“One thing that Cosmo really reinforced for me is the go big or go home stuff. Cosmo was so over the top. And I hadn’t worked in a magazine like that before and I used to keep a note in my drawer that said ‘What have you done to break the law today?’ I would get in trouble sometimes from my boss, but then the issue would sell two and a half million copies and all was forgiven. Cosmo just reinforced that you’ve got to go big. You have to ask yourself every time: Could it be bigger? Could it be bolder or could it be more badass?”

Kate White stood in a NYC showroom facing racks of clothing.  She had just won a spot as one of Glamour Magazine’s honorees in the prestigious Top Ten College Women Competition of 1972 celebrating undergrad leaders who were embarking upon ambitious careers. Her unconventional winning essay about why she had no goals was a rule breaker. She had goals of course, but opined in her submission, ‘Why lock yourself in? Be open to the future!’ Now there would be a fashion shoot and one out of the ten women would be chosen for the cover. As the other honorees all selected muted outfits in pale shades of heather and gray, Kate instead grabbed a shockingly bright yellow, green and orange number from the end of the racks. “I need to stand out,” she thought. A small choice in one of many go big or go home moments to follow—she got the cover and embarked on a brilliant career filled with gutsy moves and envelope-pushing creativity.

The recipient of the SRQ Trailblazer Award, which recognizes a women who is fearless in pursuing her dreams and helping others to do the same, White has made a name for herself as a fearless firestarter blazing trails as the former Editor in Chief of Cosmopolitan Magazine and currently as a New York Times, Wall Street Journal and USA Today bestselling author and speaker. Winner of the Matrix Award for Outstanding Achievement in Communication as well as the Woodhall Institute Award for Ethical Leadership, she has been nominated for an International Thriller Writers Award in the fiction category, and her books have been published in over 30 countries worldwide. And it all started with a love of the written word and the fearlessness to stand out from the crowd. 

As a child growing up in Glens Falls, New York, White dreamed of being a mystery writer, inspired by Nancy Drew’s The Secret of Redgate Farm. Though encouraged by her mother who bought her a typewriter, the road to her dream was not clear but there were breadcrumbs of serendipity along the path lighting the way. While babysitting, she learned that the childrens’ cousin worked for a magazine and the fire was lit. “I just remember thinking, ‘How does she work there?’ I couldn’t imagine how you would get there,” she says. Pre-internet, the publishing world was one of proximity and connections. “I knew about The Bell Jar and Sylvia Plath and how she was a Mademoiselle winner and lived at the Barbizon Hotel. I would hear these vague stories, but I didn’t know anyone in New York City,” she said. 

In high school she wrote for the local paper and explored her options. In a bit of foreshadowing, Kate’s mother seemed to predict her daughter’s future, “I could see you being Helen Gurly Brown one day,” she said, giving her daughter a copy of Sex and the Single Girl, a groundbreaking book by Brown who, like White, also went on to become the Editor in Chief of Cosmopolitan Magazine—infusing the publication with bold directives for single career women of her day. White went on to study English at Union College and when the institution submitted her for the Glamour competition she knew that there was no guarantee she would win so as a backup, she wrote to an editor at Newsweek who told her that she was welcome to apply but women were never promoted above a certain level and were not allowed to be senior editors. 

So Glamour was her shot. Becoming an honoree and cover girl may have gained her access to the publishing world but it was a shaky start. She says, “Once I got to New York, there were a few years where any chutzpah I had was sucked out of me because the city was so big and I was suddenly in a whole different fish bowl.” Instead of landing the writing gig she dearly wanted, White took a job in the promotions department at Glamour. It was not the best fit. She decided to start writing articles on the side for the magazine for free, noting that to get where you want to go, “You just sort of have to do more than you’re told to do.” Finally Glamour gave her an editorial assignment. The magazine sent her to participate as a guest clown with the Ringling Brothers Circus at Madison Square Garden and asked her to write about her experience. The article was a hit and White was promoted to be a top staff writer. Buoyed by this success, she decided to write an essay about being single in the city and submitted it to the Editor in Chief. “They’d never done a first person essay before, it was always these how-to pieces like, ‘The New Dating Rules’ and ‘Everything You Should Know About Birth Control’. My career at Glamour took off from there. They had me write more essays and gave me a column. That gave me back my chutzpah.,” she says. 

From promotions to feature writer and columnist at Glamour,  her career trajectory led her to work on and helm numerous national publications including Mademoiselle, Child, Working Woman, McCall’s and Redbook magazines before landing the top job at Cosmopolitan. “I guess the main thing is I wanted to be successful and I didn’t really know what that meant. I was always compelled to create, eventually within the context of the magazine world. Then I thought, I want to write articles that get me noticed, that help me get the next job. I did the math. If I wanted to be editor in chief, I realized that every woman I knew who was an editor in chief of a major women’s magazine had gotten there by the time they were 39 to 41. I was 33 at the time. So I took a little class in public speaking and started to do things with the idea of ‘I’ve got a window here’,” she says.” She took the window and rose on the fast track, editing and producing the top magazines in the US. 

