In short
Rachel Hochhauser (Rachel Hawthouser) discusses her career pivots—from strategic planning in advertising during the 2008 financial crisis, to earning a writing master’s, to co-founding a creative agency and Piecework Puzzles, and finally to writing her debut novel Lady Tremaine, a Cinderella “untelling.”
Guest backgrounds
NYU history major with creative writing minor; strategic planner at an ad agency (2009 onward); later earned a writing master’s via a USC teaching scholarship while teaching and working part-time; co-founded Major Studio (2016) and Piecework Puzzles (launched mid-2019 with four puzzles).
Key claims
Writing required structured time and later a “single-parent” crisis pushed her to write quickly; Piecework began as burnout relief and became a premium brand; self-directed PR (emailing journalists) drove early gift-guide traction; a “preempt” (St. Martin’s Press) beat auction.
Notable examples
Her first novel manuscript got repeatedly revised into “its grave”; Piecework’s early puzzle shoot produced “Feeling Flush” (poker-themed) and other serendipitous concepts; Lady Tremaine debuted March 3, became an instant NYT bestseller and Reese’s Book Club pick; cover art used flowers from Clara Peters (Met collection).
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Chapters
Tap a time to open that second in VOEarly Aspirations and Education
0:45 to 2:15
Rachel discusses her childhood aspirations and education choices.
“Throughout her career, she returned to writing, getting her master's in professional writing, and even completing her first manuscript.”
Navigating College and Career Paths
2:15 to 3:50
Exploration of Rachel's college choices and early career decisions.
“But by the time I went to college, I was pretty focused on wanting to write.”
Starting in Advertising During a Crisis
3:50 to 6:07
Rachel shares her experiences entering the job market during the financial crisis.
“you know, at the top of the world and you know everything.”
The Pull of Writing
6:07 to 8:15
Discussion on Rachel's desire to write and decision to pursue a master's degree.
“And it's essentially the bridge between the business.”
Graduate School and Balancing Act
8:15 to 10:34
Rachel details her experience balancing graduate school, teaching, and work.
“You can work in any field and it's life experience and it's a paycheck, but you can spend your after hours and your weekends working on your writing.”
The Journey of Writing a Novel
10:34 to 12:56
Rachel discusses her goal to write a novel during her master's program.
“So what were you working on in terms of writing at that point in time?”
Challenges in the Writing Process
12:56 to 14:01
Rachel reflects on the difficulties and emotional challenges of revising her manuscript.
“So then alongside my job, I was revising this novel.”
Initial Writing Experience
14:01 to 15:55
Rachel shares her first writing experience and the themes of her early work.
“It makes sense that, of course, you would be attached.”
Transition to Creative Agency
15:56 to 18:19
Rachel discusses the decision to leave a creative agency and start her own.
“So at what point did you decide, I no longer want to work for a creative agency.”
Founding Piecework: The Idea
18:20 to 21:09
Rachel explains the inspiration behind starting her puzzle company, Piecework.
“It was harder to step away and it's harder to feel like you really have time to yourself or you can unplug and unwind, which is ironically what ultimately led me to puzzles and my puzzle company.”
Show all 26 chapters
Brand Development Journey
21:10 to 23:38
Rachel details how she and her co-founder developed the Piecework brand.
“It was like being thrown into a swimming pool, not knowing how to swim.”
Launching Piecework: The First Steps
23:39 to 25:25
Rachel recounts the chaotic launch of Piecework and the challenges faced.
“So talk to me about what the launch was like.”
Navigating Multiple Careers
25:26 to 28:03
Rachel reflects on balancing her agency work with running Piecework.
“It was an interesting dynamic behind the scenes.”
Early Marketing Strategies for Piecework
28:03 to 28:34
Discover how Piecework gained traction through organic marketing and PR.
“we got great organic pickup on all types of listicles and gift guides and what things, which were really helpful.”
Personal Challenges and Inspiration to Write
28:34 to 29:19
Learn about the life events that motivated Rachel to start writing again.
“I'm so blown away by how much you are doing at any given point in time.”
The Birth of a New Book Idea
29:19 to 33:17
Explore how a difficult personal situation inspired the concept for her book.
“And I suddenly, you know, overnight effectively became a single parent, his caretaker.”
Navigating the Publishing Process
33:17 to 35:39
Understand the journey from completing a manuscript to securing a publisher.
“Martin's Press, which was the softest landing page.”
The Role of an Editor in Fiction Writing
35:39 to 39:26
Get insights into the collaboration with an editor and the editing process.
“Or did you turn in something that was so clean that no one wanted to mess with it?”
The Success of Lady Tremaine
39:26 to 41:36
Hear about the accolades and recognition received for Rachel’s latest book.
“It's a Reese's Book Club pick, which, by the way, I feel like that is such a phenomenal blast of additional energy on top of being an instant New York Times bestseller.”
Future Projects and Long Publishing Timelines
41:36 to 42:01
Learn about Rachel's upcoming projects and the long timelines in publishing.
“So six months to write it, and then how long until it actually came out?”
The Publishing Timeline and Its Challenges
42:01 to 43:01
Explore the lengthy process of getting a book published and the importance of writing in a vacuum before feedback.
“So I mean, publishing has a really long runway to launch a book.”
Unveiling the Unfinished Novel
43:01 to 44:18
Learn about the inspiration and research behind Rachel's upcoming book set in 1860s Santa Barbara.
“Like even positive feedback can harm the writing process because you start trying to write for like, oh, people really liked X, Y, and Z.”
Diving Deeper into Research Methods
44:18 to 46:18
Understand the extensive research involved in writing historical fiction and how it influenced Rachel's writing process.
“I did a lot of research for Lady Tremaine, but I did even more for the second book.”
Balancing Creative Ventures and Piecework
46:18 to 47:16
Discover how Rachel manages her writing career alongside her work with Piecework Puzzles.
“So I have a whole shelf next to me of probably like 20 books I've read about the history of California and that region and life back then.”
Learning from Mistakes and Taking Risks
47:16 to 49:11
Rachel shares valuable insights about mistakes and the importance of taking career risks.
