It's back to school season, and my 10-year-old daughter has been reading some of my old favorite Judy Blume titles. Remember Deenie and Are You There God, It's Me Margaret? She has also been enjoying the Owl Crate, which is a monthly book subscription. We've just started reading aloud The School for What Nots by Margaret Peterson Haddix, where all the characters get their own voices!
Equally exciting is the conversation I had with Zibby Owens, a book-loving, creative force. Zibby created the award-winning podcast Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books and is making major strides to transform the publishing landscape with her own publishing company, Zibby Books. She is working hard to create a new paradigm that is more author-centric. I find her inspiring in every way.
If Zibby doesn't already have enough plates spinning, she also just published her book Bookends: A Memoir of Love, Loss and Literature, which interlaces the books that have shaped her life with the events of her journey as they unfold.
In our interview below, Zibby shares about her mission as well as a lesson she learned at business school, which I believe is one key to her success.
In fact, Zibby will be visiting the Unlocking Your Story workshop this fall as a guest author. The 10-week sessions start next week! There is still space, so let me know asap if you want to jump in.
ZIBBY OWENS is an author, podcaster, publisher, CEO, and mother of four. She is the founder of Zibby Owens Media, a privately-held media company designed to help busy people live their best lives by connecting to books and each other. The three divisions include Zibby Books, a publishing house for fiction and memoir, Zcast, a podcast network powered by Acast including Zibby’s award-winning podcast Moms Don’t Have Time to Read Books, and Zibby Mag, a new content and community site including Zibby’s Virtual Book Club.
Bookends is Zibby’s intimate life story as told through the books she was reading at the time of pivotal moments, the effects they had on her, and what they taught her through each word on the page. An honest and moving story about relationships, love, food issues, the writing life, finding one’s true calling, and most of all, books. Bookends will inspire and uplift anyone who flips through its pages.
Zibby is a regular columnist for Good Morning America and a frequent guest on morning news shows recommending books.
KARIN GUTMAN: Let’s talk about your book! You spend so much time raising other authors up and I want to raise you up. How did you know it was time to tell your own story in the midst of everything else you're doing?
ZIBBY OWENS: Well, I've been trying to write this book for so long. So it's not as if I started this other stuff, and then decided to write a book. It actually was reversed in that I've been trying to write a book and then started some other stuff to help me do that, which ended up taking on a life of its own. Now that this book is coming out, it's like gravy on top of my life versus the main thing that I thought I was trying to achieve. Still very, very rewarding and exciting and it's been a goal that I've had for so long to get the story out, particularly after losing my best friend in 911, Stacey Sanders. I just kept writing about that, out of disbelief really. I'm sure many have gone through grief and an event that they just can't seem to process and metabolize because it's just so awful.
I tried to get the story out right after business school in 2003/4. I put it aside. I stayed home with my kids for 11 years, but it kept nagging at me. It wasn't just her loss, but I had four other losses of people close to me in that year. And since then I've also lost several other people. My dad at one point was like, “Oh jeez, I can't get through this book, so much death.”
But it's not all about that. That's just one tiny sliver of the story. It's also reinvention and finding my voice again and mothering and eating issues and everything that has led me here—and here is such a place of possibility and excitement, and yes reinvention, but also this very mission-driven life that I'm living now where I bolt out of bed (well not today, I overslept) but most days I bolt out of bed and immediately get to it. Whether I'm reading or writing or emailing or posting, if I'm not hanging out with my kids or my husband.
There were many times I thought, Okay, it's just not going to happen for me. I'll just keep interviewing authors every day and put this rejection letter in a file. But it did, and I'm so grateful.
KARIN: Since cracking this book has been such a long process, was there something that clicked or opened up for you at a certain point?
ZIBBY: I think it was a confluence of several factors. When I first tried to sell the story, even though I started as a memoir, I rewrote it as fiction. That was problematic in that it was removed from what I had experienced, but I wasn't comfortable with sharing all that. It was also my first novel, and I firmly believe you have to write at least two novels to have a good third one come out.
But ultimately, it all came together when I decided to weave in books, which is my true love anyway. That was really what unlocked the power. Also, the timing was such that when I pitched it again as this book-laced thing, my own platform had grown enough so I wasn't completely unknown. Even still, I had one offer, and I took it.
It's still hard for me to explain the book. I’m like, It’s my life!
KARIN: It is your life. I really enjoyed getting to know you and your journey.
ZIBBY: Thank you. Yeah, a lot of people are writing saying, “I listened to you falling asleep” or “I feel like I just had coffee with a girlfriend reading it.” It's not this big literary masterpiece. I'm just writing my voice on the page, like I would tell you right now. Obviously, it's more complicated than that, but I just write what I feel. I am not somebody who needs all the literary trappings of a sentence. I can do that but it's not as authentic as what I'm trying to do, for me.
