How Taylor Jenkins Reid Became a Publishing Powerhouse

Time​ Magazine

15-05-2025

Taylor Jenkins Reid is leaning against a railing in the sun outside Los Angeles' famed Griffith Observatory. We've picked this place to talk about her ninth book, Atmosphere, a space thriller and love story set at NASA in the 1980s, but as the iconic Hollywood sign shines in the hills behind her, the scene feels almost too on the nose.
Reid, despite her ability to blend in with the tourists milling about, is not just any author. She is one of the most successful novelists working today, her books not only beloved by readers but also hot commodities in the film and TV industry. Atmosphere, out June 3, is poised to be one of the biggest books of the summer, if not the year, with a movie adaptation already planned. So it feels a bit inevitable when a man in a backpack taps her on the shoulder, his phone camera open.
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Then the plot twist: 'Will you take a picture ... of us?' he asks, gesturing to his wife and son. Reid gamely starts snapping, bending down to get the right angle.
'I'm chasing a feeling. Maybe it doesn't matter if I'm fancy. Maybe I'm just fun.'
-Taylor Jenkins Reid
Julia Johnson for TIME
While this family clearly has no idea who Reid is, there are many, many people for whom this encounter would be huge. Despite grumbles that no one reads anymore, Circana BookScan data shows book sales are up—there were more than 797,000,000 print books sold in the U.S. last year, up 2% from 2023 and 14% from 2019. And the contemporary women's fiction category, where Reid is often listed, ended 2024 with a nearly 30% increase in sales over 2019 numbers, according to analyst Kristen McLean. But in recent years, as celebrity-led book clubs have proliferated and TikTok has driven demand, a select group of authors—Reid, Colleen Hoover, Emily Henry, Kristin Hannah, and romantasy favorites Sarah J. Maas and Rebecca Yarros among them—have become the North Stars of the industry. They're not just popular writers; they're brands, known entities with whom fans feel a deep connection.
Reid's novels—which center and largely appeal to women, who have long bought more fiction than men—create conversations on social media, have been selected by heavy hitters like Reese Witherspoon and Jenna Bush Hager for their book clubs, and virtually all are being or already have been adapted; Daisy Jones & the Six became an Emmy-winning series. Reid's eight novels before Atmosphere, five of which are New York Times best sellers, have sold more than 21 million print, e-book, and audiobook copies in 42 languages, per her agent. And, according to two industry sources, the scuttlebutt is that she recently signed a five-book deal for an eye-popping $8 million—per book. (Her agent declined to confirm.)
Given all this, you'd be forgiven for thinking that Reid, 41, might be a little miffed by the lack of recognition at Griffith. But where she grew up in Acton, Mass., vanity was a strict no-no: 'You would never want to be caught thinking you were something.' So she's still trying to reconcile her 'uncool life in the Valley,' where she lives with her husband and daughter, with how the world responds to her work. When people ask how she feels about having another best seller or the fact that Serena Williams wants to work with her, she isn't quite sure how to react. 'Well, what do you want me to feel?' she thinks. 'Like I'm hot sh-t?' None other than Stevie Nicks expressed interest in collaborating on Daisy Jones, but, for Reid, it still feels like this can't be real life. 'That happened to somebody else, I think,' she jokes. 'It happened to Taylor Jenkins Reid, right? God bless her. Good for you, babe.'
If you spent any time on BookTok in 2021, you probably saw young women, faces streaked with tears, sharing their love for Reid's fifth novel, The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, which had been published four years earlier. This followed Witherspoon's 2019 selection of Daisy Jones for her book club—and her announcement that she would produce an adaptation.
Publishing, like so many industries, changed with the pandemic. 'Both because people suddenly had time to read, and also with the arrival of BookTok in late 2020, genre fiction like romance and authors like Hoover and Reid took off,' says McLean. After Evelyn Hugo went viral, suddenly readers were looking for other books by Reid—many of them, according to Barnes & Noble senior director of books Shannon DeVito, arriving in stores to film content and find backlist titles. Word of mouth has always been key to an author's success. 'It can't be reverse engineered,' Reid says. 'It just happens when it happens.'
That it would happen for Reid, though, was hardly expected, especially considering she didn't originally set out to write books. The woman who now regularly fields offers to put her work onscreen initially wanted to be in the movie business.
