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Thatcher Wine, FOR THE LOVE OF BOOKS

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Thatcher Wine, FOR THE LOVE OF BOOKS

Thatcher: I never set out to start a book business. Even when I started selling books, I didn't consider it to be a business, really. I really considered it to be a hobby that I enjoyed. I had fun going to estate sales, library sales, antique auctions, things like that, coming home with a bunch of books, describing them, figuring out if they were first editions, if they were signed, if there's some prominence to who had owned them before, and putting them up on the internet in the early days, roughly, of books going online. One thing led to another. A few years later, I was still buying books in larger and larger quantities. I'd hear about a bookstore going out of business. I'd go buy their inventory. These days, we have about 20,000 books in stock. The business really transformed over the years. It was about rare books and first editions back then, very antiquarian, the older the better. Then made a couple shift in the 2000s. Some people asked if I could curate a library for their house. A lightbulb went off. Maybe this could be my niche, curating collections for homeowners and hotel lobbies and things like that when they needed books. Eventually, it shifted to more and more new books and fewer used books and old books, but we still do some of both.

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Rochelle Weinstein, THIS IS NOT HOW IT ENDS

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Rochelle Weinstein, THIS IS NOT HOW IT ENDS

Rochelle: I ended up getting rejected by agents across the board. I decided I was going to self-publish. I dealt with the stigma and the lack of credibility that was associated with self-publishing. I made a decision and what my goals were for my writing and what I wanted to do with my writing. I put the book out there. It hit the USA Today best-seller list, not right away. It built traction. My second book, I self-published as well. Then I parlayed that into a book deal. Some authors, it’s really easy and it’s a straight shoot. I'm here to tell you that it’s not that way for a lot of authors. It’s a lot of work. It’s a lot of effort. It’s a lot of thick skin and being resilient. That's the message that I give to all aspiring authors.

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Katherine Wintsch, SLAY LIKE A MOTHER

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Katherine Wintsch, SLAY LIKE A MOTHER

Katherine: We dip down into suffering when we assume we’re the only people that are struggling. We think everybody else is perfect. They're skating around on ice skates. We’re suffering because we think we’re alone. We’re knuckleheads. We suck. Everybody else is perfect. At the end of the day, we control the suffering. If we beat ourselves up less and give ourselves some grace for going through hard times, then the goal is just to struggle. If you're struggling, you're winning. That's the human existence. You can't buy your way out of it, move your way out of it, grow your way -- you're stuck with struggling, but we can suffer a lot less. Men suffer less than we do, in general.

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Jennifer Weiner, MRS. EVERYTHING

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Jennifer Weiner, MRS. EVERYTHING

Jennifer: Mrs. Everything is the story of two Jewish American sisters from the 1940s all the way through the present and slightly beyond into a lightly fictionalized future where there's a woman president. It’s the story of these two women. There's the rebel and the good girl, who sort of switch places halfway through the book. Through their eyes and through their experiences, it’s the story of women in America. That's what I was setting out to do. I wanted to tell a sister story and a woman story and an American story, a story about America. That's what I hope I did. I hope it’s a great, big, fun juicy beach read too.

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Wendy Walker, THE NIGHT BEFORE

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Wendy Walker, THE NIGHT BEFORE

Wendy: The other dynamic at play is that there's almost this inner child inside of you that still wants to fix it, that wants to find a way to make that parent stop being abusive. Because you were never able to do it as a child, when you find someone as a grown-up who gives you the chance to fix them and finally be powerful enough to solve that problem, it’s almost euphoric.

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Kathy Wang, Family Trust

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Kathy Wang, Family Trust

Kathy: It’s funny because I after I finished the book, you forget a lot about how much work it is. When I go back and read the entries from when I was writing it, I felt like a failure a lot of the time. I felt like the book was failing, that I was failing, that things weren’t working out, that there are these huge plot holes that I was not going to be able to figure out. My advice would be that when you're writing your book, you're going to feel that level of failure, and that the project can't be completed, and that there's no way that this is going to be publishable.

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Rosie Walsh, GHOSTED

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Rosie Walsh, GHOSTED

Rosie: Despite having written the novel I've written, I would always recommend walking away with your head held high. Ninety-nine percent of the time people are ghosted because the object of their desire, affection, whatever, has been too cowardly, too rude, too ill-mannered to go through the messiness of ending a new relationship. It’s abhorrent that that happens, but it does all of the time because people are lazy and rude and selfish.

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Jennifer Wallace, Award-Winning Journalist

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Jennifer Wallace, Award-Winning Journalist

Jennifer: For this article on teenage social media, it was a thousand-word article. I wrote three or four thousand words. For me, the big struggle is what do I have to leave out? As you mature as a writer, that becomes of bigger importance. What am I not putting in here for my audience?

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