Hello, writer!

Another month has come and gone—and that means it's time for us to meet a new author. I am thrilled to introduce you to Amelia Hruby, the author of Fifty Feminist Mantras and host of one of my favorite podcasts, Off the Grid!

​Amelia Hruby, PhD, is a feminist author, educator, podcaster, and the founder of Softer Sounds, a podcast studio for entrepreneurs and creatives. Over the past decade, she’s been a university professor, a community organizer, and a radio DJ. Her first book, Fifty Feminist Mantras, was published by Andrews McMeel in 2020.

Fifty Feminist Mantras started on Instagram and became a book. How did you start writing, and when did you realize it might be a book?

In the fall of 2016, I started sharing feminist mantras on Instagram, and that came about pretty organically. I was in grad school, taking courses on women and gender studies, and sharing my life on Instagram. We were seeing the rise of influencer culture, a lot of prominent bloggers moving to Instagram.

In the beginning, I had a blog and Instagram, so I'd share the mantras on both. Eventually, the blog faded out, and I was just on Instagram. My intention was to bring together everything I was learning in feminist theory classes with the social community practices. That started shortly before the 2016 election, and it went from being a fun, personal project to a political project serving a community need. I was writing feminist mantras when I went to the Women's March in 2017 and when we were seeing this new wave of feminist activism in the US.

I thought of the feminist mantras as a personal practice that I paired with the political work of a podcast I launched called 50 Feminist States. These different projects were both personal and political because, for me, feminism is so much about inner and outer work. We have to do a lot to unlearn dominant cultural narratives, patriarchal narratives, white supremacist narratives, capitalist narratives. That's what the mantras served, and connecting with local community activism was what the podcast served.

Eventually, I had this whole series of these mantras, and they were on social media, and they all included journaling prompts, and I was like, “It would be so great if this was actually a journal that you could use.” In the fall of 2017, about a year after I started the project, I had 52 weeks, I had 50 mantras, and I gathered them all together and self-published a book. The traditionally published book came three years later through a whole other series of funny internet events.

What was it like to go from self-publishing to a traditional publishing experience?

It was a serendipitous experience. I self-published Fifty Feminist Mantras (affiliate link*) and was working on my podcast, 50 Feminist States, which was funded through Kickstarter. While I was running the second Kickstarter campaign, I got an email from an editor who had seen the campaign, gone to my website, and noticed my self-published book. She was the audiobook editor or in charge of audiobooks at Andrews McMeel and was tasked with finding podcasters they could do books with. She reached out to see if I might share my manuscript with her and if I'd be interested in traditionally publishing it. I sent her the manuscript, and I got a contract.

I used that contract to get an agent, my agent negotiated the contract, and we published the book a year later. It was a one-year process. It was really fast. Then the book was done, and I was waiting for it to be released. The book came out in October of 2020, so I had a pandemic book release, which was its own whole experience. The way the book was published was really fun. I'm grateful I had that experience because publishing a book with a publisher and seeing my book in Barnes and Noble was something on my list of things I wanted in my life. I got to have that experience when I was 29 and that felt super magical and amazing. Also, it allowed me to release the dream: I had the dream, I did the book.

Everyone asked me, do you want to do another book? Are you going to do more traditional publishing? What I learned was that I don't enjoy the traditional publishing cycle. I don't want to write a book proposal. I got to skip some of that process, and I don't want to do that, having seen even the blips of it I have. It's not an exciting way for me to share. I love a more direct method, and I love self-publishing.

If I hadn't had the opportunity to publish Fifty Feminist Mantras with a traditional publisher, that might have been a dream I was chasing for my 30s, 40s, or 50s, or the rest of my life. It was nice to have that dream, get what I wanted, realize that it actually didn't entail most of the stuff I wanted, and then take myself down a different path. There was so much joy, relief, and release in that experience. It helped me become clear about what was important to me.

There is a mythology that surrounds traditional publishing, what that is like, what kind of legitimacy it confers, and the money. All of those things get wrapped up in it, and the experience is often very, very different. I feel like I was living a sort of archetype. I was the elementary schooler who wrote on my own, I wrote and illustrated my own books, and everyone my whole life told me what a good writer I was. It's a common archetypal dream that I hear from a lot of writers and authors, and I think that having this experience burst a lot of the perfect pictures that I had around what it would entail.

