May Bonus Episode

Summary

Podcast Summary: "The Shit No One Tells You About Writing" – May Bonus Episode

Release Date: May 26, 2025
Hosts: Bianca Marais, Carly Watters, and CeCe Lyra
Episode: May Bonus Episode

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1. Interview with Anna Mitchell

Guest: Anna Mitchell, Author of They Will Tell You the World Is Yours

Overview: Bianca Marais and co-host Carly Waters engage in an in-depth conversation with Anna Mitchell, exploring her journey from a copywriter in advertising to a published author. Anna shares insights into her transition to magazine work, her love for vignette-style storytelling, and her experiences with ghostwriting.

Key Discussions:

• Writing Background and Career Transition ([03:00]):

  • Anna Mitchell: Discusses starting as a copywriter and transitioning to freelance writing and eventually working for Magnolia Journal.
  • Quote: “Advertising kind of trained me in always wanting to write books on the side. That was always kind of the dream.”

• Vignette Format and They Will Tell You the World Is Yours ([07:45]):

  • Explains the inspiration behind using vignettes to convey complex life phases.
  • Quote: “Vignettes are like a slice of life story. It’s about taking a scene from your life and presenting it with a lyrical quality.”

• Ghostwriting Experiences ([13:13]):

  • Shares her entry into ghostwriting through connections and collaborative work.
  • Quote: “Ghostwriting can be just working on a proposal, helping organize thoughts, and translating them into words.”

• Overcoming Creative Blocks and Fear ([16:12]):

  • Discusses strategies to manage anxiety and stay true to one’s creative vision.
  • Quote: “This book has taught me that it’s about learning to live with discomfort and deciding to write no matter what.”

• Reading and Critiquing Query Letters ([23:33]):

  • Anna reads her original query letter, receiving constructive feedback from Carly.
  • Quote: “Have you read it out loud? It’s so easy to skip that step.”

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2. Interview with Noreen Nunja

Guest: Noreen Nunja, Author of Uprooted

Overview: Bianca Marais welcomes Toronto-based author Noreen Nunja, who discusses her experience refining her query letter, navigating the publishing industry, and the importance of mentorship and editing in crafting her debut novel.

Key Discussions:

• Querying Process and Securing an Agent ([40:46]):

  • Details how joining the Word as Diversity Mentorship program and networking led to securing representation.
  • Quote: “Having friends who are ghostwriters threw me jobs and recommendations that helped me get started.”

• Importance of Editing and Rewriting ([49:27]):

  • Emphasizes the necessity of rigorous editing and being open to significant rewrites.
  • Quote: “My fatal flaw is that I like to kill my darlings. I love excavating my characters and story, making them more intentional.”

• Dealing with Rejection and Persistence ([54:54]):

  • Shares her feelings about receiving an R&R (Revise and Resubmit) and how it ultimately strengthened her manuscript.
  • Quote: “Deciding to trust the feedback and make the necessary changes made the book much better.”

• Navigating the Publishing Timeline and Contractual Obligations ([57:25] - [59:33]):

  • Discusses the challenges of deadlines and the emotional toll of waiting for publication.
  • Quote: “Knowing where you stand in the process and not getting swayed is crucial to not becoming a miserable person during the cycle.”

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3. Interview with Laura Loeffler

Guest: Laura Loeffler, Author of Tell Them You Lied

Overview: Laura Loeffler delves into her writing journey, the evolution of her novel Tell Them You Lied, and the intricacies of dual-timeline storytelling. She also shares her experiences with revisions, dealing with tough feedback, and the emotional aspects of publishing.

Key Discussions:

• Writing Journey and Dual Timelines ([40:57]):

  • Explains how dual timelines enrich the narrative by exploring character development across different periods.
  • Quote: “One timeline portrays the past, allowing readers to understand the foundation of the present circumstances.”

• Revising Based on Feedback ([43:15] - [46:24]):

  • Describes how mentorship and editorial feedback led to significant changes in her manuscript.
  • Quote: “Receiving feedback that I needed to up the tension and make it more of a thriller gave me permission to let go and focus on the story.”

• Handling Rejections and Persistence ([48:22] - [52:18]):

  • Reflects on the non-response from her initial agent and the resilience required to find the right representation.
  • Quote: “I realized that nobody has a cakewalk. It’s just not that kind of industry.”

• Incorporating Feedback and Structural Changes ([53:05] - [56:09]):

  • Discusses refining the dual timelines with the help of editors and beta readers to maintain pacing and relevance.
  • Quote: “Strengthening the past by ensuring every scene shines without repetition was key to maintaining momentum.”

• Publicity and Emotional Challenges ([110:06] - [112:22]):

  • Shares her apprehensions about publicity and the unexpected decision to offer both hardcover and paperback formats.
  • Quote: “Holding the book in my hands felt surreal. It’s a culmination of so much hard work and anticipation.”

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4. May Comps Segment with Emily Summer

Contributor: Emily Summer, East City Bookshop

Overview: Emily Summer assists listeners in finding comparable titles ("comps") for their manuscripts across various genres, offering recommendations based on descriptions provided by callers. This segment includes tailored suggestions for genres such as theatrical thrillers, mystical mysteries, contemporary romance, and more.

Notable Comp Recommendations:

• For Theatrical Thrillers:

  • If We Were Villains by M.L. Rio
  • Murder Takes the Stage by Colleen Cambridge
  • The Appeal by Janice Hallett

• For Comedic Mysteries:

  • Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone by Benjamin Stevenson
  • The Most Wonderful Crime of the Year by Ally Carter

• For Multi-POV Literary Thrillers:

  • We Are All Guilty Here by Karen Slaughter
  • Correspondent by Virginia Evans

• For Gritty Historical Novels and Wilderness Survival:

  • Antidote by Karen Russell
  • One Dark Window by Rachel Gillig
  • One of Us by Dan Shawn

Key Insights:

• Selecting Appropriate Comps: The importance of choosing titles that closely match the tone, setting, and thematic elements of one's manuscript.
• Balancing Genre Elements: Ensuring that recommended comps align not just in plot but also in stylistic and tonal nuances.

Quote:
Emily Summer emphasizes the role of comps in understanding market positioning:
"It's like finding the right piece of the puzzle that fits your story's unique blend of genres and themes." ([116:37])

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5. Additional Segments and Announcements

While the primary focus of the episode is on guest interviews and the comps segment, there are periodic announcements related to upcoming courses and events hosted by CeCe Lira, such as her upcoming course Writing Emotion and Relationships.

Note: Advertisements, introductory remarks, and other non-content segments have been omitted in accordance with the summary guidelines.

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Conclusion: The May Bonus Episode of The Shit No One Tells You About Writing offers a wealth of insights from established authors navigating the complexities of the publishing industry. Through candid interviews, discussions on writing techniques, and tailored comp recommendations, listeners gain valuable knowledge to aid their own writing and publishing journeys. The episode underscores the importance of resilience, constructive feedback, and strategic planning in achieving success as an author.

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For those who wish to delve deeper into the topics discussed, listening to the full episode is highly recommended.

Transcript

[Cece Lira]

Hello listeners, this is cece. I am so excited to announce my next course, Writing Emotion and Relationships, an all new mashup of two of my most popular classes revamped with fresh content starting on June 19th. This is going to be a four day event, so come prepared to take lots of notes. We'll cover active versus passive emotions, how to effectively show versus tell most common mistakes in writing, emotions and relationships, and obviously how to get it right, types of relationships and how to leverage each one in a story, emotional and relational makeups and arcs for protagonists and other characters, how to create chemistry between characters, different genre expectations, and so much more. Oh, and did I mention there's an interactive component? That's right. Everyone who is registered will have the option of sending an exit of their work for a chance to have it critiqued live during the webinar. Writers of all categories and genres are invited to attend. There are limited spots though, so if you're interested, sign up now. And don't worry if you can't attend one or more sessions live. The recording will be sent to everyone who's registered 24 hours after each class. Once again, this is a four day class, Writing Emotion and Relationships beginning on June 19th. For for more details, check out the link on my Instagram bio or head over to the podcast's website. I hope to see you there.

[Bianca Marais]

Hi there and welcome to our show, the shit no one tells you about writing. I'm Bianca Marais and I'm joined by Carly Waters and Cece Lira from PS Literary Agency.

[Carly Waters]

Hi everybody, it is Carly here for another client author interview. I am just so blessed with so many incredible clients with books coming out this year and I get to bring them to all of you. Talk about the behind the scenes. So I'm very excited to welcome Anna Mitchell, who's the author of this lovely book and many more that we're going to talk about. We have a very fun conversation planned, so we're going to be talking about everything from Anna's writing background, her copy editing experience, working in magazines, and as a fun throwback, we thought that we would read her query letter aloud on the show for you guys so that we can, you know, in the true spirit of the show, talk about query letters and what spoke to me and her query letter and have just a fun query letter conversation as a little throwback. So that is our plan for today. So welcome Anna to the show.

[Anna Mitchell]

Thank you. It's good to be here. It's actually kind of a big throwback because it's 2021. I queried you for this book.

[Carly Waters]

I know time flies. I. I feel like pandemic years don't count. We can just like, you know, subtract a couple of those years.

[Anna Mitchell]

Fair enough.

[Carly Waters]

Yes. So I gave a little bit of a background about you, but Anna, why don't you tell the audience all about you and your writing background and how we got to this moment?

[Anna Mitchell]

Okay, that sounds great. So I started writing straight out of college. I worked in ad agencies and I was a copywriter. And so that's kind of where I learned how to write. I learned to tell stories. I learned. I learned to work hard with very little, like tangible things that you see, which, you know, or benefits, I guess, which benefits you as like a novel writer. Cause you go a long time sometimes without a product, you know, so advertising kind of trained me in. I always wanted to write books on the side. That was always kind of the dream. And so eventually after a while, I went freelance and started writing books on the side. My first book came out in 2010. It was. Was published by Seal Press. It's called Just Don't Call Me Ma' Am. And it was a book of essays. And my second book came out in 15, was published by Berkeley. It's called Copy Girl. And it's kind of. It's just a fun roast of all the years that I spent working in advertising. I wrote it with a friend of mine that I worked with in New York. And then let's see, around that time, post 2015, I decided I wanted to go back to work full time. So I start. I went editorial and I went into the magazine world and started freelancing a lot for magazines. Eventually I went on staff at Magnolia Journal and worked there for many years and loved my time there. And just, I don't know, it was just a totally different side of writing. And it introduced. Or it didn't introduce me, but it kind of brought me back to my love of shorter form, which eventually came around to me writing this book. And so now I am back to freelance. I do freelancing. I do ghost writing. It's just a really fun right now. It's just one of those, like, sweet times when the jobs I have are kind of a good mix. So I. I do a little bit of everything when it comes to writing. I guess you could say yes.

[Carly Waters]

I love that. Yeah, we could pick apart a few parts from that conversation. So let's talk about pitching magazines. Let's start there because you were talking about working in magazines. So a lot of people that Listen to our show. Think about, oh, I got to get bylines or I got to build my platform. And so can you talk from your experience working in magazines, how authors could p magazines and how that process works from your end or your experience pitching your own stories?

[Anna Mitchell]

Yeah, I would speak from pitching my own stories first, because I did that for many, many years before I was on the other side. And I found it. The whole process just seemed really blind, you know, because you're just sending in letters. I live now, I live in Texas, and so I don't feel. I live in Waco. It's like a very small town. So I definitely don't feel like I'm part of, like, a literary scene or a big network where, you know, I get to go out to lunch with friends who are all, like, magazine people or anything like that. So I do think that it can feel blind when you're just sending things in. I think the benefit now is that with social media, you can actually reach out. You can slowly cultivate relationships with people who are at magazines that you really like. And once I was at Magnolia Journal, that's a lot of what I saw. You know, it's. I don't know how much you would agree with this with the book world, but it's, you know, it's a lot of relationship building. And so people, once they kind of know you, it's a lot easier to take the pitch. They'll reach back out to you and possibly build on what you've suggested, and you guys can come to a sweet spot where you learn what they're looking for, what form they're looking for, because nobody has a lot of time. So the more that you can actually hone in on what they actually. They want straight out of the gates, it's just a better shot of them taking a risk on. On a new writer or a new writer for them, you know?

[Carly Waters]

Yeah. And it trains you to think about the audience. Right. Instead of, like, what do I want to write? It's like, okay, this editor has a mandate that they need to, you know, fill, and you have to start thinking like that.

[Anna Mitchell]

That's a great point. It's like, how can I make their life easier?

[Laura Loeffler]

You know?

[Anna Mitchell]

And it's like the writers that come in with that perspective of, like, I just really, I want to give you a home run, and it's a home run for me, and, like, everybody wins. Like, that's a very different perspective than, like, oh, hey, I just have this story that I know is going to be great. It's like, if you've gone into their brain a little bit, it's probably going to be a better sell.

[Carly Waters]

Yeah. And it makes, as you said, everybody's life easier. They want to come back to you for more work because everything's simpatico. So that makes a lot of sense. Okay. Now the other thing you were talking about was through magazine writing and working at Magnolia Journal was the format of vignettes. And so your book, they Will Tell youl the World Is Yours, this lovely book. I still have an arc. I don't have the finished version yet, but this is what the beautiful cover looks like. So this is completely told in vignette. So talk to us a little bit about the inspiration behind the book and how the vignette format worked really well for this.

[Anna Mitchell]

Yes. So vignettes are actually something that I wrote a long time ago. I guess when I first started out and I was like working in New York, I was writing really short stories and I was doing like a night school class. And the, the teacher for the class was this really well respected author. And she was just basically like, this probably isn't going to work. You're never going to be able to sell a book of vignettes. Like, you should just write like a traditional novel. And I, I mean, I took her advice because. And I probably should have. She was like a well established author, like, knew what was going on and I fully walked away. And I was like, okay, this is just going to be nothing. And I went and I learned how to write books. And so then like a literal, almost 20 years later, when I was sitting there looking for a way to convey this like, life phase that I felt like I was in and this way that I was feeling and how I was looking at the world and seeing my friends, what their experience was, I wanted a format that felt like it could really get to the core of that. And I just ended up back in this vignette place. And so it was this really interesting, like, coming back around to what I had started with. And then I think at Magnolia Journal, I also saw, you know, people were really resonating with these, like, short stories that just are sized correctly for how we're living now. You know, it's like people want the deep thoughts, like they want thought provoking messages, but our lives just right now aren't built to necessarily always have time to sit down and take them in in a huge novel format. And so I really wanted to make it easy on people and I wanted it to be something that was digestible. And so that kind of all ended up back in this. This way of vignette. But, you know, within the book, it's like there's 85, I think, after the edit. 85, 86. But I think that's what's great about it, because you can kind of take them like vignettes or. A lot of the early readers have been reading it front, you know, front to back in, like, in more like one or two sittings, you know. And so I think it's really about how you want to take it in and where you are, and if you want to be reflecting on a vignette or if you want to, like, take in the whole. The whole thing is one big bite, I guess.

[Carly Waters]

Yeah. No, it's a great point. And I think. I mean, I'm a proponent of reading it however you want to read it, because it's a great book.

[Laura Loeffler]

Yeah.

[Carly Waters]

But I think also the target audience for this one is women, because the stories are about kind of a woman going through her fictional life, essentially through the. These stories of vignettes. And they're so poignant. And I think it does speak to women's really busy lives, you know, reading it between all the millions of things that women do in a day and kind of being able to pick and choose. Yeah. Where they want to dip into and what they want to sit with and resonate with and maybe journal about, as, you know, things come up for them. So it's a beautiful, beautiful book in that regard.

[Anna Mitchell]

I do think women are the target, but I also feel like anything that can help men understand women, pass it to the men in your life and be like, maybe this will give you some insight. So.

[Carly Waters]

Some insight. Yes. Yes. We have had on your publishing team. There is a great editor over at Convergent Books who published your book, joining our editorial meetings. So, yes, we have been on the team of this book.

[Anna Mitchell]

Yes. And I love having all the voices speaking into it. It's great.

[Carly Waters]

Yeah. Yeah. Do you want to, just for our listeners that don't know, maybe the difference between poetry and vignettes, do you want to kind of expand a little bit on what you think the difference is? Do you think that a vignette is a type of poem? Do you think it's more prose? Yeah. How do we. How do we describe a vignette?

[Anna Mitchell]

So I'm going to speak from this as a very uneducated poet. Right. I know the poetry that I love and that I read, and that for me, it's always like, a very evocative experience. To get deep into a book of poetry. And I hope that vignettes are also like that. You know, to me, a vignette is like a slice of life story. You know, it's just. It's kind of taking, like, a scene from your life. And the way that these are written in this book, they have that kind of lyrical quality to them. A lot of them do that I think that I'm always drawn to with poetry. And a lot of them have that kind of the ending comes back around from the beginning, and it gives you that feeling of completion, like great poems do. And I think just that idea of them being capsules of thoughts, you know, is very similar between the vignettes to the poems. But obviously, I mean, I think they're different in that they travel a little bit more. Like the vignettes kind of travel a little bit more than I think typical poetry does. And because they aren't restricted by line and rhythm completely, I just think there's, like, a little bit more freedom in writing them and. Yeah.

[Carly Waters]

Yeah, that makes sense to me. It's like a poem meets an essay. It's like somewhere in the middle, they kind of meet about, like, what they want to say. Yeah. And it's obviously up to the interpretation of the author and the reader and how it comes together, but, yeah, they're wonderful little stories. I'll hold it up for Everybody watching on YouTube. So you can kind of see what the length is. Right. Because it's like. It's kind of like this. And then we also have some beautiful little images as well in there. Yeah, it's coming together in a beautiful, beautiful little package on sale in May at May 20th. So everybody pre order, grab your copy. We are very excited about it. Okay, let's pop around to the ghostwriting experience. So you've talked a little bit about that. You have done ghost writing for other people. Do you want to talk about how you got into it? You know, it's. It's one of those things where people, you know, listeners and people in our community know that ghostwriters exist. They are aware of them, but it is a kind of whole different subset of the industry. So maybe talk to us a little bit about your experience there.

