We’ve all heard stories of women who’ve created content for the internet – a blog or viral social media post – and then turned it into a book. Take the example of Julie Powell, who decided to cook all of Julia Child’s recipes in a single year and publish the results to her blog. It landed over 400,000 views and ended up leading to a movie called Julie and Julia. More recently, Rachel Hollis created a social media post with a photo of her stretch marks, with the comment that she was proud and would not be shamed by them. The sentiment resonated so much with women readers that she ended up writing a book, Girl, Stop Apologizing, and later, Girl, Wash Your Face, which was unbelievably successful in sales on the New York Times bestsellers list. You hear stories like this and it makes you wonder, could that really happen to a real person? Could it happen to me? Today’s guest, Dana Miranda, is here to share how it really happened to her, and what we can learn from her experience.
Key Takeaways from This Episode:
- How Dana landed her book deal with Little, Brown Spark, an imprint of Hachette, one of the ‘big five’ publishers.
- How Dana got started writing in the personal finance space.
- The article she wrote that caught everyone’s attention.
- How to get an agent to help you develop a book proposal, and how to get the proposal from an agent to a publisher.
- How to use your book as an anchor for marketing and building your audience.
Resources Mentioned in this Episode:
About Dana Miranda:
Dana is a Certified Educator in Personal Finance (CEPF), an author and a personal finance journalist. She’s the founder of Healthy Rich, a platform for inclusive, budget-free financial education, working with organizations, schools and companies dedicated to making money better for folks who are often left out of the conversation about money. Her approach to financial education lends an antidote to pervasive budget culture, a damaging set of beliefs that rewards restriction and deprivation and promotes an unhealthy and fantastical ideal of financial wellness. Dana grew up in a working-class family in a small town in Wisconsin. Upon joining the world of personal finance media in 2015, she quickly discovered that the niche was led mostly by advice (and admonitions) from middle-class white men, ignoring the broad diversity of our relationships with work and money. After leaving a leadership position with a popular financial media startup and spending two years as a freelance writer, Dana created Healthy Rich to start a new kind of conversation about money. She has written about work and money for Forbes, Insider, Culture Study, the New York Times, CNBC, The Motley Fool, NextAdvisor, and Inc. magazine, among others.
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