Rachel Runya Katz
Thank You for Sharing (Romance, September, St. Martin’s Griffin)
“A chemistry-filled childhood friends to enemies to lovers debut romance about two people forced to confront their pasts to save both their relationship and careers.”
Currently, Seattle, but I wrote while living in Durham, N.C. In college, I took some creative writing classes, but I mostly wrote short stories. is the first full-length novel I’ve ever written, and the idea for the first scene popped into my head when I was deep in a contemporary romance novel binge in early 2021. I started writing this book in 2021 before the COVID vaccine was available. I do scientific research, which requires me to be at work in person, so my labmates and I were working in shifts to avoid close contact. I would go into my My agent is Jessica Mileo at InkWell Management, and I found her through good old-fashioned querying. I liked her agency, thought that both the book I already had and the books I’d want to write in the future fit perfectly into her manuscript wish list, and from her social media presence, I thought I’d like her as a person. I was right! Learning to navigate writing as a business as well as an art has been an adjustment—your book doesn’t just need to be good, it needs to be marketable. I wrote what I wanted to write and got lucky that some publishing professionals’ tastes overlapped with mine. The biggest thing beyond that is I was willing to accept feedback. The very first version of didn’t sell on submission, and Jessica and I worked to craft a more “hooky” premise and plot. I implemented those changes, and the book sold a few months later. I would have made an outline before I started writing. With my second book, I’m learning that it helps quite a bit. Sprinting! I learned this tip from Ava Wilder. When I need to write but I’m feeling unsure where to start, I set a timer for 20 minutes and just write, no distractions, no stopping to think, no editing as I go. It really helps me turn off the part of my brain that constantly worries about whether what I’m writing is good, which can ultimately inhibit my creativity and my productivity. I’m working on my next book, which is set to be published in 2024. It features a sapphic couple and a road trip.
