‘The Horror of How Humans Treat Each Other’: Mindy McGinnis on How Sexism Creeps into Her Work →

When I tell people that What Rough Beast is my first horror novel, they tend to smile and say, “No, it’s not.” For over a decade, I’ve written about taboo subjects: sexual assault, mental illness, addiction, and other things that make people uncomfortable. But one theme that runs through all of them is sexism.

This isn’t on purpose; it’s simply how it is.

One of my goals in writing is to represent the world—from the dramatic to daily life—as it actually is. The fact that misogyny creeps in regularly is a testament to how women, girls, and those who identify as female move through the world from the moment we wake up to the second we go back to sleep.

While many people would argue that all my prior novels could qualify as horror, this is the first that involves a paranormal element. Before What Rough Beast, my books dealt with the horror of how humans treat each other; and while the overarching threat in my new release comes from the otherworldly, it operates through people and the lies we tell ourselves to justify our actions.

Many of those actions are small—the joke we probably shouldn’t have told, the jab we didn’t necessarily need to take, the search history we deleted, the pictures in the hidden folder—all while we make the excuse that it was all in good fun, or what someone doesn’t know can’t hurt them. This isn’t to say that the actions are always malevolent. That’s the worst part; some of the time, they aren’t. While our society conditions girls and women girls to view our worth through our bodies, it is also training boys and men to see us through that lens—and that one alone—to the extent that misogyny slips into the everyday behaviors of males who mean no harm.

I have many male friends, most of whom I’ve known my entire life. One of them—a person I would qualify as a good man—read an early copy of What Rough Beast, then texted me to say he lost sleep over it. Not because it was gory, frightening, or too much, but because it made him think about his behavior toward women when he was younger. While he wouldn’t share specifics with me, what he did say was that he simply didn’t realize that what he had said or done was harmful because in his male sphere, at that time, it wasn’t. And therein lies the issue. Sexism—and the sexualization of women and girls—is prevalent to the extent that it has become normalized.

In What Rough Beast my main character, Ava, is ostracized because she calls out these behaviors. Instead of being rewarded for questioning the status quo, she’s asked to sit down, not to speak so loudly, or maybe just to get more comfortable with how the world actually is, and where she lives—the rural Midwest. When she refuses, her punishment goes beyond being excluded. The actions taken against her set off a series of events that bring together sexism, misogyny, and an ancient evil that’s been waiting underground for a reason to resurface.

Years ago, at a family Christmas party, my father was gifted a Sports Illustrated swimsuit calendar. It was passed around, the males joking, “Hmmm…. What day is Thanksgiving, again? Better check November!” Hilarious. So funny. Meanwhile, their wives, daughters, mothers, sisters, nieces, and cousins were being subjected to wildly exaggerated breasts and butts—and commentary about them—at a family gathering.

I hated it. What I hated more was that I was the only person who had a problem with it—or at least, I was the only one to say something. And when I did? I was “overreacting.” I was making people uncomfortable. This is from people I love, and I know they love me right back. They just wish I could be a little less on point about calling out normalized misogyny on the daily.

A version of that moment made its way into What Rough Beast as well, along with a multitude of other micro-aggressions that women and girls deal with on a daily basis, both in the real world and in every corner of the internet. There are days when it feels like nothing I do to push back makes a difference. When my old friend let me know that this book made him rethink his own actions—even 20 years later—it showed me that my words matter, my voice matters, and my books matter.

So I’m not going to be quiet—not until photos of nearly nude women being passed around at a family holiday isn’t considered normal. Not until women who speak up about it aren’t considered bitches.

It’s going to be a while. But I can talk a long time.

Killer Tunes: PW Talks with Mindy McGinnis →

Murder is a pop megastar’s muse in the YA author’s darkly funny adult debut, The First Cut Is the Deepest.

What inspired this novel?

IP development company Bittersweet Books came to me with a concept I was very interested in, but wanted to take in a slightly different direction. They were very patient and allowed me a lot of freedom to just be unapologetically myself. So they kicked off the idea, but what we created is a disturbingly accurate portrait of my own mind.

Did you always intend for the book to be such a comedy?

