“Doubts are Normal but so is Success:” Interview with Publishing Entrepreneur, Meghan Stevenson
This week’s interview is with Meghan Stevenson, the founder and CEO of Meghan Stevenson Books, a company that supports entrepreneurs, thought leaders, and experts in getting nonfiction books published by helping them navigate the book proposal process from concept to landing a literary agent and traditional book deal.
Prior to starting her company, Meghan worked as a book editor in New York at the publishing houses Simon & Schuster and Penguin. To make ends meet, she quietly worked a second job after her 9 to 5 at The Container Store, resulting in a pivotal moment where she decided to start her own book company.
I discovered Meghan’s work on instagram when I read her post about that fateful moment. I had to know more: What was it like leaving a major publishing house to try and make it on her own? How did she narrow in on her business’ niche? Did it feel scary to do so? What has she learned about cultivating trust and navigating self-doubt from her own journey, but also through the lens of the authors she works with?
We spoke about all of that, as well as:
Learning what she was good at
The calendar rules she lives by
Learning to set boundaries
Being easy with your schedule and making crazy money
Normalizing success as much as we normalize doubt
The importance of rest, relaxation, and recreation
Note: The following interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length. While every effort has been made to preserve the integrity of the conversation, please be aware that the quotes may not be verbatim but reflect the essence of the dialogue.
I would love to start with your experience leaving Penguin to start your own business. What prompted you to say, “Okay, I'm leaving?” What was it like to take the leap?
There were a lot of factors. Publishing is weird because publishing pays nothing. My parents are entrepreneurs so I didn't understand corporate at all because my parents had opted out of that life. That said, I would say that publishing is “corporate light.” It has all the politics but isn’t as crazy as say Wall Street. I was never going to get dinner comped if I stayed past 7:00pm, like my ex-boyfriend who worked at Citibank in bonds did.
I took my first job at 23. I was just happy to be paid anything. Even in the early aughts, publishing was still very much an old New York institution. A lot of my colleagues were working for “dress money” – meaning cash that was meant for spending, not to actually live on. There were a few other scrappy people like me but most of my colleagues came from wealthy families. Based on the salaries that we were paid – anywhere from $25,000 to $30,000 at the time – we weren’t paid a living wage yet we also weren’t supposed to have second jobs. You were supposed to dedicate everything to publishing and just be grateful to work in the industry. I remember very distinctly having a memory when I did the math of how much time I would spend working versus how much time I would spend living my life as a grown adult, and I realized that the numbers were way out of proportion. It all came to a head in 2012 when I was told that my role was a dead-end job. I didn’t realize that when I took it. I was an associate editor within a very small imprint within a very small department at Penguin. There were only three roles, and I was in the second-highest role. In order to keep working at a big publishing house as an editor, I would have had to make a move earlier, but I simply didn’t know that.
By the time I figured all of that out, it was too late. I hadn’t been able to buy the books that I really believed in and the books that I did get to buy didn’t perform well. That’s very bad for an editor.
But the good news was: I had a backup plan. A couple years before that, I had taken a second job because I had another scrappy friend in publishing who said, “There is a second job we can take because it’s literally underground in the warehouse. No one sees us. It starts at 5:45 so you’ll be able to leave Penguin at 5:30 to get there.”
For a few years, I ended up working every day from 9:00am to 9:00pm to make ends meet. I would start out my day in the glamorous world of book publishing and then literally walk 20 blocks uptown to move shelves in a warehouse. Eventually, I had a performance review at both jobs on the same day. My second job at The Container Store offered me a way to earn more money based on my performance and Penguin didn’t. After that, I realized I was getting paid more and felt valued more by The Container Store than I did by Penguin. Simultaneously, I was having a lot of conversations with independent collaborators and ghostwriters who did what I do now. They were saying, “You’d be good at this.”
I was fortunate because I knew what was out there. Also, I’d seen another editorial assistant leave to start her own company and be successful.
Ultimately, I really believe that in order to understand what you can be, you have to be able to see someone like you doing it. I had that visibility. My parents are entrepreneurs so I wasn’t freaking out about leaving a 9 to 5. It didn't even occur to me to be scared. I'd rather just be able to go do stuff. I don't know if that’s manifesting, energy, ancestors on my side, or just good vibes, but I just wasn’t the type of person to assume bad things.
I think you were coming into entrepreneurship from a different lens than a lot of people. Often leaving a 9 to 5 is exciting but also equally terrifying, particularly during the first year. Given your background, what was your experience of that first year?
The Container Store wasn’t a ton of money, but it was enough to cover my rent. I had freelance money, and then I also had my boyfriend. I don’t think a man is a financial plan but that boyfriend is the man who is now my husband. He was in tech and didn’t have a lot of expenses so he helped me and really supported me and the business from its earliest days.
