Podcast Summary: Totally Booked with Zibby
Episode: From Working in Publishing to Entrepreneur (and Author!) with Panio Gianopoulos
Date: January 19, 2026
Host: Zibby Owens
Guest: Panio Gianopoulos
Episode Overview
In this engaging episode, Zibby Owens interviews Panio Gianopoulos, author and co-founder/editorial director of the Next Big Idea Club. They discuss Panio’s journey from publishing to entrepreneurship, his process as a fiction writer, the emotional origins of his work, and how personal life events have deeply informed his forthcoming novel. The conversation offers a candid look at the realities of the creative process, the business of books, and the role of storytelling in healing and self-understanding.
Key Discussion Points & Insights
1. Panio’s Career Trajectory: From Publishing to Entrepreneurship
[04:46 – 07:38]
- Panio details his longstanding passion for books, starting as an assistant editor at Crown (Penguin Random House), his work at Bloomsbury, and his transition into business school at Stanford.
- He reflects on failed entrepreneurial ventures post-Stanford and how they nevertheless revealed his knack for “sourcing talent”—notably, the early work with Kate McKinnon before SNL (05:52).
- Panio met Rufus Griscom, leading to his current work with the Next Big Idea Club, a nonfiction book subscription and curation service. This brought him into nonfiction after a career centered on fiction.
"It's always when you don't want something that it shows up. ...You're not looking for a job, suddenly it jumps in your lap."
— Panio Gianopoulos [07:13]
2. Crafting Fiction: Process and Preferences
[07:47 – 10:44]
- Zibby praises Panio for his immersive and insightful writing style, especially how he writes about relationships, longing, and subversive behavior.
- Panio explains the isolating nature of fiction writing and expresses appreciation for feedback, revealing it took him twelve drafts to complete the first story in his collection.
"I'm just writing these sentences after sentences and it's just like an empty auditorium. ...Is that good? No one's clapping, no one's smiling, no one's laughing..."
— Panio Gianopoulos [08:24]
- Discussion about writing groups and the potential pitfalls of sharing drafts too early, mainly the risk of being misdirected before the story finds its direction.
3. On Writing Short Stories vs. Novels
[14:15 – 16:20]
- Panio addresses the central challenges of short fiction: “portraying the messiness and contradictions of real human behavior in a compressed space.”
- His stories attempt to avoid moralism and instead show the nuanced reality of people—good, bad, wonderful, and selfish all at once.
"I've always been attracted in my reading...to a fiction that just shows you everything. Shows you the good and the bad and shows you that a person, at one moment can be wonderful and kind and another moment, they can be petty and selfish."
— Panio Gianopoulos [13:26]
- The motivations for his collection were pragmatic: a busy life made short stories more feasible (“I didn't have time to write a novel...So it was really just the nature of my life.” [16:10])
- Inspiration often comes from everyday incidents twisted into fiction—Panio recounted, at length, his failed attempts to befriend a crow, which turned into a story seed.
"So I got in my car. I gave up on becoming the crow's friend. But then I thought, oh, there's a story there. Like, why is this person obsessed with becoming friends to a crow?"
— Panio Gianopoulos [19:07]
4. Central Themes: Validation, Attention, and Alienation
[24:38 – 26:38]
- Many stories in Panio’s collection revolve around characters feeling unseen, longing for attention, or validation.
- The title story, How to Get Into Our House and Where We Keep the Money, grew from real family interactions and the idea of adult envy toward youthful charisma (“...we all want this 19-year-old to say we're cool. That's bizarre.” [25:34])
- Flattery and the hunger for approval—universal at any age—drive much of the emotional content.
5. The New Novel: Family, Grief, and Autobiographical Roots
[27:06 – 34:09]
- Panio candidly shares the deeply personal inspiration behind his in-progress novel, centered on his Greek immigrant parents and shaped by traumatic losses: his mother’s accident and protracted illness, and his father’s suicide.
- Grief blocked his ability to write anything but stories in which someone died, leading him eventually to confront his experience directly through the novel.
- The process has been long (eight years), emotionally taxing, and ultimately therapeutic, allowing him to transform personal pain into a story with enough fictional distance to feel complete.
"Every time I go into it, I'm like reopening the wound, right? ...the first few years writing the book were just like torture. It was awful. But I felt like there was nothing else I could do."
— Panio Gianopoulos [29:10]
- He reflects on the malleability of memory in fiction and the need to document real events separately so as not to lose them to the narrative’s revisions.
"My memories of what actually happened have been overwritten a little bit by these fictionalized versions."
— Panio Gianopoulos [34:09]
6. Building Community: Author Insider and Publishing Advice
[35:52 – End]
- Panio plugs his newsletter, Author Insider, a Substack for writers to discuss craft, the publishing business, and to counter writers’ isolation.
- Zibby credits Panio’s author insider guidance for influencing her own thinking about book publicity.
Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments
-
On the need for feedback in writing:
"Writing, storytelling. It's a kind of communication ... It's unreasonable as a pursuit to talk to somebody for that long and not get some sort of feedback, get some sort of connection with them."
— Panio Gianopoulos [08:57] -
On why he writes fiction, not nonfiction:
"I feel like I've sort of done both now so deeply that probably the next thing would be for me to actually write a nonfiction book. But I don't want to. I like novels too much. I like making things up."
— Panio Gianopoulos [07:11] -
On writing through grief:
"Once you put the trauma down on paper, it frees up your brain...It literally is out of your brain and your brain doesn't feel like it has to remember it all the time."
— Zibby Owens [33:30] -
On memory and fiction:
"If you're going to write something that is heavily autobiographical, just take a weekend and ... bullet point what actually happened in your life. So you can just go back when you're done with the book and be like, okay, but these are my memories. Right? The book is not my memories."
— Panio Gianopoulos [34:09]
Timestamps for Important Segments
- 04:46 — Panio recounts his publishing and business journey
- 07:47 — Zibby’s praise for Panio’s immersive writing; discussion on feedback and writing groups
- 10:44 — On reworking stories, the complexity of short fiction, and authorial intentions
- 14:15 — Exploring character contradictions and the purpose of fiction
- 16:10 — Why Panio chooses the short story format
- 19:07 — The “crow story” and how real incidents inspire fiction
- 24:38 — Themes of validation and origin of the title story
- 27:06 — Emotional roots of Panio’s novel: grief and family loss
- 33:30 — Writing as therapy, remembering vs. rewriting personal history
- 35:52 — The Author Insider newsletter and supporting the writer community
Tone & Style
The conversation is candid, warm, and thoughtful. Both Zibby and Panio speak with humor and vulnerability, sharing both the joys and the difficulties of the writing life. The tone alternates between conversational, introspective, and practical—a reflection of two industry insiders keenly aware of both the art and business of books.