221: Publishing and Personal Writing Pointers with Jennie Nash

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Writing a book is raising your voice. It's taking up space. It's standing on a soapbox and shouting out to the world and saying I have something I believe in that I want to say and I want you to listen. And that act of claiming that space and claiming that voice and knowing what you believe and knowing what you want to say and knowing why you you feel called to do that, that's the critically important part about writing. And again, the vast majority of writers miss that.

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Welcome back free Timers. I am so excited to have Jenny Nash on the pod today. Jenny is the founder and CEO of Author Accelerator Authority, a company on a mission to lead the emerging book coaching industry. She has certified more than 160 book coaches in fiction and nonfiction, probably many more and counting by now. Her own book coaching clients have landed top New York agents, six figure book deals with big five houses, and have won dozens of national indie book awards. Jenny herself is the author of at least 12 books in three genres, including her Blueprint series, so Blueprint for a nonfiction book for fiction and her latest on memoir writing, but specifically writing memoir for the marketplace. I first met Jenny when she joined the very first inaugural cohort of what is now the private BFF community, formerly Momo or Momentum for short. And I just couldn't have gotten any of that off the ground without you being there, Jenny, and you being there early. So it's wonderful to have you here. Welcome.

Thank you. It's fun to think about the flow of where things start and where they go. And here we are years later. Yay.

Well, there's a lot of tumult happening in creative industries on a whole, of course, with the rise of large language models. At the time that we're recording this, there's a writers strike. The actors just joined. But specifically within book publishing, you mentioned even offline, the recent collapse of several businesses who were hybrid publishers that shuttered in a day and there was no notice for their authors who were midstream. So I'd love to start there. Of just what you're seeing in the industry, whether in traditional publishing or hybrid or self. Like, pick any aspect and let's go to the GPT stuff next. Let's just start by the current structures and what you're seeing.

I mean, it is. I love the word you use. It is a very tumultuous time. And I sit in a really interesting place in the industry, which is I'm not an industry insider, so I don't work at a traditional publishing house. I'm not an agent, I'm a little bit on the outside. And I also sit in a place where my business is wholly focused on helping people write. So as soon as we start talking about production, producing a book or publishing a book, or distributing a book, or marketing a book, that's not where my expertise lies. So I help people get right up to the line of needing all those things. And then there's a whole giant industry on that other side of helping authors on that other side. So I sit in this interesting place and what I see is I think the changes that are coming or that are here were always going to come. You know, these changes happened in the music industry a long time ago. And the breakdown of that old guard model and the rise of new ways of distributing and reaching listeners, I think the same thing was now coming to fruition in publishing. It used to be that self publishing, for example, was way, way back in the day. It was called vanity publishing. And it's just rising in respect and prevalence and interest, people's interest in it. And readers have no idea how a book is published. They just want what they want. As a reader, I guess you would say it's a flattening of our industry that's been coming for a long time.

And in terms of flattening, I know there's a lot of talk about consolidation in traditional publishing and even the department of just blocking a recent merger. At the day they were recording this, there was like a big round of layoffs. Literally a New York Times article saying buyouts and layoffs mean changing of the guard At Penguin Random House, which is one of the big five. And then Hybrid also had some dramatic collapses recently. So I don't know, I'm curious to talk about the hybrid because a lot of authors are going that route. I went that route with free time where you do invest you and they are a professional organization that knows what they're doing. So it's a little different than self publishing, where you're completely on your own. And yet it's risky, because books can take years. And I think what we were shown in this year's shakeup is that you're not even guaranteed that your hybrid will be around by the time the book is finished. It is.

I'm so curious to have this conversation because it is risky. And it's risky on so many different levels to make something and put it out into the world and to depend on other people and to collaborate with other people. And relationships are risky. Business partnerships are risky. The world is risky. There is so much risk inherent in all of it. And what I find really interesting in my community of creators and writers and people, helping those people is a real love or embracing of the creative process as a powerful thing in its own right. And all of the things that happen after you create, you don't have a lot of control. You can make decisions, obviously, find your path, you can make your way. But the thing you do have control over is what you write, what you create, and what that means to you and why you do it. And I think sometimes people get too caught up in this idea that someone will take care of everything once I do that work.

