Thoughts on "making it" as a writer on the eve of my book release
It's always been hard. Keep writing anyway.
The Last Parenting Book You’ll Ever Read: How We Let Our Kids Go And Embrace What’s Next releases on Tuesday, 5/6, and on release day I’ll be doing a series of live interviews across Substack. Scroll to the bottom of this post to find the itinerary and I can’t wait to “talk” to you tomorrow!
If you’ve been reading my newsletter for a while, you probably know I have a book coming out early next week. What you may not know is that it’s actually my fifth traditionally-published book: I authored (or coauthored) four others - with well-known, established publishing houses - between 2007 and 2011.
If you’d asked me at the very beginning of my writing career when I would say I’d “made it,” I might have told you that moment would happen when I saw my name on the cover of a real, live, published book. That seemed so impossible as to be a fantasy when I first started, and I was sure a book would be the ticket that would let me step across the invisible threshold from “nobody” to “household name.”
But while each book I’ve written has represented an incremental stepping stone in my career, and all have provided varying amounts of necessary income for my family, not one of those publishing experiences turned me into a sudden success. I have never become a household name, and I have never gotten rich, despite two-plus decades of hard work.
And that’s how it goes for a working writer, far more often than you may think.
Climb up on Grannie Meagan’s knee, friend. I want to tell you a story, and it goes all the way back to 2001: before Substack, before social media, even before sponsored blogging.
I sold my first piece of writing - an essay in the since-folded Brain, Child magazine - for $50 that year. It felt like some Writer’s Fairy Godmother had reached a hand through my dial-up modem and personally guided me to a new place, a place of possibility where maybe, just maybe, I had what it took to do this professionally.
But life as a full-time working mom of two little kids, a toddler and preschooler, was hectic - and there didn’t seem to be enough time to take my writing seriously. It wasn’t until I found myself unexpectedly pregnant with my third in the spring of 2003 - when my older boys were five and three - that I really got the fire in my belly.
My life at that point was a chaotic and stressful mess of (mostly-late) drop-offs and (almost-always-late) pick-ups with an unrewarding and modestly-paying office job taking up all my best hours between 9 and 5. I desperately wanted a change: more freedom, more flexibility, more physical proximity to my kids for more of the day. I’d never dropped a newborn off at daycare before and honestly wasn’t sure I could bring myself to do it. Things had to change, and - as I was three months pregnant by the time I decided to really go for it - they had to change quick.
So I jumped into the deep end and started pitching editors, mostly via the U.S. Postal Service. Email addresses were closely guarded and not so easy to find or guess at in those days, and a lot of big publications didn’t accept emailed pitches at all. It took a good year of me sending submissions and query letters (complete with self-addressed stamped envelopes in which they’d send a usually-photocopied rejection) in the actual mail before I finally had made inroads with enough editors that I had a small, but oh-so-valuable cache of email addresses to reach out to instead.
I queried and queried and queried the national publications, hard, and at the same time looked hard to find the unsexy, workaday assignments that would keep me afloat while I waited for my big break. I wrote dozens of 150-word fillers at $50 a pop for a pregnancy publication owned by a company that manufactured stretch-mark cream. I pitched my employer my services as a writer and got the opportunity to write their newsletter. I pitched my local paper a weekly parenting column, which I self-syndicated to three other newspapers and wound up writing for four or five years.
The money started to trickle in, slowly at first and then more and more steadily. And I was so over the moon about the opportunity to get paid actual money to write words - and to get to do that work from home, with my kids asleep in the next room - that the creative lengths I went to in order to make all the logistics work just felt like a big game.
My first major break into the big leagues, in 2004, was a 300-word piece on natural ways to support eye health for a now-defunct newsstand magazine. I called my editor to accept the assignment from my office parking lot while on lunch break. Another early win was a 200-word front-of-book filler on how to remove poop and spit-up stains from a baby’s onesie for Parenting magazine. I have a very specific memory of jotting down notes for that story against the hood of my car while baby Will slept inside.
Those assignments (and a flurry of follow-up pitches) led to features in outlets like American Baby, Parenting, Parents and Good Housekeeping. And the really cool thing about that time was that my little filler piece on baby poop might be in the same issue as a featured essay by a much-bigger writer like
, whose career was really taking off right around the time I was starting. And her story might be just a couple pages away from mine! (And of course, I could only really guess at which writers were actually “bigger” than me, since there were no numbers published next to anyone’s name.)When my writing income made it possible for me to return to work on a very part-time schedule after Will was born, it felt like I was getting away with something. I quit that job for good a few years later, and I’ve made a living from my words every single year since.
But while print was alive and well when I first launched my career, things changed quickly afterward. Magazines floundered (and many perished) right around the time my print career was really taking off, requiring a pivot…and then another pivot, and another.
Since then, countless digital outlets have come and gone and publishing platforms have risen and fallen, and I’ve reinvented again and again, taking assignments on diverse topics: I’ve reported on everything from credit-card points to compost. I’ve profiled lawyers and builders, created itineraries for camping trips and theme-park vacations, broken down the steps of infant CPR and the ingredients in natural shampoo.
I’ve occasionally taken on long-term contracts and even W2 jobs when it’s made sense - in just the last eight years, I’ve worked as a copywriter for a marketing agency, an editor for a regional lifestyle magazine, a content director for my local Chamber of Commerce. I’ve consulted, organized retreats, taught workshops. And of course, I pivoted to podcasting, which leaned on my writing and editing skills.
