What if half your book is already written, sitting in blog posts you forgot you wrote?
That's where Karen Marcus started. After 27 years as a tech copywriter, she downloaded about three dozen blog posts, dropped them into a folder, and figured she'd stitch them into a book.
Well, it wasn't that simple. It took ten years start to finish, including a few years when she set it down entirely. A story so many authors know well.
When she came back to the book, she did something that changed everything: she made herself the client and treated the book like one very big assignment.
We talk about the writing process, surprises since publishing, how Karen uses AI today (even after losing work to it), and the moment after publishing when she realized a book being out in the world isn't the same as people finding it.
In this episode, you'll hear:
How Karen landed in copywriting without knowing what a copywriter was
The practical process of turning blog posts into book chapters
Why she put her book down after a publisher asked for changes, and what brought her back
How she uses AI at work now, and her possibly controversial take on AI-written content
What surprised her most about self-publishing
Why she skipped building a platform first and published anyway
How she's deciding what to write next
Key takeaways
Your archive is raw material, not a manuscript. Old posts make great jumping-off points for chapters. Expect to sort, cut, update, and restructure them, though. Karen had to decide what her focus was before the pieces fit.
Make yourself the client. Karen finished her book by treating it like any other assignment. That means gathering the material, finding the structure, and powering through.
Humans are the final arbiter. Karen uses AI as a starting point and a way to get unstuck. The judgment about what's good, true, and worth publishing stays with the writer.
Treat publishing as an experiment. Karen didn't wait for a platform or a perfect marketing plan. She published to learn the process, and now she's testing what comes next.
Meet Karen
Karen Marcus has spent decades helping business professionals communicate clearly. A lifelong lover of words and books, Karen earned two degrees in English and worked as a freelance copywriter in the tech industry for 27 years. She became known for distilling complex technical concepts into understandable information that helped her clients gain customer interest and trust.
In her work as a copywriter, Karen created standard processes and consistent practices to deliver quality work on every project. In her first book, The Confident Copywriter, she shares her secret sauce so inexperienced writers don’t have to figure it out the hard way.
Karen still loves to read, especially sci-fi. When not reading or writing, she enjoys spending time with people, trees, and cats.
Connect with Karen
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[00:00:00] What if I told you you might already have a book already half written? It could be sitting on your website, in old blog posts, newsletters, LinkedIn posts, and things that you forgot you wrote. That's how Karen Marcus started her book. She downloaded about three dozen blog posts that she had written over the years as a copywriter, dropped them into a folder, and thought she'd stitch them together into a book.
Well, it doesn't always happen that simply. It's not like download book, poof. It actually took her 10 years to finish it, and so many writers know this story well. They start and stop for many different reasons, and she actually set it down after a publisher asked for more changes than she really wanted to dive into at the time.
But she came back, so I totally love that, and I know you will too. And she actually made herself her own client and finished the book and looked at it like one big assignment. Totally recommend [00:01:00] doing something like this to finish your own book. We also talked about the readers that you don't see coming, the coach, the marketing person, the person that you don't know is actually reading it, and the voice that has something to say, and the people who have something to say about your writing that you weren't quite prepared for.
How do you handle that? She also uses AI as a tool, which I very much agree with, and we get into this. She actually lost work due to AI, and she's not bitter about it. Also love this. She shares how she uses this process today, how she sees AI in her work, and how she maintains authentic writing.
You'll also hear about her upcoming projects and the thing that surprised her most about putting her book out there, and this is the thing that virtually every author I know bumps into at one point: book marketing. Karen and I met in such a funny way. A former coworker of mine met her uncle [00:02:00] at a party, and he told him that his niece had just written a book, so he thought to get in touch and connect me.
I just love how this stuff happens. So if you meet someone cool at a party who wrote a book, or a friend of a friend, or a niece or an uncle or a nephew, and you think they would be a great fit for the show, feel free to send them to the How Women Write podcast. I would love to chat with them.
Anyway, I hope you enjoy this episode. I really enjoyed talking to this copywriter.
I just never know when the next great conversation is going to come from.
