The Ultimate How To: Write, Pitch, Maybe Publish with Kate McKean from Agents+Books

This is the how-to book you need right now, the one with “am I ready to query” and “what does my platform need to look like” and “what if no one buys my book” and “what happens if someone buys my book”. We have a great episode, talking about creating this book, writing this book and living this book—because Kate McKean is not only a very experienced agent, she has also lived the answer to all those questions and that’s part of what makes it special.

Follow: Kate McKean Agents and Books

Also find her at agentsandbooks.com

And buy this book! Write Through It: An Insider’s Guide to Publishing and the Creative Life

#AmReading

Kate: Madeleine Roux, A Girl Walks into the Forest (Dark, feminist and rage-y)

KJ: Francesca Segal, Welcome to Glorious Tuga (not any of those above things)

Alison Espach, Notes on Your Sudden Disappearance (somewhere in between)

Writers and readers! KJ, here. If you love #AmWriting—and I know you do—and especially if you love the regular segment at the end of most episodes where we talk about what we've been reading, you will also love my weekly #AmReading— find it at kjdellantonia.com or kjda.substack.com or by clicking on my name on Substack, if you do that kind of thing. Your #tbr won’t be sorry.

Transcript below!

EPISODE 453 - TRANSCRIPT

KJ Dell'Antonia

Writers and readers, KJ here, if you love Hashtag AmWriting, and I know you do, and especially if you love the regular segment at the end of most episodes where we talk about what we've been reading, you will also love my weekly Hashtag AmReading email. Is it about what I've been reading and loving? It is. And if you like what I write, you'll like what I read. But it is also about everything else I’ve been hashtag am doing, sleeping, buying clothes and returning them, launching a spelling bee habit, reading other people's weekly emails. Let's just say it's kind of the email about not getting the work done, which I mean that's important too, right? We can't work all the time. It's also free, and I think you'll really like it. So you can find it at kjdellantonia.com or kjda.substack.com or by clicking on my name on Substack, if you do that kind of thing. Or, of course, in the show notes for this podcast, come hang out with me. You won't be sorry.

Multiple Speakers:

Is it recording? Now it's recording. Yay! Go ahead. This is the part where I stare blankly at the microphone. Try to remember what I'm supposed to be doing. All right, let's start over. Awkward pause. I'm going to rustle some papers. Okay. Now, one, two, three.

KJ Dell'Antonia

Hey, I'm KJ Dell'Antonia, and this is Hashtag AmWriting the weekly podcast about writing all the things, short things, long things, pitches, proposals. This is the podcast about sitting down and getting your work done. And I interviewed someone last week, who told me that they did not realize I did the introduction live, to which I was like, "Wait, does it sound the same to you every time?" Because I don't know, in my mind, I go off on a tangent every single time. So I am KJ Dell'Antonia, as you probably know, author of three novels and a couple of nonfiction books, and former editor at the New York Times, and, gosh, I have, I have done a bunch of things, but I'm not going to tell you about them right now, because I am really excited about my guest today, who is Kate McKean, and she is the creator of Agents and Books, which is a Substack slash, an email newsletter. For those of you that are not Substack users, you don't have to know what that is to get this, but I'm telling you fundamentally that if you're listening to my words right now, you should be signed up for that, and you're probably going to need the book that we're talking about, which is called Write Through It: An Insider's Guide to Publishing and the Creative Life. It is excellent. It is all the books that I relied on deeply when I got into this industry, rolled up in one book, which doesn't mean you won't buy all the others, because we're writers, and that's what we do. We buy books about writing. We're supposed to right? But I feel like sometimes that's what we do, we buy books about writing, anyway. All right, I'm done introducing, Kate I'm so glad you're here. Thank you for coming.

Kate McKean

I'm really happy to be here. I'm excited to chat.

KJ Dell'Antonia

Yeah, this is going to be good. So this is, this is the book that anyone who is considering traditional publishing needs as both an encouraging guide to how hard it is going to be to get to all the points that you need to get to be ready to even try to traditionally publishing, and then to the process of traditionally publishing. This is how do you know when you're finished? This is how do you know when to pitch? This is how do you pitch. This is how do you deal with the inevitable rejections when you are pitched, this is what happens next. This is the good news and the bad news and the other news and all the news. And the blurb on the front is that it is a wildly generous guide. It is from Sarah Knight, who I adore, and it is! That is, that is most accurate...