My book advance was $7,500. They had pitched me $5,000, and then my agent negotiated it up, which basically paid for her fees. From that money, I paid my own illustrator and cover designer. I paid for all the promo. I did not hire a publicist because I didn't have enough money. I spent about half of the advance on the illustrations and other things, and then a website. By the time I invested all this in the book launch, I maybe got paid two or three grand to write the book. I will never receive royalties on this book. I think it sold 3,000 copies, which is great for what a small audience I had at that time. But it will go out of print, and I will not see royalties. I'm so grateful and glad it happened. I'm always here to be transparent and help other people see the reality of this experience. It was such a gift, and it was a blip.

I think the magic for me, in my experience of my creative practice, comes a lot from astrology. There's a lot of Earth in my chart. I'm a very down-to-earth person, so I like to be in it with the work. Self-publishing my book, getting all the copies shipped to my house, and shipping them out individually. I shipped them out myself, and when people bought them, I got the money. The flows felt much more immediate and it's super cool. In traditional publishing, I wrote the book, and then it came out, and then a year later, I got a royalty statement. The relationship between the creative practice, the readers’ experience, and the money was so stretched apart. I like it when it's all close together. If you're that kind of person, I think self-publishing works really well and may feel better than traditional publishing.

What was your writing process like for the material that became Fifty Feminist Mantras?

I'm a fan of a phone note! I was always gathering words that inspired me—phrases, snippets of things that I thought could become mantras. Every Monday morning, I would sit down, and I would choose the mantra, write the post, make a little graphic for Instagram, and then I would post it. It was a very meditative and connected, creative way to start my week.

The process had check-in points. The series was called Feminist Mantra Monday, so I would share a mantra every Monday morning. If I hadn't shared it before lunchtime, I would get texts from people like, “Is it happening today?” That became my Monday morning writing and sharing practice, and then it went on social media.

When I wanted it to become a book, I took a couple of weeks to gather all that material together. I rewrote everything to feel a little more cohesive and created the book’s layout. One of my beloved friends, Emily Jaynes, created the cover for me, and then I sent it to print. It was a long-term project with a weekly practice, and then the creation of the book was pretty seamless.

Did you encounter any roadblocks with your writing process or routine? How did you deal with those when they came up?

I definitely struggled to feel like I had something to say every week. It is both the benefit and the challenge of having a weekly sharing practice with a growing audience because people were asking me where they were. I felt a certain level of accountability to my community, and that kept me writing every week.

There were weeks when I didn't want to start my week that way. You know, sometimes I had work I needed to do, or I wanted to sleep in and not work on a Monday. I was always thinking about that practice. It was all about balancing the creative inspiration with the community sharing and then continuing to come to the page over and over again.

I did it for a year, and then I took a year off after I published the book. I would do a year on and a year off, and I did that two or three times. That was really supportive for me, having a rigorous weekly practice but also an ebb and flow over the course of these years.

There’s an expectation that we will all produce at the same level, all the time, forever, no matter what. Modeling that ebb and flow through your own practice is powerful!

Thank you! Even now, I see how I have different outlets that offer different schedules or different relationships to consistency. My writing practice has moved primarily into podcasting; I have a weekly podcast, but it's always seasonal. I take summer breaks; I take winter breaks.

A major theme of the book is that this practice is seasonal. Seasonality is a big part of how I approach my work and how I approach my writing and podcasting practice. I'm always thinking about the seasons of the natural world around us. I'm thinking about my inner seasons. I'm thinking about my monthly-ish menstrual cycle as a season, a series of seasons I go through every month. I think about projects having their own seasons.

One thing I love about podcasts is that we talk about them in seasons. There might be an ebb and flow and the more we can have those seasonal rhythms in our work, the more sustainable it is over time. I try to embrace that in the book and and everything I do.

You were once in academia and on social media—and all of that has changed. What else has changed in your writing practice?

I was excited to do this interview because being a writer used to be a primary identity for me, and that has shifted. Being a podcaster has become the primary identity. I had a conversation recently with my friend and colleague Nicole Antoinette about how Nicole used to run a really big podcast and now has a weekly Substack newsletter.

She said she can't podcast and write at the top of her game at the same time, and I feel the same way. Some of that perhaps has to do with the internal and long-term philosophical tension between writing and speaking. We can go back to Plato and Aristotle for that division. It also has to do with rhythms. When I became a weekly podcaster, I could only do one thing really well every single week. I don't have the energy to do multiple things at that level with that rhythm.

I'm in the season where I'm podcasting creatively. I'm super focused on that craft. I'm growing my community. I'm not writing as much—the writing I'm doing now is marketing writing and copywriting, a little bit of personal writing. I'm not creative writing the way that I was when I started the mantras and wrote the book. I was creative writing all the time. I was sharing it with my community. I was also academic writing very intensely. Writing was the core focus of my practice. I was writing a dissertation, and then I was writing a blog and social media posts and these mantras, and those were beautifully balanced efforts, different types of writing that balanced nicely.

