Kind Of A Big Book Deal

Skills and Secrets for Your Book Journey with Sexpert and Author Caitlin V

• Meghan Stevenson

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What if the real measure of success is not the numbers, the lists, or the applause, but the moment your work truly helps one person?

In this episode of Kind of a Big Book Deal, host Meghan Stevenson sits down with sex and relationship coach Caitlin V to explore what it really takes to turn years of lived experience, research, and repetition into a powerful book. Caitlin shares her journey from academia to coaching to YouTube fame, and why writing a book was never about money, influence, or status. It was about access.

Together, they unpack why books still matter in a world of short-form content, how traditional publishing creates credibility and longevity, and why timeless ideas always outlast trends. Caitlin also opens up about rejection, imposter syndrome, and the quiet faith required to keep going when doors keep closing. A major theme throughout the conversation is the power of reps. Real expertise is built slowly, through mistakes, testing ideas in the real world, and showing up again and again.

For entrepreneurs, creators, and experts dreaming of a book, this episode offers clarity, encouragement, and a grounded reminder: Meaningful work compounds over time, and impact starts with serving one person well.

Caitlin V. is a renowned sex and relationship coach specializing in helping men overcome erectile dysfunction, performance anxiety, and premature ejaculation. A former sexual health researcher and policy analyst, she skyrocketed to internet fame after a viral video on female pleasure. Today, she works with clients worldwide to resolve mismatched libidos, enhance sexual confidence, and create more satisfying intimate experiences.

Blending personal experience with evidence-based science, Caitlin is on a mission to foster a sex-positive world where pleasure is prioritized. With millions of views on YouTube and nearly a million subscribers, she has become a leading voice in the field. Her expertise is now reaching an even wider audience with her upcoming TV show, Good Sex, premiering on Discovery+ and Max.

Learn more at caitlinvneal.com or youtube.com/caitlinv.

Find Caitlin V on social 
youtube.com/caitlinv 
instagram.com/caitlinvneal 

Order Caitlin V’s new book, Harder Better Longer Stronger at https://caitlinvneal.com/hbls.

Episode Highlights:
(1:21) Caitlin’s path from researcher to global coach
(3:47) How YouTube success turned into a book idea
(7:27) Why books allow deeper, more lasting ideas
(10:02) Accessibility, education, & mission over money
(15:54) Paying with time or paying with leverage
(29:24) Rejection, resilience, and finding one true “yes”
(42:59) Timeless content vs chasing trends
(50:15) Why reps, mistakes, and patience build real authority
(56:20) Outro


Have a great idea for a book but don't know where to start? MeghanStevenson.com/quiz


Traditional publishing expert Meghan Stevenson blasts open the gates of the “Big 5”—Penguin Random House, Simon & Schuster, HarperCollins, Hachette, and Macmillan—to share what every entrepreneur and expert needs to know about landing a book deal. 

In episodes released every Monday, Meghan shares wisdom and stories from 20+ years in publishing as well as interviews with authors, literary agents, and editors. She also answers questions from listeners like you. 

Whether you are an experienced entrepreneur with an empire, or are just starting out—this podcast will help you understand what you need to do in order to turn your dream of being a bestselling author into real life. 

Opening And Guest Introduction

Caitlin V

The thing that makes it all worthwhile, that makes the laboring, the learning, and the refining and the process so worth it, is when it makes a difference for someone else and you get to see the difference that it made or hear about the difference that it made.

Meghan

Welcome to the kind of a big book deal podcast where entrepreneurs come to learn about traditional publishing. I'm your host, Meghan Stevenson. After working as an editor for two of the biggest traditional publishers, I started my own business helping entrepreneurs to become authors. To date, my clients have earned over $7 million from publishers including Penguin Random House, Simon Schuster, Harper Collins, and Hay House, just to name a few. In these podcast episodes, I will blast open the well-kept gates to traditional publishing. I'm going to explain what every entrepreneur needs to know about landing a book deal without losing your mind. I'm going to share stories, answer your questions, interview the successful authors I've had the pleasure to work with, and probably say platform more than a tech bro. So if you dream of landing on a bestseller list but have no idea how, this is the podcast for you. And I am so, so glad you're here. All right, listeners, today I have an exciting guest for you all, and I mean exciting in the way that excitement is titillating and fun and curious and adventurous. So Caitlin V is my author, my friend, and she is a renowned sex and relationship coach, specializing in helping men overcome erectile dysfunction, performance anxiety, and premature ejaculation. Her background is in sex health research and policy, and she skyrocketed to internet fame. After a viral video on female pleasure, we're gonna talk about that. Today she works with clients worldwide to resolve mismatched libidos, enhance sexual confidence, and create more satisfying intimate experiences. I mean, don't we all want that? She blends her personal experience coaching thousands of men with evidence-based science, and she is on a mission to foster a sex-positive world where pleasure is prioritized. You can check her out on YouTube with nearly a million followers, as well as her show on Discovery and HBO Max called Good Sex, highly recommend. Caitlin, welcome to the pod.

Caitlin V

Hi, thank you so much for having me.

Meghan

And also for you guys watching on YouTube, you can see Maddie squirming in my lap because I'm not click-clacking, so she thinks laugh. So she also joins said podcast. Okay.

From Academia To Coaching To YouTube

Meghan

So, Caitlin, you have your main audience on YouTube. How do you go from creating videos on female squirting to writing a book?

