Meet the Author: Meghan Stevenson

Today's author interview with Meghan Stevenson goes surprising places. Meghan is a ghostwriter (among many other hats), and I was excited to talk to her about how she approaches ghostwriting and working with authors, and what she thinks writers should know about the publishing process.

Meghan has so much wisdom and experience to offer (and a quiz you can take if you're thinking about writing a book!).

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​Meghan Stevenson is an entrepreneur, educator, ghostwriter, book editor, and expert in traditional publishing. After working as an editor at the largest trade publishers in the United States, Meghan launched her own business helping entrepreneurs and experts get book deals.

To date, Meghan and her team have helped clients earn more than $5,000,000 in advances from major publishers. Books she and her team have proudly worked on include Rich AF by Vivian Tu, How to Love Teaching Again by Jamie Sears, Gender Magic by Rae McDaniel, We Should All Be Millionaires by Rachel Rodgers, and Chill and Prosper by Denise Duffield-Thomas.

Before launching her own business, Meghan was responsible for multiple New York Times bestsellers in her role as an editor at Penguin and Simon & Schuster including Hot X: Algebra Exposed and Girls Get Curves: Geometry Takes Shape by Danica McKellar, The Meaning of Matthew by Judy Shepard, The First 20 Minutes by Gretchen Reynolds, as well as The Bro Code.

Meghan lives in Seattle with her husband Scott and Shih-tzu poodle Madisynn.

What drew you to ghostwriting?

This is funny. I was an editor, and unlike a lot of people who end up in writing, I stumbled here unawares. I have a couple of friends, and we were all baby assistants together at Simon and Schuster. One of them wanted to be a book editor. I was like, “I like books; they're cool.” I wanted to go to New York. That's how I ended up in publishing.

I was a very good editor. I took one creative writing class in college, and the professor there, who's still a great friend of mine, she was like, “Look, you shouldn't go to an MFA. You're not that kind of writer.” I think I would roll my eyes constantly in an MFA program.

I ended up in publishing for about eight years—Simon and Schuster, Penguin—and I worked on all sorts of books. I found my home in what we call prescriptive nonfiction, essentially, how-to books. Once in a while, I work on more narratively based books.

Prescriptive, how-to books are very commercial. I have Taylor Swift in my office for a reason. It's because she's the best-selling writer of our generation. She's super commercial, and that's my taste. When I left editorial, I had this moment in my career that a lot of people hit, regardless of industry, where you look up the corporate ladder and you say, “I don't want any of that.”

I wanted to be an editorial director. I thought that would be cool. That's the role where you oversee all the editors, give them advice, mentor them, and greenlight their acquisitions. I wanted that, but it was a long, arduous, unclear path. I was 30, 31, and I was like, “I don't know how to do this.” I don't have a byline at the Atlantic or, literally, a last name that’s on a museum in Manhattan. I don't have this cultural knowledge. At least, I thought I didn't at the time, and so I left.

People were leaving editorial to create businesses, but most of them were precious about not going into ghostwriting. I thought, “What? Why wouldn't you go do that?” I got a chance almost immediately to ghostwrite a proposal, and it was terrible. I did a terrible job, but the author loved me, and people kept giving me opportunities.

In 2015, I wrote my first book, a book on fashion by George Kotsiopoulos, the guy who used to be on Fashion Police back in the day with Joan Rivers and Giuliana Rancic. That was a good experience. It took off from there.

What my team and I do now, most people see as ghostwriting. Outside the industry, I would say it's ghostwriting. Inside the industry, we say we're a collaborator because there's a little nuance. We can't operate without them. We couldn't create a book without the author.

I had an author come to me, like, “You should have ideas for me.” That's not how this works. His book didn't sell because it ultimately wasn't his. He had a commercial idea, and he was trying to make it work for him versus organically being passionate about it and writing a book down the road.

Our team collaborates. If you think of editorial work as a spectrum, as I do, on one side, it's editing, where you don't change any writer's words—maybe you would rewrite a sentence to show people how to do things. It goes all the way over to full ghostwriting, which is what I did for George. Full ghostwriting is mostly appropriate for celebrities and CEOs of multinational companies.

Most other people, and most people that I'm dealing with, those are collaborative jobs. A client I have right now who's writing a book about men's sexual health is a great example. She's the expert. She's a coach. She's well-versed in it. She's a YouTuber. She has this whole brand. She's worked with hundreds of clients, and her issue is that she has a hard time finding the time to write. I told her, “It doesn't matter if you're writing or telling me, because I'm going to work from that transcript. It’s your content. What you're having me do is look at a garage full of shit and organize it.” That's ultimately what I'm doing, and I'm very good at it. I find that fun.

I apply all the publishing knowledge I have and continue to nurture it so I understand the way books are going. The book I mentioned above, the general idea is that men don't buy books, so a book about men's sexual health is not going to be as popular as something like Come as You Are, which was a huge bestseller about women's sexual health. But sex books are hot right now, literally. When men's books work, they work big. I'm willing to take a chance on this. She got an agent, she got a deal, and now we're writing the book.

