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00:00:01
Rachel Hochhauser
76 Plays16 days ago
Thanks for listening to our episode with Rachel Hochhauser.
To keep up with or connect with Rachel:
✨ LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/rachel-hochhauser-7b352b16/
✨Website: www.pieceworkpuzzles.com
✨Preorder her book, Lady Tremaine: A Novel https://static.macmillan.com/static/smp/lady-tremaine-9781250396341/
✨Rachel’s Instagram: @Hochhauser
✨Piecework Puzzle’s Instagram: @Pieceworkpuzzles
To stay in touch with Meredith and Medbury:
Follow Meredith on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/meredith-farley/
Follow Medbury on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/medbury_agency/
Subscribe to the Medbury newsletter: https://meredithfarley.substack.com/
Email Meredith: Meredith@MedburyAgency.com
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Transcript
Introduction and Career Apex
00:00:01
Speaker
Hi. Hi. I am really excited to get to chat with you again. Thank you so much for making time. You are an ideal content people guest. Thank you. I'm so happy to be here. Thank you for having me.
00:00:13
Speaker
For anyone who's not familiar with you, can you say who you are and what you do? Yes, my name is Rachel Hochhauser. I am a co-founder at Peacework. We're best known for making jigsaw puzzles, but we make all kinds of gifts and goods and of a great online marketplace.
00:00:30
Speaker
I am also a novelist. My debut novel, Lady Tremaine, is coming out in March with St. Martin's Press. I want to talk about both of those things, your very cool business and your cool novel.
00:00:42
Speaker
But can you – I feel like you're in a really cool place. You have this business that is doing really well and doing cool stuff and you also have a debut novel
Journey from Advertising to Peacework
00:00:51
Speaker
coming out. Do you feel like you're at an apex in your career or you're like this is a cool moment or does it not necessarily feel that way on the inside?
00:00:59
Speaker
It's a great question. It actually does it does feel that way for the first time. And i think there were earlier points in my career where maybe I've had some nice things happen. We all had our ups and downs, or maybe from the outside.
00:01:12
Speaker
Looking in, it would have looked like it would feel really celebratory, but it never really felt that way. And this is really the first time where feels like the outside is matching my inside. It's a really good feeling.
00:01:24
Speaker
What was your career
Inception of Peacework During a Retreat
00:01:25
Speaker
journey up until now? So up till this apex, what happened for you? So I unintentionally went into advertising. I went to school in New York City at NYU and got a great internship at an advertising agency and then graduated right smack at the start of the recession in 2009.
00:01:46
Speaker
And I really wanted to stay in the city and it was really hard to get a job. So I got the one job that was available to me, which was the firm I had already been working with, made me an offer.
00:01:57
Speaker
So it kickstarted a whole career and path that I never really chose. I was always really very interested in writing. And I did that for a few years and decided to refocus and pivot on writing again. So I went to grad school for fiction.
00:02:14
Speaker
But I still had to support myself, so I continued in advertising and marketing. um And in the meantime, I found a lot to love in it, and I ended up specializing in branding specifically. And
Challenges of Growing Peacework
00:02:28
Speaker
i like to describe it as golden handcuffs because things were going well. There was a lot to enjoy. i was traveling for work, which was really nice. and We got to go to Europe, see clients.
00:02:39
Speaker
So I ultimately started my own creative agency, Major Studio, with a few other women. And that was a really gratifying part of my career because I got to essentially be my own boss. and But it was also really exhausting. i was working in client services. It 24-7 when you run your own business. And I was feeling pretty burned out, which led to piecework in kind of a backwards way.
00:03:05
Speaker
Was trying to mitigate feeling so much burnout. And so I decided I wanted to get away from screens for a weekend and go hiking. And I booked a cabin in Yosemite with some friends and it ended up being this massive thunderstorm and we couldn't go outside and there was no cell service. There was nothing to do.
00:03:23
Speaker
And we stumbled into this old closet of dusty dog-eared jigsaw puzzles. I'm not historically a puzzle person. I wasn't like someone who was working on them all the time.
