Aniket PujariRomance novelist Jasmine Guillory always intended to be a lawyer.
After graduating from Wellesley College with a degree in history, she attended Stanford Law School and ultimately worked on securities law and intellectual property. But when she hit her 30s, Guillory, now 49, realized she needed a creative outlet.
“I have always been a person who loved reading books and loved fiction,” she says, so she decided to try writing a novel. “And I realized that I loved it,” she says.
Guillory tried to get that first book published but couldn’t find an agent to take her on. Her second book, however, “The Wedding Date,” landed her an agent and got published in 2018. “Flirting Lessons,” out April 8, will be her ninth published work and four of her books have become New York Times bestsellers. Guillory quit her job as a lawyer in January 2019 to dive into writing full-time.
Here’s how she built her career as an author.
CNBC Make It: You started writing as a hobby. When did you decide you wanted to try to get that first book published?
Guillory: I think it just came gradually. I worked on it for so long and I could feel it getting better. I knew it wasn’t good at the beginning. I think that was the biggest step was trusting myself when I read it and when I compared it to other books and feeling like this could be good enough.
I think that that is something that has stayed the same in every book that I’ve written throughout my career. There’s always a point where I’m like, “Okay, I really like this book.”
What drew you to romance as a genre?
I went through kind of a difficult period in my life and was reading a lot of books. I discovered that romance novels are really great during hard times because going in, no matter what happens in this book, it’s going to be a happy ending. And that was what I really needed.
And I sort of thought, this seems like it would be fun to write. Let’s see if it will be. And then it turned out it was.
When did you feel like you could leave your career as a lawyer?
I wrote my first three published books while I was working full-time as a lawyer. My first book deal was a two-book deal, and then my second deal was another two-book deal.
And then I got an offer for another deal that was significantly more than my first two had been. And that was when I knew at least I could afford to stop working full time.
I am, as many lawyers are, conservative at heart. So, I’m never sure that this is forever. But at least for now, I can afford to keep doing this.
Do you feel like you’ve made it?
Oh my gosh, no, never. [Laughs] If you had asked me seven or eight years ago at what point will you have thought you made it, I think I probably would have thought being a full-time writer would have been making it or hitting the New York Times bestseller list would have been making it. And those are definitely achievements that I am delighted by and I’m very proud of.
One of the problems with this career — but I think any other — is you’re always raising the bar for yourself.
What do you wish more people knew about being a full-time writer?
How up and down the career may be. Every year, my tax person is like, “Oh, this has been a great year for you” or “Oh, this has been a different year for you.” And I think it’s just because there are ups and downs in the career. There are years where it feels like everything’s going great, and then there are years where it doesn’t feel like that.
I think this goes back to the conversation of do you feel like you’ve made it. So many people who are full-time writers, other people see us as having made it, and we see ourselves as still clawing our way up.
What would you like to achieve down the line?
More writing! That’s the thing that I have to always hold onto is the rest of this is nothing I can control, but the writing is something that I can. Every time I sit down to write, I remind myself that I started doing this because I loved it. I never started doing this in order to make a career out of it. It was because I thought maybe I would enjoy it, and then I loved writing.
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