While she was at RedBook a former employee wrote an article about how White was a gutsy girl compared to a good girl. “I never really thought of myself as a gutsy girl but I just loved the idea of that,” she says. So she wrote a book based on that concept called Why Good Girls Don’t Get Ahead...But Gutsy Girls Do: Nine Secrets Every Career Woman Must Know. She says, “The book did extraordinarily well and I loved being able to write again.” Her success reawakened the passion for mystery and suspense writing she had as a child. Around the same time a meeting with an unusual visitor added fuel to that fire. White recalls, “One day a woman came in to see me who wanted to pitch a horoscope column. We didn’t really do that at RedBook, but I thought it would be fun to see her. She took my palm to read it and said ‘I see two sides of you. I see you sitting in this pretty office with all these people around you but I also see a part of you that’s all by yourself in this little office doing something creative.’” The reading was illuminating and White realized, “If I didn’t write that suspense novel before too long, I was going to die without ever having done it.” She pounded out four chapters of a thriller. Then fate intervened and seemed to stall her plans. One Sunday, White got a call from her boss, “I thought, ‘I’m not the editor of RedBook anymore’,” she said. But instead of losing her job, she got a better one. White recalls, “They wanted me to take over Cosmo. Of course I said yes because it was the big money maker in the company and came with all these perks. I loved the packaging for Cosmo and finding the celebrities that were going to be perfect Cosmo cover girls but I knew I’d never be able to write a thriller now.” 

It was an all-consuming job and White, married to former news anchorman Brad Holbrook with whom she has two children, knew that Cosmopolitan demanded total commitment from its staff. Nevertheless, she was determined to find balance. She says, “The person who was running Cosmopolitan when I got the job worked until 8:15pm. There was a note on her office wall that her kids left for her saying, ‘Mommy. Please come home.’ She thought that was cute. I was used to leaving at five every day and then working after the kids went to bed and I thought my gosh, I’m just not going to feel comfortable working those hours. And you don’t have to do that with magazines. It’s not like a law firm. So I just decided I’m gonna try it my way. I started leaving at 5:30 instead of five and I worked every night probably for two hours after the kids went to bed. That’s a long day when you’re finally hanging it up at 11pm but I could still take my kids to school. I was still there for dinner.” 

She says, “One thing that Cosmo really reinforced for me is the go big or go home stuff. Cosmo was so over the top. And I hadn’t worked in a magazine like that before and I used to keep a note in my drawer that said ‘What have you done to break the law today?’ I would get in trouble sometimes from my boss, but then the issue would sell two and a half million copies and all was forgiven. Cosmo just reinforced that you’ve got to go big. You have to ask yourself every time: Could it be bigger? Could it be bolder or could it be more badass?”

White’s accomplishments during her time at Cosmo were extensive. Over her 14 year run, she increased Cosmopolitan’s monthly circulation to over three million readers and presided over the most successful magazine in single copy sales in the US. She also oversaw Cosmo Books, Cosmopolitan.com, digital projects and the Cosmo fashion line introduced at JCPenney. White also found success as a career advice writer. In addition to her first gutsy career book, she published more non-fiction books with career advice for women including 9 Secrets of Women Who Get Everything They Want, and I Shouldn’t Be Telling You This: How to Ask for the Money, Snag the Promotion, and Create the Career You Deserve. 

Along with the books, White developed a thriving speaking gig. While running the magazine and writing career and suspense books she also managed to make a name for herself as an in-demand speaker at corporations, women’s groups and literary societies. She was a frequent guest expert on television sharing her wisdom for audiences of The Today Show, CBS This Morning, Morning Joe and Good Morning America.

About five months into her new job White decided to tackle the four chapters of the thriller she set aside and try and finish it. She wrote eight suspense novels while at Cosmo and notes, “I was definitely burning the candle at both ends, but I did it before my kids got up on weekends and I did it before my staff got in. I wrote an hour a day at Cosmo and the pages added up. Not only did the suspense writing satisfy White’s calling but it also provided her with a fallback. She says, “I figured it would give me a plan B if I got fired which, fortunately, I never did. So the writing was both making sure I still did this thing I love but also a bit of a cushion for me in case I fell on my ass.” 

