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You've heard the book publishing podcasts that give you tips for selling a lot of books and the ones that only interview world-famous authors. Now it's time for a book publishing show that reveals what actually goes on behind the cover.
Hosted by New York Times bestselling author Anna David, Behind the Book Cover features interviews with traditionally published authors, independently published entrepreneurs who have used their books too seven figures to their bottom line to build their businesses and more.
Anna David has had books published by HarperCollins and Simon & Schuster and is the founder of Legacy Launch Pad, a boutique book publishing company trusted by high-income entrepreneurs to build seven-figure authority. In other words, she knows both sides—and is willing to share it all.
Come find out what traditional publishers don't want you to know.
Speaker 1 00:00
Anna, okay, well, athlete, thank you for being here. Thank you for asking Anna. So we were talking about how,
Speaker 2 00:07
back in June, I had asked you, what advice for my sub sack? What advice do you have for, you know, writers aspiring to get a traditional publishing deal, and you wrote me some. The first sentence is, here you go. It's a bit dark,
Speaker 3 00:22
uh huh. And you're saying, Well, that was June. It's worse now, because now
Speaker 2 00:26
we are as we were recording. It's October. So there have been some months for darker things to happen. Tell me about your experiences with traditional publishing. See,
Speaker 3 00:33
I was lucky. I came up in the era of the gatekeeper, where people's job was to find talent and shepherd it and expose it to the, you know, the public, yeah, and so I was good enough, slash, lucky enough, to get a job first on a local newspaper and then submitted my material to a national magazine and then was asked to be on a national television show based on people who thought they knew better than the general public. Yeah, we are. We are in an era of the wisdom of the crowd. Yeah, and the wisdom of the crowd is great when you're trying to guess the weight of a cow at the at the county fair, which is where that actually came from, right? Everybody's individual guess is wrong, but when you average everybody, that's what jury do, nice about, right? Exactly, and but the wisdom of the crowd means that David Lee Roth is more important than David Byrne and Pat Benatar is more important than Debbie Harry, because both of those were much more popular in their day than the artists that were actually singular and actually interesting. You know, I mean, if the wisdom of the crowd was in charge of public media. NCIS would be a much more lasting and important show than the sopranos culturally, right?
Speaker 2 01:48
But sometimes, every now and then the crowd is right, every
Speaker 3 01:53
now and what's right, what is right, exactly what is right. And that is exactly the point. And so this is the interesting thing about the gatekeeper. Yeah, there are many people who would say that, no, just who are you to tell me? Who are you elite coastal University graduate to tell me what I should be listening to? And I would just say that, probably yes.
Speaker 2 02:18
But as a creative person, has it ever bothered you that you who cannot do what I can do, are telling me whether or not I'm good enough or worthy enough to do it?
Speaker 3 02:30
Well, the people that are now choosing are no more qualified, but there's more of them less qualified there are more of them, which means that the ability to gain mass public attention is much more important than your actual ability as a creative artist. That now it's a world of marketing and self promotion, and as someone who is now not not any longer young and cute, that's very hard to get that kind of public attention so, and I don't think that that is conducive to great art.
Speaker 2 03:02
So, you the so all this is happening. I, too, came up in the era of the gatekeepers, and it was pleasant. One of the things that I reflect on is how much smaller the world seemed. I didn't realize how many people wanted to do this. Because, you know, I was sort of lucky. I was working at magazines, and it didn't seem like everybody wanted to publish a book.
Speaker 3 03:26
Well, they knew before. They may have wanted to, but the barrier of entry was high, and now the barrier of entry is zero. You just upload something to Amazon and you're a published author, and that can be great in a lot of ways, but it is fire hose of content the average consumer. I feel bad for the consumer. I feel more bad for the consumer than for the aspiring writer. The aspiring writer can publish their work. The consumer is so inundated with content, I think that it's the consumer that needs the gatekeeper more so than the artist.
Speaker 2 04:00
That's fascinating. I love it so, but so. So this was a positive experience. You are working in a newspaper, you're working at a magazine, working at, or being published by or
Speaker 3 04:10
working at. I went from being a staff runner newspaper to getting a syndicated newspaper column going. This was back in the early 1980s and I would like to write about, you know, rock music, and review album releases and review local concerts. I was up in Northern California at the time, and I took all of my clips and I submitted them to Billboard magazine, and they said, Oh, we like your stuff. You can start reviewing some stuff. So I would review concerts in Northern California. Then I moved to Southern California, and then there was so much more rock and roll night life that I was out on the strip all the time, reviewing shows and having an absolute ball. And then a new magazine started up called Rock magazine, and they said, Oh, athletes like the name when it comes to, you know, rock music in Hollywood. So let's bring her on board. And then I became an editor at Rock. Magazine. I'm sorry, I talked very fast.