She got her start as a casting assistant, but began writing on the side, even finishing a manuscript that was never published. In 2012, she asked her husband how he'd feel about her taking time off to focus on fiction. Within a month, she had a draft for what became her first novel, Forever, Interrupted. That book, published in 2013, sold poorly. Her second, After I Do, didn't do much better.
But once readers found Reid's books, the appeal was clear. Evelyn Hugo, Daisy Jones, 2021's Malibu Rising, and 2022's Carrie Soto Is Back, a loosely connected quartet, tell the stories of women navigating the pressures of fame in male-dominated spaces. Reid's storytelling feels immersive—she takes you deep inside the worlds she builds, and delivers the gossipy details you want to hear. Her protagonists are specific, bold, and unapologetic. They have a way of lingering with you after the story ends. 'You feel like they're just sort of out there, living in the world somewhere,' says Ballantine publisher Jennifer Hershey, Reid's editor on her four latest books, including Atmosphere.
The romance novelist Emily Henry, a close friend of Reid's, finds something 'healing' in her work. 'So many of us do have fears about being too much or too little, or not performing our womanhood correctly, not being friendly enough or pretty enough or passive enough or sparkly enough,' says Henry, whose latest novel Great Big Beautiful Life is a No. 1 New York Times best seller. 'I love that she writes these women who are very aware of how the world sees them and how they may fall short in the eyes of others, and their arc is never about trying to change that thing or trying to justify their existence.'
Reid's books are also, as more literary readers might say, 'easy to read,' often looked down upon by highbrow critics. She says her aim was always to write the kind of novels you could binge in a weekend, but the more she published, the more reviews came in, and she found herself chafing at the criticism: 'Oh, this person said they liked my book, but they didn't find it to be high art. How can my sentences be better? How can my work be more literary? I fell into that trap quite a bit, looking for approval.' When Malibu Rising came out, Reid was proud—she thought this multigenerational family drama, of all her books, would be the one embraced by the literati. The reviews 'leveled' her. One person called it 'Candy Land Franzen.' She remembers how she talked herself out of the sting. 'Because I know you're trying to insult me, it hurts,' she says. 'But I am not writing as complex stories as Jonathan Franzen—that wasn't the point. So it probably is Candy Land Franzen. And maybe I love being Candy Land Franzen.'
Writing a book that's easy to read, Reid contends, is extremely difficult. She has to think about the reader's experience on every page. 'I'm chasing a feeling,' she says. 'Maybe it doesn't matter if I'm fancy. Maybe I'm just fun.'
An estimated 16 million unsolicited manuscripts are submitted to agents' 'slush piles' each year, according to Laura McGrath, a professor at Temple University who uses data to study literature and literary culture. To get published at all, even if you sell poorly, is a feat. 'It's just sad to me, when I talk to aspiring writers and they'll talk about Taylor Jenkins Reid as though anyone could do this,' McGrath says.
Libby McGuire, publisher of Atria—which published Evelyn Hugo and reportedly won Reid back from Ballantine with that massive deal—emphasizes that there's a path to success as an author without ascending to the level of a phenomenon. If you rely solely on the New York Times best-seller list, she says, you might miss books that are still selling well over time. 'When I talk to my friends at other houses, everyone has these books that are quietly succeeding,' McGuire says. 'It's just that they're selling 2,000 to 3,000 a week.' But the lack of transparency around advances and sales, combined with sensational stories like Reid's, leads to a skewed perception of what success looks like for a typical author, McGrath says. 'We lose sight of the fact that there is a workaday writer churning out a book a year or a book every couple of years, who is making a reasonable living or still has a day job.'
In the Penguin Random House antitrust trial three years ago, the publishing giant revealed that only 35% of its books are profitable and of those, 4% bring in the majority of profits, suggesting that the company runs on the success of just a tiny handful of authors. To some in the industry, the gap between what authors like Reid are offered—face time with internal sales reps, booksellers, and media, marketing and publicity support, the opportunity to tour—and what the majority receives is unfair.
