His newest book, Good Morning Moon: A Snapshot of an American Family, turns the lens inward. Part memoir and part family story, it traces an unexpected journey from the downtown New York of the 1970s and ’80s to marriage, parenthood, and family life in the 2020s, a transformation that sometimes leaves even the author wondering, “How did I get here?”

In this edition of 21 Questions, Gooch reflects on memoir, biography, literary obsessions, and the surprises that can emerge over the course of a writing life.

21 Questions with Brad Gooch

1. I couldn’t have written my last book without…

Living in the 1980s East Village a few degrees of separation away from Keith Haring, the biographical subject of Radiant. (Well, I could have written it but from another p.o.v.)

2. What’s the thing most people get wrong about being a writer?

That you can do it anywhere. “Bring your laptop and finish your book here. We’re having a house party. We’ll set you up on the outdoor deck with a cold drink and let you be.”

3. What’s your most common form of procrastination?

Instagram.

4. Do you read your reviews?

I skim them. If I come across some warm adjectives, I go back and read more closely.

5. What’s the first thing you do after you finish a draft?

Draft of what? For me, unfortunately, every sentence is a draft. I’m a major tinkerer. Word processing has only slowed me down as it’s easier to try out even more variations.

6. Kiss, marry, kill: podcasts, newsletters, and speaking gigs.

I get flak for not listening to podcasts. They’re like radio, right? I still don’t know where to find them. And I can’t think of a single newsletter. Since speaking gigs have turned mostly into live onstage conversations, I’m much happier. I used to treat them as one-act, one-person standup monologues rewritten for each event. It’s nicer to have a partner—hopefully a lively, wordy one—up there on stage blowing in the wind along with you.

7. What’s a writing habit you’re embarrassingly superstitious about?

I prefer writing paragraphs as perfect boxes with no spillover of words into a widow word or phrase onto an extra line. If I add a few new words in the text, creating an untidy last line, I feel a need to rewrite other parts until the perfect box is restored. I don’t carry this mania over into the publishing, so only an alert editor might detect my psychosis.

8. What’s something you wish you’d started doing five years ago?

Recording on Voice Memo on my iPhone rather than on my 1980s-style Sony cassette recorder, which is nicely retro but clunky, and its cassettes are more difficult to restock.

9. Where do you find new ideas, and how do you keep track of them?

I try not to find new ideas but to stick to old ideas, at least for biographies. I rely on hunches I’ve had for a subject for at least a decade and have kept coming back to—Frank O’Hara; Flannery O’Connor; Keith Haring. Biographies are so time and labor-intensive that you don’t want to discover midway that you’re bored or repelled by your choice.

10. What’s the best piece of professional advice you’ve ever received?

When I was at Columbia College and upset by not receiving a writing prize whose name I have forgotten, my “Imaginative Writing” instructor, the poet Kenneth Koch, said to me, with his murmur of a stammer, “M-M-Mister Gooch, you rely too much on authority.”

11. And the worst?

When I was a nascent writer with no agent, a friend offered to show some of my writing to a friend of his, a well-known literary agent. She advised me to read more Henry James.

12. What’s on your nightstand right now?

When All the Men Wore Hats, Susan Cheever; City Boy, Edmund White; The School of Night, Karl Ove Knausgaard; New York City’s Best Public Schools and The Manhattan Guide to Private Schools and Selective Public Schools.

13. What’s a writing rule you’ve happily broken?

Only write a memoir if you’re a celebrity.

14. What tech tools (AI included) do you actually use—and which ones do you actively ignore?

Perhaps the original AI tool was the Thesaurus. If I’m worrying over a dull word or a repetitious word, I no longer stop myself from checking an online Merriam-Webster or WordHippo. Yet most often, the word I finally land on appears on none of their lists of dozens of synonyms. In my experience, lots of AI tools are likewise iffy buzzkills.

15. What’s the best non-writing skill that’s helped your writing career?

Introversion.

16. Can you describe your ideal workday?

My ideal day would be keeping banker’s hours, 9 am to 3 pm, writing in a cork-lined studio.

17. How does that compare to your actual workday?

Pretty closely. My writing studio is not cork-lined but it’s quiet and off-site, a two-block walk from my home. Two days a week I do escape to a trainer at a gym six blocks away.

18. If you could write one book in a totally different genre than you usually do, which would it be?

A book for a musical by Stephen Sondheim.

19. What’s something about the writing life that still surprises you?

I’m always surprised—at book signings or teaching a writing seminar—how many young people still aspire to be writers.

20. Fill in the blank: In five years, successful authors will all be ___.

Unable to stop writing.

21. What is your new book about?

It’s a memoir about a gay guy from the 1970s (me) who wakes up in the 2020s to find that he is married (to a man) and has two young kids. Often, above my head, hovers the thought balloon, “How did I get here?” This book attempts to answer that question.

Leave a comment

If you enjoyed Brad’s Q&A, you can learn more about his new book here: Good Morning Moon: A Snapshot of an American Family.

More from Author Insider

Author Insider is where writers get the real story of publishing—thoughtful conversations with industry insiders and bestselling authors, clear-eyed analysis of where the market is headed, and practical strategies for building a sustainable writing career. Whether you’re just starting out or several books in, the goal is the same: helping you make smarter decisions about your work.

If you’re new to Author Insider, here are a few recent reader favorites:

• How to Stay Creative in a World That Won’t Stop Distracting You: Q&A with Austin Kleon

• Somehow, This is Working: 21 Questions with Jenny Lawson a.k.a The Bloggess

• The New Rules of Book Publicity

Until next time,
Panio

Author Insider is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Subscribe now

That’s why I’m excited to welcome Ari Gersen, owner of Longfellow Books in Portland, Maine, for an upcoming Author Insider Q&A.

Join us on Wednesday, June 24th, at 1 p.m. ET.

Longfellow Books has been serving Portland’s literary community for nearly 25 years, and Ari has had a front-row seat to the way readers browse, buy, recommend, and fall in love with books.

Personally, I’ve known Ari since the late ’90s when we both landed our first jobs in publishing at Crown. I was in editorial, he was in publicity, and we’ve been friends ever since.

We’ll talk about what makes readers pick up one book and pass over another, what booksellers notice that authors often miss, what makes an author event work, and whatever questions you bring to the conversation.

RSVP here → What Bookstores Can Teach Authors About Readers

I hope to see you there,
Panio

P.S. This is a paid-member event, so if you’d like to join us live, you’ll need an active paid or founding membership.

Upgrade my subscription

Coming Up Next

Thursday, June 18th at 4 p.m. ET
Why the Reader Is the Most Important Character in a Nonfiction Book

Why do so many smart, knowledgeable people struggle to write a nonfiction book they’re happy with? Elizabeth Dougherty and Marisa Solis—book coaches, editors, and coauthors of The Complete Expert-to-Author Guide—join me to discuss a simple but powerful idea: the reader isn’t just your audience—it’s the most important character in your book.

RSVP here → Your Book Has a Main Character. It’s Probably Not You.

Subscribe now

And yet, the longer I’ve worked with authors, the more I’ve come to believe that writing and fitness have a lot in common. Both pursuits force us to wrestle with the same questions: How do you stay consistent when life keeps interrupting your plans? How do you keep going when motivation disappears? How do you avoid letting perfectionism become an excuse for inaction?

Those questions are at the heart of Steve Kamb’s work. Steve is the founder of Nerd Fitness and the author of the upcoming book How to Try Again: An Approachable Guide to Navigating Chaos and Making Change That Sticks. While much of his career has focused on health and fitness, the deeper subject has always been behavior change: how we follow through on difficult things, recover from setbacks, and avoid becoming our own worst enemies.

Which is why my recent Author Insider conversation with Steve proved remarkably relevant to writers. During our hour-long Q&A, we discussed a number of topics, including:

• Why most productivity advice breaks down for writers and creative people

• How to experiment with your writing routine instead of judging yourself for not having the “right” one

• Why all-or-nothing thinking so often turns into “all, then nothing”

• How to give your inner critic less voting power

• Why missing a day should be treated more like missing a shower than ruining your life

• How procrastination can sometimes be useful information

For those of you who couldn’t attend live, I’ve included the video replay in this post. I’ll also share the full transcript soon for those who’d like to revisit specific sections or reference Steve’s advice in more detail.

I hope you enjoy our conversation and find something useful in it, whether you’re working on a proposal, drafting a book, trying to revive a creative routine, or simply attempting to be a little less brutal to yourself along the way.

Here’s a link if you’d like to learn more about Steve’s new book, How to Try Again.

Thank you, as always, to everyone who joined live and contributed such thoughtful questions.

Until next time,

Panio Gianopoulos

More from Author Insider

Author Insider is where writers get the real story of publishing—thoughtful conversations with industry insiders and bestselling authors, clear-eyed analysis of where the market is headed, and practical strategies for building a sustainable writing career. Whether you’re just starting out or several books in, the goal is the same: helping you make smarter decisions about your work.

