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- [00:00]
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- [00:19]
Zibby Owens
Download Today I'm here with an exciting update. After a five year hiatus, the beloved parenting podcast Longest, Shortest Time is back. And it's picking up right where it left off, sharing the most unexpected, heartfelt and downright fascinating stories about parenthood, reproductive health and beyond. Host Hilary Frank started the show in 2010 after a difficult childbirth and recovery, hoping to connect with parents and non parents alike. But what she created became so much more conversations that are funny, poignant, sometimes edgy, and always full of surprises. In fact, Hillary was on my podcast as well. These stories are about life in all its messy, emotional and incredible forms. So don't miss out. Follow and listen to Longest, Shortest Time wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, this is Zibby Owens and you're listening to Totally Booked with Zibby, Formerly Moms don't have Time to Read Books. In my daily show, I interview today's latest best selling, buzziest or underrated authors and story creators whose work I think is worth your time. As a bookstore owner, publisher, author, and obviously podcaster, I get a comprehensive look at everything that's coming out and spend my time curating the best books so you don't have to stay in the know, get insider insights and connect with guests like I do every single day. For more information, go to zibbymedia.com and follow me on Instagram ibeowens.
- [01:57]
Joe Piazza
Joe Piazza is the author of Everyone is Lying to you, a thriller.
- [02:00]
Zibby Owens
This is a Zivi's Book Club Pick.
- [02:02]
Joe Piazza
Joe Piazza is the international bestselling author of 12 books, including the Good Morning America Book Club pick We are Not Like Them with Christine Pride.
- [02:10]
Zibby Owens
She is also host of the critically acclaimed under the Influence podcast.
- [02:13]
Joe Piazza
Her work has been featured in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, among other publications. She lives in Philadelphia with her husband and three feral children. Welcome Jo. Thanks so much for coming back on my show this time to talk about Everyone is lying to you. Congratulations.
- [02:29]
Jo Piazza
Thank you. I'm so happy to be here. I always love talking to you. This was the highlight of my week.
- [02:32]
Joe Piazza
Aww, you too. And by the way, I Think this might be my, one of my favorite books of yours. So good. Could not put it down. No, seriously. I mean, not only is the plot fun and all that, and I am deep in the influencer world, so I feel like very interested in all of this stuff, but also just all the ways you talk about marriage and the day to day life of like motherhood and just the things that you don't necessarily talk about. I don't know, you scatter that about in such a way that I feel immediately understood. Anyway, I really loved it. It's really great.
- [03:05]
Jo Piazza
Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, I, you know, this was so fun to write, I gotta say. And I told myself going into this because I read it really fast, I was like, you're just gonna have a blast. Okay. You were just gonna, you were gonna write the most bananas influencer thriller you can think of. Go. That's your, that, that's your project. And I wrote it in about four months, I think.
- [03:25]
Joe Piazza
Oh my gosh. Well, it's really, it's really good. And I think there's that sense of listening to you talk. Like you're just talking like you're just explaining what it was like to go to Mom Bomb or whatever it's called. And like you're just explaining, you know, how embarrassed you are to be scrolling Instagram and like spying on someone and wondering if they're spying on you. Like this whole thing, we just, we all are doing it alone. And so the expose of it all is really kind of funny. Okay, back up. Tell everybody what everyone is lying to you is about.
- [03:56]
Jo Piazza
Yes, yes, absolutely. So I, I've been covering influencers for five years now on my podcast, under the Influence. I never thought I was going to become some kind of weird influencer expert, but here we are. Here we are. And I became fascinated with the trad wife phenomenon. You know, the kind of domestic goddesses that, whose lives always look perfect. And they've got the gorgeous white flowing dresses and white houses and nothing is covered in dirt even though their kids are running barefoot through a yard filled with chickens all of the time. But I wanted to.
- [04:27]
Joe Piazza
And a three legged goat and whatever.
- [04:28]
Jo Piazza
And a three. Yeah, I did include a three legged goat. Like I said with this book. I was like, can you just make it crazier? And I'm like, there's a three legged goat and there's an AI baby at one point. Yes.
- [04:39]
Joe Piazza
You never know what you're gonna get.
