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What’s the story you can’t stop telling? Fran and Bethany are here to help you write, sell, and launch it.
Literary agent Bethany Saltman and bookstore owner Fran Hauser—also both critically acclaimed authors—host Bookbound, the podcast for non-fiction writers who want to learn how to transform their ideas, expertise, and obsessions into successful books and publishing deals. Fran and Bethany interview accomplished authors who share the strategies and surprises behind their bookbound journeys. These how-I-did-it conversations will inspire listeners to claim their own “author-ity” mindset and turn the story they can’t stop telling into a book the world needs to read.
To connect with the hosts and more, go to www.bookboundpodcast.com/
Carrie Sun [00:00:00]:
I would say trust the process. Every day I sat down staring at a blank page at 08:00 a.m. with my coffee and just pushed through it. And it was agony for most of it. And so now I can say, oh, obviously that's the story I wanted to tell. But that, like, momentary change from not knowing to knowing, it's a split second that comes at some time. And that's the process you just put in the work. And I really believe it'll come for everybody.
Bethany Saltman [00:00:28]:
My name is Bethany Saltman, and I am an author and a best selling book coach.
Fran Hauser [00:00:34]:
And I'm Fran Hauser. I'm an author, a keynote speaker, and a publishing strategist. These how I did it conversations will inspire listeners to claim their own authority mindset and turn the story they can't stop telling into a book the world needs to read.
Bethany Saltman [00:00:49]:
This is Bookbound, the podcast created in partnership with Share Your Genius. Carrie Sun's memoir, Private Equity was named a most anticipated book of 2024 by NPR, Oprah, Daily Town and Country, The Millions, Financial Times and more. It's an Amazon Editor's pick, Vogue's best books of 2024, and the memoir of the year by Harper's Bazaar. In this incredible conversation with Carrie, we learn about her process of discovering her book idea, finding her voice, and writing a proposal for a so-called pure memoir as opposed to a prescriptive book. I absolutely love Carrie's final word of advice for aspiring authors. Trust the process. I know you'll enjoy this very special episode. Hey, Carrie, thank you so much for joining us on the podcast.
Carrie Sun [00:01:41]:
Thank you so much for having me today.
Bethany Saltman [00:01:43]:
Yeah, we're really, really excited about this conversation. First of all, congratulations on all the crazy success of this book, Private Equity, a memoir, where, I mean, I'm so happy when a great book actually gets the attention it deserves. So congratulations.
Carrie Sun [00:01:59]:
Thank you so much.
Bethany Saltman [00:02:00]:
Yeah, of course. We like to start the conversation by asking, how did you know that this was a book? It was your experience. It was something that was going on that was really big. But how did you know it was more than just what was going on for you and that it actually had the potential to become a book?
Carrie Sun [00:02:16]:
I think that's such a brilliant question because it was not immediately clear to me. You know, there were many, many years between the end of that experience and when I started writing about it. And I think between, you know, I did an MFA and even during my MFA, I was writing about so many different topics and not about this really this experience in the book at all. And I always knew I wanted to write a book. I love books, and I want to write many, many books. But there was always the question of what is going to be my first book? And when I was toying with different book topics, as you say, Bethany, how does something go from just being an idea or an obsession to actually book worthy, I think worthy of 300 plus pages? I would ask myself questions like, oh, can I see a book more focused on the personal side, starting from when I was five years old? And it's like, yes, I could see that. Could I see even a version of the book in which it's really more narrative nonfiction, in which the eye character is totally missing and the engine is just my observations about the world, so it's not focused on me at all. Yes, I could see all of these different versions, but the book itself didn't come together until it's a little cliche, but woke up one day and was like, I think it has to be this version that I'm envisioning.
