Co-Writing to Solo-Writing with Nicola Kraus

In this episode, Publisher and CEO ⁠Kristen McGuiness⁠ sits down with ⁠Nicola Kraus⁠, co-author of ⁠The Nanny Diaries⁠, which became an international #1 best-seller, selling over 6 million copies in 32 languages. Kraus continued to co-author 9 more novels, but is now entering the publishing world solo. From making money as an author to the struggles and joys of solo writing, this is an enjoyable episode you don't want to miss.

Automatically Transcribed Transcript

From the ladies of Rise Literary, welcome to Write the Good Fight. Today's episode of Write the Good Fight is with publisher and CEO, Kristen McGuiness and author Nicola Kraus. Nicola co-authored The Nanny Diaries, which became an international number one bestseller, selling over six million copies in 32 languages and inspiring the movie starring Scarlett Johansson and Alicia Keys.

In addition to co-authoring nine more novels, Nicola has contributed to The London Times, The New York Times, Red Book, Glamour, Cosmopolitan, Town and Country, and others. In 2015, she co-founded the creative consulting firm The Finnish Thought, which helps the next generation of aspiring authors find their voice and audience. Her first solo novel, The Best We Could Hope For, was just out this summer.

Nicola, I'm super excited to have you here. In addition to all of those accolades, you are also going to be with us this Friday at Book Magic in New York City. And I'm super excited for anybody who's listening.

It's going to be the day before, but Book Magic is on October 3rd in New York City, and we are thrilled to have Nicola there as one of our authors. And can't wait to start the conversation with you here today.

I am so excited. I'm looking forward to all of it.

Me too. And as I was trying to get through your bio, and for some reason could not speak this morning, I was like, I couldn't say the word consulting for the record. That was just impossible.

But I mean, that is an amazing amount of books to have written over the last few years. And I would love for you to share sort of what your writing process has looked like. And I love that you've been a co-author.

And I think that's such an incredible and unique experience. So I'd love to start there. How did you become a co-author?

And what does that look like for you?

My co-author Emma and I really got pushed together by the universe. If you believe in the universe or some unseen force, she and I were both students at NYU, going to school on Tuesdays and Thursdays, manning full-time the rest of our week. And I graduated and then I ran into her at the corner of 86 and Lexington at the ATM.

And we couldn't believe that both of us were stranded on the Upper East Side and we became instant friends, but we didn't start writing together for five years. When the economy really changed in New York City and money was falling out of the sky, and New York Magazine, the New York Times, New York Observer, kept writing articles about how hard it was for the newly rich to find good help. And Emma really had a counter argument, which is, you suck to work for.

So we started collaborating and the magical part of that was, we met the very first time we started talking about the job interview and we realized that our memories, matched each other's. So we started to see that there was something systemic happening. So we separated, she sent me her sections over the course of that week.

I wove them in with mine. So I was the first person to read what is the prologue of The Nanny Diaries. And I could immediately see because it's never been edited.

What she sent me and what I strung together is the finished prologue. And I immediately realized that it was freakish, the way our voices matched, and that this is something precious that we needed to take very good care of. And thankfully, 25 years later, we still talk every day.

Oh, I love that.

That is such an amazing creative partnership. I mean, one, I think it's rare that two people do align that well creatively. But so The Nanny Diaries was the first book, right?

And then from there, you began writing others. And so how did you continue to come up with ideas that you both would want to write towards? And what did that look like over the subsequent books?

Thankfully, we both got excited about the same things. We were equally inspired by things we saw in the culture, similar to Nanny Diaries, where we felt like there was a different take that hadn't been expressed yet. That was certainly true of our later book, Between You and Me, where we thought, huh, it doesn't seem right that Britney Spears is owned by her dad when he was abusive.

Now, we were 10 years ahead of that argument, but I'd like to say we saw it first.

Free Britney!

Free Britney! And we kept saying, there should be a movement called Free Britney, and we couldn't get it going. We didn't know about social media, but we were on the right side of history.

You were, you were.