Caitlin V

It's so funny that you should ask that because to me it feels like such a clear step-by-step. The process is so obvious, but it really is only obvious when you look backwards in time. So I left my doctoral program. I thought I was going to be a professional researcher. I was going to be a tenure track sort of professor. That was my, well, I wouldn't even say that was my dream. That was the only way that I thought that I was going to be able to make a credible living talking about sex. And I wanted more than anything, and have since I was a teenager, wanted more than anything to talk about sex for a living and help people to enjoy more pleasure and sexual satisfaction. I felt that those are birthrights. And so I left my doctoral program and I uh found my way to coaching. And then uh after about a year of coaching and finding people really like locally uh to work with, I was invited to be on someone else's YouTube channel where I talked about female ejaculation. And turns out the internet really loves that subject in particular. So I went from having, you know, a handful of local clients uh to having thousands of men from all over the world messaging me asking me if I could coach them. And I've discovered, you know, that that working with men who have performance anxiety was a super sweet spot for me. I love working with them, still have for the last 10 years focused really on them and uh and and started my own YouTube channel. The YouTube channel grew organically, started making digital courses, sort of like codified my methodology, both with my one-on-one clients, which by the way, former researcher, I you know, I was running like little studies on these guys. I was like, I'm gonna give you condition A and you condition B, and you're gonna be my control subject. And so I was constantly like comparing them and seeing what worked and building my methodology over time, put my methodology into video courses, was selling those courses, getting results with those. And then um a friend of mine wrote a book uh with your help, and I was like, you know what? I want to do that too. And so I asked for for your contact uh and and decided that, you know, at that point in my career, 10 years in, that the methodology was sound, it had been tested, it had been proven, it was repeatable, it was reliable, and that it was time to put it in this longer format as opposed to a 15, 20 minute YouTube video or even a five-hour digital course. There's just so much more that you can say over the course of 75,000 words. And so I felt that it was time to solidify it literally into the written word and onto pages and get it out into the world that way.

Meghan

I love that. And that jumps to a different question I had. So, you know, you created so much content, right? Like you have a million, I don't know how many YouTube videos you have. Oh my god.

Caitlin V

A thousand, a thousand videos uploaded to YouTube. A thousand that's insane.

Meghan

That's insane. Um, I'm just proud I'm on like episode 30, whatever of this. Yeah, so a thousand YouTube videos, and obviously you create coach uh courses as a coach. Obviously, you create courses as a coach. How did that process of creating videos, you're creating courses compare to writing your

Courses Vs Writing A Book

Meghan

book?

Caitlin V

Ooh. You know, that's such a brilliant question, and that I haven't really compared them until now. The cool thing for me, anyways, is that I am a really uh I'm a really uh uh good at verbal processing. It's part of what makes me a good coach, and part of what makes me good on video is that my thoughts come out in words, and that's really how I understand myself. And I have been in a hundred of coaching sessions where I said something and I heard myself say it, and I was like, oh, that's really good. That's exactly what needed to be said right now. But it's sort of like almost like channeling, like it's not just me, it's like there's a spirit moving through me, and it's it's being filtered through, you know, years and years of research and academia and teaching sex and sex and studying sex and being a sponge and having an encyclopedia of, you know, I have like a whole library of sex books that I've been collecting since I was a teenager now, and all of that knowledge gets sort of filtered through my voice as I'm speaking. So one of the cool things about creating digital courses has been that I get to write my little outline and then I just hit record and I just go. And that was that was fairly easy for me, and I've done it 13, 14 times by now. Uh, and and that process is really repeatable. The different the thing that was extremely different about the book was getting to spend a lot more time on each of the sort of like the the nuances of all of the individual subjects. Uh, you know, people even more now. I mean, I started creating, I think my first digital course came out in 2018 or 2019. And that was like pre-TikTok. So even though that wasn't that long ago, the way that we consume content has changed pretty dramatically over the last several years. So now what I used to be able to put in a 20-minute YouTube video, now I gotta put in like an eight-minute YouTube video if I want it to succeed in the same way. And digital courses are just extended versions. There are subjects that I could talk about for an hour happily, would joyfully speak about for an hour, but because we don't want the course to be 10 hours, we gotta keep it to whatever five hours on average. I only have 10, 15, 20 minutes to expand. And that feels luxurious, but it's not enough. And so I think the difference with the book was getting to spend a lot more time on the nuances of each subject and really make it holistic. Uh, compared to a you uh to uh a course where I feel like I'm constantly having to make cuts and just really um really like drill down to the the most important or like the the single concept that I need to explain in that video. The book just gives you so much more space to expand on those subjects, and so it doesn't feel like you're really like trying to squeeze everything into the box as much.

Meghan

That makes so much sense too. So why did you decide to write a book? Because you have these courses, they are obviously more expensive than a book. You get paid by YouTube by the video, right? So like well, I don't, but yes, most people do. Most people

Why A Book Over Monetized Content

Meghan

do, but you hopefully you get paid by YouTube somewhere.

Caitlin V

No, oh no, my the the YouTube, because of their policies regarding monetization, you can monetize channels, channels that have uh my channel is like 160 million views. If I was talking about credit cards or mortgages, I would have made a million dollars on YouTube by now. Um, but because I talk about sex, my channel, my channel doesn't make any money, it doesn't run any ads. Um, but that said, you're totally right. Each of my courses retails for 47 to 197. Uh, and so each individual course makes, you know, makes that much money for us, right? Whereas the book doesn't really make money in an ongoing way, in the same way. Um, but the book does satisfy my greatest mission. So since I was a teenager, my mission has been to get quality, sexuality, education into the hands of as many people as possible. And so each individual thing has just been like a means to that end. So YouTube is a means to the end. I kids today grow up wanting to be an influencer. I don't want to be an influencer. I used to cry before recording YouTube videos. I still have to be convinced 10 years in to like have to like jazz myself up and like hype myself up a little bit and like play, you know, work bitch by Britney Spears and like get myself on camera. But I don't wake up every morning thinking, yes, today I get to be a YouTuber. No, YouTube is a means to an end. It's to get the information to the people because that's where the people are. The TV show was a tremendous project, huge privilege to be selected to host a television show. Also just a means to an end, you know, it's it's just about getting the information to the people. And so, you know, as a reader myself, as someone who loves books, has always loved books, as someone who uh thinks that getting something that is affordable and accessible into the hands of as many people as possible, and that includes through the uh uh ebook and through the audiobook that I got to record myself, like it is a means to an end. It is getting the education to the people who need it. And I feel like I have a special privilege that I get to do that, you know, as a woman and educating men. Um, and so the book is also a great way to reach more men, men who don't have $97 to spend on a course, men who want something that's more holistic, men who can't, you know, coaching. We talked about courses being $97. We didn't touch on coaching. You know, if you want to hire me or one of my coaches to support you with your own, you know, individual sexual health journey or overcoming premature ejaculation or a sexless marriage or whatever, you're gonna be spending three to thirty thousand dollars with us, depending on who you're working with. It's it's a luxury good I fully own and I'm proud to be a luxury good. I'm not for everybody, and my time is very expensive. But with the book, you put in two hours or two years of your life, rather, but you can get something into the hands of way more people for under $30 and they have it for life. They don't need to remember their login, they don't need a password. It lives hopefully on their bookshelf or minimally inside of their phone, and they just have constant access to me, my brain, my knowledge, and it's you know, a one-time payment of $28. It's like way accessible, and I hope that it travels really far and really, really wide.

