Sarah Peck: Episode 71

Transcript

[0:00:24] Charlie Hoehn: You’re listening to Author Hour, enlightening conversations about books with the authors who wrote them. I’m Charlie Hoehn. Let’s say you have an idea for a book and let’s say that that idea is so good that you decide to pitch it to a publisher. You go off and you find an agent and they love your book idea. You might be thinking, “Hey, I’ve got a big hit on my hands, great things are in store for my book,” right? Well, not exactly. While there are a lot of benefits to traditional publishing, it’s also good to know that there are challenges and a lot of frustration ahead of you. That’s why I recorded this special episode with my friend Sarah Peck. In our conversation, she’s going to share her story of what it’s like to take the traditional publishing route. She’s super honest and vulnerable, so if anything she shares is helpful for you, I’d encourage you to reach out and thank her. Now, here is our conversation with Sarah Peck.

[0:01:45] Sarah Peck: I sent the proposal and they got back to me three or four weeks later with their notes and they said “Okay, this is an interesting idea but we’re not convinced on the structure of the book, we like the idea, sold. But we’re not convinced on the structure.” I had given them chapter titles only like just a really rough outline that said, I had broken it down into one of those books that has lots and lots of chapters, it was like 26 chapter titles. I thought it would be a collection of essays. They said, “Well, we need like more meat here. Why don’t you go and write a comprehensive outline of the book.” I was like, they want to know what the book’s actually going to be. And a proposal is such an interesting dance because you spend a lot of time writing about a book and trying to sell a book and talking about a thing you want to write and it’s this very meta exercise of like, “Well here’s the look I’m going to give you and the book will be about this,” but you’re not actually spending the time writing the book. I appreciated form them that they said, “Go spend more time on the book, it’s off and we can do a better job of selling it.” I went and I wrote this outline about 8,000 words, much more detail, a thesis for each chapter and started to hook it together. I sent it in. There was a bit of a pause, like another three week or four week delay. Now we’re getting to November of the end of the year. They came back and they said, “You know, we’re going to do something we haven’t done before but we want you to work with an in-house editor here before we go forward.”

[0:03:13] Charlie Hoehn: Why did they suggest that?

[0:03:16] Sarah Peck: That’s a really good question. I think they knew, like, if I’m being really honest, I think they knew that the idea wasn’t quite finished. I had a big idea, they always said really nice things like “There’s a book here, we just don’t know what it is.” The scope of the idea was so big, they needed more definition, more precision.

[0:03:36] Charlie Hoehn: Let’s not forget that you had an audience, you have a market, right? That you are specifically addressing. Who would you say your market is? Because most publishers I would say, all publishers, traditional, are not going to entertain this kind of thing without speaking with an author who has a platform in a market that’s ready for this message, am I right?

[0:04:04] Sarah Peck: Totally, absolutely correct. Actually, this is where it gets a little bit complicated because I have an audience, I have a built-in audience on my own website and in the website I started for the book.

[0:04:15] Charlie Hoehn: How big is that audience?

[0:04:16] Sarah Peck: It’s not that big. This is where it gets complicated and this is something I believe really strongly in is I’m not one of those authors that has hundreds of thousands of subscribers to my list. They said to me, they’re like, “Well you don’t have a big enough audience for a memoir so we need to make sure this is a business book that’s memoir driven.” Which I thought was really interesting because if I came in and I was Lena Durham or I was somebody like an Eat, Pray, Love kind of thing, I could tell a personal story. Like the Sheryl Straight. But the fact is that not enough people know me like that, I have a really strong, really solid audience which I think it made it possible for me to get in the door for them to look at me and say “Great, you’re a good writer and you have a solid audience so we can work with that.” “We might be able to build something here and your idea is really strong.” It’s kind of like all three of those things worked to get me in the door.

[0:05:12] Charlie Hoehn: What was your elevator pitch for the idea, like if you had to summarize it in a couple of sentences.

[0:05:19] Sarah Peck: Sure, it’s a startup pregnant, it’s the idea that both being pregnant and running a startup have the same source of creative inspiration. It’s the act of creating brand new things from virtually nothing and the energy that it takes to get from one to the next should be the source of inspiration for business in the future.

[0:05:47] Charlie Hoehn: What do you mean by that last part? It should be the source of inspiration?

[0:05:51] Sarah Peck: The idea is that we have been running a masculine driven business culture for hundreds of years and there’s a future of a feminine inspired business culture that looks different than anything we’ve seen before. It’s messier, it involves more play, to put a blunt point on the analogy, maybe it involves more blood and messiness and guts. You know, women have periods, they have babies, they birth things. This is a thing and that fluidity and that femininity and that different type of cycling can really influence business in my argument, for the better.

[0:06:29] Charlie Hoehn: how so?