00:03:36
Speaker
But that weekend, I found them to be so meditative and also so surprisingly social. We were we opened a bottle wine. We lit a fire. We were talking. I enjoyed it so much that I started doing them all the time in my own free time. it wasn't one light bulb moment. It was just that I was doing so many puzzles and I thought I can apply everything I know about branding and packaging design at my own agency to this.
00:03:58
Speaker
So I started piecework with my co-founder Jenna on, it was a lark. It was a whim. i was like, no problem. no big deal. We'll make some puzzles. And it just took off. The timing was good. We got really good press. This was mid 2019. And then the pandemic happened and things just went to the moon really quickly faster than was healthy for us or for the company.
00:04:19
Speaker
So that was this kind of circuitous path that brought me to puzzles. And then ultimately, writing was always threaded throughout, I can get more into that, but that had its own journey and has culminated in the publication of this first book next year.
00:04:36
Speaker
Wow. I love it. it's almost It seems like you're, I don't know, victim of your own success. That's too intense, but you've you have a lot of steps and you're like, and it was really successful and and we had a lot of growth and I had to manage that both like for your own agency and then for PeaceWork.
00:04:51
Speaker
Talk to me about
Writing Journey and Personal Challenges
00:04:52
Speaker
what was it like, because there are a lot of founders who listen to this podcast. So when you're in the thick of it with PeaceWork and suddenly way more orders start perhaps coming in than you expect. I'd imagine that's what happens when, like during the pandemic. What was that experience like for you?
00:05:09
Speaker
What was that stretch of months like? This is why I say the outside didn't match the inside because on the surface, you have this great success story. It's objectively good news. It's a good problem to have, but my personal life took the biggest hit possible. As orders grow, your customer service issues grow. And when you're still managing your own customer service, i was answering 50 emails a day of questions and address changes and orders or whatever the the million things that come up. When you're so caught in the minutia of running the business, every little unexpected problem that comes up that you don't necessarily have the experience yet to solve, it's not yet routine,
00:05:50
Speaker
The days become really stressful and they were really long. And I was still running the agency too. So I still had clients. I was having two full-time jobs and only 24 hours in the day. It was the pandemic. So there wasn't a lot else going on in my life at the time. I'm a parent now, but I wasn't a parent when the pandemic started and when the company started.
00:06:10
Speaker
So I just absorbed everything personally, almost into my body. I don't think it was good for me personally. It was so stressful. But we made it through that period. But it was a tough period, if I'm being honest.
00:06:22
Speaker
Did you watch The Bear at all? I did. picturing like that moment where all of a sudden the tickets start coming in for the first day of online orders. think That's the visual I'm getting as you talk on it.
00:06:33
Speaker
No, it's great. It's everything you dreamed of. And then you're just like, shoot, what do I what do i do now? And then you're also worried about maintaining it, right? As you're scaling to meet it, you also have to make sure it keeps coming. Otherwise, you're making all these investments you ultimately won't be able to afford.
00:06:50
Speaker
Yeah, 100%. I totally get that. Also, too, I'd say want to next focus on your book, but one thing, your story really resonates so much with me. You and I are the exact same age. I graduated in 2009.
00:07:04
Speaker
I was a writing major. I got into copywriting because I just needed a job, moved up and into these different roles at an agency, Golden Handcuffs, started my own agency, Medbury, which I run now.
00:07:15
Speaker
And I'm really inspired that you have written this book because it's such like a dream of mine to write a book to and hearing you talk through the things you've managed and accomplished is very cool.
00:07:25
Speaker
So let's talk about your book. What was the origin? How did you get the book deal? What's the story about? I want to give listeners the opportunity to hear everything about it. Yeah. Thank you for saying all that. The book was its own circuitous path. There's two ways to tell every story.
00:07:41
Speaker
And the very beginning, I think, was that i always wanted to write and I went to grad school for it. And I really wanted to be a writer. That was just my dream. And I wrote a whole novel in grad school.
00:07:53
Speaker
And I poured myself into it. And I thought, I'm really going to take advantage of this this time, this investment of energy, returned to school and i couldn't sell the book. I couldn't even get representation for it. couldn't even get an agent with it.