Carrie Sun [00:03:41]:
And that moment happened, really towards the end of 2019 and beginning of 2020 in the span of six months, when everything sort of came together. So I finished my MFA then, and I was taking a look around, and my peers, they were all working so many, like, maybe like, part time jobs, office jobs, doing things to support their creative endeavors, to support their writing, and to be able to make it. I went to the new school, so in New York, and I think everyone was burnt out. Burnout was definitely top of mind. And more than burnout, it was how much of my time, my identity, my life, myself, should I be investing in my work and my creative dreams, my dreams, broadly defined, how much of myself should I be giving to my career and my work? That was a question I think my friends, my peers, and I were definitely talking about, as I think everyone will know at the start of 2020, the pandemic happened. And so kind of this great reset of our relationship to work, that conversation was beginning to happen. And so that definitely made me realize I definitely have something to say about this, and I have to say it now. It feels urgent.
Carrie Sun [00:04:58]:
And also, I went through this experience of completely devoting oneself to work, and then what are the very human costs of that extreme devotion? You know, I had went through the process already. And then also, you know, I love. I love memoirs of all kinds, but there are so many wonderful memoirs focused on the sort of family, personal side of the equation. Borrowing a sentiment from Toni Morris and just, like, write the book you want to read. I wanted to read a book that was, you know, 50% about work and 50% about personal, because I think those two buckets of one's life, like, not only intersect, but they are one and the same. Like, the same personality that I have at home. My home bleeds into work, and work bleeds into home. And during the pandemic, unfortunately, a little too much of that bleeding.
Carrie Sun [00:05:49]:
And so all of these things sort of coalesced towards the end of 2019, beginning of 2020. And I realized, like, you know, I have the story I want to tell. So that's when I started my to work on my book proposal. Even in the book proposal stage, I wasn't exactly sure the balance of, like, the work story versus the personal story, it could go either way. But the actual balance that ended up being was only something I realized until I wrote, like, many drafts of the book. But in the proposal stage, at least, I knew I wanted to focus on this experience that I had, because I write to understand the world and understand what's happening around me and to me and this experience that I ultimately ended up writing about in the book many years after, I still couldn't fully explain to myself what had happened to me. And I think writing is a perfect way to understand all the complex, nuanced, mixed impulses about what happened to us and why did we behave the kind of very specific way we did, and what can we learn from that, and how can there be universal elements to our own story?
Bethany Saltman [00:07:00]:
Oh, my gosh. So good. Thank you.
Carrie Sun [00:07:04]:
Thank you.
Bethany Saltman [00:07:04]:
Yeah. I think that you've touched on so much about the craft of writing and how we dig deep into our hearts and our souls to find that idea, and then we translate it into a proposal, and it becomes this kind of commercial thing. So one of the questions that we're both really interested in, we work with a lot of writers who have a story to tell, but they are under pressure, or they feel like they're under pressure, either from agents or themselves or the market or editors eventually, to kind of tell the memoir with lessons, that balance that you talked about, like, how do you tell your story with universal themes? You, of course, wrote a memoir, a pure memoir, as we say, pure memoir. No call outs, no takeaways at the end of every chapter. But it certainly has universal seams, which is why it sold and why it continues to sell and why it's doing so well. So talk to us a little bit about, did anybody ask you to do that? And we'd love to hear about the process of writing the proposal and getting the agent and how your idea that came from this very writerly, creative place entered the marketplace.
Carrie Sun [00:08:17]:
Everything you that said and are asking about all of these are major decisions that need to be made at some point, right? I think early on, for me, I just feel like at least the world that I'm inhabiting in this book, which is one of, I would say, extremes in terms of just wealth, money, status, privilege. And it can sometimes get into, really, I think people can have strong opinions about many of those things. And so I didn't want my book to feel prescriptive at all or judgmental. In fact, I wanted people who both love finance and hate finance to both love the book. You know, I'm not coming down on a judgment about whether money is good itself. It's personal to everyone. You know, risk tolerance, what money means to you, what work means to you. It's personal for everyone.