Now, I'm podcasting all the time at the top of my game, and I'm much more focused on speaking. The same values permeate all of that, a similar seasonal relationship to my creative practice permeates all of that. It feels a little bit like going from being a painter to a sculptor. I shifted media, and it's not that I never paint ever, but I'm not doing that as publicly anymore.

What is on the horizon for you creatively? What's coming next?

I'm currently recording the third season of the Off The Grid podcast, which is my podcast about marketing without social media, and I love making it. I have so many great conversations! I share, I teach a lot on the show, and it is really fun to do. I spend most of my creative energy running my business Softer Sounds, which is a podcast studio. We produce shows for about a dozen clients at any given time, and Off the Grid lives under that umbrella.

And then, after I've said all of this stuff about how I'm podcasting and not writing, I do think there is a book an Off the Grid book on the horizon in 2025. I've been feeling the pull toward a book version of the podcast. We should hit 100 episodes by the end of this year, and that feels exciting. It feels like a moment to distill what has been shared.

I don't know what the format will be. Sometimes, I think it's going to be more of a guidebook about leaving social media or business success without social media. Sometimes, I think it's turning one of my courses into a guidebook. Sometimes, I think it's a written and reported book.

With podcasting, I've gotten really expansive. My creativity is all over the place. I am feeling the urge to integrate and distill that into something that people can read and explore without listening to 100 hours of a podcast. I mean, come listen, hang out with me, but also, maybe you want to hold it in your hand and read it on the couch. The full-circle moment is on the horizon.

How do you think your writing practice will change, given the shifts you’ve experienced and where you are in your career?

When I think about writing a book now, in a funny way, I return to my roots. I have gone back to my zine-making practice, which was a big part of my life when I moved to Chicago. I tabled at Zine Fest there for many, many years. I love making zines. I've always loved self-publishing.

When I imagine what the writing process will look like for an Off the Grid book or any future book, it goes back to those roots. It will be a mix of personal writing with more political commentary. I love political zines with educational informational material, which I think is a great category, so I feel like that's where I'm headed. I’m going back to my roots to step a little bit out of copywriting, a little bit out of traditional publishing. I went down the social media path, then the traditional publishing path, and then into the marketing and copywriting path. I want to come back to that initial place where I started sharing my writing, and that's what I'll be drawing on when I return to my writing practice.

If you had one piece of advice you were going to give to another writer, what would that be?

I have two: cultivate your craft, and share before you’re ready. It’s really important to keep improving your writing, and the only way you can keep improving is if you keep writing and if you get feedback. Keep working on your craft, keep honing your craft to become a better writer.

It’s important to share your work with someone. I'm not saying you need to put it on social media. I'm not saying you need to publish it on the internet at all. Show it to your best friend, show it to a stranger at a local writing meetup. Show it to people and get feedback. We need those reflections to get better. That's how we improve.

With the rise of Substack’s popularity, I am seeing way more bad, unbaked writing out there. I realized I said share before you're ready, so that's inevitably going to mean there's writing out there that's not as good as it could be. We have to do a little bit more, and we can always get better.

This is not my advice, but someone says if you read your work from five years ago and you don’t think it’s crap, you haven’t gotten any better. When I read Fifty Feminist Mantras, I’m like, oh, bless this beautiful baby book. I would write it so differently. When I listen to my 50 Feminist States podcast, I think, oh, baby Amelia podcaster. I would make this so differently.

All we can do is improve and seek out the right feedback to help us improve. That is the writer’s path.

What’s the best book you’ve read recently?

I read a fun romance called Best Served Hot (affiliate link*), a romance between two food critics. That's a real treat. I love food writing. This book made me hungry, and I really enjoyed it.

I read a really great, really short horror novel called Come Closer (affiliate link*) by Sarah Gran. It’s a story about a possession that came out about ten years ago. It's super smart and good and an enjoyable read for as creepy as it was.

My favorite nonfiction book that I read recently is Enchantment (affiliate link*) by Katherine May. My favorite contemporary essayists are Katherine May and Rebecca Solnit. Maggie Smith is a poet, but her memoir, You Could Make This Place Beautiful (affiliate link*), was written in more of an essay style. All of their work is pretty unparalleled for me. Every time I make the time to be with it, it fills my cup for creative craft and personal spiritual wisdom.

I loved chatting with Amelia about her journey through self-publishing and traditional publishing and her creative identity shifts—and I can't wait to read the Off the Grid book!

One reminder before we go: the Writing Power Hour starts next week! If you're ready to join your favorite new virtual writing group, sign up now, and I'll see you there.