Speaker 1: 0:04

When I was actually growing up I found myself gravitating towards in college really, and after college, like learning about biology really fascinated me. And then when I was working as a young reporter, I covered a very important story when I was actually living in Washington DC at the time and I covered then-President Bush's first veto. It was to deny federal funding for stem cell research.

Speaker 2: 0:38

Hi friends, this is Read and Write with Natasha podcast. My name is Natasha Tynes and I'm an author and a journalist. In this channel I talk about the writing life, review books and interview authors. Hope you enjoy the journey. Hi everyone, and welcome to another episode of Read and Write with Natasha. I have with me today Kira Peikoff, who's the author of Mother Knows Best Living Proof, no Time to Die and Die Again Tomorrow. She has a degree in journalism from New York University and master's in bioethics from Columbia. Her reported articles have appeared in the New York Times, newsweek, popular Mechanics and other outlets. Her latest novel, baby X, is a suspenseful adventure teaching on many levels about advances in science and technology. Wow, kira, very impressive. So thank you for joining me today. First, what is?

Speaker 1: 1:43

bioethics Great question. Bioethics is the study of how society should deal with up and coming advances in biotechnology, which are new breakthroughs coming out of the field of the life sciences.

Speaker 2: 2:00

I see. So that would take me to ask you about your latest novel, which is Baby X, which delves into exactly the same topic is how people can get pregnant in non-traditional ways, correct? So I'm going to let you tell us about Baby X, and I'm excited to hear about it because, for anyone who's listening or watching, this novel is all over Goodreads. So you're lucky to hear from the author. So, kira, the floor is yours.

Speaker 1: 2:31

Thank you. So BabyX spotlights a new medical technology that already today has been proven to work in mice. So this is not completely science fiction. This is absolutely a real technology, and in my book I project what if this was available for humans. And what it is is a way to create sperm and egg cells just from a small sample of somebody's own cells, let's say from their inside of their mouth or the root of their hair or some mucus, saliva, blood cell. Any cell in their body could theoretically, with this new advance, be turned into a sperm or egg that could then be used to create embryos with someone else. And this breakthrough it's called IVG.

Speaker 1: 3:25

It's seen as the next generation of IVF, which is very common, routine fertility technology today. It would have very dramatic ramifications for society because anybody would be able to have a biological child with anybody else. So your gender is irrelevant, your fertility capabilities are irrelevant, your sexual orientation would no longer be prohibitive. You could have same-sex couples having kids and age really any age. So older women today we have pressure on women to have babies before a certain age or it gets too difficult. In this case you would go to a clinic. You'd have some cells scraped from the inside of your cheek. Your partner would give a sample of their cells and the work would be done in the lab to create embryos from that, and that's all you really need. So it would be completely game-changing for the way that we have babies in the future.

Speaker 2: 4:24

So how does that work? So if you have, let's say, a woman and a woman and they both give saliva, how you know, in theory an embryo is a combination of a sperm and an egg. So where, say, if the woman, where is the sperm coming from?

Speaker 1: 4:40

So the cells would be taken from the woman let's say they're epithelial cells from the inside of your cheek and through the already established means of creating stem cells, a lab technician would coax those cells let's say it's for you to become blank cells, again called induced pluripotent stem cells.

Speaker 1: 5:02

This again, is a very real breakthrough. This has been established in the medical field now for about 15 years or so. So the researcher that discovered how to turn body cells back into blank stem cells which have the capability to become any specialized cell in the body, that researcher won the Nobel Prize and I think he invented this around 2006 and later won the Nobel Prize. So this is already being used widely in the medical field today for trying to create new types of medical cures. So in this process in the future, your cells would be coaxed back into stem cells and then, with certain chemical cues, would then be grown as the specialized cell of either a sperm or an oocyte, which is an egg cell, and then that could be then created or joined with another gamete to create an embryo. So it's like agnostic about the sex of the person giving the cell it could. This process of IVG can generate either sperm or egg.

