I’ve Launched Products for 27 Years. My Own Book Broke Every Rule By Pandora Villaseñor

The spreadsheet headers were crisp. The follow-up formulas were locked. The list of contacts was promising. I selected the elevator pitch for my memoir in the Notes app and copied it. Yet my thumb hovered over the DM. 

I couldn’t make myself paste.

I closed the social app. 

Twenty-seven years of sales, business development, and marketing. I can launch a new product in my sleep. A pre-order window, ARC list, outreach, and a business plan were easy for me. 

So why did I hesitate? 

Launching my debut memoir, All Gifts defied every muscle memory I’d developed over the years. 

Lead with how this benefits the customer.

All Gifts came from a place where I believed I had a message of hope. Even as I wrote the earliest draft, I began to study what successful, published authors were doing in the inspirational space. Knowing I needed to build an audience, I started a podcast. Shared what I’d learned. But over time, when I wrote a post or an episode ending in a tidy lesson or a clean promise (“five steps to [you fill in the blank]”), it felt wrong. I tried to ignore the feeling and keep going since it seemed to be the only way to launch a book well. 

But there came a day when even the thought of writing or recording another episode nauseated me. 

So, after three years of podcasting, I went offline. No more blogging or even social media posting. Observational writing does not have the snappy hook, the dopamine hit some people are looking for, but it felt right.

Don’t get attached — it’s just a launch. 

In my corporate life, a product passed over was data. I’d take the feedback and use it to improve my pitch. Although I’m a passionate person, customer-obsessed, and serious about my commitments, over the course of my career, I trained myself to emotionally detach and redirect my energy to the things I can control — preparation, number of dials, attitude. 

But a memoir passed over? That’s personal. Even before the first bad review, before a subscriber stops opening my emails, I tell myself to brace for the inevitable. It doesn’t work: when the beloved indie bookstore I’d been dreaming of for the past ten years passed on doing an author event, I ugly cried in my car — witnessed by the guy in the BMW next to me.

Control the message. 

When I launch a new product on behalf of a company, narrative discipline is key. I stick to specific talking points and rehearse how to redirect questions. The message is always in control. 

These rules exist to separate me, the salesperson, from the sale. It protects me from emotional burnout and discouragement. Keeps me in the game. 

But how do I do that when the product is my life story? A memoir is the surrender of control. The most private material is now the merchandise. My thoughts are the message. And once those are out in the world, I can’t put the wall back up.

I’ve promised no customer benefit. I’m attached to everything. And the illusion of control is gone.

I opened the social media app, pasted the elevator pitch into the DM, then added the date to the corresponding column on my spreadsheet. Then back to the app, to do the next one. 

I’m making the calls, stopping in the stores, sending the emails. 

Sometimes I walk away with a yes. 

Most of the time, it’s just the quiet victory of making another call.

—

Pandora Villaseñor is a writer, actor, and creator working across the page, the screen, and the stage, and the founder of All Gifts House — a multimedia company that brings together her Substack newsletter, her screen projects, and her debut memoir, All Gifts. A member of Stowe Story Labs, she has developed All Gifts as an hour-long television drama and is also at work on a half-hour workplace comedy, The Animal Hospital.

The first in her family to attend college, she graduated from Oberlin College and earned an MBA from Pepperdine University. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband and a large, blended family, where she writes, lifts, tends a small garden, and keeps the Sabbath. All Gifts is her debut memoir.

All Gifts

Finding Meaning in the Mess

Pandora Villaseñor was four years old the first time she can remember love and pain living in the same house. She was fifteen when she became a mother. Seventeen when she left for college on a full scholarship. Thirty-one when she got sober. And forty-two when she finally understood that none of it – not the chaos, not the loss, not the dream she shelved to get out – had been wasted.

All Gifts moves across four decades, following Villaseñor’s investigation of the things you inherit and the things you leave behind. Through poverty, single motherhood, and religion, she doesn’t always choose the things that happen to her, but she chooses to see them as gifts.

Told in Villaseñor’s spare, declarative prose, All Gifts is for anyone who has ever stood in the wreckage of something and wondered if any of it meant anything.

It did. It does.

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