Inside Books That Make You: Desiree Duffy On Community, AI, And The Modern Author Journey

The modern author faces many hurdles these days just to get one book to publishing stage. Aside from the usual editing process, they must know how to navigate the world of marketing, vastly transformed by the ever-evolving digital landscape. Desiree Duffy is here to share how she helps aspiring authors make their stories known to a larger audience through expansive marketing, event production, and broadcasting. She discusses how to employ powerful storytelling to promote your books and why DIY publishing is not for everyone. Desiree also talks about the inevitable role of AI in writing and editing books, changing the authorship experience forever.

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Watch the episode here

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Inside Books That Make You: Desiree Duffy On Community, AI, And The Modern Author Journey

This is going to be a great episode. We have Desiree Duffy from Books That Make You and Black Chateau. She is also the Leader and Founder of The BookFest, which is a big event every year. They’re going to have it, I believe, at the end of October 2025. Great interview. Before we get started, I just want to remind you that we have our event. This event will be with Kris Johnson and she’s going to be talking about putting together your grand manuscript. If you’ve been thinking about writing a book but haven’t pulled the trigger, this is going to be the Pre-Game Show. What do you need to get in place to get that book out there? You can go over to BAMagTraining.com and get yourself a spot for it.

If you guys haven’t been there before for these types of trainings, they are interactive. They’re fabulous because you actually get to be a part of not only the Promote Profit Publish episode, but you get to interact with the person who’s doing the training, which I think, quite honestly, a lot of times we can follow instructions, but it’s nice to be able to ask questions and get answers in real time.

Desiree Duffy is an advocate for spreading stories. By that, I mean storytelling, not gossip. Her expansive marketing event production, broadcast and public relations background, mixed with her passion for storytelling, led her to found the multi-award-winning full-service marketing and public relations firm Black Chateau in 2016, Books That Make You in 2018 and The BookFest in 2020. She’s the Executive Producer for events, including The BookFest, the annual Beach-Bound Book Bash and Jingle Books, and was the licensed holder and lead organizer for TedXResedaBlvd in 2019.

She Hosts and is the Executive Producer of the Books That Make You Show, which I was on. It’s fabulous. If you’re an author, you should definitely should be watching her show or listening. She’s programmed panels and play speaker for a wide range of writers, conferences and organizations, including the Alliance for Women in Media, Digital Hollywood, The Paley Center for Media, IWOSC, LosCon, the Twin Cities Book Festival, Women in Business, WriterCon and others.

Duffy is a member of the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences, on the Board of Directors for Writers and Publishers Network, the past president and advisory board member of the Alliance for Women and Media in Southern California and a member of the Los Angeles chapter of the Women’s National Book Association. Black Chateau holds corporate memberships with the Horror Writers Association and the Independent Book Publishers Association.

She’s a graduate of Marian University and Santa Clarita College of the Canyons. I used to live in Santa Clarita. She holds a Bachelor of Science degree in English and Communication and an Associate degree in Art and Marketing and certificates in eCommerce business and entrepreneurship. Desiree Duffy spends her time between Southern California, Oklahoma, and everywhere bookish events and book lovers can be found around the world. You guys are really going to love this, so stay tuned.

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Desiree, welcome. It’s so great to have you.

Thank you for having me. I’m excited.

Book Promotions & Content Strategies

Guys, you have no idea. I was introduced to this woman by my friend Jackie Jordan, and she does so much stuff and knows so much about this industry. I think you’re all going to be super excited about this. Let’s jump into this. What inspired you to start Books That Make You, and what was your vision for the whole platform?

Books That Make You started as this place that we could have content and articles about writing, authors and books. It’s really for those who have a love of books, bibliophiles and all their many various shapes and forms. In many cases, that includes writers, authors because if you write books, you should be reading books, at least in my opinion.

There’s something special. I think a lot of us who love books and carry that all the way through our lives. We just know that sensation of holding a book and reading a book, making books our friends. It was really just designed and that’s where the name came from. Books that make you what? Afraid, excited, hungry. There are so many things that books make us do. It’s all about underneath it, all the feeling that books give us inside.

I love that you said that feeling because it’s not just the content of the book. There’s so much going on with, am I going to listen to the book? Am I going to hold the book? Am I going to do it electronic? People have such big opinions about all of it too.

They really do.

How do you select which authors and books to feature on your site and your show, which I didn’t mention, you also have a show with the same name.

