This Is Woman's Work with Nicole Kalil - 052 / Writing Your Book with Lainey Cameron

Episode Date: April 14, 2021

Who else is obsessed with books? Reading is my happy place and I love the smell of the pages (weird, I know). I am in awe of the writers of books, the creators of stories, the speakers of truth. But writing the amazing book isn’t the only challenging part, then you need to publish, distribute, and promote it. And then you get to hear everyone’s opinions, reactions and critiques about your work. I’ve invited Lainey Cameron - A past tech industry executive turned award winning author of “The Exit Strategy” (an Amazon #1 Best Seller), to join us today. Lainey talks about why she made the career change, and how she navigated both the good and the hard of writing her first book. For any aspiring writer (like me!) who’s had it on their bucket list to write a book but has a long list of excuses, let’s get into action. As the great Maya Angelou once said “There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside of you.” This is Woman’s Work. To learn more about what we are up to outside of this podcast, visit us at NicoleKalil.com

Coming up on this episode of This Is Woman's Work. There's a famous phrase about how once we put books into the world, we don't own them anymore. Because every person reads a book differently based on where they're coming from. And so yeah, you have to be okay with the idea that once you put it out there, and I am obsessed with books. Reading is my happy place. I feel the same about reading as others do about exercise. It keeps me sane, gives me energy, and gives me strength. I rate almost every book I read a four or five stars because I either like it or I love it. And I am in awe of the writers of books, the creators of stories, the speakers of truth. Writing an amazing book isn't the only challenging part though. Then you need to publish,

distribute, and promote it. And then you get to hear everyone's opinion, reaction, and critiques about your book, your story, your truth. And did you know that women are responsible for just under half of the New York Times bestsellers at 48%? But if you look under the hood of that statistic, you'll find the gender breakdown varies a ton by genre. Women write most of the romance, domestic, and historical books. Half of the literary and mystery books we read. But very few of the political, adventure, sci-fi, or spy books. And so here's where it gets even more interesting for me. And by interesting, I mean infuriating. Over 90% of the business books are written by men. How are we as women

supposed to bring our authentic selves to work when almost all the books written about business are from a male perspective? Of the 200-selling business books in 2020, only 17 were written by women. And for those math whizzes out there, that's only 9%. But we make up 46% of the global workforce. Please tell me I'm not the only one who sees a problem here. What's the solution, you ask? Well, I believe we as women need to flex our consumer power and buy and read more books and more business books written by women. And those of us who have ever dreamed about writing a book need to get into action. I've invited Lainey Cameron, award-winning author of The Exit Strategy and Amazon number one bestseller and a recovering tech industry executive to join us today. Lainey's book is fiction, but was inspired by a decade of being the only woman at the

corporate boardroom to which many of us can relate. It's been called a rallying cry for women to believe in themselves and join together and tells the story of a Silicon Valley investor who first meets her husband's mistress across the negotiating table. Lainey, thank you so much for joining us today. I'm super excited for our conversation. Oh, thanks for inviting me, Nicole. I love your podcast and everything you're doing. I love some of your confidence programs. I wish all of these things had existed for me during the 20 years that I was in corporate before I became an author. I appreciate you saying that. I wish that too. I learned a lot of this stuff the really, really hard way and wasn't uber confident in my early career journey. So, all right, I want

to start by asking why and how you made the career change from corporate executive to bestselling author. Tell us a little bit about that decision and that journey. Well, it's a great example of sometimes you make a big decision by a series of little decisions. So I had just left my last startup job. Before I became an author, I was for a long time, for 15 years, I was a vice a long time, for 15 years, I was a vice president of a $2 billion division at a big blue chip company, blue chip tech company. And then I went on to do very many startups. I did several startups in a row where I was a marketing officer for different startups in charge of all of the marketing and strategy.

And when I finished at my last startup five years ago, I was burned out. I just felt like I perpetually had to be watching what I said, how I acted, how my expressions moved in every single meeting. I almost found the external stuff easier than the internal stuff. Like in internal meetings where everyone's looking at your expression to judge the entire future of the company. And it's a lot of, I don't want to say pressure because I've always been in high pressure jobs. But that burden of feeling like you're constantly being judged all the time and that you have to behave slightly differently as a woman and you're being perceived differently. I was burned out. And so I had this idea for a book and I thought, I'm going to take a six month sabbatical. I'm going to let myself find out if I even know the ending of this book because it was fiction.