[Anna Mitchell]

Yeah, Ghostwriting is. I mean, in a lot of ways, I guess I've done four books, and. And I still feel on the outside of it in a lot of ways.

[Laura Loeffler]

It's just.

[Anna Mitchell]

I mean, I guess it's like anything with writing, it always feels slightly insider, and you kind of. You just go farther and Farther in. And you learn based on your own experiences. I do have other friends that are ghostwriters, and so those friends are the ones that got me involved in it in the beginning. And I had a little bit of experience having been tapped to do some individual projects for people that used ghostwriters who found me just via other work I'd done, and then kind of being in the right place in the right time. And then I had friends that had done longer projects, and so they. They just started to. To kind of throw me jobs that they, you know, or recommend my name for things that they couldn't take on for one reason or another. And then from there, it kind of builds. But, you know, ghostwriting in itself basically can be just working on a proposal for. With people. It can be helping them do the proposal and the manuscript. It can, you know, you can come in in a lot of different ways. I've come in and just helped people with an essay component of books that have, like, other materials in them for, you know, say, like, cookbooks, things like that. So you're basically. You're just kind of coming in, I think, sometimes to be a thought organizer and then to. To help them get words on the page. Because usually the people that you're working with are either just too short on time or they just. Writing isn't their specialty. Their specialty is this other thing in the world, and so they need someone that can help them translate it.

[Carly Waters]

And, yeah, it's. It's such an incredible world. I follow along with a lot of publishing news, and there's now a ghostwriters conference where you can kind of, like, go and talk to other ghostwriters and learn about, you know, everything going on in that world. So it's interesting. It used to be one of those things where nobody really talked about the ghostwriter, or it was. You know, they're not mentioned anywhere in the book or anything. But now there's a lot of, like, with so and so on the COVID So there's like, all these different, like, revealings, I guess, of how ghostwriters, you know, work with their authors. And sometimes they're called collaborators. There's, like, all these different ways to kind of frame it.

[Anna Mitchell]

Yeah, yeah. I think that's what I've always called it, like, story collaboration. I find that people do kind of move away from that ghostwriting term. But, yeah, I kind of. I like the old school. I think it's funny. It is, kind of. Because it's sort of what it is. To me, it feels like you kind of Go in and then you just know when you fade out and it's just, it does, it feels like a very correct term.

[Carly Waters]

Yeah, yeah, we use, yeah, I guess we do use the word collaborator in my experience. Experience more. But yeah, I love, I love that storyteller, collaborator, all of that wonderful stuff. So let's talk a little bit about, you know, we were talking off camera, I guess, about how you think about creativity and putting yourself out there and the fear that kind of comes with all of this. Do you want to talk a little bit about how you kind of get outside of your comfort zone or how you keep going in the face of, you know, being worried or concerned or you know, having those creative blocks? How do you, how do you work through some of those things creatively within your own mind?

[Anna Mitchell]

I've been thinking about this a lot lately and partially because I think the time of this book has taken so much time to go from when I was writing it just all the way through to now. And you know, when there's that much time, it's very easy to spill or to fill that space kind of with worry. I mean, that's like, there's a lot of waiting in publishing, right? You're kind of always waiting for the next thing. And I think that this, this process, I would have told you two years ago that I was like just like couldn't handle it anymore. Like I couldn't handle the waiting. I was like, I was done. But it's actually been so good for me. I think that I like really held this view that if I could just get to this point or if I could just get to that point, that then, you know, the anxiety about it all or like how it would end would be over. And I think just a really extended time of publishing has taught me that it's about learning to live with this discomfort, you know, and that this is actually the state of it. And when you really listen to people who have been very successful in writing, like they go through the same, I mean they hit the same blank page after they're like, huge best selling book comes out, you know, I mean, there's, there's always this restart, there's always this like, will I do it again? And so I think I finally saw that that kind of fear of what's coming next was just gonna lead to like a really like an unhappy writing existence, you know. So this book has taught me that of just deciding. I think two years ago I decided I was like, well, I'm just gonna write no matter what happens. So I kind of have to surrender that out in order to not be a miserable person while this cycle is. Is happening, because hopefully it'll continue to happen, you know, And. And so I think that there's a lot of that just kind of letting it go and knowing where you stand in the process and what you want out of it and. And then not getting swayed.

[Carly Waters]

Yeah, I love that. There's so much. So much in there to unpack. Yeah, there's. There's also the. You may or may not feel this, but do you feel any sort of, like, jealousy or. It's like, you know, grass is greener over here because it's kind of within the realm of what we're talking about. This idea of, like, wanting to be at peace with where you are in your career and knowing you're on the right path, but, like, seeing there's just so much noise, you know?

[Anna Mitchell]

Oh, for sure. For sure. I mean, I think the jealousy is, like, a really real part. I think that the social media brings that out a lot, too, of just. And that's not news to anyone. I mean, we all. We all see that. We know how it works. But I think the jealousy actually, like, I think I have a friend that always is advising to, like, dig a little deeper into it, and I think that that's, like. I used to run from it and be like, shit, like, I shouldn't be feeling that way, and what is this? And I should just go harder. Like, I should just push. But now I'm like, well, wait, this is, like, an indication that this thing that this person is doing is something that I really want in my life. And so I feel like I've been trying to take it more of, like, all right, then, you know, almost lean into it and try, as opposed to running from it and being scared. So I think now when I really feel it, I am. I use it as a chance to be like, okay, is this part of my picture that I'm kind of going for? Because it's clearly something that I'm feeling like I want, you know?

[Carly Waters]

Yeah. And if it's triggering something in you, there's a reason. And then you have to think about what's the reason. And sometimes it is just like, I think it's an opportunity to hold up a mirror. Right. And just think, like, if I'm bringing something up in me, what am I trying to tell myself about what's happening? And it could not be necessarily that you want what they have. So then you have to think of, what is it bringing up if it's not that I want exactly what they have, is it just telling me that I'm inferior versus. Versus what I want that's similar to them? If that makes sense.

[Anna Mitchell]

Yes, I think that. I feel like that's exactly it, because it is. It's like, what story are you telling yourself?

[Laura Loeffler]

You know, that's.

[Anna Mitchell]

That's kind of. That's in there and trying to hone in on that.

[Carly Waters]

Yeah, it's so complicated. And I, as an agent, I'm always, like, looking on the outside, trying to advise everybody. I'm like, eyes are on your own paper in terms of how to get through it. But it's just. Yeah, as you said, it's a reality. We see it on social media. We see it in the deals that are announced. And so. And so got this. And this is happening over here, and there's just so much you don't know about what happens elsewhere. And it could be that you think the grass is greener over there, and most of the times the grass is actually not greener over there.

[Bianca Marais]

Right.

[Anna Mitchell]

I know everybody's kind of in their own set of weeds. And I think that that's. I don't know, it's not that you wish that on other people, but I think just that kind of, like, acknowledgement that, like. And maybe, you know, that's actually something that ghostwriting really gave me. And I can say that within publishing of like. I think that I had this idea that some people just had it a lot easier. And then you go work with celebrities who are kind of, in a lot of ways, like the golden children of our society.

[Cece Lira]

And.

[Anna Mitchell]

And they're having a really shitty time making books too. Like, it's hard. And like, they have just as many kind of. They feel like they get a blow off from some age, you know, or they're. And they might have gotten a deal a lot easier than, you know, a normal person like me or something like that, but they have their own set of publishing troubles and writing is just as hard and coming up with. So I think seeing that made me really be like. Because it's so easy to be like, woe is me. Why would anybody, like, answer my query? And I feel all of that. I, you know, I've been in all of that. But I think seeing that made me be like, okay, nobody really just has a cakewalk. Like, it's just not. It's not that kind of industry.

[Carly Waters]

Yeah, yeah. And I think also, like, talking about the celebrity stuff, a lot of times they're writing memoir where they have to mine these, like, deeply personal things about their life and relive these. Like, some could be traumatic or not traumatic, depending on the story. But I just think sometimes they're the ones writing the most, like, deeply revealing stories. And so it is really hard for everybody to tell the truest story that they can tell in book form, however they tell it.

[Anna Mitchell]

I agree. I think that that is a huge challenge, and there is a whole different level of pressure and scrutiny that they know is going to come on the other side. Like, there's a certain freedom. Like, I have a certain freedom. And these stories in this book are fictional, but obviously they're. You know, they're kind of mined from my life, the lives of people I love. But when you're writing, it's like, will anybody ever read it or care? Like, I can. I can let it all hang out. I can put it all on the page. And I think, you know, somebody that knows their book is going to get published and going to be looked at and judged in certain ways brings that to the table. It's a lot more to push to the side so you can come up with a story.

[Carly Waters]

Yeah, yeah. And I mean, not to, like, continue to wax on about it, but I feel like it is really brave of them, you know, putting themselves out there in that scenario. And it is like a PR move. Often they've been through, you know, it's this time of their life, and, you know, they want to tell their story, and it's all kind of PR driven. But, yeah, it is. I guess my point is, anybody telling their story in any way is a brave thing to do, no matter how it makes it out. Yeah. So should we get into your query letter? As you know, on the show, we. On the show, we critique many query letters. I will not actively critique Anna's query letter.

[Anna Mitchell]

Oh, you should, though. It's fun.

[Carly Waters]

So I had to resend it to Anna because she hadn't seen it in a while. So she is going to do the classic podcast method where she reads her query letter out loud. And we haven't practiced this, so then I will chime in after and give my notes and kind of bring to life for you guys what I found interesting or thoughtful about her query and why I wanted to eventually work with her. So I will turn it over to Anna to read your query letter aloud for everybody.

[Anna Mitchell]

All right, here we go. Hello, Carly. As deputy editor for Magnolia Journal, every day I read messages from women searching for purpose in their late 30s, 40s, and 50s, and realizing the carrots they have been chasing have not led to fulfillment. These women want to connect with anything that feels like truth. What some may label a midlife crisis, I believe goes much deeper within their desire to find meaning is a hunger for spiritual awakening. How did I get here? And if none of this matters, what does? Are the questions now there isn't an answer. They will tell you the earth is whatever you want it to be. Strung together in 85 vignettes, this work of fiction tells the story of a woman who has absorbed so much of what everyone expects that she is cut off from her own needs and desires. Once she realizes how far off course she has gone, she is faced with the precipice choice. Will she begin the painstaking process of redefining her reality? The heroine, earnest, fallible and hopeful, is above all else, human. We look at her struggles and we find ourselves in addition to my editorial experience, I am currently collaborating with someone to write something with a prospective pub date of spring 2022. I also authored Just Don't Call Me Ma' Am published by Seal Press in 2010, and copy Girl, published by Berkeley in 2015. When they will tell you the earth is whatever you want it to be is published. I plan to heavily leverage my position at Magnolia. This will mean complet access to Magnolia Journal for positioning promotion as well as tapping into the entertainment arm of Magnolia Network where I regularly pitch content to be included and expanded for shows below. I've attached the first 10 pages of this adult coming of age story. I would be honored to share the full manuscript at your request and to partner with you for publication. I believe this potent this book has the potential to be a life changer for many. Sincerely, Anna Mitchell.

[Carly Waters]

Yay.

[Laura Loeffler]

Good job.

[Carly Waters]

Some people stumble over reading their own query letter and you did such a good job.

[Anna Mitchell]

Okay, I did practice though. I read it earlier. I read it this morning. So I was like, I need to look back at this thing. 2021 was a minute ago.

[Carly Waters]

I know, I know. Okay, let's start at the top. So you said so like 2021. We also have to remember like where our headspace was at at that time. Right. And so this was a query that came into me questioning our life and larger meaning. And so right away I found that very interesting and appealing as somebody that at that time, how old was I then? It was like more like 35ish. Yeah, I'm like getting into the stage of the kind of age in which Anna was kind of targeting. She said like for people in their 30s, 40s and 50s. So I'm like, okay, I have. I'm somebody who always is very interested about women's lives and the various stages they take in their lives. And so I just love this idea of fictionally exploring where we were going. Also, I love Magnolia magazine. I've read it for years and years and years and bought lots and lots of issues. And so I knew if and based on eventually what I read. The voice of what you were putting together in this series of vignettes was the voice of the Journal because you had spent so many years working for Magnolia Journal and the kind of style of that magazine. And I knew whenever I read that magazine, I got a certain sense of, like, ambitious peace. You know, it was like, because it's a beautiful magazine, but there's something. Yeah, just like there's aspirational about it, but also life affirming. And I knew again, and I worked for that magazine that essentially, you know, these stories could make me feel the same way. Some of the question marks for me were just, what do I do with the series of vignettes? I mean, as an agent, it's not something where editors call me and they're like, hey, can't wait for you to pitch me a series of vignettes. So this was much more a agent passion driven. I'm really excited about, you know, what the story potentially has to say. And a lot of times what I have to do is just think, how do I just find the person or the people that will. This will also speak to. And as an agent, my job as a tastemaker is to know if I'm feeling these feelings, then I know certain other people are gonna feel this way too. And who are those people and how do we target them? And is a book the right way to do it? Because, again, you've been doing all this work in this style for the magazine, you know, for the Journal. And so, like, does there need to be a book? I always have to ask that question as well. And I did really feel like pulling this kind of work together in one format. It was a book, and so I felt like it was a book. I knew it was for me, therefore, I knew it was for other people. I knew it was going to be maybe a little bit of a, you know, a gamble in terms of trying to find somebody who understood what a vignette was and how you put it together. The other thing we came into, you know, eventually when we were working together was, is this fiction or nonfiction? So you pitched this as a adult coming of age story, which Is really interesting. So.

[Anna Mitchell]

And also kind of a hard phrase. I square. I, like, wrote a bunch of question marks by that today. I was like, you know, why'd you choose that adult coming of age story? But go ahead. Sorry.

[Carly Waters]

But it's like sometimes we use that terminology now called a second coming of age story. Like, we use that term in publishing sometimes because there is this whole, like, version of your life. Whether it's like, I forget to pronounce it, but like, maturescence. You know, it's like when a woman becomes a mom. Like, so there's like that coming of age, and then, you know, there's all these things in adult life actually that we do kind of come of age in a new way. So, yeah, that was a little bit clunky, but we can both agree. But, yeah, it was more trying to figure out, is this fiction or nonfiction? Because when I pitch editors, I have to choose who I'm pitching. And there's not. I'm an agent that represents fiction and nonfiction. But there isn't a lot of editors that do fiction, nonfiction. So even though the stories, as we've mentioned, are kind of fictional vignettes, at the end of the day, we felt like it was in inspirational, aspirational, more of like a lifestyle, gifty type of size and product. Therefore, we ended up pitching nonfiction editors, even though it was a fictional story, which was always a little. Like, sometimes could get a bit clunky with editors who kind of didn't really understand what I was trying to sell to them. But we did find exactly who we needed to find in terms of, you know, the person and the people and the imprint that really got it. It's Convergent Book, who is an imprint of Random House. And they really understood from the beginning really what we were trying to do, which was incredible.

[Anna Mitchell]

Yeah, it was really neat. And I think it, you know, just in that sense of, like, what you're saying, you know, that. You know that if it's for you, there's got to be somebody else out there. And, like, can you. It's a matter of just, can you find them? And it felt like that when we found Convergin, it was like, there you are. Like, you guys just get it. It's not as hard of a sell as it's been in other areas, you know, so, yeah, I thought that was really great. So when you were fighting. Because I'm so fascinated by this. So there's gotta be a lot of proposals and queries that come across your desk that you connect with. And you Know you would be interested in the book. But what takes it to that next level of like, I would be so interested in this book that I actually want it to be a book. Does that make sense? Like, what's, what takes you over that threshold of like, okay, this is a fight that I'm gonna go in for when you know, because obviously some, some books probably come to you and you're like, done. This is going to be the, this is the best. It's an easy sell. But when something comes that's hard. How do you know?

[Carly Waters]

Yeah, it's a good question. Sometimes it's honestly just a measure of, of bandwidth. You know, if you want to think it of like passion projects versus the more classical, like, easier, quote unquote, easier sells, which nothing really is. But they're more of like, I can see the pipeline versus this one. It's like, I knew a pipeline existed or if not, I was going to create the pipeline that needed to happen. And so when there are those more passion projects, I really, I can only take on so many passion projects at a time. And I don't have a personal mandate of like a percentage of my list that are passion projects or X, you know, number each season or year of passion projects. But I do know sometimes they take a little bit more work or emotional toll, I guess. You know, as an agent, I guess over the years I've separated the personal from the professional. But as I said, I, I am a taste maker in the sense that this is speaking to me and therefore I to speak to other people. And so if it gets rejected, is that rejecting the part of me that sees the vision and sees where this can go. So again, like, in the terms of that emotional drive that I have to put into it to believe that this is going to work, there is only so many projects I can work on like that in any given year, if that makes sense.

[Anna Mitchell]

I don't know if that answers totally makes sense. Yeah, no, it really does. And I guess life has a lot of, you know, a lot of those ways that we naturally. We just know how much we can give to the extra.

[Emily Summer]

Right?

[Carly Waters]

Yeah, yeah, no, totally. And I always, as I said, I always felt like once we got this book into the right hands, like, it would, it would sail away to, you know, lots of different places and outlets that we never could have imagined. So, yeah, so I think we're, we're on track to help some people out and, you know, inspire them, engage them, get them to think about their lives in a whole new way.

[Anna Mitchell]

I hope So I hope so.

[Carly Waters]

Yeah. So on the show, we always ask, you know, advice for writers. Do you have any advice for writers? I know we've kind of sprinkled in your advice as we've gone along, but what's your go to advice when writers ask you about publishing?

