It took me half of a week in San Francisco to realize it: I didn’t have much of a sense of taste anymore.

Newsletter editor Rachel here

Be careful what you wish for. 

My dad looked at me with an intense earnestness I hadn’t seen much from him. 

Yesterday, we hosted an incredible free event with Andy Dunn, the co-founder of Bonobos and author of the acclaimed and best selling “Burn Rate: Launching a Startup and Losing My Mind.”

Holy smokes.

I’ve been so consumed with my own grief and summer camps and house construction that I’ve been super remiss in telling you all the incredible stuff going on this summer like I usually do in this space.

So I want to talk to the writers and the aspirational writers today.

Y’ALL!!!!

We have an incredible AMA Zoom coming up with Stephanie Hitchcock formerly of Harper, now at an imprint of Simon & Schuster. What you will notdo is pitch her your book during this hour. That would monopolize the time from other attendees and is not how you get a book deal. What you WILL get out of this is a real from the superstar horse’s mouth explanation of what is going on with publishing, what publishers want, how to appeal to them, what stresses and pressures they are under and what happens when you get an agent finally (yay!) and pitch a publisher and they seem to like it but….

Stephanie is absolutely incredible. She was my publisher for my third bookwhile she was at Harper and the best I’ve worked with. If I wasn’t so exhausted and had another book in me, she’d be my DREAM editor. Y’all know I always bring you my best people. . . .stay tuned for a similar event with my agent!

Stephanie is also a champion for diverse voices. She pushed me to get more diverse in the reporting for my last book, and when I reached out to her a few years ago for a book I was mulling she said she thought I had a “white lady problem” in taking on that issue. I love love love love her commitment to intersectionality in publishing. You are going to ADORE HER.

BUT BEFORE WE GET TO THAT. . .

I know a lot of y’all are mulling memoirs and I KNOW KNOW KNOW for underrepresented folks just putting your hand up and saying “Yeah, I’ve got a story to tell” feels like a radical, radical act. (It is!) So we’ve come up with a ton of programming JUST TO HELP YOU. Because we also believe you have stories to tell that everyone should hear.

Whatchu need to do RIGHT NOW.

1. Go watch our free recorded memoir 101 workshop.
2. RSVP right this very second our our free live workshop TOMORROW with startup founder and best selling, blockbuster memoir author Andy Dunn. Talk about I bring y’all my best people. Andy is a long time friend, and investor in ChairmanMe and one of my favorite people on the planet. His unflinching memoir about entrepreneurship and mental health is not only a gorgeous and heartbreaking read, it’s one of the most courageous ones I’ve read in a long time, maybe ever. We are going to get into ALLLLLLLL of that. You don’t want to miss it.
3. Check out our How to Write a Memoir course. It’s a quick one! Just four weeks!! Paul and I have written five memoirs between us, mostly published by large publishing houses. And we have so many incredible guest lectures as part of this. You are gonna have like ten memoirs worth of experience to draw from. Impossible to get in that kind of compressed space and time for that amount of money otherwise. And I’m not sure when we’ll run it again. Definitely not in 2022. (Yes! You can pay in installments! And yes this course is also great for personal newsletters and essay writing!)

The first time I said I wanted to write a book, I was straight up laughed at by the older men in my newsroom. We will never laugh at your dreams. We will double and triple down and help you get there.

Testament: We just got news that one of our alums from our Open Book cohort less than a year ago, Ron Drabkin, has just inked a book deal with a major publisher. Here's how Ron describes the course....

This past Sunday, I was sitting on the tarmac in Palm Springs, furious and wishing like hell I had missed my flight. 

Newsletter editor Rachel here.

Let me tell you about our Sunday.

I’ve been dealing with some pretty substantial in medias res grief lately. I feel like I’ve seen many movies and read many things and talked to many friends who have gone through this kind of grief. It’s sadly not rare.