It started with a Sunday morning phone call to Kate White, editor-in-chief of Redbook magazine. Her boss at the Hearst Corporation asked her to come to the office immediately. Kate had never been invited to a Sunday meeting and worried the news wasn’t good. She was at her weekend home in Pennsylvania, so she had no work clothes with her. She arrived at the office dressed casually, wearing white sneakers when she was asked to be the next editor in chief of Cosmopolitan magazine.
That’s right, Cosmo––at the time Hearst’s most recognized monthly pub, as in famed women-like-sex-too Editor Helen Gurley Brown. Under Brown’s thirty-two-year reign, it had become the biggest ship navigating what was then the bottomless ocean of women’s magazines. Kate would become the second editor to succeed Brown following a two-year stint by Bonnie Fuller. Kate edited Cosmopolitan from 1998 to 2012.
“Damn, there goes the novel,” Kate told herself when she accepted the job. She’d managed to crank out four chapters of a murder mystery during the previous six months. “It’s one thing to be editor in chief of Redbook and write a suspense novel, but I didn’t know how I would do it handling a brand as big as Cosmo.”
She started her new job in August 1998 and didn’t look at her unfinished novel until the holidays. “I pulled out the four chapters and saw that I’d written that the nanny died on a copy of Cosmo—but I hadn’t remembered that. I took that as a sign from the universe to give it a try even with my current job.”
Kate was already a published author of the New York Times bestselling non-fiction book, Why Good Girls Don’t Get Ahead but Gutsy Girls Do. Her agent for that book also represented fiction, so Kate asked her about her unfinished suspense novel. At first, her agent, Sandra Dijkstra, was reluctant, but then encouraged her. Kate, after all, now had a platform as big as they get as editor of Cosmo.
“Let’s see if we can sell it without the whole book,” her agent told Kate.
It sold on only four chapters. “We didn’t think my publisher would want it, but they did,” Kate says. “I spent a lot of time polishing those four chapters about Bailey Weggins, a magazine writer turned amateur sleuth. I went in there with something as close to ready as I could possibly make it.”
Write what you know.
Morning television personality Kelly Rippa chose the finished product as her first Reading with Rippa book club pick, and in a matter of weeks If Looks Could Kill, White’s first of eight Bailey Weggins mysteries, became a New York Times bestseller, moving more than 100,000 copies.
“In hindsight, I leveraged things as well as I could with that.”
Use the tools available.
White’s magazine career began when she was a Glamour magazine “Top Ten College Women Contest” winner and subsequent cover girl. Within a few months she was working as an editorial assistant at the magazine. From there, she worked her way up to feature writer and columnist. Her first story was a first-person account of being a clown in the Ringling Brothers, Barnum & Bailey Circus. That lead to more first-person essays, mainly about being single and the New York City dating scene.
She once had drinks with the New York State governor’s advance man, George Humphries. And while her dating story subjects were never identified in print, Kate’s description was so close that Humphries’ ex-wife called him from the beauty parlor and told him, “That’s got to be you.”
“George thought it was funny, but I learned a lesson.” She made sure no one could identify her future dates.
She went on to Mademoiselle, as an executive editor, then became editor in chief of Child, Working Woman, McCall’s, and Redbook.
During her 14-year tenure at Cosmopolitan, White increased its monthly circulation by more than 700,000 readers, peaking at more than three million by the end of her tenure.
“It was wonderful to be in magazines in the golden era,” she says. “And Cosmo was the most fun job I ever had in my life.”
While working in the magazine industry, she completed that non-fiction book, Why Good Girls Don’t Get Ahead but Gutsy Girls Do. She asked her book editor about agents and contacted two. One was disagreeable off the bat, and the other’s assistant asked for a few extra days to answer because her boss was on a cruise. The assistant FedExed the manuscript to the cruise ship.
“I immediately thought wow, that’s who I want to be with,” White says. And she was right. The book sold in a bidding war and netted her a $500,000 advance.
And yet she still had the urge to write fiction. In second grade her teacher had given everyone a small writing assignment, but when she was returning them, “I was the only who didn’t get mine back,” says Kate. “I thought I was in trouble because I’d written a story about my grandfather, not the assignment. Then the teacher called me up front and made we read it to the entire class. She then hung it up on purple construction paper on the wall for everyone to see.”
As a girl, Kate devoured Nancy Drew books, like so many of her contemporaries, and fantasized about being a female detective. When she realized she was too wimpy for that role, she dreamed of writing about a female private detective.
“I loved writing almost anything back then—poems, plays, essays for my high school newspaper. I also put out my own magazine. Eventually I came to understand if I wanted a successful writing career, I would need to pick a lane, and I chose magazines.”
Kate was in the first class that accepted women at Union College in Schenectady, N.Y. But that meant no female alumni, no mentors for the first class to brainstorm with. So, she took the open door that Glamour offered to get into the magazine business. Still, the fiction bug had her around the neck. She first tried writing a “women’s novel” on weekends during her twenties, but procrastination was a big issue, and she never made any headway.
“I finally realized what I really wanted was to write a mystery, but by then I was in my forties and running out of time. So, I decided to try again. I was bummed that Sue Grafton had already written a brilliant series about a female private eye, so I made my protagonist a true crime reporter for a magazine. That turned out to be a bonus for me. It meant I didn’t have to do as much research, because we covered true crime at Cosmo. And no one else had a protagonist like that.”
And how did she deal with the procrastination issue? She tried what she called her “sliced salami” method. She started by writing the thinnest slice she thought she could handle––fifteen minutes a day.
It worked and eventually she could go for longer stretches.
More Bailey Weggins books followed, which was a challenge with her magazine position. “I couldn’t take my eye off the ball because it was such a big job,” Kate says. So, she wrote at night after the kids went to bed. And she wrote every day, which she swears by. “Some of the things I see with friends who want to write a novel is they don’t discipline themselves to write every day…Even if I could write for only half an hour, I would keep the momentum, sometimes producing only a half page.”
Some may argue she had all the advantages: a high-profile position in media in New York, acquaintances in the right places at the right time. But that discounts all she did to get there.
“I got my foot in the door by writing my non-fiction book,” she says. “I also studied everything I could about not only writing a mystery but marketing it, and I was very open to input. When aspiring authors ask me for advice, they often reply, ‘Yes, but…’ and ignore any wisdom, thinking their gut is a better guide –– even though they have no experience in publishing. I think part of my success is attributable to not believing everything I think and being receptive to advice.”
Nothing was handed to her, and she used her connections, as every writer does, to position herself for success. And when opportunity came, like most successful people, she was ready for it.
“I did have some luck because of my job, but I really threw myself into the process.”
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If Looks Could Kill
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Start to Finish: 2.5 years
I want to be a writer: Second grade when her teacher celebrated her first story
Experience: Women’s magazine writer, editor, columnist and editor in chief.
Agents Contacted: Two
Agent Responses: Two
Time to Sell Novel: Agent submitted to Warner Books, Kate’s nonfiction publisher, out of courtesy. Shocked when they accepted it.
First Novel Agent: Sandra Dijkstra (Sandra Dijkstra Literary Agency)
First Novel Editor: Sara Ann Freed
First Novel Publisher: Warner Books (later became Hachette)
InspiratioWebsite: Website: KateWhite.com
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