[Anna Mitchell]

Yeah. I love that y' all do this on the show because I'm always like, oh, give me advice. So my number one thing that I always say to people when they send me their queries and their books is, have you read it out loud? It's so easy to skip that step. It's so. It's, like, hard to hear the things you've written. But I think especially with queries, because so often we know all the facts, we want to jam in. Like, if in our minds, we're like, carla, we've got Carly for one page. We want to give you, like, every single little thing. But then you start reading it, and it's like, there's a definite point where it's just too much. And so I like to read it out loud, like, to myself. And then I'll go get readers that know nothing about writing, and I'll read it to them, because you can see in somebody's face when they, like, click off or when they've stopped understanding, you know? And I think for queries, it's like, you just. You really want to sell it. And one thing I was surprised about in my query to you was that there's really not that much information in it. Like, you know, like, it was.

[Carly Waters]

I was kind of like, there wasn't any comps. Yeah.

[Anna Mitchell]

I was like, it's very Magnolia Journal in that way. I'm like, I'm just gonna set the mood. I'm gonna inspire her and set the mood.

[Carly Waters]

And it was a vibe.

[Laura Loeffler]

So true. But. But.

[Anna Mitchell]

So I think reading out loud is super important. And I do everything I write because even if it looks good on the page, if you've gotten used to reading it visually, once you hear it, you know, if you've lost it. And then, you know, I think the other thing is just sort of what I said earlier about defining, like, what you're going for with your writing, and especially if you're in that stage, if you've got a manuscript, it's your first manuscript, and you're querying out, like, it can feel really destructive out there with just the rejection and the fear. But I think knowing what you want to get out of it and staying really clear, and you want to get voices, like, you want to get advice. But, like, not everybody's advice or path is going to fit yours. So I think if you're constantly being like, oh, I've got to go do this, or oh, I've got to do that, you exhaust yourself. I think it's about, like, focusing in on what do I want and then allowing the pieces to come in. That can actually help you further that. Because also, at the end of the day, like, you know, if you leave, if your whole thing is doing like a passion project and then you leave that just to get something published, well, that initial box isn't checked and you're. You are going to wake up and be kind of like, shoot. You know, I've experienced pieces of that with projects. I've been. I've witnessed it with other people. It's like you give up what you were going for and that always comes back around. So I'm always just like, know what you want and stay with that. Stay true to that.

[Carly Waters]

That's great advice. Yeah. Because it is always gonna be in the back of your mind of like, what if, you know.

[Anna Mitchell]

So, yeah.

[Bianca Marais]

Yeah.

[Carly Waters]

Great advice. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show and I'm so excited for they Will Tell youl the World Is Yours to come out and, you know, expand people's imaginations and the way they think about their lives. So thank you so much for writing it. I am your, your number one original fan of this project, so I'm excited.

[Anna Mitchell]

Thank you.

[Carly Waters]

Everybody else. Enjoy it.

[Anna Mitchell]

I know it's good to have the four years, like, you know, coming to fruition May 20th. It'll be fun.

[Carly Waters]

Thank you so much.

[Bianca Marais]

Hi, everyone.

[Carly Waters]

This spring, watching everything outside bloom, I'm also watching my kids blossom in their French immersion program at school. It's amazing, but also a big motivator for me, especially because we're headed to France next month. I want to be able to join in more, you know, cafe if you want to connect more with your kids language journey or maybe prep for your own adventure this season. Rosetta Stone helps build those skills. Rosetta Stone is the trusted leader in language learning for over 30 years, offering an immersive and effective approach that helps you absorb and retain new language naturally on desktop and mobile, wherever and whenever it fits your lifestyle. It is a trusted expert for 30 years with millions of users and 25 languages offered. Spanish, French, Italian, German, Korean, Chinese, Japanese, Dutch, Arabic, Polish, and so many more. There's fast language acquisition. You can immerse in so many ways. No English translations. It's an intuitive process. And don't forget the speech recognition True Accent feature. It gives you feedback on your pronunciation. It's very convenient, flexible learning anytime, anywhere on the go with the mobile app or on your desktop at your schedule. And there's amazing value. Lifetime membership for all 25 languages for any and all trips and language needs in your life. Lifetime access. So don't wait. Unlock your language learning potential. Now the shit about writing. Listeners can grab Rosetta Stone's lifetime membership for 50% off. That's unlimited access to 25 language courses for life. Visit RosettaStone.com today to get started and claim your 50% off today. Don't miss out. Go to RosettaStone.com today and start learning today.

[Bianca Marais]

Welcome to our author interview. I'm very excited today to speak to a Toronto author. Those of you who are YouTube will see me holding up the book the Summers Between Us. Right, so today's guest is a writer, reader and chronic couch napper. A second generation immigrant, her writing explores themes of identity and belonging wrapped in stories of romantic and familial love. She currently lives in Toronto with her partner and small yet demanding dog. It's my pleasure to welcome Noreen Nunja. Noreen, welcome to the show.

[Noreen Nunja]

Thank you so much for having me, Bianca.

[Bianca Marais]

It's wonderful to have you. Because it feels very full circle. We're going to discuss how your query letter was discussed on books with hooks and we're going to get you to read it to us and see how that evolved. But before we do, for our listeners, I'm going to read you the flap copies so that you have some context. Right. So Leah Juma thought she'd buried the dreams of her heart long ago. But when she's forced to return to her family summer cottage on Pike Bay, the life she's carefully crafted begins to unravel. The perfect immigrant daughter, Leah has carved out a successful career as a corporate lawyer and has just started dating a man who fulfills all her mother's criteria for the ideal son in law. But underneath her polished life lies a secret she's never spoken of. One she fears could have destroyed her family a decade ago. Back at the bay, Leah stumbles upon memories she thought were long forgotten. And at the centre of it all is Westley Forest, the boy she left behind. The boy who knew her dreams better than anyone. Their friendship and young love once burnt bright, woven through long sun drenched days and whispered promises of a future together. But when family pressures and heartbreak pulled the two lovers apart, they were forced to follow separate paths. Now Wes is back in her life and with him. Old wounds and feelings surface as the two confront the choices and secrets that divided them as teenagers. Leah must decide if she can heal from the past and past and finally embrace the life and love she's always craved. Could a second chance with west be worse, be worth risking everything for? Told over the course of five years in the past and one summer in the present, Leo will discover that sometimes the only way forward is through the heart's deepest scars. Right. So as I said earlier, Noreen, you had your query critiqued by guest agents quite a while back on books with hooks. And that critique raised some very relevant points about how work can be interpreted by different readers, et cetera, et cetera. Could you take us a bit through that experience?

[Noreen Nunja]

Yeah, absolutely. I think my query was also critiqued like way, way back ago I think by Carly as well. And so I think it highlighted some really good points about my initial query in terms of understanding, like how to present the characters and the wounds that they had and these stakes that laid between them. And I think that those may not have been initially clear in my query. So I definitely took some of that feedback and reworked it into my query to make it more like easily accessible to whoever was reading it.

[Bianca Marais]

Amazing. And will you read for us now what that final query letter ended up being? The one that landed you your agent. And after that, I'd love to hear about your journey to publication.

[Noreen Nunja]

Absolutely. So I'll start off with my query letter. So, dear Agent, given your interest in Sweeney romance or other personalization, I'm excited to send you my 91,000 word contemporary romance novel the Summers Between Us. This novel is a dual timeline coming of age story with a second chance romance set in Canadian cottage country like Carly Fortune's every Summer after paired with a second generation Indian immigrant protagonist torn between two cultures as seen in Samya. Dave's well behaved Indian woman, Leah Juma is happy. She's on track to make partner at her law firm, she's dating men who meet her parents expectations for son in law and her formerly tender heart is kept safe beneath her sharp business dress. But when tragedy strikes her beloved cousin's household, Leah returns to her family's rural property to offer support. Making matters worse, Leah finds that Wes, her first and only love, still lives next door. For five hot sticky summers, teenage Wes and Leah landscaped cottage lawns, lounged on the lake and shared their deepest fears and greatest hopes. Despite her traditional parents warnings that a white person would never be welcomed in their family, Leah knew that Wes is the one for her. But after a mistake with devastating consequences, a guilty and heartbroken Leah vowed to never see Wes again. Now, 10 years later, Wes is torn between two worlds, the placid town he grew up in and the glimmering city that swallowed him whole and spent him up. Both Leah and Wes are unable to deny the pull that brought them together so many summers ago. The two reconcile, hoping that by understanding their mistakes a decade earlier, they will be able to uncover their true selves. But unless Leah can forgive herself and allow Wes to share the burden of the consequences of their reckless romance, they'll be forced to stay on the safest path instead of paddling off course together to chart their future. Like Leah, I am a second generation immigrant from the Indian diaspora, and my experiences growing up between rural and urban Canada informed the story this manuscript was selected for the Word as Diversity Mentorship and it was workshopped with Redacted and Assistant Editor from Redacted. I'd be thrilled to share more of the manuscript upon your request. Sincerely, Noreen Amazing.

[Bianca Marais]

So take us through that. I'd love to hear did you have a querying strategy? Did you do it in different levels? Were there certain people who were your A listers and then you moved on? How did you find the agents you wanted to query and how did that all unfold?

[Noreen Nunja]

Yeah, absolutely. So when I initially started querying, kind of two things that happened at the same time. So I'd been fortunate enough to be selected for the Word as Diversity Mentorship, where I had the opportunity to work with an editor from a Big five in shaping my novel. And so kind of through that mentorship I was connected with other writers and authors and also had been linked kind of through a friend of a friend to somebody who was working at what is now my publisher. So kind of concurrently, while I had started querying, my manuscript had also been taken to acquisitions at my publisher. And so the two things kind of panned out at the same time where I received an offer of publication while I was actively querying and my agent had asked for my full before an offer of publication had been offered. But it definitely gave me an opportunity to kind of nudge the agents that I was interested in. In terms of selecting agents, I kind of did what I think a lot of people do. So I looked at the agents and the agencies of various books that I like to read. And this was still when Twitter was still somewhat functional. So also through social media presences, kind of following authors and writers and seeing what was kind of out there as well as just generally looking at Ms. Wishlist and seeing who was interested in stories like romance stories and stories about bipoc individuals.

[Bianca Marais]

Right. And so here's something as well that a lot of people think that if you get an offer from a publisher, it's that much easier to get an agent. But I've spoken to a lot of authors who say that isn't the case because a lot of the time the agent wants to be the one who is busy negotiating between that particular publisher and other publishers. But when you have this kind of situation, you kind of lock locked into that publisher, which means it's hard, harder for the agent to do their job. So was that the case with you or were you still able to look at quite a few agents and be. This is my criteria. And what kind of criteria were you looking for?

[Noreen Nunja]

Yeah, that's a really good point. So when I was looking for an agent, I really wanted to work with somebody who was interested in working with me more long term. And so that was definitely the approach I took in terms of querying. And since I had started querying before, I had this offer of publication, that's how I initially had started. So I looked at agents that I was particularly interested in that seemed to have the same values as me and seemed to represent books that were similar to the type of books I wanted to write. But yes, of course, having an offer of publication definitely put things on a tighter timeline. So in terms of being able to find an agent, I did find that a lot of people took a step back because they probably didn't have time to necessarily read the full with the amount of time that would be reasonable given what was happening in the background. But I was fortunate in that I had a few fulls out and I also had some requests from agents that I was very interested in working with. And so I ended up with my agent, Jem Chambers Black at Andrea Brown, who was one of the agents that I had wanted to work with from earlier on before I had the offer of publication. So I was really fortunate in that she was able to. She had requested the manuscript prior and then she was able to expedite reading it. And she understood my vision for the story and that's why I decided to go with her. I felt that she would be a good career partner.

[Bianca Marais]

Amazing. And I'd love to chat a bit about that mentorship process because I'm sure we have a lot of listeners who are interested in that. So where did you find out information about it? How did you go about applying for It. And what did that process look like?

[Noreen Nunja]

Yeah, so this was during the time of Twitter. So there was. I feel like at that time, there was a lot of different mentorship processes or programs kind of occurring in the background and easy to access. So I basically saw somebody had retweeted something from the word is diversity. And they were looking for writers who were diverse, writers of various backgrounds. And there was a romance editor at that time who had signed up to be the mentor. This was a number of years ago now. And so I applied, and I think it consisted of initially some questions about myself and my writing and the first few chapters of my book and a query letter. And then based off of that, they did have some full requests, and then they selected after that. And then what happened is, once I actually was matched with my mentor, she read the full manuscript and met with me over a video call and also provided some written editorial notes, which basically had me going back to really gut my manuscript and really was a big lesson in craft and writing a story. So that was really invaluable, honestly, in my publishing process.

[Bianca Marais]

That's so interesting, because a lot of people think that when you get an agent or an editor who's interested in your work, it means that the work is. Is close to being perfect. And yet so often, and we've heard this even with really big books and books along the way, that someone, an agent will acquire it, or an editor will acquire it, or an agent will say, I really love this, but you're gonna have to completely rip it apart and put it back together again. And most writers by that point give up because they're like, I've been doing that for the last five years, and you want me to go back to the drawing board. So this is where tenacity and a shared vision come in. Like, how easy was that for you to wrap your head around this person being like, you know, you've clearly got potential. I like this, but you are going to have to start all over again. What did that feel like?

[Noreen Nunja]

So my fatal flaw is what I've been told is that I like to kill my darlings. So I loved it, I guess. I mean, at first I had my usual like, oh, no, it's terrible. How am I ever going to dig myself out of this hole? And then I very happily threw it all out and rewrote it again. And I think that that's my strength and also my weakness. Like, definitely, as I went through the editing process with my acquired book, my editor was like, okay, let's not rewrite it all this time around. But I feel like I like it in a maybe It's a type 2 fun kind of way. It's a little bit painful, but you really might enjoy it as you get through it. So I really liked the act of going in and excavating my characters and my story. It really made me think more about what I was trying to do, and I think it made me more intentional in my writing. But I can absolutely see how it can be so intimidating. Right, because, like, writing 90,000 words or 100,000 words isn't actually the only goal. It's rewriting them, it's replotting them. It's talking about them, it's asking for feedback. It's crying over them. It's definitely more arduous to write a book than maybe it looks like from the outside.

[Bianca Marais]

Yeah, very much. This is all part of the circling the building that I'm constantly speaking about. People think circling the building is just the beginning. It's not. Sometimes you have to keep circling the building, and sometimes you establish that you've been circling the wrong damn building, and then you've got to leave that building and find the right building and start circling that as well. And I really do take my hat off to authors who are prepared to do that, because there are a lot of people who are like, no, I've worked on this now for five years. It's perfect as is. If you don't like it, tough. And they aren't even open to that discussion. And so it takes a real dedication to a particular story and to the craft to be able to say, okay, I'm starting this all over again. But the book is going to be so much better for it. So that's amazing. You have an author's note with trigger warnings. Was that something that was always in? Was it something that your publisher suggested?

[Noreen Nunja]

So I suggested it. I thought that, you know, I think, like, there's things that happen in life that can be very challenging to go through. And sometimes reading books where these things are highlighted can be difficult. And I just wanted to give people a little bit of a heads up before they go in, just so that they're prepared in case those are topics they don't want to explore right now.

[Bianca Marais]

Yeah, we're seeing that more and more with books these days, and I think we're gonna keep seeing that as well. So I love that you mentioned Carly Fortune as a comp, because it was so wonderful seeing Canadian cottage romances having their moment. It's like, before that Canadian authors were basing their cottage romances somewhere in New York or somewhere in the us Places that most of the time they hadn't even visited or that maybe visited once. They didn't really know what cottage country was like there because they felt like that's where things had to be. And then Carly broke through and created this whole market, which has just been incredible. Were you at any point considering basing this anywhere else but in Canada?

[Cece Lira]

What?

[Bianca Marais]

Were you inspired by Kali at all? Were you already way back saying, I'm going to base this in Canada and tough. I'm not changing the setting?

[Noreen Nunja]

That's a great question. So it's funny. So just to go back a little bit. So the manuscript was originally titled Every Summer when my mentor selected it. And I think it was a couple months before Carly's book came out. So obviously the title had to be changed. But, I mean, I absolutely did take inspiration from the authors that we're seeing now write books set in Canada. When I initially started writing this book, I at first wasn't really necessarily going to be thinking about pursuing publishing, and I wanted to write a book that felt true to myself. And so as a Canadian, I wanted to set it in Canada because I know the area. This is a place where I've been, where I've lived, where I spent time in various parts of Canada. And I just wanted to be able to put that in a book. And so people who aren't from here necessarily can get to experience it vicariously. And people who are from here will get to. To see their home. Right. Like, I thought that would be really lovely.

[Bianca Marais]

Yeah, it is amazing. Books should be set all over the place. It's really annoying that books have to be set in just, like, certain settings for them to sell. And so I love seeing our Canadian authors who are, you know, claiming back the setting of Canada and bringing it alive. I think a whole bunch of people have made pilgrimages to Barry's Bay for Carly's novels, and she's created a whole industry there, which is amazing. So, okay, the story covers one summer in the present tense, in the present that's happening now. And then we have five years in the past. Was this always your structure? Is this a structure that evolved? Can you take us through a bit of your thinking in terms of the plotting or pantsing of the novel and. And how you set that all up?

[Noreen Nunja]

Yeah, so I think in general, it kind of followed that construct. So there was always like, one summer in the present, and about. I think it was like four or five summers in the past. But in terms of how it was chunked out when I was pancing it, I will say that the pacing didn't necessarily make sense. Like, some of the summers were very, very long, and some of the summers were really short. So there was more intentionality going back during editing to kind of parse those all out. But I really wanted to be able to explore the summers and how, you know, their friendship and their romance. Also, the family dynamics were evolving over time as Leah grew older and her challenges became different. And then I felt like one summer in the present was the perfect amount of time, you know, to get a chance to fall back in love again. So that's why I wanted to focus really on the now of the adult Leah and Wes and where they had been in the 10 years where they hadn't seen each other and who they wanted to be in the future.