Speaker 2 05:02
No, I mean, that's my language. So keep going.
Speaker 3 05:05
Feel, feel free to sell it to point seven, five, exactly. You all, you're they're mostly all listening at point, you know, at 1.25 anyway, so I sound just like the other podcast listening to so then I became the executive editor of rock magazine, and because I was then known as someone who knew about the music industry, I was approached by Valentine books. Would you like to write a biography of Stevie Nicks? Would you like to write a biography of Ozzy Osbourne? So now I have a literary agent, I have a publisher, so I have that world in front of me, and then years later, I'm doing that for a decade or so, and then someone that I had no idea was in television said, I really like your writing. Have you ever thought about writing for television? And I said, I would like to be queen of France, but I'm not sure that I can get from here to there. And he said, Well, you can come right on my show. You have a show. I thought you played guitar, right? And I ended up doing one freelance script, which led to a staff job, which led to an agent, which led to another staff job. And so I had a 15 year career writing and producing television, and it was always because someone who had the ability to green light something saw my work and said, Oh, this is worth, you know, this is worth exposing to the public. What were some of the shows? Well, the first show I got on was renegade with Lorenzo llamas as a Harley riding motorcyclist, a Harley riding bounty hunter and and the reason I got the show was because I had contacts in the music industry. So the first one that I got was about, you know, sort of a 60s radical that had been on the run for everyone. We got Arlo Guthrie to be the guest star. And then the next one was about a punk rocker who faked us on suicide to try to disappear from the stress of the music scene, which was, you know, sort of a Kurt Cobain kind of story. And so my knowledge of that subculture made it possible for me to write interesting scripts. And renegade was produced by the Stephen J Cannell company. So they also produced Silk Stockings. And when Silk Stockings lost a staff writer, they said, Hey, can athlete come over here and do some stuff? So I got to be on Silk Stockings. And that got that got an immediate promotion, just because that's how it works in television, when you go to another show, they usually give you a bump. So now I'm a, what am I? I'm a executive story editor or something, and then that lets me get on. Then I wrote an episode of CSI, and then I wrote some then I started. Then my agent found out that I'm Canadian. I was actually born in Montreal. Didn't know this. Yes, I don't present as Canadian. You don't present as Canadian because I was raised in the US. I came over when I was a child, like a babe in arms, and there was so much being shot in Canada at the time, having Canadian content saved the production company money. Yeah, I was a money saver for production companies, and so I got on one Canadian SHOT Show after another. I did Beast Master, I did Earth final conflict, I did and then I did Andromeda, which was one of my favorite shows ever, Gene Roddenberry's Andron Andromeda, which was just a wonderful experience. And then from that, I did a bunch of TV sci fi movies and Hallmark movies, and I had an absolute ball.
Speaker 2 08:33
And so, so the book. So basically, you get approached to do this biography of Stevie Nicks, which was a dream to you, with access or authorized.
Speaker 3 08:44
These were all unauthorized. These were all fairly quickie biographies. There was a Michael Jackson bio that had come out. And forgive me, I can picture the writer's name, but I can't come up. I can picture the writer's face, but I can't come up with this. Nelson George, thank you. See, it's all in there. It's a retrieval system that slows down after a while. Nelson George, who was a writer at Billboard magazine, did an unauthorized biography of Michael Jackson. This is back in the mid 80s, and it was a huge hit. And so Ballantine book said, Ooh, let's do more of these. And they assigned out a bunch of unresearched but unauthorized biographies. And because I was in LA and because I was in the industry, I had access to a lot of people who were in Stevie Nick's life, yeah, and her colleagues and manager and next lovers. And so I was able to interview a lot of people, plus just research her career. And did you know pretty good people? Still people pay hundreds of dollars for the original paperback on eBay because she's so beloved. Yeah, so I just re released
Speaker 2 09:46
it. The rights reverted back to you. Yes. How long? Like 1020,
Speaker 3 09:50
the rights reverted back to me. When I went to the trouble of writing to my agents and saying, Where do these rights reside, and can I get them reverted to me. So we just did all the paper. Work. It was not a big deal
Speaker 2 10:01
that when I did that, that was really hard, by the way, when I got the rights to party girl back, even though officially they were mine, because none of the people were still there, it was like they were holding on to the rights, not because they cared, but because they cared so little they couldn't get back to us. And it was extremely complicated. So that's good that you got it. Yes, I was very lucky. And, and did you make money off the RE release? I think
Speaker 3 10:26
that I get, you know, money deposit into my checking account from Amazon every month. But it really is not enough. Significant. Yeah, I maybe it would buy me one night at a hotel. Possibly depends on what town the hotel was in Hollywood. You could, you know, probably not well.