In your business, you’ve narrowed in on a particular niche: helping entrepreneurs, experts, and thought leaders write nonfiction book proposals. Did you know that would be your focus when you started or was it more a process of trial and error to see what worked?
I generally knew that I was going to do nonfiction mostly because I did fiction earlier on in my career and although I'd liked editing it, I knew I didn't have an eye for it. There are some really gifted people out there who do. When I’m reading Taylor Jenkins Reid or Colleen Hoover, I can understand why those books work, why people like them, and why they are best sellers, but it’s harder for me to spot that in the wild. I knew I wanted to do nonfiction, but it wasn’t until 2019 that I specifically narrowed to prescriptive nonfiction. The reason I did that was because I learned very quickly that I didn't want to work on memoirs anymore, I didn’t want to work with self-published authors, and I didn’t want to work on more serious narrative nonfiction like history or politics. Mostly I learned that through trial and error.
I did take a risk by narrowing substantially to prescriptive nonfiction, and also to authors with a background as an entrepreneur or expert, who were going the traditional publishing route. It’s a smaller market, but a more obvious one in lots of ways. Publishers are realizing that now and opening up new prescriptive imprints and departments. It can be easier to market a prescriptive book and prescriptive authors because those entrepreneurs and experts are very problem-solution-based.
Was it scary for you to narrow?
It was scary. When you’re thinking about the mind game of being an entrepreneur, it's really a mind game of scarcity and abundance and choosing abundance. To be successful in owning your own business, you need to believe that anything is possible. That shit never stops.
I'm very interested in your perspective on self-doubt because not only are you an entrepreneur, but you work with people who are on the journey of getting a book published, which is notoriously filled with a lot of self-doubt. What have you found helps your clients make a shift when they're in the thick of those moments of doubt?
Honestly, I think it's having help and someone who has seen a lot of authors go through the same thing. The other day we had a client who was essentially questioning their whole concept. The woman on my team who they are working with came to me and said, “Should I survey the team about the concept?” My initial reaction was maybe, but then as I thought about it, the answer was no. Seeing an author freak out is completely normal. In that particular instance, we’re coming up on the point where their work will be seen by somebody else, and they’re going to have to say something kind of brassy and bold more publicly. They’re thinking - what are people going to think about what I have to say? On top of that, now the person on my team is questioning themselves and what they’ve told the author. If we were to survey the team, everyone on the team is going to add their individual lens and their own shit to it. Pretty soon we’d end up with something that had been super toned down – and less salable as a result.
Luckily, the person on my team emailed me back and said they’d thought better of doing a survey. They caught what was going on, which is that this type of questioning is a pattern with our clients – and really all authors. When clients hit this sort of impasse, sometimes they are surprised we know immediately how to handle things. I just say, “You're not the first author that's flipped out at their agent or team, decided to quit their job, questioned their entire life, freaked out about their subtitle, or assumed their editor hates them.”
I read an interview of yours in Bold Journey where you spoke about being burnt out. Many entrepreneurs struggle with giving themselves permission to recharge and set boundaries. What helped you make the shift? What’s the impact you’ve seen from setting boundaries?
A great example is yesterday when I somehow ended up with six zoom meetings on my schedule starting at 7:30am. My personal zoom limit is 3. My assistant is still learning how to work with me, but everyone needs to understand my calendar rules, and we have to stick to them. I need to have 90 minutes for lunch to have a mental break. I can’t do more than 2 calls back to back, not only because of mental energy, but also because I’m human and need time to use the bathroom and grab water. Within those calendar rules, there’s also a hierarchy of importance in terms of what gets the highest priority and the things that get lower priority. People are going to push us to be on the calendar immediately because they think a book needs to happen right now. But in reality, most stuff can wait.
What I realized yesterday was, “Okay, I did this to myself because I allowed her to go around the rules.” Which does happen occasionally. But I also realized that when I got done with that juggernaut of calls, I was done for the day and didn't actually have a very productive day after that.
Every call I had that day served a purpose, but I literally couldn’t do anything else because of how my schedule was set up that day. Over time, if you do that to yourself a lot, you will burn out.
Related to the above, I was intrigued by something you spoke about in an episode of Hey Awesome Girl with Tivi Jones. You asked yourself: “Can I be easy with my schedule and still make crazy money?” This interview was recorded in 2022. What’s your perspective today several years later?
The answer is yes. You can be easy with your schedule and still make crazy money. My money-making ability or my ability to hold a certain amount of money is different now. The way I see six figures now is totally different than it was 3 or 4 years ago.
