My ALLi author guest this episode is Lynne Golodner, a former journalist who built a successful marketing business before deciding to make creative writing her priority. She now writes full time, runs her own publishing imprint, and helps other writers gain the confidence to tell their stories. Her novels weave Jewish identity into contemporary life, and she’s found freedom and success as an independent author.
Listen to the Inspirational Indie Author Interview: Lynne Golodner
About the Host
Author Howard Lovy has been a journalist for 40 years, and now amplifies the voices of independent author-publishers and works with authors as a developmental editor. Find Howard at howardlovy.com, LinkedIn and X.
About the Guest
Lynne Golodner is the award-winning author of twelve bestselling books and hundreds of essays and articles, as well as a marketing expert, writing coach, and retreat leader. With an MFA in poetry, she has lived in New York and Washington, D.C., and eventually settled in her Detroit hometown, where she raised four children and now lives with her husband, Dan.
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Read the Transcript
Lynne Golodner: Hi, I am Lynne Golodner. I live in the Detroit area, and I have always been an author.
I am the award-winning author of 12 books, four of which I have self-published in the last two years. Those first two, three are novels, one is a collection of essays, creative non-fiction essays. The first two novels, Woman of Valor and Cave of Secrets have won a number of awards. And the third novel, I Love You, Charlie Tanner, just came out in June, so my fingers and toes are crossed for awards for that too.
Howard Lovy: Great. You've been writing ever since you could talk, practically. Tell me though, where did you grow up and was reading and writing always a part of your life from the beginning?
Lynne Golodner: Yeah, that's a great question. I did grow up in the Detroit suburbs, and my mother will tell the story that the first time I started writing short stories and poems, I was about six years old. So, that's what I'd go with. But books have always been a huge part of my life and my family growing up.
My dad, who I was very close to, had a study in the house that was floor to ceiling bookshelves all around; he was always reading. It was a very big deal for us to be reading when we were little, and I could just get lost in books as I still can today.
I think writing is always how I figured things out and made sense of what I thought and what was happening, and I think it has just been a tool that I started using when I was young and have done it ever since.
Journalism Career and Transition to Marketing
Howard Lovy: Now, you eventually became a journalist. Is that what you studied in college?
Lynne Golodner: Yep, I went to the University of Michigan. I studied communications in English with the goal of becoming a print journalist, but I really started as a journalist in high school. I was freelancing for our local newspaper, and in college I freelanced to the Ann Arbor News, also wrote for the Michigan Daily, but had a lot of internships in journalism throughout college.
Right away, after I graduated, I moved to New York City, about three weeks later, and I worked at a trade newspaper, but I kept freelancing for local neighborhood publications in Manhattan.
I also went to a writing workshop in the Village, Greenwich Village, every Tuesday night. I was the youngest person there and I was meeting authors and New York Times reporters and all kinds of people who really took me under their wing.
And after a year in New York City, my editor transferred me to the Washington DC Capitol Hill Bureau, and I worked there, and again, freelanced and eventually moved into Jewish journalism. I worked at a weekly Jewish newspaper in Washington, DC for a few years before coming back to Detroit in the late nineties, and for a couple of years, I worked at the Detroit Jewish News as a reporter and then an editor.
I created a scene for a section called The Scene for 20 Somethings, and was a weekly section about 10 pages that I populated, wrote, edited everything. Then I went freelance when I was 27 and I took that section with me, and started writing for national magazines and newspapers, and had a column in the Detroit News for a long time.
I was a freelance journalist for about 10 years and wrote books on the side when I did all of this, but journalism was really how I made my living until about 2007 when I pivoted to marketing and pr.
Howard Lovy: I can't believe that our trajectory hadn't collided up until now because it sounds like our biographies are similar. I was in the Detroit area, Detroit journalism for a little while, worked for the Detroit News. Then I went to New York and was managing editor at JTA for a couple of years.
Lynne Golodner: Oh, wow. That's amazing.
Howard Lovy: And then came back and I've also done work for the Detroit Jewish News. I think I might've just missed you at the Detroit News. I was there from 95 to 99.
Lynne Golodner: Yes, I think you did. I think the weekly column I had, it was about real estate, and it was from 2000 until about 2007 or 2008, so just missed each other.
Howard Lovy: It sounds like you always had a secret manuscript in your desk drawer, even while you were covering the news.