Speaker 2 10:44
So, so the but, so the first book, it comes out, what your was that
Speaker 3 10:50
the first one, the, I think the Stevie Nicks book was the first one. I would have to look at my CV, the first really, like, big and cool. One would have been Mothers of Invention, which also came about, oddly enough, because of working at Rock magazine, because we were doing a piece about Michael Nesmith. Michael Nesmith was one of the earliest people working in music videos, and he was doing this weird thing called music videos, and we were doing a piece about it. And during the research for that piece, we discovered that his mother, Betty Nesmith Graham, had invented liquid paper, right? And at that time, we were still typing, yeah, everyone was still using liquid paper. And that was such an interesting idea. It's like, well, of course, the woman invented Liquid Paper. Who else was in the typing pools in the 1950s who else needed it? And it turned out to be a really fun and interesting story. And then our next thought was, you know, I bet there's a bunch of women inventors out there, and no one knows who they are. And that led to the book, Mothers of Invention, which came out from William Morrow. So that was a hard cover from a respectable publisher. It was named as a notable book by the New York Times. And it was, you know, it led to lectures. I got to do a lecture series at colleges all over. It led to a second book called patently female. And it was, you know, and again, that was the kind of thing that, because I had established career as a journalist, I was able to go to an agent and say, Actually, she was my, the same agent that had done the Stevie Nicks and the Ozzy Osbourne books. And I said, Hey, we've got an idea for a book. It's all about, you know, women inventors, like, here's a couple of examples. And she said, Oh yeah, I can sell that. And she sold it to William Morrow, and we researched and wrote the
Speaker 2 12:36
book. So 88 I actually have this information right here, thankfully, because you gave it to me. So you got a $15,000 advance, which in 1988 money, I don't know, 150 what's that worth? What is that today?
Speaker 3 12:48
Yeah, that was that. That was, yeah, you're approaching a year salary at that time. It was, but remember, split between two of us, minus commissions,
Speaker 2 12:55
yeah. So there's so it's never as much as it sounds like. And so you the PR department flies you from LA to New York so Jane Pauley could interview on The Today Show. Would never happen today. No. First of all, getting you on The Today Show, covering the flight these are all inconceivable,
Speaker 3 13:15
fighting an in house publicist right who booked me on interviews across the country, everything from phone ins to small, small station, small market radio stations to, yeah, the Today show. It was that, and that's what they did back then. Now you hire your own
Speaker 2 13:32
publicist who can't really get you anything beyond maybe some like podcasts. I've had much greater luck getting myself on the Today Show and and Good Morning America than any publicist ever did. But so so back then, do you just there were fewer books. So your in house publicist had, you know, because now, if Harper Collins is releasing 10,000 books a year, those nine in house publicist, or however many there are, are focused on, you know, the most famous writers?
Speaker 3 14:03
Yeah, it's, again, it's the the marketing and self, self, I'm sorry, you are the product. The author is the product now. And that is, that is definitely a change. There was, well, there was a level of that doesn't exist anymore, called a backlist book, yeah, which was a book that would just stay in print for a really long time. Stayed in print for a really long time. But there are a lot of blacklist books. They're the and they're the workhorses of a publishing company. So it was worth it to them, because over the long run, it would be a moneymaker. But ever since Amazon came out, they're they're not money makers, because what happens is that people just resell used copies back list books are very available, but neither the publisher nor the author get paid each time they sell.
Speaker 2 14:51
But actually, you know, during the Simon and Schuster like acquisition lawsuit in 2020, One, it was revealed that most of the revenue for publishing houses actually does come from backlist. So it's not true for all backlist, but it's true for for some it
Speaker 3 15:10
was just shocking to me. I didn't even realize that.
