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.

Here’s my hot take on the whole thing.

Rushford’s story—as she tells it—presents to me as a worst-case version of a classic, common conflict scenario: a Frenzied Rabbit author butting heads with a bunch of Frightened Turtle publishing professionals. (Click link for my previous newsletter defining those terms.)

It’s quite rare for this scenario to end this badly. However, I do see clues as to how Rushford and her colleagues ended up together (and separately) in Publishing Hell.

As an agent, my sympathy scales are forever tipped in authors’ direction. For that reason and from my own depth of experience, I feel it’s very likely that many of Rushford’s frustrating experiences happened exactly as she describes.

Editorial deadline-blowing—often by many months—is a fact of life in this industry. (Sorry—this is turning into a bit of a clips episode, isn’t it.) This sucks. We all hate it, including the people who do it.

It would be much, much rarer for an editor to make their self-set deadline than blow it. Honestly, I’d be impressed if they came in inside of a month. Or said anything about any of this proactively without having to be poked.

An author paying for their own illustrations is likewise standard. Design, no; illustrations, yes. Other expenses generally left to authors include indices; fact checking; other copyright permissions, such as quotations; and author photos. This sucks. Especially the fact checking part.

If you’re lucky enough to work with a publisher willing to designate a separate art or fact-checking budget—to be clear, most major adult-trade publishers won’t give you art, and almost zero will give you fact checking—you and your agent must work that out before accepting an offer or signing a contract.

Rushford mentions more than once how destabilizing it was not to know when her next payments would come in for the contract, since they were tied to deliverables the publisher wouldn’t sign off on. This too happens all the time. If the book isn’t ready or the editor needs extra time to declare it ready, those dates and payments are going to get pushed. They likely will get pushed.

Living off of a book advance alone is completely incompatible with rigid, time-sensitive budgeting and life planning.

Do not ever do this. You have got to give yourself a ton of financial slack, or have family money/savings to fall back on, or have other income source(s). Got to.

Finally, on the subject of the editor who wanted to remove the social-justice content: I believe Rushford is telling the truth there, too. She reads the editor’s note out loud on the podcast, so can’t argue with that.

Experience tells me that the note Rushford reads out loud represents either 1. her editor’s sincere opinion or 2. the editor’s poor-choice euphemization method for depersonalizing an editorial note to an author who might take it personally. (For example: “your book is way too long, something’s gotta go, and the way you’ve phrased these opinions is incoherent / talks over the much better work on this by BIPOC and fat people / is inadvertently offensive. Time to kill two birds with one stone.”)

Whether it’s #1 or #2, if I’m right about this, this would also lead me to guess that her publisher specialized in the evangelical / Christian market AND even if her editor wasn’t personally from a conservative, Christian background, she was used to communicating according to its social norms at work.

Yes, and: even with my predisposition to believe authors, I came away from this podcast under the impression that Rushford was the primary contributor to her own downfall.

There are two reasons I think this.

First: during the podcast, I clocked many instances in which Rushford describes—apparently without insight—what I would call deeply maladaptive social behavior in response to stress and perceived abandonment.

She exhibits a pattern of reciting facts, then having or describing extreme emotional reactions to those facts, then revising the facts to equal the size of her emotions—in real time, on air.

The third editor’s final email—the one Rushford reads aloud, in which the editor says this needs line by line rewriting, highly recommending the retention of a ghostwriter—must have been so painful to receive. Nevertheless, it’s professional, candid, and focused on the pages’ inherent problems, not Rushford as a person.

The email does NOT contain any sentiments along the lines of this introduction is the worst thing I’ve ever read, I despise this, you’re the worst writer ever, everything ever published by anyone anywhere is better than this crap, etc.

Nevertheless, Rushford almost immediately starts talking about the email as if that’s exactly what it said. Not that that’s how it made her feel—that that’s actually what it said. She offers her Instagram audience a free download of the chapter by saying, “Wanna read the worst chapter one top publisher has ever read? Mine.” On her website, she writes, “Writing is art, and art is subjective. If you’re curious to read the same Introduction chapter my final editor despised and see if you find it cringy, charming, or captivating, here you are m’dear.”

