Nic Stone on making the jump from YA to adult fiction

Bad On Paper

Becca Freeman

Skincare, Beauty, Society & Culture, Comedy, Advice, Books, Arts, Careers

4.9 • 4.1K Ratings

🗓️ 15 October 2025

⏱️ 63 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

We’re so excited for you to hear our conversation with Nic Stone! We chat with Nic about her author origin story, why she made the jump from YA to adult with her (very!) adult debut Boom Town, writing off her strip club visits for research, and more!

Obsessions

Becca - Shonda Rhimes on Call Her Daddy

Olivia - Floor lamp from Wayfair

What we read this week

Becca - The Idiot by Elif Batuman, The Force of Such Beauty by Barbara Bourland

This Month’s Book Club Pick - Heart The Lover by Lily King (have thoughts about this book you want to share? Call in at 843-405-3157 or email us a voice memo at [email protected])

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Hi, everyone and welcome to Bad on Paper podcast. I'm Olivia Mentor. And I'm Becca Freeman.
0:23.7	And today we have a really fun interview. Yeah, we're talking to Nick Stone, who is a very acclaimed Y-A author, who just made her adult debut. The book came out yesterday. It's called Boomtown. It is a thriller set in an Atlanta
0:40.8	strip club. And we talked to her about making the switch from YA to adult, the premise for this
0:49.3	book, and the thematic and social commentary within this book and what it has to say about race and
0:58.5	about women and especially about sex workers. So very interesting conversation ahead.
1:05.4	But before we get into that, Olivia, tell me your high.
1:08.8	My high and my lower, one in the same, and that is that I am very busy.
1:14.9	I am like my days are packed. I am fully focused at my desk all day long. And it's one of those
1:22.6	feelings where I'm like, I wish I maybe had a little less to do, but I also feel really, like, satisfied at the end of every day.
1:31.0	And I feel like I'm making good progress and all my different projects. And so, yeah, it's just this, like, I wish I was maybe completing everything on my to-do list every day, you know?
1:41.8	Okay. But it's still good. It's still good. It's like the
1:44.8	the nicest iteration of my career, I guess. It's been nice and it's been a little bit tiring.
1:52.3	What is keeping you so busy at your desk if you feel comfortable sharing?
1:57.9	Well, I have the retreat coming up, which I'm really excited about. So there's a lot of
2:01.1	little things, and I had a call with the hotel this past week, just planning menus, figuring out
2:07.2	gift bags, that kind of stuff, ordering stuff. So there's that kind of little stuff. There's little
2:12.3	podcast stuff here and there. There's substack stuff. But the main thing is just managing all of the behind the scenes
2:20.4	kind of promotional stuff that go into launching a book. So like gathering addresses from people
2:26.2	and figuring out who I want to send the book to and sending notes to those people,
2:31.4	pitching essays places, writing those essays. I had to write a letter to like the
2:36.4	booksellers that goes out with the book, I guess, this week. And that's sort of like another essay.
2:40.7	So just like lots of little things in that world. And then also constantly thinking about
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Becca Freeman, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Becca Freeman and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.