[0:06:30] Sarah Peck: I think one of the things is very similar to what you wrote about in one of your pieces on play. The masculine kind of testosterone driven sense of running business, we really push ourselves too hard. We think of it as an all or nothing, on or off, hustle, go, don’t sleep, there’s glorification in the not sleeping in the Silicon Valley-esque, like a nine to five is for wusses. I worked this huge amount of time. And the metaphor that I use in the book is called “Life is not all hard labor.” If we look at the lifecycle of pregnancy and we see that pregnant women take naps during the day and they go through distinct phases, trimesters. And then when they get to go into the birthing process, there is a very distinct 40 to 60 hours that might be some of the most incredible, physical work you’ve ever done. Like you’re pushing a baby out of your body which is kind of radically mind-blowing in so many ways. I’ve done it and I still can’t believe that I’ve done it and yet we’re operating business like we’re pushing babies out all the time. You should be pushing out a baby every single week which is just absurd because the result is that we get burn out. We have people who are burned out for years. We’re naturally falling back into a patter that our bodies are demanding rest, time away, fluctuation, rhythm. But we haven’t designed it into the structure of a business yet.

[0:07:56] Charlie Hoehn: Wow, that is a really – I understand what you’re trying to communicate and it’s the feminine energy that has been completely dominated by the male testosterone, ego driven energy for a long time. Having just witnessed the birth of my own daughter very recently. I can say with confidence, it is the most impressive thing I’ve ever created with the least amount of effort on my part and it was all them creating that. And yeah, I understand what you’re driving toward which is really like – the next wave of business could be and largely should be driven by this female energy and the rhythm, the seasons of how life comes into fruition, right? That we treat our businesses more like living sustainable beings that have a birth, a life and you know, after a baby’s born, the next several years are just spent completely nurturing the child. And then it goes out and interacts with friends and becomes its own thing and grows into something that can eventually birth others.

[0:09:36] Sarah Peck: You’re hitting the nail in the head of the cyclical nature and it’s so important if you then take that lens and you step back and you look at business and you say, “Wow, in American culture, we’ve designed like zero vacation days or maybe just 10 days and every season looks the same and there isn’t a period for rest.” You start to realize that that’s actually a very precarious position for a business to be in, because if a business can’t take two months of slow time without collapsing or losing so much revenue that they have to fire people or we can’t continue. How good is that business design really?

[0:10:11] Charlie Hoehn: Yeah, I think, here’s my perspective on this which I’ve spent some time selling that notion to businesses. I think a lot of them are warming up to that idea and to the rest notion specifically. It’s something we all recognize we have to do, we don’t get enough of it, it’s rare for a business to say “Okay, yeah, taking a nap, taking a recess to go play.” “That all affects our bottom line in a positive way, let’s do it.” It’s rare, right? What I think you’re hitting on here that your publisher is potentially messing up and correct me if I’m wrong Sarah, is that they want you to go after the self-care market? You are tapping on women’s empowerment and the right that women have at the table and this wave that is happening right now, that is the wave that’s happening right now. I’ve seen it in so much media, media is a direct reflection of our culture. Wonder Woman was as huge hit so was Bedtime Stories For Rebel Girls.

[0:11:24] Sarah Peck: Yes.

[0:11:25] Charlie Hoehn: Highest selling book on Kick Starter of all time.

[0:11:29] Sarah Peck: I bought it for my son.

[0:11:30] Charlie Hoehn: Right, I bought it as well for my daughter and there is a reason that this is happening right now and there’s a reason that the biggest protest of all time all over the world was when Donald Trump was elected president. It was all women coming out to stand up for something that they collectively knew was wrong, right? You are tapping into a bigger market and I think, again, correct me if I’m wrong, the publisher is not doing the right thing if they are pushing you to, “Hey, why don’t you go after the sleep revolution market that Arianna Huffington is tapping into right now.” No, that is not the market. You need to be focused on empowering women.

[0:12:15] Sarah Peck: I love that you’re saying this because A, it’s incredibly helpful for me and to get in and debate these ideas. It’s the agent though, because I’m not with a publisher yet.

[0:12:23] Charlie Hoehn: Yeah, that’s right. Yeah, let’s get back to this whole dynamic that’s going on. How many agents do you have? Do you have one?

[0:12:31] Sarah Peck: Just one, I’m with one agency and I want to maybe counter that a little bit and say A, you’re correct, it’s a bigger movement. I think that they have identified that, the problem if I can put it into words and this is – I’m struggling with it and I’m a words person. I think the problem we’re running into is that every time I write a proposal, they ask, “Great, what does that look like and what’s next?” We’re trying to find answers for things that haven’t been developed yet. We’re on the cusp of this wave where we’re looking at, well, what does a feminine business look like? It’s like, great, how do you apply –

[0:13:07] Charlie Hoehn: That’s the pushback? Are you kidding me?

[0:13:09] Sarah Peck: Yes, no, I mean, no. I’m not kidding you. What do you mean?

[0:13:12] Charlie Hoehn: They’re telling you, you have to design the future? I mean, look, their right to say “Hey, can you give us some case studies? Can you give us some confidence that this thing works, show us.” That’s one thing, you can point to some women’s CEOs that are maybe doing some things differently or you know, something like that, right? To say like “Show us how the future’s going to look.” No. That’s kind of silly.

[0:13:38] Sarah Peck: That’s my interpretation of it and it is the most challenging work that I’ve done in a while and that it’s hard because sometimes it feels like we’re grabbing the whole kitchen sink, right? How do you incorporate on one side like, miscarriage and abortion and all of the women’s rights working and going in. You can’t, right? It’s like huge.

[0:13:59] Charlie Hoehn: You can’t carry the pregnancy – you don’t have to extend the analogy that it will include like insemination and the twinkle in your eye before. Please don’t do that. I mean, it’s just going to be – I don’t know. The analogy’s good enough, it doesn’t have to be 100% aligned with the creation process.