- [04:40]
Jo Piazza
Well, kind of like with the world of influencers, you never know what you're going to get. It just seems to get crazier and crazier. And I truly believe that influencers are our new celebrities. I mean, our attention is so focused on this small screen in our hand that it is just a perfect world for a thriller. And I wanted to pull back the curtain on this beautiful life and show what's really behind it. Like, who is lying to you? And what do we believe about people's lives? So we have two best friends from college. One of them has grown up to be a journalist. Lizzie. The other one, Bex. Rebecca has grown up to be a very beautiful, very famous, like, multimillion follower, tradwife influencer. And she lives on this gorgeous ranch somewhere out west. We are very. It's very hazy. They're. They're out west somewhere. And with her husband, Gray, and her.
- [05:34]
Joe Piazza
Many, many someone from the East Coast.
- [05:36]
Jo Piazza
Yes, yes. Somewhere out. Somewhere out west. Well, because also, it's not any one influencer. I mean, it's kind of a combination of so many different influencers that this could be Wyoming or Idaho or Utah. We don't know where it is. But Rebecca is living on this ranch with her very handsome, but, you know, we never really see him. Cowboy husband Gray and her many, many children, raising chickens, raising kids, homeschooling, homesteading, all of the things that we see on our Instagram feeds all the time. And she writes to Lizzie and they had. They've been estranged. They haven't talked in 15 years. They had a big falling out. She writes to Lizzie and says, hey, I want to give you this big interview, this big exclusive. And Lizzie writes for a women's magazine. She's kind of struggling like a lot of people in media. And Bex invites Lizzie out to a mom influencer conference called Mom Bomb. And the two of them reconnect. They have this great night together, and then suddenly, the next morning, Rebecca's husband ends up dead and Rebecca is missing. And Lizzie has to solve the murder to perhaps, you know, save her best friend and her friend's kids, and also to figure out what the hell is happening in this bananas influencer world. And I gotta say, you and I were at mom 2.0 together.
- [06:51]
Joe Piazza
I was going to say, last year, that is the last time we were together in person, was at mom 2.0. And now here we are with Mom Bomb in your book.
- [07:00]
Jo Piazza
Yes, yes. And so we were on that panel at mom 2.0. And I actually, I love influencers and influencer culture. I respect the hell out of female influencers. They've created a Multi billion dollar business for women by women that is completely disrespected by most of the world because it's by women for women. But there's also a lot of hilarity in. And, like, there are some things that end up in the book, like I literally saw or overheard and then maybe enhanced for everyone is lying to you.
- [07:29]
Joe Piazza
Oh, my gosh. Well, we might need an offline debrief of who said what and all of that. Oh, my gosh. So the two of them are estranged in a way that Bex had sort of abandoned this best friend. Best friendship. And those are kind of the wounds when you have such a close friend, especially in the college years. And that is your whole life where it's hard to just get over. Right. And so not only is she in her trying to cover this for the magazine, which she feels is like sort of on its last legs anyway, but she has to get over her past hurt, which is so hard. And you have a line early on where you say, I'm wounded in ways I can't possibly explain, which I love, because aren't we all. Isn't that the most universal line in the book?
- [08:18]
Zibby Owens
Right.
- [08:19]
Joe Piazza
Yeah. So talk about how to get over all those past hurts, because in this case, it has to be both personally and professionally and kind of all at once.
- [08:29]
Jo Piazza
Well, I. I don't think that we have enough language to talk about friend breakups, to be honest. And I. My friends are the back. Backbone of my life, and I've had many friend breakups that I still think about more than I think about the breakups with my. My romantic breakups. They haunt you and they wound you and they stay inside your soul. Because I think most of the time, I mean, for the majority of our relationships, our friends mean more to us than those romantic attachments. And yet we live in a culture that talks about romantic breakups constantly. And I. I don't know about you, but I have been been ghosted by a friend before. And that also. I mean, it just sticks with you. It sticks in your gut in a really particular way. And so this friend that ghosted Lizzie isn't just any friend. She's someone that. She can watch her life on the small screen because she is an influencer now. So she, like, sneaks peeks at this. She doesn't know how she feels about it. And then all of a sudden, when she reappears in real life, Lizzie wants to do this for professional reasons, but also to heal, really. And so she has all of these confusing motives going out west to Mom Bomb. But then they also fall into a very particular, very comfortable pattern. Because even with old friends, I think they are almost always a soft place to land, even if we've had really difficult issues with them. And you and I are recording this a little bit early, but the White Lotus finale just happened with the very toxic friendship between three women. No spoilers. No spoilers. But we've watched this friendship all season and watch the ups and downs, how they love each other, how they hate each other, and yet in a lot of ways, they fall back immediately back into their own patterns, and they are very comfortable with those patterns. So we see something really similar with Lizzie and Bex. And by the time that Bex disappears and Lizzie finds out that she may have actually murdered her husband, who might not be as perfect as the Internet has lead us to seem, she's very invested in both saving her friend and saving this friendship. And I think that we can all relate. I think we've all had a friend like that, a friend that we've lost or a friend who's just kind of changed over time. Because the friends that we make in college. I say this all the time. I love my friends from college so much. Most of them I would not have chosen now because we're very different kinds of people. And yet when I see them, they are almost like my siblings because we came up in such a formative time together, even younger.
