How My Rom Com Novel Got Its Happy Ending : Adrienne Gunn
Appropriately enough, Adrienne's publishing journey has all the twists and turns of your fave romances
“How I Did X” is my interview series with fellow writers and artists about how they accomplished one very cool thing, like breaking into The New Yorker, publishing books without an agent, and (of course) getting an agent.
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This month, I talked to my former work colleague and fellow hilarious Chicago storyteller
. She is a writer and podcaster obsessed with pop culture. When she’s not busy watching reality TV, Adrienne works as a content strategist, performs as a storyteller and comedian, and hangs out with her adorable son and adorable puppy.Adrienne’s debut novel is Fan Favorite, a smart and funny romance novel that skewers Reality TV in a way that can only be done if you’re a true connoisseur (and admirer) of the genre:
Thirty-five year old Edie Pepper, a rosé loving, reality TV obsessed copywriter from Chicago, dreams of plucking her soulmate from the depths of Hinge (or Tinder or Bumble). Following yet another dumpster fire of a date, Edie is consoling herself with boxed wine and E! News when Ryan Seacrest drops a bomb: Edie’s high school sweetheart has been cast as the lead in America’s most beloved reality dating show, The Key, and wow, does he look different. Charlie Bennett, Edie’s chubby cheeked, cosplay loving high school boyfriend has had a serious glow up, and is now a world traveling, extreme sports hunk.
Desperate to reclaim her One True Love, Edie DMs the show’s conniving producers, who are more than happy to shove Edie headfirst into the competition. But Charlie isn’t quite who she remembers, and he’s as desperate to hide his past as Edie is to reveal it. Further complicating matters is Peter Kennedy, The Key‘s cranky showrunner, who, despite his best efforts, finds himself drawn to Edie’s everywoman charm.
As Edie reevaluates her search for love, FAN FAVORITE explores the hilarious behind-the-scenes of our favorite reality dating shows, and the potential outcomes when you get vulnerable in the name of finding your Happily Ever After.
What can we learn from Adrienne? A few notes:
You can transform a devastating rejection into an empowering experience. I really admire and respect Adrienne for genuinely asking herself how she could complete this project in a way that honored all the time she devoted to it. I get so locked into doing things “right” and following the traditional path that I have often simply gone for defeated when my own goals fail to take off, instead of thinking what other life I can give them.
While connections are important in the industry, what stands out to me about her story is not how much they can open doors but how much we need to tap into others for emotional support. Dealing with frustrations on your own can often feel draining and counterproductive. Sharing them with others, you can find solutions.
Sometimes your project needs another format. Maybe that screenplay is a novel. Maybe that novel is a podcast. Maybe that podcast is a one-woman show. Do what is best for the story.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
What is the origin of Fan Favorite?
After I got divorced, I was watching a lot of The Bachelor, and I would always think that the funniest thing in the world would be if a normal person went on this show and had on a Tankini from Athleta while everyone else was in these tiny bikinis. I just felt like a regular person, who would say what the viewers at home are thinking, would be ripe for hilarious stuff to happen.
Once that seed was planted, what was the first draft to final draft process like? Did you take classes? Did you have a writing group? How did you get through it?
I did an MFA, of which I have conflicted feelings about. When I was done, I had to do something else. I decided I would write a screenplay about a Bridget Jones-like character going on a reality TV show. I did that and quickly found out it's basically impossible to get anyone to look at a screenplay you wrote. It went into a drawer. I moved back to Chicago, and I started doing standup classes and storytelling. Then I met Rachel (note: our former co-worker Rachel Bertsche, ghostwriter extraordinaire and author of The Kids Are in Bed, among other books) and she was deep in the book world, making it look like something people could do. She was taking calls with her agent and writing books, like that was just a thing people did. I would be like, “I can't believe you're doing this.” She would say, “Of course you could do it”. Eventually I decide I’d try, and I unearthed this book idea. This would've been a million years ago though, for all the struggling writers out there. I started writing it around 2018 and I felt like I had the end in sight when COVD hit. Everything got totally derailed. I was home with my kid, my puppy, work It just kept going in fits and starts until it was finally done in 2022. It was a long process. I finished my MFA in 2012, so yeah.
One of the reasons I wanted to interview you was because I know this book has had a whole journey, starting with the fact that you first queried agents and it led to zero representation. I was hoping you could chat with me about that dark period.
I would love to because I think for any writer out there, you see somebody have success and you're like, what the…? I'm out here struggling, why can't I make this work? If my story helps even one person!
I had worked on the book for years, but it had also been worked on by multiple people in my life—other writers, other people from my MFA. I felt it was solid and frankly better than a lot of books I was reading. This book is smart, it's fun. I felt nervous but somewhat confident when I started querying agents. And let me tell you that tanked it. It was terrible. I would get rejections, sometimes two a day. I remember one time being in my bed and getting one right after another.