Speaker 2 15:13
Yeah, so So the Oh, and that's,
Speaker 3 15:17
can I tell you my idea that would I have two ideas that would have changed mass media forever if they had made a different decision back in like in the 1990s one is that every time a used book resold on Amazon, they should send a quarter to the author, yeah, send 25 cents to the author every time a book resold. That would have made such a difference in the ability of authors to support themselves by writing. Yeah, and the second one was that when MP threes first came out, when Napster started sending free music around, all they had to do was come up with sort of ASCAP and BMI type contracts that were signed by not the were signed by the, you know, the internet service providers, just like radio stations, have to eventually pay the songwriters for music they play. AOL should have eventually paid the writers and actors and producers for all the media that they aired.
Speaker 2 16:14
I mean, I love it, I love it, but, but the artist is not valued over commerce, exactly so. So when this was all happening, you were saying to yourself, Wow, this book writing thing is a pretty good gig, and I don't know about you, but I certainly didn't think it was going to go away. Did you understand it was ephemeral?
Speaker 3 16:37
No, I thought that there is really nothing more solid than a book. A book is extremely solid. Now I have to tell you that I do not enjoy writing books. I don't enjoy writing much of anything. You know, I am very much of a I enjoy having written kind of person. Dorothy Parker, I like that. Yes, I stole that line from her.
16:59
But
Speaker 3 17:01
so when I'm in the middle of writing something, I do not sleep because, especially if it's fiction, the characters are awake in my head, and they're walking around in there and they're talking to each other, and they're coming up with stuff, and it's cool. It makes the writing go fast. But I also don't sleep for what if I'm writing a TV script, I don't sleep for six weeks. That's horrible. It's horrible. Yeah, and if I'm writing a book, the reason that I write the kind of books I do, which tends to be, you know, research, biography and historical stuff, is because I can think of them as a collection of magazine articles. Each chapter is like a magazine article. And I'm not feeling the weight of a book. So yeah, the writing process is not I know there are some people. As a journalist, I remember interviewing Jay McInerney, and who was massively successful at the time and super rich and and he's writing a new book, and I'm going, Why? Why? Why? What you don't have to he goes like, I can't imagine not writing. And I was thinking, I can, that's it. I can imagine.
Speaker 2 18:10
I love it. It's just not, it's more volunteer work now, then, then. So, you know, some way to make a living,
Speaker 3 18:20
and that's why I do my sub my I write a sub stack about, you know, love addiction, and it is really a service to people who are suffering. So that's the only reason that I'll get up off my ass and do it.
Speaker 2 18:30
Yeah, yeah. I mean, I was recently writing something about how Gen X was the last generation to believe that this delusion that we could make a living as writers, and it was people like Jay McInerney and Bret Easton Ellis, and I don't know Tama Tara Tama Janowitz, and like these people in Candace Bushnell, where we saw them, and they looked glamorous, and they were making a living. And no generation after had such a delusion that they could make money at this thing. I mean, unless, of course, they have a million Instagram followers, so
Speaker 3 19:05
or their parents have many millions of dollars, in which case they don't have to make a living, right, and they can buy a whole bunch of social media consultants, publicists and makeup artists, which is just leading to even more that we're we're not including everybody in the conversation anymore. We think we are because of the whole crowd sourcing thing, but we're not really Right,
Speaker 2 19:29
right? Well, it's sort of like, I will say, back when the I didn't sell books in the they fly you to the Today Show, era, it was shifting, and the publicist, when you could afford a pmk publicist, and you're paying 20 grand a month, you were getting the best publicity. I was hiring $2,000 a month publicist who couldn't do that. So it was never
19:58
meritocracy. We had the same post. Publicist probably,
Speaker 2 20:02
I mean, that's why my company now does publicity for because we do a better job of it than any publicist that you can pay to get you on a couple, you know, podcasts that aren't going to move the needle at all. So, so wait, I had something interesting to say, and it was after, you know, my my retrieval mechanism isn't working quite as