I can have a spacious schedule. I can go play golf with a bunch of women every Tuesday. I purposely joined a league on Tuesdays because I thought, “What's the point of being an entrepreneur if you can't go do that?” It was tough at first to disconnect on a “work day,” but I’ve done it now a few times and nothing has fallen apart. That said, I also know myself and know that I will do the things I promised no matter what. Here’s an example: I have a client proposal due by Monday. We messed up internally, and I’m still waiting on something I need to finish. I know I’ll need to work really hard over the next few days to get it done. I’m not going to email the client and say, “Hey, I need a week when it's our problem.” I'm gonna go in and just take care of it. I don’t usually work Fridays, but I will tomorrow, and that is what it is.
Were you surprised by making that change and realizing that everything would be fine, or were there some hurdles that you had to overcome within yourself to get there?
I don't know about you, but everything changed when I made the connection that everything I do is mental. The tactics we hone in sports like golf are the things that are going to help me in my business and with clients and their books. I play my best golf when I’m relaxed, taking it shot by shot, and when I clear my mind of the bullshit of whatever’s going on. I need to not be thinking about the text I just received, what the ladies are talking about, what my husband's talking about, what the people behind me are doing, the weather, etc. If I just do what I’ve been taught to do, let my body do it, and let it be easy, then I’ll hit it further. I think that golf as a metaphor for entrepreneurism and goals is totally true.
So, what’s the equivalent in business of taking each hole shot by shot? It’s writing content post by post, it’s asking what will make today successful. I love the question - What moves me in alignment with what I want today? That might be completing the to-do list, or it might be a nap. Your results will vary.
In both writing and entrepreneurship, there's this element of cultivating trust and self-belief before you actually see results or external validation, which is very hard to do. What have you learned about that from your own journey and working with your clients?
We have two clients who spring to mind immediately: Vivian Tu and Dr. Erica Jordan Thomas. Vivian Tu is the mastermind behind the book, Rich AF. She’s seemingly built a content creation business out of nothing, but when you look back at her resume, she worked on Wall Street and at Buzzfeed. She had the combination of media content creation skills and internet savvy to pair with the economic background to talk about personal finance.
And then there’s Dr. Erica Jordan Thomas. She's a former middle school principal turned entrepreneur who basically teaches educators how to create education consulting businesses. She has an exercise called “collecting receipts” which essentially means being able to say, “Hey, I did this before, I'll do it again.” We all have some form of career success, so we all have receipts. It’s easy to focus on the negatives more than the positives because that’s how our brain is wired, but I think looking for the positives and reminding yourself of your receipts can give you confidence.
I came up with a saying 2 or 3 years ago: “Doubts are normal, but so is success.” Doubting myself is so normal, but so is succeeding. There’s also the knowledge that everybody has those feelings. I’ll ask myself: What can I do today that doesn't totally quiet the voice altogether, but really turns down the volume of those doubtful thoughts?
The last thing I’ll say is about defining success for ourselves. One thing I’ve done is create micro goals. I was making these big goals about revenue, but I realized that those goals all revolve around other people. I thought, “That doesn't work because it takes the goal out of my control.” If I can make goals around what I can control, then I know I’ll be fine. My micro goal for May in regards to my business is to do 5 workouts a week because that keeps me healthy. When I don't work out, I get very cranky and everything starts to feel bad. I also created a goal around something I learned from Rachel Rodgers, which is about the amount of money I always want to keep in every single bank account. She encourages you to think of it as a zero (ie. $200, $1000, etc). Keeping my “zeros” is my main goal. I'm not trying to land 6 clients. I'm not trying to do something that's outside of my control. I’m working out five days a week and keeping my zeros.
Many people I interview for the No Directions blog have created lives that are uniquely theirs in terms of how they live, work, and build their lives. What does the life that is uniquely yours look like today?
It’s just me, my dog, and my husband. My husband and I are at this point in our lives where we've really taken a lot of effort over the last couple of years to work on ourselves, and now we get to choose what we want to do. I think for me it’s about pausing to decide what that is.
I journaled about this the other day and wrote, “I think I'm less goal-oriented than I used to be. I’m less people-pleasy than I used to be.” I’m also just less in a good way. I’m cool sitting out on my patio and accidentally falling asleep reading a book. I'm okay with that now in a way that I wouldn't have been before. The other thing is really balancing out work with everything else because the thing that entrepreneurship can do is suck all the air out of the room, and you can get kind of boring.
That makes me think about something I've been talking about with my clients recently, which is holding space for the idea that you can enjoy your life and still be working towards ambitious goals.
I completely agree. I once worked with a coach who asked me: What’s the recipe for your best work and your best self? Part of my recipe is good coffee. Part of my recipe is bagels. Part of my recipe is salads. Part of my recipe is working out five days a week. Part of that recipe is naps and meditation. Part of that recipe is margaritas.
I think it’s also learning to look at the balance between rest, relaxation, and true recreation. Recreation is really about doing things that produce energy for you. At a certain point, if you’re not focusing on that, you just start to get diminishing returns.