When should someone consider hiring a ghostwriter?

​We have a quiz that I aim to make as helpful as humanly possible in terms of people finding good resources. There are a lot of us out there, and as you know, your results may vary. I realized that—and we literally have data in our quiz to show this—99% of people are nowhere near ready to write their book, mostly because of platform.

Platform is being able to have an audience, having proof. A lot of people come to me, and they're like, “This changed my life, and I'm so happy, and this method is amazing.” I have to ask, “Have you tried it on anyone else?” If the answer is no, then we've got to go do that because you could have something that works for you but doesn't work for anyone else.

A coach I worked with, her teaching changed my life completely. It 5x-ed my revenue. It completely changed my business. It did all sorts of things that were wonderful for my life. So her results were proven, but by the time she wrote her proposal, she was already ten years into all that. She'd done all that R&D; she'd grown that audience.

A lot of people come to me, and they have a modest audience, and they have a method that's not proven, and that's the first line of business.

A book will not do that work for you. People think, “I'm going to put this book out in the world, and it's going to do all these things for me,” and it just doesn't. It's a marketing tool. You have got to be doing other things.

What is the publishing process like?

The first thing for us is that hurdle I just talked about, which is that we don't take anyone on that we can't sell. I don't have a perfect record. One year, 100% of our clients got deals. My assistant was like, “We should run with that.” I said, “No, I'll do 90.” I'm happy with 80 because that's our lifetime result. I don't want to ever say it's 100%. It's so subjective, the whole thing.

We try to manage that by laying out what they're buying when they work on a proposal with us and what our qualifications are. We had somebody come to us—great idea for a book, but unproven. This particular author's platform was modest. Luckily, this person is adept at digital marketing. I said, “You have to apply your services to yourself. Grow this thing and prove it out. You're not ready to work with us yet.”

What I've seen over and over again is that someone will promise me, “Yes, I'll work on my platform. Yes, I'll do this. Yes, I'll do that.” Then they don't, and I'm sitting there with a $30,000 Google Doc they paid for that I can do nothing with.

Although I know a lot of literary agents—I know over 100, and I've known a lot of them since we were all babies—I'm not sending them something I know will waste their time. That's the best way to, excuse my language, fuck up everything for the authors behind them.

I’m careful about who we take on. My men's sexual health client came in, and her platform was obvious. She had a TV show on a major streamer; her platform is there. The only thing I was nervous about was the idea that it was a book for men. I thought people would turn it down because of that. They totally did at first.

When we write a proposal, that takes about six months. It's a proprietary process. Everybody on my team who works on the proposals comes from an editorial or journalistic background. We look at it from an editorial-first perspective, with the knowledge that platform has to happen because we exist in a capitalist society and publishers are for-profit divisions of major conglomerate companies. That's just the reality of it.

At the end of that process, the author looks at the proposal, makes any changes they want, and then we send it out to about five agents. Our submission process is similar to an agent's process in that we usually have a bigger list, but we will send it out to a small list first.

I try to get a 100% success rate landing agents, and often, when we do that round, we get valuable feedback. Once, the overwhelming response was to ask if we could broaden the audience. I went back to the author, and she'd already been thinking about that. Then she got three offers.

From there, I step back. We'll make any changes the agent wants because they're often picky about our competitive and comparative title. They'll want an audience section, which we don't always do. Their agency has a different way of doing things, fine, different order of stuff, yeah, whatever. We'll do that with the client, and then from there, the agent will send it to the editors.

Sometimes they ask me who I think will like a book. I'm also in contact with these editors. There are only so many editors. I've worked with a lot of them at this point. If they don't get an agent, most of the time, I'm going to keep trying.

That’s unless we get a platform concern back, meaning that everybody's coming back and saying, “Hey, platform, platform, platform, platform.” Then the market is telling us platform’s an issue, so you have to go build your platform some more. It doesn’t mean the proposal is dead; it means it's on pause. Now, it can be on an indefinite hold, but it can be revived.

If they don't get a deal, it’s nice because I have the agent to also say we don't understand. That's rare. I would say that's only happened three times in the last 12 years. I had a client years and years ago who worked in the restaurant industry in San Francisco. He had everybody, all these famous chefs, they all endorsed this book. They were all mentioned. It just didn't go anywhere. Recently, I was reading Unreasonable Hospitality for a different reason. I was like, “This is the book. Why didn't they buy it?” It makes zero sense.

Once they get their deal, we will work with them again in collaboration. Sometimes that happens, sometimes it doesn't, especially for authors who’ve written books before. The proposal and the deal can be the hardest part for many authors. Many of our clients who like to write and who write their own content will write the editorial content for the proposal. Then, we are project managing, taking more of an editorial role.