There's a great James Brooke quote that says, There's no special line at the bank for being ahead of your time, you know?

So it's like so many times, you're like, ah, we were there first.

But is this your first solo book? Yes.

It is.

Oh, wow.

This one took 10 years because I didn't have Emma doting me on. And I was working with my clients at the finish thought at the same time. And we had a pandemic.

So there were a lot of things that slowed it down. But ultimately, I'm grateful because I think there's a lot that this book talks about that I'm better equipped to address at 50 than I would have been at 40. Yeah.

And what was it like for you writing by yourself? Did you, were you like finally like, oh my god, this is what they mean about being a lonely writer or?

Yeah, it was terrible. On one hand, I loved that I was liberated from not the constraints of Emma, but from the constraints of the commercial fiction realm that we'd gotten boxed into over the course of 10 years. So I wanted to write a story that was language forward, that was really about exploring big ideas.

And I gave myself permission to completely set any question of the marketplace aside for a few years and just really write for the sake of writing like I was in high school again. And then at the end, I put my editorial hat back on and made sure that it was a really satisfying read. But it was very pleasurable at the beginning to just do it for the sake of doing it.

Yeah, I love that. Well, and I think, you know, I mean, speaking of commercial fiction, you probably couldn't pick a harder genre to be successful in, right? I mean, it's just, it is by far the most, in terms of supply, you know, what a lot of folks read, and yet also the area in which you can have the most success if you are successful.

And I know that you help others with their books as well. So when you're working with authors in commercial fiction, I mean, what do you think has allowed you all to be successful in that genre? What do you think sets a book apart in that genre?

It's so unpredictable. I think if people knew exactly what the formula was, then people would just consistently be able to turn out hits. But it's that magical conversation between what an author offers and then what an audience's appetite is at any given moment.

And we were very lucky with the timing of The Nanny Diaries, because we were nine months out for September 11th, and really nothing had come out because film and book releases had gotten pulled. And so we were arriving with a funny story into a bit of a desert, and people were very eager for a sort of a meaty but entertaining story. And then sometimes timing is just against you.

There's a great quote from one of Nora Ephron's essays, where she talks about having had tremendous success with One Harry Met Sally and so many other films. She said that it's the failures I'm going to think about on my deathbed.

Yeah, totally, totally.

No, I mean, years ago, my editor, my first book told me he was like, you know, the number one thing that determines a book's success, it isn't talent, it isn't who you know, you know, he's like, it's not the editorial feedback. He's like, it's timing. Timing is what does it.

And it is true. It's like, there's just this luck of the draw. But in terms of craft, you know, when you are looking at contemporary fiction, you know, what do you, I mean, there are other pieces in terms of like, what makes it a good story, right?

Like what makes it page turning?

I think that writers who are very good at coming from an empathetic place are the ones who are able to create commercially consistently, because they know exactly what the experience is that they're offering that their readership enjoys and they're able to figure out how to adjust it just slightly each time to give them a new story but emotionally satisfy them in the same way. And when I encounter aspiring authors who are determined to publish commercially but are more caught up in what they want to say than what their reader needs to hear, that's when I often find to disconnect. They have a hard time getting an agent or their agent just isn't able to place the book.

So I think start with the reader always.

No, I love that. You know, as you and Emma were working, how did you craft that structure? And did you guys ever have conflict in terms of, you know, who is the reader for this?

Or, you know, and especially, I think that is the interesting thing about contemporary fiction is that sometimes your reader can feel a little bit less well formed than maybe in a more specific genre, especially in like nonfiction, where you're like doing like a self-help book that can feel very specific to a very, you know, you know your avatar, you know, you know, you're writing to. But in contemporary fiction and in commercial fiction, that can look very different because your readership can look very different. So how did you guys determine who is this author and how do we write to them?

One thing we ever fought about was the ending. Because I believed and still very strongly believe that it's important to let your character, especially if they're inspired by you, to be braver than you were. Because part of why we love fiction is the catharsis.