The Journey to Becoming an Author
Lynne Golodner: Yeah, I always had a dream to write a book. That was the dream, and actually when I left New York, I started an MFA in writing program at Goddard College. It was a low residency program so I could live in Washington, and it was based in Vermont at the time, and I could go up there a couple times a year, but really do my work from wherever I was.
These were pre-Zoom days, but it was still long distance, which was cool. My MFA was in poetry and so the master's thesis was a manuscript that could be ready for publication. So, I had this manuscript of poetry ready for my master's program, and about six months before graduation, I started sending it to indie publishers, small publishers.
Somebody picked it up, which was really cool, and it was actually a publisher in Maryland, so not far from where I was living in Washington, DC. Really sweet guy who basically was like publishing one-off books. We worked closely together on this book and I'm really proud of it, and it came out in time for me to arrive to my MFA graduation with a box of books, which was really cool.
So, my first eight books, I would say, happened like that. I wrote a second book of poetry, and I had a friend who had a small press and I said, would you be interested, and he said, sure, and he published it.
Then I had six non-fiction books that really grew out of my journalism. I was so curious about things that I think deeper here or about my life and things I was curious about. So, I used my journalistic skills to do research and reporting and investigate and then find a publisher that would be a fit.
For example, I spent 10 years in the Orthodox Jewish community, and I was so curious about the practice of women covering their hair upon marriage, and there was nothing about it. I couldn't find any books, and there were tons of books about keeping kosher and all kinds of things, but there was nothing about hair covering for women. So, I said, I guess I need to write the book. So, I interviewed rabbis and I interviewed people from all different sects of Orthodox observances, and then I had this book together and I put together a proposal, and I started looking for publishers that might be interested, and I ended up with a publisher in Israel. I got a small, teeny, little advance, but it was quite a win, and it's gone into multiple printings and it's a beautiful book.
So, each project was like that, I just had to find that sort of niche publisher.
Those first eight books, I never had a goal of making any money from it or building any notoriety. They were all labors of love, because I just loved the research and the writing and the learning; it was such a thrill when somebody wanted to take a chance on one of my books, but I didn't know anything about building an author career or making money from writing books, and I certainly wasn't making any money from writing books. So, those were the first eight.
Howard Lovy: It wasn't a get rich quick scheme.
Lynne Golodner: No, not at all.
Howard Lovy: I'm curious personally also, how did you find the transition, or was so much of a transition between a kind of a journalistic way of telling a story and telling it in long form in a book? Was there any kind of adjustment you had to make?
Lynne Golodner: I didn't really, because when I would write big magazine articles, I would map them out and outline them and take all of my notes and print them out and highlight and then compile the story. So, I did the same thing with non-fiction books because I was interviewing and I had the material in front of me.
When I speak about my books now, I like to say, all I had the skill and maturity and patience for in those years was poetry or non-fiction, because they were short and I could gather information, but I always wanted to write fiction.
I think with writing a book, like a non-fiction book as opposed to a collection of poems, I obviously needed more patience. But, again, I still had all the material, I'd collected it all. I had a scent of the story. So, it was like putting it together. For me, it was more reported than anything.
I've been trying to write fiction since forever, but my first novel that I wrote was in the year 2000 and it's still in the drawer somewhere, gathering dust. I spent like nine months writing that first draft and then sent it to five friends who were writers for feedback and put it back in the drawer after I got their feedback. So, I've been trying to write fiction for a long time, and my first novel came out in 2023. I tried another one in 2011 and got 60 pages in and abandoned it, and I picked that back up as sort of the precursor for what became Woman of Valor that came out in 2023.
I think that was the biggest leap for me, was going from short pieces or researched bigger long form pieces to completely creating a story out of thin air. There's still research in there, but I had to have the patience and the trust and the endurance to really get it done. Also, the humility to know when I needed somebody to take a look at it and that I could take their feedback, or 27 pages of feedback to make it better and stick with it so that I could reach that completion. That was a big leap.
Howard Lovy: Yeah, I did something similar. I spent my entire career writing non-fiction and decided to write a novel a couple of years ago and found a publisher. But it was completely out of my comfort zone. Even my wife told me, this doesn't even sound like you.
Lynne Golodner: Yeah.
Founding ‘Your People'
Howard Lovy: So, you're not only a writer, but you're a businessperson as well. You founded a company back in, in 2007 called Your People. Can you tell me more about that?
