Dear ____, the email reads, I want to start with something that stood out immediately. Praise, praise, praise, praise, praise . . . and yet, your rankings are low and I can help.

If you’re an author, you likely receive countless of these breathy emails every week. They come from “agents” and “publishing houses” claiming to want to represent you, from “famous authors” who just want to chat and get to know you, from “book club hosts” and “awards programs,” and increasingly from “marketing experts” who are ready to take your money to help you optimize your SEO (search engine optimization).

The originators of these scams have been working for a while now to perfect the best way to extract dollars from authors—and SEO, my friends, takes the cake. It makes sense, of course, because if I’m an author, I probably suspect that Elena Ferrente and and Donna Tartt and Ann Patchett aren’t really emailing me. I have been educated enough to know that an email coming from elena.ferrante.writer@gmail.com isn’t real, and I’ve been getting better at identifying fishy emails. But SEO is different. Marketing is different. These offers come with real deliverables, and entire companies are springing up to provide authors with actual services. It’s just that those services’ real value is questionable, are the fact that they’re completely AI-generated begs the question of what authors are actually paying for.

Publishers like me have taken to warning our authors. Don’t even read these emails. “Delete, delete, delete,” I say. Writer Beware has so much info on this, including an impersonation list (I’m on it), but still, every day, and I mean literally every day, I get an email from an author asking me if some grift that landed in their inbox is real.

More problematically on the SEO front, my authors have started sending me updates they want us to make to their metadata (description, keywords, etc.) that I recognize as AI-generated, from people they’ve hired to do their SEO. Recently, one author informed me that she’d paid $2100 to someone named Vivian Marshall, after I probed her about her very AI-looking requested updates.

Working with a couple of my authors, I discovered that “Vivian Marshall” has an IP address originating in Nigeria. “Vivian Marshall” might be a Nigerian man, or a whole crew of people, depending on how successful they’ve been. In Nigeria, the average earnings are $50-55/week, so $2100 for a few hours of work is very enticing indeed. And our author pool here in America, with high amounts of disposable income, susceptibility to flattery, and longing for more visibility for their books, is the perfect target.

Vivian Marshall (and the Industry of Fake)

“Vivian Marshall” is an attractive white female book marketing specialist from the UK. “She” has a legitimate-seeming email address: vivian@vivianmarshall.com. “Her” site is comprehensive, possibly impressive if you don’t know what you’re looking for. But it does have a few tells.

1. “She” will only communicate with you via email.

2. “Her” photo requires a second look. If you zoom in on the window, there’s a jagged edge of blue there that suggests some AI work, and what is that big round thing outside the window? And doesn’t that lamp look a little wrongly proportioned? But never mind, she’s a trustworthy-looking white woman who wears glasses, so we’re good.

3. “Her” Facebook page just went up in June. “She” has 32 friends. And “Vivian” has no personal or backstory whatsoever.

Using a service called Pimeyes (that allows you to upload a photo of a person and then it gives you “hits” on where this image lives online), I tried to see what I might find out about “Vivian.” The results came up with multiple hits across two single sites online: Skool.com and Swingers.theadultlife.com. Skool.com is a community space that has a mixed reputation, including hiring and paying people to write positive reviews. Swingers, well, you don’t have to click through to guess what it is. If I had to guess, I’d say the Nigerian team pulled a real woman’s image from Swingers, then used it to create “Vivian,” posting some reviews on Skool.com to give “her” some legitimacy. I imagine this person is a real woman living somewhere in the UK, none the wiser that her likeness is being used to prey on authors.

Just to test Pimeyes’ accuracy, I put in my own image and got a bunch of hits for sites that correspond with my real-world activity:

How to Recognize a Predatory Email

Emails like the one “Vivian” sent to my authors follow a template, and they go like this, courtesy of Claude, which spit this out in a matter of 15 seconds:

1. Warm personal opener
Addresses the author by first name, references something personal (hometown, family) to feel individually researched rather than mass-sent.

2. “Look what I found” stats dump
Presents the book’s real, verifiable numbers — star rating (4.7), review count (79), an award (IPPY Bronze, regional book award finalist), a critic quote (Kirkus) — framed as if the sender just discovered them, not pulled from a database. This is the personalization engine: real facts borrowed to make a form letter feel bespoke.

3. The “three specific things” beat
A structured (sometimes literally numbered) list of reasons the book stood out — audience fit, thematic relevance, market angle. Gives the illusion of close reading.

4. Planted emotional proof
A quoted reader reaction dropped in casually, positioned to look like something stumbled across rather than composed for the pitch.

5. Elevated closing flourish
A writerly sentence that reflects the book’s own theme back at the author (”the healing powers of truth and love can transcend...”) — flattery disguised as literary insight.

6. Single-word call to action
In the case of the case study I’m writing about today, Vivian Marshall wrote:
I would love to put together a proper proposal for you, specific to your book and this moment, no fluff. If any of this resonates, simply reply with “interested” and I’ll get it to you.

The emails you get with all that specificity are coming from AI—100% of the time. The person on the other end of these grifts doesn’t need to have read your book. AI is doing everything for them. Regardless of any feelings I have about AI—whether we or the industry should use it for things like improving SEO—is beside the point here. The point is that paying someone any amount of money for this service, never mind $2100, is falling for a scam.

Catfishing without the Romance

Authors often tell me that the emails are “so personal,” which is why they give them a second glace. They so want to believe that someone loved their book, thinks it’s deserving of more attention, wants to support it to get more visibility.

“Flattery will get you everywhere,” Mae West popularized, and apparently it’s true. But authors should get into the habit of seeing any and every flattering email solicitation as a direct line to their wallets.

One of my authors sent me a link to the show Catfish, telling me that it helped her better understand how these impersonation scams work. The episodes on Catfish show us what is perhaps the most common predation—using “love” to ensnare victims to get them to send money. It’s really sad, of course, because the victims are so desperate for emotional connection, they think they’re in love with someone they’ve never met. They send money they don’t have to spare. The show gives the victims the chance to confront their con artists. They ask, “Was anything you said real?”

If you watch the first two episode clips, you’ll see the first con artist seems to have a guilty conscience, or maybe doesn’t want to hurt the woman, so he says (lies) that yes, what he said was “real.” The second con artist, who’d posed as a woman to scam a man named Adam, is more honest: “No, nothing was real.” This is how he makes a living, he explains. It’s how he supports his family.

Does Is Matter Who “Vivian” Is if Her Results Are Real?

Whoever invested in Vivian’s site put a lot of work into it, and, in fact, they did deliver something. The SEO package my author shared with me includes new descriptive copy, revised BISAC category codes, and new keywords.

But comparing the two descriptions side-by-side, I could make the argument that the original is better, or equally good. Just to see, I ran “Vivian’s” description through Pangram, which reported back that it was likely 100% AI-generated. The $2100 aside, futzing with categories and keywords is not going to move the needle on book sales if it’s not partnered with something like Amazon ads. And again, the author could have used AI on her own to get these same results.

Another important point is that this author’s book is five years old. SEO is promoted to authors as some sort of code to crack, or holy grail even, as if a better description, or the right category, will send your book sales into a different stratosphere. It will not. “Vivian” promised my author more visibility. The services included in “her” proposal are Goodreads and Listopia campaigns, and Amazon growth—so basically getting my author more reviews.

For the record, I have not seen a direct correlation between better SEO and more reviews on better SEO alone. It takes doing Amazon ads and other intensive marketing, some of which “Vivian” has promised in “her” proposal. My author has already paid “Vivian,” so there’s no going back now. We can only wait and see what the results end up being. But I am very very suspect, and even if my author were to get a few new reviews, or more visibility on Goodreads and Listopia, the math won’t pan out. To recoup $2100, she’d have to sell 600-700 print books or 400-450 ebooks. That’s not going to happen with the services “Vivian” is offering.

If my author could sit across from “Vivian” the way Catfish’s victims sit across from theirs, I wonder what she would ask. Probably some variation of the same question: Was anything you said real? We are hardwired for praise, validation, to be seen, and one of AI’s strongest features is its capacity to scam, manipulate, and exploit our emotions. I hate to tell authors just how cynical they have to be, but this is our new reality. Assume nothing is real. Do due diligence. Check references. Don’t send money without knowing who the person really is.

It’s negative times, and during negative times you feel it. On the hearts and minds of everyone is negativity. Everything reinforces how bad things are. Things used to be better, and everyone wants you to know it.

I was 23 when I started in book publishing in 2000, and for a while I had the luxury of working and learning without anyone telling me how much better it used to be. I worked at a small publishing house where no one had institutional memory of better times, and the Internet was nascent enough that no one was telling me how much everything sucked all the time.

But that changed when I moved to Seal Press in 2004 because now I was working with people who’d been around. Publishing professionals who’d worked in the Book Publishing Mecca known as New York City, where everything about publishing was decidedly better. They’d come up in publishing in the 1980s, and things were better then, too.

Seal Press was sometimes confusing to East Coast publishing execs. They didn’t totally get our feminist left coast sensibility, and couldn’t see how a book called Full Frontal Feminism by a cussing twenty-six-year-old could possibly be a good acquisition for the company. But I was a twenty-six-year-old emerging feminist who liked crude-mouthed women my age, and when I pushed to acquire it, my boss backed me. Jessica Valenti went on to become one of Seal Press’s most important authors.

I was living in a different reality from the higher-ups because they spent all their time catastrophizing, while I was just on the ride. I heard how bad things were from all corners—established writers who bemoaned the new blogging craze, and didn’t like social media, while emerging writers embraced it full on. The executives didn’t always get the list I was building. Too crass, not literary enough, too many sex books, too many trans books.

As a young editor, I stacked up my acquisitions list with exciting feminist authors—Jessica Valenti, , , , . I forged on while they remembered the good ole days—when books sold more copies, when things were easier, when things were better.

I left traditional publishing for lots of reasons, but one of them was that I was surrounded by a sky-is-falling attitude. I stopped being able to take the risks I wanted to take in favor of P&Ls that penciled out with hopes and prayers. Books weren’t selling as well as our new corporate parent wanted them to, so the solution was more “big books” and hardcovers, when that was never what had made Seal Press thrive.

I started She Writes Press in 2012 and never looked back, but this ushered in a whole new wave of criticism. Here was an author-invested business model that was encroaching upon The Way Things Have Always Been Done. People entrenched in their ways really didn’t like it. Others didn’t understand it. When I was presented with an Innovator Award in 2017 from BISG (Book Industry Study Group), an editor at the Big Five commended me after the ceremony at The Harvard Club in downtown Manhattan, but about the fact of being author-invested, he asked, Why do you have to be public about it?

The implication was just charge authors, but don’t talk about it. Don’t sully our space with your ideas of leveling the playing field for authors. That’s not The Way Things Have Always Been Done.

Fast forward to a couple weeks ago, when I delivered a keynote to the graduating class of the Denver Publishing Institute. A central part of my talk was to tune out the voices that tell you how bad everything is. I shared another story I carry with me from my early days at She Writes Press, when I was trying to secure distribution and one of the execs looked at me and asked, “Why would you want to be a publisher?!”

Like it was a dirty word. I was thirty-four years old, and all I could see was what was ahead of me. By contrast, all she could see was what was behind her. We were standing on two very different squares.

To be optimistic isn’t the same as sticking your head in the sand, and I’m not here to try to convince anyone that things aren’t hard right now. I’m not a denialist and I’m not naïve. But I’m also so tired of reading about how shitty everything is—in book publishing and here on Substack—from people who are longing for an industry that’s not going to spring back to its former iteration of itself, or from people who put all their eggs in the Substack basket believing that any one platform will save us.

This week, a couple people sent me an article that’s going viral called “The Real Reason that Substack is Collapsing.” The gist of this post is that Substack used to be so much better—a few years ago. It seems even our nostalgia timelines are getting shorter in our current attention economy.

It’s not my experience that Substack is collapsing, and not everyone is using it the same way. I made a decision around six months in never to put any of my content behind a paywall. My subscriptions have gone steadily upward, and I’m pleasantly surprised when people pay. Rather than $8/month, I charge $5/month, and just $50/year. I didn’t come to the platform with the expectation that it would replace or even supplement my income. It makes sense to me that people who joined thinking that Substack could be their job are disappointed.

The post’s author suspects that his numbers are down because of subscription fatigue, and shares his decline in paid posts as evidence:

By contrast (and interesting given that our metrics are so similar), I’ll share that my paid subscriptions climbed up slowly but steadily over this same period:

I’m certain some of my readers decide to pay when they realize they’re reading me every week and just want to support me. Awesome, but not expected. Subscribers also come and go, but I didn’t come to Substack for the money. I came here to have a voice, and to interact with writers. If I lost all my paid subscribers, I’d stay as long as people are engaging and interacting.

In the past, I’ve blogged regularly on other platforms—on Huffington Post and on SheWrites.com—and I never got paid. I used to write regularly (and get paid) for Publishers Weekly, but I never had any insight into how many people saw my writing, and the comments were practically nonexistent.

And look, I get it. Not everyone is thriving in book publishing, or on Substack. But a counternarrative is necessary the more catastrophizing I read, and I want to spread more widely the message that it’s not as bad as people will have you believe. For instance, She Writes Press is growing, and so are other presses in the hybrid space. Our submissions have only continued to soar since the pandemic, and we just hired a new editor. So, where some parts of the industry are contracting, others are expanding. To see this, it does require us widen our lens a bit, as book publishing will have us believe it exists on a two- by thirteen-mile strip called Manhattan, but we’re bigger than that, and some of us are doing very cool things outside of the City.

Also, generally speaking, beware of clickbait and singular anecdotes that profess to speak for the whole. We live in a content era designed to trigger you by posts written by people who know a little bit about some things. Like a post I read just this morning (and choose not to link to) that suggests that publishing will not survive AI and that editors don’t have it in them to put up the fight against AI Slop. I disagree, and I reject the authority with which some content creators put forward The Things They Know To Be True. Fatigue with content creators like this might explain the real drop off in subscribers to a given newsletter, but it’s also contributing to readers recalibrating their value metrics to be more heavily weighted toward writers who write with authenticity and heart.

Publishing will survive AI because humans gravitate to other humans. We are curious about people, not machines. There is and will continue to be a premium on human creativity, and writers who are not in it for the love of the craft will only get so far. People using AI to write for them will eventually flame out because true success in writing can’t be sustained by statistical pattern predictors. It can only be sustained by heart.

After publishing this post, a friend sent me this anecdotal article: California indie publishers thrive: Far from New York, distinctive literary houses rise, so I’m sharing and documenting here!

Back when I was fielding memoir submissions for Seal Press in the late 2000s, I developed a sixth sense. An internal lie detector, if you will. I’d get a book proposal that was so unbelievable that it was both cringey and funny. My colleagues and I would read parts of the most egregious proposals aloud at editorial meetings. Call it what you will, but it was a way to blow off steam.

People often say, If it’s too good to be true . . . But you rarely hear the opposite: If it’s too bad to be true . . . We certainly see both playing out when it comes to memoir.

I remember one proposal that actually made my heart catch in my chest, both because the story was so terrible and because I didn’t believe it. What the author had survived was too much. Too many traumas, too tightly packed together, too frantic in their delivery on the page, as if shouting at me to pay attention, to listen, to see her. I started calling proposals like these the Trauma Olympics, as in the author was wanting to win them. I warned writers I worked with against this kind of writing because it doesn’t pass the sniff test. Readers want real stories, but people’s shit detectors are strong—and how you unfold a trauma narrative, and the ensuant resilience part of the story, matters a great deal.

I’m just a single voice in this publishing sea, however, and writers often tell me that the worse and more godawful a person’s experience, the more likely it seems they are to get a book deal.

They aren’t wrong.

This is a delicate topic, especially because I’m entering it this week on the heels of Jason Arday’s death (apparently by suicide though that’s not been reported). Arday’s memoir, Great and Unfortunate Things, came out on Tuesday. He died on Friday.

There is much to unpack about what happened leading up to his death, from accusations of plagiarism in his PhD dissertation and subsequent publications, to a hysterical public pile-on, to his (reported by him which I could not verify) $1.4-million book advance, to the online excoriation that apparently led him to take his own life. (Arday is Black, and I’m intentionally not writing about the race dynamics at play in what happened to him, but they’re worth reading and knowing about.)

Yesterday in The Atlantic,* Tyler Austin Harper wrote:

The online hive mind, in particular, was brutal until the moment of Arday’s death, at which point the collective swarm did an about-face. The same platform that loosed an algorithmically accelerated torrent of abuse is now dominated by kind remembrances and mawkishness. I find the whole pageantry grotesque.

Though this is the worst and most brutal outcome, Great and Unfortunate Things was already gaining traction to become the next big memoir scandal. Harper wrote that the Arday story was “ultimately a niche academic scandal,” which may have been true, but the memoir scandal was just breaking. Its publication turned out to be his Waterloo.

On Fact-Checking and Memoir

Earlier this month, I spoke on background with Anna Silman, a reporter at The Wall Street Journal,* about Whitney Frick, who’s acquired and edited Belle Burden’s Strangers and Amy Griffin’s The Tell. Both authors have been accused of lying—Burden more for omission, and Griffin for stealing another woman’s story and publishing it as her own. The profile on Frick ran earlier this month, and my contribution is my assertion that there’s “pressure on memoirists to push the envelope and find ever-more-shocking traumas to mine.”

I’ve been working with memoirists for a long long time, and of course people have lived through shockingly terrible experiences. The trauma is real, and readers are moved by trauma narratives. I believe trauma narratives are helpful for both writers and readers. They support readers to feel less alone. They in fact save lives.

But, in rewarding authors time and again for pushing ever more deeply into trauma, the publishing industry has also created an incentive structure for writers to push that envelope. To the point of lying? Yes, I believe so.