Reid reportedly got less than $100,000 when she sold Evelyn Hugo —somewhere between $50,000 and $99,000, per Publishers Marketplace—which seems laughable now that it's sold more than 10 million copies. But she feels fortunate to have started small. 'You could say, well, publishers should put all of the energy equally behind all the books. But if they do that, they can't publish as many,' she says. 'The only way they were going to publish Forever, Interrupted was to take a chance on me, give me a low advance, not put a ton of energy behind it, and see what happened.' For companies that take a volume approach, the real boon is when one of the smaller bets, like Evelyn Hugo, becomes a runaway hit.
'I always describe it as like a game of Hungry Hungry Hippos,' says Reid's agent Celeste Fine, who specializes in representing big-name writers like Nicholas Sparks and Jennifer Weiner. 'Authors to these corporations are just like marbles, like nom nom nom.' Over the years, Fine has observed a 'mission creep,' where publishers expect not only exceptional books, but also marketing and sales acumen, engagement on social media, and the ability to entertain a crowd on tour. It's as if they're saying, 'Not only are we paying for the book—now we own a piece of you, the human, and you should be grateful,' Fine says. She believes an author like Reid deserves to be treated like a business partner: 'She has earned the right to be as certain about what she's getting out of the next 10 years of her career as any CEO with their benefit packages.'
There are no guarantees in publishing, but Atmosphere is a solid bet. The novel follows Joan Goodwin, an astrophysicist who joins NASA's space-shuttle program in the early '80s. There she meets Vanessa Ford, a woman who challenges her understanding of who she is. In Reid's first thriller, she pumps up the stakes with a disaster on the shuttle in the first few pages.
She studied the works of Andy Weir, read about Apollo 13, and pored over NASA documents. Paul Dye, a retired NASA flight director, helped her untangle the technical details. But for all of Reid's research, the idea for the book really started with a desire to tell a particular type of story. 'It just felt like time for me to write a very high-stakes, dramatic love story,' she says. She asked herself: 'What is my Titanic?'
Reid knew she wanted to explore how intimate a connection could be between one character in space and one on the ground, and that those characters would both be women. She also knew this choice would lead her into another debate about identity. Who is allowed to write what type of characters has long been a fraught subject in publishing, with some arguing that authors should write only from perspectives they inhabit and can therefore be trusted to represent truthfully, and others encouraging the ideas of allyship and creative freedom. Though Reid is white, some of her characters are not, and the way she wrote Carrie Soto, a Latina, in particular yielded some criticism she took to heart. 'What I was being told was I don't have the range necessary to pull off what I'm trying to pull off,' she says. So when it comes to race, for now she'll stick to what she knows.
Her response was not the same when it came to writing about sexuality, but then neither was her experience. The publication of Evelyn Hugo, ultimately a love story about two women, led to questions about why Reid, who is married to a man, writes queer characters. 'I am very private,' she says. 'So at first, I just sort of let people assume what they were going to assume.' But now, as she prepares for the topic to resurface around Atmosphere 's release, Reid wants to be very clear about something those close to her have always known: she is bisexual. 'It has been hard at times to see people dismiss me as a straight woman, but I also didn't tell them the whole story,' she says.
When Reid was a teenager, she began expressing herself through her appearance. 'I got hit pretty quickly with, Why can't you dress more like a girl? Why don't you do your nails? Why do you talk that way? Can't you be a little bit quieter?' she says. 'I started to get people who would say, 'Oh, I get why you dress like a boy—you're gay.'' But that label didn't feel right to her—her first love was a boy, and still people told her to just wait and she'd see. Then, when she fell for a woman in her early 20s, her friends also doubted her for that. 'This was the late '90s, so nobody was talking about bisexuality. And if they were, it was to make fun of people,' Reid says. 'The messages about bisexuality were you just want attention or it was a stop on the way to gayville. I found that very painful, because I was being told that I didn't know myself, but I did.'
Reid's husband, the screenwriter Alex Jenkins Reid, recently came across the idea that a person's identity is like a house with many rooms. 'My attraction to women is a room in the house that is my identity—Alex understood this book was about me spending time in that room,' Reid says. 'He was so excited for me, like, 'What a great way for you to express this side of you.' And he helped me get the book to be as romantic and beautiful as it could be.'