Perhaps counter-intuitively, having economic need attached to my writing - which
actually recommends against in her book Big Magic - has always been helpful for me; it has always provided me with a clear goal and structure around my writing that keeps me moving forward. (Some might see dollars earned as a way to gauge of a writer’s success as shamefully mercenary, but whether or not I can pay my mortgage or put food on the table is a hell of a lot more concrete and less soul-sucking than wondering if my subscriber number is “high enough” compared to some other writer’s.)So I guess I’ve always “made it”, if by “making it” you mean continuing to get published and continuing to get paid.
But also: it’s always been a hustle.
Friends, it’s. always. been. hard.
When I see writers suggesting that it’s getting harder and harder to make money as a writer, it seems that what they are often really saying is it’s getting harder and harder to make a living writing about exactly what they want to, in the way they want to, for the outlets they want to.
I get the feeling maybe they felt they were promised that, through this platform or the last one. They built an audience and a specific body of work based on that promise and expectation, and are now frustrated by that promise seeming to disappear - suspiciously, right at the same time a bunch of bigger names are showing up.
But earning a decent amount of money - all-the-bills-paying, day-job-quitting money - writing only personal essays or memoir or fiction or poetry or op-eds has always been the coveted position of writers with some combination of extraordinary talent, extraordinary timing, extraordinary connections, or extraordinary luck.
Most of us who decide to do this as a calling and a career choose a path: either we will write exactly what we want to, where and when we want to, and struggle to earn money from it, or we will write what is marketable and cash the checks - or we will try to balance the two, and make peace as best we can with the half-written novels or essays on our Google Drive.
If anything, it’s never been easier to make at least some money writing for one’s chosen audience on one’s chosen topic from one’s unique point of view. Maybe not as much as you want, maybe not as much as you need, maybe not as much as the next writer, but some. And much more opportunity than the smattering of paying outlets for personal writing offered me in 2003.
But while those opportunities are wonderful in many ways, I think they’ve also skewed our idea of how accessible the dream of fame, recognition, and big money really is for a typical writer.
The same platforms that have created opportunities I couldn’t have dreamed of while licking stamps for SASE’s in 2003 are the same reason writers’ spaces feel ever more crowded. We see all our competitors now, along with their follower count. The comparison game is built into the profit model.
Here’s what I know: these platforms are only a tool. They are not writing itself; they do not define what it means to be a writer in 2025, or ever.
A venture-capital-funded software company’s business model cannot be the thing that makes or breaks my life as a writer, and I’ve been around the rise and fall of enough of these companies to know that I don’t have to let it.
I just have to show up, keep doing the work, and keep my eyes on my own page and my own goals…whether that page is here or somewhere else; whether my goals are connection or creative expression or actual dollars. I have to believe in my own ability to do this, and to keep doing it on my own terms - because there will always be someone bigger, better-known and better-paid than I am, sharing the same spaces.
By the way, remember that very first big, national magazine sale I made - the 300-word filler about natural eye health? My editor for that fateful, confidence-building, door-opening bit of reportage was
.I’m guessing we were both around the same age then, give or take a few years; she was definitely early in her career, just like I was.
Now Virginia has a NYT-bestselling book and something like 50X more Substack subscribers than I do.
Very likely she had better connections than I did from the start, being that she was in the New York City publishing world and I was a mom in small-town Michigan with no formal writing training. Maybe she got luckier, had better timing, chose a more attention-grabbing topic to focus on. It’s very possible she worked harder and more consistently than I did at certain times.
Who knows? Who cares? While I could be envious of her success - she’s got a NYT-bestselling book and something like 75X the number of Substack subscribers I do - the way I see it, both Virginia and I “made it”.
After all, twenty-one years later we’re both still here, and we’re both still writing.
My virtual book tour is here! Here’s how to follow along:
The big day is (almost) here, friends: The Last Parenting Book You’ll Ever Read: How We Let Our Kids Go And Embrace What’s Next officially releases tomorrow, Tuesday May 6, and I have a full day of live interviews lined up, right here on Substack.
I’ll be “traveling” to each host following this schedule:
8:30 AM EST:
of Home Again (so excited to be kicking things off with my longtime co- of The Mom Hour podcast!)9:30 AM EST:
of Pantsuit Politics10:30 AM EST:
of A Well-Read Tart11:00 AM EST:
of Building Boys11:30 AM EST:
of Planting Season1:00 PM EST:
of Parent of Adults1:30 PM EST:
of Between Two Things2:00 PM EST:
of Raising Awe-Seekers2:30 PM EST:
of Stir & Scribble3:30 PM EST:
of Rachel’s Treehouse4:00 PM EST:
of Write My StoryYou can either click each host’s link above at the time of the interview, or subscribe to them now so you’ll get a notification. Many will be recorded and published later if you can’t watch live - so make sure to subscribe to each of the participants now so you don’t miss a thing.
I am SO excited about this fantastic lineup and hope you will tune in to watch some of our conversations tomorrow!
Wish me luck, please? Release day is exciting and nerve-wracking, and I’d love to know you're rooting for me.
As always, thanks for being here, friends.
There's so much good stuff in here but I'd be lying if I said my favorite line wasn't, "Climb up on Grannie Meagan’s knee, friend" 😜
Adore you! Happy book launch day! We're still writing! A prize in itself.
Congratulations! Wishing you all the best. Great advice, as always, and I'm definitely buying a copy of the book. {{hugs}}