Meghan

I love it. I love that idea too, of like that uh it kind of reframed kind of what we're doing here with like the education around publishing, right? Because working with me is not cheap, it is expensive. We are a luxury good, like you say, even within the traditional publishing industry, we're a luxury good. Our pricing reflects that. And so that is very much like what I think too. Is like, let's get as much free education in the hands of people and then they can do with it what they want. Um, all right, so we talked about how you found me because we you found me through our mutual friend and my author, Ray McDaniel, the amazing author of Gender Magic. What did you know about the publishing process before maybe Ray had their book or you met me and I explained the whole thing? Like, what did you

Choosing Traditional Publishing

Meghan

think happened? Because I love to have this conversation with people. I think a lot of people think it's like unicorns coming down from the sky with money.

Caitlin V

Yeah, I pretty much. Um, I knew nothing about the publishing process. I still learned something new about publishing, I think on a daily basis, that my book comes out in seven weeks. Uh, and I imagine I'm gonna continue to learn more even as it finds its way out into the world. Uh, because publishing is an opaque process from the outside. Uh, I think no matter how much of a fan you are, how many books you've read, like you have no idea how the sausage gets made until you, you know, start raising your hand and offering yourself up as tribute to the publishing process, which I did. Uh, and I was very grateful to have you as my guide. I think for me, what all I understood about the publishing process was that there was traditional publishing and self-publishing. And I knew that because I a coach uh and I have plenty of coach friends who had published their own book, or marketing friends who had published their own book. And as cool as that is, and I love that that opportunity exists today, I really felt that um that it lacked the like gravitas and the credibility that came with traditional publishing. And so if I was gonna write a book, I wanted it to be published by a main, by like a big publisher, by an official publisher in the old the old school fashion. I think that still counts. I think it still matters. And I think also with the proliferation of AI, it's probably gonna matter even more because you can AI write and publish a book, you know, with nothing. You can you can have no knowledge of any subject matter and have a book on anything, right? Um, and so it was really, really important for me to go the traditional publishing route, but I knew that there was no way with the business that I was running and the clients that I had and the YouTube channel and the television show and all that, like that I was gonna be able to sort all of that out for myself and figure out this sort of like opaque kind of archaic industry, if I'm being honest. Like it's an old industry, it works like an old industry, you know, and again, publishing, like what are we what's the name of that press? It goes all the way back, like publishing being around, you know. Um, you could say sex is the oldest industry, and I think that probably the the second oldest is gonna be publishing. Um, and it has some of the the the traits of a of a of an industry that's been around for a while. Um, and because of that, it is really important to hire you to be my guide. Um, because I knew that I wasn't gonna sort it out myself, and I knew that I didn't want to um that I knew that I wanted to go the more traditional route. Um, and I'm I'm a really firm believer in like you either take 10 years to learn it yourself or you invest in someone who's already had that 10 or 20 or 30 years of experience and you pay them because you get access to their knowledge that way.

Meghan

Yep, yep. And it's about leverage. I mean, I keep talking about that in all my content for 2026. I want to emphasize the leverage that people get when they work with us because that is what they're getting, right? Even when they're just signing up for like the one-on-one consults I'm introducing this year for people that are growing their audiences. It's like you're buying leverage by understanding how to grow your business in a way that supports a future book versus making all these mistakes that otherwise you would make, not knowing any different because you're getting advice from people who don't have that book in mind, right?

Caitlin V

Right. You can either pay with time or you can pay with money. Right? There's just there's no

Market Bias And Selling To Men

Caitlin V

other way around it. You either you're either paying with your own time in spending time figuring these things out, making contacts, going to events, calling people, you know, it may take you 10 years to get there, or you can pay with money. There's no there's no world in which you don't have to give something, sacrifice something in order to have the book. It's just what do you what do you what do you have on hand to sacrifice? Is it time? Is it money? Maybe there's another thing I haven't thought about. You're your firstborn or something, but I don't think they're doing that anymore. The other thing not everyone has kids, so not everyone has kids. I don't want your kid. I'm not saying famous, we're both child-free. Yeah, so so time or money are the only ways that you can get something done anymore. Um, but the other thing I want to be like super clear is that if it were not for you and your team, this book would not exist. Because even with your support and the connections, it was still a book about sex. And beyond that, it was a book, is a book about men's sexuality. And you recall as we were meeting with agents, that many, many agents were like, This book is really great. I love it, it should absolutely exist in the world. I'm not personally going to take it on, right? And they had every reason to do that.

Meghan

Yep, yep, yep. So this is interesting. So this harpens back to like my biggest book of my career, even though it is cringe AF now in 2025, is a book called The Bro Code. And the reason that the Bro Code succeeded, and this is something I knew when I bought that book, when I brought it to my little editorial board meeting and argued for it to get acquired, was that when I was like 24. So, like, also let's just like acknowledge 24-year-old me like applicating for herself. Amazing. But I knew that the bro code was a thing, and it wasn't a thing just on how I met your mother, but it was a thing out in the world because I had an ex-boyfriend that talked at length about the code. And he had a friend who went by his last name, which is always the marker of a sketchy guy, and that sketchy guy broke the code a lot, so they would have conversations in their little friend group about the code and what this particular person did to break the code. And so I knew that this was a thing, and so I brought it and it ended up being the publisher's son who advocated for it and they bought it. And when they bought it, it had Neil Patrick Harris on the cover. It was written by the person who did most of the uh dialogue for Barney on that show. He's now one of the producers of DMV, excellent show on um CBS, this guy named Matt Kuhn. And it was a huge amount of salary, like 500,000 copies. And what I learned by doing that book was that the convention that men don't read is is kind of true. Female readers are women are the main readers, period. 25 to 65 biggest female, biggest or female identifying biggest book market, hands down. So if you're outside that market at all, with some exceptions, right? Sci-fi is pretty brocentric, um, nerdbro, but still bro centric. Dudes love a good sci-fi. But the my husband's reading romantic right now, an audiobook, which I think is like the most hilarious. He's like, I got this sci-fi book, and I was like, were there dongs? And he was like, There were, and I was like, Romanticy. So the it was really funny, and he's not the only one. Like, as I tell this story, I get more people being like, My husband did that too.