“And I think it's really important to talk about mistakes because we all make them, but we live in this Instagram highlight reel fantasy life where we don't always discuss that stuff.”
Embracing Change and Following Dreams
49:11 to 51:01
Gain insights on embracing change and staying flexible in pursuit of your dreams.
“thinking about it but just hasn't jumped quite yet?”
Transcript
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.0:05Hi, everyone. I'm Hilary Kerr, the co-founder and chief content officer of Who, What, Where, and this is Second Life, a podcast spotlighting women who have truly inspiring careers. We're talking about their work journeys, what they've learned from the process of setting aside their doubts or fears, and what happens when they embark on their second life. Today on the show, I'm speaking with the author of the buzzy new novel, Lady Tremaine, Rachel Hawthouser. Rachel always had dreams of becoming a writer, but after studying history and creative writing, she actually began her career in the middle of a financial crisis as a strategic advisor at an ad agency.
0:47Throughout her career, she returned to writing, getting her master's in professional writing, and even completing her first manuscript. But she continued to work in the creative agency world and ended up co-founding her own agency called Major Studio in 2016. While serving as a partner and brand director there, she also co-founded Piecework Puzzles, a brand of artful puzzles and gifts. Despite her entrepreneurial success, her love of creative writing continued in the background, and in 2023, she began writing what would become her debut novel. That book, Lady Tremaine, was released earlier this year and was named an instant New York Times bestseller and a Reese's Book Club pick.
1:32Rachel is an excellent example of passion and persistence, and I can't wait for you to hear from her. Now, on Second Life, it's Rachel Hawthouser.
1:45Rachel Hochhauser:Rachel, you ready? I'm ready. Let's do it. Okay. So we like to start this podcast at the beginning. So what did you study in school? And much more importantly, what did you think you were going to be when you grew up? I wanted to be so many different things when I grew up. I think writing was very much a through line. I remember seeing author when I was a kid because I thought it sounded really fancy. It does. It does. Yes. But I also went through a diplomat phase because I thought that sounded even fancier. So true. You can see where my interests lay. But by the time I went to college, I was pretty focused on wanting to write.
2:25Rachel Hochhauser:But I went to NYU and they do not offer a fiction focus for undergrad. So I minored in creative writing and then majored in history. So why history? I was ahead in my credits. I was doing summer courses and winter courses and I had gone in with AP and the history major required one less credit to graduate. Fab. And so I ended up graduating a full year early. And one of the reasons I was able to do that was because I picked a major that had less requirements. And it's ended up being really nice full circle moment. Now, later in my career, it's become a little bit more relevant. But at the time, it was just something I picked.
3:04I love it. This is the calculus that we were doing at that point in time at those ages. And it all works out in the long run.
3:12Rachel Hochhauser:I don't think I had the toolkit to look ahead at the time and the way that I would now. I would love to be a student now and picking a major all over again. I would do it very differently. I do feel like college is sometimes wasted on the young. Absolutely. Absolutely. Okay. So graduating early with that degree, did you feel like you were prepared for, quote unquote, the real world and actually like getting a job? No, I have to separate how I feel about it now looking backwards versus what I felt then, you know, when you're young and especially living in New York City, you think you're, you know, at the top of the world and you know everything.
3:52Rachel Hochhauser:With hindsight, I know that that definitely wasn't the case. And it opens an interesting philosophical conversation on what university actually prepares you for. Like you don't graduate knowing how to do taxes. I still don't know how to do taxes the way I wish I could. But I think especially being in New York, I got like an education by the city and of the world and you learn so many other soft and hard skills. I think I entered that phase of life with the tools I needed to get by, but they were really unrelated to the career I ended up going into. But I think the early stages of any career also feels like an education, right?
4:31Rachel Hochhauser:Like you're learning by hopefully being taught if you're working with the right people, but certainly by watching and making mistakes. So I read that you were interning for an ad agency and then ended up taking a full-time job there as a strategic planner, which feels quite different from what you had been working on. Talk to me a little bit about this. So my mother's best friend from high school had a sister who lived in York City, one of those like weird, you know, million points of connections. And she worked in an advertising agency and needed an intern. And it was a paid internship, which was not the norm in 2008 or whenever this started.
5:15Rachel Hochhauser:And so that was really attractive to me as a student living on a student budget. And also going into that office, it was like something out of Devil Wears Prada. It was like being in a magazine office. It was all white. There were unspoken rules about the shades and all the windows had to be at the exact same height. There was a magazine library. So it was very glamorous in a way. And it was exciting to suddenly be in that world of working professionals. I had worked at retail in high school. I had babysat in college and had other jobs, but nothing like this in a true corporate environment. So it was interesting to me.
5:51Rachel Hochhauser:And I learned a little bit about strategic planning, which is this really strange role in an advertising agency. It's almost like you have the machine of an advertising agency, and it's this little tiny bone in the machine that most people don't know what it is if you haven't worked in that world. And it's essentially the bridge between the business. You have project managers, account managers who are working with the clients, and then you have the creative team, but you need a bridge between the two who can translate the language and who can understand consumer insights and think both creatively and strategically.
6:28Rachel Hochhauser:In a sense, I do think I was cut out for it and I learned a lot about it. It's just that I never actually picked it for myself. Right. That makes sense. I mean, it's one of those situations where you're like, this is the job. So here we go to job. Yes. And I spent, you know, just a couple years doing it and I didn't think I was going to be in it forever. But then one thing led to another. And, you know, I ended up doing it for almost a decade plus. I mean, also, by the way, like you graduated during the financial crisis, right? So there also has to be like some element of that in the mix with everything, too.
7:04Rachel Hochhauser:Oh, absolutely. I mean, I know this has become a meme now about millennials and my cohort complaining about this, but it was very much a thing. You know, I graduated in 2009. I had just started. I really wanted to stay in New York where I lived. It was, you know, the only place I knew after leaving my parents' home is where all my friends were. It felt like the center of the world to me. My parents weren't going to just support me to stay there. And so I needed a job and there were none available. I mean, there were truly none. People didn't know what to do. It was a really bad time to be stepping into the job market.