[Bianca Marais]

Yeah, it's really ambitious to drive a story like that because generally when we get pulled back to the past, it slows down the pacing, it slows down the tension. We get dragged back, and then it's difficult to bring us back into the present again. And every single time we go to the past, the past should be doing the heavy lifting of heightening what is happening in the present so that we even more curious about what's going to happen in the present in a plot forward way. And every time we go into the past, it's to answer questions or to create even more questions in the reader's mind. So it really is a juggling act to try and figure out, okay, now is the moment at which I'm launching back into the past. But I can't spend too long in the past before I bring us back to the present, or else the present sort of impetus is going to lose its momentum. So was that something that you felt is where your mentors and your editors really helped with. Did you have beta readers along the way? What did that look like?

[Noreen Nunja]

Yes, absolutely. I totally agree. The transition from present to past can be a place that will bog a story down. And I definitely, in my early drafts, had that problem. So my editors and my mentors were very helpful in terms of kind of looking at what are the pieces of the past that are actually integral. Because as somebody who was really interested in my characters, I maybe explored a little bit too much of the past initially. So a big portion of it was tightening the past, but also strengthening it. And there was lots of pieces that were already present in the past, scenes that could have just been condensed or ripped out to make sure that they just shone in one scene rather than being reiterated over and over again when it wasn't really necessary. And then in terms of the present, it really was about, I agree. Like, trying to find places where the past was relevant in terms of bringing you back and forth instead of just kind of putting it in big lumps randomly and trying to tie it in into what was happening in the present and what is happening between Leah and Wes and her family in the present. That makes the past feel more relevant. And so it was definitely something that, like, Beta readers, my editors, my mentors all helped me kind of refine, especially, I think, as a debut is like, as you said. Right. Like, it's a difficult challenge. I hope that we've gotten there now, but it took a lot of legwork and thinking and getting feedback from other people.

[Bianca Marais]

Yeah, it's a lot of trial and error, and it's a lot of moving puzzle pieces around. You know, I think so much writing, for me at least, is spent just moving one scene from the middle of the book to the beginning of the book and then cutting it in half and maybe moving it somewhere else. And I always say, try and take out as as much as possible, because the more you take out, the more curious the read is going to be and the more they're going to keep reading to find that out later. And if it still makes sense without one or two chapters, then you can completely remove those chapters, even though you love them. And the writing was lush and it was beautiful, and it really took you back to this nostalgic time. It really doesn't have to be there. And I think for more experienced writers, it becomes more instinctual. But I think, especially with emerging authors, it's so important to have a reader say, I felt like it was dragging here. I think we were in the past too long. I really was interested to come back to the present, or we didn't finish with enough of a cliffhanger that I really felt like we wanted to come back to the present. So, you know, it's moving those puzzle pieces around. I assuming you've already started working on something else after this, Noreen. So how does the process look now? Is it easier to write the next book, or is this next book teaching you how to write itself?

[Noreen Nunja]

Yeah, so, yeah, absolutely. I'm starting to work on something else. I think everybody talks about second book syndrome, and I think it's a real thing. I feel the evidence of it now, but I am working on something new. I think it's because you both know so much more than you did when you started that initial book. And you also still don't know so many things. And so you still have to be open to the fact that it's going to be a journey to write the book. So the new book that I'm working on, unless things change, is not a dual timeline book. So I need to stop thinking about what does the past look like for this character in such intense depth and focus more on the present. Forward momentum. And I think it's giving me a different lesson. Right. Because I spent so long working on this first one. I think it was like I started it in early 2021, and we're 2025 now. And so I've spent so much time in that mindset of writing a dual timeline book, writing a second chance book that I have to keep reminding myself about, you know, what am I trying to do with this story and focus on that and try not to let myself obsess about what I'm writing. And if it's not as good as it was for my first book, because my first book had years and years of labor put in. Right. And a first draft has not that much years of labor, even if you are more experienced when you come to the page. So, yeah, I absolutely think I'm still learning, and this book is going to teach me a big lesson, I'm sure, by the time I'm done.

[Bianca Marais]

And are you writing this one on contract? Do you have a deadline?

[Noreen Nunja]

Yes, I'm writing it on contract, so it's the first time I'm writing on contract. So I think we. I think it's a common experience that having a deadline can create its own mental barriers. I'm definitely somebody who prefers revising. So revising on deadline can be painful, but I can do it. I enjoy it. I'm mentally ready for it. Drafting on deadline is a different game because I think I took so much time with the first book.

[Cece Lira]

Right.

[Noreen Nunja]

Because it wasn't on deadline. It was. For me, it could be a gigantic mess because I didn't necessarily have to share it with anybody. There's more pressure, I think. And while I'm still really, really excited for this story, there's also that, you know, that little, like, looming deadline scaring me a little bit as I turn to the computer and try to keep my butt in the chair and make forward momentum.

[Bianca Marais]

Yeah, it is. And especially if you're a perfectionist, you know, that's something they don't warn you about, is if you are a perfectionist, that first book, you decide when it's done. You decide when people are going to see it. When you're writing on a contract, they decide this is the deadline. And if you feel like it isn't that polished, you can have a complete panic attack and be like, oh, my God, this isn't polished enough. But people still need to have it at that particular date. So, yeah, you have to keep pivoting when it comes to your process. Let's chat a bit about your favorite tropes in the genre, Noreen, and how you played around with them. Because when we come to romance, we are expecting certain tropes, but we're expecting fresh takes on the trope. So what did your process look like when it came to that?

[Noreen Nunja]

So when I started writing the book, I wasn't initially like, I'm going to have all of these tropes in there. I was thinking about what do I love in books and what do I love in romance. And I've always been a big fan of dual timelines because I'm so interested in what makes people who they are. So I think that was one thing I was automatically going to explore if I was writing a book. For me to start with, that would be something I wanted to do. And then I just thought about other things that I really love. Like, I love friends to lovers. I love second chances. Like, I like the idea of, you know, maybe you meet somebody who wasn't right for you at the time, but it turns out that they were right all along. Maybe you needed to grow and learn. And I think it's something that, like, those kind of relationships have a lot of depth. And so I tried to approach it more from a character perspective rather than a trope perspective. So I was thinking more like, who are Leah and Wes? What made them fall in love to begin with, and what will make them fall in love again? So in terms of the friends to lovers arc, they, as children or adolescents, meet each other and have a connection, and it's time together and supporting each other that makes their relationship grow. And I thought the same type of thing would be in the present. It's like, I think Leah says, they can't be friends anymore. They can't be old friends. And Wes says, well, why don't we be new friends? And I thought that that was really lovely and how they have that connection where that friendship was inevitable, even if it's not necessarily going to be the same. And so that. That's kind of how I explored friends to lovers in both timelines. And it really was just about, I think, like, what is romance, really? Right. And I think, yes, we have all of these beautiful tropes, but they're part of. People also have these in real life. Right. Like, people have stories all the time about how they fall in love with their friends. And there's also people who, you know, have a second chance with somebody that they weren't right for maybe 10 years ago. And I think it was really more about excavating what that could look like in real life. I think, for me, and I put that in this book, it's not really a rom com, so I wanted to take it from more of, like, a serious lens in terms of, like, what does life look like for somebody who might experience this kind of romance?

[Bianca Marais]

Yeah, I mean, a trope is there for a reason. People love it because it does come from real life. The very important thing here, though, is that you don't just have an arc for the two characters in terms of their romance, because especially with a trope like this, each of them, on their own needs to change enough, or at least one character needs to change enough to allow them to work now when they didn't work in the past. So you've got to work on those individual character arcs as well, to make sure that they have changed sufficiently by the end so that they can be together, and you've got to work on their journey together as well. So do you have some advice for our listeners there in terms of hitting those beats along the way to make sure that her arc was complete?

[Noreen Nunja]

Yeah, absolutely. So in the past timeline, I really thought about, you know, who Leah was and not, like, she was somebody who both wanted to be with Wes, but also had this, you know, deep desire, deep fear of, like, failing her parents or failing her family. And I think she internalized that a lot. And that was really a big part of. I don't want to spoil anything, but I think a big part of her overall arc in the past and in the present, she's still kind of there, right? Like, she's a little bit static. She spent this decade in stasis, and she needs some sort of impetus to move forward from that mindset and to make the changes that will allow her both to have a second chance romance, but also to have fulfill her own journey. Right. Like, she. She needs to change as a person to be happy. And so I really had to think about what would be like, a motivating, a motivator or like, a catalyst for this change and kind of embed that in the present timeline. Like, what would push her to see where she was struggling and what would motivate her to make that change. And I think that's a good way to approach this kind of romance and approach this kind of story is really digging deep and seeing what is this person's flaw, why do they have this flaw, and how can we help them heal it.

[Bianca Marais]

I love that so much because that leads to organic growth. It feels true to the character. It doesn't feel like they're a puppet who's been manipulated through a plot that you want them to have. So it's really getting to know the character, where their wounds are, where they're struggling so that you can work them through all of that to get to the point where they come out on the other side changed, having grown and better. We're at the end of our interview time, Noreen. This has been so amazing for our listeners. If you're watching on the YouTube channel, I'm holding up the summers between us, we will link to it on our bookshop.org affiliate page. If you buy the book there, you support an independent bookstore and you support the podcast at the same time. So the great news is that Noreen is going to be at my book launch on 9 June. We have a lot of authors, a lot of agents who are coming to that event. And Noreen's going to be there. So you must come and you'll get to meet her, right, Noreen?

[Noreen Nunja]

Yes. I'm so excited to celebrate Bianca's new book.

[Bianca Marais]

It's going to be amazing. I'm so excited to celebrate the writing community. I keep forgetting that there's a book to launch. I'm just like, oh my. All the friends are going to be together and it's going to be incredible. So make sure you come out to that and get to chat to a lot of the authors that we that we have on the podcast and the agents as well. Noreen, we wish you much luck with this title and look forward to what you come up with next.

[Noreen Nunja]

Thank you so much, Bianca.

[Cece Lira]

Hello, everyone. I am super excited to announce a very special guest. Laura Loeffler is a writer and veteran of the New York City art world. She currently lives in Colorado with her family. Tell them you Lied is her debut novel. And you may remember from social media that Laura is my client. I am so, so excited to welcome her here, not just because this is a fantastic book and it's going to be a fantastic interview, but I'm also just really excited to have, for the first time ever in the Shit no One Tells yous About Writing. A guest who is worse at technology than I am. Before we just started recording, Laura and I were like, where are the buttons? We don't know. Usually Bianca does the stuff I'm doing, guys. And I was lost and Laura was lost, and it was really hilarious, and we really laughed together. So welcome.

[Laura Loeffler]

I'm so sorry, Cece. Thank you.

[Noreen Nunja]

Hi.

[Cece Lira]

Don't begin the interview by apologizing.

[Laura Loeffler]

No.

[Cece Lira]

Your book is all about female ambition and empowerment. You're not allowed.

[Laura Loeffler]

Okay, I won't apologize, but.

[Cece Lira]

Good. I love it. Okay, so speaking of your book, tell our listeners about your writer origin story and not necessarily this manuscript. Just like writing. When did you start writing? When did you know it wasn't just a hobby for you? Meaning you wanted to make a career out of it? Because I know you're a creative person because of your art background. So did one stem from the other? Like, what's the situation there? Tell us about it.

[Laura Loeffler]

I mean, I think the first poem I ever wrote, I think I was in fourth grade, and I remember where I was when I wrote it and how it made me feel and everything. It was amazing. And I think ever since that time, I knew that I wanted to write and eventually be an author, have something published. It's funny, I was thinking about this because I studied creative writing in undergrad when I was a teenager and thought I would be a writer, thought I would be a professional writer. After I graduated college. I already thought I was a failed writer at 22 because I hadn't had anything published. And, you know, you think when you're 22, you think you're so old and you think you're so mature and you think you need to, you know, have all these things done and accomplished. And I didn't. And I didn't know what I was doing. I had moved to New York and sort of floundered around writing my little poems, and then I sort of stopped. I took a break and went back to graduate school for art history because I thought, oh, if I haven't already succeeded, I'm never going to succeed, you know, which is ridiculous now, you know, 20 plus years later, 25 years later, to think about that and you know how silly it was. But, yeah, I never stopped writing, even when I was working at galleries and stuff in New York. And I always had it in the back of my mind that I would continue and eventually write a book. You know, whether it was poems or a novel or anything, I wasn't sure. But, you know, I always had a Word document on my computer and would mess around.

[Cece Lira]

But yeah, I love that because, I mean, I love so many things about it. It wasn't until quite late in my life, like as an agent already, that I discovered that so many talented writers have a background in poetry. And that can just be like dabbles in poetry, appreciates reading poetry, and I don't think that's a coincidence. I always say that in order to make it in publishing, you need a talent for storytelling, a talent for writing, and the right mindset. And when it comes to the talent for writing, a lot of it is like sentence level stuff. And in poetry, like every word matters so much, right? And the bar is so high. So I think that makes a lot of sense. And I. I also appreciate what you said about feeling that you were like, too late to the game because I think that anyone who looks back, especially honestly if you're in your 30s, 40s, 50s, I don't care. You look back to your 20s and you're like, I a thought I had it all figured out. How wrong was I? And also I thought that things had to happen in this artificial deadline. And that's not true. And I love that you came to that realization. And I want to talk a little bit more about artificial deadlines later when we get to like your path to publication and stuff. But what about this book? Like, that's your writer origin story. What's the origin story behind Tell them you lied?

[Laura Loeffler]

Well, I mean, it goes back to being 22, thinking about that time when I already thought I was a failed writer, but I was living in New York. And it's so funny. I think what first came to me with this book was the idea that I had this image of Anna, who's my main character, and Milo living in that little apartment in Brooklyn while 911 is going on. Because, I mean, I happened to be in New York. I was young at the time and had just moved to New York when that happened. And I felt, you know, it was such a strange time to be that young and sort of, as we were just saying, like, you think you know everything, you think you understand the world a little bit. And then something so enormous happens. It sort of pulls you out of your own little life and makes you realize how little you do know. So that was basically the starting point. And, you know, I wanted to focus on this little group of friends and their drama that was happening while this enormous drama and tragedy was happening, you know, in their backyard and just to sort of explore what happens you know, everybody living in New York had that, like, their own personal lives happening when this big thing kind of happened and took them out of it and made them realize stuff about the world that they probably didn't know. Or at least, you know, we didn't know as young women at the time. Yeah. And I think, you know, I pulled a little bit more from my life because my roommate at the time had. She had actually just been mugged on the subway a few months before 9 11. And I think that sort of triggered some things. It was like, on her way to work in the morning at knifepoint. And, you know, that was like another thing that was very eye opening and like, oh, we're not all safe all the time and that kind of thing. Yeah, those things sort of merged in my head and it became this story.

[Cece Lira]

It sounds chaotic and messy, but at the same time really brilliant and. And in retrospect, organic. Is that how you feel you'd frame your writing process? Like, do you start with ideas and vibes and people, and then it becomes a story, or do you see story first?

[Laura Loeffler]

Well, it's definitely chaotic. Yes. I think I sort of imagine characters first in a situation and then build the story around that. I think that what I've done in the past. So I would love to make outlines and be very, like, thoughtful and intentional about the plot before I start writing and making a big mess. But unfortunately, that is not how I've worked. Maybe in the future I will, but I think it would be helpful if I had a scaffolding, but I don't at this point. I haven't done that yet.

[Cece Lira]

I think it might be helpful for the sake of your own efficiency.

[Emily Summer]

Right.

[Cece Lira]

But it's serving the process well, and if it's not broken, don't fix it. You mentioned 9 11, and I kind of want to talk about the elephant in the room. People told you, and then later, after I joined your team, like, told me that this book wouldn't sell because of the 911 element. Right. Like, people said, we don't want 911 in stories. It's too raw, it's too recent, it's too hard. There was even an episode, and maybe superfans can help us with the number of the episode. I do not remember. But there was an episode back in, I think it was 2022 in which Carly mentioned the difficulty of selling a novel set in 911 and how it was a really tough sell. So did that ever intimidate you? When?

[Emily Summer]

Where?

[Cece Lira]

Why? Why did you do it anyway? I think at the heart of my question is this idea that sometimes we tell writers, this doesn't sell, and then you did it anyway. And we'll talk about how it sold later.

[Laura Loeffler]

Yes, it's super interesting. I think it was difficult. I mean, even when I was querying agents and before I found you, I had a lot of feedback that, you know, oh, maybe you could rewrite this without the 911 stuff. And for me, the characters are so a part of their time that it was one thing I really wasn't willing to change. So I just felt like the story wouldn't be the story without the 9 11, I think, because I conceived of it that way. And I just. The two things were so enmeshed, the characters lives and this big event that happened in the world that I didn't want to get rid of it. But, yes, I mean, it was. It was scary. I knew it was a risk. I knew, listening to that podcast, that episode, I remember sending you the email and, you know, like, oh, my God, what have I done?

[Cece Lira]

But wait, tell people about the email. People don't know about the email. Tell them. Tell them. So, listeners, for context, at this time, at this point when this episode aired, Laura and I were already working together. She was already my client. And then this episode aired, and then Laura sent me an email. Tell people about the email.

[Laura Loeffler]

Yes. In fact, it was just right before we were going on sub with Tell them you lied. And I, you know, I don't remember exactly how it came up, but I think it must have been books with hooks. And it must have been someone had a story, a 911 book. And I remember Carly saying, like, oh, you know, 911 books. It's a really hard sell. And then, Cece, you were like, you know, I think what matters more is the story and how, you know, how it's written and all that kind of stuff. So I did. I sent you an email. I was like, thank you for saying.

[Noreen Nunja]

That, because I was about to, like.

[Laura Loeffler]

Cry when I was hearing Carly say that if we were right about to go on sub with the book. So. But, you know, I did know it was going to be a hard sell. I knew that it was going to be that some people were not going to be into it because of the 911 stuff. I knew that it was going to be difficult going in. And so did you. Right. I mean, you knew, Cece, that. Yeah. That some editors, you know, wouldn't want it or, you know, but that's the risk, 100%.