And I don't want to read a book about someone who's going to run to Trader Joe's and then try to get their MRI covered. I want to read a larger than life story, even if it's set in a domestic or romantic setting that I can connect to. And Emma was very concerned about the story being believable, which is also incredibly important.

But I think if there was no opportunity for Nanny to stand up to Mrs. X at the end, and what we learned over time structurally, is that you have to have the never in every story that works. So there has to be that thing at the beginning of the story, very quickly established within the first 15 pages, that you know that character would never do, that is the one thing you're waiting to see them do. And if they do it, you will walk away from that book feeling like that was a good time.

Yeah. Is that how you define a happy ending?

I think the character's definition of happiness has to change and they need to do the thing that they didn't want to do, desperately avoid it. In fact, may have avoided their entire lives. But if they do that thing, then you know that they've changed.

And that's actually what we're in the bit for, right? We want to see people change and then we know that they may have other challenges in their life, but they're never going to have this challenge again. Because ultimately it's saying that this experience was valuable.

It was worth something, which also means that your time as the reader was worth something. So it goes back to the reader again.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I like happy endings personally, like especially in fiction.

I'm a, you know, if I don't get that, that this character is better off in the end than they were at the beginning, no matter what kind of sacrifice might have taken place, right? It doesn't mean that there isn't hardship or loss or grief, but that somehow they've made their life sweeter in some way by the end. You know, or they've, they've become more self-realized in the process, right?

To have that, I think, is so critical. And I guess, like, from that space, like, when you began to write on your own, like, did you feel like you came at that ending from a different space? And also, like, what was your beginning like?

I mean, and I'd love to hear a little bit of the craft on The Best We Could Hope For in terms of, like, how you began to build the plot of that book.

The challenge with The Best We Can Hope For is that it starts in the 1940s and it goes through to about 2014, and it's a two-hander. So for the first few chapters, the novel is very much centered in the perspective of the mother. Well, she doesn't know she's a mother yet.

But then by the 80s and 90s, we're in the mindset of her daughter. Because I wanted to look at why boomers were on the whole terrible parents. But I also wanted to be inside of their experience in an attempt to exonerate them, right?

They did the best they could with the tools they had at the time. So the math of that was complicated in that I needed to have two nevers running parallel alongside each other. And at the end, I didn't have a lot of road to play with, but I needed the story to satisfy both of their nevers.

You needed to see both characters do something they would never do. And it's the only thing that can ultimately not only set them free, but bring them back together. And it was a math problem, but I think, I mean, according to readers, I solved it.

So, yay, yay.

I love that. No, it's so funny. I was actually just driving today with my daughter.

And as we were driving to school, there's like a kind of like a country road, so to speak. And there's this woman walking with her two dogs, like walking in the middle of the road where the car drives. And I was like, freaking boomer, just like doesn't know, she's not moving over.

And my daughter goes, are they all bad?

And I was like, well, kind of.

And then, but my mother is a boomer, you know, so I was sort of like, and then she was like, is Nana my grandmother?

She's like, is Nana a boomer? And I was like, my grandmother's 93. And I was like, no, she's the silent generation.

They were amazing.

They're actually better than the greatest generation, like the silent generation.

They're like the Gen X.

I'm like telling her, I was like, they were like the Gen X of their time. Like they gave us the beats and like all this like art and like, you know, in descent.

And I was like, the boomers, and I was like, the boomers are like the millennials. And then I started like doing the math out though. And I was like, oh no, you're that, you're the one off generation because she's not Gen Z.

She's Alpha Gen.

And I was like, oh no, it's like going to be another asshole generation.

I was like, sorry, Ella, you're the boomer of the future.

You know, it was hard. They came out of the war into the first, they're the first Madison Avenue generation, right? Where they had advertising just surrounding them 24 seven because they're the first TV generation.

And this whole idea of perfectionism was really born and exploded with them. So they were raised not to express themselves authentically. And the crazy thing is that world changed so fast under their feet from 1963 to 1970.