7:40Rachel Hochhauser:So I already had this internship and they had a job available to me. You know, they weren't begging me to stay, but I made it really clear that I wanted it. The decision was made for personal reasons. I think I would have probably explored the field a bit more and seen what else was out there if the circumstances had been different, but it was rough. So at what point did you start thinking about getting your master's in writing? As I mentioned before, I was always interested in writing. And when I graduated and took this job in advertising, I was telling myself that I would be able to write. You can work in any field and it's life experience and it's a paycheck, but you can spend your after hours and your weekends working on your writing.
8:23Rachel Hochhauser:I cannot tell you how low my word count was in that first year. I don't have any memories of writing anything. So there was not a lot of writing happening. And I had a lot of self-recrimination and guilt about it. And I wanted to be writing and I pictured myself as a writer, but I wasn't actually doing it. And so I felt like going back to school was the way to make it happen and to give myself the focus and the time to do it. In hindsight, you know, I could have been writing more. I had the free time. I certainly know that now that I'm a parent with two young children. It was like you never had more free time than those years.
8:59Rachel Hochhauser:But at the time, it felt like a necessity to, you know, put myself in an environment around other writers and to make it the focus of my life. And it felt like giving myself a chance to like take a swing at what was most important to me. So talk to me about what your actual experience was like. Were you working at the same time or did you take a break to go and do the master's? So what ended up happening was I thought I was going to stay in the East Coast area, But I applied to a bunch of different master's programs and I got into some great ones, but I got an offer for a full scholarship, a teaching scholarship.
9:32Rachel Hochhauser:So you teach undergrads at USC and you don't want to go into debt for a writing degree if possible. So it was sort of like with that offer, my path was chosen for me. And suddenly I was selling my IKEA furniture and getting ready to move back across the country from California originally. And I went over there, but as luck would have it, the advertising agency that I was working for in New York was opening an LA office and I needed money. My grad school years were absolutely nuts because I kept working part time for the ad agency. I was teaching, which is a job in and of itself. And I was also a student taking classes.
10:09Rachel Hochhauser:So I had these insane days where I was driving, you know, to Santa Monica, to the office at the ad agency, back over to the USC campus, which is on the total other side of L.A., taking classes, trying to prepare my courses for undergrads. If I thought I had no free time before, I mean, this was the epitome of it, but it was exciting. And, you know, I felt very alive doing it. My days were packed full and I was finally writing. So it was a nice, fun couple of years. So what were you working on in terms of writing at that point in time? Did you have a novel in mind? What was the larger goal? Because I would imagine the goal is that by the time your program wraps that you have something finished to take out, right?
10:50Rachel Hochhauser:Yeah. So I was really intentional about it. I knew I needed to, for my own reasons, it was not a requirement of the program finish a novel while I was there in those two years. So pretty early on, I started working on a book. And by the time I graduated, I had finished it. And I thought this was my magnum opus. I thought this was the thing that was going to put me on the map. And it didn't. But by the time I graduated, I had this manuscript. And I was again in that position of having graduated and needing to figure out how to support myself. I had a manuscript, but that doesn't mean I was going to make money off of it.
11:23Rachel Hochhauser:So I negotiated a job with the same advertising agency. Essentially, I wanted to work four days a week, one of those days from home. And this was pre-pandemic. So this was really unusual for me. It took a lot of conversations with HR to figure that out. But my idea was I'd have one day a week dedicated to writing. Safe to say that didn't generate a lot of new writing. So once again, I was in the position of not writing a lot. I was not very good at fitting that into my extracurricular hours. But I did have this manuscript. And so I took it out into the market. I tried to leverage every connection I had with the support of some of my grad school advisors.
12:02Rachel Hochhauser:And the way that you take a novel out into the marketplace is you cannot go directly to publishers. You have to find representation first via an agent. So you do this process called querying. Most of the time, unless you're incredibly fortunate and very well connected, you're called querying, which means you're sending basically a cover letter. They follow a specific format and you're trying to get an agent to just read it, to just respond to you, to just say, maybe I'll take the first chapter to see if I'm interested. And you're essentially spamming people. There's a lot online about how to do this correctly and how to track your queries.
12:40Rachel Hochhauser:And it's a whole thing in and of itself. But I entered that process and I got some really nice rejections. essentially. I got really wonderful words of encouragement and feedback from big agents, you know, saying, if you revise X, Y, and Z, I'd like to take a look at it again. So then alongside my job, I was revising this novel. And essentially what happened over the next number of years is I revised that novel into its grave. I wrote it and rewrote it and rewrote it until by the end of that process, I was like, I can't work on this anymore. This is never going to happen. And it was very heartbreaking for me, but I quit writing in the way that you dramatically quit something in your 20s.
13:23Rachel Hochhauser:And I remember talking to my now husband, then boyfriend at the time when I was 29 and feeling like it feels like everyone has gotten on a train, you know, that's left the station and I didn't get on it in time and I didn't make it happen for myself. And it was so upsetting. It felt like a breakup. It was too emotional for me touch or try to work on something else, which now looking back, I see, you know, that's actually just part of writing and the process is not getting too attached to any one thing or one project. But that was how I felt about it at the time. But this was your first love. How could you not be all in in that way?
14:01Yeah. It makes sense that, of course, you would be attached. Maybe this is too painful to ask, but can you tell me what the first one was about or do we not want to go there?
14:09Rachel Hochhauser:No, it's not too painful. It's kind of funny because it was essentially about a marriage and I had the audacity to write it when I had never been married before. It was about a woman's relationship with the family she married into. That was actually not the issue. Like now reading it, I can see what the problems are. And I think the marriage was actually very accurate. The whole thing opens up with the scene. The protagonist has upset because she goes to brush her teeth and there's no toothpaste left. And she's like, when has anyone else but me ever bought the toothpaste. Like, why is it always on me to buy the toothpaste?
14:43Rachel Hochhauser:No one else has ever noticed. I was ahead of my time there, but it was set in San Inaz and wine country. It was about wine and food and like a wine family. It was rich and beautiful. It's just not enough happened was the issue. I don't think I had enough of a propulsive idea behind it. Got it. I mean, by the way, that sounds amazing. I don't care about plot, so I would totally read it. So you decide, my heart is broken, I can't deal with this anymore. Did you think you were done forever or did you think you were just done for then? So I don't know that I would have said I was done forever, but I certainly wasn't in a mental place where I was gonna prioritize it and center it in my life the way that I had because it was always something I was doing on top of my full-time job.
