I’m very pleased to report  the launch of Virtual Book Group–which has chosen my book, Broken Patterns, Professional Women and the Quest for a New Feminine Identity as its featured summer read.

Virtual Book Group is an exciting new venture of digital marketing guru (and chief operating bookworm) Christina Inge.  Readers from all over the world can  to join for free to share their thoughts about selected books and related topics with one another and with authors, over time.

Inge said: “We created Virtual Book Group for people who love books, and love talking about them–whenever and wherever they are. 

“This summer, we’ll be reading Broken Patterns: Professional Women and the Quest for a New Feminine Identity.  Based on interviews with women who entered male-dominated careers in the 1970s and 1980s, Boston author and reporter Anita M. Harris looks at the intergenerational patterns of women’s lives. She shows how the experiences of mothers and grandmothers influence career decisions, and traces the impact of rapid technological and social change on family structures, psyches, and gender roles. 

“As with all summer books, ours is full of great stories, riveting drama, and lessons learned. But it’s not a potboiler. It’s an eye-opening look at generations of women in the workforce that picks up where Lean In leaves off.” 

As the author, I’ll be chiming in for online and video chats through August–and, possibly, beyond.

It’s free to join–but you do need to REGISTER.
If you’d like to buy Broken Patterns,  It’s available at the Harvard Bookstore, on Amazon and Kindle...as well as  Kobo, Apple, Inktera,  Nook, Page Foundry and Scribd.   You can find more information, photos, readers’ comments and tell your own story at Brokenpatternsbook.com.

–Anita M. Harris

Anita M. Harris is an author and communications consultant based in Cambridge, MA.
New Cambridge Observer is a publication the Harris Communications Group, an award-winning marketing and PR firm located in kendall Square, Cambridge.

Authors Susan Coppack, Rick Wiggin, and Anita Harris; moderator Neil O’Hara. Photo by Katherine O’Hara. :

I was pleased to join Susan Coppack and Rick Wiggin on a panel about independent book publishing held at the Lincoln, MA Library on Wednesday, May 14, 2014.  All members of the Write Stuff, the Library’s writers group,  we’d each published a book in the past year–and had experienced both the excitement of having a book come out and the challenges of production and marketing. Link to video.

Susan told  the audience that she used a turnkey service from Book Baby to create and distribute her book, Fly Away Home: A Coming of Age Memoir, in electronic form. She said that had she realized how much time and effort it takes to market a book, she would have delayed publication by several months in order to reach her audience.  Fly Away Home describes her unusual childhood and adolescence as the daughter of disengaged parents, continuing through early adulthood until her mother’s death.  As described by moderator Neil O’Hara, who organized the panel: “At  25,000 words, the book is too long for a magazine but too short to interest traditional publishers, an example of how technology has opened up a new market for works of intermediate length, called “e-singles” in industry parlance. “Selling at “$1.99 on a multitude of electronic platforms, Coppack said she’s not in it for the money. Rather, she hopes to build an audience in order to engage in discussion with her readers.

Rick Wiggin is the author of Embattled Farmers: Campaigns and Profiles of Revolutionary Soldiers from Lincoln, Massachusetts, 1775-1783,a history of the revolutionary war focusing on the military service of Lincoln residents during the conflict, including profiles of the 256 documented combatants. The Lincoln Historical Society published Wiggin’s book in hardback and paperback. Wiggin described a painstaking editing process for which he is now grateful, a highly successful launch party that attracted some 300 people last July 4, and hundreds of sales there and at various historic sites on the East Coast. At some 1500 pages, the book sells for $30. Rick advised thinking carefully about whether to choose digital or offset printing. Digital  printing eliminates many of the mechanical steps required for offset printing such as making films and color proofs and thus offers quicker turnaround time and lower costs for very small print runs. Offset printing,  he suggests, can offer higher image and print quality and costs less as quantity increases.

Last but not least, I described the incredible number of steps involved in publishing Broken Patterns: Professional Women and the Quest for a New Feminine Identity, which tells the stories of generations of American  professional women. Originally published by Wayne University Press, it had gone out of print.   I  purchased back the rights, updated the book and published the new edition in both e-book and paperback formats through Cambridge Common Press, my own publishing imprint. I used Amazon.com’s publishing arm “CreateSpace” and Kindle.  Broken Patterns is now available on Amazon.com and Kindle, and in the Harvard Book store, in Cambridge.

I’ll write more about the publishing and the marketing processes in future blogs. For now, suffice it to say that all of us feel a bit overwhelmed by the  time, energy, strategy and skill  it takes to write, publish and market a book.

If you want to know exactly what we said, here’s a link to a video of our presentation.

–Anita M. Harris

Anita M. Harris is the author of Broken Patterns: Professional Women and the Quest for a New Feminine Identity and Managing Director of the Harris Communications Group, an award-winning PR and marketing firm based in Kendall Square, Cambridge, MA.

Featuring authors Susan Coppack, Anita Harris and Rick Wiggin 

Lincoln, MA–The Lincoln Public Library is pleased to present “Book Publishing On Your Own,” a panel discussion hosted by the library’s writer’s group, “The Write Stuff” and featuring three group members who have published books in the past year.

The discussion will be held on Wednesday, May 14, 2014 from 7-8:30 PM in the Tarbell Room at the Lincoln Public Library, 3 Bedford Road, Lincoln, MA.  

Authors Susan Coppock, Anita Harris and Rick Wiggin of the Write Stuff will describe their experiences in publishing and marketing their books, which will be available for purchase. Light refreshments will be served.

