Emma Straub on Getting Your Passion Project to the Finish Line

Emma Straub is a New York Times–bestselling novelist, a picture-book author, and the co-owner of the Brooklyn indie bookstore Books Are Magic, a childhood dream she actually went out and built in real life with her husband. Emma, in short, gets things done.

Her latest novel, American Fantasy, follows a newly divorced 50-year-old who finds herself on a boy band fan cruise, where hilarity and profundity ensue. It landed on “most anticipated” novels lists from the likes of the Times, People and Time, and had me sucked in from page one. (True confession: In the late ’90s, I was a writer for a teen magazine called Twist — I was on the frontlines of NSYNC mania.)

Emma joined me on How Success Happens to talk about ideas that can actually sustain a career, the messy reality of running a small business, and why when it comes to creative endeavors, finishing matters more than starting. Listen to our full conversation here and read on for tips to help your dreams take off in three, two, one!

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Three Key Insights

1. How to Know When an Idea Is “Something”

Emma gets ideas all the time and dutifully plops most of them in notebooks, her Notes app, or files that never see the light of day. But every so often, “maybe three or four times” in her life, an idea arrives so complete that she knows “it could carry the weight of a whole novel” instead of stalling out at page 50. With American Fantasy, the boy-band-cruise premise landed in her brain with enough emotional and narrative heft that she thought, “Hot damn. Yes.” For her, the real test isn’t whether an idea is clever; it’s whether it can sustain 300 pages and months (or years) of work.

Takeaway: Don’t chase every clever thought—wait for the idea you know you can live with long enough to build a real product, project, or business around it.

2. Treat Your Passion Like a Job (Not a Vibe)

Growing up around her father, legendary writer Peter Straub, and his friend and collaborator Stephen King, Emma absorbed one core lesson: “Writing is a job. It’s a real job that you do every day.” She watched would-be writers in their twenties act out the stereotype—staying up too late, drinking too much—while missing the actual work, and her reaction was, “That’s not what it is…You gotta get to work. It is the coal mine.” Even as life got fuller with kids, bookstores, and book tours, she kept a quota mindset, shifting from 30–40 pages a week in her twenties to a realistic 10 pages now.

Takeaway: Whatever your craft is, put it on the calendar and treat it like going to the coal mine—non-negotiable.

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3. Structure Is Your Friend

When Emma and her husband, Michael Fusco-Straub, opened Books Are Magic, they wanted it to feel like a “non-hierarchical, lovey-dovey” family, and quickly learned that is a recipe for chaos. She realized “structure is your friend,” especially in a retail business where “The only problem is people,” she laughs when describing her biggest business challenges. “It’s the people you employ and the people who walk through the door.” Hiring someone with real management experience helped them build systems and clear roles, and Emma had to accept a key truth about herself: “I would rather die than confront someone,” and that’s okay as long as someone on the team is good at it.

Takeaway: Be brutally honest about what you’re good at, what you’re bad at, and hire to fill the gaps.

Two Free Resources to Learn More

- Keep up with Emma’s world—books, events, and behind-the-scenes bookstore life—by following Books Are Magic. Her latest novel, American Fantasy, arrives April 7 and can be ordered now.

- Learn why best-selling non-fiction author Susan Orlean says to trust your weirdest ideas.

One Question to Ponder

Emma said that once you’ve finished one big project—even if it’s “garbage”—you now know you can do it again, and that confidence is everything.

What is one ambitious, slightly scary thing you want to finish in the next 12 months?

Send your answer to howsuccesshappens@entrepreneur.com, your response may be read on a future episode.

About How Success Happens

Each episode of How Success Happens shares the inspiring, entertaining, and unexpected journeys that influential leaders in business, the arts, and sports traveled on their way to becoming household names. It’s a reminder that behind every big-time career, there is a person who persisted in the face of self-doubt, failure, and anything else that got thrown in their way.

Emma Straub is a New York Times–bestselling novelist, a picture-book author, and the co-owner of the Brooklyn indie bookstore Books Are Magic, a childhood dream she actually went out and built in real life with her husband. Emma, in short, gets things done.

Her latest novel, American Fantasy, follows a newly divorced 50-year-old who finds herself on a boy band fan cruise, where hilari