But if you were a young woman who had already gotten married and had a child, you felt pretty stuck in the old metrics of happiness and success. And so it created a lot of resentment even sort of between half generations. You can have siblings, where an older sister was raised to do one thing and the younger sister was like, I'm going to Woodstock, bye.

Yeah, absolutely. No. And I think, I mean, I saw that my grandmother was the one who was like trapped.

I mean, my grandmother actually got divorced in the 60s, which was not common. She was like the first divorce on the block and then a few followed. But she never got to be who she could have been.

And I think that she did grow up resentful and that resentment came out at my like boomer mother, right? And then I also think I look at that generation of like, they never knew how to integrate work and fun. So now in retirement, like they're all just a bunch of adolescents, like they just behave like teenagers, like these selfish teenagers, because all they did was work, work, work.

And, you know, my mother's confused by my life because work and play are so integrated, like, and parenting, right? Like, I work, I pick up kids, I do fun things, I work, you know, it's not like this, like, go to work until 6 p.m. and then see my kids for dinner, you know? And so I think it's just, it's so different on how they blocked out their life experiences.

And, and then there's a resentment on how we're getting to do it differently because we saw how that didn't work for us as their children, right?

Yes, we are such a feral generation. And a lot of people are talking about that now. But when I started writing the book 10 years ago, I was like, did anyone else feel just like generally neglected?

Yeah.

And now I know the answer is like kind of yes. But I think they didn't understand that the little people in front of them who they were deciding to ignore or shut aside or focus on other things, would become the adults they wanted to have relationships with. And I think as parents now we're so aware that the time and energy that we invest in having joyous experiences with our children will pay dividends down the line because we'll have genuine relationships with them.

Absolutely.

That's my hope.

Again, I mean, I have that like I was just doing the calendar for October and I was like, my daughter is got on to swim team on Tuesdays and Thursdays. And not that dad won't pinch hit, but like I'm generally pick them up on Tuesdays and Thursdays. And I was like, oh, now I will be doing pick up at 2.30 on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

I mean, my mom never picked me up from school because she worked nonstop. But like, I was like, my kids have no idea, like the level of for an entrepreneur who's running like a big company, like how much parenting I do, which just didn't exist in previous generations to be like the breadwinner and the primary caregiver. Oh, you just didn't do those completely.

And it's wild now, like my daughter is 15. And so she's really free rein. She gets herself to her sporting activities.

And suddenly I have all this time, which is also deeply strange because I was so used to jumping up from my desk and running to pick up and getting not only my daughter, but all her friends because their moms worked at jobs where they didn't have any flexibility. So I'd have this little gaggle of chicks with me everywhere. And I missed them.

I know.

That's so funny. Yeah.

Most people in this town think I have three kids and I only have two because they always see me with somebody else's child because it is. Like I have the flexibility to be like, I'll bring your kid along for the ride, you know?

Totally.

So, but I think it's such a... Well, and I think this too, like it is... I mean, it is the joy of doing something creative for a profession.

So I'd love to hear like, I mean, maybe I'm wrong, but like, you've really gotten to like pay some bills with being a writer. And what does that look like? Like in terms of getting traditional book deals?

I know for a lot of, I mean, both the reality of it, too. I often tell people that like traditional book deals are amazing. And there is a rarified group that pay their bills with that.

But I've always seen those those paychecks as being more savings account money than checking account money, right? Because because they get paid out in like three to four payments over like two to three years. Like very few people are living off of that check, right?

Like you're doing other things.

But but what has your experience been as a traditionally published author and one who was continuing to pitch and sell and try to make it in that world?

We got very lucky with The Nanny Diaries out of the gate. And it's been interesting in the last couple of years that I've been out doing events and I've spoken to so many women who have been, you know, morning TV show book club picks regularly on the times list and they pull me aside and go, how do I make money doing this? You're asking the wrong question.

I think, unfortunately, it requires some sort of separation. I think you can decide that you're going to fully support yourself writing if you're also maybe not living in New York City or London, Chicago or LA, or you have a spouse who works in finance, or you separate out your life the way I have and I help people half my day and then do my other thing for the other half of the day. Teaching jobs seem to be eroding.

