Meet the Author: Kara Perez

Fun fact about me: I love reading about personal finance. I'm nosy, and learning about how people manage their money (and think everyone else should manage money) is endlessly interesting.

I was thrilled to interview Kara Perez, a sustainability-focused financial educator whose work I've followed for years. Kara and I talked about how she used "shame and embarrassment" to motivate herself during the writing process, her tips for negotiating with publishers, and what happened when she learned she would have to change the title of her already-published book.

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Kara Perez is the founder of Bravely Go, a sustainability focused financial education company. Bravely focuses on bringing actionable, intersectional and accessible financial education to people who never learned the language of money.

She is the author of the book Money For Change (affiliate link*). Kara has been featured in the New York Times, Good Morning America Forbes, NPR, Glamour, ABC Nightline News, and US News and World Report as a financial expert. Additionally, for 2 years, Kara co-hosted the award-winning podcast The Fairer Cents, which has been named the top money podcast for women by Forbes and The Balance.

You can find Kara on her website, Instagram, X, Facebook, TikTok, and YouTube.

What is your book about? Who should read it?

Well, ideally, everyone will read it! But my book is essentially about how to use money as a tool for change and how to live more sustainably, because capitalism is not going well for the vast majority of us.

I've been a financial educator for seven years, going on eight years, and initially what interested me in the world of personal finance is that I didn't have any money and it was ruining my life. I couldn't do anything.

It's like that Simpsons meme about how money can be used to pay for goods and services.I realized, “Oh, if I want to be able to do the things I want to do, I need money.” That was kind of the first awakening.

Then I was like, wait a second. Why is it so hard to acquire money, to save money? Why are things so expensive? Why do some people have so much money?

I have had this progressive awakening around money. That is all in the book.

Of course, we all need money to pay our rent and pay for child care. But what if we could use money to create a world where we have federally subsidized child care? What if we could use money to move away from a system that is singularly reliant on money to a gifting economy, to a solidarity economy, to a sharing economy?

That's what the book's about.

How did you decide to write a book as part of your goal of helping people learn the language of money?

I've always wanted to write a book. I grew up a voracious reader, as many people are, as many writers are. I always thought that my book would be a fantasy novel, which I still hope to write.

But the internet is an interesting place. I'm always like, wow, the power of the internet! And then I'm like, wow, the power of the internet.

So, basically, when I started talking about money, I grew a little bit of a following. I'm still a fairly small content creator, really, but enough so that several publishers reached out to me and said, like, “Hey, would you want to write a book?”

I interviewed two of them. One of them had an idea of what they wanted me to write. One of them was like, “We'll give you a small advance to write whatever you want.” I took that one.

I got the book deal in November 2023 and at that point I was pretty well established in my business, my financial education.

My presence is also progressive, and I talk about politics on my platforms. If I write a book, I have to be true to that. The publisher was like, great. Love that for you.

I want to say a question that I get a lot around the book writing is about the advance, which I get!

Legally, I can't say how much I made off of my advance, but if you're going to be traditionally published, know that your advance is negotiable. Also, you have to pay that back before the royalties kick in.

I would also pay attention to the royalty rate, which also might be negotiable. It's slightly less negotiable than the actual advance amount, but really pay attention to the numbers.

You can make your book deal more to your advantage than they initially offer.

What was the writing process like? What strategies did you find helpful?

Okay, so I'm not proud to admit this, but I am most motivated by shame and embarrassment. Because if you give me compliments, I'm like, “Oh my God, you're right. I am amazing,” and it kind of slows me down. “I don't have to do anything. You think I'm amazing.”

I need shame and embarrassment to really get stuff done. I immediately set up video calls with other creators, specifically people I knew were working on writing projects.

We would just sit on the call, keep our video on, put ourselves on mute and write for an hour or two hours, and then we'd have to tell each other what we did.

I didn't want to get to the end of the call and be like, “Oh, I spent the entire two hours on TikTok,” which would happen when I was writing by myself. I would be like, “Okay, I'll start at 9. No, I'll start at 9:30. It's okay if I start at 11.”

I made myself accountable to other people, and that was really, really helpful. I also include a lot of interviews throughout the book, and I felt like that was another type of accountability.

I wanted to portray these people well and make sure that they came across in the book the way they come across in the interview they did with me and in their own online presence.

I wanted to make sure that I portrayed them correctly and accurately, obviously, but also in the engaging way that I see them. I felt like that the style of writing I decided to go with kind of helped me stay on track.

Did you run into roadblocks, and how did you deal with those?

Oh my gosh, yeah. I mean the intro, now, I'm like, I'll throw it out. Let me try again. The intro was so hard, it felt like there was so much pressure, because it's obviously the first thing people read.

I knew my book was up against a couple of big mental roadblocks for people. A lot of people don't like thinking about sustainable living, and a lot of people don't like thinking about money. So I was like, how do I get them in the first bit? I still wrestle with how that ended up.

