Welcome to the very first episode of Your Words Unleashed Podcast! I’m so excited to be here with you, sharing everything I know as a book author, writing coach, and publishing strategist. Find the full transcript for this episode at yourwordsunleashed.com/1.

Today I’ll walk you through how your thoughts about writing can either help speed your manuscript along or slow you way down. I’ll also introduce you to some empowering beliefs that will help you produce quality writing with greater ease and satisfaction.

But before we get into that, I’d like to share a bit about my story and the reasons why I decided to create a podcast to help women scholars like you who want to write and publish your first book. 

We academics know the power of research and how it can transform the ways people think and behave. By now you’ve likely invested years into your project, and your ideas are ready to be unleashed into the world. 

You truly deserve to be a powerful agent of social change. But you might be swamped with so much work and extra personal commitments that it can feel downright impossible to carve out the time and mental energy you need to write your manuscript, let alone to fully enjoy your life.

I started this podcast because I’ve been there! A little bit about me: I’m a sociologist and feminist ethnographer who has published two books with university presses. My first book, Outsourced Children: Orphanage Care and Adoption in Globalizing China, was published by Stanford University Press in 2016 and came out of my dissertation. 

Although publishing it was a happy event, by the time it came out I was utterly exhausted from writing it, which I can only describe as an incredibly drawn-out, frustrating, and isolating experience. 

As a first-time author fresh out of grad school, I was clueless about the publishing world and plagued by self-doubt and perfectionism. Due to fears of being judged, as well as having to uproot my life three times in three years for different professional positions, I held onto my manuscript for much longer than necessary. 

And, looking back, what was even worse was that, down deep, I believed I had to sacrifice my own personal happiness to get it all done.

For my second book, Chasing the American Dream in China: Chinese Americans in the Ancestral Homeland, which was published by Rutgers University Press in 2021, I vowed to do things very differently. So I applied lessons that I learned the first time around and didn’t put the rest of my life on hold while I was working on the project. 

In fact, over the course of writing my manuscript I received tenure, completed a 9-month-long life coaching certification program, got married, and had a baby. 

Now, this wasn’t a super simple or linear path, but ironically because I was doing so many things that meant a lot to me personally, my writing also felt more intentional. In the end, I enjoyed a much smoother process that led to fairly quick publication with a press that worked hard to meet all of my needs.  

Over the course of my career, I’ve seen too many deserving scholars, especially women of color and first-generation folks, not attain professional opportunities or get tenure because they weren’t able to get their book out. 

Not only does the academy and future generations of students lose out on their unique talents and abilities, but their groundbreaking ideas also never find an audience. I want to change all that!

Writing your first book is no easy feat, in part because it’s a huge undertaking that you’ve never accomplished before AND because there is no centralized place to find out the information you need to publish your manuscript once you’ve written it. 

The world of academic book publishing can be opaque and difficult-to-navigate. The lack of useful infor