Welcome
to Zibby Media
We're so happy you're here!

Get to know us
We’re a women-led company dedicated to deepening the connections between readers, authors, and each other.
Founded by Zibby Owens, author, podcaster, publisher, bookstore owner, CEO, and mother of four, Zibby Media offers countless ways (okay, fine, we can count them) for the bookish to convene. We publish books, host retreats and events, have a book club and an indie bookstore, produce podcasts, offer classes, and more.
Shop the Books We Publish
View allPearce Oysters
Joselyn Takacs
To be released June 25, 2024
A divided family. A devastated community. And the disaster that brings them all together.
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Pearce Oysters, a family drama set on the Louisiana coastline during the historic 2010 oil spill, follows the Pearces, local oyster farmers whose business, family, and livelihood are on the brink of collapse.
This is eye-opening, eco-fiction at its best—a story that highlights the grit and beauty of lives lived in an overlooked corner of the American South. Diving deep into the bonds of family, culture, class, and industry, the novel elevates the voices of deeply sympathetic characters: Jordan, the reluctant head of his family’s storied oyster company; May, his distressed, widowed mother; and Benny, his beatnik musician brother, who returns from New Orleans in their time of crisis.

I Want You More
Swan Huntley
To be released on May 21, 2024
When ghostwriter Zara falls for her celebrity chef client, Jane Bailey, she starts to see the side Jane keeps hidden from the cameras and gets stuck in a plot she never saw coming.
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Reeling from the death of her domineering father, Zara Pines accepts a ghostwriting gig for celebrity chef Jane Bailey. Jane, star of the thrifty and wildly popular cooking show 30 Bucks Top, invites Zara to live in her East Hampton estate for the summer. Jane insists–this way, they can truly get to know each other.
As Zara starts to fall for Jane romantically, Jane sloughs off the curated personality she maintains for the media. Zara spends all of her time in Jane’s estate, shadowing Jane’s life–even wearing Jane’s clothes. As they become ever more linked, Zara watches as she changes in ways she never expected. Can Zara get out before Jane subsumes her?

Here After: Amy Lin
Amy Lin
To be released on March 5, 2024
Here After is an intimate story of deep love followed by dizzying loss; a stunning, taut memoir from debut author Amy Lin so finely etched and powerful that it will alter readers' hearts.
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“When he dies, I fall out of time.”
Amy Lin never expected to find a love like the one she shares with her husband, Kurtis, a gifted young architect who pulls her toward joy, adventure, and greater self-acceptance. But on a sweltering August morning, only a few months shy of the newlyweds’ move to Vancouver, thirty-two-year-old Kurtis heads out to run a half-marathon with Amy’s family. It is the last time she sees her husband alive.
Ten days after this seismic loss, Amy is in the hospital, navigating her own shocking medical crisis and making life-or-death decisions about her treatment.
What follows is a rich and unflinchingly honest accounting of her life with Kurtis, the vortex created by his death, and the ongoing struggle Amy faces as she attempts to understand her own experience in the context of commonly held “truths” about what the grieving process looks like.
Here After is a love story and a meditation on the ways in which Kurtis’ death shatters any set ideas Amy ever held about grief, strength, and memory. Its power will last with you long after the final page.

Burst
Mary Otis
Award-winning author, Mary Otis of Yes, Yes, Cherries (“Funny, brave, and amazing” —Lorrie Moore) delivers an arresting debut novel that explores the relationship complexities between mothers and daughters, the desire to escape, and the longing to connect. Burst is a powerful story about how we become—and unbecome—our mothers, how we absorb the past, and how we burst into our own futures.
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Viva has always found ways to manage her mother’s impulsive, eccentric, and addictive personality. She’s had to—for her entire life, it has always been Viva and Charlotte against the world. After accidentally discovering an innate ability for dance, Viva chases her new passion with the same fervor with which her mother chases the bottle. Over the years, Viva’s talent becomes a ticket to a life of her own, and as she moves further away from home to pursue her dream, Charlotte struggles to make peace with her own past as a failed artist and the effects of her addiction. When tragedy strikes, Viva begins a downward spiral and must decide whether she will repeat her mother’s mistakes or finally take control of her life.
Told from interwoven perspectives with lyrical writing as deft as a choreographed dance, Burst excavates a mother-daughter relationship to reveal its gorgeous beating heart.