15:28Rachel Hochhauser:And my full-time job, you know, through the course of my 20s, you know, got busier and busier and more consuming and I had started my own company. And it just felt like I was always jealous of people whose free time was free versus me having free time and feeling like I should be pouring it into this outside passion of mine that wasn't returning anything back to me. I really needed a break from it then. Wait a second. I love that you just so casually say, and I started my own company. Walk me through that process. So at what point did you decide, I no longer want to work for a creative agency.
16:02I'm going to go ahead with all of my free time and start my own.
16:07Rachel Hochhauser:So probably a year or so after I graduated grad school, one thing led to another and I got a job offer from another creative agency. And this creative agency was kind of like the wild west of creative agencies. It was a bunch of young people. It was very much a startup. It was the pinnacle of startup culture and figuring out things as you went along. And that was a big education for me because suddenly I was in a much more senior role than I had been previously. And I had to figure out things and kind of fake it until you make it. So at a certain point, I had another friend who had gone to college with who had gone into a similar career path at other agencies and had started going out on her own sort of freelance and hung a shingle.
16:49Rachel Hochhauser:And I started getting more and more freelance work. And a certain point we were like, we should probably just put this freelance work under a name of some kind. So it started out without really big long-term intentions and it grew really organically. So I don't think either of us sat down and said, we want to found a creative agency, but we had the work and the work kept leading to more work and we were both brand strategists. And then eventually we met two incredible designers who were sort of doing the same thing and we all joined forces. And that's when the agency really took shape and form because we had a core founding team that crossed both strategy and creative.
17:27Rachel Hochhauser:I mean, this was a little bit after I had quit writing, so I'm jumping around here. But when I had quit writing, I had formed the agency, but we hadn't joined forces with the designers until after. Talk to me about being a founder, working with other founders in your own business. Did you like that part of it? Because I know it started organically, that's great, but then it became more intentional as time went on. How did you enjoy that side of it? What were the pluses and what were the minuses compared to working for a larger company? I loved the autonomy. I loved making my own schedule. I loved when I was in LA, I would stop work every day at three and pause to go drive and take a hike somewhere.
18:07Rachel Hochhauser:I really liked that my income was tied to my work in a way. Like it felt more tangible what I was doing, what I was producing was leading to something for me personally. The downside was that I think I had a really unhealthy relationship with work. I think it bled into my moods. It bled into after hours. It was harder to step away and it's harder to feel like you really have time to yourself or you can unplug and unwind, which is ironically what ultimately led me to puzzles and my puzzle company. How did that happen? Where did the idea come from? Why do you need to work so much, Rachel? Oh, that's a great question.
18:47Rachel Hochhauser:I don't think I realized I was at the time. So in 2018, I was about to get married and I was working in client services at the agency, working around the clock, really burning myself out, probably without realizing it. And I booked a weekend in Yosemite with friends and my then boyfriend. The whole intent was like, let's get away from screens. Let's be in nature. and then it thunderstormed for the entire weekend. But there was a closet of old dusty jigsaw puzzles. And I could not tell you the last time before then that I had done a jigsaw puzzle. I didn't grow up doing a lot of them. Not a puzzler.
19:28Rachel Hochhauser:No, no, not at the time. But we cracked open a bottle of wine and put a log on the fire and suddenly we're working on puzzles and it was so fun and so meditative and like the perfect social activity because one part of your brain was engaged in the puzzle and the other part was talking and listening. And we finished one and did another. And I started doing puzzles all the time. My back started hurting because I was crouching over the coffee table in our living room working on puzzles so often. I'm not a good meditator, but I finally found a way to kind of soothe and calm my brain. And I very naively decided, well, there's none out there that speak to my personal taste or aesthetic.
20:11Rachel Hochhauser:There's none that, you know, a common packaging that I want to gift someone as a hostess present. I can just do that. That's what I do for work. So it was a really naive decision. It was not made with the intent to turn piecework into what it's become today. It was more of like a, I call it like a lemonade stand. Like it was a creative side project meant to scratch an itch. And so the timing of that, I realize this is all confusing. There's a lot of layers to this, but it was shortly after I had quit writing. So I think that there was a creative need in me that needed to be fulfilled. And I fulfilled it by turning to puzzles and, you know, this other creative realm.
20:48Rachel Hochhauser:But it turns out running a business like PeaceWork is not a creative endeavor most of the time. So I learned that the hard way. We launched in mid-2019, summer 2019, with just four puzzles. And it was trial by fire, you know, certainly so much to learn in the first year. And then the pandemic started and it was like the best thing you could possibly want for your business. And it was brutal. It was like being thrown into a swimming pool, not knowing how to swim. So it was all things at once, 24-7. So talk to me a little bit about the brand piece of it, because yes, I hear you that like developing and manufacturing products and running an e-commerce business and all that, like that might not have been part of your foundational skill set, but brand development would be.
21:35What were you trying to achieve in terms of positioning or how you thought of piecework?
21:41Rachel Hochhauser:So in 2019, my co-founder Jenna and I felt like brands were feeling pretty bland. You know, it was the era of beige and minimalism. And so we knew how to build a brand. We knew how to give a brand a voice and a story. And we talked a lot about going maximalist. We were just really interested in pattern and texture and lots of color and looking to Iris Upfel and Tom Wolfe and Diane Keaton and some of these more eccentric figures and personalities and drawing inspiration from worlds. And we're looking at old interior design photos. And that part was fun for us to create something that spoke to our taste and that didn't feel like anything else that was out there.
22:25Rachel Hochhauser:we wanted to design puzzles where the packaging looked like beautiful coffee table books, almost like something you'd see in one of those people's apartments. So all of that, we knew how to do. We were cold calling puzzle manufacturers around the US, just trying to see someone who would take our project on. We didn't even know how to talk to them at all kinds of questions for us. We were like, we don't know what any of that means. Thankfully, we found one ultimately to take us on. But above and beyond building the brand and designing the visual identity and the packaging and the website, we didn't know how to do the rest.