- [11:08]
Joe Piazza
I mean, I just reconnected with somebody I went to grade school with who I hadn't seen. Like, you have to, like, fast forward, I don't know, almost 40 years or something. And now she's, like, all over the. And I just keep, like, looking, and I'm like, oh, my gosh. How can I reconcile this person with the one who, like, I totally remember, like, hanging out in this part of my house with. And dah, dah, dah. I don't know, it's just. It is crazy that we get these time warp views of people, but.
- [11:30]
Jo Piazza
Well, that's. That's exactly what I was going to say. It's almost like time folds in on itself, right? And I had a similar thing recently. We're cleaning out my mom's house because, you know, we're squarely in the sandwich generation. So much fun to move her closer to us. And I found all of my pictures from grade school and middle school, and it. It feels like it's yesterday. And I look at these people, I'm like, I haven't spoken to you in 40 years. I have no idea what you're even doing now, and yet it still feels so visceral and feels like it's yesterday. And I thought about that a lot when I was writing Lizzie and Bex.
- [12:00]
Joe Piazza
Oh my gosh. Well, the clues that you give us even early on. So I feel like I'm not spoiling things too much. When we see like a makeup covered black eye or like a text that she happens to see and she's like, who could this possibly be from? And maybe it's from the husband. Right. We're getting little glimpses into what can be something quite sinister. And when you start feeling that, what do you do with that information? Like, at first ignore, I don't know.
- [12:29]
Jo Piazza
I don't know. Well, and you know, this is a question that I think comes up a lot in influencer culture. We actually, we see people have become obsessed with influencers. There's entire Reddit threads devoted to dissecting their actual lives, to saying, oh my gosh, I actually think that this relationship isn't going as well as they're saying it is. Like, what is happening beneath the surface? We all, like, have that desire to see these things. And so I really, I wanted to play with that, to be like, what do you, what if you see something, do you say something? Do you do something? What do you do with that information? And also to play with the perfection that not just influencers present, but that we all put forward. I think a lot about what I put on my own social media feeds and I try. I hate the word authentic. It's like the worst word in, on in the world right now. And I talk about that in the book, but I try to put out real life, but at the same time, you're not putting out the fight you had with your husband or the fact that your two year old this morning had to be wrestled to the ground like a crocodile because she wouldn't take off the bathing suit she slept in before she went to school. Which is a thing I'm still getting over from a half an hour ago.
- [13:42]
Joe Piazza
On the other hand, is it really so bad to wear a bathing suit to school?
- [13:45]
Zibby Owens
Pick your battles.
- [13:46]
Jo Piazza
It is 30 degrees today. And actually, here's the thing, I would have allowed it, except the bathing suit doesn't have diaper snaps. So it would have been a hard, hard for diaper changers. Otherwise it'd been like, you go, you walk to school in that bathing suit.
- [14:01]
Joe Piazza
Honestly, Joe, cannot believe you have diapers. Like, still have diapers. I can't believe you still have diapers. Oh, My gosh.
- [14:07]
Jo Piazza
I know, I know. They're so little. They're so little. But, yeah, you know, I think about what we present to the world on Instagram and social media and how we see other people's lives, and I think it's a big kind of, you know, mind fuck for moms, because we think we're seeing people's perfect lives all the time, but they're just curating it. They're just putting a glossy filter on everything.
- [14:27]
Joe Piazza
Well, I guess the question is, like, is it entertainment? And do you have to show? I mean, if this was a TV show, you wouldn't say, oh, this isn't fair on, you know, Three's Company, or, like, one of these shows that we used to watch growing up, like, we wouldn't expect to see. I know that influencers are not actors and actresses. Right. It's like reality TV in a way, but it's also complete entertainment. And who says you have to. Like, maybe people don't want that. Like, if I were to put all the, like, annoying moments with my family, like, I don't know who that. Like, what is that giving the world? Why do we need to put that out there to begin with?
