Caitlin Rother, a successful author, discusses her experience writing and publishing books, emphasizing the importance of book proposals and persistence in the face of rejection. She also mentions the need for multiple income streams and advises aspiring authors to have patience and work hard on promoting their books.
Key Points
- Caitlin discusses her career as a crime writer and how she got her start covering the Kristin Rossum case, which led to her first book deal
- Caitlin has written many book proposals and helps other authors write them as well, emphasizing their importance as a marketing vehicle to sell an idea
- Caitlin writes narrative nonfiction. Fiction so that it reads like a novel. But it’s all true
- Caitlin discusses her experience getting her first book published, transitioning from fiction to nonfiction, and working on a sequel during COVID. She also mentions hurting her wrists while writing quickly for NaNoWriMo and now reads her work aloud while editing.
- Caitlin’s writing routine varies depending on where she is in the process of a nonfiction book, but she is at the computer every day unless she can’t type due to other business tasks like revisions, copy editing, book tours, etc.
- Caitlin advises aspiring authors to have patience, not quit their day job until they have a contract and to prepare themselves to work hard on marketing their books. She also emphasizes the importance of persistence and not giving up too soon.
- Caitlin emphasizes the need to use rejection as a way to improve
I am here today with Caitlin Rother, rhymes with author. I first met her about eight years ago, I think, when she spoke at the Santa Barbara Writers conference. And she’s going to speak again this June 13 again at the Santa Barbara Writers conference down by the beach at the Mar Monte Hotel. So I thought I’d catch up with her and see what she’s doing lately. Welcome.
Caitlin: Thank you for having me.
Lisa: You’ve been recognized for your investigative journalism and you have 14 books you have written and coauthored. Did you always know you wanted to become a writer?
Caitlin: Well, I’ve always enjoyed writing, and I’ve been writing stories since I was a little girl back in the first grade. I remember we had an assignment in class to create our own book, and with colored pencils, I drew the pictures about a little family of mice that lived in the forest. And. My mother was very concerned because I killed off the mother of the mice family. I said, well, it just seems like there’s no story unless somebody dies. So that’s how it all got started. I didn’t really know I was going to be a writer, but I’ve always been writing stories, and I was an only child and not very social. I was very shy and introverted, and I told myself stories and I’d have voices that I’d do too myself to keep myself busy because I read a million of books. That’s what I did.
Lisa: And a lot of those when we’re kids, a lot of those fairy tales are, I mean, if you watch Disney, yeah, somebody has to die.
Caitlin: Well, some of those fairy tales, like Grimm’s fairy tales, you know, those things are dark, right? When I was in college at Berkeley, I worked for the school newspaper, and I also had an internship at a radio station. So I got into journalism. I took a class in journalism. I took fiction writing. I mean, I took everything. I had a very broad education at Berkeley in all kinds of things. So it was a great place to go because there were so many choices. But I didn’t really think about journalism because I didn’t want to go live in a small town. And that’s pretty much what I heard is when you start out in journalism, way back when you are expected to go to the middle of nowhere and pay your dues and work your way up. And so I eventually did do that. But, yes, I was working in corporate communications, which I absolutely hated. And I said, I got to get out of this. I’m going to go to journalism school because I thought the degree would help me. I ended up in the middle of nowhere, just like I said I didn‘t want to. And I actually got fired from my first journalism job because they’re like, you just don’t have it. I had to show them I did, and I didn’t miss a day of work. I went to the next job. They said, oh, you should just be in TV, which they thought was kind of an insult. But here we are years later, and I’m on 20/20, and I’ve got almost 15 books now. I think the laugh is on them. Determination and persistence and rebounding from rejection, those are the keys to getting where you need to go in this world as an author.
Lisa: Definitely the truth. Yeah. So how did your first book come about?
