Latest / The Comeback Career Podcast with Fexingo: Returning After a Gap, Stay-at-Home Re-Entry / How a Career Gap Helped One Woman Build a Bestselling Book
Transcript
- Lucas: There's a particular question that comes up a lot in the career-gap community, and it's this: what is the single highest-leverage thing you can do with a year away from your main career track? Luna: And I bet the answer isn't what most people expect. It's not taking a course or getting a certification. Lucas: Exactly. The answer, according to a growing number of re-entry success stories, is to write a book. Not a memoir. A business book. Something that sits on a shelf or in a Kindle and says to every future employer: this person knows what they're talking about. Luna: So today we're looking at a specific case. Elena Vasquez. Former marketing director at a mid-sized tech firm. Fourteen-month career gap to care for her aging parents. Lucas: And during that gap, she wrote a book called 'The Remote Playbook.' It became a Wall Street Journal bestseller. It also became her re-entry ticket. She's now a VP of remote strategy at a company you've definitely heard of. Her book was the reason she got the interview. Luna: Right, and I think the important thing here is that she didn't have a publishing deal before she started. She wrote the manuscript first, then used it to find an agent. Lucas: That's the detail I love. Most people assume you need permission to write a book. You don't. You need a good idea, a solid outline, and the discipline to write five hundred words a day for six months. Elena did exactly that. She woke up at 5:30 every morning, wrote for ninety minutes before her parents needed her, and had a full draft in twenty-two weeks. Luna: And she didn't just write in a vacuum. She interviewed thirty-five remote team leaders from companies like Zapier and GitLab. That research became the backbone of her book and also gave her a network of people who later blurbed it. Lucas: Which is a great example of something we talk about a lot on this show: a career gap can be a period of active asset-building, not just passive absence. A book is an asset. It has a shelf life measured in years. It generates credibility every time someone Googles your name. Luna: And the data backs that up. A study from the Society for Human Resource Management found that candidates who have published a book — even a self-published one — receive forty percent more callbacks than those with identical resumes but no book. Forty percent. Lucas: That's enormous. And it makes sense. A resume tells me what you did. A book tells me what you think. It shows depth, commitment, and the ability to communicate complex ideas. Those are the things hiring managers are actually desperate for. Luna: So let's talk about the practical steps. Elena didn't just write. She also built a platform while she was writing. She started a LinkedIn newsletter called 'Remote Work Realities' that grew to twelve thousand subscribers by the time her book launched. Lucas: And that newsletter served two purposes. First, it gave her a test audience for her ideas. She could see which topics got engagement, which stories resonated. Second, when she approached literary agents, she had proof of demand. Twelve thousand people reading her work every week. That's hard to ignore. Luna: She actually got her agent through a cold email. She found an agent who represented other remote-work authors, sent a one-paragraph pitch with a link to her newsletter, and had a call within three days. Lucas: And the agent loved it. But here's the part that most people don't think about: Elena also used her gap to crowdfund part of her advance. She created a pre-order campaign through a platform called Publishizer, and she emailed three hundred former colleagues and professional contacts. Luna: And that's a bit scary for a lot of people. Reaching out to your network after a gap can feel like you're asking for a favor. But she framed it differently. She said, 'I'm writing a book that I think will help people navigate remote work. If you pre-order, you're not doing me a favor. You're investing in a resource that will help your own team.' Lucas: That's a great reframe. And it worked. She raised fifteen thousand dollars in pre-orders, which gave her a financial cushion during her gap and also proved to her eventual publisher that there was a market. Luna: If today was actually useful to you, the way these stay ad-free is listener support. You can find us at buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. Just a simple way to keep these conversations going without any ads. Lucas: And we really appreciate it. It's what lets us spend time on stories like Elena's instead of reading sponsor breaks. So thank you to anyone who's ever contributed. Luna: Alright, back to the book. So the book comes out, it hits the bestseller list, and then what? How did she actually turn that into a job? Lucas: This is the part I find most instructive. She didn't apply for jobs the normal way. She didn't blast her resume into online portals. Instead, she identified fifteen companies that were hiring for remote strategy roles, and she reached out to the hiring managers directly with a simple email: 'I wrote the book on remote work. Here's a link. Would love to chat about how I could help your team.' Luna: And it worked. She got interviews at twelve of those fifteen companies. The book acted as a credential that bypassed the usual resume screen. Lucas: Exactly. And when she sat down for those interviews, the conversation was different. They weren't asking her to defend her gap. They were asking her about her research, her methodology, her predictions for the future of work. She was the expert in the room. Luna: There's a risk here, though. Some people might say, 'But I'm not a writer. I don't have a book in me.' And that's a legitimate concern. Lucas: It is. But I'd push back. Most people have more expertise than they give themselves credit for. If you've spent five years in a specific domain, you have enough material for a short, focused book. The key is to pick a narrow topic where you can genuinely add value. Elena's book wasn't 'The Everything Guide to Remote Work.' It was a specific playbook for managing distributed teams. That's a tight, actionable niche. Luna: And there's a low-risk way to test the waters. You can start with a short ebook, maybe thirty or forty pages, and see if people buy it. If they do, you have validation. If they don't, you've learned something without committing a year of your life. Lucas: Plus, the act of writing itself has value. It forces you to clarify your thinking. You start to see patterns in your own experience that you hadn't noticed before. That clarity is something you bring into every interview, every networking conversation, even if the book never gets published. Luna: So what about the timeline? If someone is in the middle of a career gap right now and wants to try this, how long does it realistically take? Lucas: Elena's timeline was about twelve months from start to publication, but she was also caregiving full-time. If you have more dedicated hours, you could do it in six. The writing itself, if you're consistent, is the fastest part. The slower parts are things like editing, design, and distribution. But you can compress those by using modern tools. There are services that help with cover design, formatting, even ghostwriting if you have the budget. Luna: And what about the fear of impostor syndrome? A lot of listeners might think, 'Who am I to write a book?' Lucas: Elena felt that too. She told me in an interview that she almost quit at the three-month mark because she felt like a fraud. What got her through was a simple reframe: she wasn't writing the definitive text on remote work. She was writing her perspective, based on her experience. And that perspective was unique. No one else had her exact combination of marketing background, caregiving gap, and research interviews. Luna: I think that's the key takeaway. A career gap doesn't erase your expertise. It adds a new dimension to it. And writing a book during that gap is a way to capture that expertise in a form that lasts. Lucas: Absolutely. And it's not just for people who want to be authors. It's for anyone who wants to re-enter the workforce with a piece of evidence that says, 'I spent my time well, and here's the proof.' Luna: So if you're in a gap now, or considering one, maybe think about that one topic you could write five hundred words a day on. It might just change your career. Lucas: Next time on The Comeback Career Podcast, we're looking at how a career gap can be used to build a software product without any coding experience. That one is wild. Until then, keep building.