You say even the strange entitlement many writers feel about their work being discovered. And I would say, yes, what you're saying, either discovered or shepherded seamlessly into the marketing process. It's like, get ready to be disappointed. That's your vision.

Yeah. And I mean, you probably are well aware it is very rare to talk to a writer published in any format, any way, any genre, who is super happy with their publishing process.

It's a fraught enterprise out there. So at the end of the day, again, control you, control. Write what you want to write, make your best choices. The customer beware is really important in this time right now because some of the companies that collapsed that you were referring to, I don't know that they were actually offering a service that was good for writers, some of them. And it's hard because if you're writing something and then you're entering this industry, you're an expert in what you're an expert in. No matter what you're writing, whether you're writing fiction or nonfiction or memoir, you're an expert in your story, what I always say is you're the God of your own story. And you probably don't know very much about the publishing industry, because why would you? That's not your area of expertise. It's not where you live, it's not what you know. And there are a lot of companies that prey on people's dreams and offer things that they can't really deliver, whether that's time or outcomes or money or all the different things that people want once they've written something or created something. So people lose their head in many ways when they're approaching that part of the process. And anyone that will say they'll publish them, they will jump on and without doing their research or their homework or understanding what's going on. And I think that's how they sometimes get into trouble.

Well, what is a good partner? So let's say they are vetting. And it is absolutely crucial that you talk to authors who have worked with that imprint before, whether it's traditional hybrid. I went with Idea Press and they actually did more on marketing and submitting for awards than I could have ever imagined. That that's because it's founded by an author himself, Rohit Bhargava. But you just simply have to talk to people who've worked with that company before. What else would you say people ideally would be looking for to determine who is a high quality, let's say in this case, hybrid publishing partner. Or it could be traditional too. But like, what would be to look for and what are the red flags?

What I do know is that it's capitalism. There are businesses out there at every level, in every form and format that are taking advantage or offering good things all over the map. It's like a massive universe of businesses. Is there room for all of them? Is there a place for all of those businesses? Is the marketplace going to determine who lives and who dies in terms of these businesses? Maybe. But for a writer. Yeah. How do you know if you don't know this industry if you're not in it? How do you know? How do you approach it? What are the red flags? And there used to be hard and fast rules about this that have changed a lot. And I think that's part of what's confusing. In the hybrid model that you're talking about, the author invests alongside the publisher up front. And that is a new way of thinking about the way money flows to authors. It used to be you would imagine that someone would just hand you money to write your book. And this hybrid way is A very different way of thinking. But in some quarters where people still say, oh, that's vanity, that's vanity publishing, if you're investing along with the publisher. Which is ridiculous. It's not. But there are these rules. So I would say the first thing is whatever rule you have in your head, whatever absolute you have in your head is probably no longer true. So that's where I would start, is not adhering to an old way of thinking or a set way of thinking, and to be open because there's so many opportunities and so many options and so much going on. So that would be the first thing. And then the second thing to protect yourself or to make sure that the risk you want to take doesn't actually have to do with the businesses out there or anything else that you're going to choose. It has to do with your own internal compass. And that's why I have a really strong teaching to know why you're publishing your book before you start doing it or before you start publishing it, before you get too far into it to stop and to think about what you're doing and why you're doing it and what you want from it and why it matters to you and to really get clear on your own internal sense of what you're doing. Because then you can find right fit partners and alignment and know what you're looking for out there. Let's say you do what you just suggested and you're interested in going with a person, publisher or a hybrid or whatever, and you talk to somebody who's published through that entity. You won't even know what to ask if you haven't thought for your own self. Why am I doing this? What outcome do I want? And I find the lack of reflection in this particular way to be at the root of most authors problems in.