Books That Make You as a brand has the Books That Make You Show. By the way, so folks know, Juliet is a guest on the Books That Make You Show. I’m not exactly sure off the top of my head when that episode is coming up, but it’s soon. We interview authors and talk about books, obviously. We do a lot of events with Books That Make You too.

For example, the LA Times Festival of Books, Books That Make You is there every year with a tent. We have authors who are there doing in booth signings and we do promotions all around that. We have, like I mentioned earlier, a lot of content articles about books, listicles about books. We feel that the listicle as a type of format or letting people know the ten best books to bring to the beach this summer, or the best books to buy dad for Father’s Day, those types of listicles.

We promote not only on the site where they live, but then we also promote them far and wide on other websites as well. Plus, there are other things. We do author Q&A style interviews, the written interviews, we do book reviews and we even give special hearted distinctions to books that are of the upper echelon, like the top 10% of books. The whole idea there is for the readers, it helps readers discover new books to read. There’s a lot that we do with Books That Make You, because underneath it all, it’s all about having the reader and the writer community come together.

I love your listicles idea. I was talking to one of my business partners after you and I talked about listicles and we’re like, “What a great place for impulse buyers who don’t know what to get that dad who has everything, for Christmas, that person who has everything. It really supports that impulse buy that my partner and I have been talking a lot about lately. How do we capture those people as gifts, because it seems like the marketing community has forgotten them with all of that. What do you hope that readers take away from Books That Make You? I love your focus on readers.

Empowering Authors To Promote Books

We’ve had this conversation on the side because we both work with authors in various ways, shapes and forms. It’s interesting because when you talk to an author about promoting their book, you give them the platform to do that, whether it be in an article or on a virtual stage. We do events again with Books That Make You, we do Beach-Bound Book Bash, where authors talk about their books.

I also founded The BookFest, where authors can talk about their books to other readers. This thing happens with writers, and I think it’s because the industry has trained them and shown them because they themselves have learned from other authors. They probably saw authors speak on a panel about writing their first page, and they’ve heard editors talk about how to develop characters better. They’ve heard marketers talk about how to promote your books.

The first thing that they want to do when you say, “I’m going to put you up on a stage and you can talk about your books.” They don’t think in terms of, I’m talking to the readers, they want to basically preach to the choir, if you are familiar with the saying. They want to talk to other authors. It’s like a mind shift, I think, that many authors should highly consider. I’m not saying you shouldn’t be talking to other authors, and that’s one of the things that’s great about the writing community. There’s a lot of helping the ones that are just starting out. Once you get to that level and you’ve released the book or books, think about what is the message of your book? What can you say to the reader?

You are also selling and promoting your own book and your own writing. If you’re telling other authors how to craft their characters and what they need to do to publish their book, you’re not really speaking to the readers. That distinction is almost like a paradigm shift in the way some authors should be thinking about their books. That’s one of the things that we do with Books That Make You. The reader, the ones who love reading, giving them the chance to explore and experience books in so many ways.

I feel like the rise of the experts contributed to this because now you can write a book, you become an influencer, you’re doing all these stage appearances, and suddenly it becomes about you and your influence instead of the people that are reading the book. I think there’s been a lot of that that’s happened along the way. I actually remember being on an interview with an author and I just smack her a little bit. I would ask her questions and she kept saying, “Read the book to find out.” I’m like, “If you keep saying that, they’re not going to read the book.” It was just a weird answer. She needed a good PR firm to tell her, “You don’t say that. You answer the question.”

Challenges Of Discussing Books

Exactly. I’ve talked to authors, too, and everybody has heard or seen that interview, too, and it’s like, “Don’t be that author or that guest.” It’s okay to maybe say it once, especially if you have something that really needs to be teased out and understood in your book. “In my book, I have the 10 steps to do X, Y, Z.” Well, then you probably need to read the book if you’re doing a ten-minute interview. Yeah, to your point, that’s exactly it. A lot of authors don’t know how to speak about their books and the ideas.

If it’s a nonfiction book, Juliet, those authors got it easy. It can be really hard to speak about their book in a way that the average person is going to understand because they tend to get a little bit caught up in theme and characters and world building and all of those types of things. Yeah, I love nonfiction books because so many times, the nonfiction book, especially if it’s business, you talk about the rise of the influencer, self-help or even some memoirs, especially if there’s sneaky memoirs, they’re offering something, you’re already giving advice or tips or things that people can use. I’m on your side. People need to lean into that a lot when they’re talking about their books.

