Zibby OwensMoms Dont Have Time to Read Booksmoves product like nothing else.
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I just really like to ensure things are in the right places and everything is okay.
Soon enough youre going to have stacks of books lined up at your door.
Maybe thats how I got involved?
Moms Dont Have Time to Read Bookslaunchedjust a year and a half ago.
Pamela Paul, editor ofThe New York Times Book Review, appeared onMomsto chat about her own books.
One former guest says, It took me a solid ten minutes to get my jaw off the floor.
Of course, the podcast appeals to authors for other reasons, too.
Weiner, who went onMomsthis summer to promoteMrs.
In a landscape with at least a hundred literary-podcast options, Zibby is locking down heavy hitters.
Zibby can move product.
As Weiner explains, Her audience are influencers, to use a really overused term.
Which makes Owens theUber-influencer and an energetic one.
Shes a centralized, all-purpose book maven, saysJamie Brenner, a novelist and 23-year publishing-industry veteran.
Shes like the Oprah of books in New York.
I won the birth lottery, she admits somewhat anxiously.I dont take it for granted in any way.
In other words, Owens did not rebel.
Like her father, she attended Yale and Harvard Business School.
At Harvard, she met the ineptly named Andrew Right; after ten years of marriage, they divorced.
Momsstarted the way many podcasts do as a lark.
Im like, Where is it?
I was looking on YouTube.
Zibby wasnt (and still isnt) a podcast listener.
She skimmed about a hundred book-related podcasts to get the general idea.
I basically taught myself how to do it using Google and YouTube.
She researched which microphones other podcasters liked.
She didnt have a single social-media account.
In an increasingly professionalized medium, her product is unpolished and rambling by design.
Her first guest was her old friend Lea Carpenter.
Not even my mother was listening to that one, says Owens.
But next came a bigger catch.
After that, it got easier and easier.
Its obvious that Zibby doesnt yearn for the microphone.
The only invited male author is the leonineRichard Kirshenbaum ad exec, prolific author, and Hamptons man-about-town.
After moving through the buffet line, Owens thanks everyone for coming and asks her guests to introduce themselves.
When the novelists raise a glass to their host, her face reddens.
How many writers have a promotional fairy godsister?
(No tough ones, anyway.)
And the people listening to her podcast and snacking on canapes in her garden are not just browsers.
Its part of their basic budget.
An author cant buy what Owens is selling that Holy Grail of publishing, word of mouth.
Building theMomsbrand wasnt all conversation and catering.
Within a year, says Brenner, these had grown exponentially …
It was agents, editors, publicists, authors from Florida, authors from Chicago.
It felt like the whole book universe was there.
Maum calls the salons an Upper East Side preppier version of what Gertrude Stein was doing.
Gertrude Stein had time to read books.
Then again, its now her job.
Time is a privilege, after all.
You didnt sell any T-shirts this week!
It isnt clear whereMomssits on the spectrum from philanthropy to profession.
I dont take a stab at flaunt it, either.
Otherwise, she says, we dont really operate in the same worlds.
Perhaps television, down the line?
Perhaps she can one day build an accidental empire out of a podcast launched on the fly.
Perhaps she will emerge with a business well outside her fathers penumbra.
When I mention that he comes up fairly quickly in a Google search, she calls it unfortunate.
I debated: Should I have him on my podcast or not?, Zibby says.
She went ahead with it out of a mix of pride and love.
Owens has created what Brenner calls a year of a solid community that Ive never felt before.
All her dad did was give the New York Public Library $100 million.