Speaker 2: 6:12

So how ethical is that in your opinion? Or is that even a valid question, because I'm sure people might question the ethics of IVF, but now it's very common. So how ethical is IVG?

Speaker 1: 6:29

Yeah, so it's a complicated question. So when you say ethical, you mean, are there guardrails in using this technology that we need to be careful of so that it doesn't get misused? Absolutely, yes, that's true. I think that's true for any new technology. There's potential for misuse.

Speaker 1: 6:47

For example, in my book and baby X, I go into one of those scenarios of misuse because that's where a lot of the drama can stem from. So in my book, cells are taken from celebrities without their knowledge and then used, without their consent or knowledge, to create babies with another person, like a stalker or a fan, to have their own children. So of course, that's a very unethical use of how easy it is to create sperm and egg. But if we're talking about mainstream society, would this have benefits for people? Absolutely, and that's why I think that it's something we should be aware of. It's coming down the pike.

Speaker 1: 7:25

This is again like it's not completely science fiction. It's rooted in reality, it's proven to work in mammals, and I do think that there is ethical uses of it too, because we could open up biological parenthood to many couples today who can't access it, and it would also involve the ability to screen embryos for diseases and for other things like traits that are starting to become possible today as well, but are prohibited in some level by only couples going through IVF. So today, if you're a couple going through the IVF process, you can have some of your embryos chosen for screening for genetic issues. And there's limitations on that today, but in the future you can imagine if it's possible for dozens of embryos to be easily created for any couple, then everyone can have this genetic screening process done and that could potentially weed out a lot of diseases and prevent them from being passed to the next generation. So that would, I think, also be an ethical use.

Speaker 2: 8:31

So what about the objection of, let's say, more traditional or more conservative people who would believe that a child should be the result of a man and a woman, at least in the lab, you know? Even when you have same-sex marriage, you know would use sperm or an egg to make the child. So how you know, like the resistance that people might face when they want to implement this technology? What do probably more religious-oriented groups or more?

Speaker 1: 8:56

traditionalist backgrounds, people who think that it has to be a certain way the quote natural way is the better way, and I mean in my opinion. I don't think that natural always means better. I think this is a common fallacy we encounter, not just with reproduction but with many things with food, for example, with medicines, with vaccines. There's this, in my opinion, fallacy of believing that natural is safer or natural is superior. And yet, when science can offer a helping hand in accomplishing something that we can't do without it otherwise, and give us an easier or better or healthier, safer way of doing something, like with vaccines or even with some bioengineered food that now can incorporate more nutrition in food that we didn't have, in the quote natural varieties these are things that I think we should be open-minded to, as long as they're proven to be safe, I see.

Speaker 2: 9:59

So your prediction when do you think the IVG technology will be in the mainstream?

Speaker 1: 10:04

So your prediction when do you think the IVG technology will be in the mainstream? I think that it's possible within the next 10 years that we'll see it in human studies because it is moving ahead rapidly in mice and last year, for example, in mice two male mice conceived healthy mice babies and it was published in Nature. Just using this technology, I think it's happening in Japan. They're on the forefront of this. I think there will be more resistance in other countries that see it as too potentially threatening in terms of ethics or morality. But I would also remind people to remember that IVF was seen as very controversial when it first happened in the late 1970s, because people had never thought of test tube babies. And how could you create babies in the lab and like isn't that a big problem? Isn't that an immoral issue? And yet generations change and things become routine and then that becomes seen as normal. So today we have 100,000 babies a year in the US born with IVF and I don't think most people would consider that immoral in any way.

Speaker 2: 11:08

Wow, would that, do you think, dissuade people from getting married, especially young women? Because you know we always. Now many women are freezing their eggs and their careers and then they have kids and marriage is no longer a pressing sort of deadline on their head. Do you think this technology as well might sway people from tying?

