“Black girls don’t sell magazines.” 

This line from author Amy DuBois Barnett’s debut novel, “If I Ruled the World,” hits like a gut-punch and becomes the protagonist Nikki’s motivating wound and a connecting thread about representation vs. perceived marketability. It was also a line Barnett was told IRL early in her career by a non-Black, chain-smoking editor.

Barnett’s debut novel is a page-turning fictional homage to late-1990s magazine life in New York City and the hip hop culture that orbited it. And as a seasoned wordsmith, she wrote it with an unmistakable insider’s eye. “If I Ruled the World” is out today, Jan 27, and it follows a Black woman editor (Nikki) who must navigate ambition, misogyny, and the messy politics of power in media and music. 

Barnett sat down with BET Current and shared that the story was “based in a world that I know,” and that intimacy mixed with that era is exactly what gives the book its visceral propulsion. The book hits the ground running with a mouth-dropping scandal, sexual coercion, power dynamics, and survival.

That juicy authenticity isn’t accidental. Barnett’s resume is a master class in magazine leadership: she served as editor-in-chief at Honey, Teen People, and Ebony, and was deputy editor at Harper’s Bazaar — a path that made her the first Black woman to run a major mainstream U.S. magazine. 

Those years in editorial rooms, pitching covers, vetting artists, and negotiating culture inform the novel’s texture, and Barnett mines those memories with a novelist’s ruthlessness and a journalist’s eye. The result is something the reader can feel. “This story has been in my head since I wasn't editor-in-chief, and it's inspired by my experience as an editor-in-chief,” Barnett said. 

The book’s scenes are loaded and cinematic by design. In our conversation, Barnett dropped details that make the work feel lived-in — a bullying executive “chain smoking in his office, in his shiny suit,” she recalled an image that feels like a character sketch of workplace toxicity. Those lived details are what turn glossy nostalgia into a critique of the costs of ambition, especially for Black women who must perform competence and likeability on unequal terms. 

Barnett shared, “I'm addressing serious themes about Black female empowerment, the complexities of being an ambitious young woman, certainly a Black woman, but also a lot of misogyny and sexual violence.”

What makes Barnett’s work resonate now is not only the backstage gossip or the sartorial detail, but the novel’s deep questions: How do ambitious Black women survive institutions that prize their looks, but fear their authority? How do friendships and mentorships survive when everything else is transactional? 

Beyond the pages, “If I Ruled the World” is already moving to the screen: Hulu has acquired adaptation rights and tapped Lee Daniels to co-write the pilot with Barnett attached as a co-executive producer. This is an obvious early signal that the book’s blend of glamour and moral friction translates powerfully to series television. Barnett says she “wrote this novel seeing it cinematically from the start.”

If Barnett’s career gives the novel authority, the book (and now the adaptation) extends her influence into storytelling’s largest rooms. As she moves from masthead to manuscript to producer’s chair, Barnett is doing something rarer than career reinvention; she is translating institutional memory into narrative change, creating a work that both entertains and insists we look closely at who gets to write the rules. “If I Ruled the World” is the start of a conversation about ambition, accountability, and creative ownership that’s only just begun. 

“If I Ruled the World” is out now, and Barnett is going on tour! The tour kicks off on Jan. 27 in Brooklyn at the Greenlight Bookstore, then Atlanta on the 29th, followed by Cleveland on the 31st, Houston on Feb. 3, and Philly on Feb. 24. Check out Barnett’s social media to meet her on the first leg of her book tour!