Terms of what they're writing. You and I both agree that book proposal is helpful no matter what. And I have a template or two for that in the author toolkit. I'll put it in the show notes. And Jenny has tons of great resources too that we'll include. I want to go to the blueprint series and I want to ask you a question. I was even thinking about this before we record. It sounds obvious to those of us who read any books at all what the difference between nonfiction fiction and memoir would be. But I'm curious if you can talk to us about your term people who are writing for the marketplace. I'm even interested in memoir. Not to write an entire memoir most likely, but elements of memoir Writing that would weave into something I'm doing, or I can't say that I have any inkling for fiction. I'm not good at it. My brain doesn't think that way. At least I don't think it does. But I'm just wondering, from your vantage point with the blueprint series that you have, maybe you could give us the high level of really what each type achieves and when an author might choose one of those three genres.

I love that question. And it goes to what I was just saying about your intention and what you want and why you're doing this work. Because a lot of people start writing because they just feel this pull. They feel this call to do it. And many times they've felt it for a long time, since they were children. Often they've dreamed of writing a book. And if we start way up there, I love to start way up there. Because what is a book? It's a. That you write and you make for someone else who's not going to be in the room with you, usually to sit down and consume in their own head. So it's different than a movie or music where you are. I guess it's similar to music in that way. But you're bringing so much to the experience of engaging with the author and their words. And so a book is a really unique way to just connect with another human and to connect in what is a very profound way. If anybody's ever read a book that moved them, you know what that profound way is. That call to do that and that pull to be that for somebody else is usually where it starts. And then in terms of the different genres, fiction is going to be something wholly made up. So that usually is a story that starts where somebody is saying, what if? You know, what if. What if Amelia Earhart actually didn't die in a plane crash and she lived on a tropical island for the rest of her life? Or what if Hillary Clinton had never married Bill Clinton? What if the haunted house at the end of the street, you know, whatever the thing is. And the what if questions can be dystopian about our world. They can be really big ideas about climate change, about racism. All the big ideas can be contained in novels, obviously, but it always comes from a what if perspective, a made up perspective. You're going to imagine a world and imagine characters and move them about in that world. Nonfiction is going to be something that is true, which is a term that has come under a lot of scrutiny lately. What is true? Right. So true meaning it's Factual, it's information. The author has learned something and they want to convey it to you. There's usually a teaching mechanism involved in it, sort of wanting to deepen your understanding about a certain topic. So that could be anything from a biography of Alexander Hamilton to a treatise on how to invest your money when you're in your 20s. Any topic under the sun. But there's usually some element in a straight nonfiction book of teaching or instruction or wanting to convey information to somebody else. And memoir is a story that a narrator writes their own self about their own life and tells the story from their own life. And there's a contract that is assumed between the writer and the reader that that writer is telling the truth to the best of their ability. We come to memoir in a different mindset as a reader than we come to fiction. Whereas with fiction we understand this to be made up, when we come to memoir as a reader, we understand this, that the author is telling us what they believe to be true to the best of their ability. And what's interesting about memoir is that it can contain big ideas, it can contain story, it can contain made up elements. It can contain all of those. You can say in memoir, I imagined that this happened or I dreamed that this occurred. You could have dream sequences, all of that. There are elements in each of the genres that have a connection to all the other ones as well. And that's where things have gotten really interesting recently. To your question, what if you're writing a nonfiction book and it's got memoir elements in it? Stories from your own life? A lot of the best nonfiction books do, and they weave together that kind of storytelling with the conveyance of information. There's also been a new term that's being used on the memoir side called memoir plus. And that is a memoir where somebody is bringing other elements into their story. So it might be other people's stories, it might be facts or information. It might be, oh, I'm thinking of a memoir by Carmen Marie Machado called In the Dream House. And it is this sort of crazy hybrid concoction where she's telling the story of her own. It sounds harrowing and it is. It's also quite moving and beautiful. But it's the story of her about three years being in an abusive relationship, and it was a lesbian relationship. And there's a sense in that community that those relationships are supposed to be utopian. They're not supposed to have problems. That's kind of a trope, if you will, within that community. And so her writing about this at all felt like an act of rebellion. And she wrote her memoir through this trope of literary criticism. So she's talking about Disney movies and the villains in Disney movies, and she's talking about grim fairytales and haunted houses and all these different literary elements that she brought into that story of her own life. So there's mixed up ways of looking at these different kinds of writing. And although you generally have to kind of choose your lane, a lot of again, the best books are blending genres or breaking those genre boundaries or doing experimental things within them, which is terribly interesting.