Now let's get to today's episode
I'm excited to chat today , Karen, and the way we met was so funny. Someone I used to work with from a company I left nine years ago met your uncle at a party.
Karen, is that right? That's right. That is wild. I just love how these meetings happen, and I'm [00:03:00] really excited to talk to you today. I'm gonna brag on you for a second, so just hang in there. Karen Marcus, she wrote copy for the tech industry for 27 years. That's a long time. And she's a lifelong lover of words, two degrees in English, and she became the writer that her clients turned to to take dense technical material and turn it into something people could understand, read, actually care about.
And along the way, she built her own process so she could do this work every day, and she put it all into her first book, The Confident Copywriter. Karen, I love your book. It is so practical. So thank you for being here. Thank you so much for having me. I'm very excited to be here. Almost 30 years in the copywriting industry, and I love in your book that you talk about a great experience with a third grade teacher.
Tell [00:04:00] us your experience with reading and writing growing up.
Gosh I just, I feel like I've always had books around me. As I was preparing for this conversation, I tried to think about, where those books came from. Did I ask for, did I request specific books? Did my parents just, continually provide them? And quite honestly, I am not sure.
I just remember that there were always books around, and I was always reading them as a kid. And I had really good experiences with English classes in junior high and high school. I didn't think of myself as particularly talented in that area, but then in college, when it came time to pick a major I considered various options, but I thought, "You know, I really like reading, and I really like writing, so I'm gonna major in English."
Yeah, I love that, and I love that you had great teachers too. I can't tell you how many people who had a negative [00:05:00] experience with teachers that actually led them far away from writing or thinking that they weren't great at it. I'm so glad you had good experiences. How did you get into copywriting?
So I had gone to grad school, and so I had a master's degree in English, and ... This was back in the day when the internet was pretty new, and we were very excited about this crazy thing called hyperlinks. And so I actually did some projects involving web design, and I thought that I wanted to be a website designer.
But I wasn't able to get any jobs doing that, and a friend of mine from grad school was doing some work at a like a marketing firm for- ... Hewlett-Packard. And back then, Hewlett-Packard was, like, the big tech company or one of the big tech companies, one of the few at that time. And [00:06:00] she said that the person she was working for at HP was looking for someone who was organized and good at writing and, you know, could be a good- potentially a good project manager, and she recommended me.
And so I got that first position. I came in as a contractor, and at that time I didn't know anything about contracting. I didn't know anything ... I didn't know a whole lot about computers, especially hardware, and I didn't know anything about marketing. I didn't know what a copywriter was. So they had me doing marketing work, and as it turns out, I was doing all the things that are involved in copywriting.
I was interviewing people at the company. I was learning about technology and internet, intranet hardware, software. All the things that, you know, that we sort of think of as very normal now were still pretty new back then, and , it was a good fit. I seemed to have a knack [00:07:00] for understanding complex technical stuff, and making it understandable for people to read.
I love that. That's such a interesting journey that you just landed in it, and you're like, "Oh," and you mentioned this in the book, that you didn't know what a copywriter was until you were one. At what point did it click, and you're like, "Oh, I'm a copywriter"? Gosh, and that's a great question. , I honestly am not sure. I think at that point I would've considered myself more of a marketing writer, and maybe it was when I started networking and meeting other people in marketing and I became aware of the term copywriter. And at that point it was like, "Oh, yeah.
Okay, yeah, that's what I'm doing." I love it. 27 years into the profession, why now for the book? I'm curious when the spark hit [00:08:00] and what drove you to write it. Yeah, so when I first was in business, after I worked at HP I went on to do freelancing for various companies, and I needed to promote myself as a freelancer.
So one of the things I was doing was I was blogging, and I was writing about various aspects of copywriting and how to do it well. And at some point I realized, I am not really writing to the right audience because the people I'm trying to get business from are not copywriters. They're people who hire copywriters, which are project managers and so forth.
So, I stopped doing the blog, but it was pretty well-received. I didn't have a large audience or anything like that, but people seemed to like it. And I thought, "Hmm," you know, putting on my content developer hat, I was like, "I wonder how I could repurpose this?" So I've always been interested in writing a book or multiple books.
