30 Years of Publishing Wisdom: Insights from Two 60s-Plus Authors

Featuring Laura Davis and Connie Briscoe

I’m delighted to have the opportunity to feature two best-selling authors in today’s post. Both Laura and Connie’s writing careers have spanned thirty years.

Introduction

Laura’s writing career spans 35+ years, during which she has written seven non-fiction books, six how-to books and a memoir. The underlying theme of her books is healing relationships, with others and with oneself. Her groundbreaking books have been translated into 11 languages and have sold more than two million copies.

Laura Davis

Kisane: When you wrote your first book, The Courage To Heal, with Ellen Bass, published in 1988, I had just begun my journey in the field of child sexual abuse. I was working in the first refuge in Australia set up for adolescent female child sexual abuse survivors. Work in this area, both in Australia and the USA, was at the cutting edge, and this notion of child sexual abuse, as opposed to incest, was still new to the general public and indeed to most professionals. It was not something that was talked about in the public arena.

#1: How hard was it to get your ground-breaking book, which went on to become a million-copy bestseller, published at this time?

Laura: I was incredibly fortunate. I was only 28, and I teamed up with my friend and former writing teacher, Ellen Bass, to co-author the book. Ellen had already published I Never Told Anyone: Stories of Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse with a small group of collaborators. Theirs was the first book where women told first-hand stories of sexual abuse. It was a huge silence broken. Everything was cracking open.

I Never Told Anyone was selling extremely well, and Harper & Row, the publisher, wanted Ellen to write a sequel about the healing process. Ellen didn’t want to do it. She knew how much work it was to write a book. At the time, she had a young daughter and a full life as a poet and a writing teacher.

When I heard about the publishing offer, I asked Ellen if she’d consider writing the book together. It was our collaboration, and my offer to conduct all the interviews and do “all the parts she didn’t want to do,” that led Ellen to say yes.

It took us three and a half years from the time we drafted the initial outline until the book was released in March 1988.

Six months later, The Courage to Heal was spreading like wildfire, passed from hand to hand and woman to woman. This was way before the internet, and the book became an underground bestseller through word-of-mouth and because women tacked little notes up on laundry bulletin boards. Rape crisis centers and domestic violence clinics bought the book by the case to hand out to their clients. The Courage to Heal was suddenly everywhere. We were even the subject of a New Yorker cartoon.

I was only 31 years old when the book was released, and suddenly I was famous for the worst thing that had ever happened to me. It was a lot to deal with, yet there’s nothing as powerful as having your words and your book make a huge difference in the world.

After The Courage to Heal, I wrote three more books about healing from child sexual abuse. But I eventually reached a point where I wanted to write about other things. I didn’t want my life so wrapped up in incest anymore. I had healed enough that it didn’t have to be. Incest would always be part of the cloth that shaped me, but it no longer had to take centre stage.

Kisane: After your books on healing, you wrote Becoming the Parent You Want to Be in 1997, together with parent educator Janis Keyser.

#2: What was it like getting your next book published, and did it help that your first book had become a best-seller?

Laura: The early books were still selling strongly, and it was easy to get other book contracts. I got taken to a lot of fancy lunches in New York. Publishing was different then, and there was much more opportunity for “B-list” authors. That was me—not a household name, not a celebrity—but a steady, strong writer. My early books got advances, and they sent me out on book tours. As I recall, Janis and I sold our parenting book easily. The same was true once I changed topics again and published my sixth book, I Thought We’d Never Speak Again: The Road from Estrangement to Reconciliation.

Kisane: In 2021, your memoir, The Burning Light of Two Stars: A Mother-Daughter Story, was published and won multiple awards. You went hybrid with this book and later took the rights back yourself.

#3: What made you switch to self-publishing this book?

Laura: Well, it had been nineteen years since I’d published my last book. I’d focused on raising my family and teaching writing to earn a living. My focus was on helping other writers find their voice and learn their craft. I didn’t get serious about writing another book until my mother moved out to California, and I started taking care of her at the end of her life. We’d been deeply estranged, and now I was her caregiver. I thought our dramatic mother-daughter story was worth telling.

It took me ten years to write The Burning Light of Two Stars, and I was over sixty when my agent started shopping the manuscript around. And in publishing, you’re only as good as your last year’s sales figures. HarperCollins had published my last book, I Thought We’d Never Speak Again, and they had an option on this one, which meant they had the first right of refusal. But when my agent sent them the book proposal, they didn’t even ask to read the manuscript. I was crushed—they didn’t even want to look at it. Memoir is a really tough sell. I really believed in my book. knew it was a gripping story, well-written, but publishing with a major publishing house is a cold, hard game. And the entry points had narrowed dramatically.

My agent shopped the book around for a year and would have kept at it, going to university presses and smaller publishers, but I grew impatient. No one expressed any interest, and I wanted the book out in the world. So, I started to investigate hybrid publishers and ended up going with Girl Friday Productions in Seattle. That was a very different journey.