KARIN: You wrote that one of the lessons you learned in business school is “it’s good enough.” What does that mean to you in relationship to writing or anything else that you're doing?
ZIBBY: I think about that a lot actually, so I'm glad you asked about it. In regards to Bookends, I was reading it again the other day, and I was like, Oh gosh, I would change so much. In fact, I kept rewriting the ending as time was going by between edit rounds. So, the ending was not what it was originally, because it hadn't happened yet in real life. It's just interesting that I was catching up right as I wrote it, and then I had the deadline. I need those external things. I'm an ‘obliger’ in Gretchen Rubin’s four tendencies. If that is the cutoff, that is the cutoff.
It is much harder to regulate myself. I've really had to reprioritize a lot of things. I used to be the first person to turn in the medical forms. I used to set my alarm for five in the morning when the afterschool signup was up and I was enrolling. Now (I shouldn't even admit this) I missed the parent-teacher conference. So I had to reach out to the school and say, I missed it, could you help me out here? Of course, they did. I'm not saying that being a bad parent is what I'm recommending, but I’m letting some of the management things of life slip a little. I'm getting in the forms, but I have to be reminded a couple of times. I feel badly about that. But I have eight million emails and so I'm not doing some things as well. My kids’ birthday parties... I'm happy to call a place and have them run the show. The day before I’m still buying balloons and making it all special, but I'm not calligraphy-ing tote bags. I've had to make a lot of choices.
KARIN: As a mom who runs her own business, I appreciate that!
The other thing that strikes me is that you give yourself permission—to write your story, to follow your instincts and pursue things you’re curious about. Where does that come from?
ZIBBY: When I hear you say that, it makes me think of giving myself permission to share and be open. I don't know why I feel so comfortable. I was literally sitting next to the husband of a friend of mine at dinner the other night, and he was looking at me like I was nuts. He was like, I can't believe you share all this stuff. And I'm like, Yeah, I just do it. It comes really easily for me to write about my feelings.
I started writing as soon as I could write. My grandparents published this mini book for me when I was nine, with two short stories I had written and I had my name on the spine and from then on, I was like, This is what I want to do. I want to be an author. But there's no great path to that.
I kept writing, and one day I had gained some weight after my parents got divorced. I was noticing these very subtle shifts in the way people were treating me and I was upset about it. So I sat down at my desk one afternoon and wrote it all out. The way I write to myself is essay’ish. I don't know why, that's just how it comes out. And I printed it. My mother intercepted the printout and walked into my room flipping through it saying, “You have to get this published. This is going to help so many other girls.” She said I should send it to one of my favorite magazines, and helped me find the address to Seventeen. We sent it in together and they bought it. I feel like my life might have gone in a different direction had they not bought that piece and actually I'm still in touch with my editor Marie Evans, who became my editor at Real Simple.
KARIN: That's amazing.
ZIBBY: Yeah, we have stayed in touch this whole time. She was really young. I was really young. And now we are not. But it was this picture of me holding a scale in disgust with the caption “Do 10 extra pounds make me a less worthy person?” I talked about the pain I felt in having gained weight.
But it wasn't just the writing of it, it was the fact that the magazine got so many letters and told me that I had helped so many people. That made me feel so good. So whenever I'm sharing, it's not to make myself into some public thing. That was never the intention of any of it. The goal of sharing is: a) it does emotionally help me, but b) I know that if I'm experiencing something, somebody else is experiencing it. You don't believe that necessarily until you have it proven time and time again. So even now, I'm thinking I should write about how I feel shame or I'm embarrassed or whatever. Other people are going through midlife and they're having some of these feelings and I should write about it, because as soon as I write about it, I get all this positive feedback. People saying, Oh my gosh, I had never thought about it. I hadn't articulated that. Thank you. And then I'm like, Oh phew, thank you. I'm not alone. So it's this very positive loop. So yeah, I give myself permission for that.
KARIN: I am curious about you as a mom. How do you do it all?
ZIBBY: The main thing is, I'm divorced and remarried and so every other weekend I have these long weekends without the kids. I could not do this if I had the kids full-time. No possible way. I catch up, I read, I write, I sleep. I have these days and I'm sad. I really, really miss them. I cry and it's still hard for me. It has been years and years. But from a professional standpoint it makes all the difference.
Also, I have a wonderful nanny, but I'm home and I also do everything at home. So they're always in and out. In the afternoons I try not to schedule anything. I organize my work day around their pickups and drop offs, because those are really important to me. I tried for a while not to schedule anything after they got home, but now it's impossible. So maybe I'll have an event or maybe one call if I really need to. Also they're growing up. I have two 15-year-olds who don't need me all the time. And my nine-year-old and seven-year-old are like BFFs. They always know what I'm doing. I'll explain, “Remember this book I've been reading the last three days? I'm about to interview this author.” So they get it. I involve them in everything, so they're excited for me when good things happen.