Speaker 1

Yeah, they're taking over.

Meghan

They are so. But what I knew, and this is mostly because of a bunch of books in the early aughts. So The Game by Neil Strauss, right? The Bro Code. Um, the entire um existence of I Wish There Were Beer in Hell and Tucker Max, right? All these books guys don't buy a lot of books. This is true, but guys will flock to one book. And when they flock to one book, that is enough to make it a bestseller. That is enough to sell hundreds of thousands of copies. Right. And so I knew that. And so I was like, okay, well, I know immediately the first thing they're gonna say. Guys don't buy books. The second thing they're gonna say is like the only books on sex that work are for women, which is basically the same idea. Um, and then I can kind of hit them with the equity equity argument, right? Which is like, well, if there's a come as you are for women, there should be a come as you are for men, like this is an equity play. And the second thing is like, who's so you're saying like men don't read books? Are we saying men don't read books, or are we saying men don't buy books? Because if it's men don't buy books, then we have to like there's probably some women buying

Audio, Ebooks, And Access

Meghan

this book, right? Just like there's some women in your community that are following it to support your husbands, because don't we end up culturally sort of babying them and doing things for them all the time? So that's sort of what we went with. And it was funny because when we went out with your proposal, that's exactly what we hit.

Caitlin V

Yeah, that's exactly what we heard from from agents and from publishing houses. And I think you know what you're speaking to is so true. If you are gonna publish a book for it's not a niche audience, we're talking about 50% of all human beings here, there's not a niche, but if you're gonna publish a book outside of the realm of what publishers typically accept and promote, then it has to be the one book that they're buying this year. Then it has to be, it has to be solid. It has to like scratch an itch, meet a need, fill a gap. And this book does do all of that. So once it did find the ideal agent for it, as soon as she saw it, she was like, Oh, yeah, yeah, I'm taking this on. Absolutely. Like, no questions. She saw it, she saw the vision, she understood it right away. She was a champion for it. And then the same was true with the publishers. You know, we heard no for those same reasons until we heard yes. And when we heard yes, it was a big resounding yes. Like there was no further explanation necessary. They understood the value of the book, the gap that it filled, and that we had, you know, a brand and a powerhouse team behind it that could push it over the finish line and get it into the hands of the male audience that is gonna buy a book this year.

Meghan

And the other thing about it too is it's so funny when people come back to me with that, because it's like, don't the same rules apply? Like, we generally think that platform sells books, right? So who's to say your platformer isn't gonna sell books just because the people in your audience are a different gender than or sex, right? Than someone else's platform. It's just sort of silly to me. Like, I'm like, uh, if she can sell all this other shit, you don't think she can sell a book?

Caitlin V

Right. Yeah, if we can get men to watch videos, if we can get men to take courses, if we can get men to go through coaching, like why would they not why does it not stand a reason that a more accessible, more affordable version of that information would be appealing to them?

Meghan

Also, it's it's not a big deal anymore if they don't like go to the bookstore either. They can buy it online, just like most people buy books.

Caitlin V

Right. Yeah, so many of the barriers have been removed. Also, they don't have to be seen reading it in public. They can get it on their phone, they can put it on their Kindle, they can put it in their ears. You know, it was really important for me from the beginning. I really wanted to record the audiobook because my audience knows my voice and they watch me on YouTube and they hear they hear my voice. And I know that they will buy the audiobook, and they have been messaging me since the minute I said that I was writing a book saying, is there gonna be an audio and are you gonna record it? So I knew that they were invested in consuming it in that way, anyways. And I think again, it's lovely that publishing is this slow-moving, more archaic system, especially like someone such as I who lives on the internet and runs an internet-based business, like they could not be more different. But I'm excited to be a part of a a project that challenges

Handling Rejection And Finding Champions

Caitlin V

some of those maybe more conventional norms that the publishing industry lives by, and also highlights these formats like audiobooks are not new, but highlights these other formats that make you know digesting this information more accessible and easier for this particular population.

Meghan

No, and I agree. I mean, audio and e-books, it's so funny. There was a reading study, and I did a reel on this for Instagram a couple weeks ago, but there was a recent study, and we should have known it with Sus because it came out of the University of Florida. But it came out of the University of Florida and University College London. That's my dig at Florida. Um, I have friends that are gators, but as of all life, I have to be like no, no gator uh in this house. So the um, but yeah, so like it was saying how reading has declined. And there's one of these studies every 10 years or so. But when you looked at the study data, it was only talking about print books. It left out ebooks and audio, which are like like to me, same thing, same, same. You're read you're listening to it, you're reading it, same, same. Like my husband listens to audiobooks because he would literally speak the book out loud, which is why it takes forever to read a book. And it's like, well, yeah, because you you that's how like an audiobook takes like forever for you to listen to, right? Because it it's literally like you're listening to it in real time. So like I get that, and I don't care how he reads, like that's fine by me. Same thing. So like it was this idea that the study was super flawed because of those, because despite what you might have heard, like when ebooks came around, print is still the number one format, followed very shortly by audio. Actually, is number two, and then ebook is number three because audiobooks existed, you know, in the 90s, they were just on CDs or tapes in the audience. Yeah, but you can go get them in the library. You could literally check out the whole collection, the box. Yep, exactly. So that's like it's not anything different. It's just I don't know, it's so funny.

