#amwriting With Jess & Kj

One of the things I think we do well with on this podcast is addressing the long game of writing. It’s not just about writing a good book or pitching one or selling one, but about the work of doing it over and over again, of succeeding and failing, of PERSISTING. That’s why I love this conversation with Tiffany Yates Martin, who is an author herself under the penname, Phoebe Fox, but who also for 30 years has been a developmental editor working with major publishers and New York Times, Washington Post, and USA Today bestselling and award-winning authors. She is a respected leader in the writing education field and my friend and colleague. Her new book, The Intuitive Author: How to Grow and Sustain a Happier Writing Career addresses the long sweep of a writing career. And I think there's a lot for all of us to learn from this book and this conversation.  You can find Tiffany via her website, on Instagram at @tiffanyyatesmartin, or check out her books Intuitive Editing and The Intuitive Author.

“I put my effort into building trust, showing up, and being present for people who have opted into my universe.” A slight paraphrase of Jennie Nash On the day we recorded this episode, no one really knew what was going to happen to TikTok (Jess thinks it’s going away, everyone else doubts her) and Sarina was attempting to manage all the emails from people asking her why she was promoting businesses on The Place Formerly Known as Twitter (she wasn’t, she quit that app and someone promptly squatted on her name, pretended to be her and began promoting for-profit businesses). What do we do when we can’t trust the people in our social media circles to be who they say they are and what is the future of social media as a whole? We discuss these and many other questions.  Things we talk about: “I’d rather be taken than be hard” Sarina quoted this via “a pastor,” and search as I may, I can’t find an attribution. We discuss the sentiment.  The OpEd Project founded by Katie Orenstein Mighty Networks I called it the

I’m Sarina, and I’m a business nerd. Hi, my name is Sarina, and I’m a business nerd. I was born this way. I can’t help it. I realize that not everyone gets excited about spreadsheets, but if you have any writerly income at all, I’m begging you to make 2025 the year you treat your writing as a business. There are actually two reasons to do this: First of all it’s centering. Treating your writing as a grownup activity helps you frame your goal-setting around writing. It holds you accountable to your goals Secondly, and more practically, it makes tax time is so much easier, and it might save you money First, let’s do a little primer on how writerly income affects your taxes. Unlike a job, which sends you a W2 in January, writers are technically self-employed. In fact, the first time someone pays you for a book or an article, you have just become an entrepreneur. So, congratulations on your promotion from artist to businessperson. Let’s go over what that means for you. I must offer a disclaimer here

Hi #AmWriters, Jess here. I’ve been wanting to do an episode on workbooks forever - on any form of companion text that pairs with nonfiction books, really. How do you propose them, write them, format them? You know me, I like the granular details. Fortunately, Ned Johnson and Dr. William Stixrud are publishing The Seven Principles for Raising a Self-Driven Child in March, and Ned was willing to come on the podcast and teach me all about the nuts and bolts of putting a workbook out into the world.  This episode truly flattened my learning curve, and I hope it does the same for you.  People and things we talked about in this episode: William Stixrud Katie Hurley and A Year of Positive Thinking for Teens Tina Payne Bryson, The Whole-Brain Child and Bottom Line for Baby StrengthsFinder2.0 TriMetrix Moo.com Can you make custom post-it notes? Yes, yes you can.  The Disengaged Teen by Rebecca Winthrop and Jenny Anderson LAST Last Call: Join the Winter 2025 Blueprint Challenge If you have big goals for 2

Essay collections—readers love them, but publishers and editors are often unconvinced. Jennie and KJ talk to Amy Wilson about getting that contract, finding the through line and writing a book about pleasing people while also remembering to please yourself.  Links from the pod Mary Karr The Art of Memoir Wendi Aarons Listen to Your Mother (Essay performances for Mother’s Day) Amy’s first book: When Did I Get Like This? Zibby Owens, Zibby Books Ina Garten What Fresh Hell (Amy’s podcast) Happy to Help: Adventures of a People Pleaser, Amy Wilson #AmReading Jennie: Be Ready when the Luck Happens, Ina Garten KJ: Meditations for Mortals, Oliver Burkeman Reasons Not to Worry, Brigid Delaney Amy: Shakespeare: The Man Who Pays the Rent, Judi Dench Last Call: Join the Winter 2025 Blueprint Challenge  If you have big goals for 2025 that include writing, finishing or revising a book, you’ll want to join us for the Winter 2025 Blueprint Challenge. We started January 5, but it’s JUST not too late to jump