- [15:04]
Jo Piazza
True. I don't know. It is entertainment. But I think the big but here is that it doesn't always feel like it, because the scroll of social media is social media. It's also right next to pictures of your friend's new baby or their poodle. It seems like this is often real life, and that is kind of the funhouse mirror situation of this. If we were able to view it just as pure media, we're looking at a digital magazine. We are looking at a TV show. I think there would be a lot less mom guilt and shame involved in it. But we. We're still. We still haven't evolved to look at it like that.
- [15:43]
Joe Piazza
Interesting. I feel like I kind. I mean, maybe because there's a lot about influencer culture in this book that when I first started, like, getting on Instagram, I was shocked by. And I'm wondering if your readers are going to be surprised by, like, I. I consulted a social media person really, really early on, like, I don't know, 10, seven years ago, I don't know, something. And she's like, okay, the first thing you have to do is you have to do a photo shoot, and you have to bring, like, 10 different outfits and you have to pretend that you're filming this all throughout the day. And I'm like, what? So I did this one photo shoot.
- [16:13]
Jo Piazza
Turns out.
- [16:14]
Joe Piazza
I ended up using those photos for years. In fact, sometimes I still use them. I'm like, that was actually kind of a good idea.
- [16:18]
Jo Piazza
Yeah, of course it was.
- [16:19]
Joe Piazza
In the book, you know, Beck says every Thursday is her time to have the kids put on all their beige clothes and like, appear in all these different scenes.
- [16:29]
Jo Piazza
And.
- [16:29]
Joe Piazza
And is that, is that real? I mean, because that is patently not real, right? Presenting as if it's. I mean, I don't know. I don't know where the line is of what you have to say is true or not. Like, would it be better if Bex was like this? Well, I don't. You know what I mean? Like, where is the line?
- [16:47]
Zibby Owens
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- [17:45]
Joe Piazza
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- [17:48]
Zibby Owens
And I can't recommend this anymore.
- [17:50]
Joe Piazza
I'm totally obsessed.
- [17:52]
Zibby Owens
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- [18:25]
Joe Piazza
Friends and family alike.
- [18:26]
Zibby Owens
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- [19:04]
Joe Piazza
Mores?
- [19:05]
Zibby Owens
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- [20:18]
Jo Piazza
There there is no line. That's the thing. It is all a gray area and we're all kind of grappling with that. And that's what I discovered about influencers five years ago too when I first started reporting on them, that they do hire professional photographers and videographers to shoot a ton of content in a single day. I was fascinated by it. I tried to do it. My whole family ended up crying and screaming by hour two like it was done. That was the moment. I'm like, you can't be an influencer girl. Your family will hate you. But and I also still use those pictures to this day.
- [20:47]
Joe Piazza
Right?
- [20:48]
Jo Piazza
I really do. It was a really nice photo shoot, but I talk to a lot of the big influencers and this is how they live their life. It's like, okay, one day a week, two days a month, you're going to shoot all of your reels, all of your content. And maybe you don't have to disclose that, but there are a lot of your followers and Fans who think you're just shooting this in the moment, that this is your real life. And I think they feel very betrayed by that. I mean, I have interviewed a lot of the people who run, like, the Reddit threads, kind of trying to dissect all of these influencer accounts, and they're obsessed with finding out what is real and what is fake. And so I think there is so much curiosity about it, and I get that. One of the things that I only learned at an influencing conference last year before I wrote this book was that you can actually rent influencer spaces, influencer houses. In order to film your content, you don't have to own the perfect kitchen.
- [21:49]
Joe Piazza
Wait, I'm kidding. So it's like a film. Like a film set, and you pretend.
- [21:53]
Jo Piazza
It'S an Airbnb that you pretend is your house. I rented one when we were in Cleveland for the eclipse too, because we looked around and we're like. I saw these inspirational quotes on the walls. We're like, oh, it's an influencer rental house. You rent it by the hour.
- [22:06]
Joe Piazza
Oh, my gosh.
