Strategies for Getting Customer Reviews for Your Book

Kristen Frantz is the Vice President of Sales and Marketing for Berrett-Koehler Publishers. She is passionate about helping authors share their ideas in the world to promote individual, organizational, and societal positive change. She spends her time working directly with authors on their marketing campaigns, managing Berrett-Koehler’s distribution relationship with Penguin Random House Publisher Services, and overseeing many of the aspects of sales and marketing of BK books.

Sharon Rowe is the founder and CEO of Eco-Bags Products, started in 1989, and the author of The Magic of Tiny Business.  She is considered a pioneer of the reusable bag movement and “using business as a force for good” to create culture and behavioral shifts. Her social-mission-based brand focuses on making responsibly and sustainably sourcing durable reusable goods. Sharon has been featured in Time Magazine, Glamour, The Wall Street Journal, NPR, Entrepreneur, and Forbes. Her ECOBAGS® have been featured on Oprah and are recognized and sold internationally.

Sharon speaks on social entrepreneurship to academic, business, and creative audiences from Yale University, Sing-Sing Correctional Facility, and FaFa Accelerator in Nairobi to the BK Fashion Accelerator NYC and more recently to women entrepreneurs in Reykjavik, Iceland.

Eco-Bags Products has received recognition as “Best for the World” by B Corporation. Sharon has been recognized as follows: Enterprising Woman Award, Westchester Business Council Entrepreneur of the Year, and the Woman’s Economic Development Center—Lilian Vernon Award. Organizations she is active with include Social Venture Network, B Corporation, Women’s President’s Organization, and the Westchester Collaborative Theatre. The Story Exchange featured Sharon in a video available at sharonrowe.com/videos.

Francine Parham is an accomplished global business professional and practitioner. Her area of expertise is in leadership development and career advancement for women and women of color in the workplace.

She is the founder and CEO of FrancineParham & Co., which works with organizations to provide solutions in advancing their female talent and leadership pipeline. Her company achieves this work through focus in the areas of qualitative and quantitative assessment and customized programmatic solutions. She is also the founder of the newly created Career Lab, focused on career mobility solutions using scientific methodology, tools, and technology.

Along with partnering with organizations, she and her team also focus directly on helping women and women of color in the workplace with their professional development.  Her company offers the Sharpen Your Skills Professional® suite of programs and events to businesses for their female talent.

Francine is a recently published author of Please Sit Over There: How to Manage Power, Overcome Exclusion and Succeed as a Black Woman at Work (Berrett-Koehler Publishers, August, 2022). She speaks publicly sharing her lived experiences as a global executive; discusses the often implicit skills that she knows are important for career advancement; and discusses the role that leadership within organizations are accountable for in helping their women and women of color talent navigate successfully to achieve their career advancement goals. She has been cited in various published books and articles.

Her career spans over two decades, and she has worked in multiple industries, with her last assignment as a global executive and Vice President, Human Resources for Johnson and Johnson. She worked for the General Electric Company in the capacity of a Vice President prior to Johnson and Johnson. Upon completing graduate school, she worked for General Mills in various roles. She holds two Master’s degrees, one from the University of Illinois (M.A.) and the other from Columbia University (M.S.) as a Stabile Investigative Fellow.

Minette Norman is an author, speaker, and inclusive leadership consultant who previously spent decades leading global, technical teams in the software industry.

Minette has extensive experience leading internationally distributed teams and believes that when groups embrace diversity in all its forms, breakthroughs happen. Her most recent position before starting her own consultancy was as vice president of engineering practice at Autodesk. Responsible for influencing more than 3,500 engineers around the globe, she focused on state-of-the-art engineering practices while nurturing a collaborative and inclusive culture.

Minette is a keynote speaker on topics of inclusive leadership, psychological safety, collaborative teams, and empathy. Named in 2017 as one of the “Most Influential Women in Bay Area Business” by the San Francisco Business Times and as “Business Role Model of the Year” in the 2018 Women in IT/Silicon Valley Awards, Minette is a recognized leader with a unique perspective.

Minette is the co-author of The Psychological Safety Playbook: Lead More Powerfully by Being More Human. Her second book, The Boldly Inclusive Leader, will be published in August 2023.

Minette holds degrees in drama and French from Tufts University and studied at the Sorbonne Nouvelle in Paris.