00:08:08
Speaker
In hindsight, I'm so glad that book was not my debut novel. But at the time,
Conceptualizing Lady Tremaine
00:08:15
Speaker
it was crushing. It was heartbreaking. And I had interest from a few parties and I was limping along and making edits after edits. When it had been a certain number of years, i hit a wall and I just said, I can't do it anymore. i metaphorically shoved the whole thing into a drawer and was very dramatic about it and quit writing in my own mind and moved on. This coincided timing-wise with starting piecework. So it was all my extra...
00:08:41
Speaker
surplus creative energy outside of my nine to five money making job, suddenly found a new home and piecework. And then I had no time to think about any of this stuff. But it always felt like a kind of a bruise, an area of my life that I hadn't met my own goals, or I had failed in some way, shape or form.
00:09:00
Speaker
So it was like tender to touch it or think about it. But then i had ah different kind of bruise or trauma A few years ago, my husband, at that point in time, we had our first kid. I was pregnant with our second, and we had a really unexpected, very serious medical situation where he ended up in emergency brain surgery. And We weren't sure what it was and if it was going to survive. And then there was a many months long recovery and my life fell to pieces and in a lot of ways in that I was single parenting our kid and we didn't know what was going to happen.
00:09:35
Speaker
Somehow in that process, two things happened. One, I got an idea for a book that I wanted to write, which I'll speak to in a moment. But two, I was suddenly in ah headspace where almost like out of survival, I needed to carve out something for myself. This inverse, like it it feels like the strangest thing that in such a tough season, I would sit down to start working on a book.
00:09:59
Speaker
But it almost felt like an act of survival. Like I needed to, I think there's an expression like touch grass. I needed to touch something that was mine or that grounded me in some way.
00:10:11
Speaker
And The idea I got was about motherhood and it was related because I was sitting in a hospital waiting room and one of our many visits to many doctors. And I should say now that Eric is alive and with us. And i think that's an important part of this.
00:10:28
Speaker
But I was sitting in the hospital
Publishing Process Insights
00:10:29
Speaker
waiting room and i was scrolling on my phone, just mindlessly trying to distract myself. And I came across a depiction of Cinderella's evil stepmother and recognized her immediately from my own childhood and the countless Cinderella folktales you read.
00:10:47
Speaker
But this time in this season of sacrifice that i was in, I didn't see a villain. I was oh, wait a second. She didn't have evil powers. She was just advocating for her children. She was just trying to protect her family. And it was this record scratch of a moment for me.
00:11:04
Speaker
And I just couldn't get her out of my head. so I just started planking away and working on this project where I could. And ultimately, when I felt like it had picked up enough steam, i decided to invest in it by taking a break from my agency work. And I took three months off to really write the book.
00:11:21
Speaker
And that doesn't even get to the whole publication and representation and selling the book and publication part of the journey, which I think is equally interesting. But that was how I got to that point in my 30s that I was never able to get to in my twenty s with finishing the book. Yeah, no. i First of all, I can't wait to read it.
00:11:39
Speaker
I know said this to you too, but anything related to fairy tales or myths, I'm in. And this sounds so interesting. What was that publication journey like for you? Actually, sorry, before we jump into that, I want to go back to your very first novel.
00:11:53
Speaker
I feel like the way you described it as like a bruise is so beautiful. Like I feel like we all have those little bruises, like something that maybe didn't come to fruition the way we wanted. What, if you're comfortable saying, what was that first novel about? In some ways, did it feel, yeah what was the focus of that one?
00:12:08
Speaker
It was a novel with a female protagonist and it was about her and it was a little bit of a coming of age, like an adult coming of age, but it was ultimately about her relationship with the family that she married into.
00:12:22
Speaker
And what it examined that I think I'm still interested in was the after the happily ever after, which ironically, my second book is also about that. and yeah But I think it's so different in style and form from Lady Tremaine, but it was looking into We're all sold a message or a fairy tale, but what is the reality of it underneath?
00:12:46
Speaker
And it was, there was a lot to love about that book. I'm glad it wasn't my first book because I think it lacked plot, if I'm being honest with myself and more for my own career.