And [00:09:00] I thought, "Hmm, I wonder if I could just, you know, stitch these blog posts into a book?" And I gave it a try, and as it turned out it, it wasn't that simple, but I did use the blog posts as jumping-off points for the chapters and what I wanted to write about that would eventually go into my book. I love that.
How long did you have the blog for?
Let's see. It was probably a couple of years maybe. Okay. Yeah, just curious, like, how much content was on there. That's something that so many people don't even realize. And you were blogging at the time, not thinking about turning it into a book, is that right? . Yeah, and the thing about blogging is that you just accumulate a lot.
I mean, I had probably, I don't know, maybe like three dozen posts or something like that. It was a decent amount. , It was a lot of material to draw on, [00:10:00] and some of it I didn't use in the book. But, I really had to go through that process and decide, okay, what do I want in here? , What's my focus? What are my chapters? What are my sections? What am I doing here? Yeah. On this show, I love getting into the process, and this is what sparks things for listeners. Some people find it boring. , Often when I'm asking my guests questions, they're like, "You wanna know how I did it?"
Yeah, because people who wanna write books know, and especially if you have a blog. So what did that practically look like? You downloaded all your blog posts and put them in a document? Give us the practical lay of the land. I did, yeah. I downloaded all my blog posts. I put them all, I believe I had them all, like, each one as a separate Word doc, and I just put them all in a folder, and I just went through them one, one by one, and just sorted through them and started to figure out what the high level themes were and what the high level ideas were and, what could be a section and what could be a chapter and what I didn't wanna use, ...
it had been a while [00:11:00] when I started doing all this since I had written the blog, and some of what I had written was no longer relevant, so I had to make sure that my book was as up-to-date as possible. AI wasn't a thing back then for sure, but I have a chapter about AI in my book.
I had the advantage of being a copywriter, right? I had gone through the process of having an assignment and gathering the information, putting it into a logical structure, and writing. So I essentially just looked at it as another assignment. Mm-hmm. It was sort of like a very large assignment, a very big assignment, but I sort of had myself as my client, and it was like, okay, I'm gonna just, power through.
. That's great. So when you were doing that, were you freelancing still or were you in a full-time role? When I started the book, I was still freelancing Okay Yeah So start to [00:12:00] finish, what did that timeframe look like? And I'll come to my next question. I always have to hold myself back from asking 10 questions at once.
Start to finish, it was probably, I mean, it was years, because I started that process that I was just describing, and then I put it aside for a while and didn't work on it for a few years, and then I came back to it, and it was just like, "You know, I'm, I'm gonna finish this." So I think start to finish, from when I first started, it was probably about 10 years.
Oh, wow. But when I got serious about it up until now, that's probably been about four years. Okay. So this was quite a long time. , When you mentioned that AI wasn't a thing, I was like, "When did you start this book?" Yeah. It was, it's been a while. Yeah. I've heard of people putting their books down for chunks of time.
I'm raising my hand. I did the same thing. I put it down for a year at a time, and I told myself I was busy. I was [00:13:00] busy doing the freelancing work. I don't have time for this book. , Was that part of your story too?
. I think it was because I actually ... When I first started putting it together, I actually put together a book proposal, and I floated it by a publisher that I knew, and she said, "Yeah, we might be able to, work with this," and she wanted me to, make changes and do various things.
And for whatever reason at the time, I was like, this is just too much for me," so- ... I put it aside. Yeah. And then did you end up self-publishing? Yeah, I did. Okay. And I also read that your spouse is your biggest supporter and reviewer. Does that mean that you had a live-in editor? Kind of. Nice.
Yes. He and I met in grad school, so we both , have master's degrees in English, and he's [00:14:00] very very good at spotting things and helping me improve my writing. So yeah, he definitely read it, and he also helped me proofread. Oh, that's great. When you're in the process of writing, editing, revising, I mean, other than , the project taking perhaps longer than you expected, any other challenges come up for you?