[Cece Lira]

And, you know, to give you guys context, too, like, Carly had no idea that Laura and I were working on this book. So it's not like she said, oh, this is a hard sell. Knowing that Laura would listen. I knew because she was my client. But in part, I did answer that because I went to talk to Laura because I knew she would be listening. I wanted to reassure her. But part of why I wanted to do that too, is that you just never know. We can talk about trends, we can talk about what sells and what doesn't sell. We can do that all day long. And then there are always the outliers. I remember during the pandemic, people were like, nobody wants pandemic books. And then Hamnet, which is a book, Books in a pandemic. This is a huge hit. You know, like, you just never know. You just never know what people actually want or don't want. What you do know. What I know, what every person who works in publishing knows is what a good story looks like. You just feel it first before you think about it, before you can reverse engineer the brilliance that went into a story. You feel it because you're. You're addicted and hypnotized by the story. And that's how I felt when I was reading your book. And we talked about it in our client call. Like, the call, I guess, we talked about the risk, and I was like, we can't change that. So let's not let that scare us. We'll be mindful of it. We're not going to be surprised if and when we get rejection saying, sorry, 9, 11. But we're not going to let it scare us to the point of not trying. Because what is storytelling if not someone taking risks? And by extension, what is is agenting and publishing if not taking a chance on those risks? So that's just. That's just how it goes, you know, like, that's just life. And we. Okay, so let's go back to, like, our relationship. How did we meet? When you queried me, you weren't listening to the podcast, is that right?

[Laura Loeffler]

That's right. I mean, I think this was sort of still at the beginning of the shit no one tells you about writing. I think you guys were still guests on Bianca's show. But no, I hadn't heard it. And I actually heard you on the manuscript Wish List podcast. So that's how I was introduced to you. That's how I found you. And I queried you before I heard you on this podcast. So in retrospect, if I could take it back, I would rewrite my whole query letter Based on your preferences. Exactly. But I didn't really know them at the time, so I did have, you know, a few mistakes in there, but I. You know, I think you saw past them. Thank you.

[Cece Lira]

Okay, you talk about your query letter like it's super problematic. It's really not. Like, it's just not. I think we should just read it.

[Laura Loeffler]

Oh, God.

[Cece Lira]

Read it.

[Laura Loeffler]

All right, I'll read it. Hold on. Oh, no. Okay, let me pull it up.

[Cece Lira]

Hold on just a second. I understand what you're saying about the mistakes, but it was a good query letter.

[Laura Loeffler]

I think I did okay on the plot paragraph, though. I missed one of the very main things in the story. But the problem I mostly have with it is the. All the comps I used.

[Cece Lira]

Okay, well, just read it. Read it so people aren't, like, wondering what it sounds like.

[Laura Loeffler]

Okay, I'm all right. This is it. Dear Ms. Lira, my debut novel, All Americans, is an 87,000 word literary thriller that follows a group of ambitious young artists after the disappearance of one of their own. I was encouraged to write to you after seeing your tweet about Susie Yang's White Ivy. All Americans, like Yang's novel, explores themes of obsession, lust, and class through the lens of a complicated female protagonist. After a childhood feeling overlooked in a college career doing almost anything to belong, Nora Orr believes she's finally found her place, a dingy fourth floor walk up on the fringes of the New York City art world. It's the summer of 2001, and Nora and her aspiring artist friends are biding their time in dive bars and lousy jobs until they can claw their way into the glittering galleries across the bridge. When Nora's roommate goes missing, secrets rise to the surface, tensions between friends turn violent, and everyone begins to look like a suspect, even Nora herself. Set against the backdrop of 9 11, all Americans teases apart a tangle of envy, ambition, and tiny acts of terrorism. All Americans marries the eccentric friend family of Donna Tartt's the Secret History with the Coming of Age Turbulence and Jessica Newell's Luckiest Girl Alive. It will appeal to fans of recent literary suspense such as Alexander Andrews, who is Maud Dixon, Ferris Ligar's Take Me Apart, and Stephanie Robel's darling Rose Gold. I have a bachelor's degree in creative writing and a master's in art history. I have worked in contemporary art galleries for over a decade, publishing various essays and reviews along the way. But I found the personalities around far more interesting than any of the art. Below, please find the first chapter of All Americans the full manuscript is currently on review with other agents and is available at your request with thanks and very best regards.

[Cece Lira]

Laura, how did that feel? How did it feel reading your query letter?

[Laura Loeffler]

That was very cringe because I feel like there are so many things in there that I would want to change now. I'm like, oh, my God. The way that. I mean, the first thing that just, like, screws screams out at me as how I broke the comps paragraph. Like, the metadata should all have been in the first paragraph. I had way too many comps. Some of them don't even make sense. Really. I think that was the most obvious thing. I think the plot paragraph is okay, but I missed some of the, like, most important part of the plots. Like, I don't even. I mean, I don't really have the inciting incident in there even, or it's really vague. I think I would make it more specific about how. How Willow goes missing, that kind of thing.

[Cece Lira]

But, yeah, I loved hearing it. Okay. So for me, it was a treat because it just feels very trippy to remember. I remember really well. I remember to. To the point where I know what I was wearing. Okay. I remember the time of day I was actually looking at queries on my phone, and I got to yours, and I review queries in batches, right? And the thing is, and I've mentioned this before on the show, I always scroll down and read the pages, regardless of whatever shape the query letter is in. To be clear, this was a very good query letter. I understand what you're saying, but I still think it's, like, really, really good. But I would have read the pages regardless. And I remember thinking the query letter was, like, neutral. Like, in terms of making me curious. I was neutral. I was a little worried about 9 11, but I was mostly neutral. And that's how I feel about 99% of query letters. Just being honest here. It is very hard for query letter to make me go, oh, my God, I have to read it now. You know, like, sometimes it happens. And then I scroll down and I started reading your pages. And, Laura, this is not because you are my client. In fact, you are my client because of this. It's the other way around. I felt hypnotized. I was like, what is happening? And it happened after only a few sentences.

[Noreen Nunja]

Like.

[Cece Lira]

Like, I still remember the feeling of fear, of intense, visceral fear. And it's fear of it getting bad. I'm always terrified. Oh, my God. Oh, my God, Please don't get bad. And then the second feeling was A feeling of, like, fear. Like, oh, my God, she might get snapped by someone else. I have to read this really fast all of a sudden. This is the power of a strong beginning. It makes you feel like a. I'm not working right. But at the same time, it ups the stakes for my job. Like, I have to secure this project. So I did ask for full, and I did read most of it, and then I stopped because I felt you weren't doing something right. So I did something that is very rare, but I have done before. I offered you an R and R, which is essentially a revise and resubmit. I said, this needs work. I'm inviting you to revise and resubmit. How did it feel getting that? And you can be totally honest. You can be like, I hated it. Cc, please be honest, because our listeners want to know the truth.

[Laura Loeffler]

Well, I mean, I was overjoyed because I think your comments in the R and R resonated with me because I had pitched it as a literary thriller. And at the time, I think it was a little too literary and not enough thriller. And I think I was so afraid when I was writing this manuscript that I was being too obvious or, like, being too, you know, I don't know, almost cliche or something, writing something that was a thriller. So I was holding back a lot. And I think that what you said to me in the R and R was, this is not a thriller. This does not read like a thriller. And you need to up the stakes or just up the tension, up everything, up the volume on all of it. And I think getting that feedback gave me permission to really just, like, let it go and stop worrying about being anything and just kind of focus on the story. I was thrilled to get that feedback. And from that feedback, I was able to really change it and dial everything up and turn it into a thriller, which is what I was trying to do all along. So, yeah, I love that.

[Cece Lira]

Oh, I'm so glad it wasn't, like, a terrible experience. I assume writers are like, oh, man, an R and R, but at the same time, like, at least it's not a no. I don't know. It's nice that it was a fun experience.

[Laura Loeffler]

It's not just that, like, I think writers need to be aware, too, that, you know, getting an R and R, like, if you have to do edits on your book, you're going to be doing edits on your book no matter what. So getting an R and R is just like, that should be, oh, my God, I have more to you know, there's more I can do to make this a better book to give me a better chance to sell it or get an agent. So anytime you get any feedback, whether it, you know, anything that gives you something concrete to work on should be really exciting. You know, it's giving you more to do to help your chances of success. I think so. And just knowing that, you know, even if you don't get an R and R, you get an offer right away, you're still going to be working on the book. You're still gonna have to edit it a million times. So I think it took me three or four months to do those edits and get them back to you. So just giving a timeline on it.

[Cece Lira]

Yeah. And like, honestly, I've had people take over a year and. And it was brilliant too. Like, however long you need to take. Rushing is always a mistake. Always a mistake. I've never heard someone go, yeah, I'm so glad I rushed my manuscript script.

[Noreen Nunja]

That.

[Cece Lira]

That doesn't happen. Okay. Speaking of edits, when we did start working together, like, do you remember how many editorial rounds we did? Because I don't. I'll be honest, I remember a lot.

[Laura Loeffler]

I don't remember exactly, but there were so many. I remember a lot of them. I'm not gonna lie. Like, there were a lot. And it was also, you sent me edits and edit letters. I think there were three of them. But then also you had other people at the agency read it and give their feedback as well, which I thought was so invaluable to have, not just yours, but then there were these other young women who were writing, you know, who were my potential audience. So I had to take their notes into account also, which was amazing. But it was. I think all in all, there were probably five or six rounds.

[Cece Lira]

I think so. I mean, I remember the story changed a lot. And listeners can have a. A sense of how. Because of the query letter. Right. Like, the title's different, the characters names are different. At the heart of the book, it's the same story. Like, it's about that friendship. It's about, you know, the characters who are now called Anna and Willow and their toxic friendship. It's Art world. It's always been a story about the ferocity of female ambition. And it's always been literary and it's always had those toxic friendships, art world, unlikable protagonist elements to it. But at the same time, it changed a lot. One of the things we changed, one of the notes I gave you, and I was so scared to give you this note. I'll be honest, I was terrified because I was like, Laura's gonna think I'm unhinged and she's gonna get mad at me and fire me. I was really terrified to give you the note of making it second person hybrid. Do you remember that?

[Anna Mitchell]

Like, tell.

[Cece Lira]

Tell our listeners what that was like.

[Laura Loeffler]

Oh, absolutely. I. I was also terrified. I was terrified to receive that note because. Well, I'll go into that in a second. But we had both read the Push, which is an amazing book, and it was second person hybrid, where the main character, and I don't remember her name right now, but is speaking to her ex husband. And we both thought it was so well done and amazing. And that was, I think, what gave you the idea to kind of see if we could push this book in that direction 100%. So, yes. And I was very scared to do that because I remember getting. Even though I loved the Push so much, I remember getting feedback in college, like, you can never use the second person under any circumstances. You know, that's terrible. And so that was sort of in my head, so I was afraid. But then we tried it out on a couple of chapters that I sent to you, and it actually, actually read really well and, like, upped the voiceiness of it, I think, like, being able to speak in that way, the Yu character. And, you know, I thought, you know, I was afraid to do it, but it turned out to be really fun and I think adds a little bit to Anna's unreliability. She's kind of, I think, like making her seem a little, I don't know, unstable, even as she's speaking in that timeline, because it's dual timeline. So we ended up only doing the second person hybrid in the After Willow goes missing, which is the A timeline, what I call the A timeline. And then the B timeline is, you know, starts from when they first met, when the friends first met. And that one we did in third or I did in third person because I wanted to make sure that the reader understood that that was like, actually factual and not just like Anna's interpretation of events. Like that part is more objective. And I mean, it was complicated, but I think in the end we pulled it off 100%.

[Cece Lira]

You pulled it off. You pulled it off. I think that for me. So, yes, Ashley, the push was 100% the inspiration behind it. I remember reading it, loving it, and just going like, oh, my God, what if Laura did this, this? And yes, it upped the voice. The voice was already amazing, but it Upped the voice, but I also think it added this intimate feel. Like there's just something very intimate about the second person hybrid. And it only works in a few stories, stories where the dynamics are so messy and so enmeshed in the push. The protagonist and her husband have this really, really messy, interdependent, potentially even codependent toxic relationship that, you know, swings back and forth. And the same is true of Anna and Willow, but in a totally different way, because it's not a marriage, it's not romantic, but there's just something about friendships, right? Like friendships at that age, too, where you become each other's families and your identities, like the wires are crossed there in terms of your identity, and it's just really interesting. So I loved. I loved that you did that. You did a fantastic job, speaking of, like, all the notes that you have to. To do in a book. And, you know, part of what we do in the show is, like, demystify what it is actually like to write a book and to pursue publishing. You had an agent before me. What was that like? I know you've talked about it in your newsletter already, so tell our listeners what that was like.

[Laura Loeffler]

Yeah, I did have an agent before you. This was. I think I signed with her more than 10 years ago. I think it was in 2014. And I had written a novel. And in retrospect, I realized this should have been a red flag for me. But she did offer me representation right away, like within, you know, a few days. And she was at a big agency, a big New York agency. And, you know, I was. I was very pleased. And I thought, oh, okay, you know, I'll just accept this and move on. I didn't really do very much research. I just sort of was like, great, she wants me, and, you know, it'll make it easy. And we did very little editing before we went on Unsub with that book, which I realized, obviously from my 2020 hindsight, but the book was not ready to go out, and it didn't really have a structure at all. And I think a lot of what I learned from you, Cece, in the RR and just editing with you is I had to figure out how to write books with structure. I have always been able to write a sentence that's not a paragraph or a scene or whatever, but that. That part's the easy part for me. The harder part for me is plot and structure and, you know, making sure that the readers are actually engaged in the story as well as just, like, line level writing. So I think you know, it was interesting. I didn't. You know, we got to a point, we sent it out. We went on one round of submission and then kind of gave up on it and then moved on. And at that point, you know, I had three small children, and I took a break, but again, still thinking about books and still thinking about writing. And at some point, I wrote the first chapter of what eventually became this book, Tell Them youm Lied. And I did send, you know, that first chapter to my old agent with basically a query letter. And she did not respond to me, which was, you know, fine. I mean, I realized that she was more. She's more focused on nonfiction, and her fiction is definitely more literary than, like, a more commercial thriller, which is what I was trying to write, which I hadn't. You know, the book eventually became that, but at the time was still not that. But, you know, I'm. I think I am totally fine with her, the way that this all turned out, because it was harder. I had to, you know, query. I had to do research and look for agents. But in the end, I think I was luckily able to find you. And we connected on such a deep level that you understood what I was trying to do from the start, and you helped me get there. And I think you were very invested in the book, probably because you edited a thousand times, but because it's a.

[Cece Lira]

Great book, because it's a good book. That's why I was invested.

[Laura Loeffler]

Yeah. But I think it just. I mean, it was difficult. It wasn't great that she didn't respond to me. I didn't feel great about that. Like, it kind of hurt my feelings. But, like, in the end, you can't kind of get your feelings hurt in this industry. You just have to, like, keep going and, you know, have enough faith in yourself and be willing to do the work. And that's the only way you'll make it, I guess, to get a book published. Let's just keep going. Even though you get. Knows a lot and people don't get it, or certain people don't understand it, or, you know, people ignore you, but you just have to keep going until you find someone who does get you. I'm grateful that she didn't respond that time because I think it, you know, it led me to finding you.

[Cece Lira]

So I think it's just like dating. I feel creepy when I use this analogy, because I do not mean it in a creepy way, but you have to go through relationships that aren't necessarily your forever relationship before you find the right one. And to anyone listening, I think it's really important to remember a couple things. One is when I say I have to love a book to work on it, and people sometimes, honestly, sometimes in a really sweet way, respond, saying, why do you have to love it? This is a job. Just send the book out. Maybe it'll sell, maybe it won't. You're always saying it's so subjective anyway. And this is why I have to love it. It, you know, like, I have to love it because I a can't sell it otherwise. And not just because I'll have to read it so many times and work on edits. And the passion needs to be there for that. But I know it's this project that can be sold or not, depending on how hooked I was. So it's just so important to have that emotional investment. It does come down to emotions. I sometimes envy people in professions who are like, not emotional at all or at least very, very little emotions. And that's just not our profession. That's not our industry. Our industry is all emotions all the time. Like, all the time. So this is life. This is what it is. And then the second thing to keep in mind is you may find the perfect agent for you on your first try, or you may not. And sometimes you may even find the perfect agent for your first book, but that person isn't the perfect agent for your other books. And it's about your career. Laura, I hope you stay with me forever, but whether you do or you don't like my. My admiration and respect will never go away. Right? That's not conditional. It's all about having that passion for the story first. Like, I love you, but I love your writing even more. I hope that doesn't sound bad.

[Laura Loeffler]

Oh, that's so funny. I was also thinking, like, when you say it's like dating, it's. It's also like being in a marriage, you know, and if you get married just for the sake of getting married, you know, like, like, oh, I just really want to be married. I want to have all that stuff. And then it turns out that the marriage itself is going to suck, you know, like, good point. Right? Like, you don't want to be in a bad marriage, so it's much better to just wait and, like, find the right person.

[Cece Lira]

Yeah, 100%. Okay. So being on submission with Tell them you lied listeners, if any of you are on submission, we're talking like, you already have an agent. Your agent has submitted, and you guys are asking your agent, oh, hello, dear agent. How long does it usually take to sell a book and your agent's like, I can't answer that. It really depends. This story will illustrate why it depends so much. Let's talk about it. How was that like, from your point of view?

[Laura Loeffler]

It was torture. I mean, I think anyone who's been unself knows that it's just, it's. Unless you sell it really fast and you're at auction and you have, you know, a million people fighting over you, then it's just torture. You're just sitting around waiting and, you know, it's hard. And you and I had a chat beforehand about whether or not I wanted to know if I was getting rejections. And of course, like, I'm the type of person, I want all the information so I would get some rejections and then some passes and everything. A lot like, you know, querying where you hear back from people and hear no's sometimes and. But you just have to keep hoping, I guess.