And I had this very clear first scene in my head, but I actually didn't know how the book ended. And I didn't know if I had an ending for this book. And so I gave myself six months and I said, after six months, either I'm going to believe I have some potential here and I'll keep going or I gave it a go I learned something new and I'll be refreshed and ready to go back into the workplace into my old roles and honestly Silicon Valley is so crazy that the jobs are still going to be there I was lucky enough that I could do it money-wise that I had a little bit of a safety net because that biggest

challenge for us all in these things and so I gave myself six months. And then what happened is the novel actually won like slightly after that a first unpublished novel competition with women's fiction writers. And I kind of sat back and I said, OK, so there's some potential here. You know, I'm not good at this yet. I just started. It's a new craft. I'm not yet good at it, but maybe I could be, and maybe I could learn to be an author that can write page turners. And so my husband and I at that point made a really big decision. We decided that if I was going to stick with the writing thing, even though we had a little bit of a safety net, we certainly couldn't afford to be living in San Francisco. And so we actually left the U S and decided to go live in less expensive locations around the world where we could both work remotely, where I could work on writing and finishing and learning the craft of being an author. And he could do his jobs, which were tech jobs that could be done remotely. And so that was what

made it possible is we had to make some lifestyle choices so that we weren't burning through cash, paying for rent in San Francisco. That's an amazing story. And I love in confidence building, I talk about both action and failure being confidence builders. And on the failure part, I think so much of us don't do things because of the fear of failure. And I loved how you said, you know, I'm going to take the six months and see if I can do this. There wasn't, it didn't at least come across of, if this doesn't work, or, you know, then I'm a failure and I suck and, you know, my life is over type thing. You really gave yourself space and grace and permission to try something big and took action. So kudos to you. I know that couldn't have been easy, all of those decisions in the moment.

And it's humbling. After 20 years, I talked to a lot of writers about this. So after 20 years of being pretty good at what I did, I rose very high in my career because I was good at it. I learned to play the game. I chose jobs that played to my strengths. We all try to go to the places of the things we think we're good at. And so, at least I think most people do if they get it right in their career equation. And so it was really humbling to start writing a book, which is an entirely different craft, right? It's a craft of writing. It's not about the first draft. And so it was really humbling to start something where you know you're bad at it, where you know that what you are putting on the paper is terrible. Because every first draft by every author is terrible. Even the best selling authors in the world, their first drafts are terrible. That's the point of it being a first

draft. And so that's a very different perspective than corporate world where we expect to go into the first meeting on a topic and ace it and be excellent at it. And to your point, we don't grant ourselves the grace to say, okay, I'm going to do this five or 10 or 50 times before I'm really competent and good at this. And that's okay. Cause I know how to learn and I don't have to be perfect from the first word that I put on the first piece of paper. And so for me, I actually struggled with that a lot at the beginning. Like I would keep rewriting paragraphs, trying to get them perfect. And I'm realizing the second time around as I'm working on my second book now, now that the first one's out and it's

done really well, I'm letting things go. I have whole sections in the second book where I have square brackets. This will take place somewhere, maybe Greece, question mark, moving on because it's okay to come back later. I know that I'll revise this thing 10, 20 times before it sees a reader. That's just the way that craft of writing works. And so it's okay to not be perfect first time around. And that was hard for me, like coming from a corporate world. That was actually really difficult. I think we can all relate to how that would be really difficult, but I think there's such

a beautiful and important lesson in that. Lainey, thank you for sharing. I mean, just when you said, you know, the first draft sucks for everybody, I was like, I don't know. I just, I felt like tension released or something. Because that should not just be true of writing books, right? Let's say there's a great life lesson in there. Okay. So you shared with me that your novel was soundly rejected by 130 or more agents. And then of course, as I mentioned, you know, in the introduction, you get critiques and people's opinions and how do you manage that? How do you stick with it? How,