[0:14:24] Sarah Peck: As a brand new, as a first time author because this is the first time they’re putting me in front of these major publishing houses. One of the things that they’ve told me is, as an agency, they really only have one shot to introduce me. The market is getting tighter and tighter, like publishing is changing and it’s changing every year. What they – I think one of the reasons I spent so much time refining the proposal is because, if they put this idea and my name in front of a publishing house and the publishing house is not that interested. They’re not going to have a chance to put me in front of them again.

[0:15:02] Charlie Hoehn: I question, no. I don’t believe that.

[0:15:08] Sarah Peck: This is good for me to hear but bring it. Keep bringing it, I love it.

[0:15:12] Charlie Hoehn: That’s just silly. Well first of all, you know, here’s the issue. How many bestselling authors, mega bestselling authors, can you list that were rejected by at least 20 publishers?

[0:15:26] Sarah Peck: Yeah, it’s true, lots of them.

[0:15:30] Charlie Hoehn: Lots. I don’t know about that.

[0:15:35] Sarah Peck: Charlie, you’re pressing all my buttons but it’s fine. I love it, you know? I’ve got the nerves, I am nervous about making –

[0:15:42] Charlie Hoehn: Hey, I’m not pressing your buttons, I’m pressing the publisher’s. I’m in defense of you here.

[0:15:49] Sarah Peck: That’s true. But I have my own insecurities and fears that come up and I’m sure they’re popping up right now, is it good enough? Can I cap the idea?

[0:15:56] Charlie Hoehn: Yeah, let’s talk about them, what are you feeling? What are you afraid of?

[0:16:00] Sarah Peck: You know, I sometimes wonder if it’s me that’s taking too long, the writing process takes me a really long time more than I would have thought.

[0:16:08] Charlie Hoehn: Takes everybody a long time.

[0:16:10] Sarah Peck: So much time.

[0:16:12] Charlie Hoehn: Yeah.

[0:16:12] Sarah Peck: It’s the squirmiest thing because half of my time is dedicated to being an entrepreneur and the other half is dedicated towards writing, although it’s not always so clear cut. Entrepreneurship is so tantalizing, right? There are always things to do and to be done, it’s so much easier to get up in the morning, send an invoice, write a marketing copy, plug up the blog for the next few weeks, all of that is so quick, easy and fulfilling. I checked all the boxes, you know, all my to do list are done and writing is to me, when I get up, it’s so much more – I have to sync into it, I’ve spent time wrestling with words, it’s unclear whether or not as I’ve moved to the words around the page if I’ve made progress because sometimes the ideas get more complicated before they get more clear. It’s been a year of difficult writing, both that I feel like I’m stretching my brain in the way that I’ve been craving for a long time that isn’t – it’s better than the things I’ve done in entrepreneurship and it’s so much more raw.

[0:17:16] Charlie Hoehn: Yeah. Who has read your writing?

[0:17:20] Sarah Peck: I work with two editors, there’s the book proposal that I’m working on, Startup Pregnant, it’s the working title of the book and then we’ve got a website with essays and we’ve got a podcast that’s coming out where we interview women. Because these stories aren’t going into the book. The two editors that I work with on the website and the blog have read my work and I work with a book editor who is helping me with my sample chapters right now.

[0:17:46] Charlie Hoehn: Okay. What are their responses when they read your writing?

[0:17:51] Sarah Peck: I wrote a piece out loud at a retreat and I know I’m going in a different direction but I was at a writing retreat where I took seven days to just focus on this and I read some stuff out loud and really interesting thing that happens is the writing prompts a discussion. Everybody chimes in, It was like, we were sitting at this big, long table with 14 people and it’s like, “What are you working on?” I shared the piece and then boom, everybody had a comment about their own story, it’s like it opens up a faucet and everybody wants to say something. Which I take as a real testament, I actually don’t get a tremendous number of responses on the writing itself. “That was a good story or I didn’t understand this.” It moves straight into the conversation of my god, I have to tell you this other thing. What about this? I take that as a really good sign but I have to wrestle people back and be like, “Yes, but what about the story? The story, did it work?” I think the answer is clear, yes it worked, because it got the conversation started.

[0:18:54] Charlie Hoehn: What was like one of the stories that popped up after that you’re like, “Wow, that really made an impact.” Do you remember any?

[0:19:04] Sarah Peck: Yeah, from the book that I’m writing or from the women who responded?

[0:19:08] Charlie Hoehn: From the women who responded because if they can take your story and make it theirs, that’s pretty great.