When Silman interviewed me for the Whitney Frick story, she asked me if Frick had overlooked anything about The Tell, specifically. Should she have known something was amiss? Should she or the publisher have done more?

My answer was no. Griffin maintains her innocence, having filed a big ole SLAPP suit against the woman whose story she’s alleged to have stolen to prove it, but it’s hard to say what her editor or publisher should have or could have done differently. Griffin asserts this is her story. And unlike with Jason Arday, the facts aren’t unbelievable. The story just seemingly don’t belong to her.

The increase in the number of memoir scandals of late has many people asking questions about fact-checking. Publishers could implement a fact-checking checklist for due diligence, but what would these facts be without being too intrusive? I think it’s a worthwhile exercise to Google one’s own author. You can see if the broad facts of their story align with public information. But it’s not these kinds of facts that get authors into hot water; rather, it’s things that require corroboration from others, such as some people in Arday’s life now coming forward to say that he wasn’t mute as a child as he asserted he was, and that he could in fact read and write before age eighteen. An editor’s job is not to interrogate their authors, and once fact-checking becomes investigatory work, the author-editor relationship is kaput.

So, should Simon & Schuster have done more? Here’s their statement on the matter in The New York Times:*

“We have worked closely with Professor Jason Arday on ‘Great and Unfortunate Things’ since acquiring it and can speak to the professionalism and integrity he has brought to every stage of the publication,” the statement said. “He worked closely with his co-writer, as well as our editorial and legal teams, to carefully research, write and corroborate the narrative.”

Will this statement come back and bite S&S in the butt? Probably not. The Big Five have miraculous Teflon, as strong as any politician’s. But my guess is that the legal team asked very few questions, and that the narrative was not in fact carefully corroborated. If it were, we would not be here.

On the Lies People Tell

We are living in an era of untruth. Our president can’t string together two sentences without lying. The most powerful titans of business speak out of both sides of their mouths. The disinformation machine makes us second-guess ourselves and Truth every day.

Memoir will continue to be embroiled in scandals because truth is a continuum, and all memoir is and must be, to some extent, fabricated. Dialogue is recreated, scenes are resurrected from unreliable memories, and the filter of our own experience will render our takeaways profoundly different from someone else’s.

In The Art of Memoir, Mary Karr tackles Truth as well as anyone I’ve read on the topic:

Truth may have become a foggy, fuzzy nether area. But untruth is simple: making up events with the intention to deceive.

I’ve come back to this often, especially when contemplating recent scandals and authors’ motivations. Jason Arday, by all accounts, seems to have been a lovely human being. It’s clear that he fabricated many parts of his story, but we don’t know why.

People lie, all the time and every day. Some people lie for attention and adoration. Some people lie pathologically, disconnected from the realm of truth. Some people embellish or exaggerate as a hallmark of their personality. (Added this line here due to a comment I want to spotlight below, which is that many people come to believe their own lies, for reasons that are psychologically complex.) Authors are not exempt, of course, and publication itself may be a motivation to lie.

How Can Publishers Do Better?

People are comparing this latest scandal to James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces 2006 memoir scandal, for good reason. Frey’s claim that he had two root canals without anesthesia was, as written, implausible to many readers. Similarly, running 600 miles in six days is a bridge too far for most of Arday’s readers—and there are countless other either exaggerations or untruths that people have documented.

People are rightly asking the question of how we got here. There are many reasons he was elevated and celebrated, many reasons he got the book deal he got. I believe, as Tyler Austin Harper suggested in his Atlantic piece, that the institutions (academia and book publishing) are partly to blame.

I can’t speak to how academia can do better, but in book publishing, there needs to be a mechanism for editors to be able to raise questions with their superiors about “untruths.” I think editors who actually read the books they acquire have that sixth sense lie detector well honed, but they might not know how to flag something as a problem, especially if the author is famous, or particularly celebrated, or a big catch for the publishing house. Once a publisher has paid a lot of money for a book, cutting its losses isn’t really on the table.

This is why we saw such different outcomes with the recent cancelation of Jerry Falade’s crime thriller, Call Me, I’ll Hide the Body, while Simon & Schuster forged ahead with H.M. Wolfe’s Daggermouth. Call Me, I’ll Hide the Body had just been acquired, so no money was out the door yet, whereas Daggermouth’s publication was just days away. Those books were printed, preorders were rolling in. Simon & Schuster stood by its author, as it did with Jason Arday, for financial reasons.

Only once was I in a position to cancel a book for plagiarism when I was at Seal Press. And the stakes were low, comparatively. We did not recoup the advance from that author because she didn’t have the money. The entire saga, though a big deal in-house, never got any kind of media attention.

Now, we live in a “gotcha” culture where cancelation and shit-talking and speculative Substack posts garner lots of likes and followers. I’ve been participant in this, so I understand the drive there too. I wrote about Amy Griffin because I don’t believe her. Other people have felt the same way about Jason Arday—but now too many people pushed too far and he’s dead.

When I saw the news about Arday, it hit me hard, mainly because who among us doesn’t participate in this dynamic of self-righteousness and blame-casting? We do it, and people suffer. We do it, and we want accountability. In Arday’s case, that accountability has been delivered by his death.

If I could do anything to change publishing on this front, I’d turn back time to when I was telling authors they didn’t have to win the Trauma Olympics to get a memoir published. But turning back time isn’t a fix, and neither is fact-checking, or more editorial courage. The incentive structure that made Arday’s story irresistible to S&S is the same one that will make the next story too irresistible to pass up.

When Roxane Gay was a guest on Memoir Nation, she said that readers are greedy. They want everything—and publishing has risen to meet that demand. I don’t see how to unravel readers’ insatiability to want to know the worst things that have ever happened to someone, or how to ensure that those worst things that ever happened are true. Jason Arday will be but a name we’ll recall, as someone who paid the ultimate price.

*I realize some of these posts are behind paywalls, so sorry about that. I hyperlink them here for citation and credit purposes.

Book publishers have an interesting job. We do a lot of things, but above all else, we are author therapists, author whisperers, and author wranglers. In my work with authors, I let them know up front that the place we’re most likely to tangle, if we do, is on cover design.

As such, I want to use this post to get under the hood on cover design, and to offer some guidance on how to give feedback. Increasingly I’m finding, due to AI, that the cover design process has gotten a little more fraught. This is an example-heavy post, since my goal here is to offer context and guidance for any author who finds themselves staring at cover concepts and trying to sort through which one to choose or how to move forward.

When I first got into publishing, I didn’t realize that a major part of my job would be “liaison.” Editors and publishers and agents are just that—we are liaisons to other people in the author’s orbit. We interpret and champion and advocate for our authors, but we also push back when authors are being unreasonable, or when they’re inadvertently getting in their own way. Where covers are concerned, I want my authors to love their covers, and I have another equally pressing mandate, which is to hold the line on professional standards and to make our sales reps love our covers, too.

So yes, if I wrangle with authors, it’s going to be over their covers. I warn about this in advance, and impress upon them the reasons I’ll go to the mat with them from time to time. I’ll never do so without explaining why. I see tough conversations about covers as an expression of a publisher’s care for their authors and for their publishing programs. You really don’t want a publisher who will roll over and let you just have any cover you want without discussion.

We all know the idiom, Don’t judge a book by its cover, but of course that’s absurd. I found this fun quote from production designer and costume designer Ingrid Weir: “Why would they have book covers if we aren’t supposed to judge the book by them? It makes no sense.”

Exactly.

Why Liaise?

Before we get to the meat of it, the liaison thing merits a bit of explanation. Sometimes authors get their designs and ask if they can be in touch with their designer or illustrator directly. The reason publishing houses don’t allow this is because your liaison’s job is interpret.

As a publisher, and formerly as an editor, I have the relationship with my authors. My role with my authors is to champion them, stick up for what they want, and distill any feedback to the design team. I serve a similar role on behalf of my design team, which is to stand up for them, and to push back on authors when they’re not making choices we can stand by. Publishers have to tend to multiple masters—their authors, their own team, and the people who sell and buy their books.

And while it’s possible for designers and authors to do this work together, of course, when you publish with a house, it’s important to remember that the designer is working for the house and not the author. As such, the liaison is in place to be a bridge—to hopefully get to a place where everyone with a stake is happy: author, publisher, editor, designer, agent, sales team, book buyers, and ultimately readers.

On Good Feedback

At most publishing companies, you’re presented with cover concepts, affectionately called “cover comps” in the business. These arrive via email from your liaison—usually your editor and sometimes your publisher, depending on the size of the house and their process. Sometimes these are quite polished, nearly finished cover designs, and sometimes they’re rougher (especially in the case of illustrated covers, when we present sketches well ahead of anything refined).

I’ve struggled over the years about how much direction to give authors about how to give feedback because I don’t want to impose my thoughts up front. I want authors to receive the imagery without my voice in their ear. We won’t send authors covers we don’t stand behind, so in a perfect world, authors choose one of our concepts and we celebrate.

But we do not live in a perfect world, and of course we welcome author feedback, and we expect some back-and-forthing.

As feedback is expected, here are some best practices:

1. Be explicit. If you’re sent five comps, the goal is to narrow the choices down to one, possibly two, if you’re truly torn. Make sure to give the image number that corresponds with the file (cover 1, 2, 3) or attach a screenshot so it’s abundantly clear which concept you’re choosing.

2. Consider the elements: the background, the image, and the type. These elements are usually (not always but usually) interchangeable. So if you love an image, but not the background palette, that’s an easy fix. If you love everything about a cover (composition, image, background) but prefer the typography from another comp, that’s an easy fix, too. Our Art Director, Julie Metz, often says that our cover comps are like a Chinese menu—which means you get set of choices and you can choose parts of what you like from different categories and columns.

3. Bullet-point your feedback. Few authors do this, but man do we love it. Authors can be a wordy bunch, and sometimes the feedback I get makes me feel like an investigator looking for a clue in a sea of evidence. To distill your feedback, go back to the above-mentioned elements: background, image, type.

Let me share an example of excellent cover feedback. When we got this, Julie suggested I share it with all our authors, so here’s my opportunity.

In this case, the author received sketches because the book is illustrated. But if this were a photographic rendering, the method of breaking out the feedback by element is a beautiful model.

Here are the concepts she was presented with:

And here’s what she wrote:

COVER FEEDBACK

I love this artist and her style—perfect for a chick lit cover. I feel like this accurately mirrors the feel for the story we’re telling, and the readers it’s targeting.

Note from Brooke: always a nice touch to lead with what you like.

I understand that this is a rough draft, and because I’m told that my feedback is welcome, I will ask for the world and settle for Cleveland (No disrespect to Cleveland).

Note from Brooke: a mindset to live by!

Please proceed with Illustration #4, with the following requests...

Elements

• Typeface: No change. Love this font and layout.
• Lady on Left: brunette; black pants (She is always wearing black)
• Lady on Right: redhead; a little more defined outline of her left breast (our right) She’s small breasted, so not larger, just a little more defined.
Background: I’d like this to be a nighttime scene, and I loved the background the artist created in the illustration below––the deep blue.

• The scene is a backyard, with hanging solar lights. Please add some twinkling lights. Stylize however you’d like.

Bench—can we add some slats, so it looks more like a swinging bench? I’m including this stock photo only to show one option of the three horizontal slats.

Here’s what we sent back to her as a result of her clear direction:

Her requested changes to Round 2:

1) I choose the white title
2) Please pop the overall colors
3) In the title, please make the capital I and the apostrophe in “I’M” fatter.

Which led us to our final cover:

This is a pretty typical process, by the way, to have the author give high-level feedback that takes us to Round 2, and then the goal from Round 2 to the next to be to get to Final.

This is not how it always goes! But the purpose of this show-and-tell is to give some insight into feedback and process when it goes well.

On the challenges of visual feedback and AI

I understand the impulse on the part of authors, especially those who are visually oriented, to offer visual feedback. Another job I have as liaison is to intercept visual feedback and decide whether or not I will share it with the design team. Usually I don’t. One of the reasons I don’t is because of respect I have for designers.

Sometimes authors aren’t thinking about the designer’s hard work, or how taking someone’s file and marking it up with your own changes is a lot like taking an artist’s canvas and drawing on it with your crayons. If that sounds harsh, I’m sorry—but this is really how it feels to me sometimes.

These days, AI has escalated our challenges enormously because more and more authors are feeding their ideas into AI and sending back visual concepts that leave us at a complete loss for how to move forward.

When I wrote about this previously, one commenter asked, “If [visual feedback] helps communication, what’s wrong with that?”

To which Tabitha Lahr, one my long-time, wonderful cover designers, weighed in:

I’m a cover designer and why I don’t want to see AI mockups is because they are so polished and specific that it stifles my creativity. Although the author is saying to not do this exactly, it boxes in my creative mind out of the gate to make something just like it. I think that an author thinking through what they would like to see with AI is helpful, but I would prefer a description of what they came to as opposed to seeing the actual AI cover results.

I’ll walk through a recent example of this for the purposes of showing where and how we hold the line against AI, and why it’s so challenging to deal with AI imagery (which we cannot license, oppose on principle, and simply will not use).

This author was presented with the following concepts:

This is a spiritual story, and the Pacific Northwest plays prominently, so the goal was to get trees for the setting. The house at the center of the novella holds memories of the protagonist’s dead mother, and it’s “haunted” by two angels. Notably, we approached this as a “literary” cover.

When the author got back to us, she sent two AI generated covers for “inspiration”:

I share this not to call out this author, but to show what it’s like for us when we present a set of concepts and get back something that’s so wildly different that it’s hard to know what to say or do. I understand how and why working with AI might be fun for authors. Here’s this powerful tool that can bring to life your inspirations. And maybe if this author wanted to self-publish, she could have gone with something like this and her readers would be none the wiser.

But for She Writes Press and for the standards we and other publishers hold, there are a number of issues with these covers, even as inspiration. They don’t look like anything we ever have or ever would publish, which is not top of mind for many authors, understandably. Every publisher has a “vibe” and there’s certain imagery that’s really out of our realm.

Also, in this case and increasingly, AI covers (like these) are easy to spot. Recently, an author approached me because she had gotten into a challenging situation with her publisher and was thinking about leaving. She asked if we would publish her book, which is basically done and ready to go to print. I asked her to send me the cover and interior, but as soon as I saw the cover I knew it was AI-generated. I asked her to confirm this with her other publisher, and she forwarded me the publisher’s response, which was: “The designer uniquely created it for your book using Adobe Photoshop’s generative AI tool as part of the design process.”

Not happening on She Writes Press, and importantly, people, the AI battle is at full tilt in the publishing industry right now, so best to keep AI out of your writing and out of your designs.

The analogy I offer to authors who give overly specific visual feedback is that it’s like hiring a choreographer to come up with a dance, and then saying, Actually, never mind, here are the exact moves I want you to do. That choreographer would walk out before you could even blink—because they were hired for their creative interpretation.

The author of Lily’s Daughter, had gravitated toward the girl from the first round, so after some good conversations, this is where we landed, which is an example of a compromise cover in that we both gave up a little of what we wanted to meet in the middle.

To be clear, there’s more than one good cover outcome for a given book. As you can see with Lily’s Daughter, positioning is key. Is the book more literary, or is it genre fiction? Publishers take into consideration other books in your genre and category, what’s selling and on trend right now. They want to be creative and unique, but also they want to create something that booksellers will love, and recognize as professional and meeting the standards they expect.

Cover designs are often hard-won—for the publisher and the author. But good, direct, honest, and sometimes tough conversations about a cover design are worth it. I’m insanely proud of She Writes Press’s cover program, and it wouldn’t be what it is if we were quick to compromise, or if I wasn’t willing to sometimes go to the mat with my authors. It also wouldn’t be what it is without Julie Metz. But importantly, sometimes I do compromise, and sometimes we wrangle in house with on another. Sometimes authors push back and they are right. Sometimes working through points of disagreement bring us to clarity‚ and to some of the best covers. There’s nothing linear or straightforward or template-able about this process, which is also why humans having human interactions about what works and what doesn’t, while not always comfortable, is ultimately rewarding. Your book will be judged for its cover, so I hope for everyone reading that you’re happy with your cover, or that you learned something here that will support you toward your future outcome!

If you have a cover story to share, bring it. I know my readers would love to hear about it.

It’s been a big but tragic week rife with AI book publishing scandals. Kathleen Schmidt, who covers a lot of these kinds of stories on Publishing Confidential, recently wrote that things cannot go on like this. But they will go on like this for a good long while because book publishing at large has no agreed-upon AI policy. It’s every publisher for itself, and we’re seeing the chaos and fallout and messiness that ensues when a meteoric event such as AI landing in our midst arrives without any instructions or guardrails or agreed-upon norms for how it should be used, followed by failure to act.

To track the events of just the past week:

July 27: The Atlantic published a story, “Is This What Comes After AI Slop?” on July 27 about H.M. Wolfe’s new novel, Daggermouth, asserting that the book was written with the assistance of AI. Many people are calling this a hit piece and suggest that it’s positive marketing for the AI detection tool Pangram (which I’ll get to below).

July 28: Daggermouth’s hardcover publication date—the book is released on Simon & Schuster’s Scarlett Press imprint. By all accounts, S&S is standing by the book and the author.

July 29: Jerry Falade, whose crime thriller, Call Me, I’ll Hide the Body, had been sold in a 14-way auction to Minotaur (an imprint of Macmillan), lost his agent (Europa) and his $2.4 million-dollar book deal after his agency sent an email to the acquiring publishers stating that they were “no longer able to authenticate how the manuscript fully evolved from origin to completion.”

These two books are being called the second and third major AI-related publishing scandals following the cancellation of Mia Ballard’s Shy Girl back in March, but there have been other notable scandals. Probably the biggest was in May with the publication and fallout around The Future of Truth: How AI Reshapes Reality, by Steven Rosenbaum, who confessed that quotes in his book were either misattributed or completely hallucinated by AI.

