Premium: How To Get A Book Deal The Easy Way - Leigh Stein's secrets for book publishing success.

The Unspeakable Podcast

Meghan Daum

Society & Culture

4.8 • 784 Ratings

🗓️ 29 October 2024

⏱️ 17 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

In this premium episode, writer, editor, and friend of the pod Leigh Stein returns to talk about the state of book publishing, including the importance of promotion via digital platforms like YouTube and TikTok. Leigh may be the Jane Goodall of BookTok. She has spent countless hours in the wild, studying the platform’s users and creators for insights into its addictive magic. As a book coach who helps authors sell their manuscripts to publishers and then (hopefully) sell lots of copies, she understands the changing landscape of publishing and sees endless potential and opportunity. Where many authors and editors feel only fear and dread, Leigh feels joy. Recently, she helped literary agent turned novelist Betsy Lerner become an unlikely TikTok star.

Want in on more of Leigh’s secrets? On November 14, The Unspeakeasy is offering a one-time webinar with Leigh called How To Get A Book Deal The Easy Way. It’s open to everyone (not just ladies) and may change your life. And it’s only $150! Visit the course page in The Unspeakeasy for more details and to sign up.

GUEST BIO

Leigh Stein is a writer exploring the impact of the internet on our identities, relationships, and politics. She has written five books, including the satirical novel Self Care (Penguin, 2020) and the poetry collection What to Miss When (Soft Skull Press, 2021). Her non-fiction work has been featured in publications such as the New York Times, the Washington Post, the New Yorker, Allure, ELLE, Poets & Writers, BuzzFeed, The Cut, Salon, and Slate.

Leigh founded Out of the Binders/BinderCon, a feminist literary nonprofit organization that supported women and gender variant writers. BinderCon events in NYC and LA welcomed nearly 2,000 writers to hear speakers such as Lisa Kudrow, Anna Quindlen, Claudia Rankine, Jill Abramson, Elif Batuman, Effie Brown, Leslie Jamison, Suki Kim, and Adrian Nicole LeBlanc. Leigh also moderated a Facebook community of 40,000 writers. She is no longer on Facebook.

Leigh’s website.

Leigh’s newsletter.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Everyone that cosmetically altered their face,
0:05.0	now we're in a backlash to that.
0:08.0	Now I find it like so refreshing to just see a normal person's face.
0:12.0	Like this is what I love about the show, my brilliant friend on HBO,
0:15.0	like all the actors' faces, I'm like, what a great face.
0:17.0	We don't have those faces in America because in America, all our actors, like, I cannot watch Nicole Kidman anymore. I cannot watch her face.
0:24.8	Her face looks so strange to me. It's so distracting. So we don't have real faces anymore. So I think actually your real face on camera, on TikTok, and you just talking like you normally would, is actually refreshing to people.
0:38.3	It's almost like the counterculture
0:40.3	to what we're getting in a Nicole Kidman movie.
0:46.3	Welcome to The Unspeakable Podcast.
0:48.3	I'm your host, Megan Down.
0:50.3	My guest is no stranger to the podcast, Lee Stein. She is a novelist, a poet, a book
0:59.2	coach, manuscript coach, publishing guru, expert on book talk. Yes, that is book talk,
1:05.9	T-O-K. And she is here to talk about the state of the publishing industry.
1:10.9	She checks in every so often to talk about that.
1:13.9	And specifically, Lee is going to be talking about a webinar.
1:17.4	She's about to teach for the unspeak easy called How to Get a Book Deal the Easy Way.
1:23.8	This is a premium episode for the podcast.
1:27.3	If you are not yet a paying subscriber, you're going to hear a little bit. And then I would invite you to join our listener community if you are not already. And if you want to take the class, good at the unspeakasy.com. I remind you of that again at the end of this interview. So enjoy. Here's Lee Stein.
1:47.6	Welcome to the unspeakable podcast. I'm your host. Thank you. Megan Down. That wasn't for you,
1:53.1	Lee. That was for everybody else. We're doing it differently now. This is a, this is a premium episode.
2:00.2	So I'm welcoming the listeners.
	...

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