When she finished the manuscript, Rose gave her agent the green light to submit it—she wanted the full experience, to see her words tested in the real market, not just bask in friends' praise and likes. The first publisher they targeted in the US was Simon & Schuster, whose haughty, corporate-letterhead rejection arrived two weeks later. The email was written with the exquisite coldness only large publishing houses could afford: "We admire the promise in these pages, but they do not align with our current editorial direction." That line, meant to be gentle, made Rose clench her jaw. She didn't even wait a day before instructing her agent to try the UK. There, Bloomsbury, the house that once took a chance on a certain J.K. Rowling, returned her script unread, with a polite-but-hasty "We are not accepting unsolicited manuscripts at this time." Each rebuff was a little burn, but Rose refused to let herself wither. Instead, she circled her pride like a wolf: she would not beg for a seat at their table. If she couldn't break in, she would build her own. But luckily JK Rowling doesn't exist in the world.
She spent the next week reading everything she could about the business side of publishing. She devoured online forums, publishing trade journals, and even the IRS bulletins on how to file as an LLC. At first, she half-expected to find some insurmountable barrier—some unscalable wall of connections and money that kept out people like her. Instead, a more mundane truth emerged: publishing was, at its core, a business of hustle and nerve, and most of its gatekeepers operated on habit and risk aversion. When she realised this, her focus shifted from self-pity to logistics. She hired a media-savvy law student to draft the company's incorporation documents for less than what she'd spent on her last birthday dinner.
By the end of the month, she had a small team: her agent's assistant's cousin, a junior publicist with a knack for viral campaigns; her mother's retired friend who'd spent thirty years in typesetting; and a rotating squad of college interns eager for a line on their resume and a selfie with Rose. They met in her living room twice a week, working off deli sandwiches and boxed wine, plotting not just a book launch, but an entire publishing takeover. Rose never once spoke of her ambitions in modest terms. She told the interns, without irony, that she meant to build the next Random House, that she would one day buy and bury the houses that had rejected her. Her vision was brash, and her new employees—many of whom had grown up on stories of women who "broke the glass ceiling"—were perfectly happy to be swept along.
Rose found a strange satisfaction in the raw, unvarnished capitalism of her new pursuit. Art had always been about expression, but the business of books was about leverage—about how many units you could move, how efficiently you could turn buzz into pre-orders, how creatively you could corner a demographic. She compared the numbers obsessively, benchmarking herself against debut authors and, more keenly, against the established powerhouses. Her goal was not just to maximise profit, but to become the very axis around which the publishing world spun.
I come from an affluent family, and I am constantly making money. I just mainly need to hire the right staff to run the company for me. I have loads of books I want to write, and it would be the perfect place to publish them. I plan to publish all the bestsellers from when I was alive, whose writers are currently not around. So this is the perfect opportunity for me.
One of the first things I did once I was set up and opening the company was to meet with the Barnes and Noble rep in New York City and send them an advance copy of the book so they could put it up in their store to sell, and I did the same for all the major book companies around the world.