I think the biggest challenge was that it didn't come together as easily as I expected. Like I said, I thought I could just stitch a bunch of blog posts together and here's my book, you know? But it was really a lot more complicated than that. And, , I had that experience of kind of dealing with Information from various sources and information that isn't necessarily entirely straightforward, so is able to use those skills with my own work. Good. I love that [00:15:00] you talk about AI in the book as well, and you also mention that you lost work to AI, and you're not bitter about it-
which is also important to note. I'm curious- Yeah ... how you use AI now in your writing process.
My writing process now is very different than it was when I was a freelance copywriter, because I now have a full-time job. The things I write are different, the way I write is different, the whole structure of what I'm doing is different from what I was doing before. But so
We have AI as part of our internal system at my workplace. And so it knows so much about everything I'm doing . And I know that might sound creepy. I don't, personally don't find it creepy. I know other people do, and I get that. But for me, it's just so helpful, [00:16:00] because I can go to it and say, "What is important about X, Y, and Z?"
And seconds later it gives me the information that I need as a starting point that might have taken me previously, half an hour, hour, two hours, three hours to develop, and it's really amazing to me. And so that, I mean, that's- that's just one way that I use it. Yeah. Another way I use it might be to, you know, if I get stuck on a s- I actually was just working on something over the last couple of days, and it's a, a long report, fairly complex, and at some points I would get stuck, and I would say, I'm not really sure what to put in here."
And it had all the information. It had all the notes from the meetings. It had recordings. It had everything that, that had been talked about in meetings. It had everything that I had asked it about previously . And so it was very easily able to just make suggestions about, "How about [00:17:00] this?"
Yeah. And I would say m- definitely more often than not, it would be exactly what I needed on the first try. So- it's really, really different. When I left freelancing, I had the opportunity to try AI, a little bit here and there, but it wasn't really part of my process, and it never really got to be in that while I was doing that work.
Mm-hmm. But it definitely is now. It's an integral part of what I do now. Yeah, I totally see that. And I love how you described it. In the book, you describe it as a tool, 100% with you there. It's like, yes, see it as a tool, and it's there to support you. Were you at the point with your book, 'cause I know in the beginning you didn't have AI to help you, did AI help your book writing, coming together, editing, or any of that?
I didn't use AI a lot when I was writing my book. There were certain sections [00:18:00] that I I wanted to make sure that it was current and modern and applicable to, what's going on now in the world. And so I did use it for research to make sure that I had some things up to date.
Other than that, it's all me. Yeah. Going back to that, you also talk about how good writing is authentic. 100% with you there. Authentic writing, how do you do that now and keep your creative brain fresh? Do you mean given that there's AI and it has the potential- Yeah ... to steal our creativity? Yeah, okay. Yeah, how do you navigate that? Are you like, "Nope, my first draft comes from me," or, "I write it with pen"?
I don't know. I've heard different things. I'm curious your process. That's a great question. And I think the honest answer [00:19:00] is I'm still figuring that out. I think because I have so much experience with writing that I know when to use it, when not to use it when I need it, when I don't need it, when it needs to come from me, when it doesn't, when what AI is suggesting doesn't work.
I guess if I could say one, one thing that I know pretty definitively, and that is that we as humans need to be the final arbiter of what's good, what works, what makes sense. Mm-hmm. Are you able to easily spot when something has been too heavily AI'd?
I'm not sure. To be honest, I don't pay a lot of attention to that. I don't really think is this or is this not AI? I think about it more in terms of is this something I can connect with? And at the end of the day, this might be a controversial take, but I don't think it matters if it came from AI or from a human if- Yeah
the human is taking [00:20:00] responsibility for it, and the human is putting it forth as something that they are standing behind, and it is something that, others can connect with. Yeah. Yeah, I can see how some people are on that side of the fight. Like, "No, it's AI, I won't read it," where it's like, no, if it's useful information to me and it's helpful, yes, I can tell sometimes it's been written by AI, but if it's useful, great.
I don't really care, especially if it was AI assisted or it's written by someone where English is their second language. I'm not going to, in many cases, let that distract me and be just like, "Oh, I'm closing this article. I'm not reading this." So your book's been out for a little while now.