Always. I have been writing about dark subjects for over a decade. I write about sexual assaults, mental health, addiction—really hard things. And for the last decade, whenever I would do a presentation or a school visit, people would say, Wow, you are not what I was expecting. I’m funny, but my books aren’t. Up until now, I was a very bad walking advertisement for my own books. Now there’s going to be a nice little dovetail where I get to be dark as hell but funny as shit.

What inspired the switch in audience?

I love writing YA because I love being around that age group. They have energy, they give you energy, they’re enthusiastic, they’re unapologetic about the things that they love and hate. But I’ve been publishing for 13 years. My first readers are parents now, right? This concept was put in front of me. I loved it. As soon as I started writing it, what came out was so complete—the first chapter is essentially what I wrote when I first sat down. I just let that ride.

Did you feel any trepidation about making the jump to adult fiction?

I have no trepidations about what I wrote or who I am. We were on submission with this particular manuscript for over a year. Might have been two. We kept getting feedback that it was too much, too hard, too fast, too gory. One person literally called it “grotesque.” Eventually, my agent, John Cusick, put all of the feedback together and emailed me asking how I felt about pulling back. And I said, Did anyone ever tell Chuck Palahniuk that he’s grotesque? John’s amazing, that’s not a stab at him—it’s a stab at society. The people who had a problem with this book, they didn’t have a problem with the content. They had a problem with the fact that a woman wrote it. It bothered them that a woman could have such dark, violent thoughts. So I said, No, I’m not pulling back. And then Daphne Durham, my editor, read it, and was like, I fucking love it—what’s wrong with everybody else? Because I’m still also a YA author, I do have concerns about parents googling me before a school visit. Maybe this book is the one that comes up first, and then there’s a party with signs with my name on them in front of the school. If there’s any trepidation, it’s that.

School Library Journal →

The former librarian shares how her first job at her former high school changed the trajectory of her writing career.

Read at School Library Journal

All my life, I’d wanted to be a writer. As a farmer’s daughter from Ohio, I had no idea how a person went about doing that. But I’m nothing if not determined, so I figured it out. However, there was a huge transformation that occurred between the time I set the goal and when I actually achieved it. That change was mostly instigated by the fact that I became a young adult librarian.

At first, I was determined to write for the adult market—and I tried. It didn’t go well. There were a lot of reasons for that. At 21, I was barely an adult myself. Also, I had never written a novel before, and practice makes perfect. I had a lot of self-confidence, but not so much practice.

When I took a job in the library at the high school that I had graduated from, I expected it to be more of a stopgap measure, not a life changer. It was the early 2000s. The last time I had been exposed to Young Adult lit was with Sweet Valley High and The Babysitter’s Club. I wasn’t wading back into it with a ton of respect; I just needed a job.

But I found out things had changed in YA lit from the stories I remembered. Characters in young adult books now had sex, swore, drank, and basically acted like real people. It was refreshing on that count. But what wasn’t realistic for me were the settings and lifestyles of most of the popular titles at the time. A lot of the books featured rich kids with rich kid problems—which isn’t to say they weren’t real problems. They just weren’t the same kind of problems that my students were facing. My district is rural, with roughly a third of the student body qualifying for free and reduced lunch. They might enjoy the escapism of reading about a fellow teen bemoaning their choices from the comfort of their penthouse, but the fantasy won’t keep them warm when their electricity is turned off.

This was when the first seed was planted. I had never considered writing YA, because my understanding of what YA was meant that I wasn’t interested. But things had changed, and I had developed a desire to not only write books for the kids whom I served, but to write the books that I wanted to read when I was younger: books where real life happened to real people. Books where people get hurt, people die, and people hurt each other—accidentally or on purpose. Books that didn’t shy away from the difficult things I knew for a fact my students were dealing with—poverty, sexual assault, mental illness, and addiction.

But more important than the hot button issues, I wanted to write books where the characters dressed and behaved like me and my students. Characters who are more familiar with Carhartts than Coach. Characters who have a job not because it will look good on college applications, but because they need the money. Characters who don’t have options, choices, or paths that don’t feel predetermined.

I love doing school visits, largely because what I write about are (sadly) universal themes. I can’t tell you how many heads I see nodding up and down when I talk about depression, anxiety, emotional abuse, and the crippling effects of social media. Those topics hit everywhere I go, regardless of median income.

I can’t say for sure that I never would have become a published author if I didn’t work in that library, but I can say that what I write and who I write for would have been very, very different. 