We'll meet with the editor at the house and say, “What do you need to make your job easier?” That makes us invaluable to the publishers. They like us. There are a few specifically that will ask for us, which is great.

From there, we see them through the whole process—writing the manuscript, editing, copy editing. I spent all of Monday getting a manuscript ready for a transmittal. I haven't done that since I was an assistant.

We've seen a million of these versus an author whose first reaction to copy editing is not being able to breathe. If it’s us looking at it, we'll know within a couple of minutes whether that copy editor wants to be an author, and we can move through edits pretty quickly. Instead of giving them 400 comments to go through, they'll have 10 or 20. We’ll sit on Zoom, review the doc, and say, “Do you care about this word usage? It doesn't feel like it's in your voice. Do you want to say no?”

Authors don't know what they can do. They don't know they can say no. They don't know that certain things are weird or certain things are normal; they have no perspective. We’re handy in terms of that perspective.

For our colleagues, whether they're agents or editors, were either an ally or a watchdog. We're ally in terms of, like, the author’s acting crazy—and the authors always do at some point, they always lose their shit. It's laughable.

I have a client who's very grounded, very smart, calculated, and chill. She held it together for this whole process, and we got to transmittal. She was like, “I don't want to make any more changes. I am done. Can you do everything?” I told her I could, but she couldn’t come back and yell at me in six months if she didn’t like something.

It happens to everybody. The hissy fit is interesting to watch, and it happens every time. It's not always a hissy fit. Sometimes, it's an existential crisis. Sometimes it's classic spiritual resistance, where you have blank brain, or you're confused suddenly.

What do you think surprises most people about the process of getting published?

Number one is the emotion involved since we were just talking about that. I think people think that they’re going to succeed and have this big dream. It's going to work. It's going to be huge. It's how you think about it when you first blog or have a social media thing; you think everyone's going to pay attention, and nobody does. That's a big emotional switch, going from full to empty.

People with platforms have been through this already on the audience-building and content creation side. What they think is so precious and so dear to them is just another project to somebody else.

It's a product in a store. It's no different than the iPhone I've got or the mug warmer I have. I love my mug warmer, don't get me wrong. It's the best thing my husband's ever bought me, seriously, but that kind of disconnect can be very upsetting to people. It’s interesting what people aren't ready for and where I've seen the most chaos or the most author reaction.

What advice would you give to a writer who wants a traditional publishing deal?

It's slightly different depending on the category you're writing. For fiction, it's important to write. It’s really important to write. It's important for everybody to write in terms of writing practice. I think people underestimate the power of a daily habit, whether journaling, meditation, or whatever. The most dramatic moments I've had in my career are with people who thought they were writers but didn't have a daily writing practice or see it as part of their identity.

I'm a runner. I've identified that way for at least a decade, and I will do things because I'm a runner: Oh, I should stretch my hamstrings every night. I'm a runner. I gotta keep that shit loose. If I get hurt and I don't run for two weeks, don't come talk to me. I'm going to be an asshole.

Same idea with writing. If I didn't take a journal on vacation, I'm going to go get supplies. People treat yoga or meditation that way, too. If you send someone gaga about yoga somewhere without a mat, she will find herself a mat. She will go get that thing. It's like that.

Writing practice for everybody on the fiction side. Understanding craft, knowing that most of your novels are never going to see the light of day. This is what I hear from fiction writers.

On the nonfiction side, especially on the how-to side, work on really, really developing that platform piece. It's not just audiences. A lot of people think it's the must-do to get a deal: you build a platform, then you'll get your deal, and you don't need your platform anymore. That is so not the case.

The platform is for you. It grows your business, which is important for entrepreneurs and experts. We can make money out of this work. At first, you don't want to do it, and then you realize you have fun doing it—hopefully. So then you want to do it. You want to do it, you want to grow because it's fun, and then you see it help people.

But the other thing it does is make your book so much better. The people that I talk to who have platforms, it just rolls off of them. They don't need me to do anything other than show up and ask questions, and they've got a million ideas. I had a client where I ended up writing an 8000-word chapter from two 45-minute calls. She knows her shit, she knows her audience, she knows her people. She's got a million stories. That makes the book really easy.

What is the best book you've read recently?

I read novels for fun, and I read this amazing book called Because Fat Girl by Lauren Marie Fleming (affiliate link*). It's a romance—my favorite kind of romance where crazy shit happens. Movie stars fall in love with regular people. She centers a queer, self-identifying fat woman who's grappling with her own identity and learning to put herself first, and some very real stuff that a lot of people go through. It's just really entertaining and really good, even for people who don't read romance.

I also really liked Astor by Anderson Cooper and Katherine Howe (affiliate link*). I was shocked at how much I liked that book. I read it in like three days.

Meet the Author interviews are lightly edited for clarity.

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Meghan has great advice for writers, whether you're working on a novel or nonfiction. Practice your craft, and work on your platform. What's on your to-do list after reading this intervew?