Hello aspiring authors, current authors, and will-be authors!
Every August Grant and Brooke share their summer plans and writing aspirations and hopes and fails, along with some mashups of their favorite interviews of the year. Write-minded kicks off this best-of series with two beloved industry experts—agent Lisa Leshne and publicist Kathleen Schmidt. There’s real wisdom and straight-talk in these conversations that writers and authors will want to take in and absorb. So even if you heard these the first time around, take it in again—and have a wonderful start to your August.
More of our favorite posts from Kathleen Schmidt’s Substack, Publishing Confidential:
Partial transcript from the show
Grant: Happy August! This is the month every year that Brooke and I choose to share with all of you some of our favorite interviews since last August. If you’re a regular listener, these are interviews you’ve heard. If you’re a sporadic listener, these are episodes you might have missed. No matter what kind of listener you are, you want to revisit the wisdom of these two publishing experts. Agent Lisa Leshne and publicist Kathleen Schimdt are two of our favorite publishing people, nevermind Write-minded guests. And Brooke, in addition to setting up who we’re featuring, we want to share a little bit about our summer plans. I was thinking back to past years, and remember that you went to Jordan one summer—that was before the pandemic. But do you have any exciting summer plans to fill me and listeners in on?
Brooke: Sadly, no. Or maybe I should say that I’m lucky because I did take an international trip this year—to Japan—but that was back in April. So nothing super exciting or far-flung this summer. We’re keeping it local, to places we can drive. Camping, visiting my mom in Southern California, and a few excursions here and there. We went to Portland and Hood River for the Fourth of July weekend, which was fun—but also very very very hot. How about you, Grant? I think you have a few more cross-country or far-flung things going on than me this summer.
Grant: I’m going to have one of the most active months of my adult life, I think. I’m going to the Chautauqua Institute to be their writer-in-residence next week. Then I’m taking a train from Berkeley to Iowa. I’ve never taken a cross-country train trip in the U.S., so I’m super excited by this. I’m hoping to get a lot of writing, reading, and daydreaming in. But then I have a lot of work ahead of me because I’m getting my mom settled in a care facility and then dealing with an estate sale of all of her furniture and then a house sale. As a nostalgic person by nature who doesn’t want his childhood home to change at all, this is going to be hard. And then the capper is going to my brother’s wedding in Montreal. I’ve never been there, and people have been telling me for years how much I’d love it, and I know I’m going to love it.
Brooke: That sounds fun, and family-focused, which is great. And congratulations to your brother. That’s awesome and I’m so happy for him and his partner. I love valuing family time in the summers—and it’s important. But another memory I had was from the summer of 2018 when I took a vacation to a dude ranch with the express purpose of carving out some time to finish my last book, Write On, Sisters! I felt like I had to do that because James was young, and I wanted him to have a place to be during the day while I wrote. I’m curious if you’ve ever created a writing trip like that for yourself in the summer? It’s so hard to do when you’re raising kids.
Grant: I haven’t done one exactly like that, but I did go on what I called mini retreats several times when my kids were small. I’d pick a town an hour or two away, and then stow away in a hotel for the weekend to write. I actually miss those retreats and should try to do another one. One time, we went to Mexico, and then kids went to a Spanish language school in the mornings, which gave time for us, but I was there more as a tourist than a writer.
Brooke: We hope all of you, dear listeners, are doing summer things—be it with family, writing retreats, having a bit of time off, working on your writing deadlines. August is one of those months that feels like a free for all to me. It can be very productive, or it can be the total opposite of that, reserved for fun and doing very little. Whatever it is for you—we hope you enjoy hearing or rehearing Lisa Leshne and Kathleen Schmidt lay out their thoughts on the world of publishing, the industry, and all the bookish, writerly, write-minded things we want listeners of this show to know. Enjoy!
Publishers are always looking for the next big thing and the big blockbusters, but the backbones of publishing are titles that are perennials, that are going to stay on the backlists and be read year after year, after year.
—Lisa Leshne
ABOUT LISA LESHNE & KATHLEEN SCHMIDT
Lisa Leshne founded The Leshne Agency in 2011. Prior to that, Lisa worked in news media, then began her career as a literary agent at LJK Literary. She is most passionate about memoir and narrative nonfiction that elevate social justice topics, women’s issues, and underrepresented voices. Kathleen Schmidt is the Founder of Kathleen Schmidt Public Relations. She’s previously worked in all aspects of the industry, as a literary agent, acquisitions editor, and ghostwriter. To date, she has worked on 50 New York Times bestsellers, and her clients have continuously appeared in top-tier national print, broadcast, and radio outlets.