23:01Rachel Hochhauser:So we did something, what we call an advice tour, which is we just scheduled as many conversations as we could with contacts and friends of friends and people who did something similar to humble ourselves and ask as many questions. and we were bootstrapped. So we invested our own money and we use some of that money to hire people as consultants to help us with the components that we didn't know how to do. Like I have a friend who works in retail operations for really big high-end fashion brands. And, you know, I was like, could you please just come and help us figure out retail operations for piecework?
Read the full transcript
23:37Rachel Hochhauser:And she did. So a lot of favors and things like that. Got it. Okay. So talk to me about what the launch was like. You said you started with Ford. What did launch look like? What were the plans for it? How were you communicating things? And how did it go? I mean, I'm going to share this from an honest standpoint in hopes that it gives someone out there some encouragement. But the first photo shoot, we didn't even have a shot list. I just showed up with a few plastic tubs of props that I thought were interesting. And the photographer, which was a friend, was like, well, what do you want to shoot?
24:11Rachel Hochhauser:And I was like, well, let's just figure it out. And we just played with the props and set them up. And we didn't know what the puzzles were going to be. We didn't know what the titles were going to be. It's very, very different from how we do it now, where everything is figured out down to the finest detail. So those first four puzzles, we ended up with one that was poker-themed. It was called Feeling Flush. It was this very lush poker scene. We had a floral still life. We had one that was like a hand smashing into a cake, but we didn't know any of it going into the day. We had some other shots that didn't work out and didn't end up being puzzles, but it was serendipity.
24:48Rachel Hochhauser:It's embarrassing and hilarious looking back on it that we managed to pull it off and get anything out of that day. Look, I always feel like if you're not a little bit cringy about the things that you make in the beginning, there's something wrong. It means that you haven't grown. I think it was so authentic to our interest in what we're doing. And even, you know, despite that, those puzzles did really well and got picked up by some great stores. And, you know, we had press coverage and key account conversations early on that I couldn't have dreamed of. So something went right somewhere along the way.
25:21Rachel Hochhauser:But, you know, it was all held together by spit and bubblegum behind the scenes. So how are you doing this at the same time that you have your own agency? It was an interesting dynamic behind the scenes. It really helped that my partners at the creative agency, Jenna, who was my co-founder at Peacework, was the other strategist. And then the two designers at the agency were the designers at the brand. So they weren't co-founders of Peacework, but they had vested interest in it and were working on it. So in some senses, it almost operated like a client of the creative agency. Like a little incubator.
25:56Rachel Hochhauser:Yeah, exactly. And also it wasn't a full-time job, but I also didn't have kids at the time. I just worked all the time. I kind of rationalized it like I can give my all to one company and then give the rest to the other. I don't recommend it. And especially with the pandemic, the first year of the pandemic was really just a rough year because of that. Like I look back on it and I just think about sitting at my desk essentially the whole time. And it's not fond memories for all the normal reasons and then some. and it all worked out great. But where we are now is born by blood, sweat and tears.
26:30Rachel Hochhauser:Absolutely. How did you think through pricing? How did you think through customer acquisition? Like what were some of the nuts and bolts of it? So I've learned a lot now, you know, like that pricing needs to have certain margins and you need to be making a certain amount of money on your products. But I think then we were just looking at the competitive space for price and we knew we had a premium product compared to a lot of the competitors. We were not like a puzzle that you would find at a big box store. We wanted to be in high-end boutiques. We thought of ourselves more like a nice candle, something you would gift someone.
27:04Rachel Hochhauser:So we looked at the puzzles that were out there. We didn't want to go so high that it would be ridiculous for a puzzle. But we ended up having to do some price adjustments over the first couple of years of our business, which is always an uncomfortable thing to do. You feel like you owe your customers an apology. But it was really just a correction of us not knowing how to structure that from the very beginning. Customer acquisition, you know, we figured it out as we went along. A big part of our strategy in the beginning was press and we didn't have a PR team. So I was emailing every journalist I could find offering them, you know, puzzle offering to send something, telling them about the company.
27:43Rachel Hochhauser:That strategy actually worked really nicely for us because I think, you know, hearing from a real person, especially about something at the time. This was a product that wasn't out there. Now I know that I've been in the business longer that we got like a really unprecedentedly high response rate. So, you know, we launched in July and that first holiday season, we got great organic pickup on all types of listicles and gift guides and what things, which were really helpful. New York Magazine was a big fan early on. They helped move a ton a product for us, this one particular puzzle they loved. So that's something that I'm glad, even though, you know, traditionally you would hire a PR firm.
28:22Rachel Hochhauser:You know, I love our PR partners now. At the time, it worked really nicely for us to do it ourself. And eventually we got into ads and everything else, but that was our focus in the first six months. I'm so blown away by how much you are doing at any given point in time. Like you always have multiple jobs. At what point did you start thinking about writing again? Not until a while later. Through these years, I had gotten married. I had moved from LA to Portland up in Oregon. I had had my first daughter. And when she was about 18 months old in January 2023, out of the blue, my husband got really unexpectedly ill.
29:07Rachel Hochhauser:And it was really bad, but we didn't know what was going on and found out after a few weeks of essentially he couldn't move that he had an abscess in his brain. And within 24 hours, he was rushed into an emergency craniotomy and the recovery was grueling. And I suddenly, you know, overnight effectively became a single parent, his caretaker. I was administering at-home IV antibiotics. I was still trying to work. I mean, my partners were so graceful through the whole thing. I definitely was not working, but I was attempting to show up as a business owner. And so just to set the scene, it was a horrible time.
29:49Rachel Hochhauser:And I was in the waiting room, one of these many hours spent there, scrolling on my phone, so bleary-eyed, so anxious, so sleep-deprived. And I came across a depiction, a meme actually, of Lady Tremaine from the animated version of Cinderella. And I was stopped in my tracks for two reasons. One, I saw she had a name, which was Lady Tremaine, and I had never heard that before. And that shifted something in my mind because I was like, this is a woman. She has a name. She's a person. She's not just a character. And the second was that I was in my own season of sacrifice. And I couldn't help but look at this mother advocating for her children, not as a villain.