At the end of the day, I queried something like 47 agents. Out of those, maybe five to seven took fulls. A lot of them just went into the black hole. You never hear from those people again. I tell people who are looking for agents, if you get somebody who responds quickly, that means they're actually reading their emails and they're interested and that's a good sign. I didn't get any agent. I was very despondent. I was so depressed. Oh my God, I've been trying to do this thing for I don't even know. I started writing seriously in 2004. It had been a lot of years, and I couldn’t even get an agent.
I talked to my friend Amy, and she sent the book to her friend Marcy, who is now my agent. It sucks because, at the end of the day, the truth is I got one through a connection. It’s a bummer because it's really hard for people to make connections and to ask other people to help them with the connections they have. It's a rough world.
How long did it take you to get your agent?
Maybe four months from the start to finish because it was just constant rejections. I did get a rejection from an agent after I'd sold the book. I randomly got a form email that said, “Thanks for your interest. No thanks.”
If I'm remembering correctly, you got to a point where every agent had passed on it or ghosted so you decided to self-publish.
That's not even what happened. I got an agent. When you get your agent, it's always good to ask questions about how they communicate and what information to expect. My agent, who is Marcy Posner at Folio Lit, has been in the game a long time. She's not huge about “peek into my world, here are all the things I've done”. She does her own thing and lets you know. We went on sub in January, and nothing was happening by March. It wasn't selling, nothing was happening. It was another dark night of the soul. I came to a place where I asked myself if this was a thing I should keep doing. It felt like it was something that hurt me a lot. Trying to make it in this world felt so disheartening. Marcy called me up one day and said, “It didn't sell. We're at the end of the line. I don't know what happened. I believe in you and in this book so much.”
Eventually I decided I'd try to take the power back, try to feel okay about this whole experience and just self-publish the book. It did feel like taking the power back. I built it out on Amazon, which is its own fraught thing in terms of capitalism, but they have the best independent publishing platforms for newbies. I put it out and I sold a lot of copies in a week-and-a-half. And then Marcy called to tell me there was an editor who wanted to buy, and we had to take it down. That's what happened. If you have an original copy of I Love You, Charlie Bennett, save it forever.
It's like a rom com Cinderella story except with the publishing industry as opposed to a man. What did you learn about self-publishing during that brief time?
Not much honestly. I wish I had more advice. I learned how difficult it is to lay out a book, that's for sure. They have a program that sort of does it for you, but I spent hours on my couch with the pages to make sure they were correct. In my book I have transcripts and news articles, things that were formatted differently. I spent a lot of time on page layouts, and I definitely got a new respect for it. That’s a difficult process.
I saw the backend of KDP publishing, which is Amazon's platform. I became familiar with that. A lot of what independent or self-publishing stuff is about is learning how to run promotions and get your book in Kindle All Access. It's about a lot of marketing and I didn't really do that. I wrote about it on my Substack as a very sad thing that happened that had a bright side, which is that people can buy this book. People did buy it and were so nice about it, honestly. They sent me pictures, posted pictures of themselves with the book on social media. Then to have it sell to a publisher was like whiplash. It was very weird. I don't know that I have tons of advice about self-publishing other than I do think taking the power back in that way is very empowering. It's good for you for sure.
I was living in New York when you launched the self-published version and I met up with Ali Kelley, who you know. (Note: Hi, Ali!) She had purchased your book, and she raved about it. She was also working on a manuscript, and I remember her saying that she thought it was wild that it wasn’t traditionally published because it was such a professional-level book. We both wondered what the hell was happening in the publishing industry.
Well, thank you Ali Kelley! That’s absolutely how I felt. The way I approach romance is with humor. I love to laugh, and I love things to be funny, but I also infuse a lot of the stuff I learned from my MFA that's really about character-driven work. This has characters who have real motivations, and it has laughs. Why does no one want it?
But eventually your editor did. How did your editor find the book? Was it because you had self-published or was it completely separate from that?
It was completely separate. She had gotten the query from Marcy but perhaps just hadn't gotten to it yet. There's also a lot of behind-the-scenes stuff that, now that I am a little farther along in the publishing world, I have a more insight into. Even if an editor likes the book, a lot of times the book has to be read by tons of people at the publisher before the author even has a meeting with them. People in marketing will read it, other editors in fiction, whoever is the managing editor of the fiction department will read it. You're not just waiting for one person to go through it. You're waiting for an entire team. I think the other thing we forget, or maybe don't want to embrace, is that publishing is about making money. It's about selling products. They're trying to figure out, especially in this economy, if they think they can sell the product that you've given them. Even though on our end we're like, “Here's this art I've made, please respond to it.” I don't know how many people were reading it or what the timeline was, but I know by the time they called me, a bunch of people at Grand Central had read it. I assume that was the delay.
What was the process of preparing this book to be traditionally published? First, I'm guessing you had to pull I Love You, Charlie Bennett, which was the original title, out of Amazon. Delete forever.
Correct.
And then what happened?
My editor wrote me an editor's letter with her thoughts. I marked up the manuscript and did one or two big revisions. Right when we aligned, my editor took a new job. My experience has never been a straight line and nothing in my writing experience has ever been easy. When my editor took a new job, I was just like what can you do? I was inherited by another editor. That's who I've been working with on things like the cover, the copyedit, moving into marketing and promotion. She'll also work on my second book.
