SOW 153 - Chicken Soup for the Soul with Amy Newmark

Amy Newmark is the publisher, editor, and author of the "Chicken Soup for the Soul" books. She's the author of the new, "Chicken Soup for the Soul: Living with Alzheimer's & Other Dementias: 101 Stories of Caregiving, Coping, and Compassion."

 

Newmark tells us about the "Chicken Soup for the Soul" business model and how she sells so many books. She shares the marketing strategies she utilizes.

 

Newmark then explains how people with Alzheimer's and dementias live more productive lives. She gives tips on how their caretakers cope. 

 

Newmark then discusses a story about how a taxi driver ‘angel’ saved a drug addict from himself. She then advises how fathers can deal with getting laid off.

Amy Newmark has been a writer, speaker, financial analyst and business executive in the worlds of finance and telecommunications for over thirty years. Today she is publisher, co-author and editor of the Chicken Soup for the Soul book series. She has edited or co-authored the last 100+ books in the series.

Amy graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University where she majored in Portuguese and minored in French. As the culmination of her Portuguese studies, she wrote a thesis about popular, spoken-word poetry in Brazil. She traveled throughout Brazil’s impoverished northeast region, meeting with poets and writer and collecting their stories as she studied whether their popular form of expression would survive the country’s modernization.

Amy joined the commercial sector while a senior at Harvard, editing a newsletter about opportunities to sell telecom equipment in Brazil. This work led to a new passion for the telecommunications. She became a consultant to the industry at the Gartner Group, where she wrote several books on telecommunications and ran the telecommunications services practice. Amy then moved to Wall Street in 1981, where she spent many years writing and speaking about telecommunications and information services, providing her stock picks to mutual funds and hedge fund clients.

Amy ran her own hedge fund from 1993 to 1995, specializing in telecommunications and technology companies, and then joined the original management team of Winstar Communications, Inc. where she served as executive vice president of strategic planning for two years. She left Winstar in 1997 and spent the next ten years serving on the boards of several public companies in telecommunications and technology.

Amy stepped in as publisher of Chicken Soup for the Soul in 2008. She is delighted to have come full circle in her writing career – from collecting poetry “from the people” in Brazil as a 20-year-old to, 30 years later, collecting stories and poems “from the people” for Chicken Soup for the Soul.

Amy works daily with her husband, Bill Rouhana, CEO of Chicken Soup for the Soul. She and Bill are the proud parents of four grown children.

Visit Chicken Soup for the Soul at www.chickensoup.com.