Yeah, they do. One of the books I really felt did the reader thing really well was a Building A StoryBrand because it was like, “Here’s how we do it.’ It wasn’t all about him, but here are the exercises that you can engage in. I always love that thing. Can you share the memorable moments or a standout interview from Books That Make You, something that just blew you away? As a podcaster, we have those moments where we get these unexpected nuggets that are so valuable.

Insightful Author Interview Highlights

The first thing that comes to mind, he was such a sweetheart. Justin Baldoni. I interviewed him. His book is called Man Enough and it a great book. As somebody who interviews authors, if you’ve ever looked at the chapter headlines and tried to pull some questions and quotes for your interview, they were written so well, he did the book so well and his points and his messaging was spot on.

He was not only fun, but just informative. He really understood what it took to write a good book to deliver that information. To your point we were just making right now, when I was asking him questions, he was just giving me so many nuggets and so much information that I think not only men, because this book is written for men with the idea, are you man enough, but it was really insightful as a woman, as a person of any gender to read it. He just had so much wonderful things going on.

Now when I see him in the unfortunate spotlight that’s happening right now, this is the first one that came to mind, I didn’t mean to pull up some pop culture stuff like that, but it is. You get a sense when you talk to somebody and I just got such good guide vibes from him. Yeah, that’s the first one that came to mind.

Isn’t that interesting? And you know what, I refuse to watch that. I don’t know why. There’s something about that story that doesn’t make sense and I refuse to follow it. I’m one of those. I used to sell high-end real estate in LA so I am so unimpressed by those people. Many of them are not impressive.

Exactly. I hear you.

You know that I used to live in LA as well. How do you think Books That Make You helps foster a sense of community? When I look at your site, when I see everything’s going on, I can feel that community shining through and that is rare that you can feel that from a website.

Thank you. That’s a high compliment. That’s exactly the intention behind it. It’s making everybody feel warm and welcome and part of that community. We do that on social media a lot. It’s inclusive and it’s interactive. Even just a couple of hours before I was doing, getting ready for this interview, talking with the team, because one of our events is coming up and we were talking about what kind of games can we do, what kind of interactive type stuff can we do on social media that supports the event?

Sometimes we’ll do like polls and questions. We like to do a lot of giveaways. On the Books That Make You site, we always have at least one giveaway going at any given time. When we do an event like the Beach-Bound Book Bash for example or Jingle Books, we have several that we do throughout the year, there’s usually a giveaway that’s attached to that.

The authors go up on the virtual stage, they’re talking about their books or exploring those themes or at an event. Behind the scenes, there’s a giveaway that’s associated with it, too. It’s not just one thing here or there. Everything is interconnected. I think that helps build that community. We also do a newsletter. I got my little guy back here. This is the Webby award that we won for the Books That Make You newsletter. Every month, we send out the newsletter and it’s a recap of authors from the Books That Make You show. It’s giveaways, it’s book reviews. It’s basically consolidating into one nice, fast, easy-to-read newsletter so people always feel connected and part of the community.

Yeah, you guys have done a great job with that. The website’s adorable too. You can tell it’s about storytelling versus mine that’s just here’s the publishing stuff and here are the things, here’s the content. I could use your services, making that more user-friendly. What trends and changes have you observed in the book industry since launching Books That Make You? How long have you guys been in business?

Since 2018.

You’ve seen a lot. I’ve been since 2010 and it’s enormous changes. What have you seen since 2018 that has been a real game changer for authors?

AI’s Impact On Authors

I think I have to call out the elephant in the room. In recent years, artificial intelligence has really sideswiped, I think, the industry in a lot of different ways. From the author point of view, I don’t think anybody would’ve predicted just a few years ago that large language models ChatGPT, etc., could write and be as creative as they are. I think there’s a lot to unpack there without going into too much detail.

We’re starting to see, from the consumer side, people recognize AI slop already. I think there was this moment of the robots are coming to take our jobs because the writers all thought they’d be coming to take over the manual labor jobs first to wait a second, in many ways, it’s elevating authors. If a writer is relying too much on AI to write their book for them or to do too much for them, it shows that storytelling voice that AI has tends to have a lot of sameness to it.

I think from the point of view of authors and just what I’ve seen over the last few years, is how AI has come in, disrupted, shaken everybody up. Now it’s almost like we can get beyond this because nothing beats a story that’s authentically told from inside the skin of a real person, because we know when it’s not authentic. We can feel that and see that now. I think that’s good news for authors who might have become a little bit disillusioned or frustrated or have anxiety about being replaced by the robot, because I think ultimately, it’s helping elevate our storytelling, not replacing us.