Caitlin: I worked at the San Diego Union Tribune. Most of what I covered during my career, I spent 19 years as an investigative newspaper reporter at mostly major metropolitan daily newspapers was government. I covered government and politics, so people think, oh, she was a crime writer, but I wasn’t. I covered incompetence and negligence and stupidity and people who lied and went bankrupt, and people still elected them. Even though I wrote these investigative stories, it made me a little crazy. So after covering government and politics and getting so disheartened by people, kept electing these people who were not qualified, in my opinion. And even when I wrote these stories exposing all that, they still got elected, which takes us to this election still happening. But I got sick of that.
I started getting more interested in crime writing. So on the Saturday shift, I asked for the police beat that day. And if there was a murder, I’d write about murder on a Saturday. And that’s kind of how I got into it. But to get my first book, I was working at county government, the beat, and I was no longer covering that. I was doing some kind of free floating fill in for everybody on the government team and enterprise team. I got a tip that this county toxicologist had been arrested for murder. And so I started covering the Kristin Rossum story from day one. It was my story. I broke the story. Turns out she was arrested for killing her husband, and she was accused of stealing drugs from the medical examiner’s office where she worked and using them to poison him. And she claimed he had killed himself because he was depressed and upset that she was leaving him for her boss, who was also married. So anyway, it was a great story, and I wrote 50 stories for the paper. I wrote a story for Cosmopolitan, which ran
in their international editions. And once that was over, I was allowed by my paper to pursue a book deal. I wrote a book proposal, which was rejected by a bunch of places. But I got it accepted and took six months off unpaid. Took a big risk. And it’s actually sold better than any of my other books. It is my best selling book.
That’s how I got started. I loved it. I got addicted to writing books because it’s journalism, but it’s long form journalism, so you can just go. The problem with journalism, especially, even more so today, is that shorter, shorter, shorter. There’s no room. The papers have gotten smaller and smaller and thinner and thinner until they’re like a pamphlet. So that’s why I really enjoyed it, I got to really dig into the investigative of side of the job, which I love. And then I got to write scenes. So I write narrative nonfiction. Fiction so that it reads like a novel. But it’s all true
Lisa: You had to write a book proposal, which, for nonfiction, that’s just like, standard. Right. But a lot of people find that kind of hard. Did you find writing that and you said it was rejected it a few times. Did you find yourself going back and revising it, or did you have to struggle a lot over that book proposal?
Caitlin: Book proposals are hard to write, but once you get the hang of it. I’ve written more than 25, and I work as a writing coach now and help other authors write book proposals because most of my book proposals have sold and are books. And when I’ve helped my clients, their book proposals have sold also.
I took a class for it. And the funny thing is, it’s fine to take a class. It’s fine to read a book on how to write a book proposal. But the real world is different. So I submitted it to an agent, and she had me rewrite the whole thing, like, three times. And I’ve stuck with the format she had me use, and it’s worked, and I’ve stuck with it. So she was right, and she didn’t end up taking me on, but I did get an agent, and then from there, I’ve had probably five agents. I think I’m on my fifth agent by now. But, you know, it’s not. It’s not that hard once you get the hang of it, but it’s important. It’s the marketing vehicle to sell your idea. So, you know, it’s a different kind of writing than your book.
Lisa: Yes, I know. Even writing query letters, I’ve written query letters for fiction.
Caitlin: It’s harder to write the synopsis than it is to write the book. Seriously? I think,
Lisa: Definitely. So you were very successful with your first book. Yes. How did you get into the second book?
Caitlin: Well, my first book, Poisoned Love, I was just so happy writing that. I remember I was just, God, this is so much fun. This is so great. Even though I’m not making any money and I’m taking this risk, and my advance was teeny. Right? The great thing was it went to a second printing within, like, I don’t know, a few weeks. And back in those days, true crime sold a lot more than it does now. And that’s what part of what makes life for true crime writers harder and harder is there’s so much on TV, there’s so many podcasts that people feel like they already know the story, and there’s just fewer and fewer people who buy the book. Unfortunately a lot of the TV shows and the podcasts use your book as the material. Don’t give any credit, and you don’t get paid. So it’s frustrating.