Has anything surprised you since it, you put it out into the [00:21:00] world?
I was surprised by I, I had this vision of I'm going to finish my book, I'm going to get my book edited, I'm going to go through the whole self-publishing process, which is, involves a lot of things, editing proofreading, graphic design, interior design. Well, I should say graphic design for both exterior and interior.
And then trying to navigate Amazon, trying to navigate IngramSpark, trying to figure out where else it should go, if anywhere. And coming back to your question, I had this vision of, okay, I'm gonna do all that, and then the book will be out, it will be available, it will be in the world and then it will sell.
And but there's so much more to it than that. I think that's probably- ... the biggest thing that I'm learning. And one of the things that [00:22:00] I tried to... Well, let's, let's just put it this way. One of the things I explored was trying to go through a traditional publisher, and I contacted some agents and so forth, and I did a little research about it, and a lot of the advice was, "You have to have a platform."
And I thought, "Mm, I, for one thing, I don't, A, I don't know how to do that. B, I don't know what my platform would be. C, I just wanna get my book out." Yes. So I thought I just, I'm not gonna do that. I'm just gonna publish my book and see what happens. And so I did that, and now there are so many opportunities for sort of finding the right place for it, finding the right audience for it having conversations with people, like this one about topics that I'm interested in writing, technology and business.
I'm really interested in the [00:23:00] intersection of those topics. And maybe actually trying to start a platform and put some ideas out there and, again, seeing what happens. This is all really an experiment for me. Yeah. Part of the reason I wanted to publish the book was just to learn the book publishing process and see if I wanted to publish more.
It's been really fun and a very interesting adventure. Interesting adventure sums it up. I mean, between KDP and Ingram, it is a lot. So you did the interior design and the cover design as well? I didn't do them myself. I had people doing that. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, so I had- I was like, "Wow, you really-" I didn't know.
Oh my gosh, . yeah, no. I had a, a graphic designer who I've worked with for years on other projects when I was freelancing. He did the cover. I think he did an amazing job, and I found someone to also do an amazing job on the interior to [00:24:00] match the design of the cover. And this is again where my experience in marketing came in because, I knew how to evaluate a graphic design.
I knew some of the concepts of layout. So that made the job easier. That's not to say that it was easy. Oh, yeah. It was hard. It was very hard. But I came away from it feeling like I had taken, like, a really very intensive class on how to self-publish.
Yeah, whether you wanted to or not. Right, yeah. That's great. Having , that experience and background and knowing what to look for in design, most writers don't have that, and they're just at the whim of, like, how do I pick a cover designer? How do I design interior? Does this look good? What should this even look like?
I'm so glad you had all that laid out with you. So I also love, I wanted to come back to this too, you mentioned that you saw it as an experiment, and you're like, "I'm just gonna put my book out there." , Because [00:25:00] so many people, I've seen this in my DMs, where someone will say, "I'm stuck on how to market my book."
And I'm like, "Oh, tell me about your book." Like, "Oh, I haven't written it yet." I'm like, "You gotta write it first, figure that out later." I mean, marketing is often the part that many authors don't want to even touch, but you put your book out into the world, and you're like, "Oh, yeah. Now I have to promote it in some way to get it out there."
Yeah. I think ideally I would've had some kind of, you know, more robust promotional plan. But I guess I just didn't really, I've been involved in marketing a lot of things, but I've never been involved in marketing a book, so I didn't really know exactly what it was gonna look like Totally different beast
before I started. Yeah. You also mentioned - you wanted to see if [00:26:00] you would do this so that you could write other books. What other books, if you're open to sharing, are going on? Have you started any? What's next? I have a lot of ideas for books. I think that a couple ways I'm going to arrive at what comes next, if anything one of them is going to be thinking much more about what could sell and being much more purposive about finding topics that people wanna read about and that people are curious about and that people would buy if it were a, a book.
