MOTHERHOOD MEANS BUSINESS: BUY THE BOOK

By Dr. Laura Marie Rivera

Mother-authors, market power, and the stories we choose to value

Mother-author is not a genre.

That became increasingly obvious as I interviewed a group of women for an upcoming episode of Motherhood Advantage. They write memoir and romance. Disability and career. Engineering and incarceration. Art, wealth, mythology... and identity.

Different books. Different experiences. Different shelves in the bookstore.

But underneath them is a similar question:

Who gets to tell the story—and which stories do we decide are worth paying attention to?

Cassie Leonard, an aerospace engineer turned executive coach and author of STEM Moms, put it simply when we talked about why it matters to identify Mothers in publishing and other professional spaces:

“When we track something, people believe it has value.”

The reverse matters, too.

What we don’t count becomes much easier to dismiss.

That idea sits at the center of my own research into the Motherhood Data Gap. Employers recognize strategic thinking, negotiation, adaptability, crisis management, and communication as valuable leadership competencies. What they often fail to recognize is Motherhood as a place where women develop and sharpen them.

Publishing offers an interesting parallel.

Dr. Keeonna Harris, author of Mainline Mama, told me she sees part of her purpose as showing young Mothers what remains possible for them. Representation, in that sense, isn’t cosmetic. Seeing someone whose life resembles yours can expand the boundaries of the life you imagine for yourself.

For award-winning author Elsa Sjunneson, representation also means challenging assumptions about disabled lives—including disabled Motherhood. Her new book, Dear Blind Lady, turns many of those assumptions back on the people making them.

Seattle art advisor and author, Ann Priftis, brings yet another lens. As co-curator of From Echo to Athena: The Evolution of Women in the Great Wealth Transfer, she explores women, wealth, leadership, and legacy—and what changes when women begin defining power on their own terms.

And then there is romance.

Angela Bourassa, whose debut romance novella Never Lasting was released this fall, reminded me that women once played foundational roles in the film industry before being pushed out as filmmaking became more powerful and lucrative.

Romance presents a particularly interesting contradiction.

Women overwhelmingly dominate the category, and readers are buying the books. U.S. print romance sales reached nearly 44 million copies in 2025. In the Authors Guild’s income survey, full-time romance and romantic-suspense writers actually reported the highest median book income of the genres surveyed.

Yet commercial success and cultural prestige are not the same thing.

A study of nearly 15,000 adult-fiction titles found that genres researchers classified as “feminized”—including romance and women’s fiction—made up 22 percent of the books published in the study but only 2 percent of the books reviewed by The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times.

Women can write the books.

Readers can buy the books.

The books can make money.

And somehow the category can still be treated as less important.

That pattern feels familiar.

Creating value and receiving recognition for that value are not always the same thing.

Stefanie O’Connell, author of The Ambition Penalty, makes a similar argument about Motherhood and the language of work itself.

“I like to say that Mothers are the real providers in our culture,” she told me. The traditional story casts men as providers and women as homemakers, she explained, even though Mothers’ lives statistically change far more after children arrive. Mothers take on dramatically more caregiving, sustain human life, and often shoulder much of the work that holds families and communities together.

Her punch line is hard to forget:

“I don’t really know how we could say anyone is providing more than Mothers.”

Perhaps that is also why it matters who gets to write these stories.

Fortunately, Seattle readers have several opportunities this fall to do more than simply agree that representation matters.

Elsa Sjunneson celebrates Dear Blind Lady at The Rendezvous on October 6 at 7 p.m. Angela Bourassa will appear at Lovestruck in Seattle on October 21 to celebrate Never Lasting. On November 9, Stefanie O’Connell and I will be at Third Place Books in Seward Park. Cassie Leonard, Sharmin Banu, and Keeonna Harris will come together at Armoire for conversation and book signing on November 18. And Ann Priftis and I will be talking about her book and the great wealth transfer on December 8, location provided with RSVP.

And showing up matters.

Elsa reminded me that preorders tell publishers something concrete: people want more of this.

But buying a book is only one way to support an author.

If someone you know writes one, celebrate them. Show up to the launch. Host the book party.

If you read something you love—or think is important—talk about it. Recommend it. Review it.

And if buying a copy isn’t in the budget, ask your library to purchase it.

There are many ways to support an author.

Most come down to one simple thing:

Help the book find its readers.

Because Mother-author is not a genre.

Mothers are already writing about disability and incarceration, engineering and ambition, sex and art, money and mythology.

We’re already in every section of the bookstore.

The question is whether the rest of the culture is paying attention.