Blank tour, plus a Q&A... with me!

Okay, I’m very excited. In 2024, I’m going on tour for my novel Blank. I’m using it as an excuse to go to bookstores and places I’ve always wanted to see and to meet up with people — like you! — all over the country. If you live in or near any of my stops, please come! Also, if your book club agrees to reads Blank, I can meet up with your group while I’m in town (schedule permitting).

Destinations: NYC, Scarsdale, Greenwich, Bedford, Darien, Newton/Boston, Tucson, San Francisco area, LA, Palm Springs, Houston, Miami, Palm Beach, the Hamptons, Dayton, Nashville, Minneapolis, Asheville, Charleston, Montclair, NJ, Watch Hill/Newport, Nantucket, Richmond, and Kauai. (This includes festivals!)

I’m going to make the tour fun. Think: Taylor Swift. Swag. Tour tees. Joy. Uniting everyone who attends, anywhere. So please start by rsvp’ing on the event site. Once you rsvp, you’ll be invited to a special Facebook group for attendees so you can meet each other, post event photos, and more!

If you’d like me to come to your town and want to host a meet ‘n greet event or coordinate with your local bookstore to do something more official, let me know and I’ll see if I can swing it.

Also, I was interviewed recently by author Alyssa Ages for Literary Mama. Before it could run, Literary Mama ended up going on hiatus, so I’m releasing the article right here. In my survey last week, 25% of you answered, “What’s Blank?!” Now you can hear a little bit more, my views on publishing, and my thoughts on the expectations of modern motherhood.

And did I mention it was just featured in The Skimm? Woo-hoo!

Article below. (Thanks, Alyssa!)

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Zibby Owens on the Release of her First Novel, the Perplexing World of Publishing, and What We Expect of Mothers

“It's not so simple to pick yourself up off the floor after rejection, but that's what you have to do if you want to be in the world of writing.”

By Alyssa Ages

Alyssa Ages is a journalist and the author of Secrets of Giants: A Journey to Uncover the True Meaning of Strength.

Zibby Owens needs no introduction here, of course. A non-fiction author, publisher, podcaster, and media mogul, Owens can now add Published Novelist to her long list of titles. Blank (3/1/24) is the story of author and mother Pippa Jones, juggling her personal life, secret side hustle, and an impending deadline for a second novel that she hasn’t even started, all while embarking on a mission to make a powerful statement about book publishing. Both page-turning and contemplative, it’s an exploration of the unparalleled fierceness and adaptability of mothers, coupled with a fascinating peek into a notoriously secretive industry.

In BOOKENDS, you write candidly about how it felt to pour yourself into writing a novel, only to have it not find a home. BLANK is now your first published novel, and I'm curious how it feels to enter into a medium that you know you've loved for so long.

I am so excited. I can't believe it's taken me until age 47, but here I am. It feels wonderful. Isn't there some expression like ‘the taste of victory is better when you've had a lot of defeat’? I am very proud to be entering this field of novelists. I'm also terrified for the response. But I'm just going to enjoy it because it's taken me a long time to get here.

It’s so true that we don't learn as much when we succeed as when we fail.

So many authors who I’ve interviewed talk about this and how persistence is the most important thing in becoming an author. I could have easily given up at many different points. And that's the only thing that separates me from the person reading this who didn't end up publishing a novel. It's not so simple to pick yourself up off the floor after rejection, but that's what you have to do if you want to be in the world of writing.

As a first-time author myself, I felt particularly seen by this quote from BLANK in particular.

"I want people to start reading all different kinds of books, not just the ones on the bestseller list. I want aspiring authors to know that when they toil over a manuscript for years and finally get a book deal, people will find their book. I want to give authors some breathing room so they don't have to be full-time marketing machines.”

BLANK is a novel about an author who's disrupting the publishing industry with her beliefs, her love of literature, and her disdain for the way publishing prioritizes authors who can sell a ton of copies. All of those descriptors might also be used to describe you and your disruption of the industry. Why is it important to you to work on so many different levels and platforms to change the publishing game?