The Role of Pangram

Pangram is the AI detection software at the heart of these scandals, and people are up in arms about its imperfection and the probability of false positives. There’s a lot to digest on this front, but the salient question for me is whether feeding someone’s work into Pangram is potentially violative. I’ve done this now a few times when I’ve suspected an author has submitted AI-generated work to She Writes Press. The challenge for us is that we specifically have a disclosure question in our submissions process, which people ignore and/or lie about. More often than not I don’t need Pangram, by the way, but increasingly it seems to me that the blending between AI-generated and human-generated is the core challenge. Work that is 30% AI generated, for instance, means that writers are using AI to build out parts of their work. In other words, they’re using AI as a cowriter, something I’m imagining is increasingly common.

This is a tough reality for publishers because ostensibly if someone tells the truth about AI use, the publisher is not going to publish their work, and this is a question the industry is obviously grappling with, to incredibly inconsistent results. I’ll also note that I’ve fed my own work into Pangram. Here are the results for this post, and maybe my seventh time experimenting like this to see if I might pull up a false positive. I have not.

One of the better posts I read last week was by Sarah Fay of Substack Writers@Work in her post, “The Truth About Substack’s New AI Detection Tool,” in which she breaks down how Pangram works and why Substack’s announcement, “Against Claudefishing,” (also announced last week) that it’s partnering with Pangram is not a threat.

I’ll confess to feeling suspicious of people who are railing against Pangram because it makes me feel that they’re using AI in their writing process and don’t want to be found out. But even as I write these words, I acknowledge that suspicion is something I hate, and I use AI (not to write but in my writing process—through research and posing questions), so I’m applying completely personal measures to what I think is okay and what I think isn’t. But this is where we are—collectively and especially as an industry. And it’s going to eat us alive if we don’t figure out what to do.

Genre Bias

For anyone not familiar with the term “genre fiction,” it’s how the industry categorizes romance, sci-fi, fantasy, crime/thriller, horror, mystery, and now romantasy. A quick review of the three books that have been recently scrutinized/punished for AI use: Shy Girl is horror, Daggermouth is sci-fi/dystopian romance, and Call Me, I’ll Hide the Body is a crime thriller.

The bias in book publishing against genre fiction has deep roots. These genres have long been seen by the publishing elite as “lesser than.” Book publishing is legendary for its snobbery. A great piece just came out in June on ArtCulture UK called “The Silent War of Literary Hierarchies - Snobbery, Genre, and the Future of Reading” for those interested in the long-standing second-class treatment of genre writers. The writer, Yulia Tulegenova, draws attention to the tension underlying a new world order where BookTok and readers online are driving the sales of self-published titles that are subsequently getting major book deals (like Shy Girl and Daggermouth). Book publishers want to publish books of literary merit, but they also want to sell books. And the best-selling books are genre fiction. But how publishers treat these books and these authors is not disconnected from this broader story.

In short, there’s a reason we’re seeing these scandals rocking the world of genre fiction as opposed to literary or upmarket or historical fiction. You can break it down into two categories: 1) The authors are less likely to be trained writers coming out of MFA programs. Their writing is propulsive and for the masses, by design, and they may not hold themselves to the same literary standards, and I don’t mean that as a criticism. 2) The readership is enormous and very online, which means there’s going to be a lot more fans, but also a lot more scrutiny (like Reddit threads and social media influencers who make it their job to pick apart every single detail of a book). I personally found it insane when I came upon Frankie’s Shelf YouTube video about why he thought Shy Girl was AI slop, not so much because I didn’t like his content but because the video is three hours long! These readers not only have time on their hands, but the communities dedicating themselves to reading, criticism, fandom, etc. in genre fiction is unlike anything I’ve seen in other genres.

The Race Question

Rightfully, people have noticed a commonality among these three authors. They’re all writers of color. I’ve read many posts by people decrying the double standards. White authors are getting away with using AI, or admitting to AI use and not being punished in the way these authors have been. The only challenge with this argument is that Wolfe’s publisher is standing by her. But Daggermouth is also a published book as of July 28. It’s very difficult to unwind a book’s publication when the print run has already landed in the warehouse, and the preorders have shipped.

Regardless, it’s extremely important that the industry answer to this critique because we have a race problem in book publishing going way back. That the lack of any policies, rules, or regulations around AI use puts human impulse at the center of all decision-making around which books move forward is cause for concern. It means that outcomes will be uneven, and definitely biased. This should make us uncomfortable.

Each of these authors has responded differently to the accusations leveled against them, and my feeling is that the onus is on book publishers to be clearer and more consistent around what is okay and what is not okay when it comes to AI use. We are not consistent. We don’t even know what we think is okay. In each of these cases, my sympathy really does lie with the authors because I don’t think any one of them set out to dupe their readers or get away with something. More people than not are using AI, and book publishing sucks at policing.

***

It’s right for us to have mixed emotions, and not to know how to feel about the real-world consequences—for writers and authors, for editors and agents, and for the publishing community at large—of how this technology is unfolding.

AI has unleashed a toxic mix of paranoia, accusations, superiority, purity tests, cancellations, scapegoating, and unequal treatment of authors. We are in desperate need of industry-wide standards. Instead, we’re left with case-by-case improvisation, and individual authors like Ballard, Wolfe, and Falade then pay the price for the industry’s systemic inaction and hand-wringing. Dear God, we have to do better.

For the past 9 years, She Writes Press has been hosting our STEP (She Writes Press Toward Equality in Publishing) contest to elevate writers of color—and submissions are now open through September 10!

This contest started with a recognition—that the book publishing industry at large is very white, that the majority of authors getting publishing deals were white, and that our own list needed a good dose of diversity. We launched STEP in 2018, before George Floyd’s murder and before the social justice movement that followed. In those COVID years (2020-2023), there were real gains for writers of color. Publishers had mandates to diversify their lists, and writers of color experienced a few seasons of parity. The backlash started to ramp up, unfortunately and predictably, well before Trump ran for president for a third time. The far right made books part of the culture wars, with attacks on librarians, campaigns against what kind of books kids should and could be reading, and attempts to frame antiracist content as somehow anti-American.

I watched all of this unfold with the same horror many Americans have felt. Trump’s second term has been catastrophic for people of color generally, but within the publishing industry (and other industries that had taken seriously the mandate to “do better”), with Trump’s policies there’s been permission (if not pressure) to back away from those meaningful efforts toward parity that had led to such positive real-world results for writers of color.

For She Writes, our STEP contest is more important than ever. We recognize it’s a small way for us to do our part to elevate voices that would otherwise not be heard. This year, we took our own efforts a step farther, though. I’m proud to share that in the past year She Writes Press has been working with a DEI consultant to find ways to bring more diversity of voice and lived experience to the She Writes Press list—and our efforts have been successful. In 2026, we acquired three times as many books by writers of color than in 2025, and we’ll look forward to repeating those efforts moving forward.

“Two steps forward, one step back,” we say about progressive movements and moments. In recent years it’s felt more like three steps back, and it can feel hard at times to imagine when we’ll even get back to our former baseline. Since I work in words and trade in books, however, I know how much story matters to progress. Publishing women’s stories—fiction, memoir, lived experience through prescriptive nonfiction—changes the lives of both writers and readers. Stories normalize experience and give voice to experience, and make space for those with less power to stand in the power of their words and their truth.

Politics and policies and misuse of power changes culture, of course, but so do books. Books are one way that the less powerful have to push back. In my recent writing to shine all the light possible on the silencing of Sarah Wynn Williams, author of Careless People (a book that details Facebook’s gross decision-making and growth-at-any-cost mentality), I shared something she said when accepting the Freedom to Publish Prize earlier this year:

We live in an age where web pages disappear, where a single politically aligned billionaire can spike a news story or delete a viral video. But once a book miraculously makes it out into the world — onto a shelf, into a library, into a home — it cannot be disappeared. With analogue tenacity a book endures.

This is true for a woman being silenced, and extends the countless women whose voices are simply not heard—because they’re marginalized, because they’re devalued (or even just not prioritized), or because someone in a position of power says: “It’s not your time,” or “nobody cares,” or “we already have enough of that kind of book now, thank you anyway.”

While I’m dismayed to find us two (or more) steps farther back than where we were in 2020 in the book industry, there is hope. There is always hope. Writers of color stepped into their power, and there’s since been an insistence to be seen and to be read. For white industry folks who took the messages and lessons to heart, there is no going back. I include myself among these people—those of us who will continue to find ways to elevate and recognize writers of color, and who do not feel relief to find ourselves in this moment of backlash. For me, the undergrounding of these important conversations makes them all the more pressing.

So, keep talking, even when it’s uncomfortable. A small ask from us at She Writes Press is to please share the information about this contest. Grab the meme below to share on social media. The link to the contest details is here. The upshot is this: two fully funded publishing contracts will be granted to women writers of color for publication in 2028.

You may remember the campaign, #BlackoutBestSellerList, organized in June 2020 by YA author L.L. McKinney to help Black writers make the bestseller list. This was a moment when we were talking loudly and excitedly about conscious reading decisions, and about elevating writers of color. We still want to do that, and we’d love to ask you to support our previous STEP winners, whose books you can find here.

Revelation, Bobi Gentry Goodwin
The Goddess Twins, by Yodessa Williams
Malcolm and Me, by Robin Farmer
The Fortune Teller’s Prophecy, by Lally Pia
Purple Lotus, by Veena Rao
The Garden of Second Chances, by Mona Alvarado Frazier
Love in the Age of Dragons, by Fatima R. Henson
All Our Wars, by Stephanie Vasquez
Far Away from Here, by Ambata Kazi
Aftermath, edited by Elizabeth G. Hines
Kinda Korean, by Joan Sung
Winter of My Spring, by Fartumo Kusow
Slums of Paradise, by Samiha Hoque
One Spark and the Desert Hums, by Caron Martinez (forthcoming on summer 2027)
Breaking Me Open, by Andrine Constant (forthcoming on fall 2027)

And, maybe you or a friend or a writer you know will be our next winner. Thanks for spreading the word!

We live in a weird world. Five years ago, if you’d asked the average person working on a book project if they liked the idea of a robot generating their stories or their personal narratives for them, I think you’d have been met with bug eyes. It wasn’t even a thing—and what would be the point, right?

Anyone who’s graduated from college, never mind high school, knows that passing someone else’s work off as your own has a name, and it results in a failing grade to boot. But now, all of a sudden, we have collective or selective amnesia on this notion of passing off others’ work as our own. Even if there were a policy in publishing, I fear it wouldn’t matter one lick—because the desire not to use AI to write for us has to come from within. I was distressed by a Times article out this week, “I Got AI Slopped,” which featured Bill Johns, who’s published 445 titles on Amazon and who responded to the question of whether he even reads “his own” books: “That’s a funny question. I certainly read them as they’re being written.” But if Amazon won’t police AI slop, and they wont’t, this is the new dystopia we live in.

I’ve been struggling deeply with AI for the past two years. It’s infiltrated my world in ways I couldn’t and wouldn’t have imagined. It never occurred to me how many people who want to write, whether they struggle to call themselves writers or not, would turn to AI to write their words for them. Now that we’re here, I understand the temptation. I talk to writers who use it, who pass it off as their own, and I see how AI preys on insecurities and appeals to people’s laziest tendencies.

I’ve had to call out writers fairly often these past couple years, and the range of responses I get is a window into the human psyche. Here are the buckets the responses fall into:

It wasn’t me!

Some people have met the assertion that AI was used in their writing by simply deferring the blame. One writer told me that her son had edited her work and had probably inserted AI without her knowing. She told me she’d have to talk to him about it, and I never heard back. This line of defense—someone else used AI on my manuscript without telling me—was what we heard from Mia Ballard after Hachette canceled her book earlier this year, claiming that her editor must have introduced AI into her writing. Hm.

I thought it would make me sound better.

These people are generally contrite, and tell me that they had a crisis of confidence with their writing. They distrust themselves. They don’t think their writing is particularly good. The problem with using AI to make your writing better is that you lose your voice in the process. I’d rather read rough authentic student writing than plastic AI writing any day. AI writing has a particular veneer, cadence, and rhythm that people who work with words can easily spot. There are tells. It matters because it’s not self-expression if AI does it for you. AI is a filter, and it sacrifices authentic voice in favor of something far more generic. Most important, AI doesn’t teach writers to be better writers because it abets in eroding discernment.

I ran out of time.

This one is a challenge because meeting deadlines is important, but so is carving out time in your schedule to do your writing. Imagine if I showed up to a 10K race without having trained because I’d run out of time. I’d surely choke, or injure myself—a powerful disincentive. We have to make time for the things we say we want to do, and writing is hard work. It’s the wrestling through it that makes the writing better. It’s reaching for better ways to articulate what you want to say that makes your words more resonant. Always give your writing the time it deserves.

I was working through something traumatic.

This is the excuse I have the most compassion for because I work with so many memoirists who are writing through trauma. Opening up traumatic experiences on the page is to reexperience the trauma, and if AI puts some distance between you and that event, I can see how tempting that would be. However, the choice to write memoir is the choice to bring yourself directly back into contact with what happened, and memoir is healing for exactly that reason. It asks us to go in deep, to remember, and to find our “now” words to reclaim the story and to take back our power. When you ask AI to write for you, you give over your power and you abdicate the gift that personal narrative offers—which is the connection that flows from brain to heart to hand.

I’m out and proud.

These are the authors who embrace AI as ghostwriter, and who make the case that there’s no difference between paying a ghostwriter and using AI. (I disagree, but that will be a post for another time.) I got a pitch recently from someone who wanted to be a guest on my podcast. He’d used AI in every aspect of the process, from writing to editing to pitching to publicity. His pitch to me was also clearly written by AI. It had that breathy, exuberant cadence I’ve come to loathe. He’s dyslexic, so for him AI was a tool that allowed him to do something he couldn’t previously do. I am not unsympathetic to this argument, and I’d rather have a conversation with someone who’s out and proud about their AI use than with someone who’s using it extensively and trying to pass off the work as their own. That said, I did not invited him to be on my podcast because I’m personally incapable of evangelizing for AI.

***

I’m in conversation on a regular basis with the editors I work for, many of whom are outraged, despondent, or deflated over the prevalence of AI in writers’ work. What happens is they’re reading along in a manuscript and all of a sudden they get to a place in the writing that’s recognizably AI. A little alarm goes off. This sounds like AI. I’m no longer reading the work of this author. Was I ever reading their work? Now I’m editing a machine. I don’t want to be editing a machine. What am I doing?

My own experience when I’ve come across AI-generated writing in my students’ work in my memoir class is similar. I don’t want to edit it. It feels nearly pointless. Luckily, this hasn’t been too prevalent, but when I do see it, my response has been simply to highlight whole passages, say why I think it’s AI-generated, and suggest that I’ll edit it after the writer has gone in and reworked the passage in their own words. This has been effective.

We’re in a strange and difficult place right now in the writing, editing, publishing profession, and this extends to schools because I’ve talked with distraught teachers who, like us, can’t stem the tide of AI.

If I could snap my fingers and make a single rule around AI it would be that writers (and students) are simply not allowed to cut and paste anything from AI into their own emails, word documents, assignments, manuscripts, etc. Forcing yourself to write your own words (even if you are using AI as a tool, or a prompt, or a fact-checker) creates that flow of energy I mentioned earlier—from head to heart to hands. When you cut and paste, you bypass the heart part altogether, and it’s my opinion that the resonant part of any writing stems from the heart.

Meanwhile, writers, I hope everyone and anyone who’s using AI on a regular basis continues to wrestle with the implications. Andrea Bartz wrote a great Substack in April called “Why I’m against the use of generative AI altogether” that I recommend reading. Andrea was one of the three plaintiffs in Bartz v. Anthropic, the lawsuit against Anthropic that resulted in countless authors hopefully someday receiving a $3000 payout for the illegal use of their books to train AI. Andrea makes the case in her piece that AI is bad for our heads and our hearts, but also that we’re enriching bad actors (AI companies), and losing control of AI products. Her piece should scare us, but we are short-sighted creatures who tend to shut off our brains at the thought of anything too epic or monumentally terrible. We are wired, after all, for small stories.

So, my small story lane is where I try to make small impacts. I can’t fathom the end of civilization or death to the human race, nor can I survive day-to-day in that level of fear or catastrophizing. But I can tell writers this: your writing is enough without the support of AI. You don’t need it, and it doesn’t make you a better writer. We need all the heart connection we can get, and we don’t do that via machine. We do it human-to-human, as we were designed to connect.

If you had asked me one year ago to comment on the importance of Sarah Wynn Williams’s memoir, Careless People, to the genre, I wouldn’t have had all that much to say. It’s an exposé of Facebook. Facebook (now Meta) has proven itself to be a pretty shitty company. Mark Zuckerberg makes an ass of himself every time he posts or speaks or launches a new initiative or compromises his integrity.

Last fall, Roxane Gay was a guest on the Memoir Nation podcast, and she casually mentioned that Careless People was one of her favorite books of 2025 (she wrote about it on her Substack in March 2025). That got my attention enough to download the audiobook. I listened to about three chapters before not exactly losing interest, but more feeling like, I’m sick of these people already. And I didn’t finish the book.

Well, damn if I didn’t go and revisit it after Sarah Wynn-Williams made headlines last month at the Hay Festival in Wales, when she sat silent on stage—not only not speaking, but not nodding or shaking her head, not reacting at all—for a full hourlong discussion that was meant to feature her and Tim Wu in conversation with moderator Carole Cadwalladr on “The Power of Tech.”

Why didn’t she speak? On the advice of her lawyers, after Meta warned (threatened) that her appearance on the panel would violate the arbitration award it had obtained against her (barring her from promoting the book) when the memoir was first published in March of last year.

Ah, the hubris of Zuckerberg and Co. I’m a person who follows memoir closely, who bought this memoir and didn’t finish it, who has loosely been aware of this memoir for over a year and still, it hadn’t penetrated. After all, there are a lot of books to read and who need more confirmation of how awful Big Tech is?