Carrie Sun [00:09:11]:
And I think the message, you know, one of many, I think, that I'm trying to advance in the book is you just have to understand what all of that means to you, what the money means to you, what work means to you, and if what you're giving to achieve that is worth what you're getting back, you know? And for me, it was just to realize that the trade off was not working for me. But it works for a lot of people, you know? And so I'm really encouraged by the feedback I've gotten from readers who write into me, many of whom are in finance and still plan to be, but they're just going in, maybe with, after reading my book with their eyes a little more wide open about possible cautionary things. And I love receiving emails from, especially women who write in, saying, like, oh, it's helped me, like, learn how to speak up at work. And so, so I personally didn't want to have any, like, actually explicit lessons or takeaways in my book. You know, there are wonderful books in which that craft aspect works really well, but I didn't want any reader in my book to feel judged, especially with their own relationship to money, you know? And so I've also gotten many college students who write into me saying, like, oh, I'm going into finance. I can't wait. But your book has helped me, like, think about in my career, how I'm going to navigate the next steps. You know, ultimately, I'm not trying to really change anyone's opinion about anything, but rather hopefully cause a response, an emotional response in a reader to question, you know, their own relationship.
Carrie Sun [00:10:43]:
And so for that reason, I chose not to have any explicit takeaways. And then the other related to kind of the lesson or to whether to write the explicit lessons in the book is I made the decision very early on to have the reader. Well, the first decision was the character in the book at that specific time. I was not going to imbue her. And this is a big decision with much or really any hindsight, because it was just so easy for me in 2020 to 2024, to write in a way in which I was judging the character. You know, years before, I couldn't write truthfully, because not only did I wanted to judge that character, you know, I thought I was incredibly naive, but also then at times, I would want to make the character smarter than she actually was. And so that didn't feel true to the narrative. Like, I would not have had that information.
Carrie Sun [00:11:40]:
If I did. I would have made a different decision. The story would not work. And so I made the decision to not make the character any smarter than she actually was at the time. And so Corollary to that is I wanted the reader to be much smarter than the character, at least certainly in the beginning, just about what was happening. Now, when I read the book, the naivete of the character at the beginning just strikes me. But, you know, we were talking about universality. I think that will certainly sometimes turn off some readers, but I think the readers that I hope will respond to my story the most can identify with.
Carrie Sun [00:12:14]:
We all are naive about something in our lives, whether that be with respect to family, career, and some aspect of ourselves. And then so it's like, and then what's the story from there? So that was the primary craft decision that also led to what the book is going to be about. So when I was writing about the proposal, because I know in nonfiction, nonfiction is sold on proposal because usually editors will want some input and say over just more of the research and the entire manuscript. I kind of, along with my agent, pitched the positioning to be sort of like 50 50. Now. It's interesting. When we went on submission with the proposal, the feedback was so varied. Many editors saw that it could go in the pure financial business direction.
Carrie Sun [00:13:05]:
There were others who wanted way more of the personal story, you know? And so I think it gets back to what we were talking about, of knowing what you want to say first and having that conviction of what your story is going to be. I think ultimately, I weighed my choices and really felt that I couldn't do away fully with the personal story, but I also couldn't lean just nearly 100% into the business side because I real. I wanted to talk about how ourselves that we are at home and at work are not just intertwined. But I think my childhood with my parents absolutely influenced the person I was at work, at this job, and I really wanted to explore those connections. And so in the proposal, it was kind of the ratio, as it were. I would say it was really 50 50, and it could have changed more to, like, 75 25 either way. But that's how I wrote the proposal together with my agent.
Fran Hauser [00:14:05]:
Gosh, there's just so much to unpack. You know what I love about this conversation is the intentionality of the craft decisions that you made. It's such an important reminder to everyone who's listening that you're going to come to these points in the process. And it might be a crossroad, it might be just maybe thinking deeper about something, but this idea of really being intentional and going back to, what is your goal with this project? Every decision really should be supportive of your overall goal, and it should be genuine and feel good, really feel like it's aligned. So I'm loving and loving this so much. And the one question, Carrie, just to go back a little bit, is when you decided, okay, this is going to be the book. This is what it's going to be about. Were you familiar with the book publishing process at that point? Did you know that, okay, I need to write a book proposal, and I need to look for an agent.
Fran Hauser [00:15:06]:
Were you connected in that world, especially.
Bethany Saltman [00:15:09]:
As an MFA student? Because we work with a lot of the tension between craft and commercialism, like I said. And so the MFA world is one thing that has a very particular idea of art and craft, and then making that leap into trying to sell, which can so often be heard as sell out. So I'd love to hear how you learned about the business of books and nonfiction book proposals and how you got an agent and then anything else you can add.
