Meet M.J. Etkind

We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful M.J. Etkind. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with M.J. below.

M.J. , appreciate you making time for us and sharing your wisdom with the community. So many of us go through similar pain points throughout our journeys and so hearing about how others overcame obstacles can be helpful. One of those struggles is keeping creativity alive despite all the stresses, challenges and problems we might be dealing with. How do you keep your creativity alive?

As a novel writer, I think so much of my creativity is a release from my day job which is very numbers and excel focused. In terms of keeping the creativity alive, engaging in creative works breeds creative, reading, movies, music all inspire my original works. I also find going for a walk lets me my mind move and imagine and that’s where I get my best ideas. My head had been writing stories my whole life and writing is just a nice release for that.

Great, so let’s take a few minutes and cover your story. What should folks know about you and what you do?

M.J. Etkind lives a double life. By day, she is a corporate girly with a business degree. By night, she writes romance novels in a cozy book filled apartment in Boston. M.J. Etkind’s most favorite fun fact is that she once took an entire vacation to visit a bookstore. Etkind has previously published two romance novels. Dishwasher Safe (2024) and The Witch of Wall Street (2025) which was featured in the New York Times Book Review. Her third novel, the Lone Wolf Paradox comes out March 17, 2026.

Looking back, what do you think were the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in your journey? What advice do you have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these?

I am an author, but I also self-publish, which means I also have to run the entire business around my books (as much as writing is a passion and a hobby there is a real business to run on the back end). I have also been a CPA for almost 15 years and that is where a lot of my business knowledge comes from. I am going to focus this on the business side of things because I think that is actually more interesting than the really solitary act of writing.

The first thing is project management skills. I think it is very important to be able to define tasks, what it means to get them to “done” and a due date. I think it is so easy to have a nebulous idea of what needs to happen and that can be really overwhelming and paralyzing. Being able to break tasks down into small chunks, define when the task is complete and follow that plan is big. This is something I really homed in on in my professional life. In addition, self-publishing often means managing a lot of different stakeholders. Editors, cover designers, bookstores, etc. Being able to manage that administratively takes a lot of management type experience.

The second is knowing who your customer is. I think for most authors, they look at selling a book and they immediately think their customer is a reader. The reality is, my best customers are bookstores and that’s who I spend the most time taking care of. I make sure they have swag and promotional materials so that they are in the best position to sell to their customers, and ultimately my readers. They are also on early ARC lists and get a lot of my social media energy. I very much run a B2B business versus a D2C business which is a very different model.

As a sort of 2a, I think the other piece and knowing when you are the customer and that’s not always easy to tell. There are the obvious places like editors or artists, but I think authors forget they are also the customers are most book events where they are paying table fees. So, understanding who your customer is versus when you are the customer goes a long way in how you manage the business side of things.

The third is general business administration skills. So this is the ability to use excel, develop customer databases etc. My most successful marketing strategy is a very large database of independent bookstores I have built from scratch. I am able to iterate on this in excel and use bulk email tools to email a lot of bookstores. I also think counter to this and knowing when you can spend a few extra dollars to prevent extra work/ burden. I use a service call NetGalley, via a co-op to distribute ARCs. It’s maybe $65 dollars but saves on a ton of admin work. So, balancing the cost versus results is big and that really allows me to run my business in the most advantage way possible.

Alright so to wrap up, who deserves credit for helping you overcome challenges or build some of the essential skills you’ve needed?

I’ll Answer this one as a writer versus a business person. I am dyslexic and I was a late reader but once I started to read, I really read a lot. It also took a lot of extra work to develop some of the fundamentals around writing. I really love telling stories and letting them marinate in my brain but sometimes they need a release and that’s what writing has done for me. I kept writing until I wrote over a million words and then finally I felt ready to publish. That’s maybe the really buttoned up answer.

The actual answer is that I have fallen hard into fandoms multiple times in my life which has ultimately led to fanfiction. So, out of love of writing and hyper obsession I gained a lot of competency from that. I think the thing with writing is that you have to love doing it most and foremost. And when I say love it, you have to love it so, so much you don’t know how not to do it. Even when your writing is bad or publishing is hard or you’re tired or life gets in the way, you have to write because it’s a release that feels like the best thing ever. I overcame the parts I struggled with because writing was my motivator.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://mjetkind.com
• Instagram: @mjetkindauthor
• Other: https://mjetkind.substack.com