Kate McKean

Thank you.

KJ Dell'Antonia

Blurb that I have ever read, I think, or...

Kate McKean

Sarah was so kind to read. I know she reads the newsletter too, and we know each other from way back when she was an editor at Simon Schuster. And I could not be more grateful that she said the kind words she did.

KJ Dell'Antonia

She's amazing, and they are and you this is a generous book. So I do have questions, but first I just have to gush for a while. So...

Kate McKean

I’ll take it.

KJ Dell'Antonia

I have kind of an unspoken policy of being very judicious in taking writing advice of any kind from someone who has not published. And there are 100% exceptions to that. I have an amazing freelance editor who she reads and she edits and wow. But there are also people who write books about writing from a place of having written things, and that's about it. And. And you know that truly, I mean, first of all, you're, you're an agent, you've, you know, you've been in this industry, you've got masses of experience. And secondly, although this is your first published book, it is not your first finished book, it is not...

Kate McKean

Not at all.

KJ Dell'Antonia

Even your first pitched book. It's not the book that got you an agent. And you are so generous in sharing those experiences with people, and they're going to help.

Kate McKean

I hope so. I mean, it's not lost on me that the first published book I have about writing and publishing books, and I even say it in the book. You know, I've tried to sell several picture books and several novels, and maybe I'm just not a great fiction writer. You know, it's very possible that is true. We'll find out. I don't know. I do have a picture book coming out in 2026, so one of them did eventually work. It's coming out with Sourcebooks, and I'm very excited. It's, you know, I know that people probably think, Oh, well, you're just, you're an agent. You could just, like, walk into a publisher and get a book deal like my friend. I am sorry that it's not true. If it had been true, I would have written 50,000 books by now, because I actually really, I mean, it's my job, but I also like doing it myself, but I'm not. I'm not special, you know, like I'm special and privileged because I know all the ins and outs, but I'm not. Nobody's just like rolling out the red carpet and handing me 1000's, billions of dollars to write a book.

KJ Dell'Antonia

Yeah, what I have said about about my fiction writing experience was, and I feel quite certain it was true for you as well. The thing that I had, and I will own it, is that I knew the people that I was sending my query to would look at it, because they knew who I was. That actually just meant it had to be awfully good, because it also means they're going to remember who you are. And if it sucks, they'll remember that next time. Whereas, if you don't have that particular thing and you send out a query that that sucks, the agent is not going to remember your name. So the next time you roll around and you send a better query, it's going to be fine, but the next time that writer rolls around and sends a better query. People are going to be like, well, yeah, I don't know.

Kate McKean

Yikes!

KJ Dell'Antonia

This was not so great.

Kate McKean

Yep!

KJ Dell'Antonia

Yikes! I got to do this again. I got to send another tactful rejection to this person that I so they're coming into it with... So it's good...

Kate McKean

Yeah.

KJ Dell'Antonia

Because you know, people read it and it's not the slush pile and yay. And it's bad because people read it.

Kate McKean

People, people really do think that it's who you know and publishing, and of course, that helps, like you just said.

KJ Dell'Antonia

Yeah.

Kate McKean

But also, you don't want to send your books to your best friends. Like, Jim McCarthy at Dystel, Goderich & Bourret, who my agent is—Michael Bourret at Dystel Goderich & Bourret. Jim is one of my best friends in the entire world, in my life. Like, I do not want Jim to be my agent, even though he's fantastic, because I prefer Jim as my friend. Michael and I have been friends for more than 20 years. Jim and I are much closer. And it's not like, oh, I could just throw away my friendship with Michael, but we just know each other in a way that would lend us to be able to work together really well. And I...

KJ Dell'Antonia

My agent is my friend...

Kate McKean

Yeah.

KJ Dell'Antonia

Because she's my friend, but she was my agent first. But I have a friend, a really good friend, that I have dinner with regularly, that's an agent we ditch about, dish about, and we just have, you know, and I don't want her to be my agent, because then we couldn't talk so much smack about…

Kate McKean

Yeah.

KJ Dell'Antonia

You know, among other things, and yeah. So yeah. I mean, I do like to to start. I like to remind people that it is actually not who you know in this it's faster to get people to read something if you have a way in, we cannot deny that. But people are actually out there looking for great things. You just have to write a great thing, which you know that's hard.