Caitlin V

No, yeah, it's kind of interesting. People are still consuming books, they're just consuming them in different formats. Like that doesn't seem like rocket science. Good job.

Meghan

It's not even that different of a format. Like, audio has existed forever. The subscription model of audio that Audible presents is different, but like that just is like that subscription model's been around forever, too.

Caitlin V

Tradition of oral storytelling predates the written language, so in many ways it's older.

Meghan

Yeah, in many ways it's older. Okay, so you got all this feedback that was relatively negative, right? And I think we did a good job of preparing you for that. But like how did you feel? And then how did you believe in your book's success despite hearing all those no's?

Caitlin V

Well, this is one of the reasons that I say it would not exist without you, because I think if I had gone out into the world and had to represent the book for myself and make the case over and over again and hear no and just sort of, you know, been been alone handling all of that, that would have really hurt my heart. Uh, and I think it would have made it a lot harder for me to like continue to trek forward towards the goal. Um, you know, on one hand, I'm used to hearing harshness and being rejected. I do exist on the internet. I really don't read the comments all that much because my team tells me that I'm not supposed to. Um, but that's not true though. Like I do, I read the comments a lot. Like I try not to during, you know, intense moments where I don't have a lot of bandwidth emotionally. I don't, but um, I love reading comments. I love seeing what people have to say. I love even, you know, I included them in the acknowledgments at first and then I took them out. But even the people who write critical things, they make me better. I'm better as a coach and as a YouTuber and as an educator because of the um critical comments that I have received. But it still hurts to be rejected. I don't think there's a world in which like getting rejected or having your ideas rejected or having your, you know, having people tell you that your ideas are not, you know, worth printing um hurts. I I like I want to maintain that much humanity or like it still hurts when I get rejected. But like, you know, for example, because of what I talk

Woo, Timing, And Trusting The Process

Caitlin V

about for a living, I've been kicked off of upwork. They thought I was like soliciting sex work or something, right? Because I use the word sex because I also only want to hire contractors who are comfortable with my subject matter, right? So I don't want to pretend that we don't talk about sex when I put a posting out there, but I I can't use that word because then I get shut down. So, you know, part of part of my industry, part of what I do for a living is to butt up against censorship and to be at the cutting edge or the or the pioneering edge of what we can say and where we can say it without getting in trouble and what qualifies as education versus what qualifies as like gratification. So like the distinction between sex ed and pornographic content, which sites like YouTube and Instagram and Facebook haven't done a great job of sorting out, right? They they've sort of wanted to put everybody into a singular bucket, and we could have a whole conversation about that and the problems of that as well. But you did do a great job of preparing me for what I was going to hear. I did believe that there just needed what I kept saying to myself throughout the entire process, and it ended up being very true, is like we only need one. I don't need seven agents who want to represent the book. I need one agent who wants to represent the book. Would it be lovely to have like a bidding more between agents and get to choose between all my agent suitors who I was going to choose to represent the book? Like, yeah, on one level, that'd be cool, but like I just need one person who really believes in it. That's that's all I need. And in fact, like in many ways, that's preferable to a bunch of people who are just willing to represent it. And the same is true for a publisher. I just need one publisher who really wants this to exist in the world. Like, in many ways, it's easy to have just uh just one really clear champion who believes in your project as well as you do, and then the rest, you know, can sit back and watch while we prove them wrong.

Meghan

Yeah, I love that too. I'm always like, we have one agent friend who will he'll pass on something or he won't have time to read it, and then he'll be like, Why didn't I get that project? And I'll be like, You did. You did get that project, you decide not to do it. Stucker. No, I don't say that. I mean, sometimes I do because we're good friends. I'll be like, you just lost some money. You don't like money today. Um yeah, like it's it's very funny, but sometimes I do that. I mean, I get mad on behalf of my clients, right? Like, I'm the one punching back at people, and and this has come up before. Um, in terms of like, I'm the one running interference and saying, hey, no, and we both know this, and like, you know, we both know that about the industry or whatever. Um that said, I think it's really interesting that you bring up that you just need one idea because I really think that's better. I've had people have betting wars and regretted their choices, right? Versus just being like kind of like stuck with one choice, stuck. I mean, with one choice.

Caitlin V

All the research says like the more options that you have to choose between, the less satisfied you are with your choice, right? Like cereal, bubble gum, you know, energy drinks. You go to the store and you have 30 to choose from. Like, it's very hard for the one that you ended up choosing to to feel like it was the best choice when you had 30 more to sample, right? And and the truth is that I the faith that I had throughout the entire process was that the book was gonna land exactly in the right place. And with every no, I was like, great, one more place that's not the right place. It gets us closer to the one that is.

Meghan

Okay, so that brings up a question that I was like, I gotta ask Caitlin this. So I know that we share an affinity for all things spiritual and woo. What are your I don't know, I was like, I gotta ask this. It's such a good question. What are your thoughts about how the universe conspired in all of this?

Caitlin V

Oh my gosh. How much time do we have? Um, you know, are you? I don't know if we've ever spoken about this. Are you a follower of human design? Are you familiar with human design?

Meghan

Okay, do you what is your design type? I am a projector, which when you hear that and you see work I do and you're like, oh, duh.

Caitlin V

Duh. So that makes a lot of sense. I think maybe we did talk about this. I also am a projector. And one of the um the life advice to projectors, if you're not familiar with human design, there's like four, five types of people, and then there's like a lot more. It's so detailed, but think about it a little bit like astrology. I'm a Scorpio, I'm a projector. And um the projector's life advice is to wait for the invitation. And I went back and forth a lot through the process of like, did I wait for the invitation or did I push this to happen? Because across my whole life, when I've pushed for things to happen, they have generally not taken off. But when I have waited, the TV show, I was invited. My master's degree. Um,