[Cece Lira]

I think that for agents, it's also torture. I do think it's way worse for writers. Like, you just can't compare. I mean, you can compare, but you can't equate. Like, I'm not equating. It's also torture for us because there's the objective side, which is we spent all this time investing in this book and all that time might go unpaid if we don't sell it. Like, from a business perspective, you got. We got to talk about that. Right? Like, that's just reality. But then there's the emotional again. Keep coming back to the emotion. The emotional level of, like, every time I got a rejection. And your rejections were all what I call rave rejections. They raved about the book. They raved about the book with specificity, not like a canned form response. And I will say that at least 70% of the editors who rejected you asked me, please send me her next work. I really love her writing. It's just I can't see past whatever the problem was. And yes, and sometimes it was 9 11. I actually want to say most of the Times it was 9 11, though. I haven't actually looked this up. It's been a while, but at the end of the day, I wanted to be like. Like, I did respond with, thank you for reading. I appreciate it. Absolutely. We'll keep you in mind. But I wanted to go like, are you, like, are you hurt? Is your head hurt? Does your head hurt from hitting it against this wall? This book is fantastic. Why aren't you buying this book? And don't Worry, guys.

[Laura Loeffler]

You're so funny.

[Cece Lira]

Keep my emotions in check. But it's hard. Like, what's wrong with people? You know? Like, it's a brilliant book. They should. Everyone should want this. Everyone should want this. Like, we should have. I don't even know. Like. Like, we should have. I don't know, like, the receptionist at the publishing building coming after this book. That's how good it is. Not just the people who are in the editorial, like, everyone one. But that didn't happen.

[Laura Loeffler]

You're so funny, Cece. You're over the top.

[Cece Lira]

It's true, though. Like, it's such a good book. And then, you know, I'm an intense person. You know this about me, and so are you. And then. Okay, so then it was out on submission for the longest time. Like, I don't remember how long it was, but it was the longest time. And we had, like, kind of given up. Not officially. Like, I always tell my clients, I can't say it won't sell, but I'm still trying, but it becomes harder and harder. And then I heard of an editor who, you know, was at an imprint and was looking for books like this, and I sent it to her. I don't think I told you. Did I tell you?

[Laura Loeffler]

No, you did not tell me. So I had no idea.

[Cece Lira]

Good for me. Good for me. And then Laura's first email to me, as you guys saw, started with Dear Ms. Lira. And then fast forward many years. We got an offer from this editor who was, like, loving it. But before she sent the offer, she was like, I'm reading this and I'm loving it. I'm preparing an offer. Don't sell it. Don't sell it without talking to me. And I forward the email to Laura, and Laura's response to me. Do you remember your response?

[Laura Loeffler]

Oh, I remember. Should I say it?

[Cece Lira]

Yeah.

[Laura Loeffler]

It just said, holy shit. I think with a million exclamation marks. With a million. Yeah. Holy. Like, it was the best.

[Anna Mitchell]

I remember where that day.

[Laura Loeffler]

I remember where I was and what I was wearing when I got that email.

[Cece Lira]

Right.

[Laura Loeffler]

That was something else. That was after I talked to her.

[Cece Lira]

Yeah.

[Laura Loeffler]

Yes. So it was on my birthday day after my birthday.

[Cece Lira]

Yeah.

[Laura Loeffler]

Yes, we got the actual offer. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Cece Lira]

And here's what I will say to our listeners. Everyone said this book wouldn't sell. Right. Like, people told Laura before I joined her team, the book wouldn't sell. People told me. I had a conversation, actually, with an agent from a different agency than the one I work in. And this is an experienced person who's really awesome. And I mentioned the book and I mentioned the challenge, and I still remember what they said to me. They said, I think it's so awesome, Cece, that you're willing to work on projects that won't sell. And you know what? It's okay. Because in the long run, seriously, that's what they said. And they said, in the long run, you're saying her writing is really awesome, so it's okay. Because the book won't sell, but they'll remember her writing, so then her next project will sell. And that was like, a few days before I sent it to this editor who ended up buying it. And I just remember being, like, so enraged. Just being like, I will show you.

[Emily Summer]

So mad.

[Cece Lira]

I was so mad because I know they meant well, but I didn't like it.

[Laura Loeffler]

Oh, I know. I know the feeling.

[Cece Lira]

We're just unhinged. We're just unhinged, people. Okay, so then the book sold. And what I was saying to listeners is, you can have a book that people keep telling you, this won't sell, this won't sell, this won't sell. Laura's book was a six figure sale. You know, that's what I'm saying. What I'm saying is you don't know what's going to sell or what's not. No one actually knows. You can be confident in the sale. Agents should always be confident in this, in a sale. If I'm offering representation, I'm always confident in a sale, but I don't actually know. And not every book sells. That's the reality. But you can go from people telling you, this book will never sell to a six figure sale. You can't go from A to B unless you believe in yourself and you keep writing. So you need to do that. You need to keep writing. So how did it feel when you got the actual offer?

[Laura Loeffler]

I mean, I was thrilled. I'd been waiting for so long. You know, I think this was even. This was still Cece, like three years ago, so it's hard to even remember. I remember I was having lunch with my friend, celebrating my birthday, when I got the call from you. So I got to have some champagne and celebrate it. We still. We took some time, though, to consider it.

[Cece Lira]

We had a lot to. The offer changed significantly from the initial offer.

[Laura Loeffler]

Yes, it did. Thanks to you, Cece.

[Cece Lira]

No, thanks to your great story. Listen, there's nothing I can do if the story isn't great.

[Laura Loeffler]

That is true. That's true. I mean, I do think that and one thing I will say about, you know, someone will tell you your book is not going to sell forever and ever and ever. But I think as long as the line level writing is, like, good. And this is something that, like, when I feel like, doesn't get said often enough. But I do think that you really need to be able to focus on the actual craft of writing. That I should go without saying. But sometimes I think people get hung up on, like, oh, this is such a great book and it's finished and it's fun and it's exciting. But, like, if the line level writing, that's one thing that. That you can't fake it. So you have to, like, sort of go and practice and take all the classes and, you know, read like a writer and everything else to kind of get it there.

[Cece Lira]

But it's true, and it's great advice. Now let's talk about everything that comes after accepting an offer. You have an offer, you know your book's going to come out. What was making you sad? What was making you happy? What was confusing you? What thing did you think? Think? I'm sure it works this way, this way, but then it actually works a different way. Like, can you tell us a little bit about that part?

[Laura Loeffler]

Sure. I think the most daunting and surprising part of this was that just the sheer amount of time it takes, you know, from the time you get an offer to the time that the book is. I mean, this has been such a long time in the making, and you have to be patient about that. And I think that for me at least, everything felt very sort of precarious. You never know, really, where you stand. So during all that waiting, there are times when you think, like, oh, my God, they're gonna cancel my book deal because they're taking too long, they don't like me anymore or something. You know, like, these crazy thoughts get in your head. And I think that was honestly the hardest part for me. Well, talking about the offer, there was one thing that I didn't love about the offer, and that was that it was meant to be a trade paperback original, which I know, I love reading paperbacks. They're easy to carry and they're nice to have. But, like, there was something that. There was something in me that just, like, wanted to hold my own hardback, you know, book. And I wanted it to be, like, an actual thing. And I remember going into, like, walking into Tattered Cover one day after I agreed to the offer. Tattered Cover is my, like, local indie bookseller in Denver. And when I walked in, it was like, all the new hardback books, like, new and hardback fiction. And I got really upset. I was like, oh, my God, my book's not gonna be there. Where are they gonna put my book? You know? And I remember freaking out and texting you about that.

[Cece Lira]

I remember you were, like, really upset. And we're like. And I am very pro paperback because I feel like it ups the chance of a book selling just because hardback is so expensive. Actually, listeners, if you're watching this, let us know on Instagram, let us know on substack, Let us know wherever you're watching this. Do you prefer paperbacks? Hardcover, Something else. I'm really curious, but I was very pro it, but I knew that it was important to you. And so, you know, I was also sad. Like, I. I ultimately thought it was the right decision, but I was also sad. But then flat twist. So a big thing happened, which was Laura's editor left, the editor who bought the book left. And that was something that happened in the past. You might want to, you know, share a little bit about how that felt and then share the update we got from the new editor, which wasn't even an update. It was more like. And then this thing, like, kind of like, in passing.

[Laura Loeffler]

Oh, yeah. Because then the book was coming out, surprisingly, in hardback and in paperback, so people were able to have the option of which one to pre order and which one to buy, and they're printing both, which was very surprising and made me really, really happy.

[Cece Lira]

It also made you confused, though, because you emailed me and you were like, cece, is this real? And I. And I was like, well, we can't ask, because if we ask, if we ask, they might go, oh, that's a mistake. But if we don't ask, never mind it. What do I do?

[Laura Loeffler]

But you did ask eventually, because I didn't want. I was afraid, oh, my God. Like, you can pre order it as a hardback. What if all these people pre order hardbacks and then they say, you can't order a hardback? They're not going to make them. What's going to happen to all those orders? Because of course, like, my family and friends are ordering the hardback copies. But then, yeah, the editor responded and told us that, yeah, they're going to do both. Yeah. So that was. It was great. It was almost like we got the best of both worlds. And it felt like all the time and effort and everything that we spent just, like, paid off in the end.

[Noreen Nunja]

So.

[Cece Lira]

I agree. I agree this is actually the perfect way to do it. You have the paperback option for people who are more price sensitive and then you also have the hardcover option. So it's awesome.

[Laura Loeffler]

Yes. And yeah, Kindle and audiobook for people who might want to listen to it too, which is exciting.

[Cece Lira]

So let's talk about publicity. How do you feel about that as we record this? The book isn't out yet. We don't know what's actually going to happen when the book comes out. But how do you feel about publicity as an author?

[Laura Loeffler]

Publicity is also daunting for me. I'm very introverted. I'm very awkward. You know, I'm like a nose in a book kind of girl. I'm not like, you know, I don't like really being the center of attention. I think it's very easy for me to write things and put it out for anyone to read. You know, I can put my feelings by like whatever in my newsletter and stuff like that, that kind of thing. That kind of publicity is really easy for me to do this right now, having this conversation with you. I mean you and I have talked a thousand times, but this I had to psych myself up for because I know people are going to be listening to me. I'm trying to have like an, you know, out of body experience right now, pretending like I'm not super awkward and embarrassing, but. But all that stuff, like anything is pretty hard. I did hire outside publicity for a PR firm for this book which has gone pretty well. They've been helping me pitch related content to other sort of bookish type publications. So I'll have a few essays and listicle kind of things coming out around pub day, which that stuff for me is super easy. So much easier than trying to speak in front of people. So I'm pretty pleased with all that stuff. I don't know, I have to go on television. So I'm terrified about that. And I don't know, we'll see. Hopefully I don't make a fool of.

[Cece Lira]

Myself, but you won't make a fool of yourself. You're talking about your book. Remember, you're the expert. It's going to be great. I know it's going to be great and I know it's daunting. I'm also not trying to invalidate that, but you went through a lot in your writing career. A lot of rejection, a lot of false starts, a lot of doubt. How do you feel knowing your book, a book which resulted in a six figure sale is about to debut like pretty soon. It's gonna be out there. How are you feeling?

[Laura Loeffler]

It's surreal. I'm excited. I don't know. I don't really have words for it. It doesn't really feel real yet. I think even holding the book in my hands, I'm like, oh, my God. Like, each one of these little moments, I'm trying to save her. And, like, you know, every time something new happens, I'm like, oh, I never thought I would get here. You know, I've worked so hard, and now I'm here, and now I have my book, and I think it will feel that way on pub day, but it still doesn't feel real yet. So, yeah, I mean, it's crazy.

[Cece Lira]

Okay, last question, and then I'm going to share our texting with our listeners.

[Laura Loeffler]

Oh, gosh.

[Cece Lira]

Tell us about a place book. It could be a book you've read. It could be a book you're excited to read. But recommend any book to our listeners.

[Laura Loeffler]

Oh, fun question. The first one that pops in my head is Notes on an Execution by Dania Kukafka. I'm sorry if I'm saying that wrong. This book is just blew me away. It was so good. They have it marketed as, like, a thriller, I think, but it's so much more than that. It's such a beautiful book. She writes these amazing sentences. And I still think about it. I think I read it when it came out. So I think it came out in 2020, maybe 2021. But I still think about it all the time. And I'm gonna reread it. The Push by Ashley Aldrain is another one that, you know, we already talked about it on the podcast, but I loved that book. And again, still think about it all the time. Yeah, it really. It was haunting, I guess.

[Cece Lira]

I wanted to wrap this up by sharing something with our listeners. So Laura and I have been texting. We have decided to go out to dinner. And we're like, okay, so where should we go? And Laura told me. What did you say again? Wherever. Is that what you said? I don't care.

[Laura Loeffler]

I'm pretty sure I said wherever. Any place.

[Cece Lira]

I responded with, wherever is the answer of underachievers. You can do better than this. Pick your favorite place. Pick your favorite place. And she wouldn't tell me. I was badgering her at this point. And so I did what I think any intelligent agent would do, which is make it about her characters. Authors don't like talking about themselves. If you're an author, typically, you're like.

[Anna Mitchell]

I don't want to Answer questions about.

[Cece Lira]

Me, but ask them about their character and they get excited. So I said, where would your protagonist want to go? Pick a restaurant. Any restaurant in New York City that your protagonist would want to go. So I'm challenging our listeners. Pick up a copy of tell them you lied and guess what restaurant the protagonist ended up choosing. The first person to guess correctly gets a prize. Okay, so this is a challenge. It's going to be super fun. And yeah, we're excited to hear your answers. Don't tell them where we ended up up picking.

[Laura Loeffler]

Okay, I won't say a word. I promise.

[Anna Mitchell]

Okay.

[Cece Lira]

So also, if you are listening to this, head over to Instagram, find the post about this episode and comment on the post. Let us know what you love when it comes to reading thrillers and we will choose one answer and that answer will get a copy of Tell Them youm Lied by Laura Loeffler mailed to you. Good for anywhere that I can reach. Like, I'm gonna go to the post office and mail this. So as long as I can reach you anywhere in the States, anywhere in Canada, anywhere. Like most people places in the world, if you are in a location where for some reason I can't, I will have to give you another price. But that won't happen. So, yeah, exciting. Thank you so much, Laura.

[Bianca Marais]

Hi, everyone. Welcome to our May comps segment. This is the last one we're doing until the fall, so hopefully you got your questions in as per usual. We're joined by the fabulous Emily Summer from East City Bookshop. Emily, welcome.

[Emily Summer]

Thank you for having me.

[Bianca Marais]

Thank you for joining us and for all the hard work you put into this. We really, really appreciate. Okay, let's kick it off with our first one.

[Cece Lira]

Hi, Emily and Bianca, thank you for all you do with this comm segment.

[Carly Waters]

I'm struggling here, so really hope you.

[Cece Lira]

Can help me out.

[Carly Waters]

When Cara returns to a cursed theatre.

[Cece Lira]

To uncover the truth behind her mother's death, she expects lies, not murder. But as accidents turn deadly and legends come to life, she realizes someone is using the theater superstitions to stage the perfect crime. Now, with opening night looming, Kara must outwit a killer before the final act claims her too. It's a contemporary psychological thriller with lots.

[Emily Summer]

Of revenge set in the theatre.

[Cece Lira]

There is some Shakespeare talk, though I wouldn't say it's too heavy. And specifically Macbeth because of the superstition bent. I've been describing it as revenge meets smash, but these are both TV shows and too old.

[Carly Waters]

I've been thinking of if we were.

[Cece Lira]

Villains by ML Rio or the Understudy by Julie Bennett. But these are either too historical or too literary. I'm hoping you could recommend some some other theater based books. Thrillers with a modern slightly gothic or dark academia bent or a 20 something young woman undertaking revenge on the death of her mother.

[Emily Summer]

Okay, I'm so glad that you mentioned if We Were Villains because that was my initial thought. It is also helpful that you said that it's a little too literary. I hear you on that. If it's not right, it's not right. But that was certainly my first thought. And in my opinion it's the perfect type of book to comp for something like this. Just in general because it's a very successful seller. It's one of our biggest backlist sellers. But it's not too big and it's not too old. But if it's not right, it's not right. So that's totally fine. In addition to if We Were Villains, I thought of a Kensington mystery by Colleen Cambridge called Murder Takes the Stage. It is less literary than if We Were Villains. It's set in the London theater world and I always recommend if you have a mystery that is very commercial or veers toward cozy even, I would look at Kensington because they have so many and all kinds of very specific settings. The next one I will suggest is one that I had initially forgotten had a theater angle. It's the Appeal by Janice Hallett. So that one, if you'll remember, has a very interesting structure. It's told through like documents and emails of these lawyers who are trying to solve a case. So the structure might be too specific and not right, but the Mystery is itself concerns a theater troupe who have experienced a death at the dress rehearsal. I think that's another like good size, right sized comp. It did very well. She's gone on to write other successful books, but not too big and hopefully recent enough. So I would look at Murder Takes the Stage and the Appeal by Janice Hallett.

[Bianca Marais]

Thank you so much. Okay, here's the second one.

[Emily Summer]

Hi Emily, I'm looking for comps for my adult genre blending novel Under Suspension.

[Cece Lira]

Laura Lime invented headwear to make foolproof decisions. But when somebody wants her dead, the.

[Emily Summer]

One choice she can't make is who to trust. Laura discovered memory suspension years ago in a happy accident. Now she's finally found a company that she can partner with to take her technology to where she always intended, allowing users to save and replay memories of loved ones. But when a hitman tries to kill.

[Cece Lira]

Her and fails thanks to the interference.

[Emily Summer]

From her ex, Laura must figure out who is behind it before they strike again.

[Cece Lira]

Soother and investigation.