After the Hay Festival silent protest, I and thousands of others read the book. The action spiked sales by over 300%. I finished the audio version, read by Wynn-Williams. It’s true that it’s mostly a confirmation of what I already knew, but it’s one thing to watch all these stories zip past your feeds, and it’s another to absorb the entirety of their recklessness in a book.

Facebook’s “carelessness” includes:
• facilitating Chinese censorship of its own people;
• 2016 election interference;
• destabilizing Myanmar and fueling violence that killed roughly 10,000 people, and included brutal gang rapes that will make your stomach turn;
• harming teens by directly feeding them targeted ads that prey on them when they’re at their lowest moments.

This is a short list of the most troubling indictments, for their brutal and in some cases deadly impact on other human beings.

Some of the specifically less consequential but infuriating stories include how:
• Leadership on Facebook falsely inflate their own numbers on the platform, which explains why Zuckerberg has 121 million followers on Facebook and why I have to see posts from him when I don’t follow him;
• Sheryl Sandberg’s sexual impropriety with her female subordinates, including demanding that Wynn-Williams “come to bed” with her on their private plane when Wynn-Williams was seven months pregnant;
• Zuckerberg asking Chinese President Xi Jinping for the honor of naming his unborn child (Xi declined);
• Zuckerberg mounting his own presidential campaign (obviously realizing at some point this would never fly).

One anecdote that turned out to be pretty prescient is when Wynn-Williams shares that Zuckerberg does an annual “personal challenge.” His 2016 personal challenge was to make an AI assistant for his home. He’s brainstorming how he’ll do a video of it and post it on Facebook. There will be a video from his perspective, and then it’s suggested, from his wife Priscilla’s perspective.

Zuckerberg thinks is this funny and says: “Maybe Priscilla would learn that the AI only listens to my voice. Like she’s trying to command it in different places and it just ignores her.”

I have thoughts on “Priscilla not having her voice heard” in her own home but I know enough about expectations of women at Facebook to keep silent. Mark thinks it’s hilarious.

On June 25, Sarah Wynn-Williams sued Meta for “coercive surveillance” for their tactics, which have involved flying staff to wherever she’s going to be to make sure she doesn’t promote or publicize her book.

Maybe you’re a person who agrees with the premise that Wynn-Williams signed an NDA so she shouldn’t have published this memoir in the first place. A well-known fact of NDAs, however, is that they’re always the result of massive power imbalances. Wynn-Williams argues that she felt pressure to sign the NDA because of how much money was on the line—for her, a $780,000 severance package. She says she was fired in retaliation for reporting her boss Joel Kaplan’s sexual harassment; Meta says she was fired for poor performance and toxic behavior. Either way, $780,000 is a lot of money, but also a paltry amount to buy a woman’s silence.

I’m not a reporter, but I do believe in presenting things as fair and balanced, so I’ll note that I read a critique of Wynn-Williams’s memoir/defense of Facebook by Katie Harbath here on Substack. The main points she takes issue with are timeline-focused, and things she herself didn’t witness. Joel Kaplan was one of the best bosses she ever had, she writes. The most interesting part of her post is the comment from Ryan Heath, Launch Editor of POLITICO Australia and formerly of Axios, who has some pretty damning personal anecdotes about Sandberg, and writes about her actions:

. . . with great power comes great responsibility. It’s not easy, and it’s not supposed to be. And you don’t get credit because you took on a hard job that made you a billionaire and you found it was, in fact, really f*ing hard. You get credit for being responsible, for learning from mistakes and slowing down, and breaking as few things as possible. Which is not really the way careless people operate, and not the track record - overall - of Facebook.

A few weeks before this Hay Festival situation put Careless People back on the best-seller list, Sarah Wynn Williams received a Freedom to Publish prize at the British book awards, alongside Virginia Giuffre, Epstein’s most famous victim who died by suicide in April 2025, one month after Careless People came out and several months before her own book, Nobody’s Girl, was released posthumously.

In receiving the award, in which she was not allowed to speak about her own book, Wynn-Williams focused on Giuffre. Her 7-minute speech is worth watching. She homes in on two points: the power of a book and what the efforts to silence someone say about guilt and complicity. Here are two excerpts:

We live in an age where web pages disappear, where a single politically aligned billionaire can spike a news story or delete a viral video. But once a book miraculously makes it out into the world — onto a shelf, into a library, into a home — it cannot be disappeared. With analogue tenacity a book endures.

But here’s a strange thing. When you try that hard to silence a woman who is telling the truth, you announce to the whole world that the truth must be very dangerous indeed.

The most tragic thing about Facebook is what it could have been under different leadership. Mark Zuckerberg truly did create something amazing. But growth and money were always the goal, never community and connection, and he seems incapable of reckoning with the human cost of what he’s done. The title of Careless People comes from The Great Gatsby—and Nick Carraway’s judgment that Tom and Daisy move through the world breaking things, relationships, promises, other people’s lives, and then retreat into the insulation their wealth provides, letting others absorb the wreckage.

Watching this story unfold, another classic novel pops to mind: The Scarlett Letter. For those who haven’t read it in a while, Hester Prynne is publicly punished for refusing to be silent about a truth the community would rather not confront, and how she’s treated is meant to land as a warning to everyone else to keep quiet. This backfires in the end, which is why this book is such a feminist anthem. Hester could leave the town, but instead she stays, continuing to wear the scarlet “A,” which eventually becomes a symbol of dignity rather than shame.

In memoir, authors are the protagonists of their own stories, and Sarah Wynn-Williams is my new favorite heroine.

Further Reading and Watching:

All Things Memoir: Why You Have to Read Sarah Wynn-Williams’s Careless People

The Atlantic’s Careless People Won

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2025/03/careless-people-won/682145

Wired’s Meta’s Pursuit of the Careless People Author Is Relentless and Self-Defeating

https://www.wired.com/story/metas-pursuit-of-the-careless-people-author-is-relentless-and-self-defeating/

The Guardian’s extensive coverage of this story:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2026/may/11/sarah-wynn-williams-and-virginia-giuffre-jointly-win-freedom-to-publish-prize-at-british-book-awards

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/may/31/meta-legal-action-forces-facebook-whistleblower-to-stay-silent-at-hay-festival

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/jun/09/meta-threats-sarah-wynn-williams-stronger-rights-whistleblowers

Jane and I have come up in publishing on parallel paths. We’re about the same age with the same number of years in the industry. We’re both industry watchers, though from different perches. She’s a publishing expert—an independent industry commentator, educator, and business strategist. I’m a book publisher—an editor, author advocate, and a memoir expert. We share an ethos that publishing is not an either/or proposition, and that there’s no one right publishing path.

We’ve occasionally gone toe-to-toe over the years as hybrid publishing has evolved. She’s been skeptical of the actors entering this space, as have I, which I’ve written about on Jane’s site. Her Key Book Publishing Paths chart has evolved alongside industry, sometimes giving hybrids their own space and recognition, and sometimes lumping them together with service providers. I care about what Jane’s thinking about both because she’s got her finger on the pulse of an industry I’m deeply entrenched in, and also because my authors hang on her every word.

So, it was with our many years of history that I found myself in the tiered theater seating of Berkeley’s Brower Center in late April, ready for whatever Jane might have to say about what publishers are for. Her talk has stuck with me over these months because she spoke to the value proposition of publishing in an era when authors can do everything themselves. She spoke to an industry in crisis as it faces what’s basically a freefall into this new era of AI, content splintering, and competition for eyeballs.

She contrasted “AI publishing” and “what a publisher is for” to spotlight the value publishers can bring to authors in this modern era where authors have so much choice. In the context of her keynote, “AI publishing” speaks not to authors who might use AI to publish books, but to publishers whose acquisitions strategies are purely algorithmic, or who’ve deprioritized what I’d argue is the most important part of book publishing: the author relationship.

These are Jane’s slides contrasting these two approaches:

I was gratified to see this because my hybrid press, She Writes Press, checks every single one of the boxes for “what a publisher is for.” And, in fact, She Writes Press was one of the case studies in Jane’s talk, much to my surprise and deep honor.

Here’s Jane sharing about meeting the fun and very extroverted SWP author Deb Miller, who introduced herself to Jane at a writers’ conference and showed off her purse—fashion and marketing in one.

In April, ahead of Jane’s keynote, I wrote here on Substack about why I think hybrid publishing has finally arrived. In part this post was inspired by a local Bay Area publisher who’d approached me to talk through how they might integrate hybrid publishing into their publishing program. Since then, two more publishers have reached out to inquire on this same topic. I do understand that the impulse is about money and survival, but it also stems from publishers wanting to publish important books that are too risky to carry the full financial weight of all on their own.

In one case, an East Coast publisher wants to be able to expand into publishing more spiritual memoirs. They’ve been approached by a few authors with good but not stellar author platforms. The projects are very much in their wheelhouse, but they don’t think the books will necessarily earn out in this publishing environment. Five or ten years ago, maybe they would have earned out. Today, with the aforementioned content crisis, maybe/probably not.

With Jane’s language in mind, I think about this particular publisher that has an excellent reputation in the spiritual space, and I imagine the memoirists they want to sign would be thrilled for the opportunity to share the risk if it means being published on this imprint. Supposing the projects on the table are author-subsidized, will the publisher still bring community, connection, conversation, development, shared values, meaning, and fulfillment? I imagine they will.

At ALA’s Annual Conference last week, I sat on a panel where I was tasked with defining how hybrid publishing is different from traditional publishing. There are numerous differences, but for reputable hybrids with traditional distribution, the primary one is the flow of the money. In traditional publishing, the author gets an advance (or sometimes no advance but the publishing costs are covered), which they have to earn out. In hybrid publishing, the author invests (meaning they pay the cost to publish), which they have to recoup.

In both cases, the author’s job is to get to zero:

You might argue that authors who get big advances are golden because they already got their payout, so even if they don’t reach zero, they’re ahead. I disagree with this sentiment because publishers who don’t recoup their investments on the books they acquire are disinclined to ever publish those authors again. An unearned advance is a cross to bear, not something to celebrate. The industry has set up its own pressure cooker, too, because it’s this expectation of advances, and the increasingly low likelihood of authors earning out, that’s causing traditional publishers to turn away meaningful projects, and/or to start considering cutting hybrid deals so that they can publish books they really want to publish by sharing the risk with authors.

I hope this post inspires aspiring authors to really consider the value proposition of the publishers they’re wanting to work with, and to take in the importance of the soft metrics. When people ask me what sets She Writes Press apart, I most often answer: the community; the education; the fact that you will not alone on your publishing journey. These aren’t the only things we offer, but they’re consistently the things that authors tell me they value. And you won’t find any of these listed in our author contract because they’re not aspects of our program we can or try to monetize. They’re just baked into the ethos of who we are and what we do.

Which brings me back to Jane’s question from the stage in Berkeley: What is the publisher for? The answer doesn’t lie in who’s fronting the money. It lies in the relationship, which is the commitment a publisher and an author make to a shared vision for the book and its journey from the author’s head to the reader’s imagination.

Upcoming publishing classes:

July 9: Today’s Key Book Publishing Paths, with Jane Friedman
Jane is a wealth of information, as many of you already know. I encourage you to subscribe to her newsletter, “The Bottom Line,” and I’m spotlighting this upcoming class for authors who are trying to get a lay of the publishing landscape, and/or who are interested in learning more about key publishing paths.

From Page to Pitch to Submission, with Brooke Warner, , Courtney Maum (), , and The Book Doctors
This fall, Memoir Nation is hosting a book proposal/pitch/submission intensive aimed at supporting memoirists to develop a book proposal, to write and refine a written and verbal pitch, and to follow through with submitting. The course covers the pitch, the proposal, author platform, author mindset, and culminates in a live Pitchapalooza and three live “submit sessions” to support you to see the work of submitting through in real time.

Everyone is looking for reasons why book sales are down. It’s a topic of constant conversation among my publishing colleagues, my meetings with my distributor, and also my friends who read. And, there’s not one answer. It’s the economy. It’s our dwindling attention spans. It’s the steady stream of content we’re consuming from other sources that are not books.

This general angst over declining sales is the backdrop for everything in the industry right now, so it’s not surprising that these conversations are bubbling to the surface at this year’s American Library Association’s annual conference (ALA) conference.

On Thursday here in Chicago (where I’ll be hanging out through tomorrow with a panel today and one tomorrow for anyone who’s here!), I had the privilege of attending the Library Insights Summit, hosted by Foreword. A topic of great interest (and ire, I might add) among librarians across the panels I attended was a recent study by The Authors Guild called “New Authors Guild Study: Only 25 Percent of Readers Paid for a New Copy of a Print Book or Ebook Read in the Previous Month.” It first came out on June 9, then was updated on June 12 (editing out some of the more finger-pointing language, I might add). It captured my attention enough that we are featuring its findings as the book trend on the Memoir Nation podcast this coming week (airs Monday).

Its findings are . . . not great. Among its points: 1) only 25% of books (print and eBook) read in the last month were bought new, and that 29% of those units were sourced through public library borrowing; 2) for digital audiobooks, 37% were sourced through digital library borrowing; 3) the most active library borrowers are women who have graduate degrees, work fulltime, and make more than $75K (in other words, the biggest consumer demographic). There’s more, but I’ll spare you the stats and you can download the full report here.

The perception among many is that this study blames libraries for declining author incomes. Jane Friedman has a good rebuttal piece, “I Wouldn’t Blame Libraries for Declining Author Income,” where she brings up some excellent points: 1) This study has no historical baseline; it can’t claim book buying is down. 2) It’s not fair to lump library borrowing in with piracy, secondhand purchases, and sharing among friends. And 3) A borrowed book is not necessarily a lost sale.

Mary Rasenberger, CEO of the Authors Guild and Authors Guild Foundation, commented on Jane’s post: “The Authors Guild in no way blames libraries for declines in authors’ incomes.” Its purpose, she wrote, is so that anyone in the industry can understand where readers get their books.

I don’t disagree with the exchange of information, of course, and I am a huge supporter of The Authors Guild (and recommend that every single one of my authors become members, always). And, I see why librarians feel blamed by this study. Ann Ford, Hoopla’s VP of Sales and Customer Support, one of the moderators at Library Insights, was among the librarians dismayed by the AG study, and her video dispatch is worth the five-minute watch. She’s angry, and rightfully so, because the publishing industry doesn’t do a great job supporting the actors that sustain the very culture we profit from. We see this when indie bookstores don’t support indie publishers and authors, or when the Big Five publishers are prioritized in all kinds of ways when it comes to reviews and contests, or when the blockbuster mentality squeezes out those writers who make literary culture rich and varied.

Michael Cader at Publishers Marketplace wrote in another rebuttal:

“We should be celebrating the broad interest in books and reading, and the many ways in which readers can and do get their fix. The enemy is obscurity or irrelevance . . . Any dispute over authors’ earnings should be focused on publisher and vendor splits, not stigmatizing eager and regular readers.”

I don’t have the space in today’s newsletter to take on publisher and vendor splits, so I’ll do so in a future post, but I do want to thread the needle on these separate but related ideas, which is the potential consequence to authors of free or discounted books, and that they equal lost sales or income. Because it’s just not true.

#1. Library borrows are not lost sales

Here’s the deal—people are not buying books for all sorts of reasons: high cost, especially $30 hardcovers; space issues for people who don’t keep home libraries or have small homes; not wanting to necessarily commit, for readers who might want to see how something reads first, especially if the book is part of a series; convenience, especially when it comes to apps like Libby or Hoopla that deliver your borrowed books right to your e-reader of choice.

A good friend of mine who’s an avid reader let me know just this week that she’d put a hold on Yesteryear at her local library. There were 512 holds for 26 hardcovers and 1579 holds on 175 eBook copies. When I asked her if she was going to buy the book, she said she hadn’t decided yet. This friend is a prolific reader. She may or may not purchase Yesteryear, and if she doesn’t, it won’t be a lost sale for Caro Claire Burke because my friend will be choosing not to purchase it. We should instead see her ability to get this title at her local library as a reader gained for Burke.

For authors, readers who love your book end up being evangelists for it—potential reviewers, recommenders, and even buyers, since people who like a book enough will want to own it. We should think of libraries as discovery sites, and onramps for potential praise, recommendations, and purchases.

#2. EBook discounts are not lost income

EBook pricing is a somewhat fraught issue. Personally, I think the push to sell eBooks at very low price points ($0.99-$4.99) is an outgrowth of Amazon having trained us all to expect extraordinarily low prices for eBooks. That said, many of my authors want to keep their eBook prices permanently low. Genre writers in particular are squeezed into low eBook pricing because of the competition, or because of the perception that they should.

I advocate for the lowering of eBook prices only if and when authors have a campaign associated with the effort. I don’t believe in setting a permanent low eBook price, though I don’t get in my authors’ way if they choose to do this.

I remember a time a few years ago when an author did a $0.99 campaign. The sale was meant to last a week, but her data never got changed and it stayed at $0.99 for something like six months. The author was upset when she saw her (good) sales over those six months, making the argument that those should have been full-price sales. The problem is, consumerism doesn’t work this way, and it’s impossible to measure who would have bought the book at full price. Which is why, again, I’m an advocate for lowering eBooks sometimes, and only in conjunction with a visibility campaign.

She Writes Press is about to launch our Summer eBook sale starting Monday, June 29, and running through July 10 (so please check out all our amazing titles in the meme below). For us, a visibility campaign means that we’ve created memes for each of the participating authors and we’re encouraging them to post about the sale and push out to their networks. The idea here is to promote their books to people who know about the book but haven’t yet bought it, or to new readers. EBook sales like these, if they work, result in new reviews, recommendations, and even purchases of the print book. I’ve been that duo-format buyer more times than I can count.

