Nancy Evans Email & Phone Number

Host of The Confab Podcast, where women share stories about how they defied the odds to create their own businesses and compose their own lives. Brought to you by the Women’s Wisdom Project on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Stitcher.

New York, New York

With the best and brightest women media and marketing mavens, founded a consulting group to work with both startups and big brands. For startups, the consortium brings its collective entrepreneurial know how to help women (and a few good men) bring their ideas to market and for second stage companies to grow their businesses to optimum potential. With big brands, WML puts a woman at the table to bring their voice, their needs into the product development and marketing so that money is not left on the table by forgetting the women, the primary consumer market.

Greater New York City Area

Advised and consulted with: Big Brands:Unilever: Worked on the legendary Dove Real Women campaign; the packaging and messaging for a new line for women 40-plus; the creation of an inaugural men’s lineCoty: Advised on the creation of an interactive educational tool to increase product salesP&G: Positioning and messaging for All’s newly introduced detergent podsTumi: Making Tumi the go-to luggage line for business women on the goABC News/Disney: Worked as advisor to the President of ABC News in making the turn from traditional television news to the importance of digital and mobile presentation of the news; helped create their first online Presidential election center; worked on the programming and positioning of GMA, during which it beat out the Today Show for the first time in decades.Start Ups: Advised and invested in portfolio of startups including Daily Skimm, Little Dish, Social Talk. Member of Plum Alley Investments: Investors in Female Innovation.

Greater New York City Area

The Web’s earliest and most successful online destination for women, where she served as founding President and Editor-in-Chief. Started in 1995 when less than 11% of the people online were women, iVillage led women online to a 51% share by the time of the company’s IPO, by creating the first original programming for the Web, fostering women’s desire to connect into what became known as the “community” paradigm, and landing the first blue chip multi-million dollar advertising deals by offering sponsors a chance to interact with the female market. iVillage was sold to NBCUniversal for $600mm. (The original iVillage logo was straightforward like real women are, not curly cue fem like the one NBC created.)

Greater New York City Area

With the birth of her daughter, Nancy noticed that the magazines for parents were white, old-fashioned, mom-centric and house-focused (like, where were sports?). That led to creating a new magazine for parents – mothers and fathers – that wasn’t dependent upon diaper ads. The target market was parents of children ages three to twelve, children who were walking and talking. After shopping it around, she went into a limited partnership with Jann Wenner because he could go faster to market than her old employer, Time, Inc. Although her prototype had been called Children’s Day, after focus groups, it was named Family Life. Persuading advertisers that had never set foot in a parenting magazine to enter its pages (Ralph Lauren was the first), Family Life had a revolutionary edit/advertising mix. Within the first year of publication, it was nominated for the National Magazine General Excellence Award by the American Magazine Publishers Association. Family Life was subsequently sold to Hachette.

Greater New York City Area

Arrived at one of the great American publishers at its nadir, when it was known for books whose spines broke on first reading and that infamously cut Steven King’s opus, The Stand because it was too big to fit into the company-owned printing presses. In turnaround mode, Nancy immediately put writers at the center of the operation, making their words what was most important and galvanized the sales force and art department to make Doubleday great again. ~ Convinced Stephen King to allow Doubleday to publish his opus as it was originally written by him, which immediately went to the top of the New York Times bestseller list. ~ With editor Jackie Onassis, convinced Bill Moyers that his phenomenally popular PBS interviews with Joseph Campbell, which remains one of the most popular series in the history of American public television, should be published in a large format, mirroring the great Man and His Symbols by Carl Jung, and in paperback, making something intellectual accessible in the tradition of The Whole Earth Catalog. The result was the bestseller The Power of Myth. Subsequently published two volumes of Moyers’ World of Ideas, both bestsellers.~ Also with Jackie, published Michael Jackson’s memoir, Moonwalk, which went to #1 on publication.~ Imagining Argentina, a first novel by Lawrence Thornton, won the Ernest Hemingway Award, demonstrating that Doubleday for its huge size was an incubator for first novel talent.During her tenure, Doubleday published 16 NYT bestsellers and persuaded agents to submit books to Doubleday when they had been crossed off their list. Oversaw Anchor Books trade paperbacks, created Currency, a business imprint, and brought on Nan A. Talese Books. Her departure after CEO Albert Vitale jumped ship to Random House made front page news in the business section of the New York Times, as her arrival made front page news in the Wall Street Journal.

Responsible for overseeing a staff of 40 to review and recommend from the 40,000 titles published each year those titles considered worthy of selection in BOMC. Led and oversaw a redesign of the BOMC News, the primary marketing vehicle; instituted a name change that any book selected be called a Selection and not the also-ran moniker of Alternate; launched the highly successful Children’s Book-of-the-Month Club to join the other specialty clubs (Fortune, Cooking); joined the esteemed Board of Judges, including Clifton Fadiman, Wilfrid Sheed and Mordecai Richler, to select the Main Selection. Increased sales by segmenting the market based on interests; attracting younger members; inviting member participation in making selections of their favorite books; offering higher price point books as the Main Selection; offering Main Selections that would feel good on a shelf without the guilt of not reading, therefore, no returns (for instance, an illustrated Bible; the AMA Family Guide, which we convinced Random House to republish).

Greater New York City Area

Served as Co-Host of the PBS television show “First Edition,” underwritten by Time, Inc.’s Book-of-the-Month Club, described by Variety “as to books what Sneak Previews is to films” and by The New York Times as “something very special; at the end of each half-hour, First Edition has a habit of making you wish there were more.” Nancy co-hosted with John Leonard, the former Editor in Chief of the New York Times Book Review and a daily NYT book reviewer, and together they interviewed the great authors of the twentieth century: John Updike, Saul Bellow, Joseph Heller, Norman Mailer, Toni Morrison, William Styron, among others.