We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Victoria Moran a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Victoria, thanks for joining us today. Naming anything – including a business – is so hard. Right? What’s the story behind how you came up with the name of your brand?

For the past 13 years, I’ve had two names: my own, and Main Street Vegan. That was first the title of my 2012 book, and then so much else: Main Street Vegan Academy (training vegan coaches), the Main Street Vegan Podcast (its 500th episode aired in January), and Main Street Vegan Productions (we led the production of Thomas Jackson’s 2019 documentary, A Prayer for Compassion, and we’re now in development with a feature, Miss Liberty, about a cow who escapes from a slaughterhouse. However, if it hadn’t been for a bona fide New York miracle, I’d never have had that name at all.

Here’s what happened: I attended a Peta fundraiser and saw videos about how animals suffer in the food system. That wasn’t new information for me, but for some reason my heart was extra open that night and on the way home on the subway, wanting so much to make a difference somehow, I got what I can only call a “divine download”: Your next book needs to be Main Street Vegan, 40 short chapters with a recipe at the end of each one, and your target audience is the young woman you were when you make the switch to vegan. So, I let my literary agent know this the next day. I wrote the book proposal, and we got a fabulous publisher, an imprint of PenguinRandomHouse. But when I spoke with my editor the first time, she said, “We hate ‘Main Street.’ You’ll have to change that.

I tried. Nothing I thought of seemed right, but I kept on with the book. Then, on a Saturday, my husband and I went to a movie. Walking to the subway afterwards, we saw somebody so famous you can recognize him from the back: filmmaker Michael Moore. Now, he’d liked an earlier book of mine, Fit from Within, and reviewed it a years before for O Magazine. I gave my card to the woman who was with him and continued up the street, but then I heard, ‘Victoria!’ It was Michael Moore. He wanted to talk about food. So we did, there at a bus stop on the Upper West Side and in subsequent phone calls. During one of these, I mentioned that the book I was writing was supposed to be called Main Street Vegan, but the publisher wanted a different title. Mr. Moore said, “They’re wrong. Let me talk to them.” And in a 3-way call with my editor, an Academy Award winner, and me, he convinced the editor. She subsequently convinced her team. And I got my title. The minute she told me that this had happened, all those other ideas started to pop — the Academy, the podcast, the production company. The name birthed the endeavors.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I do words: written and spoken. It’s always been that way, even as a kid. I’m pretty awful at most other things, but words are the mother ship. I was writing for teen magazines at 14, the year I got into my first Beatles press conference. When I was 17, Paul McCartney bought me a drink. I was firmly convinced that being a writer was the best thing ever. When I changed my diet at 19, I started writing for publications that dealt with well-being in general, vegetarianism in particular, although I also had day jobs from my 20s through my mid-30s: library assistant, editorial associate at a local magazine in my hometown, Kansas City, and assistant editor in a small publishing house specializing in spiritual books. When I was 35, my first book was published, Compassion the Ultimate Ethic: An Exploration of Veganism. It certainly was not a bestseller, but it was a book. That meant I was an author. It also meant I had a solid reputation in the vegan world, a base, what we now call ‘platform.’

That book was from a small UK publisher, and I was still making my living as a magazine writer. When I met my first literary agent, she was miraculously one of the few people on earth who had actually read my first book, so she took me on. I did two vegan books for her and then moved into books about contemporary spirituality, another passion. In 1999, I wrote a book called Creating a Charmed Life. Richard Carlson, the wildly successful author of the Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff series, wrote the foreword. The book took off, selling some 200,000 copies North American, plus foreign rights to over 30 countries. Around the same time, I did what self-help writers were supposed to do back then: get on the Oprah Winfrey show — twice! With all that success, and a daughter who was making her own waves in theater and ready for a move, we came to New York City. She was 17; I was 50. In retrospect, it was the perfect time.

What I didn’t know then — we moved to NYC in the summer of 2000 — was that a revolution was about to happen, not the kind with guns but the kind that changes everything. I was just getting used to email when we entered the world of social media, Google, smart phones, and now AI. I continue to write books — my newest one, Age Like a Yogi, came out earlier this year — and I want to write more of them. Speaking for live audiences is another great joy.

I’m proudest of two things in my work thus far: saving some animals and touching the lives of some people. I know that a lot of people have been influenced by my gentle approach to the vegan lifestyle to change their buying and consumption habits either a little or a lot. And I know my books have moved people, based on messages I’ve received and what people have told me. The most memorable was a woman who came up to me after a talk in Nebraska, either Lincoln or Omaha, and she had tears in her eyes: ‘Reading Creating a Charmed Life,’ she told me, ‘gave me the courage to leave my abusive husband, get my GED, and get my kids back.’ I was so moved. I’m not a therapist or a social worker or a clergy person. I like uplifting people but if someone asked me how I’d advise someone in this woman’s situation, I wouldn’t know what to tell her. But somehow, the book reached her. A book that came through me. That’s pretty wonderful.

What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?

It enables me to be true to myself and, even though there’s a lot about the business side of things that isn’t the romantic writer-at-the-sidewalk cafe image, I have had the incredible good fortune of spending much of my working life doing what comes naturally. I think anyone who works for a living has to sometimes call on parts of their personality that aren’t their favorite, but being a writer and speaker has given me a huge amount of autonomy. I’ve had the opportunity to write and teach about what I’d be reading and studying on my off hours if my job were something else. I suppose the word for this writer’s life is ‘fulfilling.’

We’d love to hear the story of how you turned a side-hustle into a something much bigger.

As I said earlier, I was writing articles when that was a side hustle not from another job, but from 9th grade. Even when I was working at my magazine job and writing there, ‘my’ writing was always on the side. I remember when my boss, the magazine’s publisher, called me into her office once and asked if I knew the work of a certain journalist. I said I didn’t, and she coyly responded, “Perhaps he uses a little nom de plume as you sometimes do.’ But what happened eventually was that the side hustle started to development into a reputation. What I was doing in the vegetarian/vegan world was getting me on lots of radio programs and some local TV. It also led to speaking engagements. It was at one of these engagements where I met that first literary agent, and my most recent book was my 14th.

Gosh, milestones . . . Let’s see: the Beatles press conferences … meeting the publisher of Vegetarian Times at a conference when I was 25 and getting a contributing editor gig that went on for nearly 15 years … going back to school in my late 20s to get a degree in comparative religions: that led to a Fellowship for foreign study; I went to the UK to study vegans and the result, 5 years later, was my first book … meeting my first literary agent at a conference where I was speaking (showing up, getting out to speak, always led to the next thing … landing those two Oprah appearances … moving to New York … going with the new opportunities as Main Street Vegan became my focus … and doing yoga teacher training at 70, leading to my latest book. There’s a lot of just doing ‘the next indicated thing.’ It can lead to some amazing places.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.victoriamoran.com. Also: https://www.mainstreetvegan.com
• Instagram: @VictoriaMoranAuthor
• Facebook: @VictoriaMoranAuthor
• Linkedin: @VictoriaMoranAuthor
• Twitter: @Victoria_Moran. Also: @mainstreetvegan
• Youtube: @VictoriaMoranNYC