Who are we?

My name is Liisa McCloy-Kelley.

In my professional life, I work for Penguin Random House in NYC as SVP, Director Ebook Development & Operations. I’ve worked in the publishing industry for more than 30 years and I’ve been delighted to be both a witness to and participant in an amazing evolutionary period for media as digital products, digital discovery and digital sales shift the way we think about and develop content for long-form reading.  I am responsible for leading folks who are working to redefine the reading experience on digital devices for a variety of content types and thousands of books annually.

I have great passion for what I do and a desire to help others both in my organization and our industry understand and embrace these changes. For 500 years, people have consumed information printed on paper pages and bound to spines. We have traditionally developed stories and content to fit into that framework and packaging. Now that is shifting, parts of it are shifting slowly and others very quickly as we rethink content delivery for phones, tablets, computers and many other devices. The decisions we make today in media companies will shape how information is developed and consumed digitally for either the next 5 years or the next 100. I’m thrilled that books haven’t gone the way of other digital shifts in media and that there will be a long life for printed books, audiobooks and ebooks. There is a physical pleasure that comes from reading print books that hasn’t been entirely improved by digital. But that brings challenges that keep us busy helping our authors bring amazing stories to readers in whatever form they want to read in.

All that to say, I have a pretty amazing job that can be both frustrating and rewarding and that I take really seriously. Beyond my day to day work, I also serve on the Steering Committee for Publishing@W3C (the World Wide Web Consortium) and co-chair the Publishing Business Group for W3C as well as participate in many industry standards efforts and teach and speak at a variety of venues including the Yale Publishing Course.

When I’m not working hard, I’m playing hard. In my personal life, my husband and I live in upstate NY in a crazy fantastic mid-century house perched amongst the trees on a hillside in a village on the Hudson River. I’m an avid gardener who is learning more and more about shade and moss gardening. We hike the mountains and trails in our area and often bike or kayak. I’m an insulin-dependent diabetic and a techno-geek who tries to use new technologies wherever I can to improve my life.

Tom Kelley is my husband. We’ve been married for more than 30 years. He is an avid musician, music lover, runner and bike aficionado. He works for New York Road Runners and heads up the Timing and Scoring Team who score the NYC Marathon and more than 50 other running events annually.

We have two cats and an adorable shih tzu named Ketu. Ketu is our second shih tzu and has proven to us that the love of an outdoor lifestyle is perhaps something inherent to the breed. He loves to camp and hike and bike and kayak and explore as much as we do. One of our motivations when we started camping many years ago was to find a way to vacation with the dog. Many people ask us if the Teardrop trailer is just for the dog and if you asked Ketu, he’d probably say that it is indeed his trailer. He certainly was thrilled to get the T@B and realize that camp life has a whole new direction.