Anna Dorn has published four novels. She has also abandoned about five (closer to ten if you count the ones she started and never finished). The paperback of her debut, Vagablonde, came out October 6, 2026 from Simon & Schuster, and her next novel is slated for January 2028.

In between those facts sits a pile of books it's possible nobody will ever read. For anyone sitting on a manuscript that stalled, wondering whether that means something is wrong with their book (or them), this is a great conversation to enjoy while navigating whatever highway construction is causing an unexpected delay (just me?). 

Why a Book Gets Abandoned

Not all of Anna's abandoned novels were set aside for the same reason. The first book she ever sent out on submission, written before Vagablonde, didn’t sell. Another one, written between Exalted and Perfume and Pain, also didn’t sell. Those two were abandoned by the market, not her. The rest she walked away from herself.

Sometimes she stopped believin...

Jane Bitomsky counted. Ninety rejections before her first agent said yes. Then, that agent dropped her, and thirty more rejections before the second one did.

Her debut novel, Death by Misadventure, came out October 1, 2026 from Lake Union (an imprint of Amazon). It opens with a naked dead man found under a waterwheel in Elizabethan England, missing a certain piece of his anatomy, and a coroner named John Derrick trying to work out whether it was an accident or something worse.

Jane has a PhD in early modern English history. Her dissertation covered pregnancy and crime, half of it about women pleading their bellies to delay execution. She is also, by her own description, a person who responds to professional catastrophe by calling it "slightly dispiriting."

The Timeline Nobody Posts About

Jane started writing in 2019. By 2022 she had a full manuscript and started querying. Her query letter had one credential on it, which was the PhD, so she entered contests to have something ...

I'm in my fifties, and every 30 Under 30 list does the same thing to me. I'm genuinely happy for the people on it. I also read it and feel like I missed a boat and train I didn't even know were leaving.

David Galef and Beth Weinhouse had that exact reaction in their late thirties when they came across an anthology titled 30 Under 30. Rather than stew about it, they put together 20 Over 40. When the call for submissions went out, writers wrote back saying some version of "where have you been all my life?" Twenty years later, they've done it again with 20 Over 60, out from Regal House Publishing.

David is a fiction writer and lit professor who directs the creative writing program at Montclair State, has published around 200 short stories, and edits Vestal Review, the longest-running flash fiction magazine around, where the word limit is 500. Beth is a journalist and magazine editor. They're also married, which made for a very funny recording setup!

Why They Refused to Make a Boo...

Anna Pitoniak spent years as a senior editor at Random House, wrote her first two novels in the hours before and after work, and has now published five books of her own. Her newest, The Swiss Agent, comes out December 1, 2026 from Simon & Schuster.

It arrived on my doorstep and I got unreasonably excited, because I am fully in my espionage era right now.

It's rare that I get the chance to talk to someone who's sat on both sides of this business at the same time, so I showed up with a slew of questions, starting with the one I've been circling for several episodes now.

What's the Difference Between Publicity, Marketing, and Sales?

Anna's definition: Publicity is earned media, meaning coverage that neither you nor your publisher paid to get: A mention in "People," a review in the New York Times, an NPR interview. A publicist pitches the outlet, the outlet decides the book is of interest to its audience, and no money changes hands.

Marketing, on the other hand, usually inv...

Cassie Miller is back!

She joined me last spring for her debut, Meet Me Under the Lights, and now she's here with book two, Meet Me on Mistletoe Lane, out October 6, 2026 from Penguin Teen. I somehow have three copies of it, including the finished edition with glitter on the cover. Cassie has not seen the glitter yet. I felt bad about this for almost a full minute.

This time I wanted to talk marketing, because the same two misconceptions keep coming up in my conversations. One is that traditional publishers do absolutely flat-out nothing to market your book. The other is that marketing, publicity, and sales are the same thing. While every author's experience is different, Cassie was kind enough to walk me through what her experience has looked like from the inside.

What's the Difference Between Marketing and Publicity?

Ask ten people this question, and you'll get ten definitions. Marketing, to Cassie, is what happens behind the scenes: how the book is packaged, whether it's g...