30:35Rachel Hochhauser:I mean, she wasn't motivated by harming someone or self-interest. She was just trying to take care of her kids. And that's exactly what society tells women that they should do. It's what we're judged against. And I immediately felt pulled into the tension of the position that she was in. And so that was my first idea for the character. And I wrote it down and it just kind of sat there for a little while germinating, but I was thinking about it and thinking about it and thinking about it. And my husband who, I always forget this part of the story, very important to say he's doing much better. You know, he was on the road to recovery.
31:13Rachel Hochhauser:So when he was doing better, we started talking about it and I told him, I said, I think I have this idea. I want to work on it. I think it's more commercial, has more of a plot than my first book did. And so I kind of started blinking away at it. And when I had a few chapters and I felt like there was enough there, he started encouraging me to take it more seriously. And as we've discussed, I was pretty busy. It was hard to find time to write. It almost felt like I needed something for myself in that moment. Like my life had become just this unending giving and sacrifice. And it was like, I needed to carve out some corner of it that felt like I was doing something for me or that I wanted to do.
32:00Rachel Hochhauser:And the normal prescriptive versions of self-care, like go take a yoga class, you know, take a bubble bath, like just wasn't cutting it. It felt like a return to myself in a way to start working on it. And my husband was so supportive. He was like, I think you should take some time off of work and prioritize it and really center it in your life. And it felt now that the book has had such wonderful reception, like that feels easy to say. But at the time, it was really a scary decision because I was giving up a lot of my income. I was pausing my income to focus on something I had previously failed at that had no guarantee of any kind of return.
32:43Rachel Hochhauser:But it also just, you know, everything that happened to him and with us and our family was a good reminder of, you know, it's a little bit of a cliche, but you only have one life. I decided to do it despite how scared I was. And that fear actually motivated me to write. Like instead of twiddling my thumbs, I felt this pressure that I really needed to use that time, similar to grad school. And so I wrote the book really quickly. I actually did use the hours to generate words. And from there, it was the opposite of my experience with the first book. I finished and I had multiple offers of representation and the book didn't even go to auction.
33:22Rachel Hochhauser:It was preempted by St. Martin's Press, which was the softest landing page. So my line is that it's my Cinderella story. It's been really wonderful and it feels so good. I finally feel like proud of myself and younger me is so proud of myself for having done it. So, yes, you chose to go with St. Martin's because of the preempt. But like, what does that actually mean? So I talked a little bit earlier about querying. So after you get an agent, they take your book out. We say on sub, it means on submission. and they essentially are sending it out to different editors at different presses to see if anyone wants to make an offer on the book.
34:03Rachel Hochhauser:And a few things can happen. One is that no one wants it. Obviously you hope that that's not going to happen. The second is that it'll go to auction and that's where you have different editors, you know, bidding against one another to try and get it. And the third is that an editor wants it so badly, they essentially want to make an offer too good to refuse, which you can turn down if you think you could do better in auction hypothetically. But most of the time, a preempt is designed to take it off the table. So preempt is a great outcome. It also saves you from the decision anxiety of having to choose who to go with.
34:40Rachel Hochhauser:It's like getting multiple boyfriends proposing to you or something. I'm really happy with my book boyfriend. My editor, Sarah Canton, is amazing. I feel like it was like fate or destiny that the book ended up in her hands, especially because Lady Tremaine is kind of a difficult book to categorize. Like it presents and pitches as one thing, but it's really not that. It's not fantasy. It's not fairy tale. It's technically retelling, but I call it more of an untelling because it's kind of a dismantling of Cinderella and all of its archetypes. It's not actually historical fiction because it's not set in a particular time or place.
35:14Rachel Hochhauser:It's one of those books that the publishing industry doesn't know exactly what to do with because there's not a blueprint for even where to put it on the shelf. Talk to me about working with an editor because, I mean, I have written and published three books, but they are not fiction. And the process was sort of like, write and design your book and we will print it. What was your experience like? Did you actually have an editor who worked with you on it? Or did you turn in something that was so clean that no one wanted to mess with it? Like, What was that part like? So I have an editor and they typically take the manuscript and they give you an editorial letter and also a version of your manuscript with line edit.
35:55Rachel Hochhauser:So I got both of those, but my editorial letter was really light. I have a draft of my second book. That's not the case there. So I can speak to the process of the other experience as well. But essentially, yes, you do have a thought partner who is getting in the weeds with you and helping you think on both the macro, micro level, structure, theme, character development, all of it. So I love having an editor. It's really nice to have a thought partner. So you get that edit letter and then you go into different passes, they call it. And with each subsequent pass, you can change less and less until the final passes where you're really just looking for typos or tiny things.
36:36Rachel Hochhauser:Copy editing was really interesting because I always thought of it as someone who comes through and makes sure everything is grammatically correct. But they are, I mean, this in the best way, they are up in your business. They are finding things that you never thought about. I mean, they're looking at timeline consistencies. They're saying, you said this before and you're saying this now. It's like fact checking, but for fiction, which is an interesting process. And then there's also cover design. So that's really fascinating. My joke about it is that it's like having someone else design the face of your baby because authors are not designers.
37:11Rachel Hochhauser:We don't design our own covers. But you had a lot more experience in that because of your previous job though. It was interesting because I think that actually made it more challenging on me because I came in with a lot of opinions and feelings about it. And the process was they asked me for my input and I built them a deck. I'm sure they did not appreciate it. And I said, here's all of my big ideas for this cover. And they, I don't want to say they ignored all of them, but they came back to me with something which was not like what I had been envisioning. But there was a lot I liked about it.
37:46Rachel Hochhauser:I loved that it had negative space. I loved that there was a big L on the cover. But the initial version, I said, I don't think these are the flowers I want to go with because they felt very feminine, very girly, very wedding. And I was like, that's sort of the opposite of the book. That's the opposite of the point of the book and the world of the book. So I suggested, why don't we use flowers like those from a Clara Peters painting? And Clara Peters was one of the few women painters during the Dutch Golden Age because women were not allowed to paint back then. So you had just a small handful of them.
