William Wordsworth used the expression “The child is father of the man” in his 1802 poem “My Heart Leaps Up.” If he were writing today, he might have to change “man” to “woman” or “adult,” in which case it might not be as mellifluous, but could nevertheless apply to Zibby Owens.
“I’ve been reading since I could read, since I was a little girl,” she said during a conversation at her home in Bridgehampton. “I just fell in love with it right away.” Ever since she was 3 her family spent summers on the East End, and she recalled being part of a summer reading group at the East Hampton Library when she was growing up.
She also remembered selling bookmarks door to door on Cross Highway in East Hampton when she was 7 or 8. They were priced at 25 cents; she hoped to sell enough to buy a record at Long Island Sound.
Her predilection for books and entrepreneurship has led her to where she is today: C.E.O. of the Zibby Books publishing house, owner of Zibby’s Bookshop in Santa Monica, Calif., founder of Zibby Media, “a.k.a. the Zibby-verse,” and host of the podcast “Moms Don’t Have Time to Read Books.” And Little A Books has published two of hers, “Bookends” (2022), a memoir, and “Blank” (2024), a novel.
When she says her grand vision, “hopefully in the next 10 or 15 years,” is to open a boutique book hotel “with a book concierge, books on your pillow, all about books,” you suspect it will happen sooner rather than later.
Meanwhile, this summer Ms. Owens is taking the East End by storm, starting at BookHampton on July 20 with a conversation with Joselyn Takacs, whose “Pearce Oysters” has just been published by Zibby Books, and concluding in August with Authors Night at Herrick Park courtesy of — who else? — the East Hampton Library.
But the road has not been without bumps. In the early aughts, after losing Stacey, a close friend, on 9/11, and graduating from Harvard Business School, she embarked on her first book. As she wrote in “Bookends,” “I started by copying and pasting every email or letter or essay or document I had about Stacey or my time at school into one giant file.”
She showed a draft, written in diary form, to an editor, whose response was, “I don’t know why you wasted my time on this. Try it another way.” Her second book, “Off Balance,” was considered too soon for a 9/11 novel. When she shopped “Moms Don’t Have Time to Read Books,” a collection of essays, an agent told her that books of essays don’t sell.
“It’s not like I built up a thick skin,” she said. “Each time my hopes got totally raised, and each time I was disappointed.” Now that she not only has two books in print but also her own publishing house, she realizes “it often has nothing to do with the quality of the book. It’s the fit, and the timing, and other considerations. We reject a lot of books that are really great, because we don’t do fantasy, or we don’t do this or that.”
Her advice is to be persistent. “It’s more like finding the right puzzle-piece fit for your manuscript.” She also recommends getting a lot of outside feedback. “When I started out I was only going to show two people. You can’t just show two people and expect there to be an auction from the publishers.”
Back to “Moms Don’t Have Time to Read Books.” Over coffee, she mentioned her proposal for the book to Sarah Mlynowski, a successful middle-grade novelist, who sent it to her agent. The agent declined, but soon after, as they passed each other in a crowded
school lobby, Ms. Mlynowski called out to her. “A podcast, you should start a podcast.”
“In a million years it had never occurred to me,” Ms. Owens said. “While I knew tangentially what podcasts were, I had no ambition to have one. But I have a why-not approach to a lot of things, so I decided to try a podcast but not tell anybody.”
For her first effort, she went into her bedroom and recorded her essay “A Mother’s Right to Sanity” into her phone. She then bought a high-end microphone and taught herself how to record using GarageBand, an Apple software application.
Her first guest was her friend Lea Carpenter, a novelist and editor. Her second came about more circuitously. Her husband, Kyle Owens, now a film and television producer but a former tennis pro (they met at East Hampton Indoor Tennis), was friends with Murphy Jensen, a French Open doubles champion. One thing led to another, and she wound up interviewing Andre Agassi, an eight-time tennis major champion, using Skype.
Since then, the “Moms Don’t Have Time to Read Books” podcast has logged 30-minute interviews with some 1,800 writers and received more than 13 million downloads. Thinking back to her first conversation with Ms. Mlynowski, she said, “Just goes to show, say yes to coffee.”
Having met so many authors through the podcasts, “getting to know them, becoming friends with them, and hearing similar things about their experience, it seemed clear to me that something wasn’t quite right in publishing.” The more she heard about the obstacles faced even by published writers, she wondered if she were to start her own publishing company whether she could do it differently.
Thinking it would be rewarding to work with writers and see how she liked working on manuscripts, she launched a fellowship program where she placed four writers with two editors. “But it didn’t scratch the itch,” she said. Persistence, again. She talked to book distributors, other editors, and considered collaborating with an existing house, but realized she wouldn’t have control.
“So I reached out to Leigh Newman, and we decided to try it.” They teamed up with Anne Messitte, a former Viking and Anchor publisher who had been at Penguin Random House for 25 years. Ms. Messitte is now president of Zibby Media and publisher of Zibby Books. The first book came out in February 2023. As of press time, Zibby Books has a roster of 31 writers.
After starting the podcast, Ms. Owens began holding salons with authors at her home. Then she linked with BookHampton, which provided 20 copies of each book by 60 authors, covering “every surface of my apartment.” Selecting and working on titles and selling books led to her opening her own shop in Santa Monica. (Of the BookHampton events, she said she didn’t take any of the proceeds. The goal was to spread the word about the authors.)
Zibby’s Bookshop opened in February 2023 and was recently named one of the top five independent bookstores in Los Angeles by InsideHook.com, which said it “feels more like the nicest small library you’ve ever been in than a bookstore.”
Regarding the title “Moms Don’t Have Time to Read Books,” it should be said that Ms. Owens has four children. Her twins just turned 17, her daughter is almost 11, and her son is 9. While “Bookends” charts her role as a parent, with its many ups and intermittent challenges, it also makes it clear that, considering the exhaustive list of books referred to, she somehow managed to find time to read.
“Being a mom is far and away the biggest privilege and biggest joy,” she said. “All this other stuff comes on the outskirts.”
Regarding the “other stuff,” this summer Ms. Owens will also sign books at the Cynthia Rowley clothing store in Sag Harbor on July 25, participate in Fridays at Five at the Hampton Library in Bridgehampton on July 26, and take part in a panel of authors at the Southampton Arts Center on Aug. 9. More information can be found on the events page at zibbyowens.com.
This article has been changed from its original and print versions because Leigh Newman was incorrectly identified as Lea Carpenter, and because the date of the Cynthia Rowley event has been changed.
