Win a 45-minute "Ask Me Anything" call with Alaina Lavoie, program manager at We Need Diverse Books and faculty in Emerson College's MA and MFA programs in Writing, Literature, and Publishing.

Want to learn about how to break into the publishing industry, and interested in pursuing a career in books? Alaina has six years of experience working in children's literature and prior to being a program manager at WNDB, she was the communications manager and a social media and programs volunteer. Alaina can also speak to how to find a remote job in publishing (she have worked full-time remote since 2017). Do you want to learn about marketing and promotion as a writer? Alaina teaches Personal Marketing for Authors in the MFA program at Emerson College and has consulted for a number of authors, both self-published and traditionally published. We can talk about any aspect of the marketing process from before you even have an agent all the way through scaling your career when you have several books out, or marketing as someone who writes across genres and age categories. Do you want to know more about the world of freelancing, how to get clients, and how to pitch your work? Alaina is a freelance journalist with six years of experience, and her work has been published in the New York Times, Teen Vogue, Refinery29, Cosmopolitan, Good Housekeeping, Publishers Weekly, the Washington Post, the Oprah Magazine, Glamour, and more. Alaina would be happy to talk about the pitching process, navigating rejections, following up, negotiating rates, getting recurring clients, and everything else that comes with freelancing, whether you intend to freelance full-time or on the side of a day job. If you have something entirely different you'd like to talk about-diversity in publishing, navigating the industry with a disability, whether or not to go to grad school-Alaina is here for that too!

Alaina Lavoie (publishes journalism under the byline Alaina Leary) is a Program Manager for the literary nonprofit We Need Diverse Books. She also teaches graduate-level courses in the Publishing, Literature, and Writing department at Emerson College, and is a book reviewer for Booklist. Alaina has also led workshops, keynotes, and training sessions for ACES: The Society for Editing, the Bisexual Resource Center, Bravery Magazine, Everyday Feminism, Bookbuilders of Boston, the Editorial Freelancers Association, and Westfield State University. Her journalism has been included in a number of syllabi for undergraduate and graduate-level courses, including in the Simmons University MFA in Writing for Children. Her work has been published in New York Times, Washington Post, Publishers Weekly, Cosmopolitan, Teen Vogue, The Oprah Magazine, Boston Globe Magazine, Refinery29, Good Housekeeping, Glamour, and more.

Image: A headshot of Alaina Lavoie.