Yes, I would agree with that. In fact, my son told me that he’s using it but he’s using it to clean up grammar and spelling because he is not a great writer, but he’s a good storyteller and he’s found that very useful and I actually see the improvement within his manuscript with that. There’s the other side where people write whole books and they’re just so boring because there’s no oneness.

There’s no uniqueness. It’s boring. I guess that’s the best way to put it. I actually tried using one of those programs to just play around with it and I was disappointed because I had a story arc in mind and it completely changed my story arc and I thought it made it boring from where it was supposed to be. I don’t think you can rely on those programs and just have a once-through and that’s your book.

Definitely not. It’s derivative. We all know what derivative storytelling is. Take romance, for example, because yeah, you could have ChatGPT write a romance novel for you, but it’s going to have that feeling of, “This is boring because it’s all the tropes, all of the things we’ve heard before.” There’s no originality there and that’s why I think you need the human component to it. Being from LA originally, I think we both understand the entertainment industry and the literary industry, too. There is a certain amount of, “Your book needs to have this structure, the three-act structure, the beats. It needs to save the cat. It needs to have even screenwriting. It needs to have this certain format. We became so rigid in that format type of storytelling that the human component wasn’t shining.

A format, a structure, a beat sheet, those types of things can be helped with AI. Some of the things that were really hard for writers, they can lean on AI to help and then if they’re willing and able to put in, like you were talking about your son and his storytelling chops. Take your own storytelling chops, layer that over, use AI to assist you and to maybe give you some structure.

Editing Evolution With AI Feedback

To your point, if you need some help just formulating the sentences and the structure and the grammar and stuff like that, I hate to say it, but a lot of the copy editors and developmental editors and line editors out there, they’re the ones that actually are a little bit more on the chopping block because that author can, in almost real time, get that feedback they need. “Is this scene working? Wait, should this be structured differently? Can you take a pass at it and give it a nice line edit and copy edit for me?”

It’ll do that. Now I’m going to start getting the hate emails, but I’m not saying that copy editors and the editing community should be replaced, but I think it’s going to be able to elevate that manuscript even further because that’s something we’ve been telling writers for a long time. Get it to a certain stage before you even show it to those editors or before you even shop around for an agent or a publisher.

I think authors now can do that a lot faster and they’re still doing it in the way that they want. We’ve all heard the stories of authors who went to a developmental editor and that developmental editor might not have synced with them and they changed their voice or they changed things so much that then the author didn’t feel connected to their own work. I think, honestly, that if an author uses AI quickly and the right way as a tool, that it will help elevate their voice rather than bury it.

Show Vs. Tell In Writing

Yes, I think so too. The other thing about that is what I noticed with Tyler’s writing is he’s always had a difficult grasp with show versus tell. He actually said, “When it rewrites, I’m learning. Now I’m seeing what it should look like. I’m starting to try to write more in that vein,” which I think that is probably one of the most difficult things that we encounter with writing. I know it’s one of the things in my first couple books, which is horrible with it.

When it comes to the copy editors, our last two fiction novels that have come back, the complaints have been that there has not been enough detail and we’ve gotten that complaint. The copy editor took a lot of the detail out and people are like, “I’m not following the story as well as I used to.” You know what’s interesting, the Hollywood connection. I don’t know if you feel the same way, but those rigid rules have limited what we see out there.

I’m really excited to see people like Michael Connolly. Tony Hillerman. I don’t even know if he’s alive anymore, but his books were fantastic. Colleen Hoover. We’re really starting to see some new stories come into the marketplace from authors that are very good and have new stuff. I think that’s where Hollywood was getting old. They’re just recycling.

Yeah, exactly because I wanted the same thing over and over again, because I knew it would sell and it was like so formulaic and we’ve heard that before. Give me high concept. Give me a retelling of a story everybody’s heard or characters they already know. Bring them back to universes they’ve already been in before. I think you’re right. I think it gives readers, writers, people who love story, in general, so many more options nowadays.

Yeah, it really does. It’s like we had a conversation before about when traditional publishing broke off. The result was traditional publishing didn’t like it, but we got all these new amazing genres that were not mass market produced. I think that was really lovely because you can get really granular when you choose a book now.