I mean, talk to us a little bit about that process and how you still believe in yourself and keep going. Yeah. It's such a, it's such an interesting experience going through that rejection. And I think I was benefited by having been a marketing person. So in the marketing world, when you're creating, whether it's ad creative or a new marketing campaign, there's always a stage where you take it out to the world and it gets torn apart, right? Whoever you're presenting it to, whether it's your boss, whether it's outside colleagues, you know, as the marketing department, you don't get to make those decisions on your own. You still have to share it with your colleagues

at some point. And that process of being critiqued is something that I think helps you build a thick skin. And so I really felt like I benefited from that because I was able, when I was getting rejected, to ask what's really happening here and to analyze the situation, which I think sometimes when we're getting rejected and we have that kind of, I want to curl up inside and die emotion going on, we can't be rational about analyzing what's really happening. And that's what makes it so hard because we take it so personally. One of my favorite phrases is from a fellow author. She's in her sixties and she's been around the block a few times. It took her like 20, I think 20 years to get her first novel

published. And then it went on to be an award winner right away. And so she's just, she's very insightful. And one of the things she says is you are not your book. And what she means by that is the book, or if you're in corporate, the marketing campaign or whatever it is, is a thing you created. It is not you that is being criticized. It is this thing that you created. And it's when you can't disassociate that you are not the book, you are not the campaign, you are not the thing that's happening around you, right? It's happening to you. It's happening because of you, you're part of it, but it is not you, they are not, you know, necessarily, sometimes they are, but in this case, not necessarily directly critiquing you and your self worth. And so I feel like I was so benefited by having had

that experience of learning to take critique, because I was able to step back when I got those 135 agent rejections and say, what's really going on here? What is this about? And the first time I actually queried, which is what it's called when you ask agents to represent you, a year before, and the first time I was getting some interesting feedback, and there's a wonderful thing we say in the writer world, it comes from Neil Gaiman, who's a fabulous author. He says, when you're getting a lot of critique and it's all completely contradictory, which is what was happening for me, I was getting, we love Ren,

who is your venture capitalist character, but we don't like Carly, your single mom CEO. And then some other people would say, we love Carly, the single mom CEO, but we don't like Ren and we don't believe that anyone could ever have imposter syndrome and be in a corporate world as a CEO, which that one just made me giggle. But it's all completely contradictory. And Neil Gaiman says this fabulous thing, and it may be helpful in the business world

too. He says, when everybody's giving you contradictory feedback, don't pay any attention to what they said. Look at where they pointed. And what he meant was, in this case, all of the feedback I was getting was about character. It was utterly unuseful, right? I like this, I don't like that. It was all over the place. But it enabled me to step back the first time and say, okay, so the thing that's challenging, the thing that analytically data wise, I need to fix is character. Now, I also then realized I had no clue how to fix it. And even my beta readers, yes, we actually have beta testers for books, just like corporate products.

We have beta readers. Even my beta readers couldn't tell me. They're like, it seems fine to me. And so I sought real professional expertise. I actually got the equivalent of a coach in business, which is a developmental editor. And that's someone who comes in and they don't rewrite your book for you. They help diagnose what's wrong. They help you diagnose.

And for me, what it was is I created these two really powerful women in the corporate arena and the readers, especially because a lot of my readers were not coming from that background. A lot of them were coming from very different backgrounds. They couldn't relate to these two characters. And so what I had to do was explain why my characters were the way they were. Why is Ren a little hard edged? Why would she not cry in a meeting when she suddenly faces her husband's mistress, which to me was absolutely obvious. Of course, you can never cry in a big boardroom meeting, but you know, if you've never been in the boardroom as the only woman in the boardroom, it's not as obvious. And so you have to give a

bit of background. And so I say that because there's some just fascinating lessons there. And then the second time, a year later, I rewrote the book three times working with that developmental editor over a year. I knew it was ready. When I went back out again to agents, I had feedback. It was winning awards before it was even out. I knew this book was ready. And so I diagnosed what was happening with the agents because I was getting weird feedback like this. I'll give you an example. I got your book. I stayed up all night reading it. I loved it. It's a page turner. I can't offer representation. Okay. Yeah. This was really consistent. It was really consistently positive. And I'm like, what do you do with that? And so I did some digging.

I actually called some people up. I actually said, Hey, will you spend two minutes with me and just explain this a little more? I went to some other publishers and said, Hey, if you got this in an email, what would you read that as saying? And the answer was the agents didn't know how to sell the book. They didn't know how to sell the book to a big publisher, but an agent will never say, I don't know how to sell this book because it makes them look bad. Right? Like, but the reason they didn't know how to sell the book is the way an agent, and an agent is just someone who represents you and sells your work to a publisher. And the way they judge whether they can sell a book is whether they can see a similar book that has sold in the recent past.