- [22:07]
Jo Piazza
And so it doesn't have to be your space. And it's not just kitchens. It's also, like, bathrooms for get ready with me routines. You'll never see a toilet. They don't have toilets in there. Whereas if I were to put a phone in my bathroom, the mirror would reflect a toilet at some point, probably. And, like, bedrooms for, like, you know, wake up with me and even kids nurseries. So I decided to take that a step further in this book. And I'm like, what if there's a whole shadow house? Which is a very fun thing. But again, the book just kind of teeters on the edge of satire because everything in it really is influenced by something very, very real.
- [22:43]
Joe Piazza
That's crazy. I feel like we need to do a field trip to.
- [22:47]
Jo Piazza
To an influencer house.
- [22:48]
Joe Piazza
To an influencer house or an influencer ranch out west so we can feel like we're not milking the cows or whatever.
- [22:55]
Jo Piazza
Well, I. I gotta say, I just ordered one of those influencer dresses. I ordered the EV Magazine milkmaid dress in order to. I'm gonna wear it to all of my book events. I'll wear it to your party if you have a party in June at your house. And I'm gonna go milk a cow in it.
- [23:10]
Joe Piazza
You are?
- [23:10]
Jo Piazza
Zodch. You are. I sure am. I'm all in. I'm all. I'm all in on this. This promotion.
- [23:16]
Joe Piazza
Oh, my gosh. Well, back to what you were saying. For a second about the masks that we all wear. I mean, to get through the day, we have to pretend that we're fine, right? Just to, like, get through, drop off or whatever. Nobody wants to necessarily hear the dirty laundry, air the dirty laundry, like, hear about all the innermost things until later. So how do we marry? Staying close to people, being authentic and yet not just, like, constantly sort of purging, like, what is with the masks? And do they actually serve us well? Or do they. Do they do us all a disservice and we should all just throw them out?
- [23:53]
Jo Piazza
You know, Again, it's a gray area. I gotta say. There is something to faking it until you make it right, Especially when you're a parent, because it's like, okay, I can't let my kids know when I'm totally falling apart. So there is something to having to put on a mask. What I do truly believe, though, is that we need to take those masks off a little bit more often. With friends and also acquaintances I've tried to get a lot better with. When someone asks me, like, how are you doing? Being really honest about it, Being like, you know what? Not great. I just wrestled a child to the ground and was terrified their, like, shoulder was going to get dislocated from trying to get this ballerina bathing suit off of her. Which, it was very cute. She could be like, it's my ballerina. And I'm like, God, you're so cute when you're so terrible. But I do think that there is something to admitting the highs and the lows and talking about what's working or what's not working. Because when we believe that everyone else's life is perfect, then our expectation gap gets really uncomfortable and we feel like we're doing something wrong. And that's not right because we are all struggling. I mean, you're so good at talking about it. You've been talking about it for so long and in your books with mom. Moms don't have time, right? Being a mom is. And I keep thinking about what Chapel Round said about. About being a mom on the Call Her Daddy podcast recently, that all of her friends are in hell. And it's just a very narrow view because being a mom is terrible in literally one moment and amazing 30 seconds later. And I think we could talk about, you know, that. That dichotomy that it's constantly changing. And I wanted. I wanted to talk about this in. In Everyone Is Lying to youo, which is. I mean, it's a thriller, it's so fun. You can read it if you don't have kids. But I wanted to inject some of this motherhood stuff. Like, her kid is literally under the covers in the morning and wakes her up by biting her big toe, which is something that has also happened to me.
- [25:50]
Joe Piazza
I was like, that is too specific to be fiction. Highly specific.
- [25:54]
Jo Piazza
Highly specific. And she thinks it's their dying basset hound named. Because I always thought that it would be really funny to have a dog named after a 90s teenager like Bethany or Kimberly.
- [26:06]
Joe Piazza
And so I did appreciate all the 90s references.
- [26:10]
Jo Piazza
And then. And then a second later, she's, like, hugging and kissing this baby's belly because it's so cute, and you just can't. Can't not do that. Or she loves her husband and he's awesome, but also he's not working, and that's freaking hard.
- [26:22]
Joe Piazza
Yes, Right.
- [26:23]
Jo Piazza
Full disclosure, my husband got laid off last April. And so we've been dealing with that switch to who is the primary parent and what does that look like in your household? Which I actually think a lot of women are going through right now as we see the rise of the woman breadwinner and trying to co parent through the world being so crazy. So I wanted to get all of that stuff in there, but then on the next page, someone gets murdered in a really grisly way.