Kate McKean

Impossible sometimes.

KJ Dell'Antonia

Or impossible sometimes. All right, so how did you decide to do... write through it? Did it seem like kind of the obvious thing? Or did you feel like, oh, that's been done. Like, how, how did you come to this one?

Kate McKean

I, I definitely started the newsletter with the idea in the back of my head that maybe this could turn into a book. Because I had, I had turned newsletters and Twitter feeds and Instagrams and all kinds of things like that into books for 20 years. So obviously that was in the back of my head. But I also knew that there are, as you said, tons of other books about writing and publishing out there, and who am I? And what different thing could I bring to the table? And so I started Agents and Books with just a clear goal of, like, writing posts that were like the nuts and bolts of publishing, so that people could have them in this one little place, you know? And it's not the only place in the world you can learn about publishing. But I was like, I want a little place where, you know, if you can click through and find out about option clauses and query letters and, you know, all the little commission rates and royalties and what's earning out and all these things that you could kind of go to one place and click around and see if you could find it, and that was the goal. And then I also ended up talking a lot about the feelings of writing, because they go hand in hand. You know, it's like you're going to write a bad query letter if you are terrified of writing a query letter, and you're going to put agents on these pedestal if you are terrified of agents that you know, like there were these magical beings that can, like, take our magic wands and bestow the power of publishing on you, like we can't... we're just people who like books like, so I wanted to demystify things. I wanted to like, share the nuts and bolts, but, and I wanted to let everybody know that everybody feels this way, like everybody is terrified, everybody hates it. You know, no one is alone and that that felt like the right tack to take in a book, because I guess I hadn't seen that before, or what hadn't, you know, come right out and said it, you know, like, here's how to write query letter, and here's how not to lose your mind while you do it.

KJ Dell'Antonia

Yeah.

Kate McKean

You know, because the same, that’s the same thing, and I thought about it for a long time, you know, to try the right pitch, honestly, for the book.

KJ Dell'Antonia

Yeah, no, I can. I mean, one glorious thing that this has going for us at the moment, even besides that, is that it is very timely and immediate. Because I can give you some things about writing query letters that are probably somewhat out. I mean, they're good, but they date quickly. So it has that. But also, you are right. I've not seen that combination of both. Here's how and here's how not to be so terrified that you screw up, and here's how to feel when they start coming back. Or, you know, here's how you're going to feel, because you really don't need me to tell you how to feel. But here's some thoughts on like how to deal with that, and the fact that it has happened to everyone, and also the fact that it has happened to you. Um, I'm that's terrible. I wish you had every single success, but also, since you didn't, I am so grateful that you put that in here.

Kate McKean:

I mean, my—you know—my beloved book of my heart, literary adult novel, didn't sell. And okay, it did. It didn't. I don't... I can't... I can't magically make it a book. It might be flawed. I don't know. I haven't read it in, like, four years, and I'm fine with that. Um, but I'm going to—I'll just—I'm going to... I'm going to write another one, you know? Because what are the options? Like, I really—I had a moment when my adult novel didn't sell, and I was like, I might—what if I never publish a book? Like, this was my dream. Like, since I was eight years old, I wanted to be a published author. I wanted to see my book on a shelf with my name on it, and what if I don't? Like, what if that just will never happen to me? And it kind of—you know—punched me in the stomach, and... This is telling in so many ways, of the assumptions I was making and the privilege I had and all of these things. But you know that punch in the gut could have made me stop and just be like, "Well, I'm not willing to face that, so let me decide..." Or, if I really want it that bad, I got to go do it again. And just—I'm choosing to do it again. And I cannot control if I publish any more books, except by writing them.

KJ Dell'AntoniaYeah.

Kate McKean

And then that's all I can do. And then I have to hand it over to the other forces in the world to see if anybody likes it. And then, you know—I mean, people got to buy this book, like... but not—I mean, it's not going to be great if nobody buys this book, which, you know... I—it... I can only control so much of that too. But I hope people do.

KJ Dell'AntoniaAt least ten people need to be sitting down and clicking right now. It's Write Through It: An Insider’s Guide to Publishing and the Creative Life, Kate McKean— is it Kian or Keen?