Speaker 3 20:22
sharply as guess where it's not better? Well, in 10 years, they're going to
Speaker 2 20:26
invent something where I get a new brain, right? I mean, I hope so. So. So basically, so you're, you're doing this, you don't think it's going to end. You think this is, this is a fantastic choice for a career, fantastic, not A, not a delusional choice. And so what do you do? Do you encounter the many people like I do who say to you, I'm gonna sell my novel or my memoir to a Harper Collins or, you know, i They say things like, I'm going to get an agent because I really want to go on book tour and I want my book in bookstores. Do you encounter these people and what do you say to them
Speaker 3 21:07
sometimes? Well, I remember one instance i as soon as Mothers of Invention came out, a speaking agent found me and had me go out during March, which is Women's History Month. As I always say that, you know, February is Black History Month, March is Women's History Month. The rest of the years for white guys. And I would go out in March, because colleges all over the country would book speakers to come and talk about women's topics. So I would go to go do a talk about women inventors and discoverers every March. And it was a ton of fun. And I really enjoyed it. And yes, people flew me all over and paid you, you know, and paid me 1000s less than they would pay a band or a stand up comic, but they paid me, yeah, and the and people, you know, the kids in the crowd, would definitely ask, you know, how do you become a writer? I want to do what you do. How do I do what you do? And in the late 1980s I would generally say, become very expert in a certain subject. Yeah, and find your voice, find an entertaining, specific voice, and tell people stuff that only you can tell them. And that's the way it works. And by the mid 1990s I was saying, fuck OJ Simpson, that'll get you a memoir, you know, it just had, had so totally changed the cult of celebrity. And I really do put the OJ era, the OJ trial, as sort of a trigger point for all of this, sort of the starting gun of our celebrity culture. And it just changed. It just changed. It all became about branding and celebrity,
Speaker 2 22:45
not all, but a lot. That was a long time ago. Yeah, I to me. I the nadir for me was I blame somebody who I think is fantastic, Arianna Huffington, so many, many years later, when I saw my career, my career as a working writer, end was when Huffington Post came out and they had a piece written by Alec Baldwin. And I thought, wait a minute, this is not a writer. First of all, this is what's valued. And then the news came out that they weren't even paying writers.
Speaker 3 23:19
Well, I had that personal experience. They asked because, because I had my This was after my book love addict, sex, romance and other dangerous drugs came out. So now we're talking 2011 I think that was published, and they asked me to write for them. And I thought, Great, this will be great promotion for the book. So I started writing about the subject of sex and love addiction for the Huff Post. And they loved my stuff, and they had me come back and come back. And come back and come back. And I said, Okay, this stuff is obviously doing well. It's been picked up for the you know, the opening page of AOL is getting lots and lots of readers. When do you start paying me? And they go like, never, yeah, we don't pay our writers. What do you mean? You don't pay your writers. You just sold your company for $350 million you don't you don't have a budget. Don't have a budget to pay your writers. They didn't need it. They didn't need it. They had plenty of volunteers.
Speaker 2 24:07
And then it changed. So then you started, one started paying to write. I have actually paid it ended up being worth it, because I have this company where, like, paying to write for Entrepreneur Magazine or Fast Company was worth it to me, but we go from being paid well to not because I went from $4 a word at times for magazines down to I got to be 10 cents. Wow, what? I can't do math, but that's a real decrease to free to I pay so I
Speaker 3 24:39
have, I've never paid proud. Yes, that is a play. You should understand the point. I do understand the point investment.
Speaker 2 24:47
Yeah, so and so. Why do you think people remain delusional about the fact that they could sell a book to a publisher who's going to send them on tour?
Speaker 3 24:58
Well, for the same reason. They think they can go on American Idol and become a superstar, right? Do you think because that story, that narrative, is part of our popular culture, right?