End Credits: Patty Lin
Patty Lin
A candid and revealing look at life in television, Hollywood, and work in the writer's room, from an insider who wrote for some of the most popular television shows in history: Friends, Desperate Housewives, and Breaking Bad.
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Ever since Patty Lin retired from television writing at the ripe age of thirty-eight, people have asked her: “Why would you quit such a cool career?” Especially when they find out she worked on some of the most successful shows in television history. But what if achieving your professional dreams comes at too high a personal cost? That’s what Patty Lin started to ask herself after years in the cutthroat TV industry. One minute she was a tourist, begging her way into the audience of Late Night with David Letterman. Just a few years later, she was an insider who—through relentless hard work and sacrifice—had earned a seat in the writers’ rooms of the hottest TV shows of all time. While writing for Friends, Freaks and Geeks, Desperate Housewives and Breaking Bad, Patty steeled herself against the indignities of a chaotic, abusive, male-dominated work culture, not just as one of the few women in the room, but as the only Asian person.
Funny, eye-opening, and sobering, this inside-Hollywood story will resonate with anyone who has struggled with their work and on their life journey. And it will inspire others to listen to their inner voices and know when it’s time to get out.

End Of The Hour
Meghan Riordan Jarvis
What happens when a trauma therapist is traumatized by loss?
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Meghan Riordan Jarvis lived a charmed childhood with her large Irish-Catholic family: loving parents, a house full of siblings, a top-tier education, and summers on Cape Cod. And yet, loss was part of her story from the beginning.
In therapy in her 20’s after a break-up, Meghan discovered how the silence surrounding a childhood tragedy had laid the groundwork for a life spent trying to keep other people happy and avoiding any type of risk, including love. She even became a grief and trauma therapist herself.
Despite her clinical training, Meghan’s life came undone. Still reeling from her father’s death two years earlier, Meghan was vacationing with her mother and children when her mother died suddenly. Thrown into a maelstrom of grief, Meghan knew what she had to do—check herself into the same trauma facility to which she typically sent her patients.
A story of resilience, vulnerability, and life after loss, End of the Hour is for anyone who has experienced the unpredictable, lasting power of grief—and wondered how they’d ever get through it.

Everyone But Myself
Julie Chavez
Taking care of everyone can push moms to the brink. Julie found her way back.
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Like so many mothers, Julie Chavez runs herself ragged trying to meet the needs of everyone else… until an unexpected panic attack forces her to find a new way.
Funny, deeply honest, and inspiring for readers facing overwhelm in their own lives, Everyone But Myself reads like a best friend’s confessions. Julie shares how she pulled herself back to solid ground while embracing chaos along the way.
For Julie, an elementary school librarian and mother of two boys, the signs of mounting anxiety and depression had been there for a while. She did her very best to ignore them. Then, one night, while her husband is away on business, Julie finds herself locked in a debilitating panic attack that throws her life into a tailspin.
What follows is funny, unflinchingly honest writing about managing it all, comically negligent doctors, husbands who can't read minds, family outings gone wrong… and the life-affirming joy of working in a school library, surrounded by books and children every day.
Written with humor and hope, and sure to resonate with mothers spread thin by the demands of modern family life, Everyone But Myself offers an intimate portrait of how one woman found her way back from the edge.

Hedge
Jane Delury
A summer away. One troubled marriage. Two daughters. And the love interest that threatens to ruin it all.
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Maud is a talented garden historian and devoted mother to daughters Ella and Louise. Motivated to reinvigorate her career and escape her troubled marriage, she accepts a summer job restoring the garden of a lush, 19th-century Hudson Valley estate.
While waiting for her daughters to join her at the end of their school year, Maud meets coworker, archeologist Gabriel Crews, whose passion for landscape history matches her own. When their immediate and intense friendship ignites, it sets in motion a seismic shock that will profoundly change Maud's life, as well as the lives of everyone she cares about. Hedge is a deeply moving portrait of a woman’s longing to be a good mother while still answering the call of her soul and mind.

Hell If We Don't Change Our Ways
Brittany Means
An ode to the power of the human spirit and the written word to combat the most harrowing of childhood memories.
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Brittany Means’s childhood was filled with abuse, neglect, violence, and instability, in part caused by her and her mother’s nomadic existence. Poverty, sexual assault, and evangelical Christian culture didn’t help.
Spending her childhood riding shotgun as her mother struggled to escape abusive relationships, Brittany’s life was a blur of highways and traumas that collapsed any effort to track time. With no money and only burned bridges behind her, Brittany took care of her younger brother, managed the instability of her home life, and attempted to make sense of the troublesome world around her.