Kate McKeanKeen.

KJ Dell'AntoniaKeen. Kate McKean.

Kate McKeanYeah.

KJ Dell'AntoniaM-C-K... you know, what if you just start with "writer"... I mean, honestly...

Kate McKeanThere's only two Kate McKean’s in the world on the internet. So I'm one of them.

KJ Dell'AntoniaAnd I feel like, if you just sort of go "agents," "books," "book," "K," you're going to come up with this. Because...

Kate McKeanYep.

KJ Dell’Antonia:

Yeah. That's what's going to help. And the other thing that I really like about this book is the honesty about all the time that you spent not writing, and I mean, you've already said it, but, and it is true. My number one favorite, well, one of my favorite writing books, which nobody else, as far as I know, has ever read, is it's called something like “87 reasons your book won't sell” [78 Reasons Why Your Book May Never Be Published and 14 Reasons Why It Just Might]. It's, you know, and it's in its 80… and 15 why it might and the number one reason, the first reason, chapter one, is because you haven't written it yet. You can't sell that. But, I mean, yeah, proposals, fine. That's but, and that's in here if you're writing nonfiction, it's in here to talk about how to do a proposal. But even that, if you haven't written your way to a good proposal, that's not going to sell either. So...

Kate McKean

And the fear of being late or too late, or you hang missed the bus is so tied up into that, because I'm going to be 46 this weekend, and I my first ever book will be coming out after I have turned 46 and if you had told me at 26 I would have, like, lied down on the floor and cried. That I had 20 more years to wait to get published, because I thought it was going to happen. You're not, you know, all of the bravado and the ego is you have when you're in your 20s and who's, you know, patted on the head for their whole life and told they were a good writer by every English teacher, you know, bully for me. But like the I didn't write any books, you know, like, I didn't write any books to get published until I was in my 30s, and I couldn't have spent any more time doing that because I was trying to build my career as a literary agent. And that wasn't, that wasn't on purpose. I just had to pay the rent too. So, you know, it was I didn't. I dragged my feet for many, many years, as I write about in the book, and then I had a kid, and then you get... you have so little time that you have to choose so deliberately what you do that it can sometimes make you more productive. And so when I had all the time in the world in my 20s as a single person in New York City, living the life of putting everything on credit cards and being in massive debt and not making any money in publishing, but still having buckets of time. I didn't do any meaningful work, and I didn't write a book in my MFA program. I did write a book's worth of stories and essays, but not anything that could have been published as is, and nothing that I used as a springboard for a longer piece, and that’s just what happened. That's fine too.

KJ Dell’Antonia:

Yeah.

Kate McKean

But I'm not late. This is, this is, I needed to be this person to write this book, and then we'll see what happens next.

KJ Dell'Antonia

Yeah. I mean, you know, you can't start any sooner than today if you're starting and but I did. I just I appreciated that this book kind of starts with, go ahead, read this book, but also finish your book. Write what you're writing, like, read it. Get ready, daydream, hope for the best, but also find a time, sit down, get some work done, which is, of course, what we say every week on the podcast, because if you don't do the work, yeah, there's nothing. There's nothing anyone can do for you. Well, I mean, I suppose you could become a famous person and then hire someone else, but that is presumably not anyone trajectory, yeah, that's, that's, that's different. That's, that's not the same thing, all right, so what? What was the hardest bit of writing this? This has got a chapter on pretty much anything anybody could imagine. How to read a book deal, how to query, how to you know, how the editors work, how books are sold, all those things. What was the toughest bit?

Kate McKean

The tough bit, honestly, was the what happens after the book sells. And because I realized that I had, I had a view of it for my seat as a literary agent, and every publisher does it a little bit differently and but I've only seen it through the eyes of the books I have sold. So I had to go and ask a lot of editors. I was like, Okay, this is what I think happens. Is this what happens like, when do you get first pass pages? And, you know, do I get? When does the index gain? You know, like, there were just questions I had. I had to make sure I had a consensus answer instead of the this is what happened to me answer, you know?

KJ Dell'Antonia

Right.