The other way I'm going about it is through this sort of putting some of my thoughts out there, trying to find different platforms, trying to see what could potentially work as, having a following, I guess- Yeah ... or having the people who are interested in [00:27:00] what I'm doing, what I'm saying, what I'm thinking about, and seeing where those conversations go, and seeing which topics and themes potentially keep coming up and what people are engaging with the most.
Mm. I love that. It sounds like another experiment. Absolutely. That's such a great way to look at it. I loved hearing about your process and how this book came together and your copywriting experience. One fun question I always like to end on, while you were writing or editing, was there a certain beverage you liked to have with you?
I'm a big water drinker, so I drink a lot of water, and also herbal tea, which is what I'm drinking right now. I love it. Yes, I always have water. What kind of herbal tea is it today? Today it's ginger. Oh, that's good. That's my go-to, steady warming, digestion, all the good things. Yep. Awesome. Karen, we will link to your [00:28:00] book in the show notes, and people can keep in touch with you there.
Thank you so much for being here with us. Thank you so much for having me. I've thoroughly enjoyed this conversation, and I'm so glad that my uncle and your former coworker met so that we could meet. Me too. That was too funny. I'll definitely let them know when this episode is out. That sounds great.
Thank you so much. Thanks, Karen.
Something Karen talked about in this episode, which I love so much, is that she talks about everything being an experiment. She didn't wait for a platform, didn't wait to have everything figured out. Put the book out there as an experiment, and she's going to do that with the next one and the next one.
This is a trait I see in so many successful writers and entrepreneurs, is that they're willing to test things out, see how it goes, tweak, shape things, put them out there, get information, [00:29:00] switch it up again, get it back out. I love this so much
Behind the scenes in my writing life these days, I jumped back into the Billet book this week, got a couple of chapters together, and as I began part two, I'm laughing 'cause the work started shaping or reshaping itself and changing on me. Things started rearranging. I thought there was six chapters, then there were two, then three, then four, and I had them in different orders.
When I was in it working on it the other day, it felt like a tangled mess. I eventually untangled one chapter and got that out to sub stack.
That is called The Billet Season, and you could subscribe on Substack for just five bucks a month and get the behind-the-scenes of how I'm sharing this book. One woman responded right away and told me that that chapter made her cry, [00:30:00] and she didn't expect it to. So this is why, when a book drops in, I know that I need to just listen and write it and go and not ask questions.
Like, does a book called The Billet Season fit into the books I've written so far between Unfussy Life, Intuitive Writing, and Writing With the Moon? Absolutely not. It makes zero business sense, but it was the book I had to start writing, as are at least one of the other ones that I started, and that's probably gonna be the one I come to next.
So we'll see how it goes. I will decide later if I will continue to write all my books in public. I do appreciate getting audience feedback. It is a little tricky, though, writing a chapter and then doing just enough editing so that I can send it out and there's not typos all over the place. It is far from perfect.
I'm probably going to add things, change some things, move some things [00:31:00] around. But it's an extra layer of work that I did not anticipate when I started this project. We will see how that goes. The other big announcement I have, and I'm so excited to finally tell you this, I've been talking about this for at least a year.
This is one of those examples where got the download, got the let's go, and I didn't move right away. I can't tell you why, but I am so ridiculously excited to share that I'm hosting an in-person writing retreat.
It is called the Constellation Writing Retreat. It's happening in person, in Florida, on the golf. Think four days with a small group, writing exercises, creative time outside of writing. We're gonna do some art, luxury accommodations. Every room has its own ensuite. Did I mention the beach?
In [00:32:00] January? So if you're from up north, join in soon. By the time you're listening to this, spots might be full, , and early bird pricing is up until November 20th. It is going to be such an amazing time. As I started planning this, I really realized I am made to curate and create really great in-person experiences.
I've been creating great experiences online for 10 years now, whether that first experience was just a blog post, yes, great experience, or if it was through a course or through a client experience, a three-month coaching container with me. It is not just you and me coaching, it's an experience from beginning to end.
And this event has a natural container. There's before and after support, live one-on-one time, and we will work through your memoir, business book, [00:33:00] or stories, whatever you're using those for. That's really what this retreat experience is designed for. I just can't wait.