If you’re new to Author Insider, here are a few recent reader favorites:

• How to Stay Creative in a World That Won’t Stop Distracting You: Q&A with Austin Kleon

• Somehow, This is Working: 21 Questions with Jenny Lawson a.k.a The Bloggess

• The New Rules of Book Publicity

Millions of people know Eva zu Beck as a YouTube adventurer and National Geographic TV host who documents life far beyond the beaten path. But seven years ago, she was living a very different life, one that looked successful from the outside but felt increasingly wrong on the inside.

Her new memoir, The Wilder Way, traces the journey that followed. From solo horseback riding in Mongolia to getting stuck on an island in Yemen during the COVID lockdown, the book chronicles a decade of adventures, and the personal transformation that accompanied them.

In this edition of 21 Questions, Eva reflects on freedom, focus, and why waiting until you’re ready may be the worst advice of all.

21 Questions with Eva zu Beck

1. I couldn’t have written my last book without…

Running off to the Arctic Circle in the winter to tear myself away from all distractions, human and otherwise. I needed total silence and singular focus (and little reason to go outside) in order to actually write this book.

2. What’s your most common form of procrastination?

Playing with my dog. Scrolling. Reading other people’s books.

3. Do you read your reviews?

Absolutely not. I’m at peace with the fact that not everyone will like me or my work, but I also don’t want to spend my precious mental resources obsessing over what people think of me. Besides… even the absolute best books ever written have one-star reviews!

4. What’s the first thing you do after you finish a draft?

Go for a very, very long run.

5. What’s a writing habit you’re embarrassingly superstitious about?

I never write in blue ink. If I’m writing something—anything—by hand, it needs to be in black ink. Always. Blue ink makes me feel like I’m writing a draft, while black ink makes me feel like I’m writing something of substance.

6. What’s something you wish you’d started doing five years ago?

Dedicating more time every day to being bored and letting my thoughts wander.

7. Where do you find new ideas, and how do you keep track of them?

I love going for long nature walks and trail runs. Good ideas tend to pop into my head whenever I’m outside, and I’ll capture them via long, rambling voice notes.

8. What’s the best piece of professional advice you’ve ever received?

Once upon a time, I was very concerned with what people on the internet thought about me, and a single negative comment could send me into a spiral of self-doubt. That’s when a friend told me that I need to actively choose to focus on the creative energy I put out into the world, as opposed to absorbing the negativity.

9. And the worst?

“Wait until you’re ready.” This is terrible advice, because you may never feel ready, and you may always feel like an impostor. Some of my biggest achievements have come from saying “yes” to projects that I did not feel ready for in the slightest. The beauty of life is, whenever you take on something new, you learn and grow as you go along.

10. What’s on your nightstand right now?

About ten books, my phone (sadly), and all kinds of natural oil concoctions for my body, face, and hair. Living in a shepherd’s hut in the mountains, you need to find little ways to take care of yourself!

11. How did you find your agent?

They noticed my work on social media and reached out to me, suggesting I should write a book about my adventures!

12. What’s a writing rule you’ve happily broken?

I always thought that books should be written in a linear way: you start at the beginning. When I sat down to write my memoir, starting at the beginning felt too overwhelming, so I simply started in the middle and eventually returned to write the first chapters later on.

13. What tech tools (AI included) do you actually use—and which ones do you actively ignore?

Most of my first book took shape in Google Docs, which made reviewing and commenting quite easy for my editor and me. I also used online tools to transcribe my voice note into actual written content. As for tools I would not use—that would have to be AI tools like ChatGPT. I just believe that Large Language Models do not have a place in human writing.

14. What’s the best non-writing skill that’s helped your writing career?

My delusional optimism: a skill I’ve been cultivating for years, like a muscle. It helps me believe that what I write about matters.

15. How many drafts before you show your editor?

Probably two.

16. Can you describe your ideal workday?

Sit down to write with a big cup of coffee first thing in the morning. Write for a few hours. Then, shut down the laptop and head out for a long walk or run with my dog. In the afternoon, work on my social media, read, recalibrate.

17. How does that compare to your actual workday?

My “main” job as a travel and adventure filmmaker means I’m often on the road, without any semblance of a routine. Every day looks different, and it’s hard to focus on any one thing for more than an hour at a time. This is why, when I wrote my first book, I escaped to the Arctic Circle for three months to get away from all those distractions. It worked well, so I’ll be doing something similar for my next book(s)!

18. If you could write one book in a totally different genre than you usually do, which would it be?

I feel like I would first need to run out of real-world stories in order to even consider fiction writing.

19. What’s something about the writing life that still surprises you?

Just how difficult it can be for the human brain to focus for a few hours at a time, and just how good it feels when you manage to achieve this state.

20. Fill in the blank: In five years, successful authors will all be _____.

…able to prove somehow that their book was not written with the use of AI.

21. What is your new book about?

The Wilder Way is a book about freedom and living authentically, told through the prism of my travels and adventures over the last decade. From solo horseback riding in Mongolia to getting stuck on an island in Yemen during the COVID lockdown, this is a real journey into some of the world’s most remote cultures and places… And the story of how I became a more feral, free, true version of myself along the way.

Leave a comment

If you enjoyed Eva’s Q&A, you can learn more about her new book here: The Wilder Way

More from Author Insider

Author Insider is where writers get the real story of publishing—thoughtful conversations with industry insiders and bestselling authors, clear-eyed analysis of where the market is headed, and practical strategies for building a sustainable writing career. Whether you’re just starting out or several books in, the goal is the same: helping you make smarter decisions about your work.

If you’re new to Author Insider, here are a few recent reader favorites:

• How to Stay Creative in a World That Won’t Stop Distracting You: Q&A with Austin Kleon

• Somehow, This is Working: 21 Questions with Jenny Lawson a.k.a The Bloggess

• The New Rules of Book Publicity

Until next time,
Panio

Author Insider is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Subscribe now

There's an unusual detail about this week's 21 Questions: our featured author is primarily a novelist. Aside from her first book, a memoir, she writes fiction (she publishes some of it, including her latest book, under a French pen name, Danielle Postel-Vinay).

Danielle’s career is impressive on many levels (not just because she uses a pen name, though I love how old-school that is). Her fiction has won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and France’s Prix Bête Noir des Libraires, her books have been translated into more than thirty languages, and she has served both as chair jurist for the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction and as a columnist for The New York Times Book Review.

But perhaps most impressive of all is her willingness to take risks, especially when it comes to genre. Over the course of twenty-five years, she has written nine books across five genres, ranging from memoir to gothic horror to fantasy to suspense, gleefully ignoring the conventional wisdom that writers should stick to one thing.

Her newest book, Murder Most Delicious, marks yet another turn. It’s a cozy Paris-set mystery that follows a former sommelier drawn into a murder investigation alongside an eccentric neighborhood watch led by an agoraphobic detective and her cat.

In this edition of 21 Questions, Danielle reflects on the power of saying no, fountain pens, and why she believes stories can alter reality.

21 Questions with Danielle Postel-Vinay

1. I couldn’t have written my last book without…

France.

2. What’s the thing most people get wrong about being a writer?

It’s a job with regular hours.

3. What’s your most common form of procrastination?

Instagram.

4. Do you read your reviews?

Only if my editor sends them.

5. Kiss, marry, kill: podcasts, newsletters, and speaking gigs.

This is tough for me because I’ve done all those things, have enjoyed them, and then have stopped doing them. I only engage if I’m 100 percent in. I’m a little like Elizabeth Taylor in this respect: I kiss, marry, then kill in quick succession.

6. What’s a writing habit you’re embarrassingly superstitious about?

I believe that the books I write alter reality, and so I’m careful about what I write.

7. What’s something you wish you’d started doing five years ago?

Saying no.

8. Where do you find new ideas, and how do you keep track of them?

Ideas come like lightning. I write them down in a notebook or they will disappear.

9. What’s the best piece of professional advice you’ve ever received?

Don’t dwell on the last project. Look forward. Make “NEXT’ your motto.

10. And the worst?

You must write to the market.

11. What’s on your nightstand right now?

The Keeper by Tana French.

12. What’s a writing rule you’ve happily broken?

Show don’t tell. Write what you know. I happily break as many as possible.

13. What tech tools (AI included) do you actually use—and which ones do you actively ignore?

I use Freedom to block the internet on my computer when I write. I use Scrivener and Word for my second draft (my first draft is written with a fountain pen). When organizing my notes for my latest novel, I used AI to put them into an outline, which I then revised into a workable outline. Mostly, I’m an analog author.

14. What’s the best non-writing skill that’s helped your writing career?

I’m ridiculously practical.

15. How many drafts before you show your editor?

Four.

16. Can you describe your ideal workday?

Coffee, work from 8:00 to 12:30, lunch, nap, back to my desk to revise until 3:00, gym, spend time with my daughter, dinner, bed.

17. How does that compare to your actual workday?

Coffee, work from 8:00 to 12:30, run errands, do social media, attend uninspiring meetings, deal with business-related bullshit, spend time with my daughter, dinner, bed.

18. What’s something about the writing life that still surprises you?

That I can imagine a story, write it down, and that people read it.