[0:19:13] Sarah Peck: One of the biggest pieces that this is actually the working opening of the book is I was 28. I’m going to my story to get to their story. I was 28 weeks pregnant and I was working at a startup in downtown Manhattan and we had just had a day that’s never fun in startup land but we knew we had to cut the team because we were spending more money than we were making. We had decided who we’re going to lay off and I had to go home from work and figure it out, figure out the map of who we were going to lay off and who we were going to do it the next day and then how we were going to rally the team. That involves lots of spreadsheets and PowerPoints and language and HR and I had to be in that room for every single one of the firing because I was one of the only women on the team. You can’t have – it’s really difficult to have two man firing a female colleague without having another woman in the room so I was 28 weeks pregnant and I had to be there for each of these pieces and then I was leading a team in an offsite. I left, I was undergoing in my pregnancy at the time, I had this hip separation thing that was happening. You have all these hormones in your hips where – or in your body that start to make your whole body relax and they make your ligaments and joints really lose. Well, my body was too good at it and I was having the ball sockets of my pelvis start to separate, so it felt like my legs were sliding out from under me every time I took a step. They were sliding out from under me and somebody was taking a broken glass and stabbing them into my hips. It’s not a pleasant experience and I got down on to the subway platform to head home and it takes about 45 minutes to get home from the office because I lived in Brooklyn at the time. I got rear ended and slammed into by a really angry person on the subway and it was one of the most vulnerable times I’d ever felt, like I didn’t have control of my body, I didn’t have control over what I was doing, I was barely keeping it together, working at the startup and I just lost it. I literally – like I couldn’t stand, I’m like shaking even, thinking about it right now. I was crying on the subway and nobody looked up. Everybody was looking into their phones and nobody cared and I was like, I am the biggest whale, you can see exactly what I am, I’m a giant pregnant lady and I’m five foot ten and nobody saw me. The visibility, invisibility thing where you feel society’s pressures and expectations. People tell you all the time how you’re supposed to feel and how you’re supposed to be, what you’re supposed to look like, you know, you’re gaining too much weight, you’re gaining too little weight, you’re going to be a great mother, you shouldn’t work. All of these things that people are telling you combined with the fact that nobody was looking at me and nobody actually knew what I felt like was just – I basically lost it and realized that I needed to write this book. It was the moment when I was like Startup Pregnant is fucking insane. “I don’t’ know why I’m doing this, what the hell is wrong with me” and also, there’s got to – it was that breaking point that there’s got to be another way. When I read that story to people, which is the prologue of the book, people cry and they tell me about the stories of the times when they feel invisible even when they’re in very public moments. They tell me about times when they’ve been turned over for jobs and when they’ve been fired at seven months pregnant and they tell me when they have their DNC’s and their abortions and their miscarriages and the fact that they can’t tell anybody. And yet, the statistics are that this happens to every other woman you’ve ever seen.

[0:22:56] Charlie Hoehn: That’s very powerful. Yeah. I can see why you wanted to make this into a book and I can see why people relate to that.

[0:23:06] Sarah Peck: Some part of me wants to – you mentioned this I think in the very beginning of like the scientific none woo-woo part of me. I also have such a fascination and a love for startups and for spreadsheets, right? I do, I can make a lot of formulas and I love doing it and I can geek out about automation and coding because I used to work at the startup I was working in at the time was teaching people how to code and to take power over their lives by teaching them these essential skills. I really don’t think this is a “women’s corner” or women’s issue.

[0:23:41] Charlie Hoehn: no.

[0:23:43] Sarah Peck: So many men that I talk to because I was working in a startup with all men had so many questions and they ended up coming up to me, you know, one guy would come up to me and he said, okay, I don’t even remember how this works and where the baby is. I was like, cool. You want to feel the top of my uterus? It’s hard, you can feel it right here, right? Which is probably an HR violation but, then I had other people say you know, “My sister’s pregnant and I don’t know what to do.” Or they would talk about how they were really disappointed that they didn’t get time off to spend with their babies because they wanted to be fathers. It just started opening up this whole conversation with people, right? Not just the one gender or the other so the goal is to be able to open up a conversation about what does it look to have a more balanced, I hate that word, I can’t believe I just said it but a more balanced feminine and male and masculine energy in the workplace because I think we’re all suffering from an overly masculine organizational structure and we can all benefit from an injection of feminine energy into the workplace.

[0:24:45] Charlie Hoehn: Yeah. I take back what I was saying earlier about – I mean, there goes my masculine energy, Sarah. Just jumping all over what I thought the answer was. No, I agree with you. My question I think and this is more of an open ended question, I don’t really know. Well, I have a strong inkling that the people that you make it for. This is a temptation I see a lot. I’ve spoken with authors who think their book is for everybody and technically, they’re right, everybody can use a little bit of mindfulness or a little bit less stress or better balance in their life.

[0:25:25] Sarah Peck: This book is for women aged 28 to 38 who are dealing directly with pregnancy and there will be other people that read it but I’m not trying to market it to them. It is my hope that a 45-year-old male CEO or a 24 year old startup guy in Silicon Valley going through Y combinator reads this but I’m not trying to sell it to him.

[0:25:46] Charlie Hoehn: Right. Yeah, exactly. Having someone who – that it’s really for that they’re like, “I can’t believe, this is exactly what I was going through, this is exactly what I was feeling.” One of my favorite author stories is how Chuck Palanuck created Fight Club. You know how he did this?

[0:26:07] Sarah Peck: No.

[0:26:09] Charlie Hoehn: He would go to bars and he would talk to drunk guys and just ask them about the things that they were most afraid of. The things that they regretted. It was really these hidden things that people all said, you know, after they were drunk. That they wish they knew their dad, they were afraid of getting in a fight yet they knew it was a part of who they were and they wish that they could tap into that. That they hated their job, they hated being surrounded by furniture and all these stupid stuff, that they wish they could just destroy their credit card debt and all the stuff. Then he just weaved out into the story. I think you are tapping into something where you share your most vulnerable moment of feeling invisible, of being a pregnant mom and the frustration you felt with the way the world works was not in harmony with how it should be and how somebody should be in your particular situation, you know?

