Author Kennedy Ryan Won’t Mince Words About Her Ambitions

In ELLE’s series Office Hours, we ask people in powerful positions to take us through their first jobs, worst jobs, and everything in between. This month, we had the chance to chat with beloved author Kennedy Ryan, who released her latest New York Times bestselling romance novel, Score, this spring. Mere weeks before Score hit bookshelves, Ryan announced that she had signed a first-look deal with Universal Studio Group to develop and produce series for television—a rare business arrangement for an author new to Hollywood. (She remembers her agent saying, “Kennedy, I represent a lot of authors. None of them are being offered first-look deals with major studios.”) With Universal, Ryan—who writes under a pen name—will co-write and executive produce the adaptation of her novel Before I Let Go, in addition to optioning and developing projects with other authors and creating new original IP. She wants to focus, in particular, on bringing “underrepresented communities” to the screen. But fret not, fans—she has no plans to step away from publishing: “I don’t see myself ever not writing books.” Below, Ryan shares her best career advice, her thoughts on AI, and how she navigates the volatile businesses of arts and entertainment.

It was doing retail in a local boutique. My parents had never let me work during the summer in high school because they wanted me to focus on my grades. And then the summer after I graduated from high school, I got to work in a boutique.

I had gotten so spoiled because my summers were basically reading romance novels and pretending that I had been cleaning all day. My mom would be like, “Just have the house clean by the time I get home.” I would be reading romance novels all day, watching soap operas. And then the last hour before she’s supposed to be there, I’d be running around the house trying to make it like I had been taking care of business all day. So I wasn’t used to [having a job]. In hindsight, it wasn’t that it was that bad; I just didn’t want to be working.

In the beginning, I wasn’t writing fiction. My degree is in journalism. Right out of school, I was just doing grunt work, like press releases for nonprofits and churches and whatever I could get myself into. And it wasn’t until 2014 that I published my first novel with Forever, through Hachette.

I never thought that I was going to be a romance novelist, or even writing fiction. At the time, I was running a foundation for families who have children with autism. I was writing for Chicken Soup for the Soul and parenting magazines. So when I was thinking, Maybe one day I’ll write a book, it was, like, memoir or self-help for special needs parents. I wasn’t thinking romance.

When I started reading again for my own escape and for my own pleasure, I went back to romance novels in my thirties, and it was such a breath of fresh air. And that’s when I started thinking, Maybe I should give this a chance.

My son is on the spectrum and was very fixated on water at that stage in his development. My husband would be working at night, and I would take my son to this river in Atlanta every day, because he was obsessed with water. And as I was sitting by this river every day, this town called Rivermont started building in my head. And that became the centerpiece for the Bennett series, which became my first fiction novels, traditionally published through Hachette. And then, of course, I went on to self-publish after those four books.

Be prepared to pivot.

I didn’t get my first book deal until I was 40 years old. When I realized [writing fiction] was something I wanted to do, it was not just about pivoting, but it was preparing to pivot. What I mean by that is: Even though I had a degree in journalism and I had done ghostwriting, I hadn’t written commercial fiction. So I started taking courses on how you write fiction, and then learning, especially in my self-published career, the business of writing. The intersection of preparation and pivoting, that is the best advice I have absorbed. Doing it again in this stage of my career—I never anticipated working in television—is a much bigger pivot for me. I’m now optioning other people’s work and really learning what it means to be an executive producer and navigate this industry.

My artsy advice is: Know your why. I started writing, in the beginning of my career, without a why. I stumbled into writing; I didn’t expect [my publishing career] to happen so quickly. I was very green coming into it. I was looking at the market, and I was looking at what was selling, and I was looking at what people were telling me, and I didn’t have my own “why.”

A few books in, it all started feeling hollow to me, and I was like, “Why is this not satisfying? Why is it not fulfilling?” That’s when I really started looking at the way I’m made. I want to see people who are usually on the periphery—those identities, communities, and experiences—moved to the center. I want to see marginalized voices represented. Once I had that level of intentionality, it formed a blueprint for my writing that I think started right around Long Shot. And that’s been the blueprint ever since. When you figure out your “why,” it helps you not to compare yourself so much to other people, which I think is very crucial in this business.

My business advice is this: Know that writing is a business, and you are going to have to treat it as such. You’re going to have to build a team. You’re going to have to create an infrastructure. You’re going to have to learn the industry. Don’t take the fact that this is a business for granted.

Both [the artsy perspective and the business perspective] have to be present for you to build a career you can sustain.

No. I don’t have that sense of arrival. I do think that I believed that I would have it. It’s like, “Oh, my gosh, once I make The New York Times list, I can check that off and I won’t care about it anymore.” And I do still care. What I mean by that is, you do still think about it. There is still a sense that there’s work to be done.

My therapist and I talk a lot about it. We talk about the fragility of success and how there is a sense that, at some point, it could all go away. I am working a lot on my own and in myself to create contentment and satisfaction outside of other people’s metrics, outside of The New York Times, outside of sales, outside of accomplishment and achievement. As someone who is an achiever, that’s hard. But I think it will protect, in the long run, my peace of mind and my sense of self. Because I don’t want my sense of self to be so connected to things I’ve achieved that, when I stop achieving in that specific way, somehow I feel like I’m less than what I was before.

Ryan with fans in 2026.

