Hi everyone and welcome to Bad on Paper podcast. I'm Olivia Mentor and I'm Becca Freeman.

And today we're talking about the book Killers of a Certain Age by Deanna Rayborn. It's

our September book club pick I just finished it last night and I'm really excited to talk about it.

Before we do should we do some highs and lows? Yes, tell me about your high. I'm really excited to

hear you talk more about this. I saw it a little bit on Instagram and I was really excited for you.

So tell us all about it. So my high and my lower both have to do with my book. So it's it's good and

bad right now. I have the most major warm and fuzzies. So this week I'm like slowly slowly and

quickly getting towards taking my book on submission, which means taking it out to sell. And I was talking

to my agent on Tuesday night and I was like, is there anything I can do to like help the process

because you know, I feel like people are excited about this, but how do I make sure publishers know

that I feel like there's some pessimism about whether followers will convert into readers. There's

this really interesting New York Times article that we can link in the show notes about major

celebrities. One of the key examples used today is Billy Eilish who have millions and millions of

followers and then write books and then nobody buys them. And so you know, I wanted to make sure

potential publishers knew how excited people were. And so I asked on Instagram if people would

leave a testimonial because that's what they do. I don't know when Grace did the Sephora squad,

that's how they did it. And so I was like, oh, you know, I'll put up like a Google form and ask

people for testimonials, Olivia, I put out the ask 993 people left them. They are so nice.

They are so nice. I was fully crying reading them on Tuesday night. I was so overwhelmed. This

is just people saying, I love back in. I will read anything she writes, right? Yes, some of them

were so creative. Like some people were just like, I will buy this book cannot wait to pre-order this

book. And some people wrote like very creative fun things. And I am just, I am so bold over it.

...