Yeah, exactly. I think that’s one of the things too. You’re nailing it. These are some of the opportunities that now exist out there. If you want to write mermaid meets werewolf romance based in outer space, there’s a sub-genre for that. You can tick the boxes of things that you like. If you’re a reader, you can go down that rabbit hole with some of the writers that are getting very niche like that. Again, you’re getting away from that high concept, “Everybody’s going to love this story because it’s so universal,” to the stuff that really gets into the nitty gritty of things. You’re exactly right.

DIY Publishing: Not for Everyone

I’m going to ask you this because people don’t realize how challenging this industry is. What are some of the big biggest challenges you faced at growing this company? Everybody looks at publishing, they self-publish a book and they go, “I can be a publisher now and I can market a book now.” It’s not easy. We were talking before about you’ve got to be tough as nails in this industry. What are some of the things that you had to overcome when you started this?

That’s still happening and I feel it with Books That Make You, as well as Black Chateau and The BookFest. I’ve got three brands and they’re all in the industry and they all do something a little bit different, but I think there’s a lot of, “I heard that this thing is what I should be doing.” There are a lot of authors and industry folks who want to go chasing after those trends. It’s almost like a game of whack-a-mole, trying to decide what it is you should be doing and focusing on.

I mean this in the sense of, for example, social media. There are a lot of folks out there who will tell you, “You must be on social media no matter what. You have to be posting three times a day and doing this and creating this whole thing on social media.” I’d see these poor authors struggling to become a dancing author on TikTok because they were told that’s what they’re supposed to do.

Whether it’s that or they were told that it’s easy to do your own keyword research on Amazon and find your own comp titles and do your own metadata. There are so many things out there that you could do yourself. There are some very unique unicorns out there, authors who can do it all, but they’re unicorns because that is so incredibly rare.

I think that the industry does a bit of a disservice to authors in trying to tell them that they can do stuff that maybe they honestly just can’t or they don’t want to do. I’ve worked with authors who were with a crew of folks who were all do-it-yourselfers. They were the authorpreneur crowd and they’re a great crowd, but this author was like, “I don’t want to do all of those things. I want somebody else to do those things for me or to help me.”

I think there’s a sense of I need to listen to what everybody is saying and I need to do that thing because that’s how I succeed, when the reality is one should be very particular and pick out the things that they can do that they want to do. It goes back to what their goals are in releasing this book. Not all authors have the same goals, not even by a long shot. If your goal is to be an entrepreneur or your goal is to launch your book don’t fit with those entrepreneurs, you’re going to be at odds. You’re going to get frustrated and disillusioned and feel like the industry has let you down.

I get a lot of feedback from people that have been published like, “Nobody told me it was this hard.” I think part of that is you’re walking into a whole new industry. Your expertise may be finance, and then you walk into the book industry and you expect you’re going to know everything about a particular industry in about six months.

I did this with somebody who’s in the financial world, like, “I want to understand this.” Returns are going to take me a day and a half to explain to you and you probably still won’t get it. I’ll put it this way, if you came to me and said, “Juliet, can you build me a bridge?” I could probably build you a bridge, but I don’t think I would guarantee that you drive over it because I don’t have, I don’t understand, I don’t do physics.

There are all these little ins and outs that you can tell if the author has been professionally published or not. I get that all the time too. I can take one look at your book when you bring it after publishing and say you self-published. They don’t understand that there are things missing that tell me that right off the bat.

Self-Publishing: Define Your Goals

Yeah, I’m with you on that. All those little red flags, it’s like, “Wait, you don’t have any front matter.” Stuff like that, you can just tell and yeah, unfortunately, you’re right. If you want to hire somebody to build you a bridge, then find that expert because they’re going to make sure it has everything up to code that it needs to be. There are folks out there who just want to self-publish a book just to get it out there because maybe they want it for a legacy, something for their family, and that’s fine too. I think that goes back to the goals. Do you want to be a prolific author and publish 2 or 3 books a year or is this your one and only opens that you just need to get the story out there?

Is it a book that’s going to help build up your business? Is the goal behind it establishing yourself as a thought leader in your industry or maybe you’re selling courses or something else? Again, it just goes back to what your goals are in doing it? In all of those things you need to do from the actual technicalities of self-publishing, the metadata and the layout and the cover design to the marketing and the promotion and the PR, all of those things can then fall into place once the goal is established.

Okay, last question. What advice would you give to aspiring authors who want to be featured on Books That Make You?

