The first answer was no.
We wanted to sell the book in bulk. Not as a vanity play. As the business model. Our whole launch plan was built on one idea: women would buy Entrepreneur Like a MOTHER for other women. Their teams. Their clients. Their chapter members. Five copies. Thirty copies. A box for the offsite.
Everyone told us bulk orders were how a business book makes a list. Then, when we went to set them up, we were told it couldn’t be done. Not the way we wanted to do it. Not in a way that would count.
We have been in business for more than thirty years. We know what that sentence usually means. So we picked up the phone and called independent booksellers.
They said yes.
The Corner Bookstore in New York said yes. Other indies said yes. These are owners who run their own stores, make their own calls, and know exactly what a bulk order does for a month’s numbers. They took the orders, filled them, and reported the sales.
After the first week at #145, Entrepreneur Like a MOTHER landed at #13 on the USA Today bestseller list.
The no did not stop us. It pointed us to a better door. A few weeks later we heard a second no, and that one we did not see coming.
What we did the next morning
We didn’t write a strongly worded email. We opened a spreadsheet.
Months earlier, while planning the launch, we had built a list of independent bookstores, with a focus on women-owned stores. It was meant for events. It turned into a sales channel.
We sorted it by which stores could handle volume. Then we started calling. Not emailing. Calling. An owner can hear in thirty seconds whether you are a real order or a time sink, and a phone call lets her decide fast.
No is a sentence with a missing piece
We have heard every kind of no. From clients, bankers, buyers, and our own Kitchen Cabinet. Very few of them meant never.
Most noes are short versions of a longer sentence. The word is one syllable. The real answer is a paragraph the other person didn’t bother to say out loud. In our experience, no usually means one of four things.
No, not through me. The person you asked doesn’t have the authority, the process, or the incentive to say yes. Their no is accurate for their desk. It tells you nothing about the rest of the building.
No, not like that. The goal is fine. The route is wrong. You asked for the thing in a shape their system can’t process.
No, not yet. Timing. A budget cycle. A decision sitting one level above them. Come back with a date and you may get a different answer.
No, never. A real wall. Legal, ethical, physical. These exist. They are rarer than you think.
Our bulk order no was the first two at once. The people who told us no were describing their channel, their process, their rules. All true. None of it applied to a bookstore owner on the Upper East Side who could decide by lunch.
The pitch we lost
Anyone who runs a services business knows this email. You spent weeks on the pitch. You knew the company cold. You walked out of the room sure you had it. Then the reply comes, and it is two lines long. They went another way.
One of those landed on Victoria after a competitive pitch that mattered. It was gut-wrenching. She had done everything right, and the answer was still no.
Beth told her this: “Feel it. Feel it hard. Get pissed off; go have some wine; go to sleep. And tomorrow, let it go. We need to get back in the saddle.”
That became our mantra. We said it to each other for years, every time a client said no.
Here is what all those lost pitches taught us. The no almost never meant what we feared it meant. We heard “you’re not good enough.” Usually it was something smaller. Wrong timing. Wrong person in the room. A budget already promised to the incumbent. A buyer who couldn’t explain to her boss why she was hiring a small firm.
That last one changed how we sold. Big companies won’t take a meeting with a small firm that does a little bit of everything. So we stopped pitching everything. We put our money and our content behind one subject: how CEOs and CFOs should talk to investors about ESG. When executives had that problem, they called us. Once we were in the door, we sold everything else.
A client no is information. The trick is to collect the information and not just the bruise. Wait a day. Then ask what the winner had that you didn’t. Most clients will tell you if you ask once, plainly, after the sting wears off.
Why we stop at the first no
Women are trained to hear no as a final answer. The research on this is old and it still holds up. In Women Don’t Ask, economist Linda Babcock and Sara Laschever found that men initiate negotiations about four times as often as women. In one Carnegie Mellon cohort, eight times as many men as women negotiated their starting salary out of a master’s program. And 2.5 times more women than men said they feel “a great deal of apprehension” about negotiating at all.
That is not a personality flaw. It is a learned habit, and it is expensive. Every no you accept at face value is a deal priced by the person who said it.