The book business is tricky. Authors want sales, and they want to make money (of course), but they also want their books to be widely available and widely read. ALA has been eye-opening because I’m learning from librarians all the ways they do not feel supported by this industry, not to mention the ways in which they are actively being threatened by this administration. I’ll end today by reiterating Michael Cader’s important message that the enemy is obscurity or irrelevance. We all want to be read, and the focus of every publisher and every author should be finding ways to make that happen, and bolstering the many players who support our books.

The Tell and the controversy over whether its author, Amy Griffin, stole another woman’s story is the biggest memoir scandal since James Frey was called out as a liar by Oprah for fabricating parts of A Million Little Pieces. James Frey slunk into obscurity for twenty years following his fallout; Amy Griffin is too connected and too wealthy to go down without a fight.

I (along with many others) wrote about the lawsuit filed by Jane Doe on March 4, 2026, in which an anonymous plaintiff (Jane Doe) sued Griffin, Griffin’s ghostwriter, and the book’s publisher, Dial Press, on grounds of invasion of privacy, intentional infliction of emotional distress, and negligence, among other charges. Jane Doe’s allegations, simply put, are that Griffin stole her story (of severe sexual abuse at the hands of a middle school teacher). Jane Doe alleges that the character “Claudia” in The Tell is recognizably her, and that Griffin passes off some of Claudia’s memories and experiences as her own in The Tell.

One of the most damning parts of Jane Doe’s lawsuit was the naming of a Dominique Price, who Doe said contacted her under the pretenses of being a “talent agent.” He allegedly extracted parts of her story, which later made their way into The Tell.

For months, we’ve heard nothing from Amy Griffin. Silence is a power move in cases like these. Anything you say in the aftermath of such bombshell accusations will only result in pile-ons. You don’t need to look any further than Griffin’s Instagram account, with its 94,000 followers, to uncover the furor this story has unleashed.

I’ve been following this case, as have a lot of people interested in memoir, because it’s consequential to the genre. In fact, since my March Substack post, I’ve been contacted by The Daily Beast, Airmail, and The Wall Street Journal for commentary. This story strikes a nerve because if what Jane Doe alleges is true, you have a very privileged woman capitalizing on the trauma of a former schoolmate who grew up poor, supposedly in a “children’s home.” The story pits powerful against powerless during a moment when the powerful seem to be getting away with everything and anything. Also, at its core, it pressure-tests the underlying flaws behind the #MeToo mantra that we should “believe women,” no matter what.

For my readers as interested as I am in this unfolding story, here’s where we’re at:

A counter-lawsuit and an ANTI-SLAPP motion

Last week, on June 15, Amy Griffin filed a lawsuit and a motion against Jane Doe, outing her as Joleene Altum.

It’s a defamation lawsuit, filed in Nevada, that’s basically a 29-page timeline, articulating how and why Altum is not just mistaken, but lying. The lawsuit reads, in part: “Ms. Altum has insisted on maintaining her lies, continuing the enormous reputational harm she has already dealt Mrs. Griffin. This lawsuit’s purpose is to set the record straight. It ends when Ms. Altum tells the truth publicly and plainly.”

Griffin’s lawyers also filed ANTI-SLAPP motion, which is designed to allow defendants (in this case Griffin as defendant to the original March lawsuit against her) to dismiss lawsuits being used to punish or silence them for exercising free speech on a matter of public concern.

Importantly, filing an ANTI-SLAPP motion triggers an automatic stay of discovery, meaning that Altum’s lawyers won’t be able to start subpoenaing documents, deposing Griffin, or digging into things like Griffin’s original book proposal, communications with Dominique Price, or early manuscript drafts until the motion is resolved. This feels like a very high bar for Altum to be able to clear, and could potentially get Altum’s (Jane Doe’s) original case thrown out, thereby vindicating Griffin in the process.

On outing Jane Doe

A lot of people are upset by this part of the lawsuit, understandably so. This is becoming a “she said, she said” story, with one of the shes being rich and influential, and the other being neither.

When the lawyers name Ms. Altum in the suit, the language is certainly tsk-tsking: “She even posed for a photograph that was included in the [Times] article.”

Later, it reads: “Ms. Altum initially sought to proceed anonymously, despite having identified herself by name to the Times, having posed for a silhouette photograph with the Times, and having claimed that she had been ‘identified’ as ‘Claudia’ by ‘people in her community.’ Ms. Altum has not moved to proceed anonymously, as California law requires of a party seeking to proceed anonymously. Ms. Altum’s attorneys have since produced her name in unsealed discovery with no protective order, making her identity a matter of public record.”

Book proposal as conclusive evidence?

The September 2025 NYT article that set this entire thing in motion gave significant space to the original book proposal, back when the book was called “Believe me.”

It was a 38-page document, the Times reported, “accompanied by a list of people who might help to promote the book upon publication.”

Among the more than 90 names were celebrities (Amy Schumer, Laura Dern, Naomi Watts), media big shots (Anna Wintour, Savannah Guthrie, Katie Couric) and women whose companies Ms. Griffin has invested in (Becky Kennedy, Whitney Wolfe Herd, Sara Blakley).

Griffin’s lawsuit attempts to discredit Altum’s timeline by evoking the book proposal’s very existence, saying that the book proposal existed before Altum (falsely) alleges that Dominique Price contacted her. Confounding argument to make here—it never happened but even if it did, it couldn’t have because of the timing.

Having worked on many memoirs over the years, many acquired on book proposal, I can tell you that book proposals do not contain the whole story. Writers can shop a book proposal on an outline, with summaries of the chapters they intend to include.

My original understanding of Jane Doe’s claims were that she was contacted (allegedly by Dominique Price) because Sam Lansky (ghostwriter who would have been hired after Griffin was under contract with Dial Press) would have needed more details—for specificity and for nuance. Setting aside whether Price extracted details for The Tell from Altum, the book proposal alone will not exculpate Griffin unless those explicit details were in the proposal—and I will be shocked if they are.

The MDMA angle

This needs to stay front and center in the conversation because it speaks to Griffin’s potential motivation to fabricate a story of recovered memories. I read The Tell this week, in preparation to write this Substack today, and this whole angle plays poorly knowing what we know.

In the book, Griffin’s husband basically becomes a better, more vulnerable version of himself for doing MDMA therapy. The end of the book reads like an advertisement for MDMA. She writes: “‘This medicine is going to help so many people,’ I said, It was funny now to think that I had been so judgmental about.”

From here she goes on to wax poetic about MDMA for three pages—how it was never meant to be taken recreationally, and how when it was first discovered in the ’70s, people “thought of it as a tool for healing and transformation.” But then it became an elicit and illegal drug, and it was reputationally harmed.

In the next scene, her therapist reminds her: “not to give too much credit to the MDMA—that I was the one who had ultimately done the work, even if I’d had a lot of help.”

The whole section feels forced. I know people who’ve done MDMA therapy, but I’ve never heard anyone “give credit” to the MDMA for unlocking memories. For support in moving through the trauma, okay, I can get there, but I don’t think I’ve ever talked to a survivor who spoke so reverently of any given therapy, except maybe EMDR.

Meanwhile, as written about on the Ecstatic Integration Substack in October 2025, Griffin and her husband are shareholders in Resilient, the for-profit corporate spin-off of MAPS (the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, the nonprofit leading MDMA therapeutic research). They donated $1 million to MAPS and subsequently became investors in Resilient, MAPS’ MDMA corporate spin-off.

Again, it’s just not a good look.

Personal impressions

One of the reasons I’ve waded so deep into this story is because of my long history of working on survivor memoirs. I’ve read countless of them over twenty-plus years. I’m also working on my own memoir that involves stories of recovered memories, my ex’s, not my own. So, I have firsthand experience as the partner of someone who recovered memories of childhood sexual abuse.

What I’ll say about The Tell is that Amy’s husband was far more supportive of the journey of unraveling than I was able to be for my ex-wife. He never makes a misstep, is never anything less than a supportive pillar even though recovered memories mostly lead to a diagnosis of PTSD, if not Complex PTSD, and the experience throws the family system into complete turmoil.

The Tell is mostly a journey about how Griffin longs for two things:

1. To get justice by suing her former teacher, named as Mr. Mason in the book, and to stop him from ever being able to hurt another girl again; and

2. To be believed.

On Point #1, she’s thwarted because the statute of limitations ran out on her. Also, she never finds anyone, not even “Claudia,” who can corroborate the abuse. She gets an anonymous postcard at the very end of the book that reads “I didn’t have it in me to tell you the truth.” The character “Claudia” later insists it wasn’t her who sent it.

Griffin was 12 and 13 years old when the abuse happened. It was 1988-1989. Mr. Mason’s age is not specified by he must have been in his thirties. Griffin’s recovered memories come thirty years later, so Mr. Mason is in his sixties now, if not older.

Never once does Griffin speculate about the girls he must have harmed in those intervening years other than her attempts to find them to corroborate her own story so that she can be believed. She does, however, insist that bringing him to justice would stop him from harming girls in the future. This struck me over and over again because when my ex revealed to me who her abuser was, all I could think about was how many girls must he have hurt over the many years that had passed. I agonized over the harm he’d done to her and to others. And while I’m not suggesting that a sixty-plus-year-old can’t continue to perpetrate abuse, it struck me that the worst of the damage had already been done. Not so for Griffin, whose singular pursuit seems to be one of a warrior who will clear the path for future victims.

On Point #2, being believed is an obsession throughout the book, so I imagine this outcome, where people are scrutinizing and doubting her story, is excruciating.

There’s plenty of speculation that both Griffin and Altum were abused, possibly by the same teacher. Now Griffin is throwing a new wrinkle in the story by asserting in her lawsuit that “Claudia” is not Altum, but another friend altogether. So now we have three potential victims from the same middle school.

Running out the statute of limitations on a criminal charge like rape wouldn’t shield someone from being compelled to testify in a separate civil case, such as a defamation lawsuit. So, Mr. Mason could be subpoenaed to testify. If he’s guilty of abusing three separate girls, he’s unlikely to be cooperative or helpful. He could plead the Fifth. But what if the three women—Griffin, Altum, and whoever Claudia is—were to collaborate rather than fight? Just a thought.

When I look at this case I consider who has the most to lose and what the motivations of each party would be. For Altum, it seems to be about not letting someone with more power and money get away with something; for Griffin, it’s about her reputation and her lifelong quest to be seen and believed.

At this point Griffin’s suit introduces enough doubt that I am no longer so strident about not believing her as I was in March; however, I can’t imagine Altum would have taken this on without serious evidence.

Griffin’s own lawsuit reads: “Altum’s lawyer, Zach Rosenblatt, appeared as a guest on Hot Mics with Billy Bush, stating that he and Ms. Altum ‘wouldn’t have filed complaint if we were not prepared to prove the allegations in court.’”

I do hope we’ll actually get to see that day in court.

I’m back in the book-writing saddle. I’m relieved to be riding again, but it’s also got me thinking about resistance. In my experience working with memoirists, I would name resistance as the biggest culprit for why it takes so damn long, and why it’s so challenging to push through.

Here I am again, in a new moment of embracing my writing, but I’ve been here before, so I’m staying curious about where and how I get derailed. I’m noticing things—like how the very existence of all these words and pages feels so daunting, or the physical weight I felt bearing down on me during my last writing session, so heavy I only lasted an hour.

It’s not uncommon for memorisits to take ten years or longer to complete their books. I’ve walked alongside memoirists who’ve articulated every imaginable reason for their stuckness: fear of outcome, concerns about the impact on loved ones, overexposure and vulnerability risks, inner critics, imposter syndrome, bad timing, procrastination, perfectionism, inability to make the writing a priority. . .

I used to believe in writer’s block because I worked with writers who struggled to write. So, naturally, I assumed writer’s block was to blame. But then, in 2012, I read Ann Patchett’s incredible essay, “The Getaway Car” (which you can find in the collection, This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage) and it changed my thinking.

In it, Ann writes:

As far as I’m concerned, writer’s block is a myth. . . It can take a very long time to figure something out, and sometimes, no matter how much time you put in, the problem cannot be solved. To put it another way, if it were a complicated math proof you were wrestling with instead of, say, the unknowable ending of Chapter 7, would you consider yourself “blocked” if you couldn’t figure it out right away, or would you think that the proof was difficult and required more consideration? The many months (and sometimes years) I put into thinking about a novel before I start to write it saves me considerable time while I’m writing, but it’s all a trick of accounting. There may be no tangible evidence of the work I do in my head, but I’ve done it nevertheless. Even if I don’t believe in writer’s block, I certainly believe in procrastination. Writing can be frustrating and demoralizing, and so it’s only natural that we try to put it off. But don’t give “putting it off” a magic label.

It’s unceremonious but helpful. And, of course, we put things off for valid reasons. It’s valid to tend to your mental health when you hit challenging memories. It’s valid to wait till the kids are grown, or a parent is dead. It’s valid to prioritize work that earns you a living over a meaningful project that doesn’t.

That these reasons become excuses not to do the thing we profess to want to do—well, herein lies the problem. And so, if we want to write, we have to be in relationship with our resistance.

Recently, I had a coaching session with a student who’s wrapping up my six-month memoir class. She was so upset with herself for committing to the class but not doing the writing. She showed up to half the classes. She turned in a fourth of the assignments. She used words like ashamed, angry, disappointed.

All I could do was hold her in her disappointment by letting her know that the memoir is going to take the time it takes. She’s writing about an abusive relationship that happened when she was a teen. An older man who groomed her, who took advantage. This is not easy material. It’s provocative. It’s triggering. I told her to be gentle with herself. The story will come, in time.

Forgiveness is key. Because in order to get back in the saddle, you have to forgive yourself for dismounting in the first place. Dismounting, by the way, can feel like being thrown off. It’s not always a choice. After my dad died in 2023, I just didn’t want to write, or keep up my writing practice. Loss made my writing feel trivial. Or maybe I was just depressed. I tried, but then I capitulated—and ultimately I knew I wasn’t ready. I threw myself into my job, and 2023-2025 were some of the most grueling years of my working life. But then, 2026 dawned and something shifted. More ease. Flow. Plus, I found a vehicle to write again through Memoir Nation’s JanYourStory.

The progress I made in January led me to say yes to an April writing retreat, where I wrote for a full weekend. I asked for something I needed—an accountability buddy who I’m writing with on Thursdays and texting on the weekend when I write. (Thank you, !) I’m only a few weeks in, but it’s working.

For any memoirist who’s struggling to write, you’re not alone, and there’s nothing wrong with you or your process if it’s taking longer than you want. In the Memoir Nation podcast this week (airs Monday, June 15), we interview , who speculates that the average length of time it takes to write a memoir is even longer than ten years. Ronit hosts a quarterly writing support group for Memoir Nation (the next one is this coming Thursday!) called Mining the Depths, which exists to hold space to process the hard stuff. In the interview, she shares about how she would sometimes get the shivers when she wrote something difficult or poignant, and how unprepared she’d been for that physical experience. She reminds writers to offload, to shake it off, to find ways to support their nervous system.

She also says:

“There’s no race. . . Give yourself time to ruminate and take care of yourself, and allow those passive thoughts to enter your mind. There is no right way to do this. And therapy is very helpful. Writing is not therapy, but when you’re writing memoir, being engaged in a therapeutic relationship can be incredibly helpful.”

This notion that there is no race takes me back to my saddle metaphor because when I first started to think about writing my memoir, I thought I could do it in a year. I set that goal for myself, but it was a ridiculous false construct of an idea that was all about pushing and achieving and short-cutting. There was no way this process was ever going to take a year. It’s too fraught. It’s necessarily challenging. It’s gratifying for the challenge, and I will be forever changed for doing the work. But still, it’s hard! I’ve forgiven myself for the hubris of thinking I could knock it out. It’s humbling.

Resistance is inevitable. You will face it. In The War of Art, Steven Pressfield writes:

Every sun casts a shadow, and genius’s shadow is Resistance. As powerful as is our soul’s call to realization, so potent are the forces of Resistance arrayed against it. Resistance is faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, harder to kick than crack cocaine. We’re not alone if we’ve been mowed down by Resistance; millions of good men and women have bitten the dust before us. And here’s the biggest bitch: We don’t even know what hit us.

Part of the work of being a memoirist is to try to understand what’s hit you. If you know, you can name it, and be gentle with yourself for being human and succumbing to it. You can renegotiate your goals. You can ask for what you need. You can manifest support in the form of an accountability partner, a writing group, a coach, a therapist.

Also, you are, in fact, doing something unnatural when you write memoir. You are exposing yourself, digging deep, unearthing traumas, doing hard emotional and physical work—and the body and mind are right to react in opposition. Mary Karr has said that memoir is like punching yourself in the face. Unnatural! We put ourselves through the ringer to do this work. Part of why I oppose using AI to write is because no one can or should do this work for you. The hard work is the reward.

In a New Yorker piece this week, Katy Waldman, writing AI useage by one or more(!) of winners of the Commonwealth Short Story Prize, poses the question of whether “writing devoid of an inner purpose can rival the stuff ripped out of an author’s chest with a claw grapple.” If you write, you are inviting that claw grapple into your life (unnatural 😅!), and also, you know the answer to this question.

Last night, I had the great privilege of attending an event honoring the 50-year anniversary of our beloved local bookstore here in the Bay Area: Book Passage.

I only write about events I attend when the subject is so inspiring that I can’t help myself, and in founder and president Elaine Petrocelli, who’s 85 going on 55, there’s no shortage of inspiration.

Sitting in the audience, I thought a lot about the contrast between Elaine and other founders we have to hear about in the news these days—the founders of places like Amazon, or Facebook, or ChatGPT who are so cringey and disappointing and out of touch. Can you imagine any of these guys ever uttering the words Elaine spoke last night about her long tenure running one of the most popular and beloved bookstores in the country:

She may as well have been saying this about herself, which is something that’s always set Book Passage apart—the inherent kindness underlying the operation. If all of book publishing acted with the integrity and decency of Elaine Petrocelli, we’d have a very different industry on our hands.