Find Meghan at meghanpbrowne.com or check out her book The Bees of Notre-Dame Booklab episode Redacted Kitty-Cat and Welcome to Heaven If you have big goals for 2025 that include writing, finishing or revising a book, you’ll want to join us for the Winter 2025 Blueprint Challenge. Starting January 5, we’ll be walking you through the 14 steps of the Blueprint over 10 weeks. Some of the steps are very short and we combined them into one episode. Every episode speaks to fiction writers, memoir writers, and nonfiction writers. There are workbooks, and you will get a link to the digital download of the Blueprint book of your choice. We’ll also be hosting weekly AMAs (ask me anything), write-alongs, and Zoom meet-ups with coaches—and KJ will be writing her own Blueprint, and Jennie will be coaching her through it in weekly episodes. For more about the challenge, check out these past posts: What the Blueprint is and why Jennie made it Introducing the winter book coach hosts Overcoming Pantsing Pit

We cover last years’ goals, and which of us feel great and which feel… less great. (And the audio is also less great, because 3 of us gathered in our local library and the acoustics/HVAC system noise were less than ideal.)  We end up talking about the ways we feel we need to be as women (supported by some great men) in the coming year and years, the somewhat surprising bro-commentary some of us get around our work, and how we feel like sticking together is going to be the key to maintaining our sense of self in 2025.  It got pretty deep. Writer goals, sure, we have those. But we have more.  We also reviewed our Words of the Year, then announce this year’s. I guess I should make that a big reveal? But I just don’t have it in me, so here we go: KJ: Inner Compass (which tells me that 2 words is FINE) Jennie: Teflon (you’ll love the discussion around this one) Sarah: Presence (she’s reserving the right to refine this) Jess: Growth (and a surprising announcement about her return to student life! There, ther

Today, I'm so excited to talk to my friend, Rosa Kwon Easton, about her debut novel, White Mulberry. Rosa holds a very special place in my heart and my history because she was at the first ever workshop where I taught my Blueprint framework, which is a method of inquiry for getting a book out of your head and onto the page before you start to write. At that time, Rosa thought that she was writing a true story about three generations in her family. She was calling it a memoir. And now ten years later, that story is being published as a novel. In this discussion, we talk about that long development process and the profound switch from writing a true story to writing fiction and how Rosa navigated the whole thing. Find Rosa at: rosakwoneaston.com, @rosakwoneaston on Instagram, or at one of her upcoming events. Find out more about Jennie Nash’s Blueprint for a Book method here. Announcing the #AmWriting Blueprint Winter Challenge—bigger and better and more interactive than any we’ve done before. The Blueprin

Hey listeners: This week, everyone gets a taste of what paid supporters get more regularly—a special Booklab: First Pages episode. Each month (and sometimes more often), we’ll choose two “first pages” to review. A first page, for our purposes, is the first 350 words of your book—fiction, non-fiction or memoir. We will read the page aloud on the podcast and discuss with a single thought in mind: Would we keep reading? First pages are incredibly important in every genre. If you can’t grab a reader on that first page, you might lose your chance of grabbing them at all. On the podcast, we’ll read the page aloud and then each cast our “vote”—would we keep going? Then—and this is the most important bit— we’ll discuss why or why not. Were we dying to know what would happen next, or turned off by an info dump? Ready to learn what you have to teach us or ready to see what’s on YouTube? Totally on board with a character or uncertain why we were there in the first place? In this episode, we discuss our first non-ficti

Regular listeners will recognize the Blueprint for a Book—a method of inquiry Jennie Nash developed to lay a strong foundation for books in any genre that’s not about the craft of writing or building an author platform or any of the steps that come later in the writing life. It’s about understanding what you are doing and why you are doing it so that you can have clarity and confidence.  Writer Allison Hammer is a Blueprint stan—she’s used it for years, again and again, often more than once on any given book (KJ seconds that one). We talk about why she adores the method, how she tweaks it (and why Jennie made it so strict in the first place.  You can, like Allison, work through the Blueprint steps on your own—but with the Blueprint for a Book Winter Challenge coming up, you don’t have to!  We’re going to be sharing more details about the Blueprint Winter Challenge in the coming days, but here’s a little on what it looks like: we have 10 podcast episodes on the Blueprint steps, five Author Accelerator certi

