Back in 2017, I ate dinner with Amy Newmark, the Editor-in-Chief of the Chicken Soup for the Soul franchise, which has over 250 book titles, along with other products, television shows, and podcasts. Obviously, Amy and I weren’t sharing a deep dish at Pizza Hut or a Bloomin’ Onion at Outback. We were at the National Society of Newspaper Columnists’ Annual Conference in Manchester, New Hampshire, along with about 150 other people. I was President of the organization at the time, and Amy was the keynote speaker for our Will Rogers Humanitarian Award dinner event.
About a dozen of the attendees, including me, had had our essays published in Chicken Soup for the Soul volumes. I contributed essays to Chicken Soup for the Soul: The Spirit of America: 101 Stories About What Makes Our Country Great (2016) and Chicken Soup for the Soul: Military Families: 101 Stories about the Force Behind the Forces (2017). We were all a bit intimidated to meet our glorious Editor-in-Chief, right there, in the flesh, over pork medallions and fingerling potatoes.
Amy — a magna cum laude Harvard grad, Wall Street hedge fund manager, and financial analyst — had taken over Chicken Soup for the Soul in 2008 and doubled the franchise’s book sales. And I could barely balance my checkbook.
But Amy couldn’t have been more approachable, open and friendly. She gathered all of the Chicken Soup for the Soul authors during the event, and spoke to each one of us. Despite the thousands of submissions she reads (yes, she reads them all herself) every year, remarkably, she remembered each one of us and could recall the essays we wrote. I left that conference with a genuine respect and fondness for Amy Newmark, and had refreshed pride in being a Chicken Soup for the Soul author.
So when Amy offered to review my first book, I was, of course, over the moon. Amy read my book from cover to cover in record time (that’s what reading thousands of essays will do) and sent me the following:
“I found myself rooting for Lisa and her family as they navigated constant military moves, new schools, and all the normal ups and downs of raising three busy, interesting kids. This is a wonderful look inside the kind of family we all want to invite home to dinner. And I laughed out loud at some of Lisa and Francis’s experiences as they grew into a middle-aged couple, complete with devices to stop teeth grinding and snoring. It’s no wonder that Lisa’s slice of-life stories have enjoyed success as newspaper columns and Chicken Soup for the Soul stories.”
I am so grateful to have met Amy Newmark over those pork medallions back in 2017. Thoughtful reviews like hers are a huge shot in the arm for first time book authors like me. Thank you, Amy!
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