Speaker 1: 11:35

the knot. I don't know if it would have as much of an effect on marriage. I mean, maybe if you feel like you have to get married and have to have a kid by a certain age. If this technology were accessible to you, you would probably feel some relief from the timeline and the pressure. I think it could have a big impact on careers for women because you could delay having kids longer.

Speaker 1: 11:59

Now it's kind of normal to try to have kids by the time you're in your mid-30s, late 30s, because it gets more difficult. But if you could have a kid in your mid to late 40s and lifespans are getting longer and people are having a better aging process as well with new medical advancements it could potentially, over a few generations, push back the time that we have kids until maybe we're more financially stable, more set up in our careers, waiting for the right relationship to come along Maybe that doesn't always happen in the right timeframe that people want it to and there would be more freedom, I think, to not have to get the show on the road so quickly if you could put it off a little bit longer.

Speaker 2: 12:39

Wow. So what was the reaction to your novel so far? I mean, from what I've seen it's pretty popular, but I want to hear you know the good and the bad kind of reaction to it. As an author myself, I know we usually get both. It's part of the process, so what?

Speaker 1: 12:58

was the reaction. It's part of the process. I think the majority of readers have really enjoyed it. I've heard a lot of words like surprising or a wild ride. There's a lot of twists in the book, especially one at the end that I've seen in reviews. People are like oh, my jaw dropped or I was really surprised at. So I'm happy to hear feedback like that because I was really going for a surprise ending that also still made sense within the context of the story and for the readers that have enjoyed that, I'm happy to hear that it landed for them. I think some other readers have been put off by the concept or it feels out there to them. I've seen some reviews that said I had a hard time suspending my disbelief about the premise and I think that's kind of amusing because I mean I didn't make up this technology. I didn't even make up the premise of it, I just wrote a story with it. So it's kind of funny when people are like it's too out there, but it's actually not that out there.

Speaker 2: 13:57

Oh, wow. So how did you manage to get that much of the publicity around it? What? What if you can reveal your secrets? You know, because, as authors, they always struggle with marketing. You know what's what's your secret.

Speaker 1: 14:14

I think working with a great publicist goes a long way. So having someone working in your corner to spread the word is enormously helpful, and I owe a lot of credit to my publicist for helping get the word out about the book. And then some things that just happened that I couldn't control and I don't think she could control either. Like, goodreads named it one of the most anticipated books of the spring Just got lucky, I guess, in that sense and then a lot of people found out about it through that and it actually ended up in the New York Times Book Review a couple weekends ago as like yeah, thank you, just with a shout out, and they called it a propulsive thriller.

Speaker 1: 14:57

I mean, I don't think anyone knew that was coming either. It was just kind of a surprise coverage. That was really cool to see, and I think word of mouth is helpful. I've seen a lot of people tagging the book on Instagram social media and getting like bookstagrammers to participate and just talking about reading it and what their thoughts are. So every little bit is helpful and just like, as you know, as an author, just so appreciated when people are actually reading your book and talking about it.

Speaker 2: 15:23

So this is your third or fourth book, fourth book, fifth book, first book. Okay, so I just want to ask you about your publishing journey. When you first started, did you get an agent? How did you find an agent? Did you self-publish? Just walk us through this journey.

Speaker 1: 15:41

Yeah. So when I wrote my first book, it was back in 2008. And I, um, was actually working in the publishing industry at that time. It was my, my first job. I was, um, an editorial assistant and um.

Speaker 1: 15:58

It was an ironic time for me because I had finished my own novel, my first book, and I was submitting it to agents trying to get representation and at the same time, at work in my day job as an assistant for my boss, who was an editor, I was writing rejections to agented submission oh wow, oh wow his behalf. And sometimes I was even writing rejections to the same agents that I was reaching out to for my own, but of course I was writing it on behalf of my boss, so it wasn't from me, right, okay? So it was a very weird time in my life and I submitted my manuscript, my query letter, to at least 50 agents and I got some who asked to read it and some got close to offering representation. And then my book was too long for a first novel I think it was like 130,000 words. So I got a lot of feedback. I cut it it's way too long, so I had to go back. There was a lot of revision that had to happen on that book long, so I had to go back. There was a lot of revision that had to happen on that book and I finally was able to get an agent after about a year of submitting the manuscript and I had then worked with an independent editor to cut the book and get it into better shape.

