Cindy Pham is a BookTuber (Read With Cindy) whose first novel, The Secret World of Briar Rose, is out today from Kokila. Below, she discusses how being an avid reader influenced the writing of her debut.
In 2018, I started a YouTube channel where I talked about books. Most viewers tune in for the rants; besides the entertainment of watching someone dramatically read faerie smut, people also enjoyed my critical eye for prose and characterization. Naturally, when I announced my debut novel coming out in 2026, people were curious about how my own book would match up.
I’m sorry to tell you the bad news: being a reader didn’t make me a good writer.
Making that assumption sets both the reader and author up for failure. Writing is so incredibly subjective that no book is universally loved, and even the most popular ones have the biggest critics.
Rather than strive to meet impossible standards and conflicting opinions, I wrote my book for one person: my 11-year-old self, who wished she could sleep forever and never wake up.
The Secret World of Briar Rose is a queer reimagining of Sleeping Beauty inspired by that wish. The book is not only an expression of my lifelong experience with depression and suicidal ideation, but also an amalgamation of things I’ve loved in other books: flowery prose, flawed characters, dual timelines, and ruminative writing, even at the expense of slower pacing and depressing themes.
In the end, being an avid reader didn’t make me a “good” writer, but it did make me a more purposeful one. I learned what I liked and disliked in books and specified my subjective tastes even further. I got to narrow down the exact type of story I wanted to write, rather than be influenced by what the average person believes a good book “should” be.
What matters is not chasing publishing trends or universal praise, but listening to what speaks true to you. I believe that’s what storytelling should be: a way of expressing yourself, what you care about, and how you understand the world around you. Leaving behind a fingerprint that is uniquely yours, with all its different shapes and whorls, that no one else can replicate.
For what it’s worth, I think my younger self would have liked the book too.