My What If Year
Alisha Fernandez Miranda
An exuberant, hilarious memoir about a woman who pauses her successful career for a year and explores the “What If” jobs of her dreams.
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On the cusp of turning forty, Alisha Fernandez Miranda has climbed to the peak of personal and professional success, but at a price; she’s overworked and exhausted.
Bravely, Miranda decides to give herself a break, temporarily pausing her stressful career as the CEO of her own consulting firm. With the tentative blessing of her husband and eight-year-old twins, she leaves her home in London to spend one year exploring the dream jobs of her youth, seeking answers to the question, “What If?”
What follows is a spirited and hilarious journey for Alisha - and the reader. Alisha’s “What If” year reveals that she can achieve success on her own terms by embodying the spirit of the intern: never stop learning, be flexible, and understand that failure is a prerequisite for growth.
For anyone who’s ever felt stuck in a rut, My What If Year proves that it’s never too late to say yes to second chances and explore the roads untraveled throughout your life.

Super Bloom
Megan Tady
Massage therapist Joan Johnston may work at an iconic Vermont spa, but her life feels anything but serene. She’s deep in debt, burnt out, and still grieving the death of her boyfriend.
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Enter spa guest Carmen Bronze, a hotheaded bestselling romance author, who offers Joan a chance to get back in her boss’s good graces. All Joan needs to do is slip Carmen spa secrets for her next book, but what if she wants to write it herself?
A heartfelt, hope-filled debut, Super Bloom will have readers rooting for Joan on every page—and laughing out loud at her one-of-a-kind wit.

The House Of Plain Truth
Donna Hemans
A novel of fractured family and the search to protect—or discard—what unites them.
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Set in Brooklyn, Cuba, and mostly Jamaica, The House of Plain Truth traces one older woman's decision to pursue and hold onto what has deep meaning to her—in her blood and in her bones. What does it look like to uphold the wishes of those who have departed the world and why is it that the most unlikely characters crystallize what matters most?
When Pearline leaves her life in Brooklyn and returns to her childhood home of Jamaica to care for her dying father, Rupert, she leaves her grown daughter to cope, overwhelmed, with her granddaughter back in Brooklyn. Yet Pearline feels called to return to her childhood home and soon dives deep into her family of origin.
Ostracized by her sisters for moving to America decades earlier and only coming "home" due to their father's imminent passing, Pearline must assert her own familial identity as she strives to hold onto the family's home over her sisters' objections. Always lurking in the back of Pearline's mind is her family's traumatic past in Cuba, where Rupert had sought a better life and where four of Pearline's siblings remained when the rest of the family left for Jamaica, including one who was lost for good.
In lush, lyrical prose inspired by the author's own family story, this novel explores the divided loyalties within a family, the true meaning of home, and what one woman has to sacrifice to get what she ultimately wants.

The Last Love Note
Emma Grey
You may never stop loving the one you lost. But you can still find love again.
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Kate is a bit of a mess. Two years after losing her young husband Cameron, she’s grieving, solo parenting, working like mad at her university fundraising job, always dropping the balls—and yet clinging to her sense of humor.
Lurching from one comedic crisis to the next, she also navigates an overbearing mom and a Tinder-obsessed best friend who's determined to matchmake Kate with her hot new neighbor.
When an in-flight problem leaves Kate and her boss, Hugh, stranded for a weekend on the east coast of Australia, she finally has a chance, away from her son, to really process her grief and see what’s right in front of her. Can she let go of the love of her life and risk her heart a second time?
When it becomes clear that Hugh is hiding a secret, Kate turns to the trail of scribbled notes she once used to hold her life together. The first note captured her heart. Will the last note set it free?
The Last Love Note will make readers laugh, cry, and renew their faith in the resilience of the human heart—and in love itself.

Wednesdays At One
Sandra A. Miller
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Dr. Gregory Weber appears to have an enviable life. He's a renowned clinical psychologist residing in an elegant home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with his wife, Liv, and their two kids. But Gregory feels increasingly disconnected. His marriage is strained, his children are distant, and he can’t stop fixating on an unforgivable mistake he made when he was seventeen. Something no one else knows about.
So when an unscheduled client named Mira starts to appear in his office each week with knowledge about his past, Gregory quickly grows obsessed with her. Is she a new patient? A secret referral from a colleague? Someone connected to his teenage transgression?
As his attraction for Mira grows more intense with each session, so does her probing scrutiny of him. Soon Gregory’s professional boundaries begin to dissolve, and he becomes the patient, desperate to uncover his connection to this mysterious woman and find out what she wants from him.
In searching for the answers, Gregory risks losing everything that matters: his career, his family, and his mind.

