465: Interviewing with Jeff Selingo

Jess here. My guest this week is Jeff Selingo, an author and speaker I’ve admired for a long time. His work on college, college admissions and the transition to work and life in emerging adulthood are essential reads for anyone looking to understand what want and need in higher education and life. His books, There is Life After College, Who Gets In and Why: A Year Inside College Admissions and his forthcoming book, Dream School: Finding the College That’s Right for You are all essential reads for teens and emerging adults as well as parents of teens and emerging adults. I adore all three, but I wanted to talk with Jeff about a few aspects of his writing: how he created a speaking career, finds his topics, and how on earth he gets people to talk about topics that tend to be shrouded in secrecy behind very high walls (such as college admissions). Check out Jeff’s newsletter, Next, and Podcast, Future U KJ here, as you probably know, to tell you that if you're not listening to the Writing the Book episodes Jenny Nash and I have been doing, you should be. Jenny's working on her latest nonfiction, and I'm working on my next novel, and we're both trying to do something bigger and better than anything we've done before. We sit down weekly and dish about everything—from Jenny's proposal and the process of getting an agent to my extremely circular method of creating a story. We are brutally honest and open—even beyond what we are here. Truly, we probably say way too much. And for that reason, Writing the Book is subscriber-only. So I'm here saying: subscribe. That's a whole 'nother episode a week, and always a juicy one—plus all the other good subscriber stuff: the First Pages: BookLab, Jess’s From Author to Authority series, and whatever else we come up with. (It varies enough that it's hard to list it all.) Plus, of course, access whenever we run The Blueprint—which, I don’t know, might be soon. That's all I’ve got. So head to amwritingpodcast.com, get yourself signed up, and come listen to Writing the Book. Then talk to us. Tell us—tell us about your book writing and what's going on. We really want to hear from y’all. Thanks a lot. And Subscribe! Subscribe now