Tandem Literary
Gretchen Koss and Meghan Walker have a combined total of nearly 70 years’ experience in book publishing. We have worked with debut authors and repeat bestsellers on nearly every kind of book imaginable—commercial and literary fiction and story collections; celebrity bios; memoirs; advice and self-help; and narrative non-fiction including history and politics. At a time when in-house staffs are shrinking and budgets are tight, we can give an author specialized attention and work collaboratively to tailor a campaign that complements the publisher’s plans and enhances a book’s visibility across a wide variety of platforms. We can be hired independently of one another—Meg for marketing and Gretchen for publicity—or as a team to work in tandem, building a completely integrated marketing and publicity campaign. Get in touch. We’re happy to tailor a plan to suit your needs.
Meghan Walker
Meghan Walker spent 17 years working in marketing roles in-house at major publishers. She was the Director of Marketing at Spiegel & Grau for three years when they were part of the Doubleday group at Random House, and for the nine years prior to that, she was second-in-command in the Putnam marketing department at Penguin. She got her start in 1992 in college textbook publishing at Prentice Hall (since renamed Pearson Education) where she worked in ad/promo for 6 years. Over her many fulfilling years in corporate publishing jobs, Meg crafted the national marketing campaigns for Suze Orman’s million-copy New York Times bestseller Women & Money, Artie Lange’s #1 New York Times bestseller Too Fat to Fish, Matt Taibbi’s New York Times bestseller The Great Derangement, and the mega-selling Clapton: The Autobiography by Eric Clapton on which she worked hand-in-hand with Warner Bros. Records to build a fully integrated campaign. While at Penguin, Meg worked on the Putnam, Riverhead, Tarcher, and Avery imprints including books by such authors as Patricia Cornwell, Tom Clancy, Nora Roberts, Clive Cussler, John Sandford, Sue Grafton, Robert B. Parker, Lance Armstrong, Khaled Hosseini, Nick Hornby, and George Saunders.
Since launching Tandem Literary in 2009, Meg has been the longtime personal Marketing Director for the NYT-bestselling authors Mary Kay Andrews, Patti Callahan Henry, and Nathaniel Philbrick. Since its inception in 2020, she has also served as the Managing Director of the popular online community, weekly web show, and podcast, Friends & Fiction. Meg has also built campaigns for David Wroblewski, Joshilyn Jackson, Allison Brennan, and John Searles, among many others. Together, Walker and Koss have paired up on successful campaigns for Jayne Ann Krentz, Megan Abbott, and Daniel Kraus, among many others.
The mother of two college graduates, she lives at the Jersey Shore where she was born and raised, with her husband Dave and a buddy-comedy duo of dogs.
Gretchen Koss
Gretchen Koss is a 36-year veteran of the book publishing industry. She began her career at Bantam Books after graduating from Boston University in 1990 and went on to hold publicity roles at Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Alfred A. Knopf, Viking Penguin, and Spiegel & Grau before co-founding Tandem Literary with Meghan Walker in 2009.
During her in-house career, she led publicity campaigns for numerous New York Times bestselling authors, including Terry McMillan, Nathaniel Philbrick, Melissa Bank, Mary Karr, A.M. Homes, Peggy Noonan, Robert Greene’s The 48 Laws of Power, Roddy Doyle, William Kennedy, Robert Pirsig, Andrew Weil, Carl Hiaasen, Maeve Binchy, Elmore Leonard, and Sharon Olds, as well as Suze Orman’s bestsellers Women & Money and The 2009 Action Plan, and Artie Lange’s #1 New York Times bestseller Too Fat to Fish.
At Tandem Literary, she has directed campaigns for many bestselling and notable titles, including Suze Orman’s The Ultimate Retirement Guide for 50+, Julie Clark’s The Last Flight, The Lies I Tell, and The Ghostwriter, Dorothea Benton Frank’s By Invitation Only and Queen Bee, Adriana Trigiani’s Tony’s Wife, I Have Been Buried Under Years of Dust by Valerie Gilpeer and Emily Grodin, The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons by Sam Kean, The Lives of Brian by Brian Johnson, Chris Elliott’s The Guy Under the Sheets, True Prep by Lisa Birnbach and Chip Kidd, Megan Abbott’s Dare Me, The Fever and El Dorado Drive, and Daniel Kraus’s Whalefall and Angel Down, among many others.
She lives just outside New York City with her family.