[0:27:22] Sarah Peck: Yeah.

[0:23:54] Charlie Hoehn: Author Hour is sponsored by Book in a Box. For anyone who has a great idea for a book but doesn’t have the time or patience to sit down and type it out, Book in a Box has created a new way to help you painlessly publish your book. Instead of sitting at a computer and typing for a year, hoping everything works out, Book in a Box takes you through a structured interview process that gets your ideas out of your head and into a book in just a few months. To learn more, head over to Bookinabox.com and fill out the form at the bottom of the page. Don’t let another year go by where you put off writing your book. So tell me, where are you now with everything? How close do you feel you are to having this proposal or are you so close to it and have done so many revisions that it’s all a blur at this point?

[0:28:27] Sarah Peck: That’s a really good question. I am pretty close to it but I think – so I have shifted and I am working on these chapter samples. I’m going to have three chapter samples which is a lot. It’s not standard necessarily to have three. Usually one or two and I am going to have three chapter samples and I am working on revising them over the next four weeks and if those get a good sign off, I imagine there will be another revision or two. Back and forth with those chapter samples. Then we’re going to go back to the proposal and tighten it up and they have told me and I believe this to be true, that it won’t take that much longer of tightening up the proposal once we lock in these chapter samples.

[0:29:06] Charlie Hoehn: Is there a deadline? Do you guys set deadlines?

[0:29:10] Sarah Peck: I make them. I set every deadline.

[0:29:12] Charlie Hoehn: How are they still doing this? Do they feel so strongly about the book that they’re like, “Yeah let’s kick this down the line another six months?”

[0:29:21] Sarah Peck: Well to think about it, it’s actually very similar to startup world. An agency is looking for as many big swings as they can get but they’re pitching and they’re going, “Okay we’re going to take five new ideas that we think the ideas are good or the authors are a good and here’s a couple of homeruns.” They’re investing energy in a lot of different ideas each year and trying to sell them and they make money when they sell them. So they’re going to work on more books than they can maybe actually sell. So it’s also up to me to make sure that I give them something really good that they can sell and we will see.

[0:29:55] Charlie Hoehn: What publisher do you want to go with?

[0:29:58] Sarah Peck: That’s a really good question, I am not sure yet. I have a couple of ideas in mind but there is some serendipity involved because when I drop my kid off at daycare for the first time in our neighborhood, I realized only several months later when I was still working on the proposal, I realized that the mom of another kid at our daycare, there’s only 12 kids that go there, is one of the editors of the business and print of one of the major publishing houses here in New York City.

[0:30:26] Charlie Hoehn: There you go. So I’m curious, have you tried to talk with either of those publishers and actually sit down, take them out to coffee or anything like that?

[0:30:41] Sarah Peck: Like go directly to the publishers instead?

[0:30:43] Charlie Hoehn: Yeah, I mean you are a social person. You know people, I’d imagine you are a capable person, I know that. I imagine you could make that happen.

[0:30:52] Sarah Peck: That’s a really interesting question. I haven’t thought about it yet. I think if we go another round on the book or two and it starts to feel slow, like right now it doesn’t feel slow. The ball field is in my court, I’m writing as fast as I can, they’re giving me feedback on every draft which is kind of my dream is to be able to work with. It’s not a full dream, it’s part of the dream, is to be able to work on really good ideas with smart people. But if it starts to slow down or I’m starting to feel like, “You know what? This isn’t working.” I would love to go to the publishers and say, “Hey I’ve got a thing for you”. However, I would caution that advice with whether or not people are in contract, right? If you are in contract with an agency or something like that, that’s going to be in your contract not to do that.

[0:31:32] Charlie Hoehn: Oh yeah so to be clear, I was not suggesting actually that you approach them with the proposal at all. I was suggesting introducing yourself.

[0:31:43] Sarah Peck: Oh right, being like, “Hey I got a book. You should look at my book.”

[0:31:47] Charlie Hoehn: Yeah.

[0:31:49] Sarah Peck: Right.

[0:31:50] Charlie Hoehn: Yeah because I mean so much of this stuff is just the relationship. It’s like with everything. I think there’s a bit of we forget that the world isn’t just like the American Idol effect where you are standing in front of judges and awaiting your fate. That there is stuff that goes on when the cameras aren’t rolling.

[0:32:19] Sarah Peck: Right, it’s more like the fraternity system at the Ivy Leagues.

[0:32:23] Charlie Hoehn: Yeah.

[0:32:24] Sarah Peck: Right? It’s like people who know each other help each other out and the more that you can get to know people and form relationships with people, the easier it is going to be later on when somebody says, “Hey I have to decide between a brand new author that I don’t know and somebody that I actually have known for several years, plus here’s the proposal and it’s also quite good.”

[0:32:41] Charlie Hoehn: Right, exactly and here’s the thing Sarah, I’m giving this, I’m planting this seed in your mind. I would not plant this seed in 99 out of a 100 authors I speak with and it’s not because I think they are bad people or whatever, it’s just where you are in the journey, who you are as a person and the fact that people like you, that you have social intelligence and that I know you wouldn’t do this in a hand fisted way that would be off putting or hurt your chances.