19. Fill in the blank: In five years, successful authors will all be _____

Nostalgic.

20. What is your new book about?

It’s a culinary mystery set in Paris called Murder Most Delicious. I wrote it under my married name, Danielle Postel-Vinay. The novel follows a sommelier who has lost her sense of taste as she goes to Paris, becomes embroiled in a murder, and joins a group of quirky French characters to solve the crime.

21. Anything you’d like to ask or crowdsource from fellow authors in the Author Insider community?

How does everyone discover new books?

Leave a comment

If you enjoyed Danielle’s Q&A, you can learn more about her new book here: Murder Most Deadly.

More from Author Insider

Author Insider is where writers get the real story of publishing—thoughtful conversations with industry insiders and bestselling authors, clear-eyed analysis of where the market is headed, and practical strategies for building a sustainable writing career. Whether you’re just starting out or several books in, the goal is the same: helping you make smarter decisions about your work.

If you’re new to Author Insider, here are a few recent reader favorites:

• “The Business of Nonfiction” with Hollis Heimbouch, Publisher of Harper Business & Harper Edge

• Somehow, This is Working: 21 Questions with Jenny Lawson a.k.a The Bloggess

• What Is Hybrid Publishing, Really? (Video)

Until next time,
Panio Gianopoulos

Author Insider is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Subscribe now

There are a number of possible reasons for this, including weak structure, flat or too-familiar examples, overwriting, repetitive arguments, and the temptation to prove how much you know (which can lead to information overload). But there’s one reason that most people rarely consider. They’re overlooking the book’s real main character: the reader.

On Thursday, June 18, at 4 PM ET, I’ll be joined live by Elizabeth Dougherty and Marisa Solis, book coaches, editors, and co-authors of The Complete Expert-to-Author Guide: Plan, Write, and Publish Your Nonfiction Book. Combined, they’ve worked on more than 600 books.

We’ll discuss:

• Why so many knowledgeable writers produce drafts they’re unhappy with.

• How shifting from writing about your topic to writing for your reader transforms a manuscript.

• What it looks like to write your reader into every page.

• How the “I’m not an author” label keeps qualified people from starting in the first place.

• How to tell if your draft is a monologue, and how to turn it into a conversation instead.

• We’ll also leave plenty of time for audience questions, so bring your own nonfiction writing and publishing challenges.

If you’re sitting on an idea, struggling with a draft that isn’t working, or wondering why your expertise isn’t translating onto the page, this conversation will give you a surprisingly simple reframe, and a more strategic path forward.

RSVP here → Your Book Has a Main Character. It’s Probably Not You.
✨ Exclusively for paid and founding members of Author Insider.

I hope to see you there.

-Panio Gianopoulos

Nicholas Epley has spent the last two decades studying one of the stranger contradictions of modern life: human beings are deeply social creatures, yet we often avoid the very interactions that make us happier. A professor of behavioral science at the University of Chicago and the author of Mindwise, Epley’s work explores how we misunderstand one another, and what happens when we choose to connect anyway.

His new book, A Little More Social, examines why we so often hesitate to reach out, even when the benefits of connection are well established. Drawing on years of behavioral research, he makes the case that connecting with other people is far easier, and much more rewarding, than we expect.

In this edition of 21 Questions, Epley reflects on writing, collaboration, and why conversation remains one of the most generative forces in his work.

21 Questions with Nicholas Epley

1. I couldn’t have written my last book without…

Five-pound bags of Dark Voyage blend from Door County Coffee (in Carlsville, Wisconsin). Some might say it’s a problem for me.

2. What’s the thing most people get wrong about being a writer?

How fast, and how perfectly, the words pour out of you. Readers see the one final draft, not the hundreds that came before it. That makes it seem easier to do than it actually is. It’s a little bit like watching the Olympics and thinking you could probably nail the quad jump.

3. What’s your most common form of procrastination?

Reading the news. Not helpful!

4. Do you read your reviews?

For my scientific papers, absolutely. I have to respond to them when I submit a revision. For my books, I try hard not to. I read the first review that came out after I wrote Mindwise in 2014, and it was so painful that I decided I shouldn’t read others.

Even if a book review is positive overall, there will always be some things a reader didn’t like, or things you think the reader might have misunderstood. Unlike reviewers of scientific papers, you can’t respond to the book reviewer. Instead, I just ended up crafting responses in my mind, taking up valuable space in my brain that I didn’t have to spare.

5. Kiss, marry, kill: podcasts, newsletters, and speaking gigs.

Kiss podcasts. I’ve enjoyed almost every one I’ve done. No two conversations are the same.

Marry speaking gigs. After many years of practice, I really enjoy public speaking. It’s as close as I’ll ever get to my dream job of being the lead singer for Metallica (Lars, when James retires, call me!) Plus, I often conduct experiments with the audience in my talks. Having fun and collecting data; what could be better?

Kill newsletters. Too much unedited and unfiltered information. I get too many emails already.

6. What’s something you wish you’d started doing five years ago?

Training for the Ironman Triathlon.

7. Where do you find new ideas, and how do you keep track of them?

Behavioral science is the scientific study of everyday life, so ideas can pop up almost anywhere. However, the most common place is in conversation with collaborators in my office. Talking is endlessly generative. I keep track by writing ideas in a document on my phone or in notebooks I take to presentations. As my colleague, Linda Ginzel, likes to say: “If you don’t write an idea down, it didn’t exist.”

8. What’s the best piece of professional advice you’ve ever received?

“Being a professor is the world’s greatest job because it allows you to do so many different things, and you should try everything once.” Dan Wegner, a wonderful social psychologist, told me that in my first year as a professor. He was absolutely right. I’ve tried a lot of interesting things in my job, and even done a few things twice.

9. And the worst?

“That experiment’s not worth doing.” I was once told this by a senior faculty colleague about an experiment that ended up being one of the most impactful I’ve ever conducted.

When you’re trying to be creative, your initial ideas will almost always strike other people as wrong. As a scientist, I almost always seek advice from friends and colleagues when starting a project. However, I don’t always follow their advice. You also have to trust your instincts when you’re passionate about an idea.

10. What’s on your nightstand right now?

Run by Ann Patchett. I met Ann—often referred to as Saint Ann in the literary world— at TED in Vancouver recently. My wife and I had so much fun talking with her. Ann spoke in a session with me about social connections and gave me recommendations for books I should read, as she is famous for doing. Ann said she rarely recommends her own books, but thought she had written one that I would really enjoy. It’s her novel, Run, and I’m enjoying it now.

11. How did you find your agent?

I asked friends and colleagues who had written books in the same genre, and they all uniformly loved their agent. That’s who I went with.

12. What’s a writing rule you’ve happily broken?

If grammatical rules were laws, I’d be in jail. My editor will confirm this.

13. What tech tools (AI included) do you actually use—and which ones do you actively ignore?

I write today using the same tools I have for my whole career: a computer, attached to the internet, with a spell checker. I don’t use AI for anything. It’s not that I haven’t dreamed that I could take some crap I’ve written and ask AI to polish it into a diamond. In fact, I’ve even tried it. I just found that what came out was nearly just as bad as what I put into it. Plus, when it comes to writing, using AI feels dishonest. When I read something someone has written, I am expecting it has come out of their own heads, in their own words, just as I expect from the students in my classes.

14. What’s the best non-writing skill that’s helped your writing career?

Public speaking. A great writer once told me that “Good writing is good speaking.” I’ve taken this to heart. I always read my writing out loud to make sure that it sounds right. It’s also good practice for narrating your audiobook!

15. How many drafts before you show your editor?

My approach to writing book chapters is to start every day at the beginning of the chapter and then edit my way through it until I get to the point where I left off the day before. This means that I’m revising every day. It’s sometimes taken me months to get to the end of a chapter draft. But, once I’m finally at the end, I usually think it’s ready to be read because I’ve been editing it every day. I’m not sure how to count that.

16. Can you describe your ideal workday?

Wake up without an alarm clock around 7 AM. Hug my wife for a while before going to pour a cup of coffee already brewed from the kitchen, because I remembered to schedule it the evening before. Breakfast would be two eggs and toast that I’ll eat with my kids before walking to my office at our little summer cabin in Wisconsin to write all morning. Lunch would then be with a colleague I love to talk about ideas with, followed by meetings with a few collaborators to talk about research projects, and then ending the day with another hour or so of writing before heading to dinner. In the evening, I’ll put the kids to bed and then spend some time reading or watching something funny with my wife. We’ll be in bed by 9 PM.

17. How does that compare to your actual workday?

Only moderately comparable. Our youngest daughter has me up at 5:30 AM every day, which is sweet, but I won’t mind when she learns to sleep in a little longer! I almost never remember to set the coffee schedule, and I’m usually in Chicago rather than out in the woods of Wisconsin.

But, I usually do get my morning to write, and I routinely have meetings with wonderful collaborators in the afternoon. Administrative meetings, scientific manuscript reviews, and university obligations also break up my days. These are important, but not always great fun. However, I can’t complain. I have an unusual degree of flexibility to set my schedule every day. If it’s not my ideal, it’s mostly my fault.

