by Patricia V. Davis
Fellow Writers:
Since 1998, Exceptional Women in Publishing has selected a woman in the publishing industry to honor her achievements publicly. The nominees for the annual award are solicited from former recipients, EWIP members and esteemed publishing industry colleagues. The honorees often surpass the criteria, achieving personal excellence, a reputation for mentoring, and exceptional leadership in an industry that seems to transform itself every year.
This year, I’m calling upon every writer I know to help me nominate the one woman who I believe deserves this honor above all others, Jane Friedman.
I met Jane in 2007 at BookExpo America in New York City. She was barely into her twenties, but the talk she gave on writing and editing was so chock full of information and so fresh, that I walked up to her at the end and asked if she’d agree to be interviewed for a Harlots’ Sauce Radio podcast. To my delight, she did (although we didn’t manage to coordinate our schedules for almost two years.) That podcast, which you can still find here, was one of the most listened to podcasts we’ve ever published, so singular and intelligent was the information Jane shared, at a time when all the changes taking place in the industry due to the internet and digitalization were just becoming apparent. (And were still so confusing and alarming to so many.)
And I think that’s what I like about Jane in her professional capacity the most ─ her willingness to share her up-to-the-moment knowledge in the publishing and social media fields ─ knowledge that takes many hours of research to obtain, but also a specific expertise to apply. Writers whose goals are to become published and authors who are already published who are not reading Jane Friedman’s blogs, Facebook page and tweets are doing themselves a serious disservice.
With more than a decade of hands-on experience in using new media and technology to engage and grow both online and offline communities, Jane is uniquely clued in to where the publishing world is headed and the role social media is going to play in that. She’s spoken on writing, publishing, and the future of media at more than 200 events since 2001, including LitFlow Berlin, South by Southwest, the Whidbey MFA residency, BookExpo America, and the Association of Writers and Writing Programs. Her commentary has been featured by NPR’s Morning Edition, Publishers Weekly, Reddit, GalleyCat, IBPA Independent, and PBS, among many others, and she’s consulted with organizations such as the National Endowment for the Arts and the Creative Work Fund in San Francisco. An active blogger for more than a decade, Jane’s current blog was named one of the Top 10 Blogs for Writers in 2011-2012. Her presence on Twitter, with more than 160,000 followers, is often cited as a model for those seeking to use social media effectively.
In addition to all this, Jane is also a writer herself, the author of The Future of Publishing: Enigma Variations (April 1, 2011), the Beginning Writer’s Answer Book (Writer’s Digest, 2006 and many articles and creative works which have appeared in Writer’s Market, Writer’s Digest, including the newly-released anthology Drinking Diaries (Seal Press, 2012).
All this knowledge, all this hard work, she shares freely and openly. You have to love that about her. But when you get to know her in a more personal way, you have to love her just for being herself, too.
As she says in her bio, “I am a late-sleeping, bourbon-drinking editor, at least mostly sane. I live life forward, even though you can only understand it backward. I don’t have hobbies, unless drinking is a hobby. I write, I read, I edit, I teach, I speak. I travel when I have the time. When I meet someone new, I immediately ask questions to uncover what they’re passionate about, and how their life reflects it. I’m open to just about any adventure, and even a whole lot of situations (or conversations) that most people would consider boring. I’m fascinated by the concepts of happiness, memory, loss, death, regret, settling, staying put, personal choice, homes, family, corporations, rituals, beginnings and endings. The 3 things most important to me: love, freedom, and service. I have been called Miss Jane, Wonder Jane, Sweet Jane, Plain Jane, The Other Jane, Not-That Jane, and Smiling Jane. I’ve also been called a pusher, a dream crusher, a hopeless idealist (or just plain naive, depending), a bad influence, an adventurer, a fierce independent, and the one who knows how to turn this thing around.”
From that last sentence you can see that she’s made some enemies, too, and what woman who isn’t working relentlessly hard and remarkably well hasn’t? (We all know something about that, don’t we? Another point in her favor, to my mind.)
And to my mind, too, there’s no one who helps other more in their writing careers than Jane, whether it will be through a question she answers with thought and care, whether she speaks at a conference, putting a great deal of thought and preparation into her presentation, whether she puts in a good word for someone here and there, or whether she simply offers a word of encouragement.
I know I am not the only writer who has benefited from knowing her. Jane Friedman deserves not only to be nominated for this award in 2013, but to win it.
If you agree with me ─ if you, too, have been helped or guided by Jane in your career ─ you can help make that happen by nominating Jane for this award. It’s very easy and will take far less time than the time Jane puts in helping us all with her enlightening articles, helpful links and informative tweets. (All of which, I’m sure I need not remind anyone, she presents on a daily basis as a gift to us all.)
Go to this link on the EWIP website and fill out the form:
http://www.ewip.org/awards/nominate/
Feel free to copy and paste any information about Jane from this post to the form. Just one of the things I love about the field of publishing is that it is a field of friendships and relationships forged. To every one of us who has ever asked Jane Friedman a question and gotten a great answer, Jane has proven her friendship and support. Isn’t it time we do the same for her?
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