And there was no other book about two women becoming friends and lifting each other up in the workplace. There wasn't a single comparable title out there. And so they were looking at the market saying, well, if there's never been one, I'm not sure there's a market for a book like this. And so once I worked that out, it actually became a very easy decision because it wasn't a case of I'll stick this in a drawer and give up. It was a case of, wait, no, this is a good book. Just because they don't see the potential doesn't mean that it's true. And it doesn't mean that I don't believe there's potential and the fact that it went on to become a number one bestseller and when I think it's on its fourth award now says that there was a

readership and there was potential and so I'm really glad I didn't give up I went out to six small publishers and got several offers within two months when I went to smaller publishers direct without an agent so one of the things that kept popping in my head, and you shared some really insightful wisdom, in addition to with feedback, I always think the critiques and the criticism and even the positive comments, they don't just tell you about your book either. They tell you about the person giving the critique. It tells you about where they're standing, what they're seeing. And I see that so obviously with books where I can pull up the, you know, the ratings and it's like a bunch of five stars, but then

inevitably some people rate it, rate it at one star. Like it's the same book. You know, the, the idea that one person gives it five stars and another person gives it one star means that those ratings might not have anything to do with the book and more to do with a person's perspective and what it tells you about them. I don't know. That just jumped into my head while you were talking. You can totally be an author because that is one of the main consoles that I give to other writers. I'm really involved with the community of women writers.

And that's one of the things that's seen me through all of that rejection and all of those stages. And yeah, one of the things I advise writers is when someone has a reaction to your book, especially a very strong one-star reaction, they're being triggered, right? They're being triggered by something in your book. And it's not about your book. It's about their personal life experience. And you see that again and again and again. It's the same thing when someone loves a book and they think it's the best thing like that they've read their entire life. They're reading it through the lens of their life experience. And there's a famous phrase about how once we put books into the world, we don't own them anymore because every person reads a book differently based on where they're coming from. And so, yeah, you have to be OK with the idea

that once you put it out there, you don't control that experience. In fact, I just went through a really interesting experience with the audio book. So I paid to have the book converted into an audio book. And part of why I did that is I knew that there were so many busy women in the world like I used to be where I would have a time to listen to an audio book, maybe while I'm doing dishes or doing household tasks. But I would never have had time. 20 years, I didn't read that much, I'll admit it, even though I love reading. Now I read like so many books now that I'm an author. But what I was going to say is when I had the narrator, so the way it works is you hire the

narrator, you work with them on a little snippet to make sure they get all the voices right, the way they perform them. And then they record the whole thing, 12 hours. And then you listen to the whole thing to make sure that it's all correct, they didn't mispronounce or get anything wrong. That experience was amazing, because it's the closest I came to hearing how a reader, not me, reads the book. And you never actually get to hear someone else read your book, right? You hear it again and again in your head as you revise it. But that experience of hearing someone else perform it was actually kind of mind opening for me to really, I guess, absorb that concept that the way someone else reads it isn't the way you wrote it. It's the way they experience it. And it was just fun to actually go through that in real time listening to it. It's kind of fun. Yeah. And I

think so much of that is true, not just for authors and books, you know, for all of us who put something out there, a presentation, an idea, you know, the same concepts apply. You've mentioned the author community. How might that be different than the community you experienced in your corporate life? Are there differences? Yeah. I mean, so it's not a coincidence that I wrote a book about women lifting each other up. In fact, the reason it's a page turner is we have a scenario in our heads when we think of a wife and a mistress having to work together. We think fireworks, we think tearing each other down, right? We think cattiness, bitchiness, all of these things come into our minds because that's the stereotype that we've been fed again and again by the media. If you think about like any movie with a wife and a mistress, other than one, which I think is the other woman, it's either going to end up being the women tear each other apart or the women go after

the guy in revenge. There's only two ways those stories go. And I really wanted to write a story that was neither of those things, that was about women helping each other. And so even in the corporate environment, even in the business world, I did not have that experience of women constantly tearing each other apart, which is sometimes portrayed in the media. And it's a cliche and it drives me crazy. And I hate it. I call bullshit on it all the time. So saying that the writer community is even more collaborative and the community of women's writers I'm very involved with an association called Women's Fiction Writers Association it's got 1500 members they helped me every single step of the way so when I didn't know how to edit my