But my first book I ever wrote was fiction, and it’s Naked Addiction, and it’s what I actually wanted to do was to write crime fiction. I couldn’t get it published, though, because it’s very difficult, and even more so today, to get your first fiction book published. It’s just difficult. I was a professional nonfiction writer journalist, and I thought, well, okay, the universe is telling me I probably should get published in what I actually have a job in. I learned how to do narrative nonfiction at the paper. I wrote long narrative journalism, stories that took up 100 inches in the paper, where you’re basically telling a story through characters and scenes and dialogue, just like you would in a book. I was able to kind of transfer those skills.
I was writing fiction on the weekend and trying to get it published, and it took me, what, 17 years to get my first novel published. It’s kind of interesting, though, because in this last year, I’ve been rewriting the second book. So the sequel to that book has a detective, a surfing detective, named Ken Good. And this is kind of funny, given what’s going on these days, but kind of Ken, like Barbie and Ken. I kind of thought of him like a really smart, educated, New York Times Albert Camus reading detective. Right. Who’s sarcastic and smart and good and a good person. Right? So because of nonfiction, it’s so all encompassing, and the research takes so much time and takes all of my brain. I really couldn’t get back to the fiction because you really need to get into the fiction and have enough time to keep with it. And I really haven’t had that luxury.
So during COVID when I lost one of my book contracts because they lost their funding, I got back into writing the next book in what I wanted to be, a series. But because it had been so long since the first book, you have to write it as a standalone. So that’s what I did, and I worked on it for a long time, and it went through a couple of agents who said it needed work. And so I worked on it again, completely rewrote it, overhauled it a few times. That’s what I’ve been working on. And then while I sent it to my agent, it’s still with my agent. I haven’t heard a decision yet whether he’s going send it out. Or if he thinks it needs more work too. I have written a sequel to that one. I wrote that really quickly because I did the NaNoWriMo thing, and I wrote a whole book in less than two and a half months.
Lisa: Wow.
Caitlin: Yeah. And I hurt my wrists. Now I can’t type at all. So I’m reading it aloud because it’s too long anyway. And so I’m editing. I’m still kind of working, but I have to read it aloud, which is good, because you need to do that anyway.
Lisa: Do you think you’ll narrate the audiobook?
Caitlin: No. I actually have a great narrator who did the audiobook for the first one, and I need to keep him if I can. If I change publishers, I’m hoping to bring him with me, but, yeah, I mean, it’s actually not that common for an author to narrate their own book. The publishers want a professional actress or actor to do that, usually, unless you’re really big, which I’m not.
You did NaNoWriMo, but in general, do you have a writing routine you stick to?
Caitlin: Not really, because it really depends on what I’m working on. If I’m under contract with a nonfiction book, there’ll be months where I won’t be writing at all, just doing research, and then there are some months where I’ll do research and writing, and then months where I’ll just writing, then months where I’m just rewriting, all crammed into nine months to a year. It depends on where I am in the process. And then there’s revisions and copy editing and galley proofs and writing another book proposal and writing fiction and events and planning a book tour and doing your website and doing podcasts. No, I don’t write every day, but I am at the computer every day, unless I can’t type.
Lisa: Yeah, I know how that goes. I wrote a novel and self published it, and then I’m trying to work on the sequel, and I’ve had a lot of plot adjustments to work on. And then, of course, like you said, there’s all sorts of other business stuff that comes in. And so when you’re talking about writing fiction, sometimes it can be hard to get back into it.
Caitlin: Yeah. For the past year, that’s all I’ve been doing, pretty much, is writing fiction, because my next book, which is down to the bone on the murder of the McStay family, was supposed to come out in January. So I planned to do a giant book tour. At this point. I was supposed to be on the book tour, but my publisher delayed it, and so now it has a pub date in October. I did not line up another nonfiction book.
I said to myself, hey, you know what? I’m going to write fiction. I’m going to give myself this time to write fiction. I was also hoping to work on a screenplay. Um, my most recent book, Death on Ocean Boulevard, which is the one that’s going to be featured at the conference, has been optioned for a TV series, so they’re still in development. The option has been renewed because we got in the middle of the writers and actor strike, which totally screwed everything up and postponed everything, and we kind of lost our momentum there. But once that gets going, I’m going to be involved in that. And I wanted to learn script writing so I could potentially adapt my other books to limited series or movies or what have you.
