Luvvie Ajayi Jones

Luvvie Ajayi Jones is the author of the bestselling books I'm Judging You: The Do-Better Manual, published by Henry Holt in 2016; Professional Troublemaker: The Fear-Fighter Manual, published by Viking in 2021; and Little Troublemaker Makes a Mess, published by Philomel in 2023. She has run the long-form blog Awesomely Luvvie since 2003, one of the longest-running personal-essay blogs in the Black-women's-writing landscape. She is the host of the Professional Troublemaker podcast and the Rants and Randomness newsletter.

She came to the United States from Nigeria at age nine and was raised in Chicago. Her training was in psychology at the University of Illinois at Chicago and in marketing communications. She is the founder of the Awesomely Luvvie Media and the Luvvie Cares philanthropic platform.

Her mentor focus is the long arc of building a platform business that supports book publishing, speaking, podcasting, and adjacent revenue streams. The decisions about which platforms to engage. The financial structure of a self-employed writer's income across book advances, royalties, speaking fees, subscription-newsletter revenue, sponsored-content work, and adjacent income. The team and infrastructure-building work that has supported her own platform.

Her secondary mentor focus is the trade-book publishing pathway specifically for writers without academic affiliations. The agent-and-publisher relationship work. The book-launch infrastructure-building. The platform-leveraging for trade-book sales. The long arc across multiple books and multiple platforms.

Mentees who book with Luvvie come from three primary populations. First: writers building platform businesses around blogging, newsletter, podcasting, and adjacent work. Second: trade-book authors without academic positions navigating the publishing pathway. Third: speakers and consultants building businesses around writing-and-platform work.

Her style is plain and direct. She is candid about the financial-and-time math of platform work and about what the work has actually required. She is generous on the operational knowledge.

Outside the direct writing and platform work she has founded the Luvvie Ajayi Jones Foundation and delivers regular keynote work at corporate and industry conferences.

She is a member of the Creative Arts and Media Circle network here as a senior member of the writing-and-platform subgroup, the Continent-to-Diaspora Reverse Conversations network on the topics of first-generation diaspora professional trajectory, and the Diaspora Daughters: First Generation network where she contributes to discussion threads.

Sessions are 45 minutes. The pre-session brief is a CV or summary of writing-and-platform work to date, the specific question, and a one-page document on the decision in front of the mentee. The session structure is practical. Mentees leave with detailed written notes and a specific action list.

Her platform business has been one of the longest-running in the Black women's online-writing space. The Awesomely Luvvie blog has been continuously active since 2003, predating most of the contemporary social-media platforms. The discipline of long-arc platform maintenance through multiple platform shifts is real and is part of what she discusses with mentees considering similar long-arc work.

Her I'm Judging You debut book represented the transition from blog work into trade-book publishing. The book reached the New York Times bestseller list and opened subsequent publishing opportunities. The blog-to-book trajectory is one of the specific career-arc questions she works with mentees on.

Her Professional Troublemaker book consolidated themes from her speaking circuit work into book form. The lecture-to-book pathway is its own craft. She is candid about the specific work required to translate keynote material into a book that reads as a book and not as transcribed lectures.

Her Little Troublemaker Makes a Mess children's picture-book work represents her entry into the children's-publishing pathway. The shift between adult-trade and children's-publishing requires different agent and editor relationships and different production-and-marketing infrastructure.

Her Rants and Randomness newsletter and Professional Troublemaker podcast represent the contemporary platform infrastructure she is maintaining alongside the book work. The integration of newsletter, podcast, blog, speaking, and book work into a coherent platform business is one of the central operational questions she works with mentees on.

Her Luvvie Ajayi Jones Foundation represents the philanthropic-platform transition that many established creators are navigating.

Her engagement in the platform's Creative Arts and Media Circle as a senior member of the writing-and-platform subgroup, the Continent-to-Diaspora Reverse Conversations network on the topics of first-generation diaspora professional trajectory, and the Diaspora Daughters First Generation network is consistent with her broader practice across long-arc platform work and first-generation cultural specificity.

The creative-industries landscape continues to evolve in ways that affect Black women creators and creative-industries professionals specifically. The financing landscape for films, books, and adjacent creative-industries projects has shifted across the past decade. The platform landscape has shifted. The agent-and-publisher relationships have shifted. The mentor practice connects specifically to the senior-level craft questions and to the structural conditions that determine whether individual creative-industries careers progress at parity.

Her engagement with the platform mentor practice represents a deliberate investment in supporting Black women writers who are building platform businesses outside of academic affiliation and outside of established media-organization infrastructure. The pipeline-into-sustainable-platform-business-work for Black women writers specifically requires the kind of practical operational mentorship that her own career has been built on.

Her perspective on the contemporary platform landscape is informed by twenty years of direct engagement across blogs, social-media platforms, podcasts, newsletters, and adjacent infrastructure. The platforms have shifted; the discipline of long-arc work has not.

Sessions are 45 minutes. The pre-session brief is a CV or summary of writing-and-platform work to date, the specific question, and a one-page document on the decision in front of the mentee. The session structure is practical; she works the specific question and the specific platform-business decision.

The platform's mentor infrastructure is designed to support the kind of long-arc mentorship that African and African-diaspora women have historically had to build informally across years and decades. The structured booking, the prepared briefs, the in-session discipline, and the post-session follow-up documentation make the mentor exchange durable in a way that informal conversations across career-arc moments often are not. Mentees who engage with the structure benefit from the discipline; the mentor practice benefits from the structure too because it permits sustained engagement across many mentees without the time-overhead of informal arrangement.