Carrie Sun [00:15:38]:
Absolutely. You know, there is that tension, especially in a sort of MFA and communities of literature, where there is a tension between focus on craft versus commerciality. And I knew going into my MFA that I wanted to write a book, and not everyone has the same goal. And I think that's wonderful. Many of my peers really love personal essays and have placed many of them, and I think that's wonderful. And so I went in knowing that I would be all in monomaniacal on a book. And so I was very lucky. I didn't know really much about the publishing side, how a book gets made at all when I started my MFA, but I had a friend, and she's still one of my very best friends.
Carrie Sun [00:16:23]:
I met her when I was taking, you know, I think in my book, I detail a few years in which I, after I dropped out of my MBA, I was taking a creative writing classes, philosophy, english literature classes, all the humanity classes I wasn't able to take during my college years. I was taking those classes as a non degree student. In honesty, at that time, I loved it. But I also had this nagging feeling within me that perhaps I was wasting time and money. It was like, what is going to come of this? And, like, nothing came up for a very long time. Then I will say one of my friends that I made in a creative writing non fiction class at the University of Michigan. She ended up, years later writing a book. And it was about the difficulty of young women, I think, especially in their twenties, dating, and why it's very difficult.
Carrie Sun [00:17:15]:
And the book is, I think the genre would be dating, relationship advice, more self help, and kind of pure nonfiction. But she had an agent through that process, and we continued to be friends throughout the years. And we're like best friends. We're like best friends now. And she at some point was like, oh, Carrie, by the way, my agent, who represented my book. She represented my book, and she's super smart, fantastic. And her primary thing that she does is actually half serious nonfiction and half very literary. And that was kind of, like, directly what I was hoping to write a.
Carrie Sun [00:17:54]:
She was like, I'm happy to introduce you to my agent if you would like. I was like, well, I don't have anything yet. I'm not ready. And she just, she happened to have a meeting with her agent one day, and she just, like, talked about her friend, me. And her agent was like, oh, yeah, I'd love to meet her. And so my agent, Mel, and I, we met, and, you know, I didn't really have a book to picture, but I talked about my background, what excites me, what interests me, why I'm doing my MFA. And, you know, it's not like I just, I want to write one book. I want to write many books.
Carrie Sun [00:18:27]:
I'm just broadly interested in so many things. But one of them is, I love hidden niche, esoteric worlds that somehow explain the full spectrum of the human condition to us. I also love how stories of how people become who they are. So how do beliefs change? How do people change, you know? And so I talked about all of that vis a vis, you know, my experiences so far, which have been on Wall Street. I mean, I soft pitched on I want to write a narrative critique of capitalism. Of course. That's a huge topic. And where does the narrative start and end? Which part of capitalism? Because it's everywhere all the time, you know? But that's where I started, and that was in the first month or two of my MFA.
Carrie Sun [00:19:11]:
After that, we met for, like, at least an hour or two and just talked and talked and talked. And she said, I would love to work with you. So that was at the beginning of my MFA, and just a little bit ago, I was explaining how I didn't write my book proposal until the end of my MFA. So I really spent those two years figuring out exactly what it was that I wanted to write. It was not easy, because how do you know what you want to say? That was the hardest question that I, as a writer, was trying to figure out. And I just had to give myself the freedom, the permission during my MFA to write about anything and everything. And I. The hard part for me was not judging myself and what I was producing and just putting it out there, you know? And it was everything except this book.
Carrie Sun [00:19:55]:
It was just like a pure, undirected exploration. It ended up being really helpful to me. That's how I got my agent.
Fran Hauser [00:20:03]:
Amazing. And were you getting input from Mel throughout that two year period? While you were thinking more deeply about the idea and sharpening the idea, were you in conversations with her, or were you just kind of like, you know what? I'm going to come up with it, and then I'm going to share it with her and get her feedback?
Carrie Sun [00:20:22]:
We were not in contact for most of those two years until I turned in a full proposal to her.
Fran Hauser [00:20:29]:
That is a first.