- [26:51]
Joe Piazza
Well, there is a line when you talk about that, that you say about the husband's layoff. We're not going to acknowledge that this has all shifted. And yet it has, because there's something about airing it and saying, okay, well, I do have to go to this conference because I am supporting our family. In fact, I feel like in the book, like, money is a big through line, right? Cause both girls in college were working in the cafeteria, and they. You said that. I think you said something like adding street cred to the sorority, like, to the Tri Delts or something like that. In fact, so much so that Lizzie, like, asks Becks when she's talking about, like, how she's so rich now, she's like, okay, like, what are we talking? You know, like, how much are you getting paid? Like, they can ask each other this. And so, like, money is something that I feel like they're both wrestling with, whether struggling or just seeing the effects of, like, what can money get you? And then actually, since it's Bex who has gotten all this money, but is not necessarily so happy, like, it doesn't bring happiness, so to speak, like, you can get what you've been missing and yet it can destroy everything as well.
- [27:58]
Jo Piazza
Yeah, exactly. Well, no, it's not rambling at all. Because I think that what we also don't talk about when we talk about influencers or I don't think that we talk about this. No, nearly enough is class and money generally. And so what I have learned about influencers over the years is that it is a very, very rare thing for an influencer to be making gonzo bananas money. Okay. I mean, that is like, it's almost like comparing it to the top 1% in the country. The majority of influencers or people aspiring to be influencers are kind of just getting by. And then you have a group of kind of like upper middle class influencers who are doing really well and have turned this into a media business. And then you have the gonzo banana ones who are celebrities. But we just don't, we don't talk enough about actually how they make their income, what are they actually getting paid, or even amongst our friends, like, what do you, what do you make? And how do, how do you make your money, life work? There's a great substack out there called the purse, where they dissect people's just their, their savings accounts, their income, like, what they spend. And I'm so obsessed with it because I'm just dying to know how other people live and how, like, how, how much makes. Makes someone else's life move and work. And that's what I wanted to express with Bex and Lizzie, because also, even though they've been estranged for so long, they do fall right back into that pattern where they're very comfortable. It's like, I'm gonna ask you the uncomfortable thing. How much money are you making and what does that feel like?
- [29:22]
Joe Piazza
There was a book, because I had this author on my podcast, and because it's early in the morning and my brain is not working right now, I can't bring it back. But there were receipts every day of how the fictitious character was spending all her money and. Okay, I'll think of it and I'll share.
- [29:39]
Jo Piazza
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I want to know. I want to know because I'm fascinated by money. My friends and I, actually, in the past, this is something that's changed in the past, like two years. We're very open about money. It's like, what do you, what is your, what is your new salary? Like, how much are you spending on this? And I think that's really healthy because I don't think that money should be a taboo topic, especially among women.
- [29:58]
Joe Piazza
Well, part of author life essentially is also becoming sort of many influencers. Right? All authors now are required to, quote, have a platform, you know, talk about other people's books, you know, post about their own books, figure out how to make content. It's not so easy. I feel like a lot of authors feel very intimidated by this new demand because, of course, this is a different skill set than writing, which is completely different. And yet it's now part of the job.
- [30:25]
Jo Piazza
It's fully required. I mean, I don't. I hustle my butt off on social media to promote these books and through a substack and through my own podcast. And if. If I didn't do it, I don't think I'd sell books, to be honest. I don't think that there is enough tradition except for very few rare books that are kind of anointed by the publishing world. There is not enough marketing and publicity space out there. It's just not going to happen unless you are shouting from the goddamn rooftops. I mean, we talked about Sicilian Inheritance last year and it just came out in paperback.
- [30:57]
Joe Piazza
Congratulations.
- [30:58]
Jo Piazza
Thank you. And we've sold 100,000 copies of that book. Oh, my God.
- [31:02]
Joe Piazza
Good for you. That's amazing.
- [31:04]
Jo Piazza
Thank you.
- [31:05]
Joe Piazza
That's amazing.
- [31:06]
Jo Piazza
We just hit that number. But it is because I have been a massive media whore hustle machine for it. And I want to share that with other writers and other authors who are like, this is so exhausting. This is really hard. And I'm like, I know. I see you and I am you. And I'm doing this on a daily basis and I don't necessarily like it either. But if I want my book in reader's hands, I know this is what I have to do.