Speaker 2 25:10
Right? I will say that I talk to people, I tell them that's really not realistic if you don't have 100,000 people on your newsletter list or a million Instagram followers, and they look at me like I am the dream killer, because I am and and I say to them, and you're a great example of this, I say, there is no point in doing a book if it's not going to build your authority, because you're never going to make the money from book sales. I don't know if you made more money as a speaker than you did as the author
Speaker 3 25:40
of that book for Mothers of Invention, absolutely. Oh yeah. So it's much more money from from years of speaking engagements than there ever was from actual book sales. The book did well. The book earned out. The book earned, you know, made more than its advance, which is not the case most of the time at the time they are now. And so definitely years on the road, speaking for, yeah, few $1,000 a night or whatever. It was absolutely more money, yeah,
Speaker 2 26:06
and so and so, that's why I just if you had done a novel, you know, a sci fi novel, there would be no extra income. So and so you so, so what do you what do you tell people when they then when they're delusional? Do you kill the death? Do you kill the dream the way I do? I know
Speaker 3 26:27
I'm probably a little more encouraging. I say that you have to be willing to do it for fun and for free. That the barrier to entry, if you can always be probably, how do I become a published author? Upload. How you become a published author. Today, as you upload a file to Amazon, you can become a published author. Doesn't mean you're going to be read. You can guarantee that you're going to be published. It doesn't guarantee that you're going to be read, and it absolutely does not guarantee that you're going to get paid. So a lot of that comes down to marketing and publicity and branding, but it does happen. Look at the story of the Twilight series. That was fanfic, right? That was fanfic that got enough of an audience that it was worthwhile for a publisher to pick up. That is a possible path. It's just that there are a kajillion other people crowding that path and becoming the one who's plucked out. The odds are against you, but that it is still possible. I just tell people that this is, you know what? It isn't just about being a good writer anymore. It is about being able to, you know, get your work exposed to enough people. And unfortunately, those are not necessarily the best authors,
Speaker 2 27:36
right, right? And, yeah, and 50 Shades of Gray is an example of that, but, but do you think you're
Speaker 3 27:43
right? I think I misspoke. No, I think it was also Fanta. I think the famous one, it was an absolutely unknown person who was putting up her, you know, S and M sexual fantasies. And, let's face it, not a good writer never read her, but I believe that only read excerpts, and they're actually Cabral ex you mode. I mean, yeah, too early in the morning. Anna, yeah, I hear you. I
Speaker 2 28:07
hear you. And so would you say, you know, you gave that example of it's it's also the people do it for the same reason that they go on American Idol and believe that they can become Kelly Clarkson, or whatever it is. Do you think the chances of being the EL James or whoever wrote Twilight are as rare as becoming a Kelly Clarkson,
Speaker 3 28:28
no, I think, because it's network broadcast, there are fewer people that get to be on you. I think your chances are better, but the rewards are less also. You're not going to make as much as a published author, as you are going to be a, you know, a winner on American Idol, or even a contestant on American Idol.
Speaker 2 28:45
Yeah, it's true. It's, you know, I always, I used to tell people the same thing they say about acting, which is, if you can think of anything else to do with your life, do it. But, you know, it it really astounded me when I learned that writers are not valued, but writing skills are which blew my mind, because I spent many years thinking I hated writing, and then I realized, well, wait a minute, if you can build a business around your writing skills, editing
Speaker 3 29:19
is an excellent skill. Unfortunately, AI is replacing a lot of that. I used to get paid to be a proofreader. And you know, you would find people's typographical and grammatical mistakes, and they would pay you to do that. Now, you know you're the thing you're typing on is finding those for you as you type them. So no one's paying Proof Readers anymore. Well, I'm
Speaker 2 29:40
talking to somebody who does really, because AI does help a little bit. But for our books, oh God, copy editors, Proof Readers, because AI misses a lot. There will be a day where it won't, but right now, oh no, no, no, you could not rely on it.
Speaker 3 29:57
Interesting, what online publication started relying? Saying on again the wisdom of the crowd. I was annoyed at the number of typos and grammatical mistakes and some popular Jezebel type, you know, yeah, magazine, online magazine, and I wrote, wrote them and said, You really need to hire some proofreaders. And the next day, there was a banner ad that said, Send Have you found a typo or a grammatical error? Send it to us and we'll fix it. So they did care. So yeah, but they're not paying anybody to do
Speaker 2 30:28
it. New York Magazine, which is the one magazine that I absolutely worship indoor. I was reading a story on my last night that had words, you know, chunked together. So even the best, I mean, make errors, and that's why we Web. My company, we go through so many levels, because the human eye is the human eye, right?
Speaker 3 30:45
So, okay, Dennis the fire host of content. You know, they're expected to put out so much more material, so many more articles, so many more words, so many more column inches than ever before. You just like, it's really hard to get it all right.
Speaker 2 30:59
So, so talk to me about about Love Addicts. So you were able. What's cool about your career is many things, but that you were able, you had this great passion, and probably still do, for rock and roll, but also for then sharing a message. So you've been able to write about things that matter to you, which is not true for everybody.