#4: What advice would you give to female authors 60s-plus who want to publish a non-fiction book in the current publishing environment?

Laura: It really depends on so many things: your platform, and your goals for your book. Who is your intended audience? Who are you trying to reach? Is this a book primarily for your friends and extended family? Are you publishing it so your story can finally be told? Or are you trying to get readers in the larger world? How long are you willing to wait to try to go through traditional routes—getting an agent, finding a publisher?

My advice is to do it now. Get your book out there, however you can. Self-publishing and hybrid publishing are options that put you in the driver’s seat, so you’re not waiting for months and years on end to be chosen. There’s also one press that focuses on publishing women over fifty. You may want to look them up:

https://sibyllinepress.com/

And there’s always Substack. If I were writing a new book today, I think I’d really consider releasing it, scene by scene, chapter by chapter, on Substack. That way, I’d have the satisfaction of interactive reader responses right away. I think most writers who do that are trying to attract the attention of a publisher, but I’d consider that approach.

Laura’s Substack: The Writer’s Journey

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Introduction

Connie has been publishing since the late 1990s and is the author of relationship, domestic suspense and historical fiction, and her novels have hit the New York Times and other national bestseller lists. She has been featured in numerous publications and on television programs, including Good Morning America.

Connie Briscoe

#1 Your first book, Sisters and Lovers, was published in 1994. How challenging was it getting your first book deal?

Connie: Once I found an agent, it was a fairly smooth process. Getting to that point was the biggest challenge. I spent several years taking fiction writing classes and reading books on writing a novel. I also worked as an editor for about a decade. When I thought I was ready, I did a lot of reading on how to find and query agents. This was before the Internet, so I spent a huge amount of time in libraries and bookstores. I didn’t mind, though, because I love them both. I sent a query letter that I’d polished and polished and a few sample chapters to about five agents. One wrote back and said she was interested in representing me. That was about 30 years ago, and I’ve been with her ever since.

Kisane: Your book, You Never Know: A Novel of Domestic Suspense, was published in 2023.

#2 Between Sisters and Lovers and You Never Know, you published nine books with several different publishers. What has been your experience of working with the different ones, and were some more supportive than others?

Connie: I’ve had good experiences with all of my publishers. Interestingly, my first three books and my last two were all published by HarperCollins. I’ve also worked with Random House, Doubleday, Little Brown, Grand Central, and a few others. They are all great publishers.

Kisane: In 2011, you published Money Can’t Buy Love. In March 2023, You Never Know was published and in December 2023, Stepping Out. Your most recent book, Chloe, was published in March this year. In total, you’ve published 12 books.

I imagine you’ve found that there have been big changes in the publishing world between the release of your first book and Chloe.

#3 How did you navigate publishing your most recent books?

Connie: Yes! After being absent for more than 10 years–and taking a much-needed break–publishing felt like a whole different world. When I left in 2011, I believe social media had just started to come into play, and writers weren’t expected to have large followings. Now that’s key, especially for new authors.

Also, the whole process of querying has changed, not a lot, but some. There have also been several mergers among publishers, and that initially felt a little strange for me. Fortunately, my agent had been involved all that time and was on top of everything, and she guided me through the process. Also doing some research and talking to others in the business. In the end, it’s still all about writing books that the public wants to read.

#4 What advice would you give to female authors 60s-plus who want to publish a fiction book in the current publishing environment?

Connie: First, know that it’s never too late. If you’ve got something to say that you believe others will want to read, go for it. I wrote my last three books while in my 60s. I would add that even if your book is never published, the act of writing daily or even weekly can help keep your mind sharp, and that’s a very good thing at this age.

Also, maybe even before you begin to write, read books in and about the genre in which you want to write. And don’t only read the books, study them–the structure and pacing of the stories, the behaviour of the characters, the dialogue. Spend time–weeks if not months–learning everything possible.

Take writing courses. I did. I believe that too many aspiring and emerging authors skip this part. They assume they already know how to write. But do you know how to write a good novel? Do you know about plot structure and narrative arcs, and pacing? They want to jump right into finding an agent, a publisher, or marketing. You won’t need any of that until you learn how to write a good book.

Only then do you need to learn about the publishing process–agents, editors, publishing houses and how to approach them. That information is out there, in books, magazines, and on the Internet. You just have to dig it up. Once you’re well on your way to writing your story, become a tenacious student of the business. That’s what I did, even when there was no Internet at our fingertips.

Connie’s Substack: Behind the Chapters

Conclusion

Thank you, Connie and Laura, for sharing your amazing publishing careers with us. Interestingly, you both had a long break between Part One and Part Two of your writing history—not unusual, I suspect. I had a fifteen-year break myself, while raising children.

I think it will become more and more accepted that women in their sixties and beyond will be launching careers, building on previous experiences or branching out in a new direction, doing something that they have always secretly wanted to do!

And there is no better place to explore new possibilities than here on Substack 😉

Go for it ⭐