Sometimes I think I'm doing a better job with the younger kids because I'm not hovering as much as I did with my older kids. With my older kids, I was on the floor. I was home for 11 straight years, and I was in it every minute. That was my focus. With the little kids, we all have our focuses and we do it together, and I think that's a little bit more balanced.
KARIN: I love that, it makes a lot of sense.
With the launch of your publishing company, Zibby Books, I'm wondering what your take is on publishing right now. How do you see what you're doing as similar or different than a traditional publisher? You’re forging new territory, which is very cool and exciting.
ZIBBY: A lot of it comes from, Well, what if we did it this way? Like, why does it have to be that way?
I wanted to build a company from the ground up, because so many of the authors I had interviewed had issues with the way the world is at traditional publishing houses. This is no fault of anybody who works at a traditional publishing house. It's just the way they were built. I wanted to make things more author-centric.
I know what it’s like because I struggled for so long to get this book out. I’ve had experience at multiple publishing houses with my two anthologies and my children's book and then Bookends. I got to see how publishers handled authors—how things worked, what makes sense, what didn't. I thought, Well, maybe I can be the one to make some changes here. It took me a long time. I had one call with a distributor to discuss and thought, I am so not ready. I have actually partnered with Leigh Newman who had experience and showed me the way, and our consulting publisher Anne Messite was a huge help. We just had our huge sales presentation to the same distributor. At the end of this big presentation in this packed room with so many people on Zoom—me wearing a business suit—and I’m like, "I can't believe I'm standing here doing this presentation with our six spring titles and our covers. It was only two years ago that I had my first call with you when I had no idea what I was doing." And they said, “Well, it looks like you got your act together, because now it's out there.”
Every day I have new ideas. Everything I go through as an author informs what I'm going to do for my authors. So I just got back from book tour and thought, This makes no sense. I'm going to rethink book tours. How can I do things differently? So I'm just using all my experience to try to improve the experience of others and do things the way I want.
KARIN: Can you share more specifics about what you're doing?
ZIBBY: Some of the things:
We are only doing 12 books a year because any more than that, I think we're competing with ourselves.
We are doing a year of reading. So if you were only to read our books in a year, it would be what you would need, in order. I don't like reading four really gut-wrenching memoirs in a row. I like to read a memoir, and then I like to read fiction, and then maybe this. It's like a book club. You could just read the books in the book club. I have Zibby’s Virtual Book Club and people read the books that I recommend, and they're like, “I wouldn't have read that, but you recommended it and I loved it.”
There is no lead title. We're not pushing one book the way other publishers pick one book a month. Those poor other authors. Why? Everybody's in there writing and everybody should be heralded for their accomplishments.
We have profit sharing among the author's because I really want them all united, which they are. They're all on WhatsApp and talking all the time. That's taken off without me. We're having face-to-face regularly—all the authors, all the agents, all the people at the company.
We have an Indie Bookseller Advisory Board and an Author Advisory Board. We have 750 readers who are Zibby Books ambassadors in 47 states around the country who are working with their indies. We’re even piloting a new program with bookshop.org to help local bookstores. We’re helping bookstores by doing programs like 22 in 22, where we encourage book readers to go to 22 bookstores in person in 2022.
We have a couple of initiatives in the works for next year. We are partnering with brands. We're trying new distribution techniques. And we're creating community around books.
So that's our overarching mission.
KARIN: That's a lot!
Is this the direction publishing is moving or can all of this coexist? Between what you’re doing, the hybrids, and traditional publishing.
ZIBBY: I don’t know. We’re going to wait and see how it all shakes out.
I am actively talking to lots of other players in the business towards accomplishing my mission. All of the things I'm doing are to reach a goal of helping discoverability for authors, helping readers find the right books, and connecting book lovers to each other. Other people are tackling that in different ways. And I'm all about, Let's get on the phone and how can we work together to do this? Because if there are more smart people tackling this problem in different ways, I want to use all of our brains to tackle it.
KARIN: How would you define the problem?
ZIBBY: The problem is, so many authors write books that don't get picked up, discovered, don't do well, because people aren't hearing about them. They aren't finding them. So they don't even have the opportunity to love them. I really think it's just so hard. Bookstores are like finding a needle in a haystack. It's just really hard to find a new book in that way. And yet, all the channels are crowded with noise and there are so many options for our time. So how do we get a book to stand out? How can we help authors feel valued? How do we frame success for an author? How do we have the books reach the right people and not make people feel like they're a cog in the wheel?
If we could figure it out, I'd be like, Okay great, I'm gonna go back to the beach. I just want to solve this problem.
Buy the book
To learn more about Zibby Owens visit her site.
To learn more about her publishing company, visit Zibby Books.
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