unpredictable industry.

Some of my subscribers actually work in the publishing industry, and share my Substack with their colleagues, which made me realize that one of the most valuable things I have is my relationships with publishing professionals. Many writers only know two people in book publishing: their agent and their editor. Writers give each other publishing advice based something they heard from another writer who heard it from a writer who heard it from her agent. It’s a game of telephone that leaves many writers clueless and confused—even paranoid and resentful, when rumors spread that “agents only want X” or “editors aren’t even doing Y anymore.”

There just aren’t a lot of opportunities for writers to speak to people who actually work in publishing.

I am launching a series of conversations called Chat Room for paid subscribers of Attention Economy. These will happen twice a month on Zoom. If you attend live, you’ll have the opportunity to ask a question.

My goal with these conversation is to not only pull back the curtain, but also lower the temperature on the animosity so many writers feel toward publishing professionals, seeing them as enemy gatekeepers, instead of as potential collaborators and business partners. I want to foster a spirit of congeniality and mutual respect between writers and publishing professionals, instead of mistrust, paranoia, and resentment.

The first Chat Room will be with literary agent Iris Blasi, on August 6th at 8pm EST, about what literary agents are looking for when they’re scouting for writers on Substack.

If you can’t attend live, my paying subscribers will have access to the recording for 7 days.

It is also important to me to host Chat Room convos with publishing insiders beyond literary agents, because there is a lot of content on the internet already from agents. What about editors? Marketing directors? Sales reps? Bookstore buyers? Who are all the hardworking people laying hands on your book, on its journey from Word doc to shelf talker?

My upcoming guests include:

• Kate Napolitano, recently promoted to editorial director of non-fiction at Atria

• Windy Dorresteyn, Vice President, Director of Marketing at Random House and Hogarth

• Mackenzie Brady Watson, literary agent

I don’t plan to increase the number of newsletters I send each month because I don’t think anyone wants more email. My paying subscribers will receive 2 — 4 newsletters a month from me, while my free subscribers will receive 1 — 2 newsletters a month.

Help me stick the landing.

If you trust me as your go-to source on what the internet is doing to book publishing, become a paying subscriber today for $8 a month or $80 a year.