After six nonfiction books, I've been writing my first novel for longer than I care to put in print, and everyone who listens to my podcast is aware of this because I will not shut up about it.

So when Kim Purcell reached out about her new book, Write a Novel in 100 Days, the timing felt less like a coincidence and more like the universe taking an interest in my personal business.

Kim is the author of Trafficked and This Is Not a Love Letter. She has an MFA. She has been teaching novel writing to kids, teens, and adults for decades, and she has read essentially every craft guide in existence. Her new book comes out September 22, 2026 from Penguin Random House with a foreword by Donald Maass.

It also took her longer to write than three of her novels combined, which I found deeply comforting and a little bit vindicating.

You're Probably Not Stuck

Kim teaches every age group, which gives her a view of this that most of us don't have. And she says there's a shift she can see com...

Do You Need a Big Author Platform to Get a Book Deal?

Katie Clapham had about 2,000 Substack subscribers when publishers in both the UK and the US said yes to her book.

That number is likely smaller than almost every number you've been told you need. It's smaller than the follower count people quote at writing conferences. And it's smaller than what most authors assume they have to hit before they're allowed to consider themselves "real writers."

Katie runs an independent bookshop called Storytellers, Inc. on the northwest coast of England with her mom. She also writes a weekly Substack titled "Receipt from the Bookshop." And her first book for adults, Receipts from the Bookshop, came out in the UK in June 2026 and lands in the US on September 8, 2026 from William Morrow.

She started that Substack with very few subscribers and no plan whatsoever. Here's how the rest of it happened, and what it means for you, whether you're going the traditional route or self-publishing.

The ...

Most first-time authors don't hire the wrong editor. They hire the right editor at the wrong time, which costs the same amount of money and gets them a fraction of the value.

I've been editing nonfiction and memoir for two decades, and I hear a version of this every few weeks. Someone finishes a draft on a Tuesday and wants to book a proofreader for the following month.

Fiction editor Allison Buehner of Golden Editorial gets the same email, constantly, from self-publishing authors who assume proofreading is all editing is. We talked about it at length on this recent episode of Write the Damn Book Already, and I want to lay the whole thing out here, because nobody hands you a map of this when you decide to publish a book.

The four types of book editing, in the order they happen

Here's the short version, and then we'll go deeper on each one.

Developmental editing looks at the book as a whole. Structure, pacing, argument, character, whether the thing delivers what it promises....

Laurie Notaro has landed on the New York Times bestseller list something like eight times. (She isn't sure of the exact number.) She's also not sure how many books she's written, which I found so delightful I nearly came out of my chair. She drives a 2008 Mini Cooper, lives in a 1,500 square foot house, and has earned out on exactly one book.

Laurie came on the podcast to talk about I've Got a New Complaint, her new essay collection out September 8 from Little A, with a title borrowed from a Nirvana lyric. We did talk about it. We also talked about getting fired, getting dropped by her agent over email, and being told no by nearly everyone for thirty years.

The math on a writing career is not what anyone tells you There's a story floating around out there where you land the book deal and then you're set. Royalties roll in. You buy a house with a library in it. You become insufferable at parties. Laurie's response to that: "Hardly anyone ever earns out." She said it plainly, as s...

If you are trying to figure out how to write a memoir and you keep stalling out on one specific worry, that being what your mother is going to say, you are in extremely good company. Joyce Maynard has hosted memoir retreats for more than 25 years and well over a thousand women, and she says the same question comes up every single time.

Men do not ask it. Women ask it constantly.

How do I tell an honest story about my life without hurting the people in it?

I got to sit down with Joyce for the Write the Damn Book Already podcast a few days after her fourteenth novel, In Wonderland, came out. I had one goal going in, which was to not ask her a single question she has already answered a thousand times. We were in Guatemala by minute four, so I think it worked.

Here is what came out of it, and why it matters if you are a first-time author sitting on a story you are not sure you have permission to tell.

Who is Joyce Maynard?

Short version for anyone who is new to her work. Joyce ...