Mindy McGinnis's latest book, How Girls Are Made, was published November 18, 2025 by HarperCollins.

Ohio Book Award YA Winner

AASL Young Adult Authors for School Library Month →

Celebrate School Library Month with 2 notable authors! Our panel of talented authors discuss their latest works, the creative process, and the role school libraries play in supporting all forms of literacy.

Featuring:

• Mindy McGinnis - Under This Red Rock, Be Not Far From Me

• Margaret Peterson Haddix - Uprising, The School for Whatnots

Unban COOLIES YouTube →

They Banned HEROINE for Glorifying Drugs — But It’s a Lifeline

Good Day Columbus features Be Not Far From Me

Mindy McGinnis discusses her gripping YA survival story Be Not Far From Me

Author Express Podcast

In this riveting episode of Author Express, Kathleen Basi chats with Edgar award-winning novelist Mindy McGinnis. If you’re fascinated by the balance between a cheerful personality and dark, compelling writing, Mindy’s story will captivate you. Get a glimpse into her life in a small Ohio town, marked by historical tragedies and quirky facts. Mindy’s new book, Under This Red Rock, a dark-themed murder mystery involving LGBTQ and mental health topics, offers a raw and honest perspective borne from her personal experiences. Don’t miss this episode if you’re interested in mental health awareness, author journeys, or simply love a good literary discussion.

MSNBC Velshi Banned Book Club

 “Heroine” by Mindy McGinnis is not just a deeply effective cautionary tale, but a direct and multi-layered examination of how quickly addiction takes hold and the deeply emotional and lasting toll it takes on a family, a community, and a young person in its grips. Gritty and alarmingly realistic, “Heroine” is careful to make the point that addiction, especially addiction to opioids, can and will claim anyone – wealthy and poor, white and black, young and old. Fentanyl overdoses are claiming young Americans at an unprecedented rate. According to the CDC, fentanyl has largely fueled a more than doubling of overdose deaths among children ages 12 to 17 since 2020. Statistic after statistic, study after study, shows the same thing: we are in a crisis. “Heroine” has been removed from library shelves and classrooms for “glorifying” drug use. But if you read this book, you know the opposite is true. “Heroine” is harrowing and hard to read – but necessary. One way to protect your children from the very real and present danger of opioid addiction is by offering them safe exploration – a book. Sept. 7, 2024

The Scheuneman Show: EP.93- "To Tell A Story Ft. Mindy McGinnis"

This Week We Talk To Amazing Author Mindy McGinnis! Asking Her About All Kinds Of Things From What It Takes To Get A Book Published To Her Thoughts On Some Of Her Books Being Banned And Why. But We Cover So Many Subjects In This One It Was Very Fun! (We Talk A lot About Her Books "Heroine" & "Be Not Far From Me" We Highly Recommend Checking Those Out And After Reading Those You Will Get The Most Out Of This Episode.) - Love, You. Enjoy, Like, Comment And Subscribe!

Unofficial Book Club Podcast - I Write The Books I Want To Read →

In this episode author Mindy McGinnis joins me again to discuss her relationship to reading and all of her favorite books!

Unofficial Book Club Podcast - As Women & Girls There's So Much We're Not Allowed To Be →

In this episode author Mindy McGinnis joins me to discuss her dark thrillers The Female of the Species, The Initial Insult and The Last Laugh along with all her other amazing books. Mindy talks all things writing and the stories she creates!

Mississippi Book Festival Young Adult Panel

Young Adult from Mississippi Book Festival on Vimeo.

In these coming-of-age stories, YA authors examine the mysteries of mental health, the importance of personal identity, and the universality of feeling out of place in a sometimes hostile world.

• Sami Thomason-Fyke (moderator)

• Mindy McGinnis – A Long Stretch of Bad Days

• Jeffrey Dale Lofton – Red Clay Suzie

• Mariama J. Lockington – Forever Is Now

Remember Reading With Veronica Roth - When Heroines, Not Heroes, Tell the Story

Remember Reading Podcast · When Heroines, Not Heroes, Tell the Story (ft. Veronica Roth & Mindy McGinnis)

Fictional dystopias don’t create fear as much as they validate it. And isn’t that what we want as young people and even later as adults? To be validated, whether in our fears, our pain, or our happiness? Young Adult books let us explore, without the threat of rejection, what we most wish to understand or even accept, ourselves.