Wine People
Michelle Wildgen
An intoxicating escape into the cutthroat world of wine and the complicated terrain of women’s friendship.
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What happens when two ambitious young women, opposite in every way, join forces in a competitive male-dominated industry?
Wren and Thessaly collide when they land coveted jobs at a glamorous New York City boutique wine importer. Hardworking, by-the-book Wren comes from a modest background and has everything to prove while Thessaly hails from a family of prestigious California growers—but she is plagued by self-doubt. Thrown together at work, where they're expected to have exquisite palates, endless tolerance for alcohol and socializing, and the ability to sell, sell, sell, they regard each other with suspicion.
It’s only on an important European business trip—with everything on the line for both of them—that they unexpectedly forge an alliance that will change the course of their careers and personal lives.
With mouth-watering descriptions of food and wine, Wine People takes readers from France, Germany, and Italy to the Midwest and Sonoma. An utterly entertaining page-turner that explores how close friends can both misjudge and uplift each other.

Women Are The Fiercest Creatures
Andrea Dunlop
In this wildly addictive novel, three overlooked women take on the charming, manipulative tech CEO who wrote them out of his startup’s history.
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Anna Sarnoff is still reeling from her quickie divorce from tech wunderkind Jake Sarnoff. Forced out of the company that she helped Jake build, Anna is trying to pick up the pieces of her life, navigating the waters of solo parenting their two teenage boys and adapting to her new role of ex-wife. To make things more complicated, Jake seems to want her back…and his persuasiveness tempts her to say yes.
Across town, the brilliant and striking Samanta Flores-Walsh, Jake’s college girlfriend, is busy raising her teenage daughter and running her thriving yoga studio. Although their relationship ended years ago, unanswered questions from their time together gnaw at her, and when she learns that Jake is planning to take his billion-dollar company public, she starts to wonder if perhaps it isn’t too late for justice.
Finally, there’s Jake’s much younger new wife, Jessica, who’s struggling to stay afloat as a new mom while her high-profile husband grows increasingly distant.
Set in the wealthy enclaves of Seattle’s tech elite, the lives of these three women grow entangled as long-held secrets are forced to the surface, threatening to destroy their families. Written with razor-sharp intelligence and heart, Women Are the Fiercest Creatures is a searing look at the complexities of family and the obstacles women navigate in every aspect of their existence.


Visit the Bookstore
Zibby's Bookshop
Come by our independent bookstore at 1113 Montana Avenue in Santa Monica, CA. With frequent author events and a twice-monthly book club, Zibby's Bookshop is "the new hub for the literati," says the Santa Monica Mirror.
Learn more
Listen
Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books
Zibby's podcast, Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books, is an award-winning, daily, 30-minute author interview podcast. (Zibby has that thing where people tell her things they don't tell anyone else.) You'll get craft advice, the inside scoop on today's hottest titles, and insight into books you might never have discovered.

Zibby Awards
Welcome to the 3rd annual Zibby Awards!! Launched in 2021, the Zibby Awards strove to celebrate the under-celebrated parts of a book. Best spine design, best acknowledgments, best table of contents, and more. Our first celebration was held at the Center for Fiction in Brooklyn, NY. The second was at Zibby’s home.

Travel Together
Our Retreats
Our book lovers' retreats literally bring book lovers together in fabulous locations across the country. We feature several authors throughout the weekends, visit local bookstores, learn, laugh, and have fun.

Join Zibby’s Book Club
A Monthly Meet-Up
You’re invited! Our virtual club meets monthly on Zoom with 30 minutes of discussion, followed by 30 minutes of live author Q&A. Starting in 2024, we'll have exciting new features, events, announcements, and more!







Take a Class
Learn directly from amazing authors in our online and in-person classes. Why not?!

Looking for Zibby's Writing?
She's an author, too!
Head to her website for more information about her upcoming novel BLANK and all past books, articles, and more!


















































































































Meet Our Team
We’re book lovers. We believe in authors and their work, and recognize the power in stories that are shared. We are community builders. We’re bold, kind, fearless, driven, empathetic, and smart.
And we love to read. Just like you.

Want to Partner?
Let's collaborate.
We've partnered with many fabulous brands through podcast advertising, marketing for our books, and more. Get in touch to craft a custom campaign or collaboration.