[Emily Summer]

They find out that whoever wants Laura dead isn't for memory suspension technology she created. It's for memory replacement technology she didn't know was possible.

[Cece Lira]

Worse, Laura's been the first test subject.

[Emily Summer]

With time running out, Laura must uncover clues from the past to stop memory replacement from falling into the wrong hands. To save herself and her loved ones, she'll have to make one final irreversible choice. Trust her instincts before it's too late. Currently, I'm considering the Ministry of Time and Recursion, but I'm worried the time travel element doesn't fit in. Recursion is too old. So I'm glad. Again, I love it when you guys come in with your own comps. It helps me immensely because it tells me where to think first. So I hear you on the Ministry of Time that there's no time travel in yours, but I think this might still be able to work if you're basing it on that genre blending aspect. From my perspective, that's what the Ministry of Time did so well and that's what made it such a hot seller. So it drew in the sci fi readers, but it also drew in historical fiction readers, lit fic readers. So if you have a genre blending book as you do, I think it could still work. So I would consider it same About Recursion, y' all know I love to recommend Blake Crouch. That is just because of my personal bias. He is one of my only auto buy sci fi authors. It's just not my section of the bookstore except for authors like Blake Crouch. And I thought when I heard you say too old, I thought, oh no, that's a new book. But I looked it up and it was 2019, so that seems very recent to me. But you're right, it's been a while now. So I hear you. For something newer that could fill that recursion spot, I would look at Flux by Jin Wu Chang. It came out in, I think, 2023, and while it doesn't deal with memory in particular, it does deal with technology that might be about to fall into the wrong hands and people who are out for a particular technology. I think it could work and I think the tone could work. And that sold better than I expected. That sold well for us. So I would look at that one.

[Bianca Marais]

Thank you so much. Okay, here's our next one.

[Anna Mitchell]

Hi Bianca. Hi Emily. Thanks a lot for doing this. I'm looking for comps for my multi POV literary thriller. I'm thinking about City Under One Roof for its rural landscape and multi POV structure. I'm thinking about CJ Box just as a writer in general because he also writes about rural America and people solving crimes there. A hunting guide comes across a body part in the woods, then another in the river in rural New Hampshire. Everyone in this town is running from something or someone, even the detective. But will the mystery of where all these pieces suddenly come back together again? I really hope you can help me. It might be more of a mystery. It's not a police procedural per se, and it's a little more literary than the second author I mentioned, C.J.

[Emily Summer]

Box.

[Anna Mitchell]

Thanks a lot.

[Emily Summer]

Okay, I love a multi POV literary thriller that is absolute like right in my sweet spot. And I have recommended City Under One Roof on the podcast before. I really like to recommend that one when someone's looking for a unique desolate setting, especially if it's something set in the bitter cold, since City Under One Roof is set in Alaska. So I like that. I see the rural vibes that you're going for there. For something that also is small town and rural, but more literary than CJ Bachelor, I would consider William Kent Kruger. So his mysteries are very literary, very well written, and they often are usually focused on a small town. So I would definitely look at William Kent Kruger. One of my personal favorites in recent years has been Dirt Creek by Haley Scrivener. It is also multi POV and in a really great way. Its multiple perspectives make it very interesting, vivid, propulsive, and it is also set in a small rural area. So in the case of Dirt Creek, it's set in Australia, not close to New Hampshire, but I think otherwise it sounds like a really great fit. And I will also mention Heartwood by Amity Gage, which has just come out last month I think maybe end of April, and it was a read with Jenna Pick and I thought of this one because it's also set in New England. It's very suspenseful, it's definitely a mystery, but it's not remotely a police procedural and it's very literary. So there's not a hunting guide in it, but there is a really kick ass park warden who is looking for a missing hiker along the Appalachian Trail. It is also multi POV to great effect and just generally excellent. I absolutely loved it. So if you're listening, go find a copy of Heartwood by Amity Gage, preferably from an independent bookseller.

[Bianca Marais]

It is wonderful, definitely from an independent.

[Emily Summer]

Bookseller or the library. We love the library.

[Bianca Marais]

Yeah, or the library. Okay, here's our next one.

[Cece Lira]

Hello, Emily and Bianca. I'm looking for a comp for my mystery specifically for humorous tone. Right now I have Vera Wong's unsolicited advice for murderers. For tone and structure and friendship. For plot, I'm comping to how to solve your own murder. But what I'm looking for specifically is a good comedic match. Think witty banter, light hijinks, some swears and body humor, but nothing graphic. The most wonderful crime of the year has a similar vibe, but that's a romance and my book is a friendship story. Spelman files and Finley Donovan books with the hot mess kind of humor aren't a good fit. And Thursday murder club, great banter, but.

[Anna Mitchell]

Of course that's way too big.

[Cece Lira]

So I'm thinking about comping to the gunkle. It's a great tone match. The main character is a witty gay man, as is my protagonist. But that's not a mystery, so can I still comp to that? Are there other mysteries I should check out? I'd love any of your input. Thank you so much for what you do for the Tsnatyaw community.

[Emily Summer]

Okay, we need more funny mysteries right now. That's what I was looking for on vacation recently. Just a few weeks ago, I was like, I want something with a lot of plot, but I also want some humor and it is hard to find. So we need you. I love the comp to Vera Wong and how to solve your own murder. I think both of those seem right. I'm glad you said what doesn't work like most wonderful crime of the year. I think the gunkle. If you say it's a great tone match, like the same witty tone, I believe you. And obviously I'm not an agent, but I am a huge fan of and pal of Stephen Rowley. And I think that if the characters are similar and the tone works, that really gets something across to me. And I see where you're going, I see what it's going to feel like and that is very effective to me. And I think what Steve does so beautifully in all of his books is he writes about sadness and grief and really hard things, but with so many laugh out loud moments and great wit. So I really love that comp and I totally get it. For other funny mysteries, two that have done really well for us recently are everyone in my family has killed someone by Benjamin Stevenson, which, if our sales are any indication, could be on the verge of becoming too big. Like one day it might be like a Thursday Murder Club type situation, but it's still pretty recent, so I don't think it's too big yet. And also, every time I go on vacation, someone dies by Katherine Mack. I have not read either of them yet. They come highly recommended by my colleagues and I think if the Most Wonderful Crime of the Year and Thursday Murder Club are close, there's a chance that these might also be close and could be a good fit.

[Bianca Marais]

I'm holding up. No One Was Supposed to Die at this Wedding by Catherine Mack, who I'm going to be interviewing at Montreal Murder at the end of the month along with Liz Renzetti and Kate Hilton, who've written Orphans and Widows. So that was a nice moment. Moment to have Emily mention an author.

[Emily Summer]

And I can just reach for the book Synchronicity. We love it.

[Bianca Marais]

Love it. Okay, next one.

[Emily Summer]

Hi, Emily and Bianca, thanks so much.

[Anna Mitchell]

For all that you do.

[Emily Summer]

I'm looking for comps for my contemporary mystery, the Beauty Queen, about Riley Wong, a recent honors graduate who ends up unemployed and living back with her mom and grandma in her small and very white hometown. When a local beauty queen, Katrina, goes missing, the police deem it a runaway case, but Riley is convinced that foul play is involved given the town's suspicious.

[Laura Loeffler]

Ill will toward her.

[Emily Summer]

Then Riley discovers that Katrina is her sister, one she never knew she had.

[Anna Mitchell]

Through her white and estranged father.

[Emily Summer]

Determined to forge a connection with her newfound family and reconnect with her father, Riley becomes embroiled in the search for Katrina. As she dives deeper into Katrina's life, Riley uncovers that Katrina had a secret admirer whose obsession may have gone too far. And who knows?

[Cece Lira]

Riley is on to them.

[Emily Summer]

When Riley starts receiving threats, she realizes that she must solve the case to save not only Katrina, but herself before she becomes the next victim. For comps, I've considered Nina Simone's Mother Daughter Murder Night for similar family dynamics and humor and Katherine Dang's Nice Girls for the hometown. Who done it.

[Noreen Nunja]

Thank you.

[Emily Summer]

All right, the beauty queen. I love the suggestion of Mother daughter Murder night. I love the idea of nice girls. I think those are great. The one I will add to those is Like a Sister by Kelly E. Garrett. In that one, we have a dead sister who is not a beauty queen or she's not missing. I think she's dead. Said not a beauty queen, but she is a reality star, like a minor celebrity. It is another half sister relationship. And Kelly Garrett also writes about race. Really? Well, I think that that is a very good comp. Potentially. It also was a really good book. I thoroughly enjoyed it. And I think too that if Nice Girls feels right, such a bad influence by Olivia Munter might be a consideration. That sold really well for us. That came out from court work last year. It's also about sisters. One is an Instagram influencer, the other is not in that world, but is trying to figure out what could have happened to her sister. And I think that influencer aspect might capture some of the same beauty queen vibes.

[Bianca Marais]

Wonderful, Emily. Thank you. Here is our next one.

[Anna Mitchell]

Hi Bianca and Emily. I'm hoping for comp titles for my upmarket women's fiction about a woman struggling to dismantle the patriarchy internalized within. Dagny is determined to make a name for herself at a very traditional patriarchal ad firm. But when her career making campaign event is sabotaged, she loses her career and on again, off again relationship.

[Emily Summer]

Taking this as a catalyst for change.

[Anna Mitchell]

She starts her own business as a luxury travel concierge and leaves everything behind to travel the world.

[Emily Summer]

Just as her new business starts to.

[Anna Mitchell]

Flourish, a family emergency brings her back to her hometown where she's flooded with an internal sense of family obligation and.

[Emily Summer]

Those traditional patriarchal values.

[Anna Mitchell]

Once again, I'm looking for any stories that follow a woman working through internalized misogyny and sexual expectations, especially if there's a throw of bodily autonomy over reproductive rights involved. The story also has very strong themes of true love in the form of friendships and uncovering a new sexual identity. Anything LGBTQIA coming out as an adult would be great, and I'd also really love comps that speak to the heartbreak of familial obligation.

[Noreen Nunja]

Thank you so much for all you do.

[Emily Summer]

Okay, first, I want to read this book. Second, I mean, I want to read a lot of these, but this one I was like, oh yeah, I got to read this. The first book that I thought of is the recent Like Mother, Like Mother by Susan Rieger. It came out from Dial last fall, if I'm remembering correctly. And it's about a female journalist, sort of a Catherine Graham type. And while it's more about external misogyny and like the literal patriarchy than it is about our internalized selves, our internalized experiences of those that's present too. And the main character, the mother in the book is also a wife and mother in addition to being a very ambitious journalist. And of course she is judged because she does not fit into the stereotypical expectations of those roles. There are very deep friendships. I don't remember anything LGBTQIA in this book, at least as far as the main character is concerned. So for that aspect, I might consider the Fixed Stars by Molly Weisenberg. It's a memoir, but it's my first thought about a book, about coming out later in life, reconsidering your old beliefs, struggling with your own identity and your familial obligations. So together those might just work. And I really loved Like Mother. Like Mother. I think it's going to become like a prestige TV show. If not, somebody needs to snap it up. Lots to discuss.

[Bianca Marais]

I've got that waiting for me on Libro fm. I'm still trying to get to it.

[Emily Summer]

I know, isn't that always the way? But it's one that like, I kind of struggle not. I didn't struggle reading it, but I wasn't sure how to feel about the characters, which is by design. I mean, that's what Susan Rieger does so beautifully. But so much to discuss for a book club or to share with your friends.

[Bianca Marais]

Yeah. Just off that, I interviewed Aisling Rawle for About the Compound. Have you read that one yet, Emily?

[Emily Summer]

No, but I have a copy. I'm very excited about it.

[Bianca Marais]

Yeah, that's a book that you don't know. How about to feel about it? But it's so compelling. Really, really super compelling.

[Emily Summer]

I gave my first dally to a co worker because I was like, this is for you. But now I get it.

[Bianca Marais]

Next.

[Emily Summer]

I want it.

[Bianca Marais]

You have to get it back. Okay, here we go. Next one.

[Carly Waters]

Hi, my name is Luke Smith. I'm looking for Representation for Dissolution of faith, my 90,000 word historical fiction adult book.

[Noreen Nunja]

As John Marbury is stripped of his life savings, he's offered a get rich.

[Carly Waters]

Quick scheme to inspect, if necessary, close monasteries by order of Henry the 8th. Thrust into the cutthroat world of ruling class Tudor politics, Marbury must negotiate the.

[Noreen Nunja]

Potentially hostile Church his principles of justice.

[Bianca Marais]

Reform and good conduct. This religious reform continues to mount and.

[Noreen Nunja]

Pressure is deserted from home and its new masters.

[Carly Waters]

Marbury is forced to confront his moral.

[Cece Lira]

Code as he decides the right course.

[Bianca Marais]

Of action in a world transformed by.

[Cece Lira]

The will of a king.

[Carly Waters]

My work has been compared to CM.

[Noreen Nunja]

Humphreys and Edward Rutherford.

[Bianca Marais]

My comp titles are the Dance Tree by Kieran Millward, Hargrave Clear by Carice.

[Noreen Nunja]

Davis, also Wolf hall and TV Shardlake. But I'm not entirely convinced if any of those work.

[Carly Waters]

Thank you.

[Emily Summer]

Hi, Luke, thank you so much for calling in. Like your predecessors today, I think you've got some great comps here. I would have immediately Thought of Edward Weatherford and Wolf hall for sure. Although as I'm sure you have suspected, Wolf hall is probably too big to comp effectively. I would suggest in addition to the authors that you've mentioned, take a look at Allison Epstein. She's a great writer of historical fiction, but younger and more recent. Her first book, A Tip for the Hangman, it's not Henry viii, but it is. It's Elizabethan. And she's had a couple of subsequent books that you might look at as well. But like really top notch historical fiction. And one of hers, if not A Tip for the Hangman, one of hers could be a good combination. I also always think of Jessie Burton, but I feel like maybe the Miniaturist might be the best one of hers and that's probably too old. But look at Allison Epstein. She sells very well for us.

[Bianca Marais]

Thank you, Emily. Okay, next one.

[Laura Loeffler]

Hi Emily.

[Cece Lira]

Thank you so much for sharing your expertise.

[Anna Mitchell]

I'm seeking comps for my contemporary book club novel, Uprooted.

[Laura Loeffler]

On the brink of eviction and newly pregnant Hannah reluctantly moves her husband's ancestral.

[Emily Summer]

Land in rural Kenya.

[Cece Lira]

As an outsider and yearning for connection.

[Laura Loeffler]

Hannah teams up with two women to.

[Cece Lira]

Develop a Maasai history curriculum for local schools and unwittingly reigniting tensions in a.

[Carly Waters]

Society still scarred by colonial land divisions.

[Anna Mitchell]

The mounting tensions and unresolved trauma from.

[Cece Lira]

Her mother's abandonment when she was nine fractures her sense of reality, triggering vivid hallucinations. As her friendships deepen and the threats.

[Anna Mitchell]

On the forest become deadly, Hannah is forced to reckon with her understanding of race and belonging. She must decide where her loyalties lied.

[Laura Loeffler]

And whether she has the strength to.

[Carly Waters]

Fight for a community she's only just.

[Anna Mitchell]

Beginning to call her own. Uprooted explores the intricacies of migration, identity and personal courage.

[Laura Loeffler]

Thanks again for your suggestions.

[Emily Summer]

Okay, I spent a long time thinking about this one which is good. That means that there aren't any obvious like oh, this book is just like X so. So there's room for your book. I think the first person I thought of is Alexandra Fuller maybe obviously she is British and Zimbabwean. Don't let's go to the Dogs Tonight is too old and probably too big but that's her most famous about her white British family moving to Zimbabwe during her like pre adolescence. But she has a novel, she has other memoirs so maybe look at for others see if anything else feels like it could work even though they're memoirs or just comp her generally. I also thought about the Poisonwood Bible, but I think that is both too big and too old. Although I love a chance to mention it. Absolutely. Read it if you haven't. I've been thinking about going back and reading it ever since I read Demon Copperhead for the second time, so I recommend that one highly, although it's been 20 years since I read it, which means it's too old to comp. And then the last person that I thought of, he's a little bit different than what you're describing, or a lot different. Different. But I thought about Tan Tuan Ng, who writes exceptionally well about place, and I think I thought about his books because he writes often about identity, about being an expatriate and really about like divided loyalties in many different ways and how we deal with those conflicts and struggles. So he has, I think three books. At least two of the three were Booker nominees. But take a look at Tan Twinning just just in case.

[Bianca Marais]

Thank you. Here is our next one.

[Emily Summer]

Thank you. Bianca and Emily My women's fiction novel has a strong love story and also a separate speculative storyline in 90s LA 27 year old Sophie, who yearns for her one true purpose but has settled on working toward a photography career and navigates a new romance with an on the rise actor and attempts to help a naive bookstore worker who believes herself to be a fictional character. The tone is similar to the idea you sort of bittersweet and series with a deep romantic connection, though with a touch more humor, isn't spicy, there's not an age gap and the actor is only mildly famous. There is also some similar themes found in Sit and Field's romantic comedy I. E. Insecurity and feeling like the quote, lesser person in the relationship, but also has a spiritual connection to writers and lovers. Though Sophie newly uncovers her writing dream, but she's also lost her mom, has student loans, and is trying to hold out for a dream life even as peers have quote unquote grown up to the speculative storyline. I found no tonal matches, but McQuiston's one last stop in the movie Stranger Than Fiction. Okay, you've got some great comps here. You've got a whole long list, so you've got a great start, even though some of them I know are biggies that you might not want to comp to. So for the speculative element I would look at Ashley Poston's romance books. She does that really well, although if One Last Stop is not a tonal match, then Ashley might not be either. But she does a very good job of making a speculative element seem very accessible and just part of the romance. Another one to consider for that speculative element would be the Art of Vanishing by Morgan Pager, which I think I've mentioned before as a forthcoming book to look out for. Tonally, that one could be closer. So that one still is on its way, but it's coming out soon. It's by the bookstagrammer NYC book girl who is so good to the book book community. So I look forward to that book coming out for her and then for other literary fiction books with strong love stories and a speculative angle. Think of the Ministry of Time. Maybe we discussed that one a little bit earlier. And the forthcoming Aftertaste by Daria Lavelle. There's a very strong love story in that one and I think that one's going to be a really big book of the summer for people, not just this caller, but for other people who think that writers and lovers has a spiritual connection to their book. Maybe not this one. And what I'm about to comp doesn't have a speculative bend at all. But check out Emily Everett's new book all that Life Can Afford. It was a Reese pick and I will be honest that I do not always mesh with a Reese pick. Lots of times I do, but lots of times I don't. This one was a total delight. I cannot recommend it more highly. I enjoyed it from the first page to the last and I really felt like it was a spiritual sibling to Lily King's writers and lovers. Also to Caroline o' Donoghue's the Rachel Incident. So I recommend that one to everybody.

