Did you listen to that podcast by the Instagram influencer whose book deal got canceled? If so, here are my thoughts on it.
The whole story sends me into a full-body cringe rictus. Still: the podcast is such a rich text for you all that I'm going to peck out a hot take here with my cringe-claws.
Last weekend, a friend texted me:
This request presented me with a rare opportunity: someone was actually soliciting my fulsome written opinion on a publishing gossip story I had nothing to do with! And now I am going to subject you all to what I have to say.
Although I’d never encountered Hilary Rushford’s work before my friend asked me about it—I was wrong about the “familiar ring;” my brain was probably thinking about Hillary Rodham or something—I immediately googled her podcast series and spent much of the rest of the weekend listening to it.
Oh boy. As it turns out, this podcast touches on on pretty much all of what longtime readers of “Glow” will recognize as my literary-agent obsessions:
where debut authors’ anxieties come from—and how those of us with more breadth of experience might help them navigate uncertainty
how rare nightmare scenarios in a publishing career come to pass and what happens next for authors when they do
how book deals get negotiated and paid out and why it’s a terrible idea for one to assume one will ever be able to rely solely on the income one makes from writing books
why type-A people whose sense of self-worth largely comes from external validation find the publishing experience especially hard, and how aspiring authors in that category might prepare themselves for inevitable and BIG challenges to their mental health
why it’s really important for authors to read and understand their own contracts before signing them
various behavioral red flags that authors, agents, and publishers would do well to look out for in early interactions, as they are almost always portents of more dysfunction to come
I can’t overstate how important I think it is for you all to understand all of the above, and in Rushford’s podcast, I see an opportunity to bring the “why” of that home to you all in a concrete way.
Before I do that, though, I want to be clear about the following limitations on my knowledge:
I don’t know Rushford at all.
Aside from what’s in the podcast, my knowledge of her professional platform is limited to the sort of gist one gets from googling for 20 minutes.
I have no idea who Rushford’s publisher or agent were.
She doesn’t say, and I truly don’t know either. (My inner drama piggie is DYING to know, though, so by all means tell me if you know the answer. Oink oink.)
I am offering my professional opinions and impressions on Rushford’s podcast series per se and PURELY per se.
Please do not understand my analysis as anything more than it is. I’m not trying to:
pass any totalizing judgement on Rushford, her agents, or her publisher as people / organizations
identify those people as any one particular kind of thing, even in a nonjudgmental way—I don’t know them!!! Anything I’m about to say will be interpretative guesswork based on what I heard in the podcast, nothing more.
play like I know “what really happened” in Rushford’s case, because I don’t
I am trying to:
as an uninvolved party, offer my close read of the text of this podcast to other uninvolved parties for the purposes of exploring general challenges of life in book publishing
OK? OK. Now onto what you’re waiting for—my hot take.
…Via one last detour: a basic, keeping-it-as-neutral-as-I-can summary of Rushford’s publishing experience as she relates it in the podcast, since I assume many of you haven’t heard it and don’t have time to listen. (The total series clocks in at more than four hours.)
The TL DR
The gist my friend texted me is accurate. Here are some more specifics:
Rushford describes herself in her Twitter bio as a “personal stylist and mentor for small businesses” whose interests include “West Wing, football, Brooklyn, God.” Her main social platform is Instagram, on which she shares a combination of lifestyle pics and spiritual/emotional meditations.
In 2021—or possibly 2020?—Rushford signed with a “great agent” to sell a book proposal offering personal style advice from what she characterizes as a progressive social-justice perspective, cognizant of forces like fatphobia and racism. She says she hired a book coach and did a lot of other research to prepare this proposal and had been generally working on the idea since 2016.
She and her agents eventually sold the proposal to what she calls a “top 5 publisher” for “multiple six figures.” She says four imprints participated in the auction.
Rushford thence made writing this book her full-time job. She says that although she runs a business with multiple financial needs and time demands, she planned to do no other work until the book was ready for production. She wanted it done quickly and to publish it as soon as humanly possible.
She says that the advance payments amortized down to a figure considered “low income” in her area, but she planned to make this “salary” work and then move forward on a couple of big financial goals when it was done: buying a house and having a baby, both of which she planned to do on a scheduled timetable. (FWIW, based on the fact that she lives in Brooklyn and the general principle that no one says “multiple six figures” if they could say “mid six figures” in this context, I’m guessing her total advance was $200-250k.)
She says she ignored her first red flag about this publisher by signing with them after the meetings she had. They, unlike the rest, brought their full team to their meeting and offered a lovefest. She says her agents told her this was a huge sign of their enthusiasm and therefore they were the obvious choice—despite the fact that she felt much more editorially “seen” during her intimate one-on-ones with other bidders.
After signing with her publisher, she didn’t meaningfully hear from her editor again for months. She describes this experience of their hot and cold attention as analogous to being “love bombed” and then abandoned by a toxic romantic partner.
Although Rushford did want to publish her book as fast as possible, she didn’t realize two things until after she signed her contract: one, that her publisher wanted the manuscript done in three months in order to make that fast-turnaround pub date (she had been estimating six), and two, that she herself was expected to pay for its illustrations.
At some point, her publisher also told her they wanted her to hire a freelance editor to work with her on edits as she went. Rushford did so, but she was annoyed, feeling that her in-house editor was failing to do their job.
When she did finally receive some feedback from her in-house editor, the editor wanted her to cut her social-justice insights from the book, saying these could be a book of their own and would narrow the audience for this one. (The manuscript was too long and needed to be cut from 100,000 words to 65,000.) Rushford found this request antithetical to her values, but she held off on sharing that opinion with her publisher.
The three-month manuscript turnaround time proved impossible for many, many reasons. This in turn led the pub date to be pushed back, which—since payments are tied to delivery and publishing milestones—was a source of deep financial and career-planning stress for Rushford.
At some point—I’m going off of my memory here, sorry—Rushford turned in a complete manuscript to her editor. The editor promised and then blew one or more turnaround deadlines. Rushford, who’d planned an entire writing retreat around a promised deadline so she could work on revising, wanted to ping her publisher about this problem. Her agents advised another approach. She says they cautioned her not to tell the editors she was “writing” a manuscript she had in theory already submitted, even though plenty of writers do that (they said). Instead, they recommended she tell the editors she was going on a “creative retreat.” “They told me to lie,” she says, and she did so.
This predictably led to the creation and circulation of two separate edited manuscripts: hers and her editor’s.
Around this point, her first editor quit or was fired. (Rushford says she quit the first time she mentions this, but she later uses the word “fired.”)
The book was passed briefly to a second editor and then onto a third.
Her publisher also said they wouldn’t look at the pages again until the two manuscripts had been combined into one—an extra-work undertaking Rushford characterizes as massive and deeply upsetting.
When editor #3’s feedback came back in—I believe last summer—it was just on Rushford’s introduction, not the full manuscript. Rushford reads the editor’s email aloud on her podcast. I’m not quoting it exactly here, but it was along these lines: this is not close to ready for commercial publication. We strongly recommend you hire a ghostwriter to clean this up on the line level. There is still a long road ahead.
It’s unclear how things fell apart from there, but Rushford says this is the point at which she knew it was over. She got a publishing lawyer and stopped speaking to her agents after one of them yelled at her to “get over it” during a heated exchange about all this.
In sum, she describes what anyone would find a deeply upsetting experience.
Yes, and.