38:21Rachel Hochhauser:And they surprised me. They ended up putting that painting on the book cover. And that painting's hanging in the Met, which I went to go see it a few months ago, which was a really nice moment. And I just think they're so beautiful because not just their provenance, but some of them are kind of drooping and wilting and they just reflect what a real life bouquet looks like. And I love that about it. But just to add one point about how my own expertise didn't serve me, I had a lot of opinions about typography and everything else. And it's a different industry, right? Like it's totally different from where I come from.
38:57Rachel Hochhauser:And I learned all types of things that I never would have considered. Like you have to think about what a book cover looks like at the size of a postage stamp because a lot of people are buying their books online, you know, and scrolling through pages. And I never would have thought about that. I never would have thought to look at that. So I'm so happy. The cover's gotten really great reception. And I love that it's working for the book. And I love the flowers. And I'm putting my total trust in the publishers in the next go around. Okay, so let's talk about the release. So Lady Tremaine debuted on March 3rd of this year and has already garnered so much love and so many accolades.
39:35It's a Reese's Book Club pick, which, by the way, I feel like that is such a phenomenal blast of additional energy on top of being an instant New York Times bestseller. You've gone from strength to strength with it. when I personally pulled my Instagram following and my Substack audience, it was like, what should I be reading right now? It was the number one most recommended book recently. So talk to me a little bit about how all of this success has felt. What was the process like of becoming a Reese's Book Club pick? Tell me everything.
40:09Rachel Hochhauser:So I found out about Reese's pick a while ago. It was last August. And what happened was I was in Australia for a cousin's wedding and I was coming home on a flight with two young kids and my agent and editor knew that I was on that flight and they are parents themselves. And so like they understood the context of it. And as soon as I landed, they texted and said, can you call us? And I was like, this is either really good or really bad news. It ended up being great news. So it was so exciting. And then it was just this secret that I had to sit on for months and months. And they really scared me.
40:44Rachel Hochhauser:They're like, You cannot tell a soul. You cannot tell anyone. You cannot tell your best friend. You can't tell your parents. And so that was really hard to know about it and not be able to share. I met another Reese's Book Club writer at a book conference in the fall, and I was grilling her about it and all of the behind-the-scenes thing, but I couldn't say why. And afterwards, she sent me a message. She's like, that's why you're asking me so many questions. And the New York Times finding out about that was just a similar experience. So we got a FaceTime and it felt so good. It's like I couldn't imagine a better way to launch a book.
41:21Rachel Hochhauser:It's a cliche to say you're grateful, but I do. I feel so grateful because this was such a long road getting here for me. And the thing that I'm most grateful about is that I get to do more of it. I just want to keep writing and keep putting books out into the world. And this means that I can. And that's the best thing I could possibly ask for. So walk me through the timeline again. So six months to write it, and then how long until it actually came out? So I started it in summer of 23, and I had finished it by like January of 24. I'd sold it by summer of 24, and it came out now in 26. So I mean, publishing has a really long runway to launch a book.
42:04Rachel Hochhauser:Like I already have a draft. It's not a finished version of the manuscript, but I have a finished draft of my next book. And I don't think anyone will see it for another two years, probably just because of how the industry works. Talk to me about that. When did you start working on the new novel? My book deal was a two book deal and I had a deadline. That was actually my pub day for the first book to get a draft in of my second book. And my editor does that really intentionally. It sounds really intense, but I had over a year to work on it, you know, because we had finished Lady Tremaine and kind of sealed it.
42:39Rachel Hochhauser:so early on in the process. But my editor does that intentionally because you really get in your head about your writing. Once your book is out in the world, you start hearing from all kinds of people. There's all kinds of like reviews coming in and feedback. And it's so good. She feels and she's accurate. It's so good to, you know, have your book kind of figured out before you have all these voices coming at you constantly about it. And that was my experience too. Like even positive feedback can harm the writing process because you start trying to write for like, oh, people really liked X, Y, and Z.
43:12Rachel Hochhauser:And then you're trying to integrate it and inject it into whatever you're working on. Then it's better for me to just write in a vacuum. That's interesting. Can you tell us a little bit about the unfinished second novel? Yes. I'm not adept at pitching it yet, but the best I can tell you is that it's loosely inspired by Taming of the Shrew, which also loosely inspired 10 Things I Hate About You, for those of us that have not recently read Shakespeare. It is set in 1860s Santa Barbara, which is where I grew up, which I was really interested in that time because Santa Barbara is known as this wealthy enclave and place of leisure, but it was not that and its origins.
43:53Rachel Hochhauser:And so I just wanted to learn more about the place where I was born and raised. And it was fascinating. It was definitely a cultural melting pot and a history unlike a lot of other places in the States. So it's involved quite a bit of research and it is spicy and fun and there's like a revenge plot to it and cowboys, all types of good stuff. How did the research process vary from Lady Tremaine to this? I did a lot of research for Lady Tremaine, but I did even more for the second book. So I I really wanted to set Lady Tremaine in a time and place that is linked to our culturally imagined version of Cinderella, which stems mostly from the Western European versions of the fairy tale.
44:40Rachel Hochhauser:There's more than 500 versions of the fairy tale globally. It dates back all the way to ancient Greece and the story of Rhodopis. But I felt like with the animated Disney version that we really have kind of metabolized this like Western European version. But I didn't want to set it in a particular place or decade in history because then you are wedded to historical accuracy and making sure the details are true. And I just wanted the narrative to be at the forefront versus us looking at details of dress or food or whatever else. But that said, I knew very little about life back then. And I was very intimidated by writing about it.
45:22Rachel Hochhauser:I've always written contemporary fiction up until this point. So I did feel like I needed to do some research. I chose a wide period. I was looking at the late 17th, early 18th centuries. And I was reading fiction, both set during and written during that time. I read etiquette manuals for women from back then, which was really interesting. A lot of those details made their way into the book. Anyone who's read the book already will recognize there's an etiquette manual in the book. A lot of that was paraphrased from real life and real things that women were told to do. There's a big falconry storyline.