Speaker 1: 17:15

I did get an agent at Trident, which is actually still my agency is still with the same agent who I signed with back in 2010. So she and I have been together for almost 15 years now, but she read it and the she was the perfect person to read it because she is Robin Cook's agent, the medical thriller writer, and my first book was a medical thriller and so she loved that genre and she was very established, so she took it on and then I ended up publishing that book with Tor I know the sci-fi, yeah, the imprint. And then I moved around to a different publisher. For my second and third book I went to Kensington, which is a large independent publisher, yeah. And for my fourth and fifth book I then moved to Crooked Lane, which is a more an independent publisher that really specializes in mystery thriller books, and they liked my book previous to this one, and then they signed up this one as well, so I've been with them now for these two books, wow congrats.

Speaker 2: 18:25

So what I read from your bio is that you teach correct, You're still teaching or you're still working in communication.

Speaker 1: 18:34

Yeah, I did some writing teaching for a number of years. I'm not doing that anymore. I actually now work in, as I was a journalist for a number of years. I did a lot of freelance for a while, then I ran a science magazine as editor in chief for about five years and then I ended up going over to the other side of the industry to work in PR and communications in biotech. Okay, so I now work for a company that invests in new biotechnologies and I do PR for them, for, like, whenever one of their companies has a new development, I help raise awareness of it.

Speaker 2: 19:13

Okay, yeah, it's interesting to see that you kept your day job. You know, with someone with so many books and you know they're getting a lot of praise, do you believe that authors should, you know, have both a day job and write on the side? Is that sustainable or is that the model to be?

Speaker 1: 19:36

I wouldn't really say it's very sustainable. It's been quite intense. Luckily I actually was between jobs for a lot of the writing of Baby X, so I was able to give it a kind of full-time attention for a pretty long period of time at least six months I think and that really helped me get the book done. Because I don't know how people do it with a job and a book and a deadline. It's a lot.

Speaker 1: 20:04

There was a period of time where I got the job I'm in now and I still had a deadline for baby X to complete the manuscript and I would do my day job, then my kids would come home from school, then, with the kids still, they go to bed and then I would start writing at 8pm and I would write till midnight and then I'd be done for the day. But it was so intense to do that. I think I did that for four or five months, not every day, that schedule, but a number of days a week and since then I am taking a little break from that kind of intensity. So I don't know how people do it. It's extremely challenging and I hope that. You know life allows me more space to write again and that maybe isn't always starting at 8pm, but it's also hard with young kids. So the answer is I don't. I don't know.

Speaker 2: 20:52

Oh God, so you're not working on on new books these days, taking a break, or what? I'm taking a little break, right now.

Speaker 1: 20:59

Yeah, I'm taking a little break right now. Yeah, I'm taking a little break focusing on my um, my other stuff that I have going on, but I I'm sure I will write something again. I just have to get the right idea and figure out my the right headspace to do it in okay, so what got got you into medical thrillers, sci-fi.

Speaker 2: 21:19

So your first degree was in journalism and then you got a master's in bioethics. How did you make that shift?