book and I was literally like tearing it apart and putting it back together in a worse way than it started they advised me on where to go take the right classes who to learn from who to listen to when I was getting rejection they were the ones who helped me work out what was happening they advised me on where to go take the right classes, who to learn from, who to listen to. When I was getting rejection, they were the ones who helped me work out what was happening. When my book was coming out, they were the first ones to read it and review it. And so one of the things I've noticed in the literary community, the book community, there's not a sense of scarcity. There's not a sense of one person succeeds, therefore no one else gets the job. And so I think that is one thing that's very different. Like what I do is I run a podcast myself called The Best of Women's Fiction,

where I feature other women's fiction writers. And that lifts all of us up. It's not like somebody read my book, so they're not going to read this other book. It's quite the opposite. Somebody read my book and now they trust that I know what I'm talking about and I can write a page turner and they enjoyed it. So they're going to listen to my recommendations on other books that I think are worth their time. And so actually it's very different. It's more like a one plus one equals 10. It's not like we're competing for one opportunity and one person becomes a bestseller. Therefore nobody else does. There's definitely this sense. And you come across the odd author who honestly, I want to kind of like shake who doesn't get this, but like, it is not a competitive world where one person's success means another's

failure. And it creates a very collaborative environment across authors where we can all help each other. So that's amazing. And, you know, I think it's my hope for sure. I hope a lot of other people's wish that more environments would look and feel like that. It's, um, you know, such an opportunity for us as women. I, I often say, if you want to vent about another woman or gossip about another woman or whatever, I'm not your girl. Like I'm

the wrong person to come to. So, uh, anyways, anyways, what time that we really need the girls version of the boys club, right? Like for so long, there have been these spaces that men can go and hang out and collaborate without necessarily having women in the room with them. And whether it's the golf club or it's the, God forbid, the strip club. Yes, I lived through that more than once, but like there are these spaces or it's like the old boys club, or the men's club, or whatever it is, you know, there's an undercurrent to my book of sexism, it's actually set in a very sexist environment. And both of the characters are dealing with not only being the only woman in the room, but both blatant and not blatant sexism through the book. And like, I really want someone to create like there needs to be the equivalent of

the boys club for women, it has some advantages. We can collaborate. We are great working together when we choose to. Yeah. I couldn't agree more. And, and how would you respond? Cause I get this question a lot. I know, you know, my response, but when somebody says, well, isn't that just sexism on the other side? Like if we do the women's clubs or the women's things and exclude men, you know, any thoughts or reactions when people say that? You know, I wrote down on my notes here, something I heard you say in a, in a previous podcast, I think it was the one with Andrea Williams. And I think Andrea, or you said differences are my competitive edge. And I thought that was a really interesting phrase in the writer world, we call that our voice. It's the idea that you can pick up a novel by Jodi Picoult,

for example, and she might have written about 10 different topics, but it's always a Jodi Picoult novel, right? The way she expresses herself. And so, you know, I see it more as we're a mosaic. I love the analogy. When I did my citizenship and became a U.S. citizen, they gave a wonderful analogy. They said, don't think about the U.S. as a melting pot, because that implies that we take everybody together, we stick them all in one pot, we kind of store it a little, and we end up with brown sludge. That is not very attractive. They said, think of the U.S. as a mosaic. We all are individual, beautiful pieces of glass, but together we can make something even

more beautiful. And I think everybody's part of that mosaic, right? Every, the ethnicity, every background, whether you're male, female, trans, it doesn't matter. And so just because a group lifts each other up doesn't mean they don't also need to participate in the bigger conversation and be part of that. And it doesn't mean we don't also need male allies. And there are so many different things we have to fix in our society. And I don't mean we don't also need male allies. And there are so many different things we have to fix in our society. And I don't think, you know, anyone who wants to take on any part of that

and contribute, that's okay. I don't see it as some negative, you know, loss, but that's just my take on it. Well said. Okay, my last question, and you've already given us a ton of tips, but what can women executives or women in business learn from those in their writing profession

and maybe even vice versa? One of the things that I had to learn, we talked about this at the beginning, is this idea of you can find your confidence in a place of knowing that you have choices and you can learn, as opposed to confidence coming from competence. And for my whole career, the concept of confidence can only come from competence I can only be confident if