Why Your Book Stands Out

I get this question a lot, “What can I do to ensure that my marketing and PR is successful?” I say, “Write a good book.” If the book is good, you’re halfway there. You might appreciate this or not appreciate it. I’ve actually had folks come to me and say, “There’s books that are on the market that really suck. It’s all about the marketing. I know my book isn’t that great, can your marketing and PR help me get there?” To that I say, “No.” I mean there are a few flashes in the pans and opinions vary. Everybody has their own opinion. Don’t discount a book just because it’s not written the way you would do it.

I would say that if your book is good, if it’s got something to it, that je ne sais quoi that is going to pull in readers, it might be because it follows a lot of the romance tropes and you’re in the romance genre, but you gave it a new spin and people are going to love it. It might be because there’s a message behind it. Think about when the book The Secret came out, what is the secret? Everybody had to know what the secret is.

Does it have an interesting hook to it? Is it something we haven’t seen before? In writing a really good book, it makes you pitchable not only to Books That Make You and the Books That Make You family of brands and the show, but to everybody else that’s out there. If somebody is going to have you up on their stage, maybe speak on a panel or do a podcast with you, talk to you about your books, maybe even it’s just at your local farmer’s market or your own book signing at your local bookstore, people are asking why you, why this author, why this book?

Why should I buy it? Why should I talk to them? Why should I listen to them? When you think in terms of, “Yeah, why my book? Why me? Why am I a perfect fit for this?” Answer that question and that’s going to get you farther than if you’re just, “Look at me. I wrote a book. Talk to me about my book,” and you send a bio that only has information that doesn’t explain why.

Now that’s the big picture stuff, but if somebody wants to pitch themself for the Books That Make You Show or do Books That Make You promotions with us, we do book advertising and we do book reviews, editorial style reviews. You can find that on the Books That Make You website or just drop me an email if you want some more information or you want to pitch yourself for the show. I’m happy to talk to you about it.

That was a great segue. Where do we find you?

I like the way you set that up, Juliet. If you go to the Books That Make You website and you hit Contact Us, the same thing with Black Chateau. Black Chateau Enterprises is like the parent company. Black Chateau is the PR marketing firm underneath Books That Make You and The BookFest is underneath too. You can always go to the Black Chateau Enterprises website, where it says, Talk To Us or Contact Us. Those emails, by the way, don’t go into some crazy barrel somewhere that’s forgotten. I actually see those personally myself. That’s probably the best way to get in touch with me.

Gratitude Exchange

That’s very cool. You guys, you’ll be happy to know, after so much information here, that Desiree’s going to become a good contributor with her blogs for the magazine. You’re going to see a lot more of her and she has such a diverse group of product offerings. They’re so much different than what we have. There’s room for everybody in this industry and that’s what makes it so unique. Desiree, thank you.

My pleasure. Thank you, Juliet.

Important Links

• Books That Make You
• Black Chateau
• The BookFest
• Superbrand Publishing Monthly Training (BAMag Training)
• Books That Make You Show
• Building A StoryBrand
• Man Enough
• The Secret

About Desiree Duffy

Duffy is an advocate for spreading stories. Her expansive marketing, event production, broadcast, and public relations background, mixed with her passion for storytelling, led her to found the multi-award-winning, full-service marketing and public relations firm Black Château in 2016, Books That Make You in 2018, and The BookFest® in 2020.

She is the executive producer for events including The BookFest®, the annual Beach-Bound Book Bash, Jingle Books, and was the license-holder and lead organizer for TEDxResedaBlvd in 2019. She hosts and is the executive producer for the Books That Make You Show. She has programed panels and placed speakers for a wide array of writers’ conferences and organizations including: the Alliance for Women in Media, Digital Hollywood, The Paley Center for Media, IWOSC, LosCon, the Twin Cities Book Festival, Women in Business, WriterCon, and others.

Duffy is a member of the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences (IADAS); on the board of directors for the Writers and Publishers Network; past-president and advisory board member of the Alliance for Women in Media in Southern California; and member of the Los Angeles chapter of the Women’s National Book Association. Black Château holds corporate memberships with the Horror Writers Association (HWA) and the Independent Book Publishers Association (IBPA).

Duffy is a graduate of Marian University and Santa Clarita’s College of the Canyons. She holds Bachelor of Science degrees in English and communication, and an associate degree in art and in marketing, and certificates in ecommerce business and entrepreneurship. Desireé Duffy spends her time between Southern California, Oklahoma, and everywhere bookish events and booklovers can be found around the world.

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