What were the big changes between the self-published version and this one besides the title?
There weren’t a ton of huge changes. My favorite change is that I wrote an epilogue that Rachel, my first editor, really wanted me to do and which I did not want to do. It was too hard. I didn’t think I could do it. It felt that way, it really did. But she said, “No, you have to write an epilogue.” And now the epilogue is my favorite part. There were a couple other full chapters that got inserted that were mostly about developing Edie's relationship with the other contestants on the show. I think that made it a much better book. I liked the first version too, but I think Rachel was correct to point out that there were areas that Edie could become even a fuller person and the other characters could become even fuller people if we saw them interact more without the men around.
You're working on a new novel now. From what I've gleaned from Instagram, it has to do with nineties boy bands and girl bands, which sounds amazing. Since you have the support of the established publishing industry now, how are you feeling about this process? Is it easier? Harder? About the same?
I would say the process is harder. I think everybody says second books are really hard. The timeline is truncated. They want your first book to come out and then they want the second book to come out right after, like a year later. But you're still working on the first book. I didn't realize how much time you spend on it, even after it's done. We accepted the copyright, we are aligned, all the changes are done, but then you still have the copyedit, so you read through the entire book again. Then they put it in layout, and you read the entire book again in layout. We spent a lot of time collaboratively working on the cover. There are just all these things that keep happening for book one when you're supposed to be writing book two. And I have a day job and a kid. Right now, I get up at four o'clock in the morning and I write until six every day trying to finish this book.
In terms of traditional publishing, you will be reminded it is a business, and you are part of a business, and they want you to be successful for their business. They want me to stay on schedule because they have a plan.
I remember talking to another writer friend of mine who is published and very prestigious. She said that she sometimes missed the pre-published part of her career because she could really take the time to just be in this fantasy world she's created without the demands of the actual industry.
When I sit down to write, I have my MFA demons that I'm trying to battle away. There were times I remember arguing with one of my professors about whether a woman could push a stroller and also look at the houses around her because I had descriptions of what things looked like. He insisted it was impossible. I remember one time in my workshop we spent an hour discussing how this woman answered a phone call in the middle of the night and had to get in her car to go rescue her brother. But the author hadn't specifically said that she changed out of her nightgown, and it just went on and on. So, I have this thing here that's always trying to protect me from people pointing out what's logically not possible. I'm already trying to push that away.
Then, I've got the pressure that publishers want me to deliver something quickly and I'm not a quick writer. I'm a person who will spend an hour on a paragraph just rewriting it over and over again. I don't think that's good. I think it's anxious and it comes from the MFA. But I don't necessarily think being on deadline helps you relax into your world. My new book is about Y2K pop girl groups and boy bands. I've had to write songs, and I did that over Christmas break. That might be the most fun I had, where I just spent a whole day being silly and writing lyrics.
I'm so excited for the official launch of the book. Do you have any parting words?
It’s the worst advice but just keep going. I do think it's a long game, I really do. One of my friends who I was on the agent circuit with didn't get picked up for her first book. She put it in a drawer and sold her second for lots of money. She's been in the game for as long as I have, like 20 years, trying to do the thing. I do think it works out in the end, but it's so disheartening and hard while you're in it. Trying to get people around you who've been there, who understand it, I think that is really important. I felt so much despair and I really had to get to a place where I asked myself if I would do this with or without ever having success in this industry. I think I said yes, but then I wasn't fully tested. Because then it sold.
To learn more about Adrienne, visit her website or check out her newsletter WHERE THE F*CK'S MY HAPPY ENDING?! If you live in Chicago, she is celebrating the launch of her book TONIGHT with friend of the newsletter
at the Book Cellar at 7pm. Please go and give both of them a huge hug for me!Further Reading
If you need more behind-the-scenes look into the franchise, I highly recommend Bachelor Nation: Inside the World of America’s Favorite Guilty Pleasure by Amy Kaufman.
- and I had a lovely back-and-forth on Notes about how The Valley deserves to be part of the Divorce Memoir (TM) canon awhile back. I’m so glad he got the chance to articulate and expand his thoughts on the subject in his GQ article, “‘The Valley’ Is the First Great TV Show About the ‘Divorced Guy’.”
Please feel free to discuss all things Love Island in the comments. So many thoughts! We need to implement ranked-choice voting on the show, for starters. “Mommy? Mamacita?” will live rent-free in a luxe apartment space in my mind forever. I need the Islanders to understand that Latina is different from Spanish is different from Middle Eastern but I get it, we’re all mamacitas lmao. But above all, I think we need to discuss “In Defense of Huda."
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“15 Questions with Ines Bellina”. 11am Saturday, The Movie Theater Questionnaire
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Ah love you both! It makes me so happy to see this story/Adrienne finally get the recognition they deserve! Next up: let’s get this on Jenna Bush’s radar.
I love this so much, thanks for doing it!!!! I hope it inspires at least one person to never give up!