Reinvention, Podcasting, and Championing Authors with Zibby Owens

In this episode of The Write and Wrong Podcast, host Jamie is joined by author, bookshop owner, publisher, and podcaster Zibby Owens. Zibby discusses her new essay collection, Between Chapters: How I Started Over, Took Some Chances and Found the Plot, and shares her inspiring journey from facing early publishing rejections to building a massive literary media company.

Key Takeaways:

• Zibby’s seventh book, Between Chapters, is a deeply personal essay collection chronicling a decade of reinvention, including divorce, remarriage, and shifting from a stay-at-home mum to a media CEO.   

• After struggling to sell a parenting essay collection in 2018 because she lacked a platform, Zibby launched a podcast to interview authors, eventually scaling it to five episodes a week during the COVID-19 lockdown to help writers promote their work.   

• Witnessing how frequently traditional publishers failed to properly support and tour their authors post-release inspired Zibby to launch her own author-first publishing company with Leigh Newman in 2021.   

• Rejection is part of the process; Zibby wrote a novel after business school about losing her best friend in 9/11, but after it failed to sell, she stopped writing fiction for 15 years before eventually telling the story in her 2022 memoir, Bookends.   

• Zibby's entrepreneurial spirit began early: as a child, she sold self-designed 25-cent bookmarks door-to-door to save up for a record.

  
  

Navigating the Spaces "Between Chapters"

Releasing on September 22nd, Between Chapters: How I Started Over, Took Some Chances and Found the Plot marks Zibby's seventh book and her first standalone collection of her own essays. The book covers a turbulent decade of her life where everything changed, capturing the funny, sad, and compelling moments of her reinvention. Because she loves hearing about other people's life transitions, she also launched a companion Substack to feature guest essays from writers experiencing their own major life changes, such as entering retirement or dealing with profound loss.

Building a Podcast Platform

Zibby has always possessed an entrepreneurial drive, having started businesses since she was young. After taking an eleven-year break to be a stay-at-home mum to her four children, she wanted to publish a collection of parenting essays. Advised that she needed a platform first, she launched a podcast in 2018—originally called Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books, now Totally Booked with Zibby—despite never having listened to a podcast before. What started as a nervous, heavily prepared weekly interview eventually scaled into a massive operation. During the COVID-19 lockdowns, Zibby ramped up to five interviews a week to help authors who had lost their promotional tours, and she has now completed over 2,300 interviews.

Founding an Author-First Publisher

Through her hundreds of interviews, Zibby kept hearing a frustratingly common story: authors were finally getting their books published, only to find that their publishers offered no support, marketing, or tours. Realising that authors were not being celebrated the way they deserved, she became determined to fix the problem. Teaming up with Leigh Newman in 2021, she launched an author-centric publishing company designed to treat writers the way she would want to be treated. Around the same time, she also opened a bookshop in Santa Monica, creating a multifaceted literary ecosystem.

An Unexpected Cabin Read

When asked what book she would take if snowed in at a cosy woodland cabin, Zibby bypassed the classics. Instead, she chose a self-published book written and illustrated by her youngest son, titled Stephen the Sushi. They printed twenty copies of the charming story, which follows a piece of sushi who decides he does not want to be eaten and escapes the table to go on adventures.