You can’t be distracted. At a certain level, you have to focus on what’s in front of you—you have to focus on the work. The book space, especially currently, can be really toxic. There’s a new drama every day. I have had to learn to separate myself from that. Staying connected to my readers is very important to me. I still answer my DMs; I’m still commenting on all the posts when people tag me. I try to do that. But it’s being engaged with the people who are your audience and who are supporting you, and at the same time putting some distance between the toxicity that exists in that space, because it’s distracting and it can be disheartening. If I allow myself to pay too much attention to that, it begins to affect me creatively, and I have to insulate that. I have to protect that process. When it comes down to it, the story is the point.

I’ve talked before about how I’m very mission-oriented in my writing, and I think about how I am deploying this story. I’m not just publishing it; I am deploying it. I’m sending it out to accomplish something specific. And when I keep that sense of mission, that sense of intention and purpose, it doesn’t matter that there’s this huge drama going on, or even that sometimes I am at the center of a drama that I don’t even know about. I’m like, “I am not going to investigate, and I am not going to care.” Because these are the things that matter, and all of this distracts from that. But I think it’s a hard lesson to learn. And I always say, “Okay, that’s a checkers’ problem. I’m playing chess.”

I think it’s disingenuous to pretend that how well a book sells, or whether or not it hits a list, is not a part of how people calculate success. Of course I’m cognizant of it, especially at this stage of my career, because there are pressures that come with it. But [sales] is not my first metric of success. My first metric of success is impact. When I’m building a story, I don’t start with character; I start with discourse. What is the conversation we want to have, and who do I want to feel seen?

That’s where I start. Using Score as a case study, I want to have discourse about mental illness and, even more specifically, I want to talk about Black women and mental illness in this country. I want to talk about delayed diagnosis, misdiagnosis, compromised outcomes, criminalization of mental illness—that is the conversation I want to have.

This story is incredibly intersectional. The protagonist is a woman, she’s Black, she’s bisexual, and she has bipolar disorder. All of those intersections are on the page. I want people who are bisexual, who are Black women, who are navigating mental illness, I want them to feel seen. So when I am getting messages from people who are like, “I’ve never seen my thing on the page in fiction this way,” or, “I knew there was something wrong, but now after reading Score, I am going to get a diagnosis,” or, “I haven’t spoken to my mom in five years, I never understood what she was going through, but after reading Score, I’ve gone back to my mom who has this diagnosis…” That is the impact that I’m looking for. That is the first metric of success for me.

When I see the story accomplishing what I sent it out to do, that is success.

When people ask me, like, “How do I get to this? I’ve seen you do this thing. Give me the step one, two, three, four of how you do it.” I’m like, “For me, it is not a list of things you do. It’s a way to be.” I think there’s no better example of that in my life, maybe in my career, than this.

So Before I Let Go was optioned by Universal and then set at Peacock for development. We were celebrating, me and the acquisitions team at Universal, and I was like, “I want to see more voices that we don’t see enough of. I want to see more of those stories make it from book to screen. We are having a romance boom, and I am not seeing enough underrepresented voices make it all the way.” So they were like, “Well, send us some books.”

I’m sure they thought I was going to forget. But I immediately started this pipeline of books. There is a disconnect between the people who are actually making movies and television and this vibrant community of storytellers. So I’m sending them all of these books, and one day my agent sends me a text and she says something like, “I just had an interesting call with Universal.” And I’m like, “Oh, about Before I Let Go?” And she’s like, “No, they want to give you a first-look deal.”

I’m looking around, and I don’t see a lot of authors with first-look deals. So I’m like, “What is that?” I know conceptually what that is, but how does that apply to me and to what I do? She’s like, “Kennedy, I represent a lot of authors. None of them are being offered first-look deals with major studios.” And she goes, “And not only do they want to give you a first-look deal for your work, they want to give you a producer’s deal because they know that you are passionate about developing other authors’ work. This is exactly what you wanted, but it’s just taken a form that you didn’t expect.”

I’m a huge Heated Rivalry fan, and there is this meme where Hudson Williams is going, “Fuck AI.” You said it, Hudson.

I am deeply resentful that there are platforms that have harvested our original thoughts, our original words, to teach AI how to write books like ours. I think that there is no substitute for human emotion; there is no substitute for human voice.

I understand the race to meet demand. I understand the human desire for a shortcut. I get that. But I think that there’s so much about AI that is harmful. I’m not saying that there aren’t some benefits—because I know some people will be like, “Oh, but when you’re talking about medical research, like, AI can do this!” I am not completely discounting that there could be some benefits. But I think the active harm that it is doing to artists and to creators is reprehensible. I am deeply resentful of my work and the work of my colleagues being used to teach these systems how to replicate some facsimile of what we do. So I am with Hudson. Fuck AI.

I think it’s an extension of what’s happening now. I don’t think that people realize how few things that are optioned [for adaptation] actually make it to screens. Most things that are optioned just never make it. The big dream for me is that the projects that I really, really believe in, that I’m working on now, that have been optioned and are in various stages of development, that we actually see those things on screen. That’s a dream not just for me but for the authors that I am working with. People might not believe it, but when I got to call these authors and say, “Guess what? We are optioning your book”—being able to give that call is just as fulfilling and satisfying as when I get that call. The opportunity to actually shepherd those books all the way to the end, so that people get to experience those stories in a new medium, that is my dream. We’re at the beginning of that dream. We’ll see how far we get.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.