She seems to forget inconvenient nuance as she goes.

Over and over over the course of a 4+-hour series, Rushford uses the words disrespect and the audacity to describe her experience. The experience she actually describes, though, strikes me as fundamentally mediocre: an exhibit of human frailty, not audacity.

She argues that if her publisher hated her authentic writing so much, they should have read the proposal so they could have known that ahead of time, but before that, she also says she hired a book coach to help with the proposal. Was the book coach helping with the manuscript, too?

She fishes for compliments and validation like they’re tuna and she’s Star-Kist.

This feels mean to point out, but it’s important to note for reasons I’ll get into momentarily.

Rushford repeats many times that she has been complimented on her writing by people who know good writing. She mentions that her dad is a university professor with a 10,000-book library. She says her publisher was a “top five publisher,” by which I assume she means Big 5. “Top” and “big” are not synonyms, but I get the impression Rushford needs them to be.

Rushford’s Instagram pics, like many influencers’, are a symphony of calls for people to validate how pretty and put-together she looks. As far as I can tell, she seems to have gotten married in two separate meticulously-curated and documented multioutfit destination weddings, one of which she successfully pitched to Martha Stewart Weddings.

Also: she posted the chapter to her website with the note above.

I read deep, deep insecurity into all of this. I wonder if, as was the case with other industrial compliment-fishers I have known in the past, all of this might be a sign of a person who confuses compliments with intimacy and constructive criticism with panic-inducing existential vulnerability. See also: a person who becomes dysregulated in a professionally challenging way when informed of a setback or disappointment, which might or might not lead to future avoidant behavior in the person or people whose job it is to give her that information.

She doesn’t fact check.

At one point, Rushford says she doesn’t really need to be factually comprehensive because this isn’t a trial, it’s an accounting of what was emotionally true for her (or similar). Fair enough, but I do struggle with skepticism when I hear her say things like it’s standard for both publishers and agents to include nondisparagement agreements in their contracts with authors. Um….no.

She relates her experiences in black and white, and she seems to expect life to unfold in black and white, too, with rigid expectations that get met 100% of the time.

She describes much of her story via a relational narrative some therapists refer to as The Drama Triangle—one in which everyone present is either a rescuer, persecutor, or victim. No middle ground. No mess. People in her narrative are either all good or all bad—or all good and then all bad. (Spoiler alert: she’s good.)

She talks about deviation from her careful, rigid plans as though these developments were not just upsetting and frustrating, but great wrongs perpetrated on her by incompetent people.

When her book deal falls apart—again, it’s unclear how it fell apart—Rushford describes her subsequent grieving process as so intense, a dear friend who saw her Vague-stagrams about it assumed she’d lost a baby.

Again: my sense is that Rushford is NOT lying about her feelings. This painful situation made her feel authentically awful, intolerable, enormous feelings. It would be awful for anyone to go through. Ugh.

However: something extra Rushford seems to be doing is figuring out a way to make her story and feelings align perfectly, because otherwise nothing about her worldview would make sense to her.

Finally, she goes in hard on one of Gavin de Becker’s “pre-incident indicators” for, well, unhealthy future social interaction.

At one point, Rushford pauses in the middle of talking about how bad the bad people were to say to her listeners something like this: you understand. You know exactly what I’m trying to do. You are my allies. Unlike them.

This is classic forced teaming—generally the biggest and earliest big early warning sign that a social or professional interaction is going to get real dysfunctional, real fast.

For me, this was the most troubling aspect of Rushford’s story. If someone doesn’t know the person or people they’re talking to, forced-teaming behavior is a BIIIIIIIIIIIIIG red flag.

*

These are all behaviors that can lead authors to lethal career self-sabotage (unless you’re a mega-mega-megacelebrity, in which case, you can get away with a lot).

Second: I read Rushford’s chapter, per her invitation.

Sigh.

Look—Rushford’s writing on Instagram isn’t bad. It’s pithy and succinct.