Making The Book Evergreen

Caitlin V

I wasn't exactly invited, but but you can make a case for it. My my my doctoral program definitely was an invitation. And every time I've waited for someone to invite me into the next project, it's always been very, very successful. Even if I didn't really know what I was doing, I was like walking into the darkness going, I know this is gonna work. But I do feel that the um the invitation that Ray, our mutual friend, made to me was like, hey, I'm I've got this book I'm working on right now. Like maybe you should do one too. And I I didn't find you on my own. I was referred. Like Ray was the person who invited me to connect with you. And so I've really come back to that over and over and again throughout the process and said, like, well, if it wasn't meant to be, it wouldn't be. If it wasn't meant to be, then the universe wouldn't have lined this up so clearly for me at the time that it did, with the team that I have, with the opportunity that I have. Like, you know, my the reason I ended up working with men with premature ejaculation is just because they started contacting me. Like, you know, I didn't go out, I never woke up one day and was like, I'm gonna be the last longer in bed queen of the internet that wasn't anywhere on my radar, on my life bingo, in a million years did I think that that's what I was gonna end up being known for as a coach. I just answered the thing that was in front of me, worked with the person who was in front of me, focused on the thing that was needing my attention the most, and poured myself into that thing, and then you know, got to like watch it take flight. Uh, and I that's been my sort of woo-woo foundation for the book, has been like, well, it wants to exist. It wants to exist in the world. It's chosen, you know, us as its mothers, essentially. Um and uh and like my job is to really like get behind it or get out of the way.

Meghan

I love that. I love it so much. And maybe it wasn't like maybe I was the invited person because you were like, hey, yeah, I want to write this book. Do you want to work on it with me? And I was like, Yes, yes, I do, right? And then I was like, Do you want to work on it with me? And you're like, Yes, yes, I do. So it's like a very mutual thing because we hit it off from like the first five minutes of our first call. Like the vibe was high from the get.

Caitlin V

Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then you were like, Oh, you can work with me or you can work as a member of my team, but you're gonna have to wait a little bit because I've got the I was like, I'll wait. You just let me know when you're ready.

Meghan

I love it. I love it. I love that you're patient too, because a lot of people get really focused on like the timelines and all of that. Although they did move your book up, so you did get a pretty quick publishing time.

Caitlin V

Oh my god, I would have definitely taken three more months to work on the book. They tried their own. If you never had a mind, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, in terms of like how long I thought it was going to take from proposal to publication, it happened like a full six months faster than I probably expected it to be. But the other that this also, this is my woo-woo, this is the faith that I have. It's like the timeline is the timeline. Who am I as the like 3D, you know, living a 4D experience human with all the thoughts in my brain to tell, you know, the larger machine what time things need to happen on. You know, there are things that I would have happened sooner. Certainly, I am impatient, but I also realize like I I am I the best uh um the best advice that I can give to myself is to surrender and go with the flow as much as possible and you know, and force, control, dominate, push wherever that push is actually like being received. You know, there are things that are easy to push, and then there are things that are really hard to push. And the things that are hard to push, like just wait, it'll come around.

Meghan

Yep, yep. I love that. To that point, a lot of people try to capture trends, but you purposely made the book timeless. That was something we we really tried to do, so that we could make sure it stayed on shelves longer than you know, just something that would have felt outdated in five years. Why did you really want to focus on that?

Caitlin V

Yeah, you know, we started this conversation by talking about how the book gave me so much more spaciousness to dive into things, but it is also true that a lot got cut. So I was like, oh, we can put this, we can put this, we can put this, you know, and um and you did a great job of like kind of like keeping the main thing the main thing. Um But men are having a moment, masculinity as a conversation is really having a moment, and I've been watching this sort of wave continue to grow uh year over year. The the conversation has shifted from like women and even queer folks to like a conversation that also includes men and masculinity as like a as

Impact Over Metrics

Caitlin V

a subject inside of that conversation of gender and sexuality and how we um are forming the world that we're all like living into together. And that conversation is is trending, I think, right now. Um and it was difficult for me to cut back on some of the things that would have made the book really a comment on this time period and like riding this wave. But what you reminded me of at many points when I would be so insistent and I would be like, Meghan, you don't get it. Look at this. We have to talk about, I gotta talk about this, I gotta talk about this. Um this thing happened in the news today and it's urgent, we have to include it. Um and you would just, you know, represent later what the goal was. But you also reminded me on many occasions that I get to market and share the book forever. And so the more that I commit to um sort of wrapping the book in the current moment, but the book stays uh evergreen on the inside, the more opportunities that I will have to share it indefinitely for the rest of my career. Like I any moment that men in masculinity or men's sexuality is is back in the news, the book will always apply to that situation because it doesn't be, you know, in by by taking out like today's uh application, we give it the ability to be applied to any time frame, any news story, um, any moment where gender and sexuality are like in the uh in the cultural conversation.

Meghan

I love that because it does trigger, like I think a lot of people chasing trends in publishing is dumb because of how slowly books come out, right? Like we can't keep up, like we just can't. And if we ever could, it's that window of time is diminishing every day. Um, literally, books are on a slow boat from China. So, like, it's not coming anytime soon, y'all. And still it is it is a lot of that. Um, but I do think like having these timely hooks, right? We talk about hooks and like being able To get take

Imposter Syndrome And Mastery

Meghan

something like the man box, which is a concept from Paul Kivill that you talk about in the book, of like this small boundary area box, if you will, that men are allowed to exist in. And if they step out of the man box, they get punished. And how quickly do they go back into the male man box? I remember talking about Jason Kelsey and that incident that went slightly viral where he like ruined somebody's phone that like said something negative about his brother. And it was so Jason Kelsey being seen as kind of an evolved caveman, for lack of a better way to describe the man. He's lovely, I'm sure, but like he's kind of got this big burly, you know, football man exterior, but he's also very like well spoken and eloquent and smart, clearly very smart. Um, and but it all it took was like a comment about Travis and Taylor, and he was right back in that man box so quick. It was like lightning fast. And we almost included it in the book until we realized, hey, this is not this gonna like feel dated reference right now on this podcast, right? Versus like, oh yeah, like let's not, and not everybody would have seen that and all that stuff. Right. But like it's it's very um, I feel like anytime that would happen, like if that happened again with Slivery, you could jump on, you know, as a talking head and talk about how that was emblematic of this broader masculine identity issue that comes up a lot in a lot of different contexts, right? Right.