In this episode, we explore a new era of female protagonists and the dystopian world in which they exist. Authors Veronica Roth and Mindy McGinnis create stories that challenge the conventional role of young female characters in YA literature and set forth to expose how heroines see the world.

Podcast: Beyond the Shelf with Orrville Public Library

This month is a gathering of Thriller titles from across the literary world. Jenny and Dawn discuss classic thriller and mystery books and favorite shows. We are pleased to share a conversation with young adult author Mindy McGinnis who has written a number of titles in the thriller genre as well as historical fiction and fantasy.

Page Count Podcast Live: Turning Points in a Writing Career

This episode was recorded before a live audience at the 2023 Ohioana Book Festival at the Columbus Metropolitan Library on April 22, 2023. A panel of five authors discuss turning points in their writing careers—the good, the bad, the ugly, and the existentially fraught. This conversation covers everything from rejection to reader reactions, imposter syndrome, awards, inspiration, validation, and more.

Featured authors include:

• Mindy McGinnis, author of the YA mystery A Long Stretch of Bad Days

• Ric Sheffield, author of the memoir We Got By: A Black Family’s Journey in the Heartland

• Judith Turner-Yamamoto, author of the novel Loving the Dead and Gone

• Andrea Wang, author of the picture books Watercress and Luli and the Language of Tea

• Felicia Zamora, author of the poetry collection I Always Carry My Bones

Mindy McGinnis Event Interview

This was one of my favorite book talks that I have been to! It was so much fun, and the Pizza was delish! And Cover to Cover. OMG, it was soo cute and unique. I will definitely be back.

Cover to Cover Children's Books Address: 2116 Arlington Ave, Columbus, OH 43221

Mindy’s new book! A long stretch of Bad Days: https://a.co/d/dx0yzp7

Follow me on Instagram @aditipyakurel!

Mindy McGinnis, Margaret Rogerson, MJ Kuhn on What's Going On Dayton NBC 24

More than 20 authors will be on the show floor at Rossford Junior/Senior High School for the Northwest Ohio Teen Book Festival.

Just before the start of the festival, we brought in a few more of the guest authors to highlight their latest work:

• "Among Thieves" and "Thick as Thieves" by MJ Kuhn

• "Vespertine" by Margaret Rogerson

• "A Long Stretch of Bad Days" by Mindy McGinnis

Authors, experts and avid readers will gather at Saturday from 8:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. for a day filled with story development discussions, slam poetry, board games and book giveaways.

Q&A with Mindy McGinnis – A Long Stretch of Bad Days

By Fiona Stephens

We are thrilled to welcome Mindy McGinnis to The Reading Corner to talk about her hotly anticipated new release A Long Stretch of Bad Days, out on 14th March 2023.  

Lydia Chass doesn’t mind living in a small town; she just doesn’t want to die in one. A lifetime of hard work has put her on track to attend a prestigious journalism program and leave Henley behind—until a school error leaves her a credit short of graduating. Undeterred, Lydia has a plan to earn that credit: transform her listener-friendly local history podcast into a truth-telling exposé. She’ll investigate the Long Stretch of Bad Days: a week when Henley was hit by a tornado and a flash food as well as its first—and only—murder, which remains unsolved.

But Lydia needs help to bring grit to the show. Bristal Jamison has a bad reputation and a foul mouth, but she also needs a credit to graduate. The unexpected partnership brings together the Chass family—a pillar of the community—and the rough-and-tumble Jamisons, with Bristal hoping to be the first in her family to graduate. Together, they dig into the town’s worst week, determined to solve the murder.

Their investigation unearths buried secrets: a hidden town brothel, lost family treasure, and a teen girl who disappeared. But the past is never far, and some don’t want it to see the light. As threats escalate, the girls have to uncover the truth before the dark history of Henley catches up with them.

Hi Mindy- firstly, it was a pleasure to get my hands on your new book. I loved it. It was a mysterious, small-town thriller that bubbled with humour throughout. To begin with, please tell our readers a little about yourself and your work. 

It might be obvious, but I am a small-town girl. I grew up – and still live in – a town in Ohio that graduates about 65 kids a year. We are tiny and tight knit, and I can’t imagine living any other way. All of my books reflect small town life, while illustrating that all problems are human problems, that cross boundaries. 

