Nicole Reed

I think a lot of my success stems from my parents, family, friends, and the circle that I built after I left the house, but also the one that was provided to me when I was younger in my childhood home. There was always integrity, honesty, and mutual respect, and it went hand-in-hand with doing the best you can. If you've done the best you can and you didn't succeed, then you've still done the best you can. When I left my childhood home at a very young age, I did my best to continue those values, to instill them in my son, and I try to instill them in all the places I've worked. I just tell people, hey, just be honest with me, okay, you can't make that deadline, we'll fix it, we'll move on. That constant belief that as long as you've done your best and you continue striving for your best, you can succeed.

The grief-to-dollar ratio should always be in favor of whatever is most important to you at the time. This came from one of my mentors when I was very young, starting out in the newspaper world. She was the first female publisher I had met, and she was the first person who ever told me to negotiate my salary. We were sitting there discussing a job offer, and she threw out a number, and I went to accept it, and she said, please don't accept that number. This is a mentor-mentee salary negotiation discussion now. She explained that sometimes, especially when you're young or a new mom, you may need more dollars and you're willing to put up with a little more stress in the job, coworkers who aren't great, or industry setbacks. So dollars may be more important. But there may come a time in your life where the dollars don't matter nearly as much as protecting your peace. That is the best advice I ever got, and it's the one I've given to every mentee I've had since then. And trust me, it works, because if you ever wake up one day and you're saying to yourself, they don't pay me enough for this, it's time to reevaluate.

Speak up. Don't be afraid to speak up. You made it to the industry because you either have a passion for it, or there's something about the industry that has hold of you in a way that speaks to you inside. So don't doubt yourself. You can spend a lot of time with imposter syndrome, especially as a woman in a male-dominated field. Yes, it's changing on the surface, there are a lot of female writers, but still, the majority of contracts go to males, the majority of best-selling authors are male, and on the editorial side, a lot of females are editors, but they don't get the credit that I think they deserve sometimes. So there's this habit of thinking, okay, I can't ask that much because I'm new, or I can't speak up because I don't have enough years in it. If you're passionate, that'll come across. So speak up and advocate for yourself as much as you can. And advocate for each other too. Sometimes it can feel like there's only one spot in the room for one female, so it's real easy to get competitive with each other. Well, how about we just knock a few other people out of the room and bring three or four of us with us.

AI is both a challenge and an opportunity on multiple fronts in our industry. As a business owner, you want to do things efficiently and streamlined, so there's this push and need to integrate AI so you can stay competitive with other agencies who have implemented AI. But when we do that as an editorial and publishing firm, what we end up doing is putting up a barrier between us and our authors. And we don't want that barrier there, because if you don't understand your author when you're working with them, it's really hard to engage with their material, because you don't understand the heart of it. So there has to be a happy medium. As a business owner, you have to be able to stay current, stay relevant, stay working within the industry in a way that makes sense, but at the same time, we can't do so much of that that the authors, the storytellers, the people who actually have that creative spark in their brain are pushed to the side. The opportunity is that people are craving authenticity. We're seeing an interesting shift in pop culture where people are turning away from what is considered general celebrity status and that fake manufactured authenticity that reality TV and social media have presented to us. People are gravitating toward authentic human storytelling from normal people sharing their real experiences. That authenticity in your neighbor, your family members, the person down the street, or the person across the world in a different culture is very important right now.

Integrity and honesty are most important to me. If I can trust you and if you can trust me, there's nothing we can't overcome. But in order to trust someone, you have to build integrity. Honesty is a conscious choice, in my opinion. Integrity is something that you're either born with, bred with, or you have developed in your life enough to hone it really well. If you can stand by your decisions, even when you make a bad decision, and say, look, I made a bad decision, but I still stand by it, to me that's honest and has integrity, and you can go from there. You lose one of those, it's really hard to continue either professional or personal relationships.