Tired of Gatekeepers? Let Taylor Swift Show You How It's Done

Seven Rules Every Authorpreneur Needs

Precious and sensitive people can be so annoying—especially when we’re the precious and sensitive people in question…thinking how we feel is so important, getting all hurt when we’re rejected, threatening—to ourselves or whomever we’ve gotten wrapped up in our drama—that we’re done, we’ve had it, we’re never going to put ourselves out there again.

But guess what? I know the solution! You need to follow my just-created Taylor Swift¹ Guide to Being an Authorpreneur. Here are the rules:

1) Take back your power.

When Taylor’s first producer royally screwed her over by selling her masters to her mortal enemy Scooter Braun, Taylor did not go off and cry. Or…well, she did cry—if “My Tears Ricochet” is indeed about that incident, she wept “in a sunlit room.” But she didn’t just cry. Instead, inspired by an idea Kelly Clarkson shared with her, she re-recorded every single song and released them to even greater success than the originals. This was all before May of this year, when she was able to get the rights to her first six albums back, forever changing the music business in the process. But she’d actually already won long before since the re-releases introduced her music to a whole new group of people who’d previously dismissed her as some boy-crazy teen country music girl with feathered hair (raises hand). Honestly, my decision to re-release a PG version of my first book Party Girl was very much inspired by this. So, if you’re feeling rejected by agents or publishers or reviewers or readers—or you feel like your publisher didn’t help you get a story in the Wall Street Journal but you realized could do it yourself—maybe it’s time to take your power back.

2) Don’t be afraid to look ridiculous.

When Taylor announced at the 2024 Grammy’s that her next album was going to be called “The Tortured Poets Department,” everyone assumed it would be about her six-year relationship with the actor Joe Alwyn. There was even a whole theory going around about how it was named after some text thread that Alwyn had with Paul Mescal that I would very much like to be accidentally included in, a la Jeffrey Goldberg. But then! The album came out and most of the songs were about Taylor’s much-ridiculed relationship with a musician named Matty Healy—a person whose charms are seemingly only visible to Taylor. Rather than hoping we’d all forget her romance with the sweaty weirdo or trashing him to remind us that he was way beneath her, she took a different approach. She included one brilliant song after another that seemed to delve into a two-week affair that left her bereft after he wooed and then dropped her. Her devotion to honesty—to sharing her pain no matter how silly it may make her look—is something every writer needs to remember when they question whether or not writing something is going to make them look stupid.

3) Show up no matter what.

Oh, so you have writer’s block? You’re not feeling inspired? Well, on “The Tortured Poets Department” album, Taylor told us about what it’s like to show up every day even when you feel like you want to die. We had no idea that during the first part of her Eras tour, she was dealing with the one-two punch of the Joe Alwyn relationship dissolution followed by Matty Healy whiplash. Turns out that even though all the pieces of her felt shattered, she was showing us what it’s like to smile through your tears. In other words, bed rotting isn’t going to help you get your mojo back. But continuing to create and dancing on your own version of Taylor’s stage just may.

4) Be open-minded.

Truth: if I were Taylor Swift and I heard that some football player dude was trying to hand deliver me friendship bracelets with his number on them, I would probably have been concerned. If he was then talking about it on his podcast, I might have filed a restraining order. But hey, athletes have never been my thing. Besides, Taylor is apparently more open-minded than I am because she decided to go out with this Travis Kelce guy and now years have passed and they’re America’s most beloved couple of all time—such a part of the American Dream that Trump accused their relationship of being a Democratic plot to turn football fans against him. Does Taylor care that Travis doesn’t know how to spell the word squirrel while she’s a modern day wordsmith the likes of which we’ve almost never seen? Please! She’s too busy having fun with him. So if you’re committed to some idea you had ages ago about how your book publishing journey was supposed to go and you’re still refusing to look at other options, maybe it’s time to open your mind a bit?

5) Don’t get mad; get even.

They say that the best revenge is living well and Taylor is nothing if not an example of that. Also karma is her boyfriend, so if you’ve wronged her, I suggest you watch out. I mean, Kanye West humiliated her again and again, and look at him today. Scooter Braun stole her music and is now dealing with what he had coming. Oh and if karma doesn’t come for you, one of Taylor’s blistering takedowns might. Heaven help the playboys who seduced her when she was barely old enough to drive and then treated her like sh*t. Might they have thought twice about their behavior if they’d known it would inspire savagely brilliant songs that would end up providing catharsis for millions of women across the globe? Especially after Taylor pointed out to Hoda Kotb that if guys don’t want you to write bad songs about them, then maybe they shouldn’t do bad things? In other words, if you’re feeling rejected, maybe it’s time to exact revenge by showing them what they missed.

6) Don’t care about being cool.

If there’s anything less cool than being best friends with your mom when you’re a teenager, it’s going to the mall with your mom/best friend and discovering that your friends who told you they didn’t want to go with you are all there together. But Taylor not only did that—she also wrote a song about it! And she constantly reminds people that her mom is, as she said in Miss Americana, her “person.” Perhaps the only thing on earth less cool than all of this would be putting a song about your grandmother smack in the middle your tour set. The point is: don’t try to conform to what other people are doing. You do you. And if the world doesn’t get it, just wait for them to catch up.

7) Be grateful to your supporters and not your gatekeepers.

At award shows, movie stars and musicians tend to thank their agent, manager, publicist and God, in that order. You know who Taylor always and forever thanks? Her fans. She knows that agents and managers and publicists only want you if you don’t need them and the second you do need them, they’re onto another sure thing. She never forgets that without her fans, she’d still be that girl in Nashville hoping to be the next LeAnn Rimes. So remember: agents and publishers don’t make you legitimate. Readers do—and they’re never going to find you if your book stays on your computer. As a woman with numerous journals in her past but only one book—which she of course published on her own—Taylor knows this truth perhaps better than anyone.

1. If you're one of those people who still says they don't like Taylor Swift, I'd venture to guess you just haven't heard the right song yet.