Lynne Golodner: Yeah. 2007/2008 was when the economy was really spiraling downward and personally, I was leaving a marriage. I had three little kids at the time. So, it was a perfect storm of all kinds of tumult and uncertainty, and journalism was really affected by the economic downfall and a lot of magazines that I relied on for regular assignments were shuttering.
And I thought, okay, what am I going to do? I have to support these three children, and my ex-husband is an Orthodox Jewish musician, so I couldn't really rely on him for a lot of support. So, I started to think about what I could do with my skills; communications and my knowledge of the media and things like that, but have other people pay me to do something of value.
So, I came up with this concept that really is public relations and marketing, but it's driven by storytelling.
So, I took a journalistic approach and I put together this formula that has really worked, about really great narrative storytelling that sort of is the anchor story with a lot of depth and soul, and a focus on building relationships, long-lasting, mutually beneficial relationships with your ideal audience, and then all of that driven by higher purpose, and that sort of, motivates your marketing.
It's been a real success. I think it's really the key. I think it's the only way to market and I started off dipping a toe in the waters, thinking who's going to pay me for this, and ended up with clients around the world. It's been really fun.
Howard Lovy: Interesting. What kinds of clients, are they across the board?
Lynne Golodner: So, early on, I did a lot of food writing when I was a journalist. So, I had a grocery chain, you might have remembered Hillers Markets, from Detroit. So, they were my first client. That was really fun, and I did basically everything for them and it was amazing.
Then I also started working with a company in Detroit called Yoga Shelter, and I was really just curious. I'm like, what makes this tick? They came on as a client and then I ended up building an expertise in yoga businesses. So, for about four or five years, I had a lot of yoga clients all over the world; yoga instructors, businesses, yoga retreats. Did blogging and photography for different yoga teachers who took retreats to India and to Bali and things like that.
Then I transitioned into supporting non-profits and eventually I also developed a specialty in education, but really out of the box education. So, like Waldorf and Steiner schools and small universities that sort of had that same out of the box approach to higher education. I did that for a long time as well.
It was just about five years ago that I shrank the business. I actually fired a lot of my clients because I wanted to pivot to focusing on writing novels and building my author brand. So, I guess you could call it like a midlife crisis or something, but I kept just two clients that were good bread and butter income clients I really liked, that I loved working with, it was easy.
So, that helped me to pivot, and I'd always taught writing since I did my MFA, and so I ramped up my writing teaching so that I could spend more of my time focusing on writing and the art of writing to support my desire to write books than on writing for marketing and things like that.
Howard Lovy: Yeah. So, your midlife crisis, instead of buying a sports car, you decided to write some more.
Lynne Golodner: Yes, exactly.
Pivot to Full-Time Writing
Howard Lovy: What was the moment when you said, okay, this is not really what I want to be doing?
Lynne Golodner: I think it was just before the pandemic and I had this crisis of identity where I thought, I always say I'm a writer, but when I say that I mean creative writer, and it's the last thing I do. I do it so occasionally and I don't take it seriously. If I say that I'm that, when am I going to do that as my priority?
And it was a wakeup call. Then, of course, I think the pandemic actually helped because I was home and I could do more. I've always worked from home, but I could just focus on that creative energy.
So, I started off by doing an hour of writing before I did all the client work, before I made this real pivot. And when I finally had a serious talk with myself, I said, I'd like to get to the point where I don't have to wake up at 5:00 AM to write and that my creative energy in the morning, which is my best time, is put into creative projects that are passion projects, and then the client work can be in the afternoon.
So, it took me about two years to really complete that pivot and get to a point where what I love to do is the first thing I do in the day and then what I need to do, to afford my life or whatever, comes after. I planned it out, I thought it through, and I knew it would be step by step and it was really great when I finally one day was like, oh my gosh, I'm there.
Howard Lovy: That's great. That's exactly what I want to do when I grow up. There's my editing work that I need to make money because I have two kids in college, and then there's my creative work, which doesn't make me any money, but it is more fun.
But you couldn't help yourself. You also created a business out of that.
Creating an Independent Publishing Imprint
Howard Lovy: You created an imprint focused on women over 40.
Lynne Golodner: Yes. That's an interesting conversation, especially for this podcast, because I just assumed when I made this whole change that I would shop around for an agent, shop around for a publisher. So, when I finished Woman of Valor, I worked with a developmental editor. I really knew that I needed that help in that first novel, and when I felt that it was ready to go, I started querying. I got a lot of great response; I got a lot of requests for full manuscript.
