In this month’s Behind the Book series we asked the best-selling, award-winning authors of So Close, Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus, to weigh in on how to find the perfect co-author. So Close, released June 7 on SparkPress, is the authors’ last—yes, last!—co-authored book together. The book has already been praised by US Weekly (“Best Reads for the Beach”) and Redbook Magazine (“21 Books By W9781940716763_fc(1)omen You Have to Read This Summer”), to name a few. Booklist declared “Guarded, genuine Amanda makes a compelling heroine in McLaughlin and Kraus’s most moving outing yet”, while Library Journal said “

[So Close] is a great rags-to-riches story with a sincere, determined protagonist.”

Emma and Nicola have written 10 books together, with the best known probably being the #1 New York Times bestseller The Nanny Diaries. Newsweek declared The Nanny Diaries a “phenomenon.” It is the longest-running hardcover bestseller of 2002, and in 2007 it was released as a major motion picture starring Scarlett Johansson, Laura Linney, and Alicia Keys. McLaughlin and Kraus are also the authors of three other New York Times bestsellers―Citizen Girl, Dedication and Nanny Returns—and just released their last novel, So Close (SparkPress, June 7). They have appeared numerous times on CNN, MSNBC, The Today Show, Good Morning America, Entertainment Tonight, and The View. In addition to writing for television and film, McLaughlin and Kraus travel around the country speaking to young women about feminism and gender issues in American corporate culture.

Below, Nicola dishes on the core elements of working with a co-author, and also answers the question everyone wants to know: why is this the last book for her and Emma?

 

There’s a song in A Chorus Line called “What I Did For Love,” in which an actress presumably on the cusp of moving on with her career says, “I can’t regret what I did for love.” It comes to mind as my writing partner and I try to sum up a career spanning sixteen years and ten novels, figure out the takeaways, and try to pull some actionable advice from the experience.

The first, and most obvious, piece of advice is that you must be in love with your work. Unabashedly in love. Even though we’re women and we aren’t good at touting our strengths and we self-deprecate as a reflex and try to beat other critics to the punch by being our own, it is essential to be wholeheartedly in love with your work. Even if it’s so far from where you know it’s going to get to. Even if it’s garnering a hundred rejection letters. Your story is yours. And the very act of getting it out of your brain is one of bravery.

The second is that, as we all try to consider the marketplace and be strategic and capture eyeballs, you have to make those key decisions about which story to tell from your gut and heart—not your head. If you put out a novel you’re passionate about and it doesn’t sell, well, you swung for the fences and you’ll have no regrets. But if you write something because you think you should and then it doesn’t sell, it will be harder to live with yourself.memes

Third, the creative life is hard and it helps to have allies. One of the best gifts of our career is our friendships with other authors. We love reading their work, cheering them on when their books come out, and watching their progress. Which is why it always surprises us when we hear younger authors trying to jockey for position and figure out who they can climb above and claw past. We’re a community. Treat everyone in this business how you want to be treated. It feels disgusting when you suspect other people aren’t celebrating your success—don’t do that to someone else, even if you’ll never meet them.

Fourth, get clear—are you doing this for love, as in the service of? Or for love, as in to get it? Because the love that you give you can always control, the love that comes is a harder beast. We are give-a-limb grateful that The Nanny Diaries came out before social media. I actively shudder to think what would have happened if people could have pounced on us after that first wave of media without reading the book and seeing that we weren’t criticizing mothers at all. Twitter, Amazon, blog comments—these are all places where people can sound off in the most brutal way now. I always caution my writer friends who publish articles in advance of their pub date that you can write, “Kittens and Ponies Are Cute,” and someone will write, “Kittens and ponies are fucking heinous you fucking asshole,” and someone else will write, “I’m allergic to ponies. You clearly have no sensitivity whatsoever and I hope you die.” It will take your eyebrows off and hurt your heart.

But it is not a real comment on whether you were making a good point in the first place. Don’t read your 1-star Amazon reviews, don’t read your article comments, don’t read the second half of your Kirkus Reviews. Don’t focus on trying to win approval, because the people who will love your work will most likely do so in silence. Love tends to be quiet. Hate is loud.

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Try to focus instead on being in service of the work, and your readers. Think of yourself as their Secret Santa. You’re sending this gift out to them, they’ll never really know you, and you don’t expect thanks.

Fifth, get clear on what you love about writing. Emma finally figured out after all these years that she loved problem solving through narrative, but the act of sitting down to write every day actually really stressed her out. So now she’s taken her same skills and applied them to narrative-based executive consulting and she is so much happier. I actually love the whole package—I love my desk, my coffee, my snacks.

I love the feel of my fingers on my silicone keypad protector. I love that I can see myself sitting here ten, twenty, thirty years from now, thinking, sharing.

That love dictated that my next move after Emma and I stopped collaborating had to be writing-based. My first comic book comes out this fall. It also dictated that my day-job had to be the same, so I started a creative consulting firm. It’s important to be open to what form that love takes. My actor friends became voiceover artists. My poets are copywriters, my artists are graphic designers. They channeled that love into something that loved them back in the form of money—and that is the love you never regret.

Which brings me to the great love—Emma. The books blur, but I will never forget two safety-conscious women throwing it all to the wind, hitchhiking to get to Madonna before the doors shut, or the airport that looked like it had nipple pasties stuck to the floor. Being in a partnership forced me to be present to the part of the process outside of the page. And that’s where the joy—and the laughing until we peed—happened.

In our early 20s we loved the song “Human Nature”, which ends with Madonna saying, “Absolutely no regrets.” In our 40s, we love Brene Brown, who says that regrets are a healthy and vital part of maturing. So I will say that I do have regrets, but they pertain to bad advice we followed, good advice we ignored, all to do with the business, none to do with the art.

As we put out our tenth and final novel this month we are kissing that part of today goodbye, but the love for each other, and the books, we take with us.

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About So Close by Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus:

From international #1 best-selling authors Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus comes a story about a girl from the trailer parks of central Florida and the two powerful men who shape her life―one of whom will raise her up to places she never imagined, the other of whom will threaten to destroy her.

Amanda Beth Luker has spent her whole life desperately looking for someone who can show her the way out of her trailer park Florida town. And then, finally, help arrives―in the form of Tom Davis, a successful lawyer with political aspirations who grew up just a few towns over from Amanda. But it’s his wife, Lindsay, who really captures Amanda’s imagination. Strong, smart, and determined, she gives Amanda something she’s never had―a role model. Meanwhile Amanda is introduced to the wealthy, charismatic, and deeply troubled Pax Westerbrook. He clearly desires Amanda, but if she gives in will that move her closer to the life she’s always dreamed of―or make it impossible?

Amanda rides Davis’s political success all the way to Washington, where he becomes Senator and will later be tapped for president and even make a bid for the White House. But when Amanda starts to suspect, and later confirms, his moral indiscretions, her loyalty is tested. Will a girl from a trailer park even be believed if she goes public with damning information? Will she be willing to risk losing everything she’s gained?