About the authors
Susan Coppock is the author of Fly Away Home: A Coming of Age Memoir, which describes her unusual childhood and adolescence as the daughter of disengaged parents, continuing through early adulthood until her mother’s death. Susan used a turnkey service from Book Baby to create and distribute her book in electronic form. At 25,000 words, the book is too long for a magazine but too short to interest traditional publishers, an example of how technology has opened up a new market for works of intermediate length called e-singles in industry parlance.

Anita Harris is the author of Broken Patterns: Professional Women and the Quest for a New Feminine Identity, a book first published by Wayne University Press, about the changing role of women in society over time. The original book was out of print, so Anita purchased back the rights, updated the book and published the new edition in both e-book and paperback formats through Cambridge Common Press, her own publishing imprint.

Rick Wiggin is the author of Embattled Farmers: Campaigns and Profiles of Revolutionary Soldiers from Lincoln, Massachusetts, 1775-1783,a history of the revolutionary war focusing on the military service of Lincoln residents during the conflict, including profiles of the 256 documented combatants. The Lincoln Historical Society published Rick’s book in hardback and paperback; it is not available in e-book format.

Directions and parking: http://www.lincolnpl.org/index.php/how-do-i/get-to-library

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New Cambridge Observer is a publication of the Harris Communications Group, an award-winning PR and marketing firm based in Kendall Square, Cambridge.

Pleased to announce that our imprint, Cambridge Common Press, has launched a new edition of Broken Patterns, Professional Women and the Quest for a New Feminine Identity . The release is timed to Women’s History Month (March, 2014).

Broken Patterns,  by award-winning journalist Anita M. Harris (that would be me)  traces the experiences of 40 American professional women who entered male-dominated careers in the 1970s and 1980s. Placing these groundbreaking women in generational context along with their mothers and grandmothers, the book outlines a “push-pull” pattern of historical development going back to the Colonial period in America.

The new (2nd) edition adds stories of present day college students and recent graduates, a new preface and an afterword assessing how far women have come since Broken Patterns was originally published, in 1995.

In the 19th century and again in the 20th,  Harris writes, the more women left the home for paying work in one generation, the  deeper the societal belief in domesticity for women in the next.

A “push-pull” pattern first became apparent when,  to Harris’ surprise, women told her they chose their careers because they didn’t want to emulate their mothers, who were homemakers in the 1950s–but described grandmothers who had worked outside the home in the early 1900s.

In light of the struggles of today’s working women to balance careers and families, Harris asks, what does such a push-pull dynamic portend for the future?

Unlike several new books arguing that women’s quest for equality has stalled, Harris takes a hopeful view, suggesting that “progress is not linear, nor cyclic, but spiral.”  As individuals and as a society,  she writes, “we  push forward toward a goal, reach an impasse, pull back  to retrieve and reintegrate aspects and values of the past, building new frameworks in which to move forward, once again.”

The book will be of interest to all working women because it shows how their life decisions may be influenced—consciously or unconsciously—by mothers’ and grandmothers’ lives.

NPR Reporter and author Margot Adler calls the book  “A splendid study of professional women.”

Broken Patterns Second Edition  [ISBN 978061590615907062] is available from Amazon.com, Kindle.com, and  the Broken Patterns E-store.   It will soon be available at the Harvard Bookstore, in Cambridge, MA.

For more information, please visit the Broken Patterns Website at http://brokenpatternsbook.com, or http://Cambridgecommonpress.com.

New Cambridge Observer is a publication of the Harris Communications Group, a PR and marketing firm based in Kendall Square, Cambridge, MA.

Much appreciated Katie Johnson’s insightful May 27 Boston Globe article “Many Women With Top Degrees Stay Home.” It’s about a Vanderbilt University study showing that married women with degrees from the most elite colleges and universities are likelier to opt out of professional careers than are women who attended the least selective schools–and that this differential has little to do with family income.

One analyst suggests that women with degrees from elite schools feel freer than others to opt out because they think their prestigious degrees will allow them to easily transition back into the workforce.

Mebbe so–although this implies that, given the choice, all women would rather leave their jobs to stay at home with children–which I don’t for two seconds believe is true.
Based on my research for Broken Patterns, Professional Women and the Quest for a New Feminine Identity, I’ll bet the explanation for opting out is a lot more complicated than that.

In my interviews, many women told me they chose male-dominated professions because they didn’t want to live the sorts of lives their homemaker mothers led–but many had grandmothers who worked outside the home in the early 20th century. This–and the historical record– led me to posit a push=pull process in which, going back to the industrial revolution in the US, the more women left the home for paying work in one generation, the greater the pull to domesticity, in the next. That push-pull process–driven by social, technological, generational and psychological forces–is also reflected in women’s personal development along their life cycles. I believe it helps account for some of the choices–such as schools, spouses, and careers– that women make.

I’m not saying Johnson and her interviewees are wrong…Only that that women make life choices for a multitude of reasons. The Vanderbilt study points out that women who graduate from elite schools tend to marry men from similar schools. It strikes me that if both spouses pursue highly competitive careers that allow little time for family life, something’s got to give when children come along. Most often, it’s the woman.

Like Sheryl Sandberg, the Facebook COO and author of Lean-In, I am troubled by the conundrum this creates: talented women who opt out of careers, even for just a few years, may lose the opportunity to attain positions in which they can influence workplace culture–and enhance the lives of women and men of the future. On the other hand, perhaps it is not the privileged who are likeliest to push for equality–but, rather, those who have struggled to overcome barriers.
–Anita M. Harris

Anita Harris is the author of Broken Patterns, Professional Women and the Quest for a New Feminine Identity (Wayne State University Press, 1995), A new edition will soon be published; please comment below if you’d like to reserve a copy.

New Cambridge Observer is a publication of the Harris Communications Group, an award-winning public relations and digital marketing firm based in Cambridge, MA.