Friends of mine who had tenured positions now are adjuncts. So that is another avenue. And magazines, you know, when Emma and I first separated, I got a $3,000 job with Cosmo and a $15,000 job with Maxim that month.

And then both magazines said to me, and that was the last time we're hiring anyone outside. Oh, and we're closing in the case of Maxim.

Yes, I know.

So it has gotten more challenging. I just want to be honest about that because I think young people look at the various avenues and are trying to figure it out. I just want them to know they're not crazy.

I've actually been recommending to creative arts students to get a degree in social work and to be a therapist two days a week and if they feel the calling and then do their creative work three days a week. But I think as Liz Gilbert so beautifully said in Big Magic, if you're expecting your writing to not only feed your soul, but also fill your bank account, you're putting too much pressure on it. One of the great gifts is separating from Emma professionally, was just that I stopped needing to make money with my creative pursuits.

It's wonderful and I'm deeply appreciative of it. But most of that money gets turned right back around into hiring an outside publicist and paying touring expenses. And it's really about connecting with the reader.

Then if you're someone like Annabel Monaghan, you make that investment and then three or four books in, you are making a wonderful living doing it. So I don't want to be discouraging, but I also don't want people chasing windmills either, or tilting up windmills.

Yeah. No, I think it is a reality that folks need to know when they go in. And like I say, I always look at them like, look, you could maybe pay off a credit card with it.

You can go on vacation. But it also is really hard to have that consistency from it. And I do think it's also important to see other things that it can help you do.

I mean, I got into book coaching. Similarly, you have the finished thought, right? So I want to say that, though you should always come to us for book coaching.

But also, Nicola is a fantastic book coach. We really have to work together at some point. And I think there are so many different ways that you can make money.

I mean, I myself got a full-time job and non-profit at one point during my writing career, because I actually was ghostwriting. And I will also say that that's another area where like I paid my bills. I bought a house through ghostwriting.

Like I made enough money that I could actually save up and purchase a home through ghostwriting other people's books. But then at a certain point, I wanted to write my own book. And what I found was, if I was ghostwriting, you know, six books a year for other people, it was really hard for me to write my own book.

So I went back into like a full time, just like nine to five job for a little while. So I could write a novel, which sounds crazy. But like, but it was like, because I was like spending every day writing other things.

Like it was really hard to then have that creative space. I needed to go into a job where I just like clocked in, clocked out, had a free brain on the weekends and a free brain at nights to like write, you know? And so I think there's so many different ways to be a writer.

And I think, you know, over the course of your career, I'm sure you've found so many different ways yourself. So I know we've got a shortened amount of time with you today, and I want us to be able to grab our last and final segment. We always like to ask all of our interviewees what their one writing tip is for aspiring and emerging authors out there.

Writing makes you a writer. So don't wait for someone to give you that external approval and validation. You are just as much a writer while you're working on the book before you have an agent as you will be after.

You're just as much of a writer doing those revisions as you are after you've sold it. So like the Wizard of Oz, I just want to empower you to see yourself as the thing you are trying to be, because any amount of devotion, the time that it takes to sit in the seat and do the thing, makes you the author.

I love that. I always think of it as that, as long as you have a writing practice, you are a writer. That's all it takes.

All it takes is writing. I think that's so important. And I'm super excited, speaking of writing, that you're going to be with us for Book Magic this Friday.

If anybody is listening in the future, we are doing Book Magic live events. We have one coming up in February in LA, and we are looking to do a two-day writing retreat in Paris in June, I know, called Story Magic. We're really excited.

We're just beginning to put that together, but really thrilled for our fall event in New York. We're super excited to have you there on Friday. And Nicola, thank you so much for doing Write the Good Fight with us today.

Oh, thank you.

This has been wonderful. I can't wait to see you Friday.

Yeah, I know, me too. All right, have a great one.

Take care.

Thank you.

Bye.

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From Write the Good Fight: Co-Writing to Solo-Writing with Nicola Kraus, Oct 2, 2025

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