Carrie Sun [00:20:30]:
Yeah. Well, you know, here's the thing is, like, I have to say that my entire team is so fantastic, and they have really helped me become a better writer and become a better person. And a lot of that is also knowing and responding to what I need. Every writer needs different things. Right? My first editor, and I had two editors on this book, which I can also explain later, but my first editor said something about, like, you know, just given who I am and my personal background, that I actually needed less voices in my head all the time and that my number one job in writing this book was to protect my own memories. And so I actually needed to tune out the world, including, like, people I respect, admire, love, and trust both their, you know, professional advice. But just I needed that pure silence in order to hear my own voice, which was at times, extremely quiet because otherwise, I certainly have people pleasing tendencies and so when someone says something, I might over index to that or overvalue it too much, such that, like, my story that I want to tell actually gets lost in the puddle there. So the story that I ultimately do end up telling the book is one of actually discovering my voice.
Carrie Sun [00:21:48]:
So it was important for me to kind of just have that space to work on my own. And I actually love feedback. All of the feedback I got during my MFA was helpful, and it was helpful because most of the time it was learning to develop my own sense of judgment and taste about writing and also to come up with actually why that suggestion doesn't work. In my case, even though I didn't take, I would say, 99% of the suggestions, but it was actually just for me to develop the muscle of knowing why some feedback doesn't work and then also knowing why it would work. But all of the feedback was especially from my agent. It was pointed to something that needed attention, and so maybe the solution. I could come up with a better solution to solve that problem, but nevertheless, if some part of it is giving somebody pause, it's going to give someone else pause. So I ended up taking all of the feedback but incorporating it in a way that felt true to me.
Bethany Saltman [00:22:53]:
Hey, Bookbound ones, if you're loving this interview as much as we are, we think you'll want to join us for this very special first of its kind. Read like a writer book club. What the heck is a read like a writer book club? I'm so glad you asked. This idea came to us after working with so many aspiring authors who are still reading books like a reader. Liking this, not liking that. Instead of studying successful books for lessons and how to weave their own stories into clear structures or develop frameworks that really change people's lives. And we thought, hey, why leave so much learning on the table? Then we realized that we have this incredible archive of author interviews. Yes, this very podcast.
Bethany Saltman [00:23:34]:
And so we put it all together and said, hey, let's host a read like a writer book club. This is how it works. For the low price of $175, we'll meet once a month over Zoom for seven months. Our meetings will take place on Wednesdays at noon eastern time. We'll give you a list of books related podcast episodes to review and a simple reading guide. We'll meet up and discuss together and in small groups. Fran and I are so excited to get started. We love reading.
Bethany Saltman [00:24:03]:
We love you guys. And we love studying books with other women. Sign up at bookboundpodcast.com/club we can't wait to see you there. Can you give an example of something that you felt was really important that you hadn't seen about the idea or about the proposal that Mel helped you refine that really ended up selling the book.
Carrie Sun [00:24:28]:
There were just so many. You know, I met her at the beginning of my FA, and then I turned hyper proposal towards that on my MFA. And actually, we completely redid it, but also, it was exactly the same. Initially, I was like, well, I love books that are a day in the life or like a slice of life, like a very ordinary day, and yet somehow it has so much drama inside it and character. The structure initially, was going to be one day and kind of infuse the stories through flashbacks or maybe even flash forwards or asides. It was going to be a lot more experimental. And to Mel's credit, she's so wonderful in giving feedback. She never told me something doesn't work, but she suggests your story has such a clear arc to it, and so why not just do the more chronological story? And I was like, why not?
Bethany Saltman [00:25:26]:
That's a great. Yes.
Fran Hauser [00:25:29]:
And the structure, I mean, I love the nod to the quarter. Like the quarters, like q one, q two, q three, q four. That was brilliant.
Carrie Sun [00:25:37]:
Thank you so much. You know, this is my debut first book, and discovering my voice, really, I think voice is definitely about, you know, on the line level, sentence level. But really, I think what's under talked about is I feel that voice is also the architecture of your thoughts, the structure of what you think about, where you slow down, where you speed up, what you notice, what you don't notice, and how much time you spend noticing what you do. And so for me, it was important to, as I was developing my writer voice in general, but also specifically for this book. Fran, you mentioned the quarters. Yeah, kind of. Discovering that structure of the quarters was super important to me because I also wanted the structure to infuse meaning beyond the text. And what I mean by that is, the structure of the book is purely time based, and it's not always quarter by quarter.