We'll be right back just after this.

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It's so interesting you're reminding me. Just today, Substack sent a roundup of serialized fiction that has passed its copyright. I think it's like 93 years.

And Dracula, I didn't realize this. The book Dracula was written in an epistolary manner. So it's like snippets of articles and essays and diary entries. And anyway, these people on Substack are taking these old books and releasing them in a serialized way over many weeks. So I'll link to that roundup in the notes. But yeah, just playing with the format. And that's kind of a post modern take on these genres as well. Like you even referenced Glennon Doyle's book Untamed, that it kind of, as my dad would say, unhooks from the grid, you know, of a typical book, and she talks about that too, that she had given her friend Liz Gilbert a copy of an early draft. And Liz said this isn't. You gotta shake it up and break the rules. That's what the whole book is about. And so she did. Playing with the format itself and the timelines. And I know Jennifer Egan does that really well, too. In the Candy House.

Yeah.

I'm curious, because memoir writing seems so vulnerable. What could those of us who just do regular communications, like writing a newsletter or creating articles or blog posts, maybe a book, what could we learn? Could we take a page out of a memoirist's toolkit to improve our personal storytelling? What would be some pointers, if you have any?

The thing that I see people like you're describing. So they communicate all the time. They write all the time. They write blogs and newsletters and speeches and keynotes, and they're writers. It's what they do. And they're good at it, and they're confident in it. And what tends to happen when they start to write memoir is that they just narrate the events of the story the way that they would in these other kinds of communications. So it's that old show, don't tell idea where they're just telling you what happened or telling you what went down and not creating a world and not showing you and pulling you into that and letting you feel and experience that world. And as a coach, as a book coach, when I'm working with a writer like that, and this is what someone can do for their own self, is constantly asking, why did that happen? Why did you feel that? Why did you make that decision? Just pushing the story deeper, if you will, because the tendency is to skate along on the surface. And it particularly happens if somebody's writing about something either dramatic from a outside perspective or, you know, like my mother was murdered or which is a story I helped actually two different people write strangely, or some dramatic external thing. It's so easy to think, well, I just have to tell what happened because it's so dramatic. Or if someone's writing something that is not that demonstrably dramatic, but is dramatic in their own life or profound in their own life, they forget that all of the meaning of that story that they carry in their own head and heart isn't conveyed on the page. You have to do the work to convey that on the page. And that's what's hard about memoir. There's such a tendency to assume that the reader knows things they don't know. So that's why I'm constantly saying, well, what about this? Well, how did that work? Well, can you go deeper here? Can you say more about that? And what's fascinating to me is that the result that we're looking for when I'm asking those Questions is not write three more pages or write three more chapters on that idea or topic. It's usually literally one more sentence, one more line, just a little bit more about what did that mean to you? What did that feel like? Why are you even telling us this?

Yes, that's super helpful, thank you.

The next piece is that I often say you have to make room for the reader when you're writing memoir. So just earlier this week I had the chance to be a guest at a writing class, a memoir writing class at ucla. And it's a small intensive nine month program. So there were only six students in this class. And we went through their stories one at a time and they had done some good work and they were, they have an amazing instructor and they had these stories and they had carved out the shape of them and the beginning and the end of them and what they were and who they were for. So they had done all this hard work, but the work that they needed to do, that they all needed to do, was to make room for the reader. And what I mean by that is when you're writing memoir, you can get so caught up in what happened to me and what it felt like and how it went and all of that, that you're not even thinking about who's going to read this, why are they going to care? What are they coming to this book for? What are they looking to experience through my story? How can I help them or connect with them, or encourage them, or inspire them or whatever the thing it is that you want to do through my story. So it's a mindset shift and it sounds esoteric or intangible and it is, but it's everything. It's the huge difference between writing a memoir that falls flat and writing one that invites the reader in and is expansive and lets us be in it. And that's the work of writing memoir, of getting the emotion on the page. That was the first thing I spoke about. And going deeper than you're used to going. And you know, you spoke about vulnerability. You have to be ready to be vulnerable and to share. When I say, you know, how did you feel? What did that mean? It's often what you're getting down to is the parts of you that are maybe not so pretty or so tied up with a bow. It's really showing the complexity of your emotions and your human experience and your self awareness of those things. And most people stop short of doing that because it's very frightening to do it. And the second piece is kind of a commitment to Doing that, it's making room for the reader, making a commitment or a promise that you're not going to just present some shiny, polished version of yourself or the best version of yourself or the cleaned up version of yourself. Nobody wants to read that book.