Jess here, hosting my entire extended family for the holiday weekend and sending love to you and yours. Enjoy this #WriterGift flashback! It’s the gifts episode! Here are the links you’re looking for: KJ: Redbubble ❄️ Stamp blocks ❄️ Stamp blanks and stencils ❄️ Frixion Pens ❄️ Leuchterm planner Jess: Sarina’s Socks ❄️ Half Broke by Ginger Gaffney (for KJ, but Jess loved it, too!) ❄️ Fillion planner cover by Little Mountain Bindery ❄️ Jess’s favorite sticky tabs ❄️ Pens by Schneider ❄️ Sarina’s stamp with the kinda-sorta True North Series three pine tree logo ❄️ The “Begin” mug Jess wants a case of. Sarina: Hedgehog Pencil Holder ❄️ Post-its that fit over planner months ❄️ Corkicle (it doesn’t come with the sticker, sorry…) #AmReading Jess: Scarcity: The New Science of Having Less and How It Defines Our Lives by Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir KJ: The Other Bennet Sister by Janice Hadlow Sarina: The Girl with Stars in Her Eyes by Xio Axelrod Zowie! Thanks for listening. If you want to chec

It is of course the inimitable, the unconquerable, the inexhaustible Jo Piazza, all of whose adjectives require me to use spell check. I am a long time fan of Jo, and she’s been on the pod before—see also Episode 393, I Want to Sell Books, But I’m Also Writing What I Want to Write. She is the author of, most recently, The Sicilian Inheritance and coming soon, Everyone Is Lying to You, which started out as a serial in her weekly email/Substack, Over the Influence. She’s also the host of a great podcast, Under the Influence. As far as I know she’s the first person to pull off this feat. She probably isn’t, but we’re going to roll with it as a working theory. This is a great convo, and you will undoubtedly leave inspired, as I was, to write your own serial. (I probably won’t but I WAS inspired.) Join Jo’s Substack and vote on the cover HERE. #AmReading Jo: The Displacements, Bruce Holsinger (author of The Gifted School) Nightwatching, Tracy Sierra Here One Moment, Liane Moriarty KJ: I’m Mostly Here to E

The Anxiety is Real You can’t swing a Blackwing pencil without hearing another creator worrying about generative A.I. And we get it—the ubiquity of generative A.I. tools has soared over the last two years. In this episode we aim to take a deep breath and discuss the topic from a candid but calm position: why authors are worried, why we should be worried and what to do about it (besides anxious posts on social media.) Things to freak out about: a Two Part List In service to our measured discussion, we lay a bit of background. Sarina tells us why The Authors Guild is suing OpenAI, and why you should join the Authors Guild.  Then we mine two different veins of anxiety:  Column I: Billion dollar AI tools stole our intellectual property to train their models, and… Column II: AI might take my job. We delve into both these concerns, discussing ongoing litigation, the potential for licensing content to AI companies, and more. We also discuss how AI tools are affecting other parts of the publishing ind

Today we’re talking about the need for a writer to be resilient over the long haul of a career and my guest is A.S. King A.S. King has been called “One of the best Y.A. writers working today” by The New York Times Book Review and is one of YA fiction's most decorated. She is the only two-time winner of the American Library Association's Michael L. Printz Award (2020 for Dig and 2024 for The Collectors) and has won the LA Times Book Prize for Ask the Passengers. In 2022, King received the ALA's Margaret A. Edwards Award for her lifetime achievement to YA literature and 2023, she accepted the ALAN Award for "artistry, courage and outstanding contributions to YA literature." Amy – which is her real name – has taught for years in MFA programs and is working on her PhD in creative literature I wanted to talk to Amy because I heard from a mutual friend – Caroline Leavitt – that Amy’s publisher had made a change to her promotional team just weeks before the launch of her newest book, Pick the Lock, which one revi

I couldn’t resist the subtitle, kids, sorry. It’s not that shocking—but Tim’s journey was definitely only for the bold. I’ve known Tim Grahl—or known of him—for more than a decade. I watched him help writers like Dan Pink launch their non-fiction books onto the best seller list, and devoured and followed his excellent advice about launching my own books (which you can find here at booklaunch.com). Then I watched—or rather, listened—as he pivoted into the world of fiction, enlisting editor Shaun Coyne to join him on a podcast and help him use Coyne’s Storygrid method to work on what eventually, after many revisions and a whole lot of failing in public, became Tim’s first novel, The Threshing. At the same time, he and Shaun were building Storygrid into what’s not just a business, but a huge community of writers and editors. He’s just published his second novel, The Shithead, a very different book from the first… I call it The Firm meets The Alchemist; Tim prefers Fleishman Is In Trouble meets Faust. Both work.