Specifically, I’m talking about an ethos of equality that you can feel at Book Passage. This is a store that regularly hosts famous authors and luminaries, and at the same time always makes room for unknown, debut authors.

Last night, Elaine told the story of an author who’s now very famous who had an event at Book Passage for his first book where only six people showed up. “And one of them was his mother, and another one was me,” she laughed. She didn’t tell us who he is, but we’d know his name, she said.

When She Writes Press first started in 2012, Elaine and Book Passage embraced us. Our authors, local or not, have always wanted to have events at Book Passage. It’s kind of a rite of passage for local authors especially—and Elaine and her husband Bill supported what we were doing from the jump. Elaine’s interviewer last night was Lisa Kay Solomon, and she spoke to Elaine’s talent at spotting things—books to carry, authors to cultivate, friends of the bookstore to acknowledge. And I’ll add to that list, local publishers to champion.

When I go to Book Passage, the honoring flows both ways. I feel Book Passage’s appreciation for She Writes Press, and I’m devoted to Book Passage and to Elaine. When I was contemplating moving distributors, Elaine was one of the first people I contacted. She’s never been too busy to take my call.

Listening to Elaine share stories from the early days of Book Passage, I kept thinking about hard work and humility. We’re living in a world now where cheaters and exploiters get ahead. Listening to Elaine, you feel her commitment and her kindness, but also her strength and her resolution.

She told a story of when Bill Clinton came to the bookstore’s San Francisco location, and 2500 showed up having been promised their books would be signed. About 1000 people in, Clinton’s aid explained to Elaine that they had to stop the line. When Elaine reminded him of the deal, the aid pushed back.

Resolute, Elaine said, “Really, I don’t think that would be good for the president.”

The man said, “I am the one in charge of this event.”

To which Elaine said, “When you are President, I’ll do what you say, but he’s the president, and I’m going to ask him.”

You can imagine what happened. The aid said never mind and every single one of those 2500 people got their book signed by Clinton.

I love this story because it shows Elaine’s fair-mindedness. Clinton committed to those fans, and Elaine was going to make sure her patrons got what they came for.

More of our modern leaders could take cues from Elaine’s style of leadership. I see so many people in leadership positions thinking there’s power in forcefulness, in bullying, and in one-upmanship. Our new attention economy rewards the people who are the loudest and the most bombastic. But those aren’t the people who positively impact the most lives.

Elaine was nearly brought to tears remembering 9/11. That morning, after the second plane hit, she thought of her employees, and realized she needed to drive to the store and close shop for the day. When she got there, well over 100 people were in the store. They didn’t know where to go, so they’d come to Book Passage. She talked about raiding the café for all the food and drinks they had, and setting up a space for people to just commune, and be, and to get news from loved ones in New York as they could.

Elaine is my kind of role model because of the loyalty she and Book Passage inspire. It doesn’t take a lot, really, to honor the dignity in others. In the early days of She Writes Press, when I got so much pushback about hybrid publishing, Elaine and Bill saw it as innovative and important. They’ve always made my authors feel special and welcome, hosting events, selling their books. This shouldn’t be rare, but it is. I’ve felt seen and buoyed by their support all of these years, and the value of that is immeasurable. Last night I witnessed that Elaine does this seamlessly, for countless people.

A couple times from the stage last night, Lisa Kay Solomon suggested that someone needs to write Elaine’s biography, and I agree! When Lisa Kay closed with the question of what the biography might be called, Elaine didn’t hesitate to share a perfect closing story, which was how she refused to have an event for our current president, and his response was: “Who are you, anyway?” Which would indeed make a great book title for the story of Elaine’s life.

There’s a rich story waiting to be told here. For now, I’m honoring Book Passage and Elaine with this tribute and hoping to read in the comments the ways others have been touched and impacted by their hard work. Happy 50 years to our amazing local indie.

It’s hard to imagine arriving on the other side of AI scandals in publishing. Will this all feel quaint someday, the way we might look at photographers who must felt similarly violated when digital cameras came on the scene? Or can publishing find a way to hold the line when it comes to machine-generated books?

It seems simple, the notion that we might have an industry-wide consensus, that there might be policies, or rules, or best practices, or regulations. But no, there’s none of that. Instead, publishers are choosing outrage and canceling as a strategy, and we all know how effective that is.

The latest AI scandal on everyone’s tongue centers a book called The Future of Truth: How AI Reshapes Reality, by Steven Rosenbaum. What should have been a publicity score for the author and his publisher, BenBella Books, has instead cascaded into a national shame fest not dissimilar from the March 2026 fallout surrounding Shy Girl, the novel Hachette pulled from publication following accusations that the author used generative AI.

Here’s what’s happened so far:

On May 14, publication week for The Future of Truth, Wired posted this excerpt from the book: Gen Z Is Pioneering a New Understanding of Truth. If you click on this link now, you’ll find a note from Wired’s leadership reading that its “editorial leadership has determined that [the excerpt] does not meet our editorial standards. It has been removed.” But nothing can ever be removed from the Internet, folks, so you can read the excerpt in full here.

On May 19, The Times revealed in an exclusive that Rosenbaum, whose entire book centers how artificial intelligence is threatening and reshaping the concept of truth itself, had confessed that quotes in his book were either misattributed or completely hallucinated by AI.

On May 29, Wired did a follow-up in the form of an interview: “We Asked the Future of Truth Author to Explain How He Used AI. It Didn’t Go Well.” It’s behind a paywall, but here’s the part that’s trending:

I read the pile-on that followed, and it’s hard not to feel some satisfaction at it. But the very same week that all of this was happening, I got an email from a former author asking me what our upcoming publishing schedule is, and whether we might consider her next book.

I would have been excited to welcome this author back to She Writes Press, but in her subsequent email she informed me that she’d used AI to write her book. She framed it to me this way:

I must disclose that I used Claude AI to be my ghostwriter and editor to some degree, and the project is still my voice and my stories and my ideas including the framework.

I respect this person a lot, so my heart sunk in on itself as I read these words. Of course, we cannot and will not publish a book with Claude as a ghostwriter, but immediately my head started to swim with what will happen next. Will she just go and find another publisher? Will she stop disclosing that she’s used AI in this capacity because of my reaction? Will this ruin our professional relationship?

When I let her know it was a no-go, but not without letting her know (kindly) how I feel about AI as a ghostwriter, she responded that she respects my position as a publisher. Notably, she continued:

As a writer, from my perspective, it feels much more authentic and genuine than my first attempt at writing, and I am amazed at how well it maintained my voice. And the readers who are reading it experience nothing except my voice.

Do I find this disheartening? I do. But increasingly I’m finding that the line between what belongs to AI and what belongs to a given writer is blurring. Questions come up for me about how divided we’ll become, and how long publishers will continue to hold the line when they’ll be saving so much time and money allowing AI to do more and more for us. I’ve found that people’s ethical stances tend to buckle under financial pressure, and publishing is feeling a lot like the proverbial frog in the boiling pot right now.

On May 28, in the wake of the fallout over The Future of Truth, New York magazine put out an article called “Nonfiction Book Publishers Aren’t Remotely Ready for AI.”

It’s behind a paywall and worth reading, but here are the two intractable problems it identifies about publishing:

#1. Publishers don’t fact check

The gist of it is this:

But fact-checking is expensive: Hiring an outside checker can cost between $7,000 to $10,000 per book, or even more depending on its length, which might not be feasible for an author with a modest advance.

Worse, it seems publishers have no idea what to do about this glaring vulnerability.

#2. Full transparency about AI usage poses more problems than we might imagine.

It’s complicated. And don’t I feel it! Transparency isn’t enough, and we’re not encouraging more transparency when shame is the primary tactic. Detection tools are unreliable, and they pit publishers against their authors.

As of the writing of this piece, I believe that Rosenbaum is fixing the inaccuracies in The Future of Publishing for a next edition, and that the book is not being canceled. But things move fast from one day to the next, and publishers respond to public pressure when it comes to cancellation.

Book publishing’s strategy against AI thus far has been absolutism. The industry has decided that our best response to the tsunami coming our way is to post a sign at the beach that says No Waves. There’s no nuance here, no acknowledging how much support (and dare I say joy) people are finding as they interact with AI to create.

Creative industries are scared, and I feel that, too, but we are also rendering ourselves irrelevant by not taking a lead on establishing guidelines. There’s a huge difference between using AI as a thought partner and cutting and pasting lines of text, verbatim, and passing those lines off as your own. But if we’re equally outraged by all of it, we’re alienating would-be authors and missing our moment to do what publishing has always done best‚ which is to lead, to set standards, and to be an arbiter of what work gets published. I don’t have the answers, but I know I’m not alone in hoping we’ll continue to negotiate, and to find a shared language that doesn’t completely alienate publishers from their would-be authors.

There’s something in the air. You probably feel it. A certain tension. A certain agitation. One might even say combativeness. These vibes are pulsing everywhere, and it’s not without consequence on the genre of memoir.

I’ve been in book publishing for 26 years. From 2000-2016, my experience with litigious third parties was limited to a total of three books. Two of those were trademark infringement, when Seal Press published a book called Adios, Barbie, and almost published a weight-loss memoir called Breaking Up with Layne Bryant. In both cases, we changed the books’ titles. The third was a claim of “false light.” The woman making the claim was the author’s former guru; luckily, the author had the good sense to send the woman her pages prior to publication, so we were able to remove any offending passages before the guru escalated.

Since 2016, the number of demand letters we’ve received at She Writes Press has gone up exponentially, and in the past two years alone, I’ve had six run-ins with third parties that have racked up more legal fees than we’ve had in the previous decade.

Questions arise: Is it that authors themselves feel more emboldened? Are they writing more exposing things about people in their books and being more careless about disguising identifying details? Or is it that the threatened parties feel more emboldened? That people are perhaps more likely than they were in years past to escalate and fight back?

I think it’s both.

Publishers try to get ahead of legal exposure. We aren’t sitting ducks. But, memoir is fraught, and full of stories of people doing bad things. Publishers can’t always foresee authors’ bad behavior, either, when it comes to scandals such as the one resulting in a lawsuit against the author of The Tell (and no, this story is far from dead or over).

For years I’ve told authors not to worry too much about lawsuits because authors tend to be over-anxious about their risk of exposure. The biggest issue is defamation, and it’s notoriously difficult to beat in court. Truth is an “absolute defense,” which gives authors a lot of protection to write their stories. If a memoirist recounts a personal experience of abuse, the onus is on the abuser to prove falsity. This protection is obviously incredibly important since the alternative—requiring survivors to prove the truth of their own trauma—would effectively silence the people most in need of a voice. I think about Chanel Miller’s incredible memoir, Know My Name. Absent these kinds of protections, there’s no doubt that her abuser, Standford swimmer Brock Turner, would have used his money and privilege to block publication of that book.

Annie Lamott famously wrote, “You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.”

This is true.

And, in today’s contentious climate where perpetrators are winning, I feel compelled to advise memoirists to be more cautious, and to get their work legally vetted if they have any concerns about how they’re portraying another person. Change names and identifying details as a matter of course. Spend the money for a legal read. Mind how you characterize someone. You can describe abuse, for instance, without calling someone names.

Years ago, we received a cease and desist letter from an ex-husband of one of our authors because she called him “porn addict” in the pages of her memoir. There were countless worse behaviors portrayed in that book, but that was the one thing he could point to that was in fact potentially libelous. Resist name-calling or characterizing someone in blunt terms. Own your experience, feelings, and interpretations and you’ll be okay.

What follows are a handful of the aforementioned recent “run-ins” we’ve had recently, which showcase the variety of accusations, and explain how we’ve dealt (or are dealing) with them.

Case study: Defamation

I’ll start with the only book I can name: Dumb Girl, by Heidi Yewman. This is because Heidi has written publicly about her experience in a post about her book launch that reads:

Six days before the launch, my brother—whose sexual abuse I wrote about in the book—sent a cease-and-desist letter via his lawyer to my publisher, demanding that She Writes Press not publish the book. My publisher, along with a lawyer explained that the book will be published and that he had no legal grounds to stop it.

Our lawyers response was multi-point defense of our position and was enough for the brother and his lawyer to back down. Heidi had a successful launch and has told me that getting her story into the world has been a huge burden off her shoulders. Her truth has been set free, which is one of the most powerful outcomes of publicly releasing shame. One of the very important outcomes of survivor memoirs is to redistribute shame—away from the survivors and back to those who caused it.

Case study: Tenants-in-common

This is a tale of two sisters. One is my author who finished her book that largely centers the sisters’ father. The book is nuanced in its treatment of the father, but at issue are the letters and photos that my author (Sister 1) wished to reproduce in her book. The father is long dead, and the two sisters are “tenants-in-common” of their parents’ documents. Sister 2 doesn’t want these documents to be published. Sister 1 insists her book doesn’t hold the same power if the documents, especially the letters, have to be removed. We’re moving ahead here, but cautiously and with some agreements and understandings in place.

Case study. Privacy

This one’s sad because the demand letter we received resulted in the author canceling her book contract. The memoir focused on the foster system, specifically the author’s relationship with one family who are fostering minor children. At issue here is a foster mother who seemed to have first agreed that she was okay with the book being published, but who later changed her mind. Her demand letter cited “Public Disclosure of Private Facts” as the reason for us to halt publication.

Because minors were involved, this one felt intractable. The author disguised the family and the children—their names and identifying details and where they reside. Her intent was not to harm, of course, and the book would have been an important contribution, but at the end of the day, some of what would have been disclosed about these kids is their story to tell. It might have been different if they weren’t still minors. As it stands, this is the first book SWP has ever canceled for potential privacy violations.

Case study. Publicity violation

This one has been the wildest ride because it’s ongoing, with a person on a dogged mission to put us in our place, it seems. The aggrieved party is the director of the estate of a beloved teacher and author who passed away nearly twenty years ago. The director claims that one of our books is exploitative, using the deceased author’s name to leverage the book’s salability. The facts are this: Our author writes about meeting this beloved man in person and asserts that he was deeply inspiring to her (as he has been to many). Later, he appears in a dream sequence, encouraging our author to write her book. She does—and the result is the book we published.

The director is trying to insist that we remove every single link in which the deceased author’s name is mentioned, something we’re not willing to do because he’s part of her story. We disagree that it’s exploitative, and the book isn’t selling in any kind of meaningful numbers that would indicate we’re piggy-backing off of the name recognition of this dear author. Even if the book was a bestseller, however, it would be hard to prove that the reason was because she met and wrote about one of her literary heroes in her book, or that said meeting is something reviewers include in their write-ups about the book.

Memoirists are allowed to write about interactions they have with people. A similar example is a book we have on our list, Anne Abel’s High Hopes, a story that credits Bruce Springsteen for lifting the author out of a depression. In another situation, we took the more cautious road, but mainly out of a difference of opinion. An author approached us to publish her memoir, Finding Truth with Michael, about her friendship with Michael Jackson. During the production process, we pushed back on too many things the author wasn’t willing to compromise on. We didn’t want Michael’s likeness on the cover. We wanted her to change her epilogue. We mutually agreed we weren’t the best publisher for her and she self-published, to her credit by the way! I appreciate an author who knows what she wants.

As for what we’re doing about the director’s insistence that we act to take down publicity and other listings, we’re not doing it. Our lawyer has let us know she has no ground to stand on here, so it is right and good to seek legal advice and to push back when someone is coming after you for reasons that are more personal than legal.

***

I don’t mean to scare writers with this post. I recommend that you let it all hang out while you write. Write everything. Write your absolute truth. And then when you’re done with your danger draft, as author Joshua Mohr calls it, comb back through with the following considerations in mind:

• Change names and identifying details of anyone who’s portrayed in a negative light.

• Ask yourself whether a portrayal is opinion or fact. Opinions are protected whereas statements like “He was a porn addict” is where legal exposure lives. Write about how your narcissist ex treated you (he or she was manipulative) rather than calling them a sociopath or psychopath.

• Consider what you’re claiming to remember versus what you know. Language like “I believed,” “I felt,” or “my experience was,” is more subjective, and offers more meaningful protection.

• If someone is deceased, that changes your exposure significantly. You cannot defame the dead, though living family members can potentially bring related claims in narrow circumstances.

• Trust your instincts. If you hesitated before writing a particular passage, flag it to come back to later. Come up with some measures for what you’re willing to cut and what must remain.

• Once you feel ready to publish, get a legal read if you’re still worried. Most of the authors I work with who get legal reads are advised to change details about their manuscripts that do not affect or alter the core story in any meaningful way—and these evaluations provide major peace of mind.

***

There’s a lot of time to get this right after you’re done with a more complete draft of your work. Getting ahead of all of this pre-publication rather than post is a gift you can give yourself and your publisher. Hang in there, Memoirists. Eyes wide open, as always, and take heart in the power of Truth.

I want to thank you so much for your support of my writing here on Substack, and I’m sending out a rare paid subscribers-only post because I have a couple special offerings on the horizon and I hope you’ll consider journeying with me.

The two opportunities I’m sharing are:

Six-Month Memoir Intensive.

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I spent a few days this past week at the annual Independent Book Publishers Association’s Pub U conference, where I always learn something new about books or writing or publishing—or all three.

Publishers attend this conference to be better at what we do, and we get to learn from our peers (publishers, and also authors since authors are often also publishers) about what’s working for them.

At Pub U, all the sessions I attended (or in one case moderated) were about sales and marketing. The effect of 4 million books having been published in 2025 (a 32.5% increase over 2024) is dilution. All publishers are selling fewer books, and therefore all publishers are looking for solutions to sell more. If you’re guessing that a lot of publishers think AI holds the answers, you’re right. They do.