How to test a no
Here are the five tests we run before we accept one.
- Ask what would have to be true. “What would it take for this to be a yes?” That one question turns a verdict into a list of requirements. Sometimes the list is impossible. Usually it is paperwork.
- Find who owns the yes. The person who says no is often not the person who can say yes. Ask, “Who decides this?” Then go find them. For us it was store owners. For you it might be the CFO instead of procurement, or the managing partner instead of the marketing coordinator.
- Change the shape. Keep the goal. Our goal never moved: get the book into the hands of groups of women. The route moved. If your proposal hits a wall, hold the outcome and rebuild the ask. A smaller pilot. Different payment terms. A different door into the same company.
- Put a date on it. Ask, “If not now, when?” A no with a date is a yes in waiting. Write the date down and call back on it. Most people won’t. That is your edge.
- Price the cost of believing it. What does accepting this no cost you over the next twelve months? If the answer is nothing, let it go. If the answer is your launch, your margin, or your exit price, spend a week testing it before you walk away.
What the indies taught us
Independent booksellers are founders. They decide like owners because they are owners. The American Booksellers Association now supports more than 3,400 independent bookstores with almost 3,800 locations, and 2025 was the fifth year in a row that more than 200 new indies opened in the U.S. That is a whole channel of people who can say yes on the spot.
A no often comes from someone whose incentives don’t line up with yours. Stop arguing with that person. Go find the one whose incentives do.
Then Publishers Weekly said no
This is the part that still stings.
Before launch, everyone gave us the same advice. Publicists. Other authors. People who have put books on lists for years. Get bulk orders. Get your network buying in volume. That is how a business book makes a list.
So we did exactly that. We heard no, found another way, and made the calls. Women bought the book for their teams, their clients, and their chapters.
Then Publishers Weekly flagged our sales and pulled the book from its bestseller list. The reason: too many bulk orders.
We did what everyone told us to do. We sold the books. And we got kicked off the list for the exact thing we were told would put us on it.
Those were real copies, paid for, going to real readers. The same orders that put us at #13 on USA Today took us off theirs. Selling enough books didn’t matter. How we sold them did.
That is the fifth kind of no, and nobody warns you about it. No, after you won. You follow the rules everyone hands you. You hit the number. Then whoever owns the scoreboard decides your number doesn’t count.
You can’t test your way around that one. Their list, their rules. A real wall.
What you can decide is how much the wall matters. So we ran the last test. What does believing this no cost us? Very little. The list was never the goal. Women reading the book was the goal, and bulk orders are how women buy books for other women. We are not going to stop selling the book the way our readers want to buy it to protect a ranking.
And here is what doesn’t make the headlines: we make more money selling books directly than we do through retail.
Founders get this kind of no all the time. The client who changes the scope after you deliver. The buyer who rewrites terms after diligence. Feel the feels. Then file them, and put your energy where it pays.
The no on your desk
Every founder has one sitting there right now. The client who said the budget is set. The lender who said the line is maxed. The referral partner who said they don’t send work outside their network.
Pick one. Run the five tests this week.
You might find a real wall. Fine. Now you know.
More likely you find a door nobody told you about.
We found ours on a phone call with a bookstore. It put us on one list and got us pulled from another. We would make the same calls tomorrow.
PS. Want a signed copy? We have them at femalemavericks.com. Buy one for yourself and a few for the women on your team, your clients, or your chapter. That is exactly the order we were told couldn’t be done. Buy Entrepreneur Like a MOTHER
SOURCES
Linda Babcock and Sara Laschever, Women Don’t Ask: Negotiation and the Gender Divide (Princeton University Press, 2003). Summary of findings: https://ucd-advance.ucdavis.edu/post/women-dont-ask-negotiation-and-gender-divide
American Booksellers Association, 2025 Annual Report (press release). https://norfolkdailynews.com/online_features/press_releases/the-american-booksellers-association-releases-2025-annual-report–notes-consistent-growth-amidst-challenges/article_801c31c2-f5eb-5165-866e-ca2f9c88a272.html
