Ayesha Curry Adds Book Publishing To Sweet July Brand Through New Partnership

Ayesha Curry wears many hats as an entrepreneur, mom, wife, producer, chef, host and author. However, after noticing disparities between women of color and their white counterparts as writers, she decided to add another hat: book publishing.

In an exclusive interview, Curry told Forbes that she recently notched a deal with upstart book publishing company Zando to publish books under the Sweet July Books imprint, or publishing trade name. Founded in 2020, Zando specializes in partnering with influential creators and organizations to discover and publish titles under their own imprints. Its partner roster includes Lena Waithe, John Legend, Sarah Jessica Parker and The Atlantic.

Curry said her publishing focus will be on four Fs: faith, family, food and female empowerment. Sweet July Books has a revenue sharing agreement with Zando, but the companies declined to disclose the terms. And she’ll emphasize giving writers of color a platform in an industry where 76% of publishing staff, reviewers and literary staff are white, according to one study.

“It’s insane and it certainly lights a fire within me,” Curry told Forbes in a phone interview. “I think that was also what was exciting for us going into this partnership with Zando, was the ability to kind of shift those metrics even if it’s a little bit.”

Molly Stern, Zando’s CEO, has been in the publishing industry for more than 20 years, including as a senior executive at Crown Publishing Group where she worked on titles including Michelle Obama’s memoir Becoming. Stern founded the company in the months following the 2020 murder of George Floyd, as protests about racial inequities touched sectors including the publishing industry.

Stern said she has had a front row seat to some of those inequities–such as seeing publishing companies hire a Black editor, but there were “50 people behind them who [were] not a diverse set of hands touching a book,” she said.

“One of the things that felt very important to me was to build a company that reflected the world as it is, and that's diverse,” Stern said. “That's about highlighting and empowering a huge range of people, which required independence.”

For Stern, the partnership with Curry was a no-brainer. The content that she plans to bring to the publishing house under the self-help genre is different from the content that the company currently has, which consists of fiction, young adult and mystery books. Stern said Curry’s ability to “communicate the things she cares about in a very entrepreneurial and powerful way,” makes Curry a dream partner for Zando.

Sweet July Books is the newest addition to the Sweet July brand. The company, which started out as a quarterly magazine, has branched into various businesses. It sells home decor, kitchenware, apparel and beauty products through its online and in-person store and has a monthly subscription service of lifestyle products.

According to Curry, the Sweet July name holds sentimental value as a lot of important events take place in the month, such as her wedding anniversary with four-time NBA champion Stephen Curry and all three of their children’s birthdays.

As the leader of Sweet July Books, Curry plans to be hands-on in the publishing process, from the acquisition stage to release and marketing. The plan is to release around four books a year, prioritizing quality over quantity.

“The goal here really is to tell quality stories full of meaning,” Curry said. “Stuff that’s going to make you feel good or maybe it's going to make you feel not great at all, but you're going to come out of it feeling amazing because you'll have learned something, or you'll have had a breakthrough through the pages of some of these books we're gonna publish.”