That said, my takeaway about AI post-conference is that it can do a lot of things for us—it can help us do our systems better and faster and more efficiently; it can help with discoverability through better keywords and back-linking/internal linking and SEO optimization, driving readers to find our books—but it’s no home run hitter. It might be able to help publishers load a base or two, but we and our authors still have to be the ones who swing the bat.

Every publisher longs for a breakout book, but that’s not the only thing that drives publishers to publish. For instance, She Writes Press is not focused singularly (or even particularly) on trying to make bestsellers. Our mission is to give voice to women writers. Some books perform better than others, and not always for reasons we can know or predict. I’ve always felt this is the magic of book publishing, actually, because what fun would it be if we could predict our winners? There’d be no effort to level the playing field, and the Big Five would have a lock on the market. As it stands, indies are in play because there are nuances to this business, and no single publisher has a monopoly on taste or what readers are looking for.

While I was at the conference, one of my authors sent me an email asking for my opinion about another book, written by a friend of hers, which the author perceives to be similar, but also which the author perceives to be breaking through in ways her book did not.

These are hard emails to respond to because authors don’t always understand how difficult it is to sell books, and many authors believe that getting their book written and published is the hardest and heaviest lift. Of course, it’s not. The hardest and heaviest lift is the sales and marketing, which is driven by many factors.

In the case of the author in question, her friend’s book is a new release, Divine Corners, a memoir positioned as a holocaust survival story. It has two five-star reviews to date, and it’s #1 in Jewish Holocaust History as of the writing of this post. (Congratulations to Michelle!)

The SWP author, Enid, published her book, All Shook Up, in 2024. The book is a true story but she chose to write it as a novel. It’s categorized in YA. While the holocaust theme is there, front and center for the young protagonist whose parents’ survival and subsequent trauma shape her young life, we (by design) tried to sell this story as a book about teen culture of the 1950s with a young girl embarking on adventure and music who ultimately uncovers family secrets.

I share this because these two books, while they share at their core a story of two protagonists whose parents who survived the holocaust, could not be more different in the eyes of a reader. My author, Enid, sees the overlap in her shared history with Michelle, but a reader is likely gloss over this connection, especially at first glance.

I share this as a case study and because I put some significant time into considering Enid’s question. Was it a lost opportunity for us to have published Enid’s book as a novel, and a YA novel to boot? It’s hard to say, honestly, and it’s something we contend with every season with authors who want to fictionalize their stories. I will always advocate for memoir over autofiction since autofiction is fiction, and therefore must be sold as fiction—but there are plenty of books that prove that autofiction works. In other words, there are exceptions to every single opinion of what is best for a given book.

For Enid, she’s looking at the early success of another book and wondering if there could have been something we could have done differently or better as a publisher, or that she could have done differently or better as an author, and the answer is always going to be yes. Publishers make the choices they make when it comes to positioning: title, cover design, content. It’s a bit like Choose Your Own Adventure insofar as there are multiple ways to present the same book—and the publisher and the author make those choices, usually together, though sometimes one overrides the other’s advice, opinion, or desire.

Authors play a bigger role in sales and marketing than most of them realize, or want to. Publishers have (or should have) a role in getting the books out in the world, and many/most have sales and marketing strategies in place, but publishers aren’t always transparent with authors about what they can and can’t do. Part of the reason I left Seal Press (and traditional publishing at large) was because I felt we were not being honest with authors about what we could or were doing for them when it came to marketing and publicity. I wanted more transparent conversations so that authors would know how much fell to them. I wanted authors to be better educated about what it takes to sell books, and to realize that they should supplement our efforts with their own marketing and publicity campaigns.

It’s not the case—and it’s never been the case—that you publish the book and the readers will come. Instead, there are many factors at play that together are combined into some recipe that drives book sales and that make a book “work,” as we say in the industry. These include but are not limited to:

• The writing! Well, yeah. The writing matters, and countless well-written books never see the kinds of sales numbers they deserve. Someone once said to me that the best book ever written is one you’ve never read. All that means is that there are so many countless gorgeous books that don’t get elevated like they should—and the reason has nothing to do with the writing.

• A compelling, universal hook. Publishers work hard to help authors with this, but some books (often memoirs and novels) never quite get there either because there really isn’t a hook, or because the importance of this eludes the author.

• The author’s connections, platform, or name recognition. As much as I have long pushed back against the celebritization of book publishing, there’s rationale in big publishers seizing on authors who are known quantities, and for pushing authors who are not to be tireless in their efforts to elevate and amplify themselves, their brand, and their message.

• Timeliness and cultural relevance. This cuts both ways because national events can make or break books. Many books failed because of 9/11, or because of the pandemic, simply due to timing. October 7 resulted in the industry seeing certain Jewish-themed books as off-limits for a time. The social justice movement resulted in countless more books being published by authors of color. These things ebb and flow, and you can’t predict what world events are going to have an impact on how your book is received.

• Positioning. A publisher’s job is to support the author with a compelling title, cover, and overall package. That said, authors have a big say in this conversation, and sometimes they get in their own way. Sometimes publishers don’t get it right. You can see evidence of this from time to time with book covers, when the paperback cover attempts to rectify whatever information the hardcover sales conveyed. Case in point, Dani Shapiro’s Inheritance:

• Marketing/publicity. Helpful, of course, but even well-executed marketing and publicity campaigns don’t always sell books. In publishing we talk about “sticky” publicity, which generates real sales. At the conference this weekend I happened to be with the publisher of Mark Nepo’s The Book of Awakening, who shared with us that Mark’s Mel Robbins interview alone generated about 37,000 sales of this book. Incredible! This is on par with what Oprah used to be able to with a single show, and now what book clubs like hers and Jenna Bush’s and Reese Witherspoon’s can do over the course of several months for a debut. But most authors don’t get this kind of publicity, and not every podcast episode (not even Mel’s) generates this kind of sales result. And even great media can fall flat. I recall a book we had where the author was on “Good Morning America,” and we got a sales bump of about 200 copies from that appearance. Needless to say, disappointing. Publishers try to be ready to respond to media, but we don’t always know what will move the needle.

• Added post-publication from the comments: From Kathleen Schmidt, who penned “3 Things Every Author Must Do” following this post and who writes in the comments below: “I would also add that authors REALLY need to know their audience. So many do not. They must also know how to pitch their book. It doesn't mean pitch the book to the media. It means if I ask you what your book is about, you should be able to tell me in one very succinct sentence. Lastly, they need to understand audience development!” Read Kathleen’s post and subscribe to Publishing Confidential.

As I said, these are not the only things that sell books, but they’re some of the things that sell books. And it’s more recipe than formula. As an author, resist comparing yourself to another author. Easier said than done, I know. Publishers of course try to learn from the success of other books, which is why the industry is obsessed with comparative titles, but if we all knew how to replicate success, we’d all be rolling in bestsellers.

Importantly, AI might be able to support us to improve upon our recipes, but AI is more formulaic than creative. This is good news for publishers because what makes this industry so very special is that any author can get their work into the world, but we never know who’s going to reach what readers, or which books are going to make their mark or exactly for what reasons. This leaves room for creativity and new ideas, and for all of us to put energy, hope, effort, and expectation into every single book we publish. This is the fun part of publishing. If it ever becomes so formulaic as to be rote, we’ll lose the magic. Thankfully, the best books have never followed a formula—and no algorithm has figured out how to fall in love with a story. That’s still our job.

I’m on a bit of a how-to kick of late, so if you like it, great and thank you, and if you’re wondering when I’ll get back to industry news, that will be as soon as something moves me. For this week, by request from my author community, I’m writing about endorsements, aka blurbs.

I learned a fun historical fact about why we call them blurbs from reading Michael Castelman’s (former guest on my podcast) The Untold Story of Books (terrific book) in which he tells the story of why we call blurbs blurbs. Writing about how the early twentieth-century public was starting to take issue with celebrity endorsements and exaggerated claims of books’ excellence, Castleman shared:

As the kerfuffle over cover quotes raged, in 1907, Frank Gelett Burgess (1866–1951), a San Francisco satirist, released a collection of essays and, as a joke, included a ridiculously over-the-top dust-jacket quote from a fictional admirer, one Belinda Blurb. Ever since, promotional quotes have been called “blurbs.”

So now you know.

There are a a lot of things to think about when it comes to blurbs: 1) how many you need; 2) what kind of writer or expert you should ask; 3) who specifically to ask; 4) how to ask and on what timeline; 5) when and how to follow up; 6) how long blurbs should be and can they be edited; and 7) what to do with them once you have them. So let’s dive in.

How many blurbs do you really need?

This varies from author to author as much as it does from publisher to publisher. Sean Manning, the publisher of Simon & Schuster’s flagship imprint, made national news in early 2025 when he announced that his authors would no longer be required to get blurbs. The thing is, it doesn’t matter if a publisher says they’re not necessary because authors want them, and the industry does in fact rely on them in many ways (see below: What to do with them once you have them (aka, why they matter)). A good benchmark for how many, in my opinion, is one to four. I’m a fan of just enough blurbs for the cover (front optional, and only if it’s exceptional). Some publishers and writers, as you’ve undoubtedly seen, are blurb mad—which is how a book can end up with pages and pages of praise, or why you’ll see Amazon listings with tens and tens of blurbs. So there’s no right number, and my orientation on this is to follow my authors’ lead. So it comes down to the number you’re comfortable trying to solicit, and ideally a minimum of one.

What type of person should you ask?

My recommendation is to divide your list into three columns: 1) sure bets; 2) realistic possibilities; 3) pie-in-the-sky.

Having sure bets is simply helpful, but not everyone has sure bets. These will be people you know, friends of friends, people who are accessible to you. Realistic possibilities are acquaintances of friends, people you have connections to by degrees. Maybe they’re authors you know or have studied with in some capacity. In other words, these people are in your orbit but not exactly people you know. Pie-in-the-sky are your dream blurbers, and these ones will be tough because the reason they’re pie-in-the-sky is usually because they’re famous. The more fame an author has, the harder the effort will be, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try. I’m a fan of putting yourself out there and seeing what happens. The worst outcomes is not hearing back or getting a no. And being an author requires being bold. Go for it—you have nothing to lose.

Who specifically should you solicit?

Once you have your three columns, start to think about who should go in them. Sure bets, like I said, are people you know. But what kind of people for what kind of book? Generally speaking, if you’re writing a novel, your blurbers should be novelists; if you’re writing a memoir, your blurbers should be memoirists. But there are exceptions to these best practices. For instance, if you’re writing a prescriptive or topical memoir, it’s not at all outlandish to consider getting an expert from an appropriate other industry to blurb you: a therapist for a divorce memoir; a doctor for a weight-loss memoir; a politician for an advocacy memoir; etc.

For your realistic possibilities and pie-in-the-sky folks, usually these will be authors in your same genre. Occasionally my authors go after other types of celebrities, though often other kinds of celebrities are also authors. For instance, one of my She Writes Press authors got a blurb from Cindy Crawford, the model who’s also an author. We’ve had blurbs from chefs and movie stars, too. One of the most fun blurbs I ever got on one of my Seal Press books was from Jane Fonda, known for many things other than being an author, but yes, she’s an author, too.

If you do solicit an author outside your genre, there are two criteria to consider: First, is the topic of the book similar? For instance, maybe you’ve written a memoir about a topic or a region (or even town) that a novelist circles, or maybe they’re from there, making them an appropriate genre-jumping possibility. Second, the blurber is famous enough that it doesn’t matter. One of the first books I ever acquired for Seal Press was a nonfiction book about reckless women and their interesting lives, and we printed the book with a cover blurb by Tom Robbins. Why Tom Robbins? Well, the author knew him, he had name recognition, it mattered to the author, and was good enough for us.

How do you go about said soliciting

The “how” of this endeavor is where things get creative—and you want to stay agile and think outside the box when it comes to tracking people down. How you find people, how you ask, and how you follow up all falls under the umbrella of how to get this job done.

The best method is full-on guerilla mode. If you’re separated by degrees, you may have to ask someone to ask that person on your behalf. You should look up your potential blurber online. Do they have a website with a contact form? Are they on social media? Do they have a book agent, or a speaker’s agent? I personally think it’s always best if you can get the person directly, so through their website or through their social media DMs, but that’s also a likely place to be ignored. Which is why how you ask is as important as anything.

Whether you write a letter, an email, or a DM, make sure it sings. Your note should be both flattering and authentic. (Note: if you are going to use AI to support you to write a query letter, please please make sure that it really reads like your voice. I can’t tell you how off-putting the current AI surge is and how many of the emails I receive lately feel like they’re written by AI. Resist!) Tell the person why you love their work, but also make the case for your own book. Blurbing is a favor, but if you don’t know someone, they have no reason to do you a favor. Therefore, you have to sell to them why your book matters. Make a case. Spend time with your letter/note, and make sure to think of any and all reasons why the person you’re asking would be moved to support you. The number one reason here is a shared passion or connection.

Tip: Make sure your letter/note is framed as an ask. Give the person a sense of the timing of publication and/or who your publisher is or will be. If you don’t have a publisher yet, you can leave this out. Include that you will be happy to provide your manuscript in any format they prefer: in ARC (Advance Reader Copy) form, printed out, digital, or even audio-recorded. The more options you offer, the better. If they say yes and have a preference for how you deliver the content, you’ll figure it out!

The next part is both easy and anxiety-producing beyond measure. You hit send. Send might mean a number of things: 1) You’ve sent to your shared connection; 2) You’ve sent to the author/expert via their contact form or DMs; 3) You’ve sent to the author’s/expert’s agent or representative. And then you wait.

How you go about following up

Following up is an art and an opportunity. The follow-up phase is a good time to make it increasingly easy for your potential blurbers to say yes. Of course, first you have to weigh whether you think the person you’re trying to reach has even seen your request. I recommend going about your follow-up based on what information you’ve gotten back from your potential blurbed based on one of the following scenarios:

Scenario 1: Blurber or your connection to the blurber gets back to you and says they’re open to the possibility
In this case, you’re halfway there! Here’s where you make your blurbers life easy. Make sure you don’t have a pressured timeline. Ask (even if this is a re-articulation from your original letter) how the blurber would like the manuscript to be sent. I once had a blurber ask me to audio-record two chapters of my book for her and send it as a voice note. I was happy to oblige!

Here is also where you might be bold and offer some template language to your potential blurber. It can’t hurt to write, for instance:

Given how busy you are, I’m enclosing my chapter summaries and my favorite chapter. I’d be happy to send you the full manuscript if you feel you want or need more, and I can get that to you as a printed ARC, or digitally. This will be ready on xDATEx, and I’m hoping to have the blurb back by xDATEx.

In the meantime, here are some sample blurbs my team has come up with that I invite you to use as a baseline or guidance, or even as is.

Sample 1: Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua.

Sample 2: Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua.

Scenario 2: You know you’ve sent to the right address and you’re not hearing back
In this case, I recommend one to two follow-ups before giving up. You might use your first follow-up as an opportunity to restate your case if you failed to make a strong one in your first note. If you get something published in the form of a story or an op-ed or a personal essay, use that moment to share with your potential blurber. If you weren’t previously contracted with a publisher and you get a publisher, that’s another good reason to follow up. After an initial request and two follow-ups, I recommend letting it go.

Scenario 3: You’re not sure if you have the right address and you’re not hearing back
You might keep trying here if you’re not sure you reached the person, but this is a sleuthing job and at some point you might hit enough dead-ends that you will decide you’ve gone the distance you can go.

What’s the appropriate timeline?

Per my xDATEx placeholders above, you’ll want to give the average blurber at least six months to consider your request. In your initial letter, you can let them know if you have a publication date. If and when they say yes, they’ll consider blurbing your work, your follow-up letter might read something along these lines:

Date: May 11, 2026

Thank you so much for your consideration. My publication date is June 2027. Given how busy you are, I’m enclosing my chapter summaries and my favorite chapter. There are a number of ways I can get you the manuscript—via email or a printed and bound copy. If you prefer to wait for ARCs, they’ll be ready to send out early next year.

My team has come up with some sample blurb language that I invite you to use as a baseline or guidance, or even as is.

Sample 1: Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua.

Sample 2: Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua.

I’ll leave you with this for now and if you have a preference on how you’d like me to send the work, please let me know. Otherwise I’ll follow up again when the ARC is ready.

If you think offering sample language is too bold, don’t do it. I’m telling you, however, it works—and people are busy, so food for thought.

How you follow up after this depends on whether and what you’ve heard back. The entire process is, as I said, an art and an opportunity. Be persistent without being pushy. It’s okay to follow up with very busy people, and it’s not a no until it’s a no. In other words, not hearing back is not necessarily a no, and the gentle art of nagging is expected and required of authors when it comes to nailing down blurbs.

What length should your blurbs be and can you edit them?

If you’ve gotten to this step, hallelujah! You have a blurb! Or more than one. Some people will generously offer a lot of words, others many fewer. Authors are understandably thrilled when someone writes a page-long blurb about their book, but readers are not so thrilled to read a review when they’re expecting a blurb. So keep within the industry parameters of 50 words or less. Cover blurbs should be even shorter—three to fifteen words being a good benchmark. You don’t want your blurb to overwhelm your front cover design. On the back of the book, there’s typically room for two or three substantive blurbs or four or five short ones.

Yes, you can edit blurbs, but you can’t add words, or put words into blurbers’ mouths. You can use ellipses to truncate blurbs, and in some cases you might possibly go back to a blurber with an edit you made if it changes their language or their meaning, but that would need to be approved, and you’ll want to consider whether your ask will be alienating. You do not need to get a blurber’s approval to use a partial blurb, which means that if you pull out a single line among five lines to use as your official blurb, that’s considered fair play. You are not required to use every single word a blurber offers.

