Publishing has a habit of talking to itself.

That habit made sense for a long time. The industry was bigger, the supply chain was more contained, and the people doing similar jobs in adjacent fields were doing genuinely different work. None of that is true anymore. Marketing a book in 2026 has more in common with marketing anything else on the internet than it does with marketing a book in 2006. The tools, the channels, the discovery engines, the audience behavior. All of it is shared infrastructure now.

Which means the people working on the same problems are mostly not in publishing. They are content marketers, brand marketers, comms strategists, and editorial operators across consumer brands, B2B companies, agencies, healthcare, finance, and tech. They are running experiments that publishing isn’t running. Testing tools publishing hasn’t heard of. Solving problems six months before publishing knows it has them.

Staying sharp means being in those rooms.

One of the best rooms to be in is the Women in Content & Marketing Association.

WICMA, In Brief

The Women in Content & Marketing Association (WICMA), led by Executive Director Julie Hochheiser Ilkovich, started as an awards program in 2018 and has since grown into an Association of women across content and marketing. Started by Masthead, a women-founded content marketing agency, and is presented in partnership with the Content Marketing Institute.

WICMA is built on three pillars:

• Awards. The Women in Content & Marketing Awards (the WICMAs) honor exceptional work across categories that have grown with the industry. Current categories include Content Marketer of the Year, Content Marketing Program of the Year, Marketing Leader of the Year, Pivot, AI Innovator, Rising Star, and Freelance Excellence. The AI Innovator category, added in 2024, is itself a signal of where the conversation has moved.
• Community. A live membership community where women in content and marketing share ideas, ask questions, and trade resources. Discussion happens in a member Slack and across regular programming.
• WICMA Connect. An event series of expert-led discussions, workshops, and forums.

Why Publishing Should Care About a Content Marketing Association

Content marketing has always been part of publishing. We just don’t always call it that.

Backlist promotion, frontlist launches, author brand-building, audience development, newsletter strategy, SEO, social, podcast pitches, retailer co-op campaigns, library outreach. That is content marketing work. The publishing professionals doing it deserve access to the same toolkits, frameworks, and peer networks as the marketers running campaigns at consumer brands or agencies.

Two things happen when publishing marketers stay only inside publishing rooms:

• They benchmark themselves against an industry that is, on average, behind the curve. That makes “we’re doing okay” feel true when it actually isn’t.
• They miss the experiments that are already producing results elsewhere. AI tool testing, AEO and GEO optimization, custom GPTs for editorial planning, podcast-first content engines, audience research at scale. These are happening. Publishing tends to find out 18 months late.

The fix is simple: be in the rooms where people are talking about the work that is actually happening. WICMA is one of those rooms; full of women running content programs at companies whose problems are not identical to publishing’s, but rhyme with them so closely that the lessons port directly.

What Julie’s Session Showed: 25 Tools, 25 Weeks, Real Data

Julie Hochheiser Ilkovich, WICMA’s co-founder and executive director, brought a session to the Human-Aligned & Ethical AI in Book Publishing Summit that is a perfect example of what cross-industry rooms can do for publishing.

Through Masthead, Julie also co-founded the AI Marketing Innovation Council (AIMIC), a working group of senior marketers from across consumer brands, B2B companies, agencies, and content teams. The AIMIC was built to answer a question every marketer in 2025 was asking and most could not answer: in the sea of AI tools being released every week, which ones are actually worth using?

Their answer was a 25-tools-in-25-weeks project. The AIMIC selected and tested tools across the categories marketers actually need: research, writing, video, design, audio, presentations, sales enablement, meeting capture, image generation, and analytics. Each tool was scored on two dimensions: an overall tool score, and how likely the testers were to recommend it. Real marketers sharing real ranked results.

Here is what publishing professionals would walk out of that session with, ready to apply on Monday:

The Top 10 Tools, And Why They Matter for Publishing

These were the top performers from Julie’s presentation, in ranked order, with notes on why publishing teams should pay attention:

• Google Vids. Top-rated tool overall. AI-assisted video creation for social, internal, and high-production work. For publishing marketers building author videos, reel concepts, retailer pitch decks, or book trailer drafts, this is the kind of tool that collapses production cycles.

• ChatGPT Deep Research. Powerful for client and category research, with the caveat (as Julie noted) that LLMs hallucinate and outputs always need a human check. For publishing: comp title research, market positioning, audience segmentation, and competitive landscape work.

• ElevenLabs. Audio and voice. Text-to-speech, voice cloning, AI-generated podcast voices. For publishing, this connects directly to the ethics conversations around audiobooks and AI narration, but also to legitimate uses like sample audio, internal training, and accessibility prototypes.

• Napkin. A visual tool for turning text into infographics and charts. Useful for sales materials, internal reporting, and visual one-pagers.

• Copilot. Microsoft’s embedded LLM, scored well in testing. If your publisher is on Microsoft 365, this is already in your stack. Use it.

• Granola. AI meeting notes and transcription. Publishing teams running constant editorial, marketing, and acquisition meetings can recover hours per week from automated capture and follow-ups.

• Claude. Especially strong for uploading multiple documents and finding patterns across them. For publishing, that’s author questionnaire synthesis, manuscript briefing, jacket copy variations, and reading large reports without losing the thread.

• Loom. Video messaging and screen recording. Great for instructional content, internal explainers, and async communication. Especially useful for explaining marketing assets to authors and editorial teams without scheduling another meeting.

• Whisk. Fast AI image generation. A tool worth knowing exists, especially as image-generation continues to integrate into design and concepting work.

• Otter AI. Another meeting notes tool, with strong conversation-with-the-transcript features. Granola or Otter, pick the one your team will actually use.

Julie’s slide deck included consistent fields for every tool: cost, what it does, recommendation score, overall tool score, a positive note, and a critical note. That is the kind of structured comparison publishing rarely produces for itself. It is exactly the kind of artifact that comes out of a working group made up of practitioners across many industries, comparing notes on the same problem.

We’re Proud to Have WICMA as a Summit Partner

WICMA is a Supporting Partner of the Human-Aligned & Ethical AI in Publishing Summit.

Together, we make a stronger case for cross-pollination than either of us could alone. Publishing has things content marketers in other industries can learn from: long-form editorial craft, author relationships, decades-deep institutional memory about audience and category, etc. And content marketers in other industries have a tremendous amount publishing should be learning from in return.

We want publishing to stay sharp, and WICMA is a great place to start that honing.

How to Join WICMA

Join here: womenincontentmarketing.com/join-the-community

As a WICMA Community member, you can connect with members via the private Slack community, access to all WICMA Connect events (ranging from in-person happy hours to digital webinars and more), access to the WICMA Awards, and a network of women content marketers running campaigns at brands, agencies, and organizations across all industries. Including, increasingly, publishing.

If you market books, support marketing teams, run editorial content for a publisher, and want a space to talk with other women doing the same, you belong in this room.