[0:33:15] Sarah Peck: Like the email I sent you. I just be like, “Hey Charlie.”

[0:33:19] Charlie Hoehn: Exactly like that is a perfect way to start a conversation with a publisher. They’re like, “Who is this woman of mystery? We need to get her in here now.”

[0:33:28] Sarah Peck: It would just be like, “Nice book.”

[0:33:32] Charlie Hoehn: Here’s a nice book, yeah. Check this out. Yeah so I’m curious, what is your – and this should have been my question at the very beginning, what is the number one hope that you have with this book, the goal? If you have to sacrifice everything else that could potentially come with it because every single author I talk to has multiple goals and they often conflict and compete with each other, what is the one thing that you most hope happens from this book?

[0:34:03] Sarah Peck: Yeah, I was writing about this. I write on my moleskin a whole lot and I do a lot of design thinking where I sketch and I draw. I sat with a question a couple of months ago, what would be your wildest dreams for Startup Pregnant? And I wrote out some kind of, I don’t know, they felt like trite in some regards like somebody else’s dream. I was like, “That I get to be on Oprah” I was like, “Okay that’s a wild dream” and the one that really rang home, you know sometimes words, that hit home. There we go, hit home for me was that it’s a moment that happens over and over again and if I could just capture this and have it hundreds and hundreds of times, thousands, millions, whatever when somebody comes up to me and says that something I’ve written helped them through a really hard time. Or my book was like this was the sister they needed during this huge moment in their lives when they’re literally letting go or they’re killing off their old self if you will in the hero’s journey. And they are becoming a brand new person, they can never undo it. I hope that this book helps in those moments and so even if I never hear from them and it does that thing, that is like I don’t know, bottom of the gut sit down satisfied, like pleasure for me.

[0:35:23] Charlie Hoehn: Yeah when have you had that?

[0:35:26] Sarah Peck: I’ve had it occasionally. You know sometimes I’ll get a note in the mail from people I worked with from many, many years ago and they say, “Hey this thing that you’ve helped me through really, really helped.” I had three days ago in the park because I run this group, The Startup Pregnant, there is a private Facebook group, and we’re starting to publish these stories on the blog. We only have 20 stories up so far. It’s a brand-new thing and the podcast isn’t even live yet but people are listening. And that email list we only have 103 subscribers, it’s just brand new but I have a 90% open rate and I went out to the park and I saw this woman and I know her and I said, “Oh hey how are you doing?” I looked at her and she looked a little different and she said, “Not that well” and she was with her two and a half year old and I said, “Well what’s up?” and she goes, “Well I have to have a DNC tomorrow” that’s the technical term for having to clean out your uterus. Like remove tissue from your uterus and she had gotten pregnant. She was 10 weeks pregnant and they went in for the routine ultrasound and there was no heartbeat. So something was growing inside of her but it wasn’t working. It wouldn’t turn out to be a human or I’m going to jumble my words here but it wouldn’t live. So what they do is they do a DNC. It’s a very common procedure that we just don’t talk about and she was so sad because her expectations were that she was going to have a baby and that had just changed. And she was then in that waiting period, that liminal period of 24 hours where you have to wait before the thing changes. I was just gutted in the best way that somebody at a park could know that I was a safe person to talk to. I think that’s the moment when it’s like yeah, you don’t have to be scared. I can see you and I can be there for you and that’s – in the biggest ideal world that I hope my book does that for people. I don’t want to close people off or judge them but I want to be able to say, “Hey I see you.” You’re experience, we may not have the same one, we may have different stories but exactly where you are is okay and I see you.

[0:37:27] Charlie Hoehn: Do you think your book is going to be the best vehicle to deliver those experiences to you?

[0:37:36] Sarah Peck: I like books and I like words because they scale. It’s like The Original Startup if you will.

[0:37:41] Charlie Hoehn: I understand.

[0:37:42] Sarah Peck: Right? But in terms of the intimacy of dialogue, I think the podcast is actually going to be really incredible.

[0:37:51] Charlie Hoehn: And that woman approaching you that was from the podcast?

[0:37:56] Sarah Peck: That was because she knew the work that I was doing.

[0:37:58] Charlie Hoehn: She knew the work that you were doing. Where did she find out about it?

[0:38:01] Sarah Peck: The blog, the blog where we’d put 20 stories, yeah.

[0:38:05] Charlie Hoehn: Okay. Have you ever given that experience to another author of a book that you have read?

[0:38:12] Sarah Peck: I hope so. I remember seeing Daniella Port once when she was on book tour and being able to tell her. And one of the things that I try to do with other authors is be really kind about their space because they may have a lot of people coming up to them. So just to pick in three words something that conveys thank you and gratitude and then also doesn’t take a tremendous amount of time. I was able to make eye contact with her and just tell her. It was so beautiful and I just told Sarah Lacy. I got a galley copy of Sarah Lacy’s book, A Uterus is a Feature not a Bug, which I think is a brilliant title and I got this galley copy and I read the thing. I cried three different times and the very prolific like I love crying. What makes me cry is good. I’m a prolific crier you can get me into tears right away. I did it on this podcast and I tweeted at her and I just said exactly that. This book made me cry, it was so beautiful and I hope that that conveys that feeling.

