Joni Evans used to be one of the most powerful women in the book industry—the publisher at both Random House and Simon & Schuster as well as a VP-level agent at William Morris. These days, she’s running wowOwow.com, a website whose ideal reader she describes in an interview with mediabistro.com’s Diane Clehane as “the self-assured woman who is just a little too old to care what everybody thinks.”
Evans says she left the industry because “I knew the model for books was broken,” and when she looks at everything that’s going on in the business now, she describes the situation as “inevitable,” adding, “You could see it coming years ago.” But books are still a big part of her strategy, and she recently launched a new program called “Just the Right Book,” where wowOwow readers can email the staff at the Connecticut-based indie bookstore R.J. Julia for recommendations or staff-curated “new baby” and “new mother” book packages for $99 each, or a combo deal for $150.
Some of us, who started out behind the counter of an indie bookstore, note with mild amusement that dealing with requests such as these by email is likely to be a much more pleasant experience for R.J. Julia staffers than it would be over the telephone, although we’re still half-tempted to start a pool on when they get their first email from somebody outside Connecticut asking about “that book I heard about on the radio when I was driving into work this morning.”