Kate McKean

Or this is my what I think answer. And so it just was, I had to make sure. I had to do more research about that than I anticipated, because I didn't want to make I wanted to make sure I wasn't wrong. You know? Hey, I had to make sure. But it wasn't a hard the writing process at all wasn't what I would call hard. I I'm a fastidious outliner, and I love an outline. Outline is my roadmap, like I know where I'm going in the morning I makes me happy. I'm happy to change it, if I have to, but I love it. I'm an outliner, not a pantser, and when I get going, I can go, but then there's just every other million things to do with a book, you know, like the nine times I've read, and then I recorded the audio last week, and which was so fun, but hard, very, very hard. But maybe it's a little bit like, you know, like you kind of forget the hard part after a while, but I don't have any, like, real pain points with the creation of this book. It was definitely hard. It is a lot of labor. It is a lot of time. There were many times where I was like, if I read this paragraph one more time, I will scream, but yeah, I’d do it again.

KJ Dell'Antonia

So it sounded as I as I read through it like, like, finding your structure was maybe a little more challenging than you expected it to be, because it seems like it would be pretty obvious, but then it sounds like there were things where you're like, well, maybe this goes here, or maybe it goes here. Did it surprise you how much you had to play with the structure in the editing?

Kate McKean

Yes, it because everything made sense when it came out of my brain.

KJ Dell'Antonia

Of course.

Kate McKean

You know, like I could, it makes sense to me that this linked to that and then get... you have an editor. My editor, Stephanie Hitchcock, was wonderful. She was like, oh, yeah, this part does not make any sense. And I was like, Oh, totally. If you step out of it and look at it through somebody else's eyes, you're like, Yeah, I didn't explain anything about, you know, royalty statements or whatever, right?

KJ Dell'Antonia

Yeah, the rule is if somebody else says it doesn't make sense, you have to listen. You don't have to do what they say to do to fix it, but you do have to, you have to... Yeah, because you can't hold the reader by the hand. Say, oh, no, no, no. See what I meant...

Kate McKean

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And a lot of times the way I wrote the outline was kind of the way it came out of my head and it made sense, but, you know, I’m in a vacuum.

KJ Dell'Antonia

So I'm torn between talking about the writing of Write Through It and talking about, of course, the contents, which are exactly what our listeners are going to be interested in. So tell me what in here to you, sort of answers the most questions that you get as somebody who gets a lot of emailed questions about this process, because you invite them by having, having an email or having, not by having an email address, which is not an invitation to send people questions. People questions, but by having the agents and plus and books email you, you've put yourself out there as a guide for people and there, I mean, I can name only a few agents in the business that do that, and a couple of publicists, and that makes you like, you know, it gives you a certain profile, and people ask questions. So what in here answers the most questions to you?

Kate McKean

I think, I personally, I would say the stuff about a platform, about the marketing stuff and platform. Everybody's worried about their platform. Everybody thinks they have to have 1000 followers on Instagram. Everybody was so worried about this. They and it's, it's shifting all the time. I mean, I hope, I hope we don't get 16 new social media platforms in the next month so that this isn't completely out of date, like things are going to change. I mean, Twitter completely changed while I was writing this book, but I but there's a lot about social media in there, yes, but there are so many other things that are your platform that people don't realize and they think that you have to have these numbers before you're allowed to write a book. And that's not how it is. That's not the rule. There isn't this, like, okay, where you get so many on this platform and so many on that add them together, it equals a book deal. Like, no, but it... the reason you need a platform is because you are going to do this marketing for your book, and that is also okay, because you are going to do it better than the publisher. A lot of you know angst about publishers don't market anything anymore, and nothing ever happens. And like they actually do, could they do more? Yes. I wish every book had a billion dollar marketing budget and 17 people to work on it, but that is not the industry we have. So...

KJ Dell'Antonia

There's not really anywhere to do this stuff anymore.

Kate McKean

Yeah, yeah, there's nowhere to do it.

KJ Dell'Antonia

I mean the world... the world has changed.

Kate McKean

Yeah, there's, yeah, there's no news coverage for books, hardly anymore, you know? And algorithms are horrible, all these things. So, so if you have a way for readers to talk to you directly and get news from you directly, that's your primary marketing outlet. And so that's why you need it, not because the number equals book deal or validation or proof. It's because that's how you sell books. And it's not the only way, and it's not even a great way, but it is a way that readers need, even, I mean nonfiction 100%, it's like one of the most important things when you're writing nonfiction, and it’s getting to be more important for fiction. It's just also more it's useful when you're writing fiction, but it's just not as like, don't, don't even try until you've started a TikTok or whatever.