I even also queried some small publishers that you could go to directly, and I was offered a contract from one of them. I thought about it, I read the contract, I didn't like it. I also felt like something in my gut was telling me that I just didn't want to go that route, and even though I had been raised with the perspective that self-publishing was something you didn't do unless you had no other choice, I knew that had shifted and that it's an incredibly valid decision and it's so much more professional nowadays.
And I knew that I could do it and I wanted to do it my own way. I knew that I would have checks and balances. I would have editors; I would have cover designers. I would have people who could see it with new eyes, and it wouldn't just be me.
But because my author brand really focuses a lot on threading Jewish identity through the stories, I didn't want anybody to tell me to water down the Jewish so that the book would sell, and that was my main reason for creating Scotia Road Books. Also, I wanted to write a book a year, and the publishing industry doesn't move that quickly.
So, I felt like I was getting a late start, although I know so many authors don't even publish a book till after 50, but I felt like I have catching up to do, and I don't want to be slowed down by other business goals, other people.
I think the last part of it too was that I'm so awake to the idea that authors, no matter how they publish, have to really put a lot of effort into their own marketing, and since I already have a company and I have those skills, I thought, why would I go through gatekeepers to make them money and still have to do my own marketing?
I just thought, yes for validation, but all those reasons led me to say, I'm going to create my own imprint for my books, but also to provide it as a service for anybody else who might really want that help and doesn't want to do it themselves.
It's not my priority business, but it's there if somebody wants to make use of it.
Howard Lovy: As we both know, this past couple of years have been an eyeopener for many Jewish authors.
Lynne Golodner: Yes.
Howard Lovy: We've been marginalized by the mainstream literary community. So, being an indie author helps because you don't have that gatekeeper saying, we don't want to hear Jewish voices right now.
Lynne Golodner: Exactly.
Howard Lovy: And that's a statement of fact, not an opinion; we've both written about this. Does being an indie author help you bypass that traditional gatekeeper? And do you still find any pushback, even as an indie author?
Lynne Golodner: Thank God, I have not, and I don't want to jinx anything by saying that out loud, but I have actually had great feedback.
The only negative reviews I've gotten on my books are like, I had one that said this was boring, and I'm like, okay, that's an objective statement, you're not my reader; it's fine. I don't take that personally. But most of my reviews are really positive.
In fact, my first novel Woman of Valor is a very Jewish book. It's an orthodox protagonist. My subsequent novels, they still have Jewish identity in it, but it's not the front and center, like it is in Woman of Valor.
And I will say, I've spoken to a lot of audiences, including outside of the Jewish community. I had this one book club over Zoom that asked me to speak to them. They were reading Woman of Valor. They were not Jewish, they didn't know anybody who was Jewish, and they so loved the book that, there were some different foods that were mentioned in the book, that they found recipes for challah and for matza ball soup and for some other things in there, and they made it for their book club when I was speaking to them. And that was what they ate as I was talking to them and they were like, oh, we learned so much. And it was really nice. It was just a way to build empathy and understanding of a new identity for people who had never stepped foot in the Jewish community.
So, I was really heartened by that. That was encouraging to me.
Howard Lovy: Yeah, that's great. That's everything a writer could ask for. Not only reading your book, but living it and eating it.
Lynne Golodner: Exactly.
Howard Lovy: You said Jewish identity is threaded through your books. Is it one aspect of your books or is it front and center?
Lynne Golodner: It is front and center, strong, proud Jewish identity is a theme that is important to me in every book. In Woman of Valor, it's a young woman who chooses to become Orthodox and is married and has kids, and one of her kids is abused at school, and this is her adopted community. She has to obviously, support her child and protect him while incurring responses and blowbacks from the community. So, what will she end up doing?
Cave of Secrets, my second novel, takes place in Scotland. There's also a Michigan connection in every one of my books.
So, in Woman of Valor, the protagonist is originally from the Detroit area, but she lives in Chicago, in Skokie. In Cave of Secrets, there's an Ann Arbor home base for one of the protagonists, and then she goes to Scotland on a fellowship and she discovers some aristocrats from the 18 hundreds who, one of them was secretly Jewish, and there's this whole lineage in the aristocracy that was hidden and she wants to out it, and she falls in love with a descendant of that. So, it's a whole big upheaval of we're not who we thought we were.