18. If you could write one book in a totally different genre than you usually do, which would it be?

A novel, because my wife loves to read them, and because it’s so completely different from what I write now.

19. What’s something about the writing life that still surprises you?

How little I feel like I know what I’m doing, despite writing scientific papers for three decades now. Every time I sit down to a blank page to start writing something new, I feel like I have to remind myself how to do it by either reading something I’ve already written or by reading someone whose writing I love.

20. What is your new book about?

Why we’re not social enough for our own good, and how to do better.

For the last 20 years, my colleagues and I have been trying to understand why highly social creatures like us often choose to avoid social interactions that research has shown make us happier and healthier. We’ve found at least one answer: We can be overly pessimistic about how others will respond when you reach out to connect with them. No research I’ve ever been involved with has changed how I live my own life more than this. I hope that learning about our research can do the same for many readers.

21. Anything you’d like to ask or crowdsource from fellow authors in the Author Insider community?

Just curious: how many of you have told your spouses or friends that the book you just finished will be the last one you ever write, only to come back and do it again not all that long after?

Maybe it’s just me?

Leave a comment

If you enjoyed Nicholas’s Q&A, you can learn more about her new book here: A Little More Social.

More from Author Insider

Author Insider is where writers get the real story of publishing—thoughtful conversations with industry insiders and bestselling authors, clear-eyed analysis of where the market is headed, and practical strategies for building a sustainable writing career. Whether you’re just starting out or several books in, the goal is the same: helping you make smarter decisions about your work.

If you’re new to Author Insider, here are a few reader favorites:

• The Business of Nonfiction (with Hollis Heimbouch, Publisher of Harper Business & Harper Edge)

• Oliver Burkeman Knows You Don’t Have Time

• Somehow, This is Working: 21 Questions with Jenny Lawson

Until next time,
Panio Gianopoulos

Author Insider is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Subscribe now

To talk about this new landscape, I sat down with Hollis Heimbouch, publisher of Harper Business and Harper Edge, whose authors include Jim Collins, Chris Voss, Satya Nadella, Gary Vaynerchuk, and Clay Christensen.

During our hour-long Q&A, Hollis spoke candidly about a host of topics, including:

• Why nonfiction publishing has become more challenging post-pandemic

• The difference between having an audience and having a book-buying audience

• What makes editors immediately pay attention to a proposal

• How authors should think about platform, publicity, and positioning

• What makes an author difficult to work with (and how to avoid it)

• Why large advances can sometimes become a liability

• The publishing myths she wishes authors would stop believing

Below is the (lightly edited) transcript from our live Author Insider conversation.

📺 Prefer to watch instead? Watch the video replay here.

📄 Prefer reading offline? Paid and founding members can download a PDF of the transcript at the end of the second section (Why Personality Matters More Than Ever).

What’s Changed in Nonfiction Publishing?

Panio Gianopoulos: Hollis, thank you for joining us. Hollis is a nonfiction legend. She runs Harper Edge and Harper Business and has seen it all and is really in that sweet spot—or at least what I find the sweet spot—of business, social science, and personal development… let’s start off. I have quite a few questions.

Hollis Heimbouch: Go for it. Glad to be here.

Panio: You’ve worked with a lot of the biggest names in nonfiction publishing. So when you look at the market today, 2026, what’s changed in the past five or even ten years?

Hollis: Yes, that’s a great question. We’re all trying to figure that out ourselves. I would say that there’s definitely a dividing line between the pre-pandemic and post-pandemic publishing.

During the pandemic, we were all home and had plenty of time to read, and we were seeing extraordinary book sales of fiction and nonfiction. And particularly for nonfiction, a lot of classics. I think a lot of people felt like, Oh, I’ve always wanted to read that book. Now’s my time.

So we saw a lot of increases in some of what we call our backlist, which are titles that are sort of three years or older, and a lot of interest in that. We saw less interest at that time in new titles and frontlist titles. And I think that’s just because people were going for the tried and true, not feeling like they wanted to take a lot of risks in their lives. They were already feeling like life was pretty risky. So we saw that was an interesting shift.

And coming out of that, I think the landscape is pretty different. There’s been a huge surge in fiction publishing. Publishing is sort of people who do fiction and people who do nonfiction. I’ve always done nonfiction publishing.

On the nonfiction side, we’ve seen a lot of pressure on nonfiction publishing because there are these new and better, to some degree for some people, outlets for getting the information that you want. So the proliferation of podcasts, the proliferation of social media, the Substackers, the audio publication, which is not just necessarily podcasts, but even short-form audio. We really saw a whole new kind of competition for attention for nonfiction.

And in many cases, people might have listened to one podcast and felt like that was sufficient. So I think for book publishers, our challenge is just to make books that make people want to buy them and feel like they’re going to get more than they could possibly get in a post on Substack or in even an hour-long podcast.

So that’s the challenge: to get people to want to buy a book because they feel like it’s going to add more than what they could already get.

I don’t have the statistics on how many books were published, but I don’t know that we’ve seen a decline in the number of books published. But we’ve certainly seen a decline in overall sales across—I’m talking about sort of big trade publishing, which would be the Big Five publishers in New York. The majority of the books published from nonfiction, there’s been an overall decline in the category.

Panio: That’s really interesting. I didn’t realize there was such this switch in types of books post-pandemic. Although it makes a lot of sense. I think a lot of people I know finally busted out Moby-Dick and…

Hollis: The Power Broker. A lot of people bought The Power Broker.

Panio: Yeah. So what I was curious about is you mentioned the podcast. Somebody can be on a podcast, they’ve got a great book, and then someone listens to 45 minutes and then that’s always the fear I think publishers and authors have. They’re like: That was enough. That was good. I get it.

So what do you think as a nonfiction author—say you’re putting together a proposal or even writing the book—what is the element? Is it the personal element? What makes that book more interesting than just, yeah, I get the five basic points. Thanks, ChatGPT.

Subscribe now

Why Personality Matters More Than Ever

Hollis: Well, I think having a personality is really important now. Back in the day when I started publishing business books—this is a long time ago—they really felt more like medicine to be taken. The idea wasn’t that they were fun to read necessarily. They were not entertaining. But they were instructive, and they were necessary to have a better career.

The Malcolm Gladwell era really ushered in a higher quality of writing, more storytelling, more personal anecdote. And I think that’s the playing field today: you do have to have a kind of personal warmth. Use personal anecdotes, use life experience when you can.

And then I think you also have to find a way to say something that is both intuitively true and timely and timeless. It’s hard to do all those, but I think it has to be something that people are urgently feeling like they need to understand right now. But also, because of the life of a book, it needs to be something that matters in five or ten years. Maybe that’s a long life cycle, but at least beyond two weeks. It has to last for a year or two or three.

And then I think somehow when you hear about it, it has to intrigue you, but it also has to speak to you as something that might absolutely be true. It feels true to you, and now you want to know more.

That’s one shorthand to think about what a book proposal needs to do. And then obviously, to do more than just what you could do in a podcast is to offer not just more stories, but more prescription if it’s a more prescriptive book, or more insights, more high-level frameworks—something that can’t be reduced to just a 45-minute podcast.

Read more

Read more

As a longtime personal tech columnist for The Wall Street Journal and now the founder of the media outlet New Things, Joanna Stern has become one of the sharpest and funniest voices covering how technology shapes daily life. She is a two-time Gerald Loeb Award winner, a Pulitzer Prize finalist, and the creator of the Emmy-winning 2021 documentary E-Ternal.

Her new book, I Am Not a Robot: My Year Using AI to Do (Almost) Everything, chronicles a year spent letting artificial intelligence into nearly every corner of her life, from work and decision-making to parenting and household chores.

In this edition of 21 Questions, Stern reflects on first drafts, AI, and why the hardest part of writing has nothing to do with the words themselves.

21 Questions with Joanna Stern

1. I couldn’t have written my last book without…

My back patio. I spent most of the summer of 2025 out there, writing day after day, with my dog, Browser. Also Gaby, my barista, who made me an iced latte every morning that summer. She's the first person named in the acknowledgments.

2. What’s the thing most people get wrong about being a writer?

It's not the writing that's hard. It's the thinking.

3. What’s your most common form of procrastination?

Checking social media.

4. Do you read your reviews?

Yes. Are there people who don’t?

5. Kiss, marry, kill: podcasts, newsletters, and speaking gigs.

Marry newsletters — they're the long-term relationship, the thing that actually compounds.

Kiss speaking gigs — thrilling, profitable, over quickly.

Kill podcasts — sorry, I love them but I’ve been on so many of them lately.

6. What’s a writing habit you’re embarrassingly superstitious about?

The first draft of anything important: Google Docs, Arial, 11pt. Any other font and it doesn't feel real.

7. What’s something you wish you’d started doing five years ago?

Building my own newsletter audience. For 12 years, I wrote for The Wall Street Journal. I learned a ton and built a great following, but I didn’t build a direct relationship with that audience that I personally owned. Everything I'm doing now at New Things—and launching my first book—would have been much easier if I'd focused on that in 2021.

