Q: Prior to launching the Zibby Books publishing venture, you have been cultivating a book loving community via your daily, award-winning, author interview podcast Moms Don’t Have Time to Read Books, Zibby’s Virtual Book Club, a magazine, an author salon series, and through your own books. How much have these other bibliophile ventures influenced your approach as a new publisher?
A: My other ventures are actually what led me to become a publisher and a bookstore owner! After interviewing so many authors (I’ve interviewed 1,500 in the past five years!) and really getting to know (and befriend!) many in the publishing community, I kept hearing a lot of the same issues coming up over and over again which really centered around the author experience. I also had my own time on the author side with my two anthologies (Moms Don’t Have Time To: A Quarantine Anthology and Moms Don’t Have Time to Have Kids: A Timeless Anthology), memoir (Bookends: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and Literature), and my children’s book (Princess Charming). After hearing about and experiencing some structural things, I thought, well, maybe I can do something different. I had a LOT of ideas and with my own background of entrepreneurship and marketing with an MBA to boot, plus my fierce passion for and reverence of authors and books, I decided to throw my hat in the ring. I’m so glad I did!!
Q: Your website states that each of your books have four key characteristics: a strong sense of voice, a strong sense of place, propulsive narratives, and beautiful writing. Are there other characteristics you look for when reading submissions?
A: We only publish contemporary fiction and memoir. (I categorize anything that takes place before I was born in 1976 as historical fiction!) Mostly we look for stories that are transformational in some way, that address overcoming something, relaunching a life, love, career, or touch on how to get through loss or other life challenges. I love books that give me goosebumps and that leave you thinking about life a bit differently afterwards. But mostly we’re looking for stories that really touch us, move us, and that we can’t wait to tell others about.
Q: Zibby Books has access to 800+ brand ambassadors across the country. How can a bookseller or book lover join this community?
A: We do! Actually we have just under 1,000! We would love others to join as ambassadors and definitely to join our mailing list on our brand-new website www.zibbymedia.com. They can sign up there!
Q: Can you share a forthcoming Zibby Books title that you are excited about and why?
A: I’m so excited about [our] October release, HELL IF WE DON’T CHANGE OUR WAYS, a memoir by Brittany Means. Brittany worked with Kiese Laymon who was her thesis advisor at Iowa and introduced Brittany to PJ Marks, his agent at Janklow & Nesbit. We won this memoir at auction, our only title we entered an auction for. Once I read it, I knew it was exactly the [type] of story I had to help get out into the world. Brittany’s childhood, in which she was homeless and lived with her mother and brother in their car, only to then be abandoned by her mom and her abusive boyfriend to stay [with] her Pentecostal grandparents in Indiana, was hard to even read about at times. By the time she went into foster care, only to be then abused by her foster brother, she had been through so, so much. And yet, she kept righting herself, only to end up in college and have a teacher realize her enormous writing talent. Brittany is the sweetest, kindest young woman. The fact that she not only survived through all of it is one thing, but that she wrote a work of art so intensely beautiful that it was already raved about by the likes of Jeannette Walls and Ashley C. Ford is just astonishing and amazing. Brittany is a star and an inspiration to us all. Like most the books we publish, when readers finish they’ll put the book down fueled with inspiration in their own lives beyond the book.
