A video made the rounds recently with a pretty direct title: “I’m an Editor. Please Don’t Take Freida McFadden’s Writing Advice.” It’s a pushback on McFadden’s now-famous stance, the one she’s repeated in interviews and on her own website: stop procrastinating, just write the book, put it out there, and fix what needs fixing later. An editor’s perspective on that advice is worth hearing, especially from someone who’s worked inside traditional publishing and seen what a polished, agent-ready manuscript actually needs to look like.
Equally, I think the conversation is missing a middle option that many indie authors are already using without explicitly naming it.
McFadden’s advice isn’t wrong,
It’s aimed at a different finish line
As an author who has made mistakes since 2009, I can say there’s no perfect way to go about this journey. If you have a book and you want to self-publish it. Do it. That is the advice I get when I hear authors like McFadden tell would-be authors to do it. Jump in. Feel the water. The assumption is that this is the only story the author will ever write. I suppose there is that, like a one-hit wonder. It happens. Freida speaks of her personal experience when she offers advice. After seeing as of today, she has 33 books on the market. I would say she’s earned a seat at the table. If that doesn’t, she’s a New York Times bestselling author. I would say she has earned the right to advise authors.
She wrote from childhood and kept writing while becoming a physician. Before self-publishing, she tried the traditional route: she queried agents, got rejected, and at one point even landed an agent, but that manuscript never sold. Eventually, she decided she cared more about getting her work into readers’ hands than waiting for a publisher. (The Washington Post)
Other authors have similar stories:
Stephen King: The breakthrough came in 1973, about six years after that first professional story sale. Doubleday accepted Carrie for publication. King had already written several novels that publishers rejected, and Carrie itself almost ended up abandoned—his wife, Tabitha, famously encouraged him to keep working on it after he threw pages away. (The Guardian)
J. K. Rowling: She eventually finished Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone and began trying to get it published. She first needed an agent. Christopher Little agreed to represent her, but then the manuscript went through a long string of publisher rejections. The commonly reported figure is 12 publishers turning it down before Bloomsbury finally accepted it. Rowling herself has said she remembers receiving “a good few” rejections, though she doesn’t recall the exact number. (The Guardian)
Brandon Sanderson: He wrote Elantris around 2000 and submitted it. One publisher rejected it. He sent it elsewhere and then waited roughly 18 months before Tor editor Moshe Feder contacted him in 2003 wanting to buy it. The publication process took another couple of years, and Elantris finally came out in 2005. (Brandon Sanderson’s Bio)
Colleen Hoover: She self-published Slammed in January 2012. At first, it got very little attention. Then she started doing giveaways, reaching out directly to book bloggers, posting teasers, and interacting with readers on Goodreads. By late April, Goodreads’ recommendation system began surfacing the book more heavily. (PW Select)
These authors tell us the path to discovery is not a formula laid out as A + edits + repeat + B + insert your ritual = success. If it were that easy, everyone who desired it would do it. It’s different for everyone. And that makes it exciting. When you think about reading, and how easy it is to pass up a good book for a show or sports clip, it is amazing that it still exists as a pastime. If you have a book, you deserve to see how it would go. Maybe you are the next bestseller. Or maybe it does no more but collect dust. Either way, it takes courage to put your work out there.
The Platforms Built for Exactly This
Inkitt, Wattpad, Ream, a personal blog — these all let an author post work in progress, chapter by chapter, in front of real readers while it’s still being shaped. You receive reactions, observe what resonates and what doesn’t, revise based on real reader feedback rather than guessing alone, and the work remains unlocked as a permanent, reviewable, for-sale product. That’s “getting it out there” in the exact spirit McFadden means: stop hiding it, stop waiting for imaginary perfection, but it’s not the same thing as skipping editing altogether.
By the time a story that’s been tested this way moves to self-publishing, it’s already been through a real revision process, just a different one than a traditional developmental edit. Beta readers on a platform, chapter comments, the pattern of where readers drop off or come back for more — that’s genuine editorial information, even if it doesn’t come with a manuscript letter attached.
There’s No One-Size-Fits-All Here
That’s really the heart of it for me. An editor coming from traditional publishing is likely to set the bar at the traditional publishing level, because that’s the system she knows and has worked within. McFadden’s advice reflects a different, now equally legitimate path, one where the barrier to entry is lower, and the room to learn in public is much bigger than it used to be.
Neither is wrong. They’re answering different questions. If your goal is a Big Five deal, the editor’s caution is sound advice for that specific goal. If your goal is building a readership and a body of work on your own terms, McFadden’s push to stop waiting and start putting your writing in front of people, whether that’s a finished self-published book or a serialized chapter on Wattpad, is exactly the permission a lot of new writers need to actually start.
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