Caitlin V

I feel like as a content creator, speaking today, I don't know that this is already true, but this is definitely a direction that we are headed in collectively. There's really two types of content. There's content that is ephemeral, it's happening right now, it's fleeting, it's like bread. You gotta bake it fresh every day. It's not, it's not gonna be fresh tomorrow. You gotta like recreate every that's the hamster wheel that a lot of content creators feel like we are on, we are on one. You have to keep making the content fresh all the time. But then there's this other kind of content that is timeless. This is like the courses that are educational. This is the way that YouTube used to be. A lot of my early YouTube content was like explaining a single concept that would live forever. It was evergreen. You could you can still sign on and watch early YouTube videos and get like an education on those subjects. But as more and more content creators exist and more content is pumped out every single day in order to stay relevant and to build a following and to like have an endless well to draw from, there's a lot of bread baking going on. So you have a choice. You and I don't actually think maybe it's a false choice. I really think you have to do a little bit of both. You have to do the content that is solid, that's gonna last, that like, yeah, I don't know what the food analogy is for that. Salt. Salt feels like something that lasts a long time. I don't know. You get the salt content that's like always gonna be the same, and it's just it's timeless, and then you get the bread content that you need to like create all the time. And the book is meant to be the salt content, it's meant to stay around. It's meant to, you know, I have

Platform, Reps, And Real Foundations

Caitlin V

I hope that this book outlives me by hundreds of years, you know, and I hope that like people hang on to it and they have it in the future, you know, long after they have watched their last YouTube video of me or something along those lines. Like, I hope that it has that kind of longevity and therefore it has to speak to subjects that are timeless.

Meghan

I mean, you're answering my questions before I even ask them. So we're recording this about a month before your book comes out. Um, but I was gonna ask you what you're most excited about now that your book is about to be out in the world, because when you all are watching this or listening to this, it is either immediately the day before her book comes out, January 27th, 2026, or after said day. So what are you most excited about, Caitlin?

Caitlin V

Well, I'm speaking to you from vacation right now, so I can't even say traveling because I have managed to. I'm I feel like I'm having my book moon right now. You know, people have a baby moon. Like before the baby comes, let's take one vacation. Like, I'm on that right now. It's like, oh, it's getting kind of hectic around here. I think I need a little break before the real, you know, next chapter of this marathon.

Speaker 1

Um what am I most excited about?

Caitlin V

You know, I think what I'm most excited about is being surprised by where the book ends up or where it takes me. Um I think I'm most excited about hearing from people who read it and digest it and really put it to use in their lives because it is very practical. So it's a it is a book that you can put into use right now. Um you know, something that's really cool about people coming up to me and talking to me from the YouTube channel or from the courses or from good sex is when they say, like, we did the thing that you mentioned, you know, especially good sex because it's couples. So people would come up and they'd be like, We tried the exercise. You know, you didn't give all the details, but we tried to figure it out and we played with it at home and we did it and it worked and we loved it, and it was so good. We had such a great night, and uh, our relationship is better as a result of it. So the book is all 75,000 words of that, right? More than what a TV show could could display. Um, and so I think I'm most excited about people coming up to me and being like, I did the exercise in chapter five, and oh my gosh, it was like life-changing. And you know, I think that's true whether it's coaching, whether it's courses, whether it's YouTube, whether it's television, podcast, like you name it. The thing that makes it all worthwhile, that makes the laboring, the learning, and the refining and the process so worth it, is when it makes a difference for someone else, and you get to see the difference that it made or hear about the difference that it made. And you know, there were times during the book writing and now during the book marketing and promotion process where I've gotten stuck on bigger numbers of like, oh, is it gonna make this bestseller list, or are you gonna sell this many copies, or oh, we're gonna is it

Title Reveal And Preorder Bonuses

Caitlin V

gonna get me onto you know the today show or whatever? I've gotten stuck on these like other career level highlights um or sales figures. And what I constantly come back to is exactly that is like actually, it only has to make a difference for one person. If one person sends me an email, writes me a DM, catches me on the street, and says, I tried something from the book and it changed my life, like then it was all worth it. I would do it all over again just to have the impact on that single person change their life, change their sex life, save their marriage, keep their family together. And it's not an overstatement to say that that's the kind of impact that it can have. And if it has an impact on a single person, it's worth it.

Meghan

I mean, I love that. And I the amount of times my husband has heard me come downstairs from this office and said, Caitlin said this. He's so sick of that. But like you can tell he was kind of like into it, and then certain things he's like, Meghan, I already know that I have a penis. I'm good. And then other times you'd be like, Oh, that's interesting. And I was like, Oh, I see the brain. I see that, I see it. It's already doing its work, it's already achieving its mission. Two more questions. This kind of goes back to our work together, but what was your favorite part of the book journey? Ooh.

Caitlin V

You know, I think my favorite part was this is but I this is just honest. Um, realizing how much I knew. You know, the book, the book cured a lot of imposter syndrome for me. It brought up new imposter syndrome. So it I had like a recurrence, like a bigger imposter syndrome that came as a result. But like, isn't that how it always works? Like you up level, and then you you're in, you feel like an imposter, and then you realize that you're there, and then you up level again, and then you feel like an imposter, and then you make it there. Like it's just it's it's probably a never uh ending uh journey. It just matters like what part of the journey you're on. And if you feel like you're not on the journey anymore, you're not pushing yourself hard enough. Um, I think that the book in many ways cured my imposter syndrome because I would like go back over it or reread it or you know, like cycle through an idea, and I would be like, Oh, I really do know this. Like, I really do, I know this inside, I know this out. And it might feel a little funny to like hear an author say that they were shocked at how much they knew when they wrote the book, but like I had never seen, and most first-time authors, I imagine, have never seen their work on that scale ever before. Yeah. And you might wonder, like, do I have enough to say on that subject, or am I really an expert enough to put a book together on that subject? And like for me, one of the greatest joys was realizing, like, oh, and there's so much more that I could say. There's uh and and getting to watch all the pieces, you know, my brain is like a sponge, but it's not necessarily always a very organized sponge. So getting all to see all the pieces fall into place, like puzzle pieces, making up like one beautiful image was just very enjoyable from like a from an author's perspective. I love that.