I have idolized authors forever. I love books. I love reading. I know what it takes on every side of this equation. Having gotten to know so many authors personally and being an author and aspiring author for so long myself, the idea that people are putting out such a hard-won product and not getting the attention or even the opportunity to succeed because of the way the marketplace works or the way publishing works feels devastating to me. You're not even all on the same starting line. And that doesn't seem fair. Publishers need to support their authors to help them get discovered. If not the publishers, then who? That's supposed to be the role of the publisher otherwise authors could self-publish if they wanted to be full-time advocates for themselves.

I do think that most A+ books find their audience one way or another. I do believe that that is true. Most, not all.

But for the many books that are not going to sell five million copies, it is very, very hard. I feel like I went backstage and I've gotten to see behind the curtain to the Great Wizard of Oz, and I want to tell people what I found.

You write so vividly in this book about conversations with Pippa's kids, the distractions, trying to work while they're trying to do their own thing. I generally hate the question of like, "How do you do it as a mom?" But in general, just how much of Pippa’s experience was drawn from your own life, doing everything that you do and also being a parent.

Every night before I go to bed, I do a mental inventory: How well did I do as a mom? How well did I do as a CEO? How well did I do as an author? I run through it all because the most important thing to me is how well I do as a mom. And that eclipses everything.

Pippa's stress level is very, very much from my own heart. And I have four kids, all at home until recently (two are at boarding school now). So I get it. It's a lot. It's almost too much.

I do it all by doing a lot of things at the same time. I do it by involving my kids in everything.

I keep them apprised of everything. They're helping me create. They're already fighting over who's going to get the bookstore when I die. I do it by inviting them to every event I do, letting them weigh in on cover design. So when they see me working, they understand why I'm not, you know, just watching TV with them, but why I'm on my computer. And that's an important philosophical shift.

At the start of BOOKENDS in your author's note, you wrote that you chose not to include some parts of your life to protect your children. In BLANK, there is this real beauty and honesty with which you write about Pippa's kids and her fierce determination to protect them. It almost feels like you were given the freedom to write about your life because you could infuse it into fictional characters. How much did you draw on your own experience?

This was definitely not about putting my own experience in and fictionalizing it. I tried to imagine the worst case scenario in a marriage and how would someone handle that. And how would it unite the kids? And how would you handle the most divisive thing that could possibly happen?

This is not at all what's happened in my own family. We're all very close and everyone has really nice relationships on both sides. I just tried to imagine the absolute worst and how I might feel in the absolute worst. And that's how I wrote Pippa and her kids through that.

As someone who's only written nonfiction, one of the most fascinating and compelling things to me about people who write fiction is the way that you create characters and infuse them with depth. There are no one-dimensional characters in BLANK. Even though we don’t see much of Pippa’s friends, for example, there is so much depth to them as well.

I don't know how anyone else does it, but I kind of had an actual person in my mind that I knew for all of the characters, so I could describe them. They weren't them. They didn't say or do the same things. But physically, I had actual people in mind. So I was able to at least have a human to reference and say, ‘Okay, well, I know these parts about their personality that I can draw on.’ And I started from there as a jumping-off point.

You've written a memoir, a novel, a children's book. You've edited two anthologies. For your own writing, what's next?

I have a middle grade novel out on submission that I'm excited about. I am trying to see if BLANK can be adapted for film. So I'm trying to sell those rights if I can. And I've already started another novel, which I hope to announce early in the new year. My publisher asked me if I could stay on a schedule of publishing a book every year-and-a-half. And I was like, ‘Oh, my gosh. How can I do that?’ But at the same time, it's like a total dream come true. I'm always like, ‘Sure.’ And then I figure out how I'm going to get it done. I always figure it out.

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Thanks for reading, everyone. Enjoy the holidays!!