8. Where do you find new ideas, and how do you keep track of them?

My mother-in-law asking me why her iPhone is doing "that thing." Other parents complaining to me at kids’ birthday parties. The gap between what tech companies promise and what we all actually experience. My best ideas come when I'm not looking at my phone or laptop. I keep track of them on a phone or a laptop.

9. What’s the best piece of professional advice you’ve ever received?

Find what you love to do and the money will come.

10. And the worst?

Find what you love to do and the money will come.

11. What’s on your nightstand right now?

Ice water and a Theragun. Launching a book has not been good for my back.

12. How did you find your agent?

Through trusted friends.

13. What’s a writing rule you’ve happily broken?

“Kill your darlings.” I keep mine. In fact, I feed them. If I wrote a joke I still laugh at on the fourth read, it’s staying, and my editor can (and will) fight me.

14. What tech tools (AI included) do you actually use—and which ones do you actively ignore?

This question could be a new book on its own. The short version: ChatGPT and Claude daily, for editing myself, brainstorming, fact-checking, and talking me out of bad ideas. Notion for to-do lists, meeting notes, and shared calendars with my team. Otter for transcripts. Google Docs for pretty much everything else.

15. What’s the best non-writing skill that’s helped your writing career?

My sense of humor and my reporting. I don’t consider myself a particularly good writer, but I know how to find a story and present it in a way that’s direct, clear, and occasionally makes someone laugh.

16. How many drafts before you show your editor?

My AI editor or my human editor? AI, one. Human, two.

17. Can you describe your ideal workday?

Up at 8. Coffee. Shoot some fun video in my studio or out in the world. Writing, scripting, brainstorming. Done by 6. Put the kids to bed. No email after 8.

18. How does that compare to your actual workday?

Meetings all morning. Lunch. More meetings. Begin writing or scripting. Break for dinner. Email until midnight.

19. If you could write one book in a totally different genre than you usually do, which would it be?

A children’s book! Working title: Goodnight iPad. But seriously, something like that!

20. What’s something about the writing life that still surprises you?

When I was really in the throes of writing the book, I was surprised by how torturous it was not to have a simple end-word count. As a columnist or newsletter writer, you know the length you need to hit, and that constraint makes you more thoughtful about every paragraph. With a book, the boundaries are a lot blurrier because some chapters or sections can be longer than others. It was freeing, but not always in a good way!

21. Fill in the blank: In five years, successful authors will _____

Allow AI to interact with our books in productive ways. I don’t want my book to be completely sucked up by a large language model, but what if people could use a large language model after buying the book to ask questions or go deeper into my source material?

Leave a comment

If you enjoyed Joanna’s Q&A, you can learn more about her new book here: I Am Not a Robot.

More from Author Insider

Author Insider is where writers get the real story of publishing—thoughtful conversations with bestselling authors and industry insiders, clear-eyed analysis of where the market is headed, and practical strategies for building a sustainable writing career. Whether you’re just starting out or several books in, the goal is the same: helping you make smarter decisions about your work.

If you’re new to Author Insider, here are a few reader favorites:

• Sharon McMahon Didn’t Chase Followers. She Got 1.3 Million Anyway.

• Oliver Burkeman Knows You Don’t Have Time

• Somehow, This is Working: 21 Questions with Jenny Lawson

Until next time,

Panio Gianopoulos

Author Insider is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Subscribe now

I dread being on camera. This is hardly a surprising confession: most writers I know find the experience awkward and embarrassing. And yet, like it or not, being in front of a camera is pretty much unavoidable these days. Whether it’s podcasts, Substack Lives, virtual events, social media, or (rare, but it happens) TV appearances, a basic degree of on-camera skill has become essential for authors.

Unfortunately, most of us were never actually taught how to do it well. Case in point: the last Instagram video I shot took me 22 takes, and when I watched the final version, I ran out of the room clawing at my eyes like Oedipus.

Which brings me to the good news:

On Wednesday, May 27, at 1 p.m. ET, I’ll be hosting a live, members-only conversation with Kim Rittberg, an award-winning video expert, media coach, and former executive producer at Netflix, People, and Us Weekly.

Kim has spent years helping professionals communicate more clearly and confidently on video, combining deep media experience with practical coaching around presence, messaging, and storytelling. She’s the real deal.

Kim and I will talk about:

• How to look and sound more confident on camera

• Common mistakes people make on video

• How to feel more natural without sounding overly polished or fake

• Tips for interviews, livestreams, and social video

• How authors can use video strategically without becoming full-time content creators

If you’d like to learn how to communicate your ideas more effectively, how to stop cringing in front of a camera (raises hand), or if you’re really ambitious, how to thrive on BookTok, this is the conversation for you.

👉 RSVP here to get the link: How Authors Can Look and Sound More Confident🔒 Exclusively for paid and founding members of Author Insider

I hope to see you there.

— Panio

Today, I’m going to walk you through how I think about book launches, which is perhaps the most strategic and least “drafting-by-candlelight-at-Walden-Pond” part of being an author. Alas, if you want your book to have an impact, you have to do your part to get the word out.

When I published my debut back in 2023, I wish I had a step-by-step guide to follow, so here’s my attempt to create one for you ahead of my sophomore release (which comes out today!)

1 year before publication: Tend to your own garden

So much ink has already been spilled on how to build your author platform, so I won’t add much. But a year before your book launches, you should have at least four things set in place:

• a website

• a spreadsheet with a consolidated list of your contacts (both personal and professional),

• a newsletter

• at least one strategy for generating awareness for said newsletter

You don’t need to write weekly 3,000-word Substack essays, but at a minimum, give your community a place to sign up for updates on your book. Tend to your garden now, so that you can plant seeds and later reap what you sow.

9 months before publication: Identify your big fish

You may have heard of the Pareto principle: 80% of the results tend to come from 20 percent of the effort. Well, book publishing is more like the 95/5. Given the nature of attention and influence these days, there are a few influential people/platforms that have an outsized ability to bring awareness to your book. It’s worth identifying who those potential big fish are for you. For a business/self-help author, perhaps it’s a certain podcast. For a novel, perhaps it’s a book club. For a memoirist, perhaps it’s an influencer.

As my friend Tim Grahl likes to say, promoting a book can be boiled down to three steps: get influential people to share about the book, get fans to buy the book, and get fans to share about the book. Your big fish sit at the intersection of who is influential for the readers you hope to reach and who you might have access to. Nine months out is a good time to identify who they are and start making inroads.

6 months before publication: Start pitching long-lead media

I hate to put it in such crass marketing terms, but getting attention for your book, like so much of life, is a funnel. You might need to pitch a hundred podcast producers to get fifteen interested in reading a galley to record five episodes. It’s unlikely that Ezra Klein or Good Morning America will come knocking at your door, so you have to come up with a strategy for proactive outreach. The two channels that require the longest lead times are events and podcasts.

Events: I like to break events into two categories: existing audiences that might be interested in your book (companies, conferences, affinity groups) and book tour stops. Not everyone wants to go on a book tour (and traditional publishers are increasingly wary that the juice isn’t worth the squeeze), but I’d recommend identifying a few possible destinations for each category. Six months out is a good time to start reaching out.

Podcasts: When it comes to pitching media, podcasts, radio, newspapers, TV, and magazines all work on their own timelines. But six months out is a good time to start pitching to large, nationally syndicated shows, since you should have galleys to send out and they book out further in advance. As a journalist, I’m always asking myself four questions when I pitch:

• What’s the story?

• Why should people care?

• Why am I the person to write it?

• Why is now the time to write it?

The latter two are the ones people most often neglect.

4 months out: Set up your pre-order campaign

One word separates successful and unsuccessful pre-order campaigns: incentives. Sure, some of your loved ones will pre-order your book to support you, but the vast majority of readers will not pre-order your book unless there’s something in it for them. To create an enticing pre-order campaign, you need offers that are both compelling and urgent. The most typical pre-order offers are bonus content (a companion guide, a bonus chapter), exclusive access to the author (a live webinar/workshop), or some sort of physical tchotchke (a bookmark! a pin!).

In my opinion, pre-order campaigns are really hard to pull off well. Sure, generating a lot of pre-orders increases your chances of hitting a bestseller list as all pre-orders get lumped together with week-one sales, but most campaigns don’t move that many copies. Think about your own book purchasing behavior: How likely are you to pre-order a book that isn’t written by a friend? This isn’t to say that it’s not worth creating some pre-order incentives, just proceed with tempered expectations.

3 months out: Identify targets for excerpts and original writing

You’re officially in the splash radius of publication day. It’s time to get your name out there. One of the best ways to do so is through original writing. This is around the time you start to see authors appear on what I like to think of as the “personal essay circuit.” The types of original writing you put out will vary based on your genre, but you should look at your manuscript from the perspective of what can be easily adapted for shorter pieces. For nonfiction authors, this often means pitching op-eds. For fiction authors, you might write something about craft or adapt a part of your novel.