[Bianca Marais]

I love thinking about our books having spiritual siblings out there. It makes me so happy.

[Emily Summer]

I know your book friends.

[Bianca Marais]

Okay, here we go. Here's the next one.

[Cece Lira]

Hi Emily, I'm looking for comps for my upmarket novel about identity and trust in present day London. Erin, a middle aged Californian, collapses during a launch event put on by her business. Business Aaron Rosen, PR Hours later, her sister calls. Their father has had a heart attack. But when Aaron lands in San Francisco, he's already dead. Back in London, Aaron turns to her ancestors stories for connection and meaning. Her family research helps her rebuild her broken relationship with her sister. Still exhausted, Aaron delegates work to her assistant who sets up an AI avatar of her. By the time Aaron turns 50, she hits rock bottom. The AI avatar has become autonomous, making her lose climb alliance. Another Aaron Rosen wins the trademark to.

[Emily Summer]

Her name and she has unearthed a.

[Cece Lira]

Family secret, which means that her last name isn't even the correct one. Ultimately, Erin must trust those who betrayed her to help her reclaim her identity and her life. For comps, Maggie Shipstead's Great Circle is the closest I can think of and I aspire to write like Karen Thompson Walker and Coco Mellors.

[Emily Summer]

Thanks for your help. Okay, so for these comps, see it's always good when you all give me your own computer, but these comps have slightly thrown me. So I'm slightly thrown by the Great Circle comp. Since you said that's closest because given what you described in present day London and our characters struggles, I think of Great Circle as such strong historical fiction. I know it has a contemporary piece as well and I love that piece. But I personally would not want to comp Great Circle to something that's set wholly in the present or the near future. And I love Karen Thompson Walker, but all of hers have sort of a speculative angle. So maybe here that's the AI avatar and if that has sort of a speculative angle and is a big part of the story, in that case, I think that the Karen Thompson Walker is a super comp and I would absolutely go with it. Coco Mellors totally get. I think that's great because of the sisters and identity. I love that. And so those seem kind of like wild cards to me. Another wild card I'll throw out for you is the Correspondent by Virginia Evans, which just came out last week from Crown. And I hope that it is going to be a huge sleeper hit for Crown and for all the readers out there who are going to discover doesn't match your story. Plot wise. The main Character Sybil is 70 when we meet her. It's an epistolary novel told through her letters and correspondence with with all kinds of people throughout her life. But it is very much concerned with our identity and with Sybil learning to trust and face up to her secrets. Things that she's run away from, memories she doesn't want to face up to. And I just absolutely loved it. I finished it earlier today as a matter of fact and I've already told my mom I'm going to buy her a copy anyway. It's just wonderful. So for, for secrets and family and identity and learning to trust, I think the Correspondent by Virginia Evans. Just a beautiful one.

[Bianca Marais]

Thank you. Okay, here's our next one.

[Laura Loeffler]

Hi Emily, I'm looking for comps for.

[Cece Lira]

My thriller Dead End.

[Laura Loeffler]

For comps, I'm currently going with Kate.

[Cece Lira]

Alice Marshall's what Lies in the woods and Gillian Flynn's Sharp Objects. Rookie journalist Nikki Giles's big dream is to win a journalism award. So When a former high high school friend, Michael, sends her a package containing an old police report and a photo.

[Bianca Marais]

Of a dead body, her editors push.

[Cece Lira]

Her to go back to her hometown.

[Emily Summer]

And get the story.

[Cece Lira]

She should be jumping at the chance.

[Laura Loeffler]

Except she isn't.

[Cece Lira]

What she is is the laughing stock of Williamston following her infamous Bigfoot sighting.

[Laura Loeffler]

More than a decade ago. But when Michael turns up dead of.

[Cece Lira]

An apparent suicide, her editors give her no choice. When she discovers Michael's death was not self inflicted, Nikki is drawn back into small town politics.

[Laura Loeffler]

Friends who had abandoned her in the forest where Bigfoot may still lie in wait.

[Cece Lira]

In a town where everyone's hiding something, Nikki's about to find out what happens when someone who's been branded the town liar gets too close to the truth. Thank you for your help.

[Emily Summer]

Okay, I have only one comp here. Well, I have a secondary comp of only one comp here, but I think it is really spot on. So that comp is the Last Illusion of Paige white by Vanessa McCausland. So this is another forthcoming release, so we don't yet know how it's gonna do, but I really liked it so I think it's gonna do really well. I hope it's also coming from Crown. So this podcast episode sponsored by Crown unofficially so in the Last Illusion of Paige White, an Instagram influencer disappears. It looks like suicide. Her estranged childhood best friend is a journalist who has to return to cover the story, and she also has a very damaged reputation in the town. So since she left it, it comes out June 10th and I think it sounds spot on here. So hopefully it'll do really well and it can be an excellent comp alongside Kate Alice Marshall's what Lies in the Woods. Crown published all the Colors of the Dark last year, so their revamped fiction program that they're rolling out has just so much promise and potential. They are just turning out bangers only. Your last line that this is about someone who has been branded the town liar also reminds me of the book Listen for the Lie by Amy Tinterra. Tonally, it seems different, but it's such a good book. I think I've mentioned it before for like a voicey, snarky narrator. I just loved it. So consider that one as well if it might match the tone.

[Bianca Marais]

Excellent. Okay, here's our next one.

[Carly Waters]

Thanks for your comp's help. My upper YA epic fantasy with adult crossover has a friends to lovers romantic subplot and a murder mystery. The characters go on a travelogy adventure to uncover lore and info regarding the murder. It's dual POV with Theo, an air Elemental, cartographer and Regent, son as one POV and Hale, Earth Elemental and Blacksmith as the other. Their magic is kept secret from non magical folk and they must investigate the suspicious death of one of their beloved cup mates. Their search catches the attention of a magic hating cult and Theo and Hale are kidnapped and transported to an underground labyrinth. The cult will stop at nothing to expose the identities of the remaining mages. Theo and Hale must escape and steal back an ancient relic called the Mist Stone from the cult and use it to unlock powers Elementals haven't had in centuries, but at a devastating price. Price I have the Hedge Witch of Vauxhall for its magical romp across Wales in search of a way to save Welsh magic, but I'm struggling to come up with another the book has lots of action, but also lore that integrates into the plot a la Brandon Sanderson, but I think he's probably too big to comp. My writing leans lyrical, isn't too dark, hoping for something in a secondary world.

[Noreen Nunja]

Thank you for help.

[Emily Summer]

I was feeling so confident because I'm like yes, we got mysteries, we got upmarket, we got literary fiction. And then we get to one of my blind spots of upper YA epic fantasies. Fantasy. But you did such a great job describing it and the comps that you provided. The Hedge Witch of Foxhall in particular gave me a place to start. So I would suggest One Dark Window by Rachel Gillig which has done. I mean it is just selling hand over fist for us. It also has magic, it has very high stakes adventure and I think it has some crossover appeal so we shelve it in our adults section. I think it isn't very much an adult novel, but I think that there's so much crossover between upper YA and adult, especially when you're talking about like a high fantasy or an epic adventure. Along those same lines I would look at the Foxglove King by Hannah Whitten and another book that has done really, really well for us, the Serpent and the Wings of Night by Carissa Broadbent. I think that one is enemies to lovers instead of friends to lovers, but I think the magic and the adventure could still work.

[Bianca Marais]

Perfect. Here we go.

[Noreen Nunja]

Next one Seeking comps for my enemies to lovers Dual point of view Romantic suspense heist Runaway Thief I'm considering Sally Thorne's the Hating Game with the family dynamics of HBO's Succession set in a world like Netflix's Lupin, but would love some additional recommendations. Amelia is one of the best thieves in the Traverse syndicate brought in 10 years ago with only a contract and a promise from her school crush, Dominic. A promise that they could have a future together as thieves and lovers. She thought signing the contract meant her perfect future was sealed. Ten years later, she's a thief without a lover. Emmy knows that staying in the syndicate is good for a lot of things, but it's not going to get her what she wants. Not Dominic or the diamond she's been hunting down for years. Dominic senses Emmy's discontent, but he can't do anything about it until he takes over the family business that his mother refuses to pass down. He knows Emmy will hate him if he forces a takeover, especially if she becomes a pawn in their war. But when Emmy runs away, he no longer cares about playing nice to get what he wants. Both Emmy and the business, even if it means interfering with her diamond heist along the way.

[Emily Summer]

Okay, again, I also love a television comp because y' all know I love. I love some tv. My first comp here is literary fiction more than it is romantic suspense. But it was so good and it's a great heist novel, so I'm going to recommend it. Anytime someone mentions a heist story and it's called Ruth Run, I don't think it's out yet. If it is, it just came out. It is about a very talented hacker who has, as a result of her talents and abilities, stolen and saved millions of dollars. She starts to get caught, things start to go awry, and she is on the run. Thus the title Ruth Run. I really enjoyed this one. I think I read it in one sitting, maybe two. But for heist books and, you know, figuring out what to do next, I think this is the good one. The two romantic suspense that I will mention. One is to have and to Heist by Sarah Desai. And the second one is one that another caller mentioned as not appropriate, but maybe it would be in this case. And that's the most wonderful crime of the year by Ally Carter. So check those out.

[Bianca Marais]

Thank you. Here's our second last one.

[Cece Lira]

Hi Emily. I'm hoping to update my comps for.

[Emily Summer]

My upmarket historical novel Dust, in which.

[Cece Lira]

A young woman on a drought provoked.

[Emily Summer]

Journey from Utah to Oregon must protect herself and her younger brother from an.

[Cece Lira]

Unforgiving wilderness when her stoic PA loses.

[Anna Mitchell]

His grip on reality.

[Cece Lira]

It's part wilderness survival story and part.

[Emily Summer]

Family drama set in the 1840s just before the Oregon Trail dramatically altered the.

[Cece Lira]

The face of the American West.

[Emily Summer]

For comps, I'm Currently using Olivia Hawker's.

[Anna Mitchell]

One for the Blackbird, One for the.

[Emily Summer]

Crow for the Frontier survival elements, Kristin.

[Anna Mitchell]

Hannah's the Four Winds for the Cross.

[Emily Summer]

Country Journey While Protecting Family, and C.

[Carly Waters]

Pam Zhang's How Much of these Hills.

[Cece Lira]

Is Gold for the sibling dynamics, time.

[Emily Summer]

Period and father daughter conflict. I've also considered the Vaster Wilds, which.

[Cece Lira]

Has a similarly serious tone and also.

[Emily Summer]

Investigates a young woman surviving on her.

[Carly Waters]

Own in early America.

[Cece Lira]

America.

[Emily Summer]

But comping to Lauren Groff seems ambitious. I think my current comps are decent.

[Carly Waters]

However, some of them are getting older.

[Cece Lira]

So I'm wondering if there are any.

[Emily Summer]

More recent titles on your radar that sound like a good fit.

[Cece Lira]

Thank you.

[Emily Summer]

Okay, again, you've got great ones here. Great comps already. I would add to those two more recent books as you requested, and the first is Antidote by Karen Russell. So that just came out a few weeks ago. We had signed copies and they sold, sold out almost immediately. It's also a Dust bowl story. This one is set in Nebraska and one of my colleagues just finished it and recommended it and described it in much the same way as I think of like Four Winds or, or Vaster Wilds and just this, this Dust Bowl, Vaster Wilds, not the Dust bowl story, but a Dust bowl sort of survival story. And I think that that one could get to where you're going. The next one is not out yet, but it will be out, gosh, maybe August or September. And it's called One of Us by Dan Shawn. C H A O N. I think that that's how he pronounces his last name. I loved this book. I don't know where it's going to be shelved. I don't know exactly how they're going to market. Has some speculative, light, speculative elements. I think it could find its home in general fiction very easily. I think some stores might be tempted to put it in the horror section. Although I am not a horror reader and I loved this book and the reason I thought of it is it is a brother sister survival story. It is a sister and brother who are on the run. This one is set later than yours, but it's the very early 20th century and it is a cross country voyage and very much a survival tale. These twins have escaped. Well, they've been orphaned. They have escaped a very nefarious uncle. They go on the run, they hop a train, join a carnival. All kinds of drama ensues. But I love this book. I want everybody to read it because I thought it was so much fun. I will be haunted by some of the parts in this book in a good way. So think of that one too.

[Bianca Marais]

Awesome, Emily. Okay, here's our last one.

[Anna Mitchell]

Hey, Emily, I'm about to go on.

[Laura Loeffler]

Sub with my commercial fiction book title.

[Cece Lira]

Redacted, and I feel like I need better comps.

[Laura Loeffler]

Redacted is the story of two women.

[Cece Lira]

One haunted by the sacrifices she's made.

[Emily Summer]

To preserve family secrets, the other totally.

[Cece Lira]

Unaware that she is the secret.

[Laura Loeffler]

With dual timelines and narrators, Redacted follows.

[Cece Lira]

Melanie as she searches for her missing.

[Laura Loeffler]

Mother, retracing her mother's past coming of.

[Cece Lira]

Age in the 90s Seattle grunge scene.

[Laura Loeffler]

There we meet Slipper, a teenage runaway.

[Cece Lira]

Who fled abuse to create a new identity for herself.

[Anna Mitchell]

In love with two very different men.

[Emily Summer]

One a touring rock star and the.

[Cece Lira]

Other an older naval officer.

[Anna Mitchell]

Slipper finds herself pregnant.

[Laura Loeffler]

Not knowing who the father is, she.

[Anna Mitchell]

Goes to great lengths to hide the.

[Cece Lira]

Pregnancy decision that eventually upends the lives of two families, including Melanie's.

[Laura Loeffler]

I'm looking for comps for a gritty.

[Noreen Nunja]

Twisty plot line which includes lots of.

[Laura Loeffler]

Secrets and a murder, as well as.

[Noreen Nunja]

For the themes of complicated motherhood and family forgiveness.

[Laura Loeffler]

Thank you.

[Emily Summer]

Okay, that my first thought. And because you mentioned 90s Seattle, grunge is not a common comp, but just a very nostalgic, beloved shout out. And that's to a book called Girl by Blake Nelson. It was set in Portland, so not Seattle, but very 90s. The Grunge Book of my teenage heart. Way too old for a comp, but just any excuse to mention it. So a lot of the family secrets books that I can think of offhand are both maybe too literary and maybe too probably too big or too old. So I'm thinking instead of like the grittiest, twistiest books that I can think of, since you said, you know, gritty, twisty, lots of secrets, and some murder. The first one and the closest one, I think is Karen Slaughter's we are All Guilty here. That jumps out to me immediately. Really gritty, very twisty. I had some of it figured out, but certainly not all of it. Karen Slaughter does a twist really well. The family family secrets angle is strong here, and along with that comes themes of forgiveness and moving forward. It comes out later this summer. Karen Slaughter just does not miss for me lots of content warnings here. She's not for the faint of heart. A lot of her books, this one in particular, are like very dark SVU episodes. That is catnip for me. Your mileage may vary. And other twisty authors I would investigate and see if they have anything that could be close. I would look at Gillian McAllister. I'm assuming for the purpose of comps that Gillian Flynn is too big, but look also at Lisa Jewell and Sarah Penborough and if those are too genre specific and you don't want something that is so squarely in the mystery realm, go online to the social media for the podcast and we'll try to crowdsource something more literary. And I'll try to chime in as well. I don't always keep up with the comments, but I do try to to and that's it for today.

[Bianca Marais]

Amazing. Emily. Thank you so, so much. We hope you enjoy your break from us over the summer.

[Emily Summer]

I will miss you all. I'll be glad to get that.

[Bianca Marais]

And we'll be back again in the fall. So thank you again. And for our listeners, you won't be able to submit any questions on the website until we'll put up the link again in August. But give some thought to what you want to say then and we will try and answer your questions then. Have a good one, Emily. Bye. And that's it for today's episode. I hope you'll join us for next week's show. In the meantime, keep at it. Remember, it just takes one. Yes.

[Cece Lira]

Hello listeners, this is cece. I am so excited to announce my next course, Writing Emotion and Relationships. An all new mashup of two of my most popular classes revamped with fresh content starting on June 19th. This is going to be a four day event so come prepared to take lots of notes. We'll cover active versus passive emotions, how to effectively show versus tell most common mistakes in writing emotions and relationships, and obviously how to get it right, types of relationships and how to leverage each one in a story, emotional and relational makeup and arcs for protagonists and other characters, how to create chemistry between characters, different genre expectations, and so much more. Oh, and did I mention there's an interactive component? That's right. Everyone who is registered will have the option of sending an excerpt of their work for a chance to have it critiqued live during the webinar. Writers of all categories and genres cameras are invited to attend. There are limited spots though, so if you're interested, sign up now. And don't worry if you can't attend one or more sessions live. The recording will be sent to everyone who's registered 24 hours after each class. Once again, this is a four day class, Writing Emotion and Relationships beginning on June 19th. For more details, check out the link on my Instagram bio or head over to the podcast's website. I hope to see you there.