That was going to be, hopefully, mt next part of my career as I’m continually having to evolve and change with the incredible shrinking media and the incredible shrinking publishing world and all of the changes that requires and reinventions. And at the same time, the development production company is also trying to get me a podcast deal where it would be a seasonal and episodic kind of way of reusing the material from my books.
But I have a lot of material that didn’t even get into the books. I have audio interviews and other things that wouldn’t go into a book. They would only be suited for a sound format. I’ve got a bunch of irons in the fire, all different kinds of stuff that I can do with the same set of skills because I do TV as well. I’ve been on 20/20 twice recently. I just had a conversation yesterday with a producer in England who wants me to do a show actually on my first book. They still are looking for stories, and they can’t find new ones, so they go back 20 years to the stories that have been done already. It’s kind of funny, but that’s actually a whole other line of skills that I’ve developed by being an author. So podcasts, TV, radio, all kinds of things, blogging and coaching and teaching, and all these things are all related to being an author. And you need all those income streams to keep you going.
TV deal and the screenwriting, that sounds very exciting.
Caitlin: The producer is actually also reading my fiction that I’ve worked on. So she’s interested in that as well. So we’ll see what happens.
Lisa: Yeah, that’s great. To bring it back to the Santa Barbara Writers Conference, the founder, Barnaby Conrad, he wrote the bestselling book around 1950, Matador. And I think over the course of the rest of his life, it was optioned for film, like, several times. He got a lot of money on that. But they never made the film.
Caitlin: That’s not unusual. Yeah, just because your book is optioned does not mean it gets to TV. Everyone like, oh, when can we watch that? I’m like, let’s hire some writers first. And a showrunner, let’s get there first.
Lisa: So when you submit things and they get sent back to you, and when a deal falls through, and that must be kind of crushing. How do you handle that?
Caitlin: Well, I’ll tell you what. The past year I’ve been tested mightily. The delays in the book for the McStay book, that’s been very frustrating for me because I can’t do anything until that gets out. I’ve been having to wait. It was in legal review for a long time, and I couldn’t do anything. I couldn’t set up a book tour. I couldn’t promote it. I just had to wait.
Then I did the fiction, and I had to wait for the agent to get back to me. So there’s been a lot of waiting, and that is not unusual right now. Everybody’s backed up. The actors and writer strike really screwed up a lot of things. So did COVID, and it’s completely changed again and made more dysfunctional and already pretty difficult industry. So agents are tired. Their submissions are completely backed up, and apparently, so are the editors. There are fewer editors. The agents are tired. I mean, it’s just a difficult time to get something published. And so the big writers who are already big, they’re doing okay. But the midlist authors like me and the newbies who are trying to break in, it’s much more difficult. And I’ve got a lot of books.
It’s not like I haven’t been successful so far. I have been, and I keep getting book contracts. When I write a nonfiction book proposal, it generally sells. There have been a couple that haven’t, but the vast majority of them have. So it’s just that it’s gotten really difficult also to write nonfiction, and the kind of nonfiction that I write. Because true crime, like I said, there’s so much of it on TV in these podcasts that the market is saturated.
But also the resources for research are also less so. I’m lucky I have good sources. I’ve managed to get entire sheriff’s investigative files through the discovery process. There’s somebody involved in the case, but if you don’t get that, you got to go to the court. I’ve gone to some of these courts, and I’d open up the file, and there’s nothing in it. Back when I was a newspaper reporter, it would be packed with stuff, but we have these new laws and a governor who thinks that rehabilitation is really important. And so the people who have criminal convictions and criminal pasts, once they get out, there’s a time limit now where that information is in the file and then it’s taken out. So I went back like a year later to go look at something that I looked at a year later and a year before, and it was gone. Everything I wanted to look at was gone. It’s even more difficult to write my primary genre that I’ve been working in for all these years. So I’m kind of having to rejigger where I’m going and what I’m going
to be doing in all those different ways.