It's so true. We're recording this in the summer and I've been, ugh, on the most vulnerable rollercoaster of more personal writing and publishing to a secret substack. So I'll put the link in the show notes. Cause I don't know when I'm gonna announce it officially. But if you're listening and you're here at this point in the pod, you're welcome to check it out. It's freetime.com secret and I notice I tend to want to jump to making some nice point, like the way I would as a. A thought leader, a podcaster, an author. And it seems like such a fine line between staying personal, staying in a story. This new project is very clear. I'm not an expert. It's like I'm so sick of it. I just want to be my flawed self and share it. And it's so vulnerable. But that's my mission right now. And yet there is a universalization that I think you're talking about that my hope is even by me being vulnerable and sharing my roller coaster and not having it look pretty and shiny from the outside, that that's in service to fellow business owners who are just having a hard time. Or it's like always, not every event or contract or client goes your way. And what is that really like? I think we don't talk about it very much in business because we don't want to bring in more bad events, you know. And yeah, my coach, Jay Akunzo, who I worked with for a little while, he says, you know, in your storytelling, a universalization line might be. That's the thing about. Or Carrie Bradshaw, Sex and the City. Or maybe it's Candice Bushnell. I couldn't help but wonder, dot, dot, dot. Or in the new horrible show. And just like that, dot, dot, dot. So how can we walk that line, thread that needle of keeping the reader making room for the reader while not coming across as overly glossy or trying to hand them a most perfect takeaway from what is sometimes a mess?

I mean, that's the work. That is the work. And there's the dangers are, as you describe, there's two dangers. The first is that you take that stance or that voice or that mindset of the thought leader or the expert or the business leader and try to make points and use your story to wrap up to little nuggets of truth. I mean, that's a way of writing. That's a kind of book that you could write. There's some amazing books that are like that, but that's their purpose and intention. They're still in the lane of let me teach you, I guess, is how I would think of it. And then the second danger is you go too far and you think this is akin to the I have a dramatic story and therefore it's going to be a good story kind of danger. You fall too much into too much sharing. Let me just tell you all the things about myself. This sort of lift off the lid and just show you all the things. And we don't want to read that book either because it's not crafted. It doesn't have the self awareness or the intention of making space for the reader. It's therapy or it's the person's writing for their own healing or their own pleasure. And so again, it's a mindset of, I am sharing in this way in service of bringing other people into my story. And the absolute best way to learn how to do this is to read excellent people who have done it. There's two books that come to my mind recently that I can recommend. One, my friend Mary Laura Philpott wrote a book called Bomb Shelter that came out recently. And you can look up the New York Times review of this book. I mean, if you ever want to envision what a rave review looks like, this is the rave, iest review that you could ever hope for as a writer. That review is a good primer on why Mary Laura does what she does in this book. And Bomb Shelter is a collection of pieces basically about loving people who are going to die is basically what it is. And that's being a mother, that's being a daughter, that's being a wife. And she's just approaching the idea of time and love. And there are so many ways that this kind of a memoir could go wrong and could go sideways and could be cringy and presumptuous and all those things. And it is just absolutely pitch perfect. And you can read what it's like to have somebody be so vulnerable, be self aware, make room for the reader. She's clearly not just doing this for her own self. She's crafted it in a way that leads us through and gives us an experience. It's just stunning. It's a stunning example of that. And the other one that I recently read that struck me in a similar way is a book called In Love by Amy Bloom, which is a chronicle of her husband's assisted suicide. And same things go for this book. Just the way that she leads us through that story, which could be so hard to read and oppressive in the hands of somebody who didn't do all these things we're talking about. And I realized that those two books that I just named kind of come from a particular type of book. There are business books and books about business and about being a human in business that also do this, that are equally powerful and beautiful. It doesn't have to just be in that sort of family realm.

