Demand What Your Work Deserves

When Dr. Anna Malaika Tubbs’s debut book came out, her publisher kept soothing her: don’t obsess over the New York Times list, it’s not the be-all end-all. Then the sales numbers came back: her debut, written while she was a PhD candidate with no platform and no celebrity, had missed the list by a hair. She watched The Three Mothers sell out on Amazon during Black History Month. Sell out again on Mother’s Day. So she booked a meeting with her publisher and made exactly one request: print enough copies of the paperback, because I’m spending the next year building the buzz myself, and these women are going on that list. A year later it hit number six and stayed for four weeks. She cried; one week, she felt, for each of the three mothers, and one for her.

And here’s the twist I keep turning over: the woman who wrote the book on erasure got a firsthand dose of it on the campaign trail. While her husband — Michael Tubbs, the youngest mayor of a major American city — was running for office, she was called the trophy wife to her face. “He’s the brains, you’re the beauty.” Someone assumed he’d gone to Stanford and she’d gone to Sac State; she met him at Stanford, mid-path to a Cambridge PhD. She’s studied this system from inside it, which might be exactly why she sees it so clearly.

We talk about all of it: the childhood spent across six countries, the mothers history tried to delete, the four-hour writing rule, and why “how does she do it all” is the wrong question.

About Anna: Dr. Anna Malaika Tubbs is a two-time New York Times bestselling author and a leading voice on race, gender, and equity. She holds a PhD in Sociology and a master’s in Multidisciplinary Gender Studies from the University of Cambridge, and a bachelor’s in Medical Anthropology from Stanford. Her books are The Three Mothers: How the Mothers of Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and James Baldwin Shaped a Nation (2021) and Erased: What American Patriarchy Has Hidden From Us (2025); her third nonfiction is out next year. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband and their three kids. Find her on Instagram at @annamalaikatubbs.

Everything we celebrate MLK Jr. for — the marches, the boycotts, the faith braided with justice — his mother Alberta King did first. Berdis Baldwin was a gifted writer decades before her son James. Louise Little was organizing for Black liberation before Malcolm X existed. Their sons said so, openly, crediting their mothers as their first teachers. The historians heard it and left it out anyway. That's the part that gave me chills: the record wasn't incomplete. It was curated.

“Those historians and scholars decided that wasn’t the story they wanted to tell. And so they participated in the erasure.”

Anna’s publisher meant well when they told her the bestseller list didn’t matter. But the moment she made it, everything changed — a two-book deal, a movie in development, royalty checks that still arrive because the book now has its own life cycle. The industry runs on numbers while telling authors not to think about them. Anna thought about them. Notice how often women are counseled out of ambition by people whose outcomes improve when we stop asking.

“They were trying to placate me by saying you don’t need it. But then when I got it, it was like, oh, okay, great — now you can keep doing this thing.”

Anna's confidence didn't come from nowhere — it came from a mother who answered every dream with "great, and you're gonna be the best at it," and two older siblings who treated her like a project they were coaching, not competition. Then she wrote a book proving the most iconic self-made men in American history were formed by women we never learned about. The myth of the lone genius requires deleting everyone who built them.

“The belief she had in us was so deep that I didn’t feel like I had to do anything — but that I could do anything.”

The person Anna thanks in her acknowledgments right after her parents and husband is her nanny, who cared for her children through two of her pregnancies so Anna could close the office door and turn off her phone. She names her deliberately, because a generation of feminism pretended the help didn't exist — and quietly wrote another set of women out of the story in the process.

“Then we’re just erasing the women who are making it possible for us to do the things that we feel passionate about doing.”

Anna gets the you're-so-incredible compliment constantly, and she refuses to accept it at face value. Yes, she's organized. Mostly, she has support: a partner who guards her time, a mother-in-law who drives down from Stockton, a grief group that held her when she lost her mom four months after her second baby was born. She's precise about this because she knows who's listening — and she doesn't want a single woman comparing herself to a highlight reel with an invisible crew.

“It’s not ‘cause you’ve done something wrong or you’re less skilled or less talented. It’s what are the people around you doing wrong, to be honest. Are they not supporting?”

Anna plans every hour of her week the Sunday before — including rest, including lunch — so that when a writing block arrives, there's no ambient guilt about what else she should be doing. She's learned she needs a four-hour window to write, not because she writes for four hours, but because the buffer is what lets her stop watching the clock. And the work always comes before the inbox, because everyone else's "urgency" (her quotation marks) will happily consume the career you're actually trying to build.

“Emails will kill your writing process.”

Right now Anna has a third nonfiction in progress, two novels being shopped, two screenplays, a children's book project, and a movie adaptation in the works. Not because she's frantic — because publishing is a waiting game played on other people's timelines, and pinning your sanity to one project is how you lose it. When any one of them takes off, it pulls the others up with it. Her debut doing exactly that is why the two-book deal exists.

I don't take any one of them as the be-all, end-all. If one thing takes off, then the others will have a better chance, too.

Anna spent years recovering lives that powerful people decided weren’t worth recording — and then had to fight to keep her own work from being quietly under-ordered into obscurity. The through-line of this conversation is that visibility is not vanity. It’s the whole fight. Here’s where to start:

1. Write your un-self-made list. Take ten minutes and name the people who made your career possible — the parent who believed first, the colleague who said your name in a room, the person watching your kids right now. Then credit one of them somewhere public this week. Practice the opposite of erasure.
   

2. Find your four hours. Anna’s best work needs a four-hour protected window — not to fill, but to breathe in. Figure out your own number: the minimum conditions under which you do your most important work. Then schedule it into next week like it’s a meeting with someone you’d never cancel on.
   

3. Flip your day. For one week, do your heaviest, most career-building task first and banish email to the end of the day. Notice how much of your old inbox “urgency” resolved itself without you.
   

4. Ask the placate question. The next time someone tells you not to worry about the title, the list, the raise, the credit — pause and ask: does letting this go serve me, or does it serve them? Sometimes it’s genuinely fine to let go. But make it your decision, not your sedation.
   

5. Start a second horse. If one project is carrying all your hope, sketch a second one this week — a pitch, an outline, a first page. Not to abandon the first, but so the waiting can’t hold you hostage.
   

6. Connect with Anna. Grab The Three Mothers and Erased wherever you buy books, and find her on Instagram — it’s the only place she checks, so that’s where to tell her you found her through Ladies Get Paid :)