KJ Dell'Antonia

Yeah, I just, I just finished a novel that I completely enjoyed, Welcome to Glorious Tuga by — I think her name is Francesca. It's either Sega or Segal [Francesca Segal]. And after I finished it, I thought to myself, you know, I wonder, because, because I'm a writer, readers don't do this, but Is this her first book? You know, does she? Is she somewhere where I can follow her? Because I'm kind of interested in how she did this, I'd like to, and I went to look her up. And fundamentally, this is a person with very little platform that I can see. They turned out to be British. So that is, I think, a little bit different. But there wasn't an email that I could sign up for. There wasn't... I was willing to do all those things. I was kind of jealous.

Kate McKean

Definitely, oh, definitely.

KJ Dell'Antonia

Yeah.

Kate McKean

My wonderful assistant isn't on social media. And I'm like, Wow, what a life, that's amazing.

KJ Dell'Antonia

Yeah, so, I mean, so I there was very little point to that other than that, it's not, apparently required, and yet it's probably required of you. Sorry.

Kate McKean

Right, you're not the except…, like, if you don't want to be on a specific platform, then don't do it, because you'll make bad posts.

KJ Dell'Antonia

Yes!

Kate McKean

Hate it.

KJ Dell'Antonia

Yes.

Kate McKean

Fair game, and also, if your market isn't on there, then don't go on there, or you don't prioritize that.

KJ Dell'Antonia

Yeah. But you can still find me on TikTok, and if you would like an example of how to not do something like that. That would be it. Yeah, there's about six things that are pitiful and sad, and I regret them, and I should go take them down, but that would involve looking at them again, and that would be really embarrassing for me. So I'm not going to do it.

Kate McKean

I mean, I'm not on TikTok. I do Instagram reels. They're horrible. Reels are like bad Tiktok’s from three weeks ago, but doesn't whatever. It's what I have chosen to do. But if, but to the writers out there, if you hate something like you can kind of maybe opt out a specific thing, but that doesn't make you the exception to every rule, right? Like, just because it's hard doesn't mean you get to bail out because everything's hard and you got to do hard things all the time. That's life. Sorry. So yeah. And also, I want to say too, if you are unsafe on a platform. Don't be there, no, but don't that's not a question. No publisher would be like; you should really be on Twitter. And you're like, I'm a trans person. I'm not going to go on Twitter. It is not safe for me. And they’d be like...they're like, yes, cool, cool, yeah, no problem.

KJ Dell'Antonia

Yeah…definitely not. Yeah. So okay, that that doesn't surprise me. I thought you were going to say query letters, but...

Kate McKean

I was going to say query letters, but every it's, it's so much, there's always so much query letters.

KJ Dell'Antonia

Yeah and there's others, there's, there's more of an answer to that, like...

Kate McKean

Yeah, yeah.

KJ Dell'Antonia

You know, there is a way to do that. There's an accessible, checklist-able, figure out, able, learnable process for that, I would argue that there is not that for social media and platform.

Kate McKean

100%.

KJ Dell'Antonia

That is a really is a it's constantly changing, and it's different for everyone which query letters really, they do change, but they are not different from everyone. Do not make your quality query letter different from everyone else's. That's a bad idea.

Kate McKean

No. It's so annoying. It's, it's, no one is going to be wowed by the inventiveness of your query letter, and it’s like sending a singing telegram to apply for a job. You're like, No, don't. Don't do that. No one wants to hire you, if that's what you're going to do.

KJ Dell'Antonia

What is… can you... can you give us an example of someone getting creative with a query letter, just for fun that is not going to out the person?

Kate McKean

You know, I would say that. Now, everyone is much more educated about query letters, and so the random stuff doesn't happen as often. The memorable things are people doing. And these are the general examples you'll get too. It's like writing the query letter in the voice of your character, which is like, okay, but I'm not signing your character up. I'm signing you up. I would like to talk to them please, you know? And then there's the inexplicably, inexplicably short ones that are like, here's my book. Thanks. You're like, I need context. Like, even when you go to the store to buy a book, you have context for what you're shopping for you know what section you're in. You know if it's a hardcover, paperback, whatever you have context. And if you do not give me context for a query letter, I don't know what you're talking about. And then the ones that really get me too are the ones that are like, you're probably going to hate this. I'm like, okay, cool. You just made the decision for me. Thank you. I have to make 400 decisions today, and now it's 399 Cool. Thank you.