It’s around this time that I start thinking about the old advertising adage: a customer must hear about a product 7 times before they make a purchase. Rather than consistent drips of attention over the course of months, you want to try to concentrate as many of those impressions as possible in the period around your pub day—one concentrated splash rather than many drawn-out drips.

1 month before publication: Mise en place

Now’s the time to put everything in place for pub week. Follow up with everyone who received a galley. Create a list of supporters who will help spread the word. Pre-write the social media posts and emails you’ll send. Prime your supporters on how they can help: buy the book, leave a review on Goodreads, and share the book with a friend.

I’ve found that people genuinely want to help—especially if you make it easy—but no one will care about your book launch as much as you. Make your asks explicit. Remember, if you believe in your book—if you believe reading it is genuinely worthwhile—asking them to buy a copy isn’t about doing you a favor, it’s about adding value to their lives.

Pub week: Don’t forget to celebrate

This is where I am now—my book officially comes out today, but god knows I didn’t write this post last night. Successful book launches are part preparation, part perspiration, and part luck. As my friend Marisa told me after her book became a New York Times bestseller, book launches are not the time to be meek. They require you to be at least somewhat shameless.

If you’re anything like me (or the many other authors I’ve spoken to about this), pub week can feel both like the most important week of your life and wildly anticlimactic. My advice is to make sure you carve out some space to celebrate how far you’ve come. After all, the launch is just the beginning.

If you got value from this post, please share it with someone who’s about to launch a book. And if you want to go above and beyond, please consider ordering a copy of How To Not Know on Amazon or Bookshop.org (see, shameless!). It’s about how to get better at dealing with uncertainty, and as Lori Gottlieb says, it’s “a must-read for our time.”

Manoush Zomorodi didn’t set out to write a book about posture, walking, or movement breaks. But after years spent reporting on technology and behavior, and after noticing how exhausted she was, she began asking a deceptively simple question: “Why do I feel so damned tired all the time?”

The host of NPR’s TED Radio Hour and creator of the Body Electric project, Zomorodi combines personal experimentation with reporting and scientific research in her new book, Body Electric, an investigation into the physical costs of modern work and digital life.

In this edition of 21 Questions, Zomorodi reflects on writing, movement, and the challenge of staying human in a world of increasingly digital routines.

21 Questions with Manoush Zomorodi

1. I couldn’t have written my last book without…

A Columbia University researcher named Keith Diaz and the 20,000 people who volunteered to be part of our Body Electric study.

I had a question (why did I feel so damn tired all the time?), Keith gave me the scientific understandings and solutions, and our participants showed that regular people could integrate movement breaks into their days, live better with their tech, and prove that we don’t need to throw away our phones to live healthier lives.

2. What’s your most common form of procrastination?

Going for a walk. After doing this project, the good news is that my body craves regular movement. The bad news is that I’d rather walk and think than come back to sit at a keyboard and get it all down on the page.

3. Do you read your reviews?

Yes. As a friend in college once said to make me feel better about some unkind gossip going around: “Honey, at least they’re talking about you.”

4. What’s the first thing you do after you finish a draft?

Go for a walk. Are you sensing a pattern here? I’m trying to walk the talk: Taking movement breaks helps me shake off anxiety that my writing sucks and I’ll never be able to string together another sentence.

5. Kiss, marry, kill: podcasts, newsletters, and speaking gigs.

I’ve been podcasting since 2013, so that’s a committed relationship.

Newsletters and I have had an on-off-on relationship over the past decade. Right now we’re very much ON.

Speaking gigs… hmm. I would never get rid of them, but they require a lot of my energy. I try to only say yes if I feel like I can “kill it,” not in a murderous but in a triumphant way.

6. What’s something you wish you’d started doing five years ago?

Working on my posture with strength training.

7. Where do you find new ideas, and how do you keep track of them?

They find me on walks. My notes app is full of them.

8. What’s the best (or worst) piece of professional advice you’ve ever received?

It’s the same answer. My boss at the BBC back in the ‘90s told me the key to professional success was bringing senior management solutions, rather than problems. On the plus side, this pushed me to become a nimble and proactive news producer who rose through the ranks at a young age. But it also meant that I took on problems in my mid-twenties that I wasn’t trained to deal with (like a correspondent’s mental health struggles). Decades later, I look back and see that this advice was a bit manipulative of a young woman who really wanted to please.

9. Whose career do you most admire and why?

Gretchen Rubin. She loves the entrepreneurship part of being an author and has turned her writing successes into a stable solo business. She diligently does what it takes to get her work out there and is always looking around the next corner to see how she can serve her readers.

10. What’s on your nightstand right now?

CBD cream for sore neck muscles, the Kripalu catalog, and every book about how AI is changing our lives that’s on the market or about to be, including Noam Scheiber’s Mutiny, Jill Lepore’s The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State, and Cory Doctorow’s The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI.

11. How did you find your agent?

I got connected to Daniel Greenberg through a friend of a friend. He was so no-nonsense on our first call that I knew he was for me.

12. What’s a writing rule you’ve happily broken?

Write every day. Sometimes I just don’t have it in me.

13. What tech tools (AI included) do you actually use—and which ones do you actively ignore?

Google Docs and Google Scholar are the core of every writing session. I’m constantly going back to transcripts of interviews, random notes, and finding new research that I’m cross-referencing with other studies.

For the last year, I’ve been playing around with ChatGPT and Claude, mostly to help me workshop a single paragraph that I’m struggling with. I’ll ask them to rewrite it for clarity, and inevitably, they do a shitty job, which forces me to articulate why the rewrite is shitty, which then helps me understand what connective tissue was missing in the first place.

I tried Grammarly. I thought it flattened my voice completely. Delete.

14. What’s the best non-writing skill that’s helped your writing career?

Being curious about people and asking them a lot of questions before I knew it was something called journalism.

15. How many drafts before you show your editor?

Two to four. The first version is always so, so crappy.

16. Can you describe your ideal workday?

Walk the dog (silently at first, then listening to NPR news after I get my first coffee), write for an hour, walk while taking a call with my producer, write for another hour, take a walk listening to podcasts with someone I’m going to interview the next day (I like to get a sense of how they talk and their energy), come back and prepare for the interview, update my calendar/to do list/Notion boards so I know what I need to tackle the next day.

17. How does that compare to your actual workday?

HAHAHAHA. Way more Slack and Zoom meetings than I would like. A dog who doesn’t want to walk and I end up carrying half the time.

18. If you could write one book in a totally different genre than you usually do, which would it be?

A graphic novel! In fact, I was (at first) convinced Body Electric was a graphic novel, and I ended up studying all sorts of great graphic novelists (my faves are Alison Bechtel and Maryam Satrapi), but I realized I had no idea what I was doing and it was better to stick with what I know: Talking directly to the reader.

19. What’s something about the writing life that still surprises you?

How much physical energy it takes. Sitting, typing, and struggling with ideas takes a toll on my body that shows up in tight shoulders, dry eyes, and sluggishness. Every day, I have to wrestle back my equilibrium with enough stretching, walking, and being out in nature.

20. What is your new book about?

I’m going to defer to how Oliver Burkeman described Body Electric, because I think he really sums it up beautifully:

“A wonderfully inspiring and intensely practical exploration of how technology took us out of our bodies, and how we can learn to inhabit them again, thereby transforming only our physical health, but our creativity, productivity, relationships, and the state of our souls.”

21. Anything you’d like to ask or crowdsource from fellow authors in the Author Insider community?

How do you pace yourself during book launch month and beyond?

Leave a comment

If you enjoyed Manoush’s Q&A, you can learn more about her new book, Body Electric, here.

More from Author Insider

Author Insider is where writers get the real story of publishing—thoughtful conversations with bestselling authors and industry insiders, clear-eyed analysis of where the market is headed, and practical strategies for building a sustainable writing career. Whether you’re just starting out or several books in, the goal is the same: helping you make smarter decisions about your work.

If you’re new to Author Insider, here are a few reader favorites:

• Sharon McMahon Didn’t Chase Followers. She Got 1.3 Million Anyway.

• Oliver Burkeman Knows You Don’t Have Time

• Somehow, This is Working: 21 Questions with Jenny Lawson

Until next time,

Panio Gianopoulos
Editorial Director, Author Insider & The Next Big Idea Club

Author Insider is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Subscribe now

​Mind & Motivation is a new monthly member chat focused on the ideas, research, and conversations shaping personal growth and human behavior. While it’s a Next Big Idea Club event, Author Insider paid and founding members also receive access as a perk of membership (hint, hint).

For our first event, on Monday, May 11th, 1 pm ET, we’ll discuss time management and productivity, two intertwined topics I never seem to tire of learning about. I have spent an absurd amount of time over the years researching productivity hacks and poring over time management books (yes, I am aware of the irony, thank you).

To be clear, this is not a presentation or workshop. It’s an informal chat, a chance for members of both NBIC and Author Insider to exchange ideas, questions, suggestions, experiences, and strategies for managing our time and attention effectively.

Claim Your Invite Here:

Monday, May 11th, 1 pm ET

There’s nothing you need to read or prepare beforehand. No homework! No cramming! You don’t even have to Google anything or ask some AI bot to get you up to speed.