Speaker 3 31:19
This is true. I've always, I always think of myself as a writer for hire. So, you know, give me a paycheck and a deadline, and that's what I write. But the fact is, when you look at it that way, I have been very lucky in that I have had success writing about things that actually did matter to me and that I had deep knowledge about and love at it came about I actually was writing for fun and for free. When I started, you know, investigating my own love addiction and learning about the stories of other people, it was so much that people needed to know and needed to hear that I started, people would say, you should, you should write about this stuff. So I started a Tumblr, which was called affection Deficit Disorder. I got the, I got the, you know, the.com and I just started writing about this stuff and sharing it with people. And then, of course, someone said, Oh, you need to get an agent. This needs to be a book. And I was connected with an agent, and she got it published. And so it was, again, that same thing, that the content was notable and noticed
Speaker 2 32:16
and something you cared about, yes. So, okay, so that different agent, then, you know,
Speaker 3 32:23
yes, a different agent. My previous agent that it was not her area, but I believe she actually was retired by that time, because we're talking about the 80s versus the 2000s
Speaker 2 32:33
and interestingly, same size advance,
32:37
exactly yes, 30 years later, 30
Speaker 2 32:39
years later. So when $15,000 was really $15,000 and you're giving 10 or 15% away, and so you so that book Love, addicts, sex, romance and other dangerous drugs won an American an ALA Award, a public library award,
32:58
and those were the earlier books that won those
Speaker 2 32:59
awards. That's not what you told me in June, by the way.
Speaker 3 33:03
Then that was my mistake. Interesting. I have written those. I've won the American Library Association Award for Mothers of Invention. The Public Library award for was
Speaker 2 33:13
for I'm a liar. This is what you wrote me. So I apologize. So
Speaker 3 33:17
those were books that were written back when the publishers would submit your book to these various contests so that they could be considered. Now, all of those contests charge you for entry. They may actually have charged you for entry back then, but the publishers would have taken care of it. But now, the writer is supposed to pay to enter their book in these various competitions, and you have to have a publicist or someone to do it for you. Otherwise they would be so totally overwhelmed, and if they're charging you, they quickly become a scam. That their business is no longer finding excellence. Their business is getting lots of people to pay the money. So that has totally changed, and love at it was, as far as I know, never submitted for any awards. I know that I didn't, and I don't know that that's even a legitimate industry
Speaker 2 34:04
anymore. I don't know that it is so you told me they didn't even print enough copies for it to earn back its advance. How did they tell you that
Speaker 3 34:10
that's correct? No, I found out by accident later. How'd you find that out? Someone had requested a box of free books to give out at a banquet, a charitable fundraiser for the recovery industry, and they said that we wanted to put them in the gift bag of the goody bag at this banquet, and they wanted a box of 100 books or something. And the publisher says, Well, we're only printing 2000 that's a lot to give away. And I go, you know, it just that was it? That was the whole print run was not enough to pay back the advance.
Speaker 2 34:44
That's that's interesting. I once did a I got an advance for $2,000 and I've never gotten royalties, and that seemed impossible, does. Yes, it does. And so the perhaps I'm not good enough at math to even do that kind of calculations that you did to understand but that. Has to be what happened. But, you know, which is an interesting point, because your publisher really keeps you in the dark about a
35:06
lot of things.
Speaker 2 35:09
One of the I know a publicist who used to work for big five, and she said the hardest part of her job was that she had to lie to our writers, because they'd say, Well, you didn't submit me for this. Or did you know how come my book isn't in bookstores and they she'd have to say, Well, they didn't want it when the truth was, she was pushing for a book that her bosses were making her push for. Did you?
Speaker 3 35:32
Did you? Well, they don't work for you. They work for that, that boss. Yeah, that's the other thing to remember. It's like I was, I was very much just abused my when I got a TV agent for the first time, I was just like, yeah, no, he doesn't work for you. He works for all of his clients, right, right? And when one of them is, you know, going to make him more money than you, he doesn't work for you anymore.
Speaker 2 35:52
Which, in a way, I spent so many years angry about it. And in a way, it's, it's a business. There's nothing wrong with wanting to, you know, to be an entrepreneur who wants to make money. The problem is that they're not being honest, yeah, with the ones that aren't going to make the
Speaker 3 36:09
money. And it's funny that all of these public facing, glamorous careers that people want to get into are the most likely, and I probably has something to do with the desire of so many people, it's just like, hey, there's 1000 more. Where you came from, sweetie,
Speaker 2 36:24
I know, and I and I see that look in their eyes when I kill their dreams, and that look says, I'm going to be the exception. And I know the look so well because I had it six times, you know, because I had the naysayers, and I was just like, yeah, yeah, that was true for you. It's not going to be true for me,
Speaker 3 36:41
and I didn't have that because, as you heard, my career was essentially a door would open. Yeah, I was incredibly lucky. I had no idea at the time, right, how lucky I was. It's only in retrospect I realized how rare and just, you know, just fairy dusted my entire career was, but, of course, I was good, but a lot of people are good, and I just was, I just fell into open doors over and over again. I realized that when I went back, I went to UC Santa Barbara. I went to use the College of Creative Studies at UC Santa Barbara in Isla Vista, California. And I thought, Oh, this is just what college is like. And I went back for like, a 40th reunion. I go like, Oh my God, this campus is the most beautiful place I've ever seen in my life. I can't believe all these people get to be here and they don't realize that they're like, one of the most beautiful places in the world. And I was there and I had no idea. I just thought, yeah, this is college. Same thing with my career. Oh yeah. Somebody says You're really good. Come John Perales from the New York Times called me up and said, I've seen somebody work in Billboard. I think you're good. Would you like to write for the New York Times? Yeah. I said, Who do I have to kill? You know?