Speaker 1: 21:31

Yeah, when I was actually growing up I found myself gravitating towards in college really and after college, like learning about biology really fascinated me. And then when I was working as a young reporter, I covered a very important story when I was actually living in Washington DC at the time and I covered then President Bush's first veto. It was to deny federal funding for stem cell research. Okay, and I remember thinking like what a travesty that was at the time because there were a lot of exciting possibilities on the horizon for things like treating cancer and other diseases through stem cells, but then having the government and policy involved shut a lot of that down. So I remember thinking about how can we do things differently or better and who makes those decisions? And the intersection of policy, law, ethics and science is what always captivated me, even from that time forward, and not just in that issue but in a lot of realms, everything from the start of life through the end of life and new technologies that affect those things that can be within the umbrella of bioethics. So I didn't even know there was a field with that name until I started researching like how can I go to school to understand these topics better? I know I don't want to be a scientist, but what do I study to become more educated in this?

Speaker 1: 23:01

And I stumbled across this graduate program at Columbia in bioethics, which is again a relatively new field, especially in graduate school. My program at that time, which I enrolled in, had only been around for a couple years, so I was one of the earliest groups of students that went through the program. But it was great. I learned a lot. I got a great background in a wide variety of topics. I took law courses, neurology, biology, like history, philosophy, and it was just a fantastic, well-rounded education in these issues.

Speaker 2: 23:39

Wow, and then why did you decide to write about these issues, and how many female authors are there who write similar topics?

Speaker 1: 23:49

Yeah, that's a great question. It seems like a male-dominated field. From the author perspective. We have, like our male medical thriller writers. I'm not sure. I mean there's people like Margaret Atwood who are doing more sci-fi versions of this. I think mine are different in that they're more rooted in like reality, like it's, it's near future sci-fi, it's not super hypothetical stuff. That's what interests me.

Speaker 1: 24:17

And as far as why I'm interested, um, I find these to be extremely personal and emotional topics. They're beyond being interesting for ethical, philosophical, kind of abstract reasons, as well as policy which affects all of us. I think it's these the things that I'm drawn to, like how we reproduce, how we have children, the topics in Baby X. We reproduce, how we have children, the topics in Baby X. Nothing could be more personal than that and more kind of profoundly intimate and life-changing than that.

Speaker 1: 24:49

And I think for me as a mom, I'm interested in that, as someone who's raising the next generation of kids, and they will have to face some of the questions that maybe not this book raises, but certainly within bioethics, their generation will have to deal with things that we don't even have today. I just find myself like both fascinated and intrigued and kind of personally invested in what happens with these technologies and I also see a brighter future stemming from a lot of the scientific research that's happening today. And I think part of my work as an author, I hope, is not just talking about some of the problems that can provoke and some of the misuses Of course those are fodder for thrillers but some of the benefits of new science and the way that our lives can be made better and healthier and longer because of science. So at the end of the day, I'm an optimist. I think that there is a definite place for technology in society if it's done properly, and I would love for people to be more open-minded to it.

Speaker 2: 25:50

Interesting because what we're seeing in Alabama now with Roe and Wade and the IVF and it seems to be, there's still resistance to advances when it comes to production and I wonder how welcoming these kind of technological advances will be across the nation.

Speaker 1: 26:15

It's a really good point. It's a fair point, and when I started writing this book five years ago, we were still in the era of Roe v Wade and things were different. And now, even in these last few years, we've seen such a dramatic turnaround and a change that it's becoming much more hostile than it ever was. So it's a really good point that you know, even if the technology is available and feasible which of course today is not in real life, it's just in animals but if it were to be possible, it doesn't mean anyone would even be able to access it if our policy environment is very resistant to it. So if people want to see science thrive and want to be able to have these technologies impact their life in a positive way, they have to try to advocate for them and support them, otherwise it will never actually happen okay, so, um, I want to kind of switch gears and talk about an an issue that's very important to authors especially now those who are listening which is marketing.

Speaker 2: 27:24

I remember I started this interview saying that you know your book is doing really well, but you, as Kira, what kind of social media activity do you do on a daily basis and what's your favorite platform where you get the most engagement and also the most conversion, where it's not only likes and retweets but actual people?