The real soul of this book is centred on our two protagonists- Lydia Chass, who is the upstanding, respectable cornerstone of the community with an unblemished family legacy. She has been ruthlessly focussed on her means of escaping Henley via the Ivy League. Whilst Bristal Jamison is the girl from the other side of the tracks with a fondness for cussing and vaping, who has little to no expectation placed on her. It is a case of opposites attracting (without the romance). How would you describe Lydia and Bristal’s relationship?  

They really are opposites, right down to their bloodlines. In a small town, your last name means a lot, and people attach generational meaning to it. Lydia has grown up with a certain expectation, while Bristal has grown up with virtually none. Lydia wants to escape by being admitted to an Ivy League school; Bristal wants to be the first person in her family to ever graduate high school. But they are both goal-oriented, determined females who have zero patience for their gender being identified as a weakness. It’s that common strain of grit that unites them, eventually. 

I found their burgeoning friendship touching and authentic. Each has something the other lacks. The excitement, the vulnerability, the friction, the realizations. Lydia, at times, can be a very difficult character to warm to but we see her especially evolve and mature by the end of the book. What do you think they each learn from the other? Was there a character you leant to more as you were writing? Do you identify more with Lydia or Bristal? 

Oh, if I had to pick, I’m Bristal, all the way. I definitely grew up with some of the expectations and outer shell that Lydia deals with, but all of my internal monologue was Bristal. An interesting thing about Lydia is that I had her pegged as a certain way in my head, but when I started writing her, she was angry. Her voice kept coming through with this aggression I hadn’t expected—she just doesn’t show it to the outside world. It made her so much more interesting as a character, having access to her internality. Whereas for Bristal, I didn’t need chapters from her POV, because she says exactly what she is thinking and has no concern whatsoever of how she is received or what people think of her. 

When writing a cold case whodunit with many interweaving layers, what is your writing process? Is there a board with lots of red string tied to different characters? Do you work backwards from the reveal?  

No, I’m an absolute non plotter. I knew who the guilty party was, but I had no idea how the girls were going to figure it out. I let the story evolve as I write, and I love that freedom. It maintains an organic feel, and also can take me by surprise at times as well, which is always fun, as a writer. 

I must admit, I saw the word ‘tornado’ in the synopsis and was compelled to read this. There is something captivating about their iconography in film and literature. A tornado springs up in ‘A Wizard of Oz’ to transport Dorothy to a fantastical world far removed from her mundanity. Or they show up in movies like ‘Twister’ for the determined scientists to chase down answers and solutions. But that is not to trivialize the very real danger they pose. Coming from the UK, we don’t really see these absolutely devastating phenomena in our lives. The use of the tornado immediately rooted this in rural America. ‘Destruction is one thing…But this is different. This is my hometown…’. When Bailey Foxglove says the townsfolk use things like the church spire as signposts to navigate the town but they can’t do that when the church spire is no longer there. This felt very real and personal. Why did you choose Henley to set your novel in? Why did you include natural disasters as a backdrop? As catalysts?  

For a very real, very simple reason. My own hometown was utterly destroyed by a tornado in 1981. Everyone in our town has a tornado story. Generationally, we can place who was alive “before” and “after” by how they describe the architecture, or the names of certain stores or landmarks—because the town changed completely as a result. It’s a narrative that comes up repeatedly, and is simply referred to as “when the tornado came through.” I was alive for the tornado, but only a toddler. I do have a recollection of fear, and feeling my parents’ fear, and suddenly realizing that something was very, very wrong if they were scared. “The tornado” is something that has just been an ever present story in my life, and is a defining one for most people around here. 

This story is partly about teenage girls coming to terms with their own truths written for teenage people. It is pitched as a YA novel, how does this inform the choices you make in the book as opposed to an adult novel? What would you like parents to know about this book if choosing this for their child?    

I don’t make any concessions. I write about teenagers, but I write for everyone. I write real people in real situations, so they talk about real things and they use real language. If I wrote an adult novel, I wouldn’t change my approach. Here in the US, we’re currently under a storm of censorship that a few of my titles have been drawn into. I’ve never altered who I am or what I write, and I won’t apologize for my content.  

When it comes to parents, if they believe something is inappropriate for their child, then they are correct. They know that child, and it’s their job to raise them as they deem appropriate. When they say something is inappropriate for all children, they have moved out of their lane, and I deny their unilateral decisions. 