45:58Rachel Hochhauser:And I am not a falconer. So I took a falconry workshop. I was reading falconry manuals. I was watching YouTube videos. I had to learn about all of that. The second book, the 1860s Santa Barbara book was like that, but on hyperspeed because there was just so much more to learn because I was actually trying to be historically accurate. So I have a whole shelf next to me of probably like 20 books I've read about the history of California and that region and life back then. And I have just gobbled it up. It's been really fascinating. I love that. That's so cool. So do you finally have just one job?
46:34Rachel Hochhauser:No, I'm still doing piecework. God, so that's still going on. Yes. I left the creative agency after I got my book deal, but I still do puzzles and I love working on piecework. It's finally at the place where we're big enough that the things that are not my strong suit that I don't have a ton of experience in, like other people who are much better at it are doing it and handling it. And I'm able to just work on the parts of the business that bring me a lot of joy and pleasure. And so I write and I do Puzzle World, although piecework's now so much more than puzzles. We do a lot of different things, but they're both creative and use different parts of the creative brain.
47:12So we like to end this podcast with the same three questions that we ask everyone. And the first one is about mistakes. And I think it's really important to talk about mistakes because we all make them, but we live in this Instagram highlight reel fantasy life where we don't always discuss that stuff. But I think it's important because women need to hear about other women making mistakes and then figuring it out that that's not the end all of something. So can you tell me about a mistake that you've made at any point in your career and what you've learned from it?
47:46Rachel Hochhauser:I want to go back to the very beginning when I was in advertising and I knew my husband at the time, but we were not dating. And he out of college had taken a job because similarly, you know, it was a very hard time to get a job in real estate development or something like that. That was not his strong suit. He had always wanted to be a journalist. and six or eight months in, he quit because he got an internship at a magazine. And that changed the trajectory of his life. He ended up working in magazines, winning awards for magazine journalism, you know, having a whole life now. And it was all because he took that scary risk.
48:28Rachel Hochhauser:And at the time, I remember just thinking I could never do something like that. And I wish I had. I have taken risks, but they've always been half steps. So I would just encourage anyone who is in, you know, earlier stages of their career and thinking about something they want to go after, set yourself up to do it. Think in the long game. And I envied his bravery at the time and I still have a lot of respect for it. So my next question sort of piggybacks off of that, but a lot of the folks who listen to this podcast are in their first lives. They know that there's something else that they want to do, but they haven't made that leap because they're scared or they're worried about the pivot.
49:08As someone who has made a number of pivots, what advice would you give someone who's thinking about it but just hasn't jumped quite yet?
49:16Rachel Hochhauser:I mean, I think the first thing is that if it's fear that's holding you back and nothing else, if it's just fear, then you got to just do it. Because I mean, so many people are held back by a fear and, right, it's a financial constraint or something else that's getting in the way. but you're so privileged if it's just your own fear that's keeping you in that position. I also just want to share that I'm in my very late thirties now and of my peer set, you know, all my friends who have grown older with from the time we were in our early twenties, almost everyone has made a big career pivot of some kind.
49:52Rachel Hochhauser:And it's been so fascinating to watch this cohort of women take risks, you know, whether it's pay cut or uncertainty or jumping into the unknown. But I don't know anyone that is unhappy about having made that decision. I think everyone has found positive in making change. I would just encourage anyone to embrace change if it's something that feels kind of ticklish to you in a good way, like you want to scratch that itch. My last question is my favorite, which is if you could go back in time and give your younger self some advice, what would you say? Oh, I would say write more. Just like keep doing it.
50:29Rachel Hochhauser:Don't quit. I mean, that was for me. It was like, don't abandon your dream. Don't accept no for an answer. But also maybe don't get wedded to your version of what the dream is going to look like. Like, I thought it was going to be that specific book happening in that specific way. And I needed, frankly, to work harder. I needed to put more into it to try something new. It's flexibility. You You know, don't abandon your dream, but be flexible in the way that you're approaching it if what you're doing isn't working. Well, Rachel, I love that. This has been such a pleasure chatting with you. As I said, when we first sat down, it is a tremendous book.
51:06And I really hope that our audience goes out and buys it immediately. Thank you so much for writing it. It was fascinating and disturbing and thoughtful and thought-provoking and beautiful and heartbreaking. And it's so complex. and I just adored it. So thank you, one, for writing it and two, thank you for taking the time to come and talk to me today.
51:28Rachel Hochhauser:Oh, it's my pleasure. Thank you for saying all of that. It has been so nice chatting and I'm a big fan. So thanks for having me.
51:43That was Peacework Puzzles co-founder and the author of Lady Tremaine, Rachel Hochhauser. For more inspiring interviews with women like Rachel, head on over to secondlifepod.com, where we have so many more for you to peruse. If you like today's show, please subscribe on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. And don't forget to rate and review us. We love seeing you spread the word on social. And now you can tag us in your posts. We are at secondlifepod on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook. We always want to know who you're interested in hearing from on the show. So send in your requests to hello at secondlifepod.com, or you can DM us on Instagram.
52:26I'm at Hilary Kerr. The show is at Second Life Pod. Our DMs are always open. I'm Hilary Kerr, and you've been listening to Second Life. This episode was produced by Hilary Kerr, Summer Hammeris, and Natalie Thurman. Our production assistant is Grace Ingram. Our audio engineers are at Treehouse Recording in Los Angeles, California, and our music is by Jonathan Leahy.
From the publisher
Rachel Hochhauser is the author of the buzzy new novel Lady Tremaine, but before achieving her dream of becoming a professional writer, she held many different titles. After studying creative writing and history in college, Hochhauser began working at an ad agency as a strategic advisor. She went on to cofound her own agency called Major Studio in 2016, and while serving as partner and brand director there, she also cofounded Piecework, a brand of artful puzzles and gifts. That said, throughout all her success, she still had the itch to write, and in 2023, she began writing her debut novel. Lady Tremaine, a feminist retelling of Cinderella, was released earlier this year and was named an instant New York Times best seller and a Reese’s Book Club pick. She is currently working on her second novel.