In fact, I'll add the best one of those that I've read in recent years is Rand Fishkin's Lost and founder. I've already interviewed him. I don't know if that conversation will go live yet or not. By the time this one comes out, I'm a little bollocked up because I got so many in the can so that I don't have to record in the sweltering sauna that is my office in the summer. But I'll put Lost and Founder in the show notes. He's so honest about his process and in a way it is chronological, but he's sharing mistakes he made so honestly. It's not a book where he's trying to say, I'm so good at business. Look at me, look what I figured out. Oh, here, let me give you like a knee scrape story and then tell you how I conquered the world and I'm a billionaire as a result. It's like it's the nitty gritty. And you really do learn by as if you're in the passenger seat and he's driving the car through an old town and that town was building a business that was venture backed and he's pointing everything out along the way from his experience. It's so good, so good. Along these lines, I love books like this.

And the sort of big fish in that sea is Shoe Dog by Phil Knight, the founder of Nike bestseller. Yeah, that book was written with the ghostwriter whose name is escaping me, who worked with Prince Harry.

J.D. mullinger.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yes. And he's also worked with Andre Agassi on his memoir. But I loved Shoe Dog. I thought it was just wonderful. And you learn so much about decisions and business and risk and all these things. And it's this mega company that's being built. But it's not business lessons that you go to. That book for you get them, but that's not what you go for. But that's the big bestseller if anybody wants to start somewhere. But there are many, many really beautiful books that made a smaller splash than that one that do this just really powerfully.

We'll be right back just after this.

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I think it's fun as well to just that's why I was asking you about memoir. I just recently took Dan Brown's masterclass on thriller writing. He's the author of the Da Vinci Code and Fun. That was really fun. And he's like, okay, a good thriller starts with a ticking clock and it has three Cs and now I even forget what they are. But it's like, so then you can play with this. So let's say still you're writing a newsletter for your business or you're recounting a story and it's like we'll just bring the ticking clock to the surface, you know? Or he'll say, if you pick three months, it's not that exciting. So a real good thriller might have a 24 hour ticking clock or the next thing needs to happen and the next thing. And it is kind of fun to then zoom in on a personal story and say, what was the moment where I had 24 hours or one week instead of three months or six months. There's something at stake here and there's a goal that needs to be achieved, you know, So I love like I'm starting to do more of this now, just taking random writing classes and Seeing what I can do with it.

I love that I'm a big proponent of all the writing helps all the writing. So if you are writing memoir, reading nonfiction, reading fiction, all those things, I think being siloed as either a reader or a writer, you're losing out on a lot. There's so much to learn from cross pollination of all the ideas, if you will.

We might have touched on this already in Making Room for the Reader. I just want to come back to this phrase, how to write for the marketplace. And now I know that the whole Blueprint series, you have a trilogy of blueprint books for these different genres. Is there one key takeaway for us on what that means to write for the marketplace that authors often miss or that you see as commonly missed?