Carrie Sun [00:26:37]:
The book is a total of 13 chapters, plus prologue and epilogue. And in the 13 chapters, the start of the chapters, it's like July 18 through August 12 or something. Then it's like September 3, and then in the middle section, it's like first quarter, second quarter, third quarter, fourth quarter. I wanted the reader to kind of feel this, like, time that's defined by work that has almost this, like, ritual and monotonous aspect to it. So that's why it's like quarter one, quarter two, quarter three, quarter four. You know, whenever people think of those quarters, usually people think of, like, the financial markets or just needing to close your books for that quarter, like paying taxes. And the chapter titles and the delineation of the chapters at the beginning and the end are major dates in my life. So it goes from me living my life to being on the timeline of work in the quarter system to then exiting with November 18.
Carrie Sun [00:27:38]:
I think it was my last day at that job. There are major moments, major dates in my life, and then another one was July something. That was the day that I met with my future publisher. It then goes back into time as defined by me, my story.
Fran Hauser [00:27:55]:
Amazing.
Bethany Saltman [00:27:56]:
I love that you said, having a structure that imbues meaning. We talk to our students about this all the time. The structure of the book don't leave meaning on the table is actually what we say. It's an incredible opportunity to shape the story. We have to ask you about the title. Was it always called Private Equity?
Carrie Sun [00:28:19]:
No. It was so difficult to come up with a title at the proposal stage. It was sold as the infinite game, which is very different. Mel and I had a very difficult time coming up with titles. I had so many titles ranging from just one word, vaguely financial, could have other meaning, titles, to many words, half sentences, literary titles. They could be the title, but it didn't, like, feel just right in my bones. And so the infinite game was the title we went out on submission with because, well, one, it's a nod to a book that's very popular, like a cult book in the financial space about people playing these finite and infinite games. And infinite games are ones where you can't really win.
Carrie Sun [00:29:09]:
You just play to keep on playing, playing forever. Wealth is one of those games accruing wealth, accruing status, but also, you know, interpersonal games, like being a good friend, being a mother. You can't really win at that game. You just. You want to do well enough so you keep on doing it, you know? And so it felt, like, apt for both the business side of my story and also the personal. But we always knew it was probably a placeholder because there's also another very popular business book published by Business Press, actually called the infinite Game. And it was actually a recent book, and it was only after I turned in the complete manuscript of my book and my first editor had to present the book at some internal conference where she was like, guys, I think we need a title. Private Equity was actually her suggestion.
Carrie Sun [00:30:01]:
And I just thought immediately that was it. It's perfect because it's, it's really about our self equity, right. And how do we invest our time in ourselves, in our work, our family, our relationships. But really, it's about the sense of how do we build our own sense of self? To me, that's Private Equity. So, yeah. Oh, my gosh.
Fran Hauser [00:30:27]:
And then, of course, like, the financial meaning of Private Equity. I mean, it's just like, so good. Its so perfect. So the Times refer to the book they say Private Equity does for finance what the devil wears Prada did for fashion. And I just love that because you instantly get it. When we talk to our students, we talk about, even in the proposal stage, if you can come up with a really strong metaphor where agents and editors immediately get what your book is about, theres something so compelling about that. I just wonder, when you were working on the book and when, even when you were working on the proposal, did you ever think of the book along those lines?
Carrie Sun [00:31:09]:
The Devil wears Prada, first of all, is just one of my favorite stories, films, books ever. It's fun and it's smart and it's like, it's so emotional, but also just fun. And so I wanted my book definitely to have that element as, as well. And it was always in the back of my mind. But interestingly enough, I don't think we actually use that as a comp. In my discussions with my agent and also later with my publisher to think about how to, you know, position the book more publicly, it was both extremely hard and extremely easy to come up with cons where there are some kind of, I think, easy comps for my book, you know, but I also think that my, my book kind of really hits buckets of readers. At least this is what my publisher was telling me, because they have a lot of data on this, that typically those buckets of readers don't intersect. And the two buckets are, one is the finance business readers, econ, and the other is the more memoir literary readers.