- [31:29]
Joe Piazza
Okay, but that is a lot of copies to sell. That is not normal. Just because you get on social media, to anyone listening, you will not sell 100,000 copies necessarily of your book that is like, wildly successful. So you. And you are uniquely great at this and have a lifetime of media connections and whatever. So I just don't want people comparing and feeling like a total.
- [31:48]
Jo Piazza
No, no, no, no, no, no. No one should compare. Also, I mean, I'm totally burnt out from it too, but I've also been like, I've been a journalist for 25 years. I can place stories myself. I can get podcast guest machine works, and still I do more on marketing and publicity than I do actually writing my books. And I wish that it were the opposite, but I think it is a rare, rare small group of authors that it can be the opposite. For sad, sad, sad. But, I mean, that's why what you do, I think, is so remarkable with your books. You are a massive marketing and publicity machine for your authors, and that means so much. And I think the traditional publishing houses do try. Right? But there's so many books. You're publishing so many books. There's only so much space.
- [32:35]
Joe Piazza
I know. If only they weren't all so good. There's so many good books.
- [32:39]
Jo Piazza
There's so many good books. There's also so many good books out there. Right. So it's really hard to find books, which is why I love promoting books that I love, even on my platforms, just to help people find them.
- [32:50]
Joe Piazza
Yep, agreed. Well, I really enjoyed this book. I truly did. It's, again, one of my favorites. And I've read, I think, almost every book of yours have. I read every book. I think so.
- [32:59]
Jo Piazza
I think so. Well. And I get to see you in July. I'm coming to the bookstore.
- [33:03]
Joe Piazza
Oh, amazing. Oh, I hope I do.
- [33:04]
Jo Piazza
Oh, yeah.
- [33:05]
Joe Piazza
Okay.
- [33:05]
Jo Piazza
Yeah, yeah. My big LA event is with you.
- [33:08]
Joe Piazza
Oh, yay. Oh, I'm so excited to have you, Jo. Congratulations. I can't stop thinking about this. I love these characters, and I really want this to be a movie. So I'm hoping that that is in the works.
- [33:20]
Jo Piazza
Oh, we're working on it right now.
- [33:21]
Joe Piazza
Okay, good, good, good, good. Okay. All right. Thank you so much, Joan. Thank you. Okay, bye.
- [33:27]
Zibby Owens
Thank you for listening to Totally Booked with Zibby, formerly Moms don't have time to read books. If you loved the show, tell a friend, leave a review. Follow me on Instagram Ippy Owens and spread the word. Thanks so much. Oh, and buy the books.
- [33:49]
Jo Piazza
This is not a drill. You can get the new iPhone 16e with Apple Intelligence for just $49.99 when you switch to Boost Mobile. Wait, that's the actual fire alarm? We need to go visit your nearest Boost mobile store for full offer details. Apple Intelligence require iOS 18.1 or later restrictions apply.
- [34:04]
Tide Ad
Did you know Tide has been upgraded to provide an even better clean in cold water? Tide is specifically designed to fight any stain you throw at it. Even in cold butter. Yep. Chocolate ice cream.
- [34:16]
Joe Piazza
Sure thing.
- [34:17]
Tide Ad
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- [34:34]
Jo Piazza
Acast powers the world's best podcasts. Here's a show that we recommend.
- [34:42]
Marc Maron
Hey, folks, it's Marc Maron from WTF. It's been more than 15 years now, and I'm still talking to all kinds of people in my garage every week. Sometimes it's Bill Burr, sometimes it's Ariana Grande. Is she just looks at me because.
- [34:56]
Jo Piazza
She'S always going like, dad, it's not.
- [34:57]
Marc Maron
That big a deal.
- [34:58]
Jo Piazza
Yeah.
- [34:58]
Marc Maron
I go, sorry, I lost my temper. I go, I still love you. You know, Daddy has issues.
- [35:04]
Joe Piazza
Are you afraid of it?
- [35:05]
Jo Piazza
Of death? Well, I don't know.
- [35:06]
Marc Maron
I think about it all the time.
- [35:08]
Joe Piazza
How are we here already?
- [35:09]
Marc Maron
Listen to WTF with Marc Maron twice a week on your favorite podcast app. Or get more WTF with a WTF plus subscription. Just go to wtfpod.com and click on WTF.
- [35:25]
Jo Piazza
Acast helps creators launch, grow, and monetize their podcasts everywhere. Acast.com.