Meanwhile, the chapter she published on her website doesn’t contain any objectionable ideas. I can follow what she’s saying. I agree with her politics, at least insofar as she’s shared them here.

But her erstwhile publisher is right: the writing’s a mess. Never mind the clunky syntax—it’s festooned with outright errors, including mixed metaphors, faulty parallelism, un-rhetorical sentence fragments, and the like. It’s physical agony to read, like listening to a person who’s hyperventilating and also chewing on jujubees.

Rushford has a someday-book here, but for it to be a someday-book up to the standards of commercial publication, someone would have to come in and clean up sentences. This is way, way more work than an in-house editor is supposed to do; they’re supposed to focus on big-picture matters. And if Rushford can’t see what the issue is, then yes! She needs a fucking ghostwriter!

Which is exactly what her publisher said in the end, just more diplomatically.

And also too late.

Which brings me to my last point.

Even if I’m right about all of the guesses above, I still strongly suspect that Rushford’s agents and publisher failed her.

Life is a mess. Mature people accept that and communicate accordingly. People who collude in an immature person’s fantasy to the contrary are themselves behaving immaturely.

I get the sense Rushford’s agents and editors made disastrously bad calls on how to work with an author like her. They thereby eliminated any chance that this situation would end happily.

None of the red flags I point out above are signs to cut and run per se. However, at the first sign of any of them, the right thing to do if one chooses to continue in any kind of productive relationship with the person flying them is refuse to join them in letting their anxiety and other painful emotions run the show.

If you possibly can, do not ever meet maladaptive behavior with manipulative behavior—even the lightweight kind in which all of us indulge from time to time, such as white lies, overfunctioning, and flattery. These might be an OK or even fulfilling / “good” call in some relationships, but not in these.

I get the impression Rushford’s team tried to “handle” her with what human resources guru Kim Scott would call “ruinous empathy” vs. what she actually needed: “radical candor.”

Yes, Rushford should have read her contract to find out what she didn’t know, but if she didn’t read it, why on Earth didn’t her agent correct her impression that she didn’t have to pay for illustrations (or admit they were mistaken when they realized she did)?

Did anyone try to have difficult conversations with her early on—to say things like you’re going to need to use that book coach throughout if you needed them so much on the proposal or this book is going to be done when it’s done right vs. on an arbitrary timeline? Or what are you doing withdrawing from all your other income-generating work and calling this advance your “salary” (her word, used repeatedly) when it is not at all, AT ALL, a salary?

If I am right about the sort of publishing collaborator Rushford is, any professional with experience should be able to see the coming dynamic a mile off—as well as understand what people in this category need to collaborate successfully. Hint: THEY DO NOT NEED YOU TO WALK ON EGGSHELLS. They need verbalized empathy; immediate and unembellished truth; and for you to give the fuck up on trying to solve their unsolvable emotionality, which was never your job in the first place.

That, and: as an agent or editor, you would have to honor some outsized needs for this relationship to be successful, too. Namely, you’re going to need to be able to keep yourself hinged, calm, and serene in your own self worth—even if someone is exhibiting very large, unpleasant emotions in your presence, probably at you.

You’re going to be able to need to understand that that’s not about you. And still communicate with that other person as to an adult. And be willing for the relationship to fall apart some day no matter what you do, because it probably will. But if you have acted with self-care and self-possession throughout, the loss won’t feel intolerable.

Am I capable of being that person in this kind of relationship myself? Uhhhh…………..sometimes. More than I used to be. But being that person all the time requires a level of emotional evolution equivalent to, like, Advanced Buddhism. It’s not something we’re all capable of, and that’s okay. You just gotta communicate. Communicate about it the second you realize what’s happening. (Which can be a while if you’re trauma-sleepwalking.)

*

This is a hard, hard world. We’re all so hard on ourselves and each other. Life’s such a mess, and anyone who tells you they’re never bothered by the mess of it, the intolerability, is lying.

Yes, and. There are healthy and unhealthy ways of dealing with that pain. The former will in time nurture hope from ash. The latter will only breed more loneliness and misery—for you and everyone to whom you attach.