Speaker 1: 27:48

buying your book? You know it's such a hard question to answer. I'm not sure if anybody has the metrics to be able to say here's the conversion from my activity on this platform and sales. I mean, I think this is true for most authors. My sales figures are quite delayed. I probably won't even get my first sales report for a number of months, so I don't actually have a lot of insight into that part of it yet.

Speaker 1: 28:13

Since my book just came out, I can just gauge soft metrics like rankings and reviews and the number of people that are posting about it, which seems to be popular. But as far as like my activity on social media, I use Instagram. I like interacting with readers on there and to some extent, twitter. I'm not really active on Facebook anymore as an author. I mean, it's there but I don't really use it and I have resisted TikTok, so I'm not really not on TikTok. But I would say Instagram is the main platform that I've been using and it's great because there's so many readers on there. There's so many people interested in sharing the books that they are reading with their audiences and tagging authors and like just being involved and seeing what people are saying and being able to like thank people for reading the book and spread the word has been really fun.

Speaker 1: 29:07

But, that said, I don't spend a lot of time on social media doing that either. I know some authors have been super successful with that and they're posting like all these reels and all these you know how to's and snapshots and like have their own newsletters and content platform, basically through their work, and I really haven't gotten into that. I have to say I'm kind of more reactive or a little passive. Maybe that's not the best answer to give people out there, but you know it is like another job to fully do social media. Yeah, but you know it is like another job to fully do social media, yeah, and I wouldn't say that that's like my core strength. If some people are awesome at it, I wouldn't say that I am, but I do have a presence and I am there.

Speaker 2: 29:50

Okay, yeah, because I wanted to ask you about the newsletter. Many authors now are advised to have a very active newsletter. That's where you have your most engaged audience or your super fans, so you stayed away from newsletters and all of that I have.

Speaker 1: 30:10

I mean, that's also not the right answer. I'm supposed to tell people I think you should. You know, for authors out there, you should do all this stuff. You should do the newsletter and the social and everything, I think, because I'm juggling like a day job and other things. It's just I can only really focus on the writing. That's all I have bandwidth for, and then, once the book is out, just doing some uh promotion in some activity on social. But I don't have like the full bandwidth to do everything. That is that would be helpful. So yeah, we'll see. Maybe when another book comes out one day I will, but not at the moment.

Speaker 2: 30:44

Yeah, well, um, have you dabbled with Substack? There's a lot of authors are on Substack these days.

Speaker 1: 30:52

Yeah, I subscribe to a number of authors Substacks, but I haven't done my own so far. I I cause I think part of it is that I don't want to start something that I can't do regularly and do a really good job at. I don't want to drop off. So it's a bandwidth issue, honestly.

Speaker 2: 31:07

Yeah, yeah, I understand. So why do you think? I think we talked a bit about it, but why do you think there's not enough female authors who are in the same genre that you're doing?

Speaker 1: 31:21

I don't know. I think it's a good question. There should be more, and I'm trying to think of others who I can like, just off the top of my mind, recall in this space, but like the few authors that I would say are closest to my subject matter are John Mars, the British author, and Blake Crouch is a sci-fi author yeah, both guys. And then I would say it's in the vein of, like Black Mirror, which also has, like, a male creator. I don't know why technology seems to be more male heavy, especially when we're talking about technologies that really affect women, like the one in my book. Right, there should be more attention to this, or at least more interest in it from other, like female authors, I think, but I don't know. Do you have any thoughts on that?

Speaker 2: 32:14

I think it's the stereotypes is women usually are more interested in art, while men are more interested in science, and that's kind of like the stereotypical approach to things which is no longer the case. Yeah, yeah, I mean, think of the top female authors are Colleen Hoover, which is a romance author, and the top readers now are women, and mostly romance. They mostly read romance or historical fiction. So yeah, it's true. I mean, is it, you know? I don't know, maybe it's just a gender stereotype sort of thing. I mean, there's nothing that prevents women from pursuing that right. It's just I think the interest or maybe it's also the education system did not guide women towards that field and subconsciously put that thought that science is for men, I don't know and subconsciously put that thought that science is for men, I don't know, but it's.