I'm self-employed, so I tried to limit other types of work that I was doing so I could focus on writing. I work with people one-on-one as a money coach, and I did not take any coaching clients in January, February, and March of 2024.

That obviously negatively impacted my income, because I did not get a big six-figure advance. That was really hard, trying to tell yourself it's okay.

The book was due the first day of May, so I tried to remind myself that it was five months of lower income so I could focus on the book.

But that was definitely a big balancing act that kind of threw me off. It's hard when you're like, I am deliberately earning less money right now. Deliberately earning less money is so bananas because it's like, again, I'm a fairly small creator.

I know some creators are like, “I have six-figure months.” Never in my life, never in my life have I had a six-figure month. I wish.

I have a very middle-class income, and now I'm deliberately choosing to lower that? Girl, in what world?

It all turned out fine. The year did end up being less income than I thought it would, but not in a panic-inducing way. I wrote a book, you know, and hopefully that leads to other opportunities down the line, and, ideally, some money through the book.

You're relaunching the book because you had to re-title it. What has that been like?

My publisher is very hands-off, like, hey, marketing is on you. We're going to print this and we're going to tell our team that it's printed, and if they want to buy it, they can, and that's it.

It was very much on me to find podcasts, to find newsletters that wanted to feature me, to create content for my own channels about it.

I actually ended up hiring a cousin of mine for like 10 hours to come up with a list of any type of podcast that was women-focused, sustainable living-focused, money-focused, and to get the contact information.

I pitched myself, and I think I ended up pitching 120 podcasts. I ended up on something like 40 to 50 in the lead-up.

You get the preorder link four or five months before the book is out. My book came out November 14, 2024, and so I was doing these podcasts in September, October, November.

I did the same thing, reaching out to newsletters or blogs that I thought would maybe want to do an interview with me. “Hey, I think that this is a good fit for the type of writing you do. I'd love it if you could just include a blurb or a resource,” stuff like that. I had less success with that.

My book came out in November, so that's like prime buying season, right? We're deep into the holiday season at that point. I tried to get included in gift guides. That also did not go quite as well as I had hoped. It was hard because, I think, for two reasons.

One, if people were going to link to it on gift guides, people make money off of the affiliate kickback. My book was like $24 or something. It's a small affiliate. Two, half the book is anti-capitalism. It's hard to include in gift guides.

So that was my first launch, and then, as you shared, I ran into a legal situation where I had to change my book title.

Book titles are not trademarkable. Let me start there. They are not trademarkable. It's totally legal for books to share a title. Multiple books have the same title.

My book had the title of someone who had a very similar trademark. It was not 100% the same, but very, very, very similar. Two weeks after launch, after the book came out, I got an email that said, “You're infringing on my trademark,” and my publisher did not want to fight it.

They immediately were like, “We'll change the title.” I get it from their end and I get it from the trademark holder’s end.

But the trademark holder was super rude and it compounded my feelings of, honestly, shame and embarrassment and foolishness, like, why didn't I catch this? How could this have happened?

I walked right into those sort of feelings and then sadness that all of this work I had done in the lead-up and all of these podcasts I've been on, now they have the wrong book title. Now they have the wrong keywords for people to search.

I'm associated with this book that no longer exists, technically, and so that was pretty devastating, and it really slowed my promotion.

I had to stop everything while we picked a new title. I’m just now relaunching.

This was not your mistake. That is the publisher's job.

That's what everyone keeps saying, which makes me feel a little bit better, but I still feel like it was on both of us. Somebody should have caught this, but neither one of us did. So here we are.

What are you doing to relaunch the book?

I'm really trying to focus on in-person events. I'm doing a small book tour, completely self-funded. I specifically saved some of my advance to do this. This was always the plan.

I reached out to local bookstores in cities on the East Coast, because I'm in Massachusetts. We have four booked, which is really exciting. We’ll be in Boston, Wooster, New York, and Philadelphia.

I'm trying to co-host each of these events with another sustainable living or money influencer who ideally has a bigger audience than me, so that I can be introduced to their audience.

I'm going to go back to my podcast list and all the ones that either ghosted me or turned me down, I'm going to re-pitch.

You know, you’ve got to have a thick skin in any business. I would say authors and creatives have to have particularly thick skins, because there always is the chance that people won't like what you create, and it's nothing to do with your business idea or the sellability.

It's just sort of like, “I don’t like those colors” and you're like, “Okay, that hurts my feelings, but okay.”

I really don't even feel like I got the chance to talk about it that much on my own platforms. The first time around, I did try to do some lead-up. I tried to post weekly with an early review on my Instagram in the lead-up to the first launch, but that was it.

I'll be talking about it more on my platforms. I've grown on TikTok and YouTube in the past couple of months, so I'll introduce it to those audiences.

Last time, I was really Instagram focused, because that's my most comfortable platform. I've been on it the longest. I think my audience knows me the best. It feels more intimate, whereas TikTok feels a little chaotic.

YouTube feels a little bit like there's more of a barrier, because you can't DM people, which I really like and appreciate, but I do feel like it makes it a little less intimate. This is just a long-winded way of saying, I'll be on social media. The readers are there.