What to do with them once you have them (aka, why they matter)

Once you have your blurbs collected and edited, they serve a few purposes, and this goes back to why I think it’s silly for a publisher to express that blurbs aren’t required. No, they’re not and they never have been. It’s not a publisher’s policy for authors to get blurbs. It’s just a best practice. Why? Because blurbs serve many purposes and live in many places:

1. Cover, back cover, and/or praise sheet. Depending on how many blurbs you have and of what caliber, you may decide to put one on your cover. Look at other covers of books you own to see how this looks—not too many words! Choose wisely when it comes to placement. Better-known people should occupy cover real estate, but you may also want variation (ie, industry expert vs. author; male vs. female author; etc.) If you have a lot of blurbs (not to mention reviews, which is too much to tackle in this post, but that means industry reviews like Kirkus, Booklist, Foreword, etc.), then often this will merit including a praise sheet (or sheets) at the front of your book.

2. Online retailer platforms. If you spend any time on Amazon or Bookshop or B&N online, then you know that blurbs spill into online spaces. They’re a selling tool! The way I think about blurbs is that they’re a tipping point. If you see a blurb from a well-known writer, or someone whose credentials lends credibility, or if the language of a blurb moves you in such a way, it might be a reason to buy a book that you otherwise wouldn’t have.

3. Foreign/subrights sales. Our foreign/subrights agency wants us to send them every single blurb our authors get because blurbs support the case that a book is a strong bet when it comes to subsidiary rights. Blurbs (and reviews in this case, too) build a case file in a sense—showing anyone in any position to leverage a book that it’s a worthwhile bet.

4. Bragging rights. You can and should make memes that feature your blurbs, which you can then use as part of your social media campaign. Blurbs are often used on sales and publicity sheets, as well as press releases. Any public space where you post about your book might be enhanced by a solid blurb.

5. Selling tool. There’s the actual selling of the books post-publication of course, but agents also appreciate blurbs for the purpose of selling your manuscript. A strategically placed blurb on a proposal can make the difference between an editor sitting on a project and moving it to the top of their consider pile. I do not think a blurb has so much power that it will make someone acquire a book they wouldn’t otherwise, but a meaningful blurb by a big name will cause industry people to sit up and take notice.

I know many of my readers are industry professionals and savvy multi-published authors and I love that, so I’m sure you all have creative ways you’ve used blurbs and more to add to this post, which I welcome! I love it when I see a restacked post in which people recommend reading the comments. Thank you and bring ’em on!

Remember a mere two years ago when spam emails actually looked and felt like spam emails? When they weren’t flooding your inbox to the tune of two or three per week, or even two to three per day? When spam wasn’t tied to the names of famous authors, or agents, editors, and publishing professionals?

Well, we’re not there anymore, and our inboxes are officially a preying ground. Late last year I wrote a Substack post about the various kinds of emails my authors were getting—from famous authors to book clubs to book and film agents to editors.

It didn’t seem possible that it could get worse, but it has. Victoria Strauss’s recent Author Beware post, “Watch Out For This Scam Impersonating Editors at Major Publishing Houses,” tackles the heart of the problem, and if you’re an author, read it—comments included.

Obviously these scams are working or they wouldn’t be on the rise. One of my authors emailed me recently to tell me she was so excited that an agent had reached out to represent her. This author’s book is three years old, hasn’t sold tremendously well, and she doesn’t have a new book out. I told her, gently, this doesn’t happen. Agents will not pursue you unless your book has sold upwards of tens of thousands of copies, and certainly not three years post-publication, when nothing new has happened with your book for months. It’s more pressing than ever to remind yourself every time you open your inbox: If it’s too good to be true . . .

Earlier this year, I got opened my own inbox to find an invitation to teach memoir in Europe next year. I thought it was a scam because of course I did. I typed into Google the name of the woman who’d emailed me and the name of the company—and Google pulled up no results. Not a good sign! When I told her as much, she sent me all manner of evidence to prove that it was a real offer, and I agreed to schedule a preliminary call.

Her email response said:

And sorry for sounding like a “Nigerian prince” promising you the moon and the stars, I’m sure once you’ll hear more details, you’ll realise there’s quite a bit of work needed, but it is all worth it! :)

Strauss points out in her post about impersonators that this is exactly what these emails are—the “Nigerian Prince” scam updated for the creative economy. And since AI has eliminated any human effort cost (as always, shoutout to the tech bros for thinking through the consequences of their actions with such care), we’re drowning.

So far, none of my authors has confessed to me that they’ve lost money in these schemes, but they probably have. That said, I actually think the damage is more emotional than financial. Authors are perfect victims because we all believe in our books and we crave validation. Authors spend years toiling on their book babies, and there are few who don’t think their books should get or should have gotten more recognition. Perhaps the biggest tragedy of this kind of exploitation is that AI scams dampen authors’ enthusiasm, making them suspect of everything. The constant onslaught of these kinds of emails (and texts and phone calls) erodes trust and exhausts all the players involved.

These scams follow a playbook:

flattery → relationship → payment → disappearance

Flattery, dear authors, is not a thing in real book publishing circles. True publishing professionals are practically conditioned against it. So while compliments can be real, flattery should immediately result in a delete, don’t bother. Don’t waste your time. Do not get sucked in.

The challenge for authors is to ignore the specificity of these emails. AI is very good at generating personalized, book-specific praise with just a few keystrokes from the predatory party. Combine that with the use of real names from industry professionals, and you’ve got the makings of a sophisticated trap.

Just this week one of my authors forwarded me an email she got from “me,” impersonated (see below). Receiving this made me feel angry and violated. It made me think about the author who might fall for this scam and its real-world impact on She Writes Press and our reputation. Unfortunately, I’m one of huge number of publishing professionals who’s being impersonated in this way, and I commend Victoria Strass (again) for bringing attention to this matter with her Impersonation List. There are a lot of names on this list, my own included.

Frustrating to the extreme is that there’s nothing to be done. The scammers are after money, but in the process they’re corroding the interpersonal connections that are the heart of the publishing industry, and the AI tools that allow them to do this are only growing more sophisticated. In 2025, Americans lost $20.9 billion as a direct result of internet scams, a eight-fold increase since 2020. Undoubtedly we can credit AI for that supercharge.

Meanwhile, I was ready to write off the company that’s inviting me to come teach in Europe, and if the woman reaching out to me hadn’t been more persistent, maybe I would have lost that opportunity. So we’re losing both ways.

What to do:

• Check the email addresses first. If they’re coming from gmail and have a bogus handle, that’s an automatic tip-off.
• Research the person and the company that’s reaching out to you. In the case of my European contact, I couldn’t find her by Googling her, but she was able to provide me with her LinkedIn profile, the company address, and references.
• Check the references. If they don’t pan out, walk away.
• If you can’t help yourself and you do bite, watch out for pressure tactics, pressuring or aggressive tones, promises that sound too good to be true.
• Never give your credit card over the phone ever and no matter what. Any company that’s taking money from you should be able to send an invoice, which gives you another layer of checking out their details. But hopefully you never even get to this point!

Here’s the email from my impersonator. The brackets are mine to protect my author’s work. Note the bogus email (dead giveaway), but also the signature line which went so far as to capture a screen shot from the She Writes Press website.

From: Writer <info.writerpress@gmail.com>
Date: Sat, Apr 25, 2026 at 2:37 PM
Subject: The emotional pull behind [specific book title]
To: <lbgschwandtner@gmail.com>

Hello [author name],

I hope you’re doing well.

I recently came across [specific book title], and what really stood out was the emotional tension at the heart of Carla’s journey—especially the idea of carrying a buried past while being presented with a single wish that could change everything. That internal conflict between protecting oneself and risking love creates a strong, relatable pull throughout the story.

The presence of the [specific series info] adds a unique layer of intrigue, but it’s the emotional stakes—Carla’s guarded nature and the possibility of opening up again—that make the story feel personal and engaging. The way you bring your characters to life and draw readers into their emotional world is clearly a strength in your writing.

At She Writes Press, we work with authors who are crafting character driven stories with emotional depth, helping them expand their reach through strong editorial development and wider distribution, while still allowing them to retain full creative control.

Given your blend of paranormal elements with heartfelt, relationship focused storytelling, I believe your work aligns well with audiences we help authors grow into.

I would love to explore whether there is an opportunity to support the continued reach of [specific series title] series. Would you be open to a brief conversation?

Kind regards,
Brooke Warner
Publisher, She Writes Press

Dear readers, share your stories with me, please. It helps all of us know what’s going on to hear reports from others. What’s been your experience with this? What are you doing in response beyond just deleting? Any good tips for reducing the sheer volume of these emails in your inbox? Thanks for reading and sharing!

So many authors struggle mightily to come up with the perfect subtitle for their books. I spend a lot of time titling and subtitling books (with the support of some amazing editors on the She Writes Press team), and I like to remind authors that subtitles serve a purpose—they’re meant to be a complement to the title title, to provide context, to hook readers, and to convey your book’s essence.

This purpose also varies by genre, and different genres have different conventions. Also, why and whether a book’s subtitle is very simple—ie, A Memoir, A Novel—can will vary by degree of what subgenre a novel falls into, whether a memoirist is famous or not, or whether the title is strong enough to carry the entirety of the book’s message.

Any conversation about book subtitles should start with genre. The quest for the perfect subtitle is often elusive, and there’s often more than one best outcome. My goal for any subtitle on the She Writes Press list is this: that it guide readers to know what the book is, and to connect readers with the author’s work. We also pay attention to trends; do’s and don’ts; and repetition (never repeat in the subtitle a word that’s already in the title), and I’ll end this post with some of these best practices.

Subtitles for Novels

In most cases, the best subtitle choice for a novel is “A Novel.” This is mainly because not all novels are immediately recognizable as fiction, and because of convention. Publishing loves “how things have always been done,” and novels have a long history of not having subtitles.

In fiction, there’s been a strong push, largely led by self-published authors, to give subtitles to genre fiction. The rationale for this is strong: keywords. Keywords lead to discoverability. This is why you’ll oftentimes you’ll see something that looks like a subtitle when you’re searching for a book online, but it’s really just that the publisher (or self-published author) populated the subtitle category with something searchable:

At She Writes Press, we use subtitles more often than not for our subgenre fiction: thrillers; romance; mystery; historical fiction; or fiction that’s about a historical figure (ie, Jo van Gogh).

If you are writing a series, note that your series title is not the same thing as a subtitle. That said, a series title is always a nod to fiction. When readers see: Book One; Book Two; Book Three on the cover of a book, it can make the need for “A Novel” irrelevant. At She Writes Press we do both. Sometimes we leave “A Novel” on our series covers; sometimes we don’t.

Subtitles in fiction can be practical, descriptive, or artistic, but they should always serve the purpose of clarifying and enhancing the reader’s understanding of the book. That said, if you’re writing commercial fiction, don’t be surprised if your publisher wants to stick with the convention: A Novel. Not every novel is enhanced by a more descriptive subtitle.

Subtitles for Memoirs

Memoirs like to straddle between the simple A Memoir and sometimes much more descriptive subtitles. We use A Memoir only when the title is doing the heavy-lifting, so much so that we think additional words in the subtitle would be unnecessary. Sometimes if an author is well-known, or if their book is particularly literary, the publisher will deem A Memoir to be sufficient. Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House could have carried a subtitle along the lines of: A Memoir of Surviving Domestic Abuse, but as a literary memoir, that would have been too heavy-handed. In these other two She Writes Press examples, we felt the titles and the cover treatment were strong enough to stand on their own.

When we do opt for descriptive subtitles in memoir, our goal is almost always to drive home themes. Below you’ll see two common constructions—the passive version: A Memoir of [theme/message], and the active versions in which the subject leads: A Seeker’s Story…, One Introvert’s Year…. It’s not uncommon for us to subtitle our memoirs: A Daughter’s Memoir, or One Woman’s Journey…. Sometimes the subtitle works to identify the protagonist’s role in the story. If your book has a strong theme or message, it’s good to get those words in the subtitle so your reader knows what your book is about.

I’m personally a fan of subtitling memoirs. Like I said, there are reasons not to. But oftentimes if and when we opt for A Memoir on its own, our sales force at Simon & Schuster will ask us to go back and give the book a subtitle. And that’s not always an easy process. Widow in the City is one of our memoirs I’m excited about (coming out in May), and it’s a book that had a lot of subtitles before we landed on A Memoir of Heartbreaks and Hookups.

I dug up a handful here:
A Memoir of Grief and Getting Laid
A Memoir of Loss and Getting Laid
A Memoir of Falling Down and Hooking Up
A Memoir of Heartbreak and Hook-Ups
A Memoir of Pain and Pleasure
A Memoir of Grief, Growth and Lingerie
A Spicy Grief Memoir
A Memoir of Grief and Sexting

I love where we landed, and there must have been at least 15 exchanges between us and the author before we got here. These conversations matter—a lot—and getting it right means three parties have to agree: the author, the publisher, and the sales force. Once everyone’s on board, we can feel confident that we will pull readers along.

One construction we always avoid in memoir is the From ____ to _____. Memoirists seem to love this because it shows a trajectory: From the Streets to the Boardroom; From Addict to Successful Fill-in-the-Blank. This stems from the desire to show an arc (usually a la Rags to Riches), but publishers do not love it. Sometimes certain constructions simply don’t work as subtitles, or they feel amateur or overused.

One of my authors on a recent season sent me a couple of subtitles, neither of which “felt” like a subtitle, and that was the response I gave her about why I didn’t like them:

Southern Roots, Global Reach
Against All Odds

Others presented were either cringey (Surviving Sexism and Far Worse) or too vague (A Memoir of Perseverance).

Sometimes a publisher’s or editor’s job is simply to hold the line, or to explain why something doesn’t work. You want a publisher or an editor who will be in dialogue with you about your subtitle, and who’s willing to push back for the sake of getting it right. I like to remind my authors, it’s all in service of the book; it’s never personal.

Subtitles for Nonfiction or Self-Help Books

Finally, there’s nonfiction. Here the book subtitle has a bigger job. It’s to do the heavy lifting. Lots of times, therefore, nonfiction books will have long subtitles. In two of these examples—How to Be Okay When Nothing Is Right and You Are Not So Smart—the design solution to these funny, over-explainy subs was to put them in starbursts. In the case of Elephant Company, the long subtitle tells us exactly what the book is about: The Inspiring Story of an Unlikely Hero and the Animals Who Helped Him Save Lives in World War II. I can only imagine how long the publishing team and author might have workshopped that one!

For other nonfiction, the point is to show what the book is going to deliver, what the reader can expect. Motherhood Discounted is on She Writes Press, and this was another much-workshopped subtitle. We had: How American Capitalism Punishes Mothers (too negative) and A History of Caretaking and Motherhood Before and After Roe (too long), and ultimately the author really wanted to use the term “Care Work.” In The Emotional Side of Money, we want to tell readers what they can expect: a roadmap, and we’re very pleased with the package on this one, which tells its own story. True Color is an interesting case study, where Knopf chose a simple, short title, and a long and intriguing subtitle to drive home what this book actually is.

Best Practices for Book Subtitles

• Book subtitles that are long but not clever don’t help anyone. Stay concise. Workshop your subtitle till you pare it down to its core essence.

• Remember that your reader has no context for the intricacies of your story when they’re browsing in the bookstore or online, so don’t try to do too much. Focus on your themes, and keep it straightforward.

• If you have a publisher, trust that they understand the industry and that they know what booksellers are expecting. Lean into their expertise.

• Spend lots of time looking at other subtitles. Pay attention to where a book is published. Legacy publishers have lots of experience doing this work, and they’re better publishers to take your cues from than self-published authors.

• If you know that online is your main or only sales vehicle, use keywords in your subtitle, but use them effectively. Read up on keywords and their purpose, and run your ideas by people who have book experience, not just your friends.

• Clunky, heavy-handed subtitles carry the mark of an amateur.

• Don’t repeat in your subtitle a word you’ve already used in your title—ever.

• Getting your subtitle right is part of publishing a book that holds its own against traditionally published books.

• When in doubt, keep it simple.

General Questions for All Genres

• What role does your subtitle need to play (e.g., clarify the title, highlight themes, attract specific readers)?

• Does the subtitle clearly communicate what the book is about to someone unfamiliar with the title or with you as an author?

• Is the subtitle concise and easy to read, or is it overly long and clunky?

• Does the subtitle align with the tone and style of your book?

For Fiction

• Should you include “A Novel” to ensure readers know this is a work of fiction?

• Do you want to enhance your subtitle with keywords to convey its subgenre (ie, mystery, fantasy, romance)?

• If your book part of a series, so maybe you don’t need a subtitle at all?

For Memoirs

• Does the subtitle explain or enhance the title for readers unfamiliar with your story?

• Does the subtitle reflect the central themes or key emotional threads of your work?

• If your subtitle is long, is it clever, funny, or engaging enough to warrant the extra length?

For Nonfiction and Self-Help

• Does the subtitle highlight the book’s structure (ie, “Nine Steps to...”) or clearly outline what readers will gain from it?

• Have you included keywords that potential readers might search for online?

• Does the subtitle address a specific problem your audience faces, or does it offer a solution or a promise?

Market and Reader Considerations

• Will the subtitle resonate with your target audience and meet their expectations for this genre?

• How does your subtitle compare to others in my genre? Is it overused? Can you think of something more original?

• Have you researched relevant keywords and trends to ensure discoverability online?

Final Refinement

• Can I simplify the subtitle while retaining its core message?

• Does the subtitle flow naturally when spoken or read aloud?

• Have you tested the subtitle with trusted readers or professionals in my genre for feedback?

• If you have a publisher, does the subtitle align with their expectations and what their sales force wants?

Crafting the perfect subtitle is both an art and a science, requiring a balance between creativity, clarity, and strategy. By aligning your subtitle with your book’s genre, themes, and target audience, you will create a compelling complement to your title that entices readers and enhances discoverability. Good luck, dear writers!

*This post is a much-updated and totally enhanced version of a post I originally published on the IngramSpark blog in 2017.