Speaker 2 37:51
And I had the exact same thing, you know? I the first essay that I ever wrote for an anthology. I wrote it in I don't know, an hour, and it ran as a modern love in the New York Times because my agent submitted it. I didn't know what modern love was. I didn't read the New York Times and and, you know, my boyfriend and I will talk about how these things happened. I don't think they happen today, but they happened. And you if you were me or him, you go, Well, yeah, of course, yeah. And you don't realize that the universe or God or whatever is throwing you a bone. You just think that's the way
Speaker 3 38:26
life is. But I think it does still happen today. I hear it occasionally. I was listening to a podcaster called Katie Herzog, whose work I like, and she basically had the same experience. She wrote an essay, and it got picked up in some weird, you know, self financed anthology, and someone saw it, and it ended up in, you know, the stranger or something like that, and it got attention, and she ended up getting a career, because something that she just wrote, you know, for fun and for free got noticed. So it happens today. Well, I mean, it happened five years ago. I don't know if it happens today today,
Speaker 2 38:59
yeah, I think it's very it's very engineered. And the people who understood early the importance of Instagram and the importance, you know, I don't know if you've noticed, in recovery, a bunch of women came up who understood Instagram early, who got huge followings, who were like, three weeks sober and saying that you should get sober, doing yoga, and got massive book deals and have true just huge influence.
Speaker 3 39:28
It drives me crazy. That whole breaking my head in the industry drives me crazy. And yes, and again, it's like, if you're young and cute, you don't have to actually be a deep expert in your subject, or a particularly good writer if you're
Speaker 2 39:43
young, cute and understood the importance of Instagram early, right? So, okay, so we got to wrap up. What? Tell me any final words, anything I didn't ask you. Oh, my goodness,
Speaker 3 39:55
I think, well, the theme that I'm coming up with as. As we're talking is that you, if you want to write, write, write. If what you want us to be rich or famous do something different. But if what you want to do is write, just write. Because the note literally no one can stop you. You can probably you can be published tomorrow. I'm not saying that you're going to sell your book. I'm not saying you're going to make money from your book, but you can absolutely be a published writer tomorrow. So if that's what you want to do, do it. Do not do it with the expectation of being rich and famous any more than if you're you know, community theater actor. You're going to come to LA and take up my parking spaces.
Speaker 2 40:37
Stay Stay away. You people. Well, if people want to find out more about you, where should they go? Well,
Speaker 3 40:43
there's ethley.com and there's affection deficit disorder.com which you can obviously get to through ethically at least. I hope the links work. I'm not very good at keeping up my web presence, because I am, you know, I am not a digital native. I'm so so much a digital immigrant, and I'm so not bilingual and digital, but I try. So yes. Ethel lee.com, E, T, H, L, i, e, if you can spell my name, you can find me. It's how it's the license plate in my car. It's my email address. I'm very easy to find. It used to it used to be if you wanted to be publicly embarrassed, you would have to wait for someone to write your name on a bathroom. On a bathroom wall. That is no longer the case. Now, it's flattering. And when you have an unusual name like ethley, it is very hard to find, hard to hide, and easy to find. So ethley.com, affection, Deficit Disorder, of a backlist of books, a lot of them are newly reprinted, because Amazon will do that for you. Now, a lot of them are newly available on Kindle and as audio books. So help yourself. And I love to hear from people, well, the athletes, I can't get anybody an agent or a publisher, so yeah, leave her alone when
Speaker 2 41:53
it comes to that, because nobody can do that. Sorry. Death dream. Death killer. That sounds really negative. I mean, it is. It sounds really morbid. That's the word. See, it was in there. We just have to wait. We just have wait. Okay. Adley, thank you so much. Y'all. Thank you for listening. Thank you, Anna,
42:12
that was fantastic. Anna.