Hi all! Jess here. When I wrote my first book proposal (for The Gift of Failure), I had a foggy idea of what a “comp” was. A book just like the book you want to publish, right? Not exactly. Comps are a really important part of pitching any book - nonfiction or fiction - because it helps an editor understand your vision for the book and consequently, what the publishing house’s vision for the book could be. What does the market for this book look like? Who is on the shelf already? Why is this book similar or different?  Like I said, an art.  Come with me while I explore the parameters for comps and help you write a better “Comparable Titles” section for your next book proposal.  I use the comp section from the proposal for The Gift of Failure to discuss comps in this episode, so here’s what the formatting looks like in that document: Hey readers—KJ here. This episode of #AmWriting is brought to you by my latest, Playing the Witch Card. I wrote this at a moment when I needed more magic in my life—but it

“As I said in my earlier email, you have so much to work with here. First off, your premise is gold. Easy to summarize, clear conflict, big stakes. I’m envious! When you’re ready, agents are going to sit up and take notice—which is all the more reason to have a rock solid thing to give them when they ask (and they will ask—don’t send a single query until you have a full, completed, polished manuscript ready to press “send” on, because I think you will get requests immediately).” That’s from my October 2021 developmental edit* for guest Erin Quinn-Kong. This month, Hate Follow is out from William Morrow & Company—because Erin knocked the revision out of the park. In this episode, we dig into what it felt like to get those (tough love) notes, how she worked with them, querying and the big moments that came next. You’re going to love it—PLUS, Erin has agreed to let us share the full 6 page edit letter with supporters who purchase a copy of Hate Follow in any format and send us their receipt. (Details on how

KJ here, team. In this episode, Jennie asks the questions, and I walk us through the whole thing from start to finish—the options, the renewals, the moment we thought we were getting the rights back and the big calls that finally convinced me this was really going to happen—and then of course what it’s like when it DOES.  Above are a few glam shots from the premiere screening, which will never not be one of the biggest nights of my career. I’m not sure how you top it. You can watch The Chicken Sisters—an 8 episode series starring Schuyler Fisk, Genevieve Angelson, Lea Thompson, and Wendie Malick on Hallmark Plus (or Amazon Prime) now. Here’s a little preview on YouTube, too. Hey readers—KJ here. This episode of #AmWriting is brought to you by my latest, Playing the Witch Card. I wrote this at a moment when I needed more magic in my life—but it turned out to be a book about how until we know who we are and what makes us happy, even magic doesn’t help. My main character, Flair, is a total control freak who

Hey #AmWriters, Jennie here. I'm excited to welcome editor and publishing strategist, AJ Harper to the show to talk about the art of helping writers do their best work.  AJ helps nonfiction authors write foundational books that enable them to build readership, grow their brand, and make a significant impact on the world. She was part of the writing coaching team for TEDx Cambridge, one of the largest TED events in the world. As a ghost writer and a developmental editor, AJ has worked with business writers of all kinds, guiding them to bestseller lists and to many millions of copies sold. She's worked on 10 books with business writer Mike Michalowicz, including Profit First: Transform Your Business From a Cash Eating Monster to a Money Making Machine.  Her own book on writing came out in 2023. It's called Write A Must Read: Craft a Book That Changes Lives, Including Your Own. This book is one of the best books on writing nonfiction I've ever read and it's one of the best books on writing period, which is why

Sarina here! There was a scramble over who got to interview Lyndsay Rush about her poetry, but I raised my hand first.  I’ve always thought of poetry as the fustiest kind of writing, but the moment I opened A Bit Much, I knew that Lyndsay was here to change my mind. Not only is her poetry gorgeous, her path to becoming a published author was unusual in all the best ways.  Tune in to hear how she accidentally became a poet. And how she accidentally accumulated over 140,000 Instagram followers.  We ask her about that magic moment—when she suddenly realized that this Instagram poetry habit of hers was going to be a whole big thing. It’s a publishing story for the ages!  Or just skip to the good stuff and find A Bit Much at Bookshop, Amazon, or Barnes & Noble.  Lindsay on Instagram. Lindsay on Tiktok. Lindsay on Threads.  Hey everyone, I'm Jennie Nash, and if you're interested in becoming a book, coach, I have a special offer for you. It's a free pass to a mini course called The One Page Book Coaching