Carrie Sun [00:32:12]:
Now, of course, I think those should intersect, and I think people should, should read both genres, and I love both genres. And so to have kind of those different buckets that don't normally intersect. So it was hard, I guess, to come up with comps. But then there are also so many comps. Like, one is definitely the devil wears Prada. Young, bright woman, goes to work for a big name in an industry that people think is glamorous, but actually, it's very difficult, and she has to learn about herself through work. But another version of that exact story is sweet, bitter. So that was one of my comps.
Carrie Sun [00:32:51]:
It's not a memoir, but a literary novel by Stephanie Dandler. And it's about this young woman who moves to New York, who starts working at a very fancy restaurant and receives an education in the world and at the same time about herself. And that definitely has a very, very fast paced literary feel to it. I don't have a perfect comp for my book, but also there are all these, like, comps that could work for different reasons.
Bethany Saltman [00:33:21]:
Well, it's so good. It's so good because we talk to people about building your complist is actually one of the most creative parts of the proposal because you get to create, you're building a case, a business case, for why this book needs to be in the world. And you can go. I love that you went to different genres, not just categories, but actual genres, and built the case for why there are readers that are all pointing in the direction of Private Equity. So well done. That's a great tip for our reader or our listeners. So as we wrap up, we'd love to get one tip that you have for an aspiring writer, someone who's listening to this podcast and who's saying, you know, okay, that's, you know, it also. And you did such a good job of, you know, letting everybody know it's a long journey, but people don't believe us, right? And they're thinking like, she can do it, I can't do it.
Bethany Saltman [00:34:14]:
I'm not sure what my next steps are. What would you say to her?
Carrie Sun [00:34:17]:
I would say, trust the process, because I will say that for most of the time, I didn't know what I was doing. I know where I wanted to be and how I wanted to feel. I wanted to have conviction about the story I wanted to tell. For most of the time when I was drafting the book, I didn't have that conviction, but I trusted the process. Every day I sat down staring at a blank page at 08:00 a.m. with my coffee and just pushed through it. And it was agony for most of it. And so now I can say, oh, obviously that's the story I wanted to tell.
Carrie Sun [00:34:48]:
But that, like, momentary change from not knowing to knowing, it's a split second that comes at some time. I wanted it to come earlier because after, with hindsight bias, I was like, well, I should have known that years ago. It's like, well, I didn't. And that's the process. You just put in the work. And I really believe it'll come, and I think it'll come for everybody. Because for me, I was so unsure for much of the process, both in the writing and in the publishing. And every day you just stick with it.
Fran Hauser [00:35:20]:
It's such great advice. And this will give you the confidence, Carrie, when you're working on your next book and you have those moments where you're like the blank page and you're stuck and, you know, it's like, okay, no, I did this before. I was in this exact same spot, and I got through it, and I created this incredible book, this piece of art that people are loving and enjoying. Right. So now you have that evidence based confidence like you've done it before. Right? You can do it again. So that's such beautiful advice. We just absolutely loved having you on today.
Fran Hauser [00:35:54]:
We're so grateful. Thank you for your time and energy. It was just really so special, so beautiful. And let us know what is the best way for people to stay in touch with you and to stay connected with you.
Carrie Sun [00:36:09]:
Right? I think the best way is through my Instagram, which I'm not a heavy user of, but I do post updates there and events and readings, and my Instagram is just my name, Carrie. My middle name is Yi, so Y I carry ye son.
Fran Hauser [00:36:27]:
Perfect. Thank you so much, Carrie.
Carrie Sun [00:36:30]:
Thank you so much. Bethany and Fran, this was an amazing conversation. Thank you.
Bethany Saltman [00:36:36]:
Thank you for joining us on Bookbound.
Fran Hauser [00:36:38]:
If you like what you heard, please subscribe and rate and review us on your favorite podcast listening platform.
Bethany Saltman [00:36:46]:
Please visit us@bookboundpodcast.com for more on us and how we work with authors.