KJ Dell'Antonia

Yeah, yeah. Okay, so get that one right. But social media, there is no recipe, but at least there is some advice in, in Write Through It. And yeah, I can't, I can't say enough about how much I suspect most of our listeners would really benefit from and love this book. If you have not, yourself, been in the industry for 20 years, and even if you have, you're going to get stuff out of this. What I got out of it, and what I desperately needed was somewhere, I think, towards the end, you talk about how, you know, 20% of the way into a draft, you're going to hate it, and then with 20,000 words to go, you're going to hate it. And I was like, yeah, yeah, I'm there. I'm hating it. We joke around the podcast that we need to create, like, a, like a book growth chart, sort of like for babies, like, oh, you hate your book. You're right on target. Feed it some solid foods next.

Kate McKean

Yeah, exactly.

KJ Dell'Antonia

Yeah.

Kate McKean

And I get a lot of when you go to write another book, you you're like, wow, yeah. And that's what did I forget. Did I ha, but I did it before. You don't know, you don't know how to write this book. You wrote that book, and it's different every time. And that's like a learning curve that you don't get to until you write your first one, whether it's published or not. But like everybody feels this way, my clients, who are graphic novelists, feel this way. My novelist, my, you know, picture book writers, like every single writer I talked to has been like, oh, how do you do this again? Whoops, I forgot.

KJ Dell'Antonia

Yeah, yeah. I like you, and I'm a fan of the outline or the blueprint, or, you know, how, however you do it. And I have just hit a point where I need to go back and redo that and that's hard. I would really much rather just chug along the path that I have set for myself. But sometimes you can't do that.

Kate McKean

That's writing too. It's like, the word count doesn't go up, and that's the metric we all want to use about our productivity. But then you have to stop for a week and do your stupid outline or whatever, and you're like, but I didn't get any work done, but you did, because then the next two weeks you can just write a billion words. And yeah, you know, you built a fire, so...

KJ Dell'Antonia

And yet, the process is hard and slow, and also hard and slow, and even when it's fast, it's still slow, and even when it feels easy, it'll be hard later. Yeah, and I liked that. That was that that's all in here, but not in a bad way, in a Hello, this is what you have signed up for.

Kate McKean

Yep.

KJ Dell'Antonia

In a “Welcome” kind of way.

Kate McKean

Yeah, it's you're in the club. Yeah? Everybody hating writing and not being able to stop.

KJ Dell'Antonia

Yeah, yeah.

Kate McKean

It's the thing we love to hate the most.

KJ Dell'Antonia

I don't hate it when it's going well, I don't, I don't hate it, but, man, it'd be nice if it were easier and faster and more like, I don't know, walk in the park, okay. But it's not. All right, well, so the book is Write Through this, I'm sorry, Write Through It, and it's wonderful, and I've said that about 56 times. So anything else that people should know about why they should go right out, I would recommend getting it in paper, because I think you're going to want to scribble on it, and I also think you're going to want to go back to it a lot. But you know, y'all do you. It's available in all the formats; apparently it was read out loud, too.

Kate McKean

Out loud by me.

KJ Dell'Antonia

Yeah!

Kate McKean

I think that it's useful to have as in print. And I did write it thinking that you'd go back and forth and be like, Okay, well, today I'm writing my query letter, I’ve got to go to chapter three or whatever. And the other thing, the other reason I wrote this book, is that if you are a writer, and the people in your life know it, or if you're an editor or freelancer whatever, and they want to ask you questions about publishing, you can just give them the book like I literally wrote it as like a favor to my friends who are writers and editors, whose uncle corners them at the family reunion and says, ‘So I want to write a kid's book.’ And you're like, ‘Okay, I would like to go talk to my cousins, but here, I — here's the book for you.’ You know?

KJ Dell'Antonia

Yeah.

Kate McKean

It is the service I am providing through this book. And so if you want to avoid having people email you to say, can I pick your brain. Be like, oh goodness, I'm just so busy. But you know what? You should have Kate's book, and just send them a link.