That said, if you’d like to dip into some recent thinking on productivity before the conversation, here are a few recent Book Bites to check out:

• The Anti-Busy Formula for Getting Things Done and Making Space for Fun
• The 5-Minute Creativity Habit Anyone Can Start
• Don’t Say Yes Unless You Mean It: How to Say No When It Counts
• Why Your Work Calendar Is a Dumpster Fire—and How to Put It Out
• 5 Ways Constraints Make You More Productive and Creative

I hope to see some of you there.

Best,

Panio Gianopoulos

Editorial Director, Author Insider & The Next Big Idea Club

I’m happy to announce an upcoming Q&A that I think you’ll find especially helpful in achieving your creative goals.

On Friday, June 5th, at 2 pm ET, I’ll be hosting a live, members-only Q&A with Steve Kamb, author of How to Try Again and founder of Nerd Fitness, about a challenge almost every writer faces: staying consistent in your creative work.

Unlike much productivity advice, which tells you to build a routine and just stick to it—gee, thanks—writing rarely works that way. Schedules are messy, unstable, and often outright defiant.

But there’s hope!

Since 2009, Steve has helped millions build sustainable habits through his Nerd Fitness platform, sharing research-backed insights on behavior change and advising individuals and organizations, including Google, Facebook, and Vanderbilt.

We’ll talk about a more realistic approach, including:

• Why most productivity systems break down for writers

• How to build habits that survive missed days (and bad weeks)

• The role of failure, quitting, and restarting

• How to stay consistent without burning out

If you’ve ever fallen off track, this will give you a more forgiving—and more effective—way forward.

👉 RSVP here to get the link (paid and founding members only).

Hope to see you there.

—Panio Gianopoulos

Tomorrow afternoon, I’ll be hosting a Substack Live that many of you will want to check out. It’s about how authors can make money beyond book sales and advances.

Yes, you read that right. The forbidden publishing topic of (gasp) money.

I’ll be joined by Karla Starr, behavioral scientist and author of Can You Learn to Be Lucky? and co-author of Making Numbers Count.

Karla and I will discuss:

• How to position your book as a platform, not just a book

• Using early outreach to refine your ideas and build demand

• Strategies for turning your ideas into workshops, consulting gigs, and speaking appearances

• How to find the right audiences and organizations for your non-book work

• More insights I don’t know about because we haven’t had our conversation yet

If you’re writing or publishing a book—or just thinking about it—this will give you a smart, revealing, and expansive perspective of what’s financially possible. Also, it’s a Substack Live Q&A, so you’ll be able to ask questions in the chat you’d normally be too embarrassed to ask in person :)

Usually, our Q&As are for paid and founding members, but I’ve made it open to all because I think it’s a topic everyone should know more about.

👉 Join us here when we go live: Beyond Book Sales

I hope to see you there!

Best,

Panio Gianopoulos

Editorial Director, Author Insider & The Next Big Idea Club

Marisa Renee Lee writes about grief with wisdom and compassion. In her first book, the bestselling Grief Is Love, she approached the complex feelings and emotions that accompany loss with a perspective shaped by deep personal experience.

Her new book, Waiting for Dawn: Living with Uncertainty, turns to a different but related challenge: how to live well when the future feels unclear, and control is out of reach. It’s a question that feels especially urgent right now.

In this edition of 21 Questions, Marisa reflects on writing, caregiving, and the challenge of making space for the work.

21 Questions with Marisa Renee Lee

1. I couldn’t have written my last book without…

A lot of naps on the floor of my office, takeout, childcare (free and paid), and the Cowboy Carter album.

2. What’s the thing most people get wrong about being a writer?

That being a writer makes you rich. I wish!

3. Do you read your reviews?

I used to, but after encountering a few reviews where people called me a racist, I’ve stopped. I know what I’ve created and who I create for, and I’m not for everyone, and that’s OK.

4. What’s the first thing you do after you finish a draft?

Cry and then ideally drink bourbon.

5. Kiss, marry, kill: podcasts, newsletters, and speaking gigs.

Marry: podcasts

Kiss: speaking gigs

Kill: newsletters (I think their moment has kind of passed. I believe a shift is coming in that space for sure.)

6. What’s something you wish you’d started doing five years ago?

Putting myself first. When we prioritize our needs, we make life so much easier for ourselves and others, and unfortunately, it’s taken getting long covid to realize that.

7. Where do you find new ideas, and how do you keep track of them?

I find ideas everywhere, and I usually put them in the notes section of my iPhone, so I don’t forget them! I am middle-aged and have long COVID, so my memory is not what it used to be!

8. What’s the best piece of professional advice you’ve ever received?

Glenn Hutchins told me to just keep making career decisions aligned with my interests and my values, and it would all work out. One day, I would look in the rear-view mirror and be shocked at how far I’d come. He was right.

9. And the worst?

Anything or anyone who tries to convince me my career is the most important thing in my life. It is not. My family is so much more important.

10. What’s on your nightstand right now?

Kindle, journal, night guard, an ancient Bible, and a Laniege overnight lip mask. (Highly recommend!)

11. How did you find your agent?

By paying attention to people who were happy to help me just because. Marya Spence had been in and out of my life for a few years before I signed with her, and she’s just a really good human. I’m very lucky.

12. What’s a writing rule you’ve happily broken?

I don’t even know what the rules are, but I wrote most of my first book on an iPhone while tending to a newborn, so I’m sure that broke a few rules!

13. What tech tools (AI included) do you actually use—and which ones do you actively ignore?

I’m notoriously bad at tech. I found out a few weeks ago that I wasn’t even using my podcast mic correctly. I appreciate tech, but I prefer pens, index cards, bulletin boards, and journals.

14. What’s the best non-writing skill that’s helped your writing career?

Meditation.

15. How many drafts before you show your editor?

Two to three.

16. Can you describe your ideal workday?

Slow start, lots of time to think, write and strategize, and minimal calls and meetings

17. How does that compare to your actual workday?

Well, my day starts in mom land, taking care of my son and getting him ready for school, and I work in progressive politics in addition to my work as a writer. As you can imagine, that work has been pretty busy lately! I usually get my ideal day once a week

18. If you could write one book in a totally different genre than you usually do, which would it be?

Historical fiction—my favorite

19. What’s something about the writing life that still surprises you?

You can’t force it. The words come when they come. The best thing you can do is take good care of yourself and invest time in the people and places that inspire you.

20. Fill in the blank: In five years, successful authors will all be…

Multi-hyphenates. I think it’s hard to be any one thing, so I think many writers will wear multiple hats professionally.

21. What is your new book about?

Waiting for Dawn is about navigating uncertainty. Over a three-year period, our family suffered multiple losses, and then I found myself sick with long COVID. It was all incredibly challenging and overwhelming, and throughout, I felt a real desire to learn how we can all live well during seasons of pain and uncertainty. Fundamentally, this book is about hope.

More from Author Insider

Author Insider is where writers get the real story of publishing—thoughtful conversations with bestselling authors and industry insiders, clear-eyed analysis of where the market is headed, and practical strategies for building a sustainable writing career. Whether you’re just starting out or several books in, the goal is the same: helping you make smarter decisions about your work.

If you’re new to Author Insider, here are a few reader favorites:

• Somehow, This is Working: 21 Questions with Jenny Lawson

• Sharon McMahon Didn’t Chase Followers. She Got 1.3 Million Anyway.

• Mothers, Daughters, and Deadlines: Memoirist Irena Smith on the invisible threads that shape a life.

Until next time,

Panio Gianopoulos
Editorial Director, Author Insider & The Next Big Idea Club

Author Insider is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Subscribe now

How do you juggle long timelines, self-imposed deadlines, revisions, logistics, and the emotional rollercoaster of publishing, all while dealing with challenges like task initiation, hyperfocus, and, of course, a steady undercurrent of shame?

This was the subject of my latest Author Insider conversation with , author of The Golden Ticket and Troika. Irena, who teaches a writing class for women with ADHD, spoke candidly about the difference between distraction and disorder, the role of urgency in getting your writing done, and how ADHD can shape storytelling itself.

She also shared some of the strategies that have worked for her—and the ones that haven’t. Whether or not you have ADHD, her insights and advice about the psychology of writing are worth considering. As a perennial procrastinator (followed by ruthless self-criticism), I was particularly grateful for her encouragement simply to be kinder to yourself.

Important Note: Unless you want to hear us chat about horror movies while we wait for people to join, I suggest you start at the two-minute mark. And if you don’t have time for the full conversation, below are a few key moments you can jump to:

Key moments from the conversation

02:54 — What ADHD actually is (and isn’t)

06:18 — Writing in bursts, and the role of urgency

09:21 — A simple ritual that helps unlock writing

12:45 — Associational thinking and the power of “ADHD storytelling”

19:33 — Revisions aren’t the problem

22:25 — Outlines don’t work; this does instead

30:05 — Hybrid publishing: clearer timelines, faster feedback, and a “more humane” approach

40:35 — How to quiet your internal critic

45:58 — The strengths and weaknesses of hyperfocus

I hope you enjoyed our conversation and found something helpful to take back to your desk/kitchen table/wherever you find writing time.