Then in, I Love You, Charlie Tanner, it's probably the least amount. There's actually a Traverse City angle, that's where the protagonist is from.
Howard Lovy: That's my hometown, by the way, for those who don't know.
Lynne Golodner: Exactly, and she ends up in a cult in Cape Breton for 20 years. When she leaves it and resettles in Vermont, she falls in love with a widowed rabbi and she's like, well, I guess my family is Jewish, but we never did anything growing up and so she has to confront it and make a decision at midlife, do I want this identity and what do I want it to mean to me?
So, it's a theme that comes in after she meets him, but it's in the background really.
My next book, which is in process, it's very front and center. Antisemitism is actually a big theme through it, but identity as well. I guess I'm just writing the times.
Howard Lovy: Exactly, yeah. I can relate, as a Jewish author and also a Michigan author.
Challenges and Coaching Other Writers
Howard Lovy: So, alongside your own writing, you coach other writers and lead retreats and workshops. What are some of the biggest challenges writers are facing today and how do you help them?
Lynne Golodner: The biggest one, hands down, is confidence and self-belief, and I find that's what I'm really teaching.
Yes, I'm teaching craft and technique and publishing, and how to build an author career, I teach all of those things. But really and especially, I have all kinds of students, but the majority are women somewhere in midlife, maybe even in retirement, and it's remarkable how the through line is really that they always wanted to write, but.
Either somebody told them it was a nice little hobby, or you couldn't make any money at it, or not to take it seriously, and it just kept dogging them until they got to a point where they said, I've always wanted to do this, and it's time for me. So, there's a lot of unlearning that has to happen. Letting go of other people's voices in their heads and giving themselves permission to listen to their own voices, and really refining that so that they can feel good about it and brave to put their writing in the world believing that they matter and that what they have to say will make a difference and it's worth their time and effort.
So, that's the biggest thing I find.
Howard Lovy: Yeah. The old, what do they call it, imposter syndrome.
Lynne Golodner: Yeah, exactly.
Howard Lovy: And that's very real, even for experienced writers. I felt that when I made the shift from non-fiction to fiction. Who cares about a story I make up?
Lynne Golodner: Yeah, I see it in all the genres. I think it's also setting realistic expectations. Most of us are never going to be, award-winning New York Times bestsellers, making millions off our books. That's unlikely for most people.
So, then bringing it in and saying, what do I really want from this? If it's to start a conversation or to impact someone, that's very reachable.
We've had conversations in my courses, especially a long-term course that I offer called the writer's community, which is that if one person feels less alone because of something you wrote, was it worth it? And everybody says yes. There's never a question.
So, if that's just one person who is moved by my words or feels comforted or less alone, I think it's worth it, and I think we have to have realistic goals in that regard too. That helps with the confidence.
Howard Lovy: Exactly. It sounds like you don't suffer from a lack of confidence. You said you plan to write a book a year for the rest of your life.
Lynne Golodner: Yes.
Future Plans
Howard Lovy: So, what's next for you, both as an author and a coach and a businessperson?
Lynne Golodner: My goal would be at some point to sunset the marketing company because I've been juggling a lot of things for a lot of years, and I'm a little tired of that. And then simplify my teaching so that I do less of it, but spend more of my time writing.
I really am looking for really marketing growth in my books too. My books have done really well, but again, because I'm juggling so many things I have fits and starts with the marketing of it because just don't have enough time.
Next year, 2026, I will publish at least one book, but I'm hoping for two, to be honest. I have a second book in the Woman of Valor series, if it becomes that, that I've written two rough drafts of that I didn't quite love, and I would like to work on them to create something that I'd feel good about publishing.
It's about the main character's best friend and how she became religious.
Then the book I mentioned before that I'm working on now; I expect the first draft will really be done by the end of this year. I would like to be able to release it next year.
But it's interesting because I have an agent who wants to see it, and I have a publisher who wants to see it, and I don't know how I feel about that, because I've made this big decision and I'm like, will I show it to them? Will I not? What would be the pros and cons? So, that's up in the air too.
Howard Lovy: I'd like to have a little bit of whatever you eat for breakfast, because you seem to have a very energetic writing life, which I envy.
Thank you very much, Lynne. I appreciate you taking the time to talk to us about your life, your career, and your writing.
Lynne Golodner: Thank you so much for having me, Howard. It's been a lot of fun.
Howard Lovy: Thank you, Lynne.