Then there’s TikTok. So don’t even get me started on how much time that takes and that intimidates me. And Congress is trying to ban it. I am on TikTok, but I haven’t really made use of anything because it’s so time consuming. And I’ve tried doing one of those little things, and I’m just not good at it. I need an assistant. I need somebody who’s young and good at that.
Lisa: But you do coaching yourself. What kind of things do you do to help authors?
Caitlin: Well, I am really good, I think, at developmental shaping. So editing on the front end, helping somebody kind of shape an idea, helping somebody sell their book proposal, so putting the book proposal together, and this is also how they write the book. If they come to me early enough, I will help them figure out what needs to be in the book and how to create a narrative structure and how to tell a story and how to do research, because research is my big thing.
I’m a research consultant also, so I get hired sometimes just to do research for people for various personal or professional reasons. I help people with writing, I help people with research, help people with book proposals, help people shape their book ideas. They’ll come to me and they’ll say, I have an idea for a book. And I’ll say, tell me about it. And then I’ll help them shape it and what they need to do next.
Lisa: Yes, adapting and pivoting and patience. All those things are things we need. Are there any other parting advice that you have for authors out there?
Caitlin: If you’re like me and you feel like you have a calling, I mean, I wanted more than anything to have a book published, and it took me, I think it was 17 years to get my novel published. It took me 15 years to get my first book published. So I had been trying to get published for 15 years when I got the Poisoned Love deal. And I can’t tell you how much I was ecstatic when I got that first contract. I was, like, beyond ecstatic. And it was addictive and I kept at it. And even though things are hard and they continue to be hard, there still isn’t anything else that I can see myself doing. And so it doesn’t pay very much. But like I said, you have all these other things that you end up developing as other income streams.
Some people don’t quit their day job, which is my advice.
Until you really have, you’re into the groove and you know you’re going to get more contracts. Don’t quit your day job. People say, well, I don’t have time and I don’t have the energy to write. I’m like, well, I worked at the newspaper and then I wrote around the time that I was at work. It’s before work, after work, on the weekends. So you have two jobs. I did that for a number of years. And then once you are an author, you still have to bust your butt to be promoting and marketing and blogging. I don’t know so much now, but newsletters or podcasts or whatever it is that you’re going to do to promote yourself because the books don’t sell themselves.
It’s a lot of work. But if you really believe in it and you really want to do it, you do it. Because the problem is if people who give up too soon, the overnight success, 20 to 30 years. Look at Robert Downey, Jr. When did he say, 40 years? He’s been an actor before he won his first Academy Award. That’s literally not everybody, Meryl Streep. And that’s the same thing with being an author. It’s a lot of hard work and determination, rejection, rebounding from rejection and persistence, and you got to get up every day and keep going because the day you quit, that’s the day that you’re not going to get there.
Lisa: That’s true. It sounds like things are changing in your career and developing every day, every week. And so we’ve got a couple of months until you speak on June 13 at the Santa Barbara Writers conference, so I’m sure things could change again and you’ll have a lot of news and updates for people then.
Caitlin: Probably. I hope to have good news.
Lisa: I’m sure you will. Well, thank you so much for all that. I think this has been very encouraging.
Caitlin: Oh, good, because I was worried that I didn’t want to be Debbie Downer.
Lisa: No, I think it’s been very encouraging and people really do need to. I mean, speaking of writers conferences, I’ve heard that there are people who will go to a writer’s conference and they’ll be there for a couple of days and they’ll say, nobody wants to publish my work now I’m going to leave.
Caitlin: Then they’re not going to get anywhere because you get kicked to the curb about a million times and you just got to get up again. That’s it. You just got to brush yourself off and go, okay. Either I don’t trust or believe what that person said. I believe in this or he’s right or she’s right, and I do need to do more work. And then you use that to improve.
Lisa: Yes. Well, I’m looking forward to seeing you in person in June.