Reid knows being married to a man gives her 'straight-passing' privileges that others in the LGBTQ community do not have, so she wants to speak thoughtfully about what it means for her to share this part of her life. 'How do I talk about who I really am with full deference to the life experiences of other people?' she asks. 'Basically where I came down is I can talk about who I am, and then people can think about that whatever they want.'
As our conversation shifts back to Atmosphere and its other themes, she leads me to the basement level of Griffith Observatory and stops in front of her favorite exhibit, a representation of time since the creation of the universe made with more than 2,000 pieces of jewelry in celestial shapes.
'This is 400 million years after the Big Bang, and we're only right here,' she says, gesturing to the long wall as we walk. We pass the billion-year mark, the 10-billion-year mark, and still we have yet to reach the moment when human life began. 'You start to realize the amount of time a human is alive is so short, and yet all of our problems seem immense,' Reid says. To her, it's reassuring. No matter what any one of us does, the universe will keep expanding.
The next day, at an open-air café in West Hollywood, we sit down for lunch beside a 20-something actor describing his recent Nickelodeon gig. This seems as good a place as any to talk about the many projects Reid has in development.
There are the previously announced adaptations of Carrie Soto, executive produced by Serena Williams, for Netflix; Malibu Rising, which was with Hulu but, Reid's producing partner Brad Mendelsohn tells me, now needs a new distributor; and Forever, Interrupted, executive produced by and starring Laura Dern and Margaret Qualley, in development with A24 for Netflix.
But there's also news: Reid and Mendelsohn envision a global theatrical release for Atmosphere, and just brought on Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck, the duo behind Half Nelson, Mississippi Grind, and Captain Marvel, to write and direct. And, independent of her adaptations, Reid and her childhood friend Ashley Rodger wrote a jukebox Chicks musical, Goodbye, Earl, about two friends who team up to kill one's abusive husband, with the Chicks signed on as executive producers. 'It's got Thelma and Louise vibes,' says Mendelsohn, a partner at Circle Management + Production. 'It's a story about what you would do to protect your friend,' Reid says. 'I'm writing it from how I feel about Ashley, and she's writing it from how she feels about me. There were a lot of tears, and a lot of making each other laugh.'
Meanwhile, fans can't stop talking about even the projects for which there is no news. Stevie Nicks herself has expressed her eagerness for a second installment of Daisy Jones. And, though the show was released more than two years ago, star Riley Keough still sees posts from people pleading for more. 'Being able to play—or watch or read—a woman who's beating her own drum is inspiring. It speaks to something within all of us, the desire for that freedom of self,' Keough says. That said, she doesn't have high hopes for a return: 'The way the show was made very much wrapped it up.'
And for years, fans have speculated about casting for a promised Netflix Evelyn Hugo movie. So many have clamored for Jessica Chastain to play the redheaded actor Celia St. James that she's had to clarify multiple times that it's not happening. Ana de Armas and Eiza González, meanwhile, have both expressed interest in playing Evelyn. (Emily Henry's vote is for de Armas: 'I know that she already played Marilyn Monroe, but she's an even more perfect Evelyn Hugo.') 'We're not casting until we have a script that's ready,' Mendelsohn says. 'There's so much attention on it because of the fan base that there is a pressure to get it right.'
Reid, the former casting assistant, says she has strong opinions but is keeping them to herself. One thing she will share is her desire to update the story. Evelyn Hugo came out just months before #MeToo went viral. 'There was no Harvey Weinstein conversation when I finished that book,' she says. 'We have a real opportunity here to further that conversation, and to make the movie better than the book.'
For all the glamour that Hollywood projects bring, Reid is clear on the real benefit of adaptations. She thought the money she'd get from selling screen rights would be what changed her life. 'But actually you need the movie, the TV show, whatever it is, to come out and be a hit,' she says. That's what gets your books back on display and readers back in stores, which shows your publisher they should invest more in you. 'If you can get that snowball going once, you can ride that goodwill for a while.'
And, ultimately, that's the point: longevity. Reid wants to be the kind of author who can experiment with genre, write whatever she wants to write, and still be embraced—like Stephen King, whose brand is so much bigger than any given book. 'It's a lot of pressure,' Reid says. 'But the thing I try to keep in mind, and that my agents certainly help me keep in mind, is that you have to keep your eye on what the actual goal is: I hope I produce work that makes people happy often enough that they'll give my next one a chance.'
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