KJ Dell'Antonia

I love this. I love this. For all of us, it is absolutely going to fill that need. So maybe you want to have three so you can go and hand one…

Kate McKean

I mean, I think good plan, it’s a great idea. Just buy a case, stick it in your house.

KJ Dell'Antonia

Yeah, maybe put it in the back of your car. You never know when you're going to need this.

Kate McKean

No, I think it's a it makes a great gift for all occasions, even if they're not writers.

KJ Dell'Antonia

Probably they'd like to be... everybody. Like, there's some statistic about how many people want to write a book. So, yeah, you could just do it.

Kate McKean

What the saying? That grads, dads, and there's another one...

KJ Dell'Antonia

Dads, grads, and...

Kate McKean

Something like...

KJ Dell'Antonia

Mom! Its Moms, Dads and Grads. I know that doesn't wrap run, but that's the Book Riot podcast that, um, that I will yeah and...

Kate McKean

Yeah, this is a big book buying season. Is like, Mother's Day, Father's Day, graduation. So you know what? I think everyone...

KJ Dell'Antonia

For your graduate and your mother and your father who want to write books, I love it, all right. Well, this was fantastic. You can obviously follow Kate on Instagram. We'll throw that in the show notes, but also have multiple links to her agent's, and books, email, slash Substack, depending on how you like to consume these things you should be getting it. Yeah, that's, that's, that's that. Now, the one thing we always like to end a podcast with is asking people what they've been reading and loving lately. So I hope that's not throwing you under the bus because you can't think of anything because you've been doing this, but I bet I am wrong. So it'd be lovely if it's something people can get either now or soon, because I can see you playing out...

Kate McKean

I just, I pulled… I just re-read my clients, Madeleine Roux’s [inaudible] hard novel called A Girl Walks into the Forest. It is out on the same day that mine go out.

KJ Dell'Antonia

Oh wow!

Kate McKean

I know it's very exciting. And Maddie Roux has written like 25 books. We have been together a long time, and this book is amazing, and it is dark and it is full of feminist rage, and it is has, like, a Baba Yaga character in it.

KJ Dell'Antonia

Awesome.

Kate McKean

And it's just; it's kind of the book we need right now to, like, kind of burn stuff down. So I highly recommend pre ordering it. I loved reading it again all in one place, like I read your earlier draft, but now I can see it again, and, like, I just re- read it as I also wanted to, you know, keep up with my clients work, but I wanted to read it because it was good. Like, it's just good.

KJ Dell'Antonia

Great, amazing.

Kate McKean

I'm like, hugging the book right now.

KJ Dell'Antonia

You are. Yeah, no one will see, yeah I know I've been waving your book around this entire time, and no one sees any of it, but it increases our the enthusiasm level in our voice, or something. So that's fantastic. Well, I mentioned Welcome to Glorious Tuga, which is a saga about it's like a bunch of people. I don't even know how to sell it, other than it's kind of like all creatures great and small set on a tiny island where people can only get off and on for half of the year with, you know, lots of animals and lots of fam…, of people interaction and but also one protagonist who sort of brings you through. And I gosh, if I can't come up with, and I love this book, and I have, I'm having trouble coming up with a great way to sell it, but I hope somebody, I hope somebody does it, because it's super fun. So there was that, but I mentioned that in my last podcast. So I also want to add Notes on Your Sudden Disappearance by Alison Espach. That was her book before The Wedding People. It is vastly different. It is a single POV, first person narrative of a girl who loses her sister in a car accident at I think, the age of 13, and her ongoing and continual relationship with her sister's boyfriend who was driving at the time, which sounds really awful. But it's not sad. It's weirdly honest. It's a fantastic exploration of not just grief, but like people, and how we think and how we aren't who we think we are should be. But it is not The Wedding People. It's really different, which I found super interesting. So since y'all are writers listening to this, you might find it interesting, too. All right.

Kate McKean

Excellent. That sounds great.

KJ Dell'Antonia

Thank you so much for talking to me and everyone out there who is listening, buy Write through it. And also keep your butt in the chair and your head in the game.

Jess Lahey

The Hashtag AmWriting podcast is produced by Andrew Perilla. Our intro music, aptly titled Unemployed Monday was written and played by Max Cohen. Andrew and Max were paid for their time and their creative output, because everyone deserves to be paid for their work.

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