[0:39:18] Charlie Hoehn: Tell me the time in your life where you felt most accepted because the people around you loved you for not being a judgmental person, for being an accepting loving person, right? Because that sounds like what you’re most wanting, right? Is for the world to see you as that person and to respond accordingly.

[0:39:46] Sarah Peck: Which is probably part and parcel with the severity of the inner critic that I have like this deep desire maybe because of how critical I can be at times but –

[0:39:57] Charlie Hoehn: Yeah, is this book your message that you see other people, you don’t judge them and it proves to yourself that you are that type of person?

[0:40:09] Sarah Peck: Maybe in a sense like it’s a striving in some regards, to be towards that. I think that’s –

[0:40:18] Charlie Hoehn: I think that’s every book that every author wants.

[0:40:21] Sarah Peck: Right and it’s work. It’s the work of being human, yeah.

[0:40:25] Charlie Hoehn: Yeah, Ayn Rand did not live up to the expectations. She sat in Atlas Shrugged but it was a hell of a book.

[0:40:37] Sarah Peck: Yeah, I don’t know. I think also being human we strive to create these works and they’re going to always have flaws or parts that we don’t understand and so I’ll write it. I’m in the writing of it and I even am looking forward to two years from now when I look back at it and they say, “Well gosh I don’t think that way anymore,” right? Because the only way I’ll get there I feel is by doing this work now.

[0:41:06] Charlie Hoehn: So what happens if your agent says, “Well you know, we’re really close and it’s end of 2018.”

[0:41:16] Sarah Peck: No, stop. No. Nope.

[0:41:22] Charlie Hoehn: Then what?

[0:41:22] Sarah Peck: I think at that point, I’m taking lots of meetings with other agents and or working with or reaching out and making the relationships with publishers but at that point the idea, I feel like the idea is being born already. And it’s got the quality of coming out and it’s going to come out in whatever form it comes out in and one of the forms is a book. But the podcast and the blog are already starting to live and to be out there and there isn’t – I am not able to hold it in. It feels like there is a certain inevitability with it.

[0:41:57] Charlie Hoehn: Yeah, I agree. Yeah the question is, will you have the energy when you get to that point?

[0:42:06] Sarah Peck: Oh god and it depends on if I get pregnant again, right? There are some real deadlines ahead of me and we don’t know if we are going to have one or two kids but it’s not like my husband’s going to be the one making the second kid so.

[0:42:16] Charlie Hoehn: Right, I mean this is the trouble right? Is we’re always optimistic about the outcome where humans are relentlessly optimistic just like you are optimistic that the manuscript would be done by now.

[0:42:31] Sarah Peck: I don’t know. I work pretty well under a stiff deadline. So if –

[0:42:35] Charlie Hoehn: Yeah, I’m not arguing with you. I’m not arguing with your ability to execute. I am arguing against the external factors that you are relying on. You are depending on agents to help you through this process efficiently. They are not efficient and you are depending on not being pregnant again. I believe you’ll make the time, you’ll get it done but you are working with a partner who is telling you it’s not there over and over and over. Right? Which don’t get me wrong, as an editor is like the most fun thing to tell an author.

[0:43:23] Sarah Peck: Thank you?

[0:43:26] Charlie Hoehn: I’m just empathizing with them. It is pretty fun to be like, “Nope not good enough. Good luck”.

[0:43:32] Sarah Peck: Totally.

[0:43:33] Charlie Hoehn: It’s not my job.

[0:43:33] Sarah Peck: Yeah, oh no I was talking with this neighbor, a friend of mine and she is an editor and she’s like, “Oh I don’t want to be a writer. I get the fun part, you have to figure it out” and I do feel that.

[0:43:45] Charlie Hoehn: This is something to look forward to. It’s the most ridiculous nonsense. When you get to the point where you’re getting close and the manuscript is being edited, you will have friends come out of the woodworks being like, “Hey if you need a proofreader just let me know. If you need an extra set of eye” like no, I don’t need an extra set of eyes. No.

[0:44:08] Sarah Peck: Well that’s funny. I’ve always worked with my sister as the final proofreader for my things because she’s six years younger than me and her favorite thing in the world is to point where I’m wrong. So she just gets such immense satisfaction. I will send her something and she’s like, “You have a typo” and she’s so good at it and it’s something that’s really great. I may have her look at my book. That’s funny, people come out of the woodwork.

[0:44:33] Charlie Hoehn: So you said at the beginning of this you were hoping that this conversation would just be helpful, has it been helpful?

[0:44:42] Sarah Peck: Yes and there’s places where I can feel myself feeling a little uncomfortable like why is this taking so long and should I push back a little bit further and then wondering I’d be like, “Oh Lisa I don’t want you to listen to this” which is okay, right? Because it’s in pursuit of these ideas but –

[0:45:02] Charlie Hoehn: Look, if she listens to this she will have a perfectly valid response to it. She will be on point with her response, she will agree with some of what I said and then she will defend what she’s doing. I’m thinking I have no skin in this game, I’m just thinking of my friend, Sarah and what she’s going through and what she’s trying to get out to the world and if the agent is not playing on the level that you need to play at then you guys got to find some solution there. You got to make some compromise somewhere.

[0:45:40] Sarah Peck: I think we’ve got book chapters, sample chapters in front of us and the final round of the proposal revision and Charlie, I want to come back on this podcast and tell you how it turns out hopefully not at the end of 2018.