Speaker 1: 33:18

I think that's there's something to that as far as education goes to. But now I know we're seeing more STEM classes geared to girls. I've seen like coding classes geared to girls and it's becoming, at least just on an anecdotal level, like more common for girls to also be interested in like computers and robotics and things like that. So that would be a helpful sign.

Speaker 1: 33:47

You know, when I was growing up I was always the English kid and I liked writing and books and stories and even within my own family I was like always going to go in the English major direction and I never was seen as someone who liked science and I probably, to be fair, didn't really show much interest in science growing up until I hit college and then I had to take a required course in biology at NYU and like my mind was totally opened by that and I realized I was actually very interested in that topic and figured out a way to merge it with journalism and write about it.

Speaker 1: 34:21

But before that, I think, yeah, I was always kind of see, I saw myself as this to humanities, straight humanities, and the other stuff was just unimportant until I had to learn more about it unimportant until I had to learn more about it. So there's something to be said for having to take a wide variety of courses, especially once people are in college and they're a little bit more independent, more able to like figure out what they're interested in, and they're old enough to do that, you know yeah.

Speaker 2: 34:50

Yeah. So before we conclude, do you have any tips for aspiring authors, especially female authors who want to get into a similar field.

Speaker 1: 35:02

Yeah, I think one thing that was tremendously helpful for me before I got to this stage in my career, like when I was a newer writer was working with a freelance editor. So this isn't specific to genre whatever genre you might be, this doesn't matter for that. But having someone who you could trust to give you feedback, who's not a friend or a family member or someone who's you know, someone relatively professional that you could take a writing class from or you could do independent editing with, that was huge for me at the time, because I needed professional advice and I wasn't yet published, so I didn't have an editor to give me that advice yet. So if you're in that transition stage where you're like querying or you're finishing a book and you don't have representation that I think would be I would recommend that to any author to try to seek out an independent editor to give you feedback. And how did you find the editor?

Speaker 1: 36:00

So I took a course in New York from a company called Gotham Writers. They offer writing courses to anyone like any adults who are interested in. They don't have to be professionals at all. Most people that take those courses are not professional writers, but they want to learn about it. They want to learn about publishing or novel writing or whatever it is, and I just signed up for one of their you know how to write a novel 101 courses when I was like 22. And I was.

Speaker 1: 36:28

I was struggling, trying to figure out how do I write a book. I wanted to write one. I had no idea what I'm doing and, um, I met some of their teachers and they were wonderful and I hired one after that to be my personal writing coach and editor for my book. That really needed help. So I think it was a lot of thanks to her that I was able to get to the next level with finding my agent, finding, then getting my book submitted and getting somewhere.

Speaker 1: 36:55

Because in the publishing world today, once your manuscript is submitted to editors, it's expected to already be in a plus shape and polished and ready to publish. You know, editors today are not sitting around wanting to massively edit and revise and like fix something that's very flawed. They want something that's, you know, essentially ready to go and they have to market it and package it. But so by the time you're on submission, you need to have that all done already. Yeah, and that's where I think the independent editor slash if you have an agent, an agent can also help with that, sometimes too.

Speaker 2: 37:34

Interesting. Well, this has been fascinating, kira, and where can people find you and connect with you?

Speaker 1: 37:42

So I'm on Instagram and Twitter and my handle is just my name, kira Picoff. You can also just Google Baby X book and you'll come across my website and has all the links there too, sounds great.

Speaker 2: 37:55

Thank you very much for joining me today and for anyone who's listening or watching, thank you for joining us for another episode of Read and Write with Natasha, and until we meet again. Sounds good, thank you. Thank you for tuning in to Read and Write with Natasha. I'm your host, natasha Tynes. If today's episode inspired you in any way, please take the time to review the podcast. Remember to subscribe and share this podcast with fellow book lovers. Until next time, happy reading, happy writing.