Meghan

I love that so much. Okay, so this podcast is listened to experts and entrepreneurs like yourself, like me, who want a book deal, but who likely, because this is just how my audience pulls, need

Closing And CTA

Meghan

to expand upon their thought leadership, get proven concept for their like what they're gonna put in their book, um, grow their audience, grow their business, as someone who has built a following of millions and developed all of that, right? Developed a proven framework, worked with people, proven that out at scale, created a bunch of thought leadership, becoming a little bit of a subject celebrity, obviously, you know, successful YouTuber, all the things, content creator. What would be your advice to those folks that they're coming here, they're listening to this, but they also need to do these other things, right? That feel ancillary at times or feel like a drudgery or like that hamster wheel you were talking about.

Caitlin V

No, it all counts. I'm glad you asked this because I I also get a lot of um newer sex coaches coming to me because I have such a big brand. They find me and they're like, How did you get there? And what I always say to them, and it's the same thing I would say to others, is like, don't be afraid of the reps. Just don't be afraid of putting in the reps. You can tell the people who skipped the reps, it it always shows, right? It it's it it they they might have a big flash in the pan sort of moment, or they might get some media or some coverage or some followers, or you know, look like they've got the trophies or the flowers. But it will never, ever, ever last if you don't actually have the foundation to hold it up. And you know, I think about it like someone who can, like, you know, lift a deadlift 200 pounds or something, but they break their bones doing it because they didn't do the reps to earn that versus someone who can lift it two times in a row without injuring themselves because they put in the reps before. And I meet a lot of coaches in particular who think that they should know everything, they should already have it, they should already have the methodology and the experience, they should know who they speak to and how they speak to them. And and they they think that they should already be on the big stage or they should already be charging the top tier prices or whatever it is. And it's like, don't compare yourself to where you're going, compare yourself to where you have been. And if you book a slightly larger stage or a slightly larger podcast, you work with a slightly more challenging client, or you take on two clients instead of one this week, or whatever it is, like eat everything counts. So quit comparing yourself to where you want to be, compare yourself only to where you have come from, and don't be afraid of putting in the reps. It isn't beautiful, it isn't glorious. What there's a very famous phrase, like a uh 20-year overnight success. Yes, right? That's the this book is a 10-year overnight success. I started teaching, I started learning about sex at the age of 14. We're it's it's over 20 years later that this book is coming into the world, and it is a result of all of that time and all of those reps that this book exists. So don't be afraid of the reps.

Meghan

I love that. And you do not want to be the person that gets to proposal with us, and this has happened, where we're like, wow, you have a giant following, you do not have enough for a book, and yes, you still owe us the money.

Caitlin V

Oh, they have oh, they don't have enough of the like the the the content for the book.

Meghan

Yeah, they don't have content, and if you don't have enough content for a proposal, you don't have enough content for a book, and then if I get the sometimes this will happen where we'll work on a book proposal and I'll be like, I don't want to write this book. And there'll be a few reasons for that. Number one, the author's for whatever reason a problem. Number two, I have a feeling there's not enough content, so I'm not getting myself in that hole. I'm letting them figure it out, right? No, so like that's just it. You want it all, right? You want that foundation, you want the proven methodology, you want the fans, you want the audience, you want the the connections, you want the colleagues to support you, you want all those things. Like there's a reason they call it a platform.

Caitlin V

We just got the birds super excited. We just the top of the hour. The bird is here. The bird is here, and don't be afraid, furthermore, of the mistakes that you make along the way, because every single client story that I shared in the book is the result of me messing up, like really, it's of me guessing and checking, of me not knowing exactly how to serve that client and figuring it out one client along the way. Like it was never perfect, it's not meant to be. You know, the the more mistakes that you make, the quicker that you learn, the more that you have to speak to the the more content that you have to put in the world. 100%, 100%.

Meghan

So you want the foundation, you want to be able to have it all. There's a reason they call it a platform, and it's because it gives you the foundation to stand on and for your book to sell from. That is why they call it that. Actually, I think it goes back to like people literally standing on soapboxes and like orating, but like whatever. It's fine. Platform is a platform. A platform is a platform. Awesome. Thank you so much, Caitlin. So your your book comes out January 27th. It's called, I don't know if we've ever actually said the title, which I you say it because I mess it up sometimes. I love the title.

Caitlin V

It is Harder, Better, Longer, Stronger, Science, Skills, and Secrets for the Best Sex of Your Life. And if you want to sign up for all of the pre-order bonuses and like class above the class, I highly recommend that you do because my marketing machine is it's like full steam ahead on marketing this book. Go to HBLSBook.com. That's HBLS as in harder, better, longer, strongerbook.com. Sign up for all of the pre-order bonuses, pre-order the book, get all of the bonuses, get like you'll get like an inside peek at at least how one company does uh bonuses and incentives, and there's a bunch of um chances to win these really great prizes, and you'll have an amazing book, whether you have it for yourself or for a loved one. Um, and uh yeah, you'll get to you'll get to see it from the inside out. So go to hblsbook.com, pre-order your book, get the bonuses, um, and and thank you.

Meghan

And y'all, when you check out these pre-orders, you should definitely go check it out. We'll put the link in the show notes because you'll get to see the level of promotion that it requires to have a book succeed in today's market. Like Caitlyn has all the bells and whistles, she's got raffles and giveaways and like a fucking retreat and like all sorts of things going on that are just amazing. Go check that out. Definitely read the book. It will benefit you, will benefit the men in your life that you are having sex with or that you know have sex with your friends. Okay. Uh so uh to all that. Thank you so much, Caitlin, for joining me, especially for joining me while you're on vacation. That is like next level. Um, come to expect it from you. Everybody else. We will see you all next week. And until then, cheers to your success. Thanks for tuning in to the Kind of Big Book Deal podcast. Want to see where you're at on your book journey? Check out my free quiz at MeghanStevenson.com forward slash quiz. That's M-E-G-H-A-N-S-T-E-V-E-N-S-O-N dot com forward slash quiz. See you next time.