Meet Jenn T. Grace, Founder and CEO of Publish Your Purpose Press (PYP), a publishing company that gives underrepresented voices power and a stage to share their stories, speak their truth, and impact their communities.
Jenn T. Grace is an award-winning author with a focus on the LGBTQ+ market. Before PYP, she was a CEO and an LGBTQ+ Business Strategist, offering valuable counsel to business owners wanting to understand business etiquette around the LGBTQ+ community. She became an author in 2013, while running her consulting business, after hearing her clients’ feedback and finding that out the need for a specific book in her field of expertise When Jenn began writing her third book, people were curious about how she wrote and published her work. In order to explain her process to these curious minds, she started a group coaching program, the PYP Academy, which then lead her to founding her own publishing company, Publish Your Purpose Press. Although Jenn is occupied with telling the stories of others, she hints that she has a couple more books in the pipeline for the readers.
Jenn holds a bachelor’s degree in communication and advertising from Salem State University. She attended the Golden Gate University for her master’s in Integrated Marketing Communications. She is currently based in Connecticut, where PYP is headquartered. In addition to being a publisher and entrepreneur, she has a 12-year-old son who keeps her engaged most of the time. She likes to maintain a balance between her personal and professional life.
Publish Your Purpose Press has a focus on elevating and amplifying the voices of others. They offer the services to authors and upcoming authors both on the publishing side of the process, but also in helping authors get their ideas on paper and into a manuscript. PYP authors tend to be public and inspirational speakers as well, so PYP also focuses on how to get their authors’ messages out into the world.
On a scale from smooth to challenging, Jenn calls her professional journey a relatively smooth one. She follows her intuition and doesn’t concern herself much with the opinions of others, as her focus and mission is much bigger than she. When asked about the pandemic and how it impacted her and the business, Grace feels she is fortunate that it gave her an opportunity to take time and work on strategy. She was given the opportunity to reconfigure processes within her company and restructure to better meet need the needs of her clients. Moreover, she was able to focus on projects she has been wanting to do for a long time, but had been putting off.
Jenn’s key to success is believing in herself and having confidence in her own abilities. Her advice to others is, “Pave your own path. Don’t worry about what other people are doing. Don’t pay attention to the competition as everyone says you should. Just do your own thing and do what feels aligned and right for you both professionally and personally. We can have much more fulfilling lives if we focus on what we want to do and not on what others are telling us we should be doing.”