Her fallback plan proved to be prescient. In the highly competitive magazine publishing world during its heyday, editors and publishers were used to competing for the number one position on newsstands and the fight for readership was fierce. But there was a new threat to the industry on the horizon and White recognized it immediately—the internet. On the day White got the Cosmopolitan job she had the foresight to hire a trend spotter specializing in the Gen X and Gen Y demographics who suggested shorter cover lines right off the bat and changes overall to established norms. White notes, “A lot of magazines did not adapt to the attention span of young readers. So many editors were at the mercy of their temperamental art directors and there wasn’t enough attention paid to the fact that magazines needed to be designed differently.” White held focus groups every month and read every email she got from readers. But the signs of change kept rolling in and she recognized the industry was in trouble. “One of the things I learned in my job as the Editor in Chief of McCall’s and RedBook is that there would be a really precipitous drop in circulation and then it would all level out and plateau for a while. That was a warning. When those big industry dips happen you better put on your wading boots. After those big dips and plateaus everybody would think okay, it stabilized, but I knew that it hadn’t,” she says. 

It was time for a new chapter and a return to her first love but the transition was bittersweet. White notes, “I loved my job, I loved my boss, I loved my company, but I just knew. I had a fabulous career and loved every minute of it but I saw the magazine business just going downhill.” She committed to writing suspense fiction and has produced 18 novels of suspense: eight Bailey Weggins mysteries and ten standalone psychological thrillers, her most recent called The Last Time She Saw Him.

Her writing is described by adoring fans as “layered” and “full of red herrings and plot twists you didn’t see coming.” She has a gift for creating depth in her characters and intricate details in environments that jump off the page and beckon you in. White’s first mystery, If Looks Could Kill, was a Kelly Ripa Book Club pick, a #1 bestseller on Amazon and an instant New York Times bestseller. As happy as White was with her new career, switching from the bustling atmosphere of a magazine to solo novel writer took some adjusting. 

 “It is very solitary compared to magazines. At Cosmo I had my private office but we did our meetings out in the bullpen. It was exhilarating. I did a salon every six weeks where we would have interesting speakers. Dave Simone did three salons with us and he brought a 13-week-old tiger to one and a mountain lion to another. Celebrities like Alicia Keys, Pharrell Williams Ludicrous or Rumor Willis would just stop by. It was like being in a television show. It was so much fun. Suddenly, I’m in this private office and dealing with a different type of content.” Without the regular magazine deadlines, motivation was also a challenge. “When I tried to write fiction before I’d been a big procrastinator. That was one of the good things about magazines. Done was better than perfect. You just had to get it out the door and you didn’t have more time to write that cover line.“ Her new vocation required new systems which she uses to this day. She notes, “I use a time management trick where you slice the project into the thinnest slice that you can handle. With the first book I wrote for only 15 minutes a day for the first six months. There’s another technique called the Pomodoro Technique where you use a timer and do 25 minutes of work then a five minute break. You must work for these 25 minutes.”

In addition to time management practices, White has rituals she uses to spur creativity and help the writing process. “I’ve got a home office and I like to use a scented candle just to make it a little bit more appealing to force me in there. I like it quiet. Too much music or the wrong kind is just too intrusive. My zone is in the morning. So I try to be at my desk at 8:30am and go to lunch time and then I can usually edit for an hour or so in the afternoon. Where my ideas come from can be a conversation or from a news article and then I do a wonderful technique that writers use where you just start playing with the possibilities. Also, I have to remind myself, just like I did at Cosmo: Did I do anything in my books today that broke the law or is going to scare somebody to death?”

White says that writing is a lot like life and can provide a roadmap for those embarking upon a path of change and reinvention. She recommends using a suspense writing technique that ignites the plot, and creates a thriller’s page-turning momentum called the “inciting incident,” a moment when the protagonist realizes there’s something that needs to be done and she’s going to do it. In the Hunger Games it’s when Katniss sees that her sister has been tapped to be in the game and knows she will never survive so volunteers to take her place. White notes, “When you are ready for the next chapter in life, whether it aligns closely with what you’ve been doing, I guess mine did a little bit but there’s a big difference between running a fashion magazine and writing about blood spatter and corpses, what you have to do is create your own inciting incident and embrace it. A protagonist’s stakes are that she’s probably got a serial killer on her ass. That’s a motivator. It’s worth thinking about your own stakes. For me, it was if I don’t write this suspense novel now I’m gonna die without having done it. Sometimes in the inciting incident the motivator is feelings. Is it regret? Envy is a great motivator. We think it’s so horrible, but let it shine a light on what you want. What you’re trying to do in your own life is embrace activational energy. Motion begets motion. Start small. Raise your hand. Create the job. Start with just making that one call or going to hear that one talk or like me writing 15 minutes a day. You will find that you start to create that energy that allows you to go after the next chapter.”