[0:45:55] Charlie Hoehn: Yeah for sure, well do you have any parting words of wisdom for authors from everything that you’ve learned?

[0:46:05] Sarah Peck: I think having friends regularly give you a debriefing or like a check in almost like what this was Charlie in many ways can be super useful because it is so easy to get lost inside of your head of like what is the idea and how is it moving forward and making sure that you are shipping things. Parting words of wisdom, be really clear of what it is that you want from traditional publishing. I’ve known since the beginning like I know why I want to get into this game. And I knew that it would be a little bit maddening and I also know that it may be changing rapidly but I do know that prestige and the reputation that comes with the publisher is something that I would like because the state of my business is I’m still mid-level, right? I’ve got a medium-small sized audience. So I’m very clear on why I want it. I think sometimes people chase traditional publishing and it’s not what they want at all. So take the few minutes to figure out what’s the end goal. Do I want to grow an audience? Do I want to make sure that my ideas are heard? Do I want to share and distribute relevant information because there is a different vehicle for every one of those questions.

[0:47:13] Charlie Hoehn: Yes, don’t just blindly follow what another author did just because that seems to be the path to that person’s success rather than your own. Yeah, I agree.

[0:47:26] Sarah Peck: A thousand percent.

[0:47:27] Charlie Hoehn: Traditional publishing, again just to reiterate, there are tons of pros to going with a traditional publisher. There are also plenty of cons with going that direction. If you are looking for speed to release ideas, may not be the route to take. In fact, I almost guarantee it to not be the route but there’s a lot of great work that comes out of traditional publishers because that’s their business. They are in the business of polishing ideas that are worthwhile for a lot of people. That’s their model, that’s how they’re in business. You know you don’t need the help of a traditional publisher to do that but most people can’t do it on their own. So it really does help you to have a team and the door is open for you that – I mean I spoke with Jennifer Armstrong. She wrote “Seinfeldea” which was a bestseller and I’m speaking with a woman named Jenine Roth. She was number one New York Times for six months. She was on Oprah, you name it and they do describe these real level up effects that you can get with a traditional publisher that you don’t necessarily get self-published. It’s pretty rare to get with self-published that kind of glamour but it depends again on your goals. What are you willing to? What is the pain and the struggle that you’re willing to take on in order to achieve what it is that you want to achieve? Only you really know that.

[0:49:10] Sarah Peck: Right, a 1000%.

[0:49:13] Charlie Hoehn: Well Sarah, I am really appreciative and grateful that you are such an open book on this episode and that was not an intentional pun for real. I think there’s something too, I mean this in the absolute best way possible. There are some authors that I speak to that I say, “Well why are you writing a book? Why don’t you just do therapy instead?” and I don’t say it in a diminishing way but I do think that there is a deep emotional component that you want. Which is having that, the people around you to see you and connect with you, to really appreciate you for the person you are which is somebody who’s not judgmental, who’s loving, who’s caring, I’m curious how else can you get that in addition to publishing a book?

[0:50:09] Sarah Peck: That’s an interesting question. Well I hope it was useful to A, bringing everybody into the Kimono and talking about what the process looks like in the middle of the messiness of it. I think there is so much post-doc analysis that goes, “Well this is what to do. You know follow my ten steps to a guided book deal” right? Where it’s easy to gloss over the uncomfortable middle or the unknown. I don’t know what’s coming up over the next year. So hopefully that’s useful to people and then that question you just asked, a good question.

[0:50:42] Charlie Hoehn: And you could say that’s nonsense, I don’t know. You might be getting plenty of that and the book is just the thing that scales it up. I don’t know but I know with myself, I wrote hundreds of thousands of words. It was a 300 page book and I had to cut out a huge chunk of it and basically the whole thing was unusable and if I’ve gone through a traditional publisher, they would have stopped me. They would have said, “You need to build the structure first, this is wrong”. But I did it on my own and looking back, a large part of what I was writing is like I should have been talking to people about that rather than just sitting around and making a 200,000 word journal entry. So hopefully you didn’t take that too personally or anything. I just know that a lot of authors go through that. It is an emotional journey and it is difficult.

[0:51:54] Sarah Peck: A thousand percent and I think that even with working with this agency and having an editor check in every six or eight weeks because I’ll submit something to them, they’ll review it, they’ll send it back, it does seem to take a long time. It’s so much longer than, “Wee! I published a blog post, right click” like WordPress schedule to now and you’re like, “Oh my god, it’s just my words. Oh I got likes on Facebook” you know? It’s so much longer. It feels almost brutally slow but it’s not actually that much time and working with them has been a breath of fresh air because each time I dive in and I get in over my head and I get tons of words and I send them a 20,000 word thing, they come back and they say, “Okay tighten it up. Here are the questions you need to be focused on again and move this ship a little bit further forward”.

[0:52:42] Charlie Hoehn: Well I’m excited to talk to you at the next phase. So thank you again for doing this.

[0:52:48] Sarah Peck: Thanks Charlie for having me.

[0:52:51] Charlie Hoehn: Many thanks to Sarah Peck for being on the show. You can buy her book, someday, maybe, I don’t know? I hope so. Just kidding Sarah. I really do hope so though. Thank you so much for being on the show. Thanks again for listening to Author Hour, enlightening conversations about book with the authors who wrote them. We’ll see you next time.