A special thank you to everyone who joined the live session and contributed questions in the chat. I truly appreciate the thoughtful participation from the Author Insider community.

Until next time,

Panio Gianopoulos

More from Author Insider

Author Insider is where writers get the real story of publishing—thoughtful conversations with bestselling authors and industry insiders, clear-eyed analysis of where the market is headed, and practical strategies for building a sustainable writing career. Whether you’re just starting out or several books in, the goal is the same: helping you make smarter decisions about your work.

If you’re new to Author Insider, here are a few reader favorites:

• Sharon McMahon Didn’t Chase Followers. She Got 1.3 Million Anyway.

• The Freedom of Constraints: David Epstein on why limits can fuel creativity, focus, and even contentment.

• Oliver Burkeman Knows You Don’t Have Time

  Author Insider is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

A longtime contributor to The New York Times Magazine, Benoit Denizet-Lewis has covered stories about everything from why American teenagers are suffering from escalating levels of anxiety to overbred bulldogs to transgender conservatives in the Trump era. He’s the author of three previous books, including America Anonymous: Eight Addicts in Search of a Life and the New York Times bestseller Travels With Casey.

His new book, You’ve Changed: The Promise and Price of Self-Transformation, explores what it really means to remake ourselves in a culture obsessed with reinvention.

In this edition of 21 Questions, Benoit reflects on process, persistence, and the long road to finishing a book.

21 Questions with Benoit Denizet-Lewis

1. I couldn’t have written my last book without…

My student research assistants, my therapist, my gay and straight group chats (though the boundaries blur in the age of identity fluidity), my husband, and people I met naked in the baths at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, where, as the social psychologist and political scientist Walter Truett Anderson put it, “Some of Western civilization’s leading philosophers, theologians, educators, scientists and therapists… have eased their eminent rears down in the hot water to sit and consider the surging sea.”

2. What’s the thing most people get wrong about being a writer?

That we choose what we write about. I’m not convinced I chose the subject of transformation so much as it’s just another way I’ve become my father. We’re both writers interested in change who also—and I still can’t believe this is real—each fell in love with and married a person from the Czech Republic.

There are, in my defense, differences between us, but in my book I quote the writer and professor G’Ra Asim, who, rather dispiritedly for those of us who like to believe we’re driving the bus of our self-transformations, declared, “At best people have a 15-year span of hubris-driven confusion before they morph helplessly into their parents and grandparents.”

3. What’s your most common form of procrastination?

Reading magazines, Northwestern sports message boards, and Nietzsche. That’s two truths and a lie.

4. Do you read your reviews?

I dislike this question, which probably answers it.

5. What’s the first thing you do after you finish a draft?

Find something to change about it. Old habits.

6. Kiss, marry, kill: podcasts, newsletters, and speaking gigs.

I know the game by another name, but I’ll play along. I would “kiss” podcasts, marry speaking gigs, and, though I enjoy the newsletters of others, kill newsletters.

7. What’s a writing habit you’re embarrassingly superstitious about?

At least once each writing day, I print out what I’ve written and edit it on paper. Then I also read what I’ve written on my iPhone. I catch entirely different problems depending on what format I’m editing my work, and I can’t believe anyone turns in anything without reading it in multiple formats.

8. What’s something you wish you’d started doing five years ago?

Figure out how to organize my research digitally. When I travel to Prague, where I spend many of the months I’m not teaching, I tend to lug suitcases of books and files like I’m relocating a minor research institute. My husband finds this very annoying, especially when I make him carry the heaviest suitcase to the car.

9. Where do you find new ideas, and how do you keep track of them?

I have purchased many beautiful blank books in my life, intending to use them to write down ideas. They’re still empty. That’s not to say I don’t have ideas, but they exist in my head. And I find ideas everywhere, especially when I manage to look up from my iPhone.

10. What’s the best piece of professional advice you’ve ever received?

When you’re struggling with structure, go for a walk or take a shower. Showers work particularly well for me; almost every good structural decision I’ve ever made came to me—like an epiphany—with water raining down on me.

11. And the worst?

“Maybe stop pitching the New York Times Magazine.” When I was young, I pitched editor Ilena Silverman—now the magazine’s Deputy Editor for Features—about ten ideas over the course of a year. Ilena said no to all of them but encouraged me to keep pitching. A friend suggested I stop embarrassing myself and move on, but I’m glad I didn’t listen. Ilena liked the eleventh idea, and I’ve been writing for her and the magazine ever since.

12. Whose career do you most admire and why?

The Buddhist nun, Pema Chödrön. I’ve never met her, unfortunately, but from a distance, she’s the coolest person in the world. Chödrön has lived an incredible life and has written beautiful books that have helped countless people going through hard times. Also, part of me has wanted to be a monk since I was a kid.

Subscribe now

13. What’s on your nightstand right now?

I’m not convinced anyone has ever answered this question truthfully—and I won’t be the first. In my defense, I don’t typically read in bed. Some of the books on the coffee table near my couch, where I do read: True Nature, the brilliant biography of Peter Matthiessen by my friend Lance Richardson. In Love with the World by Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche, which I assign to students in an interdisciplinary class I teach about transformation and identity change, the same themes I explore in my book. And Murder Your Darlings, a fabulously titled thriller by my friend Jenna Blum, set in literary circles that I’m excited to begin.

14. How did you find your agent?

Todd Shuster of Aevitas Creative invited me to lunch two decades ago. I text him so often that it’s likely he regrets it.

15. What’s the best non-writing skill that’s helped your writing career?

I’m a curious person who likes when people change my mind.

16. How many drafts before you show your editor?

I have many editors—friends, exes-turned-friends who are lawyers but should be editors, research assistants, and finally my actual editor. I never send anyone a draft I’m completely ashamed of, but I do send early drafts to people who I trust to tell me whether it’s time to murder a few darlings.

17. Can you describe your ideal workday?

I wake up in my imaginary house in Provence, write for a few hours, and then spend the rest of the day reading, walking the dog, eating cheese, and, after the sun goes down, drinking Chablis with friends.

18. How does that compare to your actual workday?

It’s very different.

19. If you could write one book in a totally different genre than you usually do, which would it be?

I fancied myself a young Harold Pinter as a teenager, so I’d probably try to write a play about people struggling to connect.

20. What’s something about the writing life that still surprises you?

How hard it is. I spent six years on this book, and my husband has implored me not to begin a new one for many more.

21. What is your new book about?

You’ve saved the best question for last! You’ve Changed is about the biggest mystery of all—how and why we change, or don’t. Drawing on six years of reporting, it traces the chosen and unchosen forces that shape our transformations. It’s also a book about our surreal decade: the most intense wave of identity change since the 1970s, another period marked by social upheaval and political disillusionment.

In a culture where change is narrated and judged, some transformations are embraced while others are dismissed as suspect or strategic. (The shift as grift.) My book asks not only how change happens, but who gets to decide whether it’s real—and, in its final chapter, what it might look like to “be the change” in a strange and disorienting moment like ours. That famous phrase turns out not to come from Gandhi at all, but from an octogenarian I visited in her Arizona retirement community—one of many people who changed my mind about change.

More from Author Insider

Author Insider is where writers get the real story of publishing—thoughtful conversations with bestselling authors and industry insiders, clear-eyed analysis of where the market is headed, and practical strategies for building a sustainable writing career. Whether you’re just starting out or several books in, the goal is the same: helping you make smarter decisions about your work.

If you’re new to Author Insider, here are a few reader favorites:

• Sharon McMahon Didn’t Chase Followers. She Got 1.3 Million Anyway.

• The Freedom of Constraints: David Epstein on why limits can fuel creativity, focus, and even contentment.

• Oliver Burkeman Knows You Don’t Have Time

Until next time,

Panio Gianopoulos
Editorial Director, Author Insider & The Next Big Idea Club

Author Insider is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Subscribe now

I’m happy to announce a great conversation coming up.

On Wednesday, May 13, at 4 p.m. ET, I’ll be hosting a live, members-only Q&A with Hollis Heimbouch, publisher of Harper Business and Harper Edge, and one of the most experienced decision-makers in nonfiction publishing.

If you’re working on a book proposal (or thinking about one), this is a rare chance to hear directly from someone on the other side of the table.

We’ll talk about:

• What makes a proposal stand out right now

• How publishers are thinking about platform and positioning

• What separates a good idea from a sellable one

• What’s changed in the nonfiction market—and what hasn’t

• Where authors tend to misread the process

Hollis has worked with authors like Jim Collins, Clay Christensen, Satya Nadella, and Gary Vaynerchuk, and brings a clear, candid perspective on what it actually takes to get a book deal today.

If you’re serious about traditional publishing—or would like a clearer picture of how decisions get made—this conversation is not to be missed.

RSVP here to sign up.

Note: This event is exclusively for founding and paid Author Insider members.

I look forward to seeing you there.

Best,

Panio Gianopoulos
Editorial Director, Author Insider & The Next Big Idea Club

Subscribe now