Linda Carlson has spent her career in marketing and the media. Her first book, The Publicity and Promotion Handbook: A Guide for Small Business (John Wiley, 1982), provided step-by-step how-to’s for businesses and nonprofits that wanted to handle marketing communications in-house. Her work with architectural firm promotion resulted in a case study published by the Harvard Business School (1980) and then in Services Marketing (Prentice Hall, 1984). She currently writes on book marketing topics for the Independent Book Publishers Association and consults to Seattle-area publishers.
She contributed to The New Writer's Handbook: A Practical Anthology of Best Advice for Your Craft and Career (Scarletta Press) and Calling All Authors: How to Publish with Your Eyes Wide Open (Nightengale Press), both published in 2007. Other recent publications include Internet Safety and Your Family (Parenting Press 2008) and a Dummies guide to digital book printing (edited for the Book Industry Study Group and John Wiley, 2009).
Carlson began serving as the Harvard Business School’s Seattle-area career adviser in the mid-1980s, a volunteer position that led to nine job-search guides published between 1990 and 1998, weekly Q & A newspaper columns and frequent presentations on career topics. She taught sales and sales management at the University of Puget Sound in the mid-1980s and led job-search workshops at Puget Sound-area community and technical colleges in the 1990s.
Her background in forest products resulted in Company Towns of the Pacific Northwest (University of Washington Press, 2003). A finalist for the Washington State Book Award and the basis for Carlson’s presentations through the Humanities Washington speakers bureau, it has been quoted in New York Times, USA Today and International Herald Tribune articles regarding company towns and timber communities. Company Towns was also the basis for Carlson's interview by CNN and the London Daily Telegraph. "Home," a 2010 documentary about Valsetz, a long-lived timber community in the Oregon Coast range, quotes Carlson extensively.
As an avocation, Carlson creates note cards. Many feature vintage ads and brief histories of now-defunct Seattle businesses and the long-ago publications in which the ads appeared. Other cards use vintage Northwest maps and early twentieth century images of Norwegian relatives and early-day immigrants to the Puget Sound area.
A native of the Pacific Northwest, Carlson is a graduate of Washington State University’s journalism program and the Harvard Business School.
January 2012