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Jenn T. Grace, M.S., Founder & CEO of Publish Your Purpose.

Jenn T. Grace is a nationally recognized business strategist, speaker, and award-winning author. She has been featured in Forbes, The Huffington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and CNBC.

Jenn passionately believes the more raw and real we can be\\u2014the deeper the connections we can experience. This drives her fierce commitment to bring voice to the invisible stories that free people from their isolation.

She is committed to giving underrepresented voices power and a stage to share their stories, speak their truth, and impact their communities. She is the Founder of Publish Your Purpose and In addition to publishing 70+ books that share the stories of others, Jenn has written six, including her memoir, House on Fire.

A marathon runner, animal lover, and novice birder. She lives in Connecticut with her family.

Most passionate about

• I feel like my passion always lies in helping people tell their stories. And how I do that is by helping people publish their books\\u2014primarily nonfiction books and memories.
• What I'm really passionate about, as of late, is making a difference within the larger publishing space and context surrounding the predatory practices of many publishers out there, who are essentially taking advantage of first-time authors.

Jenn\\u2019s career and story

• I was a consultant. My background is in marketing, so that's certainly a unique angle that we bring to the publishing process. We really have a strong focus on the marketing side.
• I wrote my first book in 2013. I started it probably at the end of 2011, beginning of 2012. I self-published it, and I made every possible mistake. It was not a good-quality product.
• I wrote a second book, and I learned from all of my mistakes on the first one. And then I wrote a third book.
• By the time I was in between my second and third books, everyone I knew kept asking me, \\u201cHow did you know how to hire an editor? How did you know how to lay out the book?\\u201d I kept getting all of these questions: \\u201cHow did you do this? How did you do that?\\u201d The process of having one-on-one conversations with people and then teaching people in smaller groups how to get their books published eventually led me to found a full-blown publishing company in 2015.

Best advice for entrepreneurs

• The best thing that I would recommend is to track your data. The only way that we can really scale and increase that impact is if we really truly know the very core of whom we're serving.
• The more clear you can be on whom you're serving, and the more you track that, the more robust it becomes, and the easier it makes your marketing for purposes of finding more of that same person.

The biggest, most critical failure with customers

• I think, in a lot of ways, it\\u2019s ego.
• I had this kind of ego that was telling me, \\u201cYou can't switch focuses, you can't switch your business, you're known for doing this consulting work, and you've worked for a decade to build your reputation in that specific consulting area.\\u201d
• I think if I had listened to my intuition, listened to my gut and my instincts, I would have started the publishing business even faster, or perhaps more confidently, rather than fighting it like an internal battle with myself that no one actually saw on the surface.

Biggest success with customers

• One of the things that I was completely hell-bent on achieving was to get national recognition for our chamber of commerce. I had such laser focus.
• This is a really good example of how I do this in my business. I had laser focus on winning the Chamber of the Year award on a national level in the U.S.

Jenn\\u2019s recommendation of a..."