00:12:58
Speaker
not that I think that the writing was bad, but for my own career and growing a readership and out of interest of wanting to do this long-term, I want a book that feels sticky enough that it really grabs people.
00:13:09
Speaker
And yeah, definitely the evil stepmother, she marries into a family and it's just like super. All right. Yeah. So what was the process like you started writing it? Did you start sending out proposals the moment you started writing or did you finish it first? What was that whole journey for you?
00:13:25
Speaker
So in traditional publishing for fiction, you have to have a completed manuscript before you start querying. I can talk through the whole process if that's helpful. And that You know, my advice there, which I received, which I read and which I would echo and underscore is you only want to start querying when you are totally done. Like when you have pushed that book as far as you can, not when you're still making edits, not when you know it could be better, but you're hoping someone sees a spark in it because of the sheer volume of manuscripts that are getting pushed through the funnels of agencies and publishers. You really want to make sure that
00:14:07
Speaker
yours feels as close to publication as it possibly can. Nonfiction is really different. You can sell a book based off of a proposal. You don't have to write the whole thing. You just you need a great proposal, a good one to three sample chapters. so They're different processes.
00:14:22
Speaker
So for me, i I got the book as far as I could on my own. I had one really great reader, a friend of mine who happens to be developmental editor, and she helped me with a round of edits.
00:14:33
Speaker
And then i went out for representation, which is a process called querying. And it can be very demoralizing. It's essentially you write your query letter. They follow a template, but the query letter is essentially your cover letter for your book.
00:14:50
Speaker
And you're doing anything you can to stand out in an agent's inbox so that they want to request some sample pages and read the success, the not even the success rate of getting representation, but even getting a response from queries are really low. So it's applying for a job or something. You are just researching each agent and finding some personal connection and who they're working with and laboring over your query letter. And then you're very unlikely to get a response.
00:15:20
Speaker
So you do that many times over. I was really lucky because i had some relationships from my first round of querying and my novel, and I was able to revisit some of those. And i ultimately ended up, I had a few offers of representation and ended up picking an agent that had been so generous with their feedback with me, with first book. That relationship was 10 years in the making, essentially.
00:15:48
Speaker
I like to draw that connection because anyone who's not getting the responses that they want in their own outreach, you just don't know what connections you're making for later, what ripple effects your actions now have.
00:16:04
Speaker
It's interesting. It's reminding me of business a little bit. Yes. Yeah. his Relationships years later end Becoming something cool that you didn't expect. One question. I'm actually in the middle of writing a synopsis and it's due. and today So any advice for folks when they're in the synopsis writing part?
00:16:25
Speaker
Oh. I had a horrible experience writing a synopsis. They're so hard. I only had to do it once. I didn't do it before querying. I waited until an agent requested one.
00:16:35
Speaker
felt like I did it in 24 hours. i was just like, okay, they requested one, I have to figure this out. One thing I read about a synopsis is you want it to be a really factual summary of what actually happens. It's a plot summary. So It's not as focused on the interiority of the characters. It's so an agent or whoever's reading can easily spot plot holes in the action sequence of the book.
00:16:57
Speaker
Some books are more interior, so I think that would be a harder thing to do. But when in doubt, I think taking a broader step back, You're looking for someone to find an emotional connection with your material. So even if you're not following all the rules or doing it exactly right, that doesn't necessarily prohibit you from making the relationship and the connection. That's good advice.
Writing from a Misunderstood Perspective
00:17:20
Speaker
What was it like spending so much time writing from the perspective of a woman who was historically understood to be a villain? I don't know what this says about me. That part came really easily to me.