”Funny thing about those cracks” Bristal says. “Most of them are teenage-shaped girls” ‘. It really does cut to the crux of the matter- Bristal is very good at doing that. When towns and individuals ‘turn the other cheek’ as they do in the case of Denise, the safety of these troubled people is threatened. Swallowed up by the dark underbelly of any town or city. Were there real-life cases that inspired this strand of the novel?  

Both her name and what Denise was wearing when she disappeared is directly pulled from a real life case, detailed in both The Innocent Man by John Grisham and The Dreams of Ada by Robert Mayer. The chilling, random, senseless death of this young woman—Denice Haraway—had a deep impact on me when I was writing The Female of the Species, and those echoes clearly linger, years later. 

Yet one of my favourite elements of the book was how both Lydia and Bristal were determined to use their voices and their online platform to discover the truth and achieve justice. The power of female unity. The need to speak up when it matters. Who are the people (real/fictional) who inspire you to find courage in adverse moments?    

This is where, quite frankly, I always come off sounding like a bitch—I’m my own hero. I grew up in a conservative community, and all of the women in my life fell into very gender appropriate ways of speaking, working, and living. Even as a little girl I was like – no, fuck that. I want to do what I want to do, and I like what I like. I’m going to be me, and people are just going to have to deal with that. To this day, one of my mom’s enduring goals for me is to “be nicer.” Lol. 

Podcasts are becoming a significant trope for the crime genre as seen in TV’s ‘Only murders in the building’ and literature’s ‘A good girl’s guide to murder’. What do you think podcasts add to a narrative in terms of pace, tone, and perspective? What makes them an alluring ploy for a writer?  

Honestly, I don’t know. I don’t listen to podcasts, myself. I tend to find them fairly annoying. I only have so much free time, and if I come to you for your content, get to your content. I don’t care what you had for dinner or what you bought at Kohl’s or what your kid did yesterday. It doesn’t matter to me.  

I DO find the egalitarian spread of news and opinion in podcasts to be liberating, which is what I find attractive about them. The current proliferation of them—literally everyone has a podcast now—and, if I’m being honest—lack of quality in many of them, is what turns me off.  

“…look at the darkness and find the shades of grey”. Lydia’s dad, Brent, also mentions how bad people can do good things and good people can do bad things. There is a great deal of moral ambiguity throughout culminating in a wonderful twist at the end. Was that fun to write? To challenge readers’ assumptions? Or was it difficult to place your characters through these quandaries? What messages do you hope readers take from this book?   

All of my books operate in this area, so it wasn’t difficult for me to focus on that theme. Good and bad, black and white, may be an easy way to educate children about the proper way to live, but it’s simply not how the real world works. We are all capable of horrible things; we are all capable of beautiful things. Learning and accepting that early on will help anyone move through reality.

What is currently on your bookshelves? Which books and authors do you recommend for our readers?  

Unfortunately, I have very little time to read these days. A lot of avid readers that I know suffered during the pandemic—a time that should have been our golden age. For whatever reason, reading was difficult for me during the lockdown, and I’m still feeling the effects of that hangover. 

Thank you so much for your time, Mindy. It’s been a pleasure and I hope you enjoy great success with this book. To sign off, where can our readers get your book on March 14th 2023?  

Online, at major retailers, and of course – support your local indie! 

How To Make It As A Writer, With Mindy McGinnis

With Stacy Ennis:

Many aspiring writers want to be able to make a living as a writer. But how in the world does someone go from dreaming to doing the thing?

This week, I’ve got answers for you. Along with sharing my own experience in nonfiction, I’m joined by novelist Mindy McGinnis to share her journey on the fiction side.

Mindy is an Edgar Award-winning novelist who writes across multiple genres, including post-apocalyptic, historical, thriller, contemporary, mystery, and fantasy. Her experience has not always been rosy, and, as you’ll learn in this frank and open discussion, she has experienced hardships along the way to make her dream happen. But she’s done it—she’s doing it—and she shares some of the behind-the-scenes of a novelist living the dream.

I also share insights from my world of nonfiction and offer insights for nonfiction authors who are writing books connected to a bigger purpose. We also dig into marketing and social media, and Mindy shares what she does to attract new readers and book paid speaking gigs.