Yes. So that phrase that I use as a subtitle for the Blueprint for Memoir, how to write a Memoir for the Marketplace, what that means to me is it's a really big idea. And what it means is embracing the desire to have other people read and engage with your book. There's a lot of people who write privately for their own selves. Maybe they have a journal or maybe they write poetry. Maybe they write just in a way that's private, or they're writing for a purpose in their business. So that might be a blog post or a newsletter or a keynote or all those things. And those are usually in service of selling something in another capacity. But writing for the marketplace, in my mind means saying to yourself, I want this book to be read by people. I want people that I don't know to take it and go off and curl up on a couch or a pool deck or wherever they read and engage with the work. So it's about the intention of having that book live in the world as its own thing. And too often people approach writing either thinking, oh, I don't want anybody to see what I'm going to write. This is just for me. It's just private. It's just my own thing. Or it's just for my small community that's already connected to me and already opted in, or they think too big, which is, I shall be discovered and I shall be given a massive amount of money to publish this book. And Oprah's going to call. And that sort of pick me attitude that's so prevalent in writing. And both of those extremes, they usually don't lead to the outcome people really want. And so when I say write for the marketplace, I'm really talking about the author's mindset. Be intentional about why you're doing this, why you're writing this, what you want to have happen as a result, be intentional about. As we started this conversation, talking about the partners and the collaborators that will help you achieve that goal and publish the book in that way, but approach it all with intention. There's kind of a coyness that is very prevalent in a lot of just kind of the writing mythology of, you know, you hear it when people say, my writing group thinks that what I'm writing is really good and that I should take it out to be published. Or the extreme example of this would be, my mom thinks that it's really good and she'd be taken down to be published. There's this externalization of why should I think that people want to read what I have written? So writing for the marketplace means making the decision that you want to do, that you want your work to be read, you want it to be out in the world and in people's hands. And that mindset shift of, yes, I am doing this for the marketplace. I am doing this because I want to be read. I'm doing this because I want my story or my ideas to spread. And owning that is surprisingly one of the hardest things for any writer to do. That's why I start there.

I love it. And that goes with your statement from the Blueprint series that every book is, at its heart, an argument for something. And even if that's something, I love how you say, even if it feels cliche, like love conquers all. We have so many books about these topics, and yet that argument, it's like to bring that to life. Even you say that that argument can just be a way you want your reader to feel. But I love how you described writing that's kind of for ourselves versus actually eliciting and crafting the work to achieve that desired feeling, or making that argument or zooming out to that universal theme.

And going in with that intention when I said it was one of the hardest things. Now we're getting down to the real thing. It's because writing a book is raising your voice. It's taking up space. It's standing on a soapbox and shouting out to the world and saying, I have something I believe in that I want to say, and I want you to listen. And that act of claiming that space and claiming that voice and knowing what you believe and knowing what you want to say and knowing why you feel called to do that, that's the critically important part about writing. And again, the vast majority of writers miss that. And when you don't embrace that, that what you're doing is taking up the space and claiming your voice and making your argument. That's where we get books that are just flat and we get memoirs that are self indulgent, we get rambly novels. It's kind of the root of all evil of bad books really, where if you are intentionally understanding what it means to do this and what it means to you to do this and what you want to say and that. By the way, this is right back where we started. Actually. It takes all the metrics of success. I'm using air quotes of what how a book is successful in the world or in the marketplace or what we traditionally think of as a successful book. You know, I mentioned Shoe Dog earlier. It's like, is that the only metric of success? Of course not. You know, having a big giant splashy book that lives on shelves in that way? No, I mean having a book that quietly and profoundly impacts the right people at the right time. That's really what most writers want, is for their book to be in the right people's hands. And in order for that to happen, you have to again know why you're doing it and be intentional and understand that that's your desire.

What a beautiful way to close coming full circle. Last question. If you could give authors permission to do something differently or drop something altogether, what would it be?

I would ask them to drop the idea that they're going to be picked by the publishing industry and to take up the idea that they're going to be creators and they're going to raise their voice and take up space and write what they want to write and find their own way to get that book into readers hands, whatever path that is. But giving up that idea of wanting someone else to wave a magic wand and make this happen for you and realize that you make this happen for you. And the more that you can embrace that and claim that and understand that the better book you're going to write.

Amazing. I know you have tons of resources. I'll link to all the books we talked about yours and the other ones in the show notes. Where else would you like to send people to keep in touch?

They can come find me at jennynash.com, which is my website. And if they're interested in the blueprint books, there's tabs on there for resources and downloads and all kinds of things related to to those books on there. And I would love to have them visit me at that site or on Instagram. Ennynashbook coach.

Amazing. And that's Jenny with an ie, which is so fun because you get to write a little heart over the I like I never got to do.

It's true.

My substitute is I make the J the Y in Jenny into a smiley face. That's my new signing technique.

Yes.

Well this was so fun. Thank you Jenny. Thank you so much for sharing your wisdom with us. And big thanks to everybody for listening.

Thank you for having me.

If you've listened this far, you get a gold star.

Thank you.

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