USA Today bestselling author Kristina Forest shares her path from being an aspiring writer to becoming a published author, highlighting the invaluable lessons that she learned along the way. With her background in Creative Writing and an MFA from New School, Forest’s writing path took her through various jobs and internships in the publishing world, which provided her with vast knowledge about writing and the publishing industry. This article highlights some of the key steps that Kristina Forest took throughout her writing career and how those steps may be able to help you with your own writing journey.

The Partner Plot by Kristina Forest

Get wrapped up in this second-chance romance between two former high school sweethearts who find themselves in a marriage of convenience. Violet Greene, a fashion celebrity, just had a very public breakup with her ex-fiancé six months ago and is now trying to focus entirely on her career to keep herself together. Xavier Wright is a high school teacher and basketball coach, just looking to get away on a birthday trip. But when the two former lovers reunite in Vegas, they decide to party the night away together. And party they did, the next morning waking up with rings on their fingers and officially married. Their impulsive and accidental marriage might just be exactly what they need, but can they get their lives together enough to finally get their happy endings?

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Guest post by Kristin Forest

I was a writing major in undergrad, and while I knew that I wanted to be a fiction writer one day, I wasn’t sure how to go about attaining that goal. I’ll always be grateful to my Creative Writing professors in undergrad who saw something in me and my stories and who encouraged me to pursue a Master of Fine Arts Degree in Creative Writing. (I do want to clearly state that I don’t think a MFA is a necessary step to becoming an author. A majority of authors do not have MFAs and are very successful! This is just the path that I took.) I applied to a few programs, and I was accepted into the New School’s MFA program.

That first semester at The New School, we had the opportunity to meet with several alumni and learn about life after the program. A few alumni had full time jobs in publishing, and this piqued my interest. I knew that I wanted to stay in New York after graduation, and in order to do that, I’d need to find a full-time job. I also felt strongly that if I wanted to be an author, it would be important for me to learn how the sausage was made. I wanted to learn the inner workings of the publishing industry so that if I ever became a published author, I’d hopefully be prepared to navigate the landscape.

Publishing Internships

I applied to several internships during my spring semester of graduate school. It’s very competitive to get a publishing internship, and I wasn’t having much luck. But I always made a point to stay in contact with the HR teams and ask them to keep me in mind for future internships. Thankfully, this worked in my favor. I was given a chance to interview for an internship in Children’s Subsidiary Rights. I didn’t know what Subsidiary Rights was at first—the most popular internships were in Editorial, Marketing and Publicity. After doing research on Subsidiary Rights, I still wasn’t completely sure what the internship would entail, but I was determined to try my best in the interview.

At the time, I was working part-time in an after-school program at the library. I helped first and second graders with their homework and read books to them. Because of this, even though I didn’t know much about Subsidiary Rights, I was familiar with this particular publisher’s children’s book catalogue, and I was able to speak to some of their books in my interview, and I was hired to be their summer intern. Coincidentally, the week that I started was the same week that the team’s assistant was leaving. Because it was a summer internship, I had a full-time work schedule, and I did many of the typical assistant duties while the team searched for the official replacement. I learned so much, not only about publishing, but this was also my first taste of what it would be like to have a full-time job. I learned that Subsidiary Rights is the team that pitches books to book fairs like Scholastic and book clubs like Book of the Month. They secure audio licenses, and they also are the team that licenses an author’s book to publishers around the world, among other things. I went to seasonal launch meetings and listened to editors pitch their new books to the rest of the division. This publisher was located down the street from a very popular bookstore and on my lunch break, I would browse the aisles and pick out books that I heard discussed during meetings as competitive titles. I was also able to read many books for free from the publisher. These were either advanced reader copies or copies of previously published books that were on the Subsidiary Rights team’s shelf.

After that internship ended, I landed editorial internships at different publishers. There, I learned about how to write jacket copy (the description that is put on the back of a book/jacket flap). I sat in acquisition meetings and listened to editors pitch the books that they wanted to acquire. I once asked the VP of the editorial team how long it took him to decide if he wanted to acquire a book, and he told me that he usually knew within the first two pages. From that, I learned that books need strong openings.

Full-time Work in Publishing While Being Published

Later, I landed a full-time job in Subsidiary Rights, and I moved up from assistant to coordinator to assistant manager to associate manager before I took the leap to write full time. Between my internships and official jobs, I worked in publishing for about seven years. During this time, I got my first few book deals.

The Neighbor Favor is a book about a woman who is an editorial assistant, and I used a lot of my firsthand experience in publishing to write that book, but otherwise I think that my background in publishing has mostly helped in the way that I navigate my career as an author. Being an author isn’t the kind of job where you have a manual or rule book to reference. There are a lot of unknown factors, especially when you’re a debut. This is why an agent is one of the most important people on an author’s team because they can fill in those knowledge gaps. Because I worked in publishing for almost a decade, I have an understanding of the landscape and how internal systems work, and I have a good idea regarding what I should and shouldn’t worry about. I know what questions to ask my publishing team and more than that, I know how hard everyone works to get a book out into the world. A lot of hands touch a book before it lands on shelves.

Like all industries, publishing is ever evolving, and there will come a time when my knowledge of the industry becomes outdated. But for now, I’m incredibly grateful for the experiences that I’ve had, and I hope to have a long career as an author.