You mentioned wanting to write a fantasy novel. Is that next on the list?

No, unfortunately, the fantasy novel is shelved into my 40s. That's what I've promised myself: My 40s would be for fantasy.

I just set up another accountability call with one of my writer friends. I've been feeling called to write poetry, which is very weird for me. I have never been a poetry person, ever, but I'm just really feeling it, so I'm going to work on that.

It's going to be 100% private. I'm not interested in trying to publish it or even share it. I just want to see where this creative impulse takes me.

I'm online all the time, and I'm just really excited to have this creative urge. It feels so precious. I have been actively trying very hard in the last couple of years to really build a community, to build offline interests, even as my screen time is still atrocious. I'm excited to nurture my creative writing desires right now.

I always ask myself, “What would 16-year-old Kara think?” Because I feel like 16-year-old Kara—I hope I'm going to get this psychology term right—is a representation of my id, my pure, raw self.

She had a lot of energy, she had a lot of rage, and she did a lot of things. I used to go to school board meetings and protest cutting the arts and stuff by myself. It's amazing.

I always ask myself, as a litmus test, what would 16-year-old Kara do? And 16-year-old Kara used to fill notebooks with thoughts and maps of her future fantasy world and songs and poems and stuff.

I'm like, 16-year-old Kara would be down with writing some poetry and not trying to be the queen of poetry. Just doing it. So that feels good.

What would you tell someone who is setting out on a writing project?

Be protective of your writing. Feedback is always good, but fundamentally, it's what you have to say, and if you don't want to share it for a while, while you're working that out, be protective of it.

Be protective of giving yourself that time to write. Be protective of how you write, whether you set up accountability calls like I did or write alone.

You can write in your house. You can say, I need to leave and go write at the library or something, but form a box around your writing practice and really hold it dear.

It's so easy for other priorities, for other people's priorities, and for other priorities of your own, to overwrite that. If you really want the writing to get done, you have to be protective of it.

It's very easy in our capitalist brainrot to think, well, if I'm not publishing this, or if no one's reading this, it doesn't have value. If this writing isn't productive—I hate that word—then I can't protect it, because it's not leading to anything.

And it's like, it absolutely is. It's making you a better writer. It's giving you an outlet. You truly never know. You could come back to this in 10 years and say, oh my gosh, this is actually the makings of my first book or my second book.

You never know where that practice will lead you.

What is the best book that you've read recently?

I'm going to give you two because one, I thought it was well written and I enjoyed it, but it's very heavy. 2025 might not be the time, but it's called I'm Glad My Mom Died, by Jennette McCurdy (affiliate link*).

I thought it was going to be very different. I want to offer a trigger warning. There's a lot of discussion of a very serious eating disorder, which I went into completely blind. I don't have a history of struggling with food, but it was quite graphic. But it was a very good book, and I hope she writes more.

And then the other book that changed my life. I read this a couple years ago, but I always want to give a shout out to The Day the World Stops Shopping, by J.B. MacKinnon (affiliate link*). He's a Canadian writer.

Super good as a thought experiment of what happens if the world stops shopping. He interviews people from such an array of walks of life.

He starts the book off by interviewing a VP at Levi who’s like, “First of all, I don't wash my jeans. I only spritz them with vodka. I haven't washed these jeans in 30 years to be sustainable. Second of all, if people stop shopping, our business would collapse in a month, and the economy would collapse in two months.”

He goes and interviews people who don't consume as much, so people who live in less wealthy nations than the United States. He interviews someone from Ecuador. He interviews a Japanese candy business that's been in business for, like, 600 years, because they're not focused on growth, they're focused on making the best candy they can.

It's so fascinating, and it really examines this idea of shopping and consumption from angles I had never considered before. He has the data to back it up, and it's super well written. It was a really easy read, so I really recommend that book.

I made a TikTok about that book. I was like, “This book changed my life,” and I got around 600,000 views. A lot of people were like, “Well, but should I buy this book or not? Tee hee, it's about not shopping. Tee hee, hee, hee.”

J.B. MacKinnon reached out and was like, “Hey, thank you so much for making that TikTok. Because, as you can imagine, a lot of those commenters are right. It's hard to promote this book.”

J.B. MacKinnon, a celeb in my inbox. Hello. It didn't go anywhere. We never became friends. But shout out, J.B. That's why I say the internet's amazing.

I made that TikTok looking like this. I had just woken up, but it was on the top of my brain, and 600,000 views later, it introduced me to this writer that I really admire. That is one of the very cool things about the internet.

But you really never know. And this goes back to what I was saying about writing, too. You really never know what will happen with what you create.

Meet the Author interviews are lightly edited for clarity.

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Kara offers so much good advice for writers. Protect your creativity, be willing to get flexible with how you promote your book, and remember that publishing contracts are negotiable! What's your biggest takeaway from this interview?

Grab a copy of Money for Change and, until next time—