Let’s Shine Our Light: Crone Authors Together

The issue of "stay small, sweet, quiet, and modest" sounds like an outdated problem, but the truth is that women still run into those demands whenever we find and use our voices.

—Brene Brown, Daring Greatly

We live in a time of massive change, including huge changes for authors. Print on Demand and online sales have upended traditional publishing. Access has opened up, and voices of marginalized people (including older women) are published in greater numbers than ever before. Plus outreach to readers has been transformed. Today’s major publicity and marketing venues didn’t exist in our youth. And these days every author (regardless of how she publishes) is expected to be an entrepreneur. To be an author now means being both a writer and a marketer.

Women who are well past midlife grew up at a time when girls were raised to be demure, not to stand out or make waves. Now that we’re writing and publishing, the idea of reaching out to our audience can be uncomfortable (I know it is for me).

Many older women are voracious readers with a hunger for books by and about their peers. This recent Note on Substack echoes a sentiment I see over and over in reader reviews of books with vivid older protagonists:

My reading tastes have changed as l've aged. I find myself seeking out stories with older characters, not as tropes — plucky older woman — but as fully fleshed out humans dealing with the issues of life in your 50's and beyond.

Anybody else?

—Jennifer Louden

Yet promoting to these readers may not come naturally. Plus, despite our enormous economic power, older women as a group are largely ignored by marketing professionals—so there isn’t a lot of published information to guide us in connecting with our audience. As a result, scammers rush in, posing as publicists or leaders of huge book clubs. While this is not a good scene, we do have real options. We can inventory our strengths, build marketing plans that rely on those strengths, and create author communities to support one another on our post-launch journeys.

I got thinking about all this because I couldn’t do a traditional launch for my newest book (Rock On: Power, Sex and Money after 60). Rock On published last August, right before my cancer diagnosis. By the time I recovered from surgery it was time for the holidays. So after the New Year I decided not to resume edits on my next novel. Instead, I’m focused on marketing the latest, and learning more about how to reach out to readers.

The good news is, the traditional publishing “season” (the three months right after launch) is just an artifact of traditional publishing. Marketing staff at a publishing house could focus only briefly on your book before they had to switch to someone else’s bright shiny newest. But as author entrepreneurs we have no such constraints. We can continue marketing all the books we publish long after that artificial three month cutoff, including cyclical marketing by season (vampire books in October, self-help books at New Year’s Resolution time, etc.). We can keep finding new venues for publicity, including guest appearances on podcasts for older women and connecting with real book clubs.

Let’s Shine Our Light

In the vortex of these challenges and opportunities, I invite us Crone Authors to gather each month. We will share what we know, what we wish we knew, what’s worked (or not), and what we’d like to try next. Together we can choose which topics to cover at each gathering, including how to identify our strengths, ways to directly support one another’s success, and so much more. We can tackle the sticky subject of internalized ageism, whether in ourselves or our prospective readers. I believe there is a larger readership out there for all our books, and that we are stronger together.

Some women who will read this message haven’t yet published, and you are welcome to join us because ideally marketing starts even before you write your first page. Many of us are published already, having varying levels of success with our books. And we can succeed even better by sharing ideas. As the saying goes, “You can’t compete with me. I want you to win too.”

Our monthly gathering, Crone Authors Together (CAT), will be hosted by the Grandmother Collective, a terrific organization that brings together women from all over the world. I’ll facilitate these online meetings on the fourth Tuesday of each month. We originally planned our first gathering for the end of January 2026, but a family emergency required us to pause until the end of February. CAT will not be a course. It will instead be a forum where participants will share what we know—a sort of Stone Soup for Crone Authors where the whole is larger than the sum of the parts. You can register for the next and future gatherings on this link.

If you are writing a book or have written a book, congratulations! You’ve already overcome the pervasive social conditioning that tells us it’s too late to try something new (which we all know is hogwash). And you’ve overcome the conditioning that tells us the voices of older women are not worth sharing. How dare they!

Now it’s time to take the next step. Let’s stop hiding our light under a bushel. Instead, let’s shine our light even more brightly together.

Crone Authors Together! Forever.

Whatever you're meant to do, do it now. The conditions are always impossible.

—Doris Lessing