I'm the best in the room at this and I actually had a wonderful male ally take me aside very early in my career I want to say like my late 20s I was like a junior executive I was progressing very fast and he took me aside and he said you don't need to prove to everybody that you're the smartest person in the room. Because I was, people could sense that I was perpetually trying to prove that I was smarter, that I, that it deserved to be there. And he said, you don't need to prove it. It's okay. Like, don't, you don't need to. And so like, that was a huge relief to me at the time, because I was like, okay, maybe I can just come into this room confident in who I am and that I have something to bring, whether or not I'm the smartest person in the room on every topic at every moment. And so that was something I learned in the corporate world and the business world

that I think enabled me to come into the writing world and be okay with, for example, you read a book by another author who has a very different voice to you. So for example, I have a fast paced, easy to read sentences, page turning voice. That's what I'm going for. And I embraced it. I read a book by someone like Barbara O'Neill. She wrote a book called When We Believed in Mermaids. It sold like 2 million copies. And she is all about the setting and the scenery. And she writes with all five senses. And when you walk into one of her books, you can smell and touch and the colors. She's also a painter. And I can admire her book while knowing that I will never write like her style.

And that's okay. And so learning to be able to admire other people's strengths without feeling deficient yourself, that's been a journey for me. And I think it's a big journey as a writer, because that's part of embracing your voice is being okay with the fact that when someone says you're good at something, go double down on that. I always used to tell people like,

build on your strengths, not your weaknesses in the business world. And so I think this is very similar finding your voice as a writer is about building on your strengths, not your weaknesses. And you only spend time on your weaknesses to the extent that they're going to be a derailing factor, but they're never gonna become your biggest strength. And so don't like double down and spend all your time worrying about

the weakness. And I think the same thing goes in the writing world. I love that. I, I, uh, there's a quote and I recently just posted it on Instagram. It's something to the effect of confidence. Isn't walking into a room and comparing yourself and saying I'm better than confidence is walking into room and not have to not saying, I'm better than confidence is walking into a room and not have to not having to compare yourself at all. And that jumped in my head when you were saying that I agree. And it's funny, you know, my confidence building work is, is, is focused on women. And what is obviously absent from anything that I talk about is competence. I'm going to get there somewhere, but I think women, we are over-rotating on competence over confidence. And so I'm just

not addressing it at this point because I want people to interact with confidence without having to go towards competence just for a little while and see what that feels like and how foreign it might be. But anyway, my favorite thing that you said is I walked into one of her books. That's how I feel when I read. I love that. Lainey, thank you so much for your time and your wisdom and for risking big and putting your story out into the world. For those of our listeners that want to learn more about Lainey, you can visit her website, LaineyCameron.com. So L-A-I-N-E-Y-C-A-M-E-R-O-N.com. You can subscribe to the Best of Women's Fiction podcast. You can follow her on Instagram at Lainey underscore Cameron and go buy The Exit Strategy at your local bookstore. I'm a

big promoter of local bookstores, but if not Amazon, again, the book is called The Exit Strategy. Lainey, you said it's coming out on audiobook. It might even be by the time this episode is released. Thank you. I'll give you a little tip if you're not familiar. There's a great company called Libro.fm and it's an audiobook alternative to Amazon Audible. So if you're on Audible, I'm not dinging you for it, but you might not be aware that there's a company called Libro.fm, and when you subscribe, it costs exactly the same as Audible. It has exactly the same audiobooks. You choose which local bookstore will get the profits from your purchases. Sold. Lainey, thank you for that tip. And thank you for your time today. It was a great joy to get to know you. It was wonderful. Thank you so much for inviting me. My pleasure. Okay, ladies, how about we be more conscious of buying books written by women, by people of color? How about we invest in different perspectives and perspectives that better represent us? Whether it be novels, mystery books, sci-fi or business books, our voice,

our perspectives, our stories, they matter. And for any aspiring writers, for anyone like me, who's had it on their bucket list forever, but have come up with so many excuses, I could actually write a book about coming up with excuses. Let's get into action. As the great Maya Angelou said, there is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside of you. This is woman's work.