00:17:33
Speaker
think women are constantly misunderstood. We live in a time period of like tribalism and you're always gonna have people who feel differently than you. I really found it easy to empathize with the protag protagonist situation. i think because of what had happened in my own life, but also she was just a mother. She's a mother of two girls. I'm the mother of two girls. he was not as far as stretched as you would think yeah it's and i feel i like what you're saying there i do think i don't want to project things onto it i'm very excited to read it i feel like i'm particularly interested right now in stories of women who are falsely portrayed as villains so i feel like you've hit on a cultural nerve too was that intentional or was it just organic to the story that came to you based off of your experience and the connection you felt when you saw that photo
00:18:26
Speaker
I think it came from ah personal tension of mine because I really love Cinderella. I love the story. it was my favorite fairy tale as a kid I still am drawn to the pomp and circumstance and the fancy dress and the balls. those The kind of false messages were sold by it. There's still a part of me that buys into them despite it all, despite knowing better. And then on the other side, I do know better. And on the other half of me really examines like, why was I spoon fed this as a kid? Why do we allow, why do we tell little girls that if they're beautiful and nice and quiet, they just might be lucky enough to be picked by a prince. It's truly a story where the named character has no agency whatsoever.
00:19:10
Speaker
And if you look at it, the prince picks her based off of how she looks. Like it's just a really so uncomfortable thing to sit with. So the book is my grappling with both of those things. And it ultimately is a version of the fairy tale that I wish we were told. Ultimately, it takes everything I
Balancing Writing with Parenting
00:19:30
Speaker
love about Cinderella, the pageantry and whatnot, and mixes it with a more contemporary kind of read of the situation.
00:19:41
Speaker
You took three months off of work and did you just focus on and complete the book in those three months? No, I wish I could write book in three months. I got a really good chunk done.
00:19:53
Speaker
really did treat it like a job. I wasn't screwing around. i felt I actually felt a lot of anxiety and nerves. I don't want to make light of taking that time off because I was also taking a time off from that income and also working in client services. I didn't know if the work would be there – went back. It wasn't like a job at a corporation where the income was for sure going to be waiting for me. So I really felt like I had to take the writing seriously.
00:20:20
Speaker
But I had more work to do after those three months. And I had hit a point of momentum by then, like a critical mass, point of no return. And then I was just moving through.
00:20:32
Speaker
And as far as fitting it in, I was writing, obviously, during work hours with childcare, but When I have to, I'll get up really early in the morning. When I had energy late at night, i would try and fit in 20 minutes during the length of a Daniel Tiger episode. I would on weekends ask my husband to watch a kid or the kid, depending on when it was in the process. So I could go to a coffee shop for 90 minutes. I think in parenting across the board, you have to get really good at code switching, but that was the ultimate code switch, right? It's like going from being mom or mommy and dealing with a meltdown to let me get into writing mode as quickly as I can so I can make the most of this 30 minutes that I have.
00:21:15
Speaker
Sounds like you were very You're doing a lot of, I have 30 minutes. I'm going to do some work. You weren't like, I can only write when I have a stretch of three uninterrupted hours in front of me. I've spent a lot of my life in the ladder camp of I could only write. i've i have had a lot of rules I've made for myself. And it was that anxiety and desperation of I have to finish this and try and sell it that ultimately got me to write.
00:21:38
Speaker
But I'm not, I don't want sugarcoat it or make it sound like i have it super figured out. I'm still figuring it out. Lovely. Where can people follow you or pre-order the book? And is there anything else that you'd want to say or that we could plug for you before we wrap up?
00:21:55
Speaker
Yeah, I do want to give a plug for pre-sales and generally not just for myself, but for any author that you want to support in their career. The number one thing you can do is buy a book before publication date, because that actually indicates to the booksellers and the library and the publisher that there's interest in the title, which is not something I knew about before i started this whole process, but it's become really useful for me and just thinking about writers that I want to do something for.
00:22:23
Speaker
You can follow me on Instagram, my personal ones at Hawkhauser. That's really hard to spell. So good luck in the show notes for everyone. Peace work. We have our Instagram handle on our website.
00:22:36
Speaker
The book is available for pre-order on bookshop.org and Barnes and Noble on Amazon and a lot of the indie bookstores. So wherever you buy books near you, I can't wait for everyone to read it.
00:22:48
Speaker
I'm very excited. Thank you so much, Rachel. I'm going to go pre-order it this afternoon. and I can't wait to read it. you know Thank you so much. Thank you so much. it was awesome to have this conversation with you. Take care.