Mary McCarty
Creative Director, Creative and Strategy Development

Life Before Accurance

In 2015, Mary McCarty joined the Accurance/ Publish Wholesale teams as Creative Director. Before she joined our team, her 30-year career began with Sunrise Greetings, a ground breaking greeting card company founded in Bloomington, Indiana in the early 1980’s. When Mary joined Sunrise in 1986, they had just signed an artist that was to change the face of greeting cards forever. Mary Engelbreit’s meteoric rise in social expression, fashion and book and magazine publishing was nothing short of exhilarating and unique in the industry. Thus began a decade of non-stop growth for Mary’s career, and certainly for Sunrise Greetings.

Mary began at Sunrise in various sales roles - ultimately as Midwest regional sales manager. She was then called inside to try her hand at Product Development. Laurel Burch was the first artist Mary took on with the development of the “Laurel Burch Paper Company” which hit the show floor of the National Stationary Show at the Javits Center in NYC in 1994, and won “Most Innovative and Conceptually Beautiful Booth” of the show. Following this, Mary was asked to take on Product Development and Innovation which she did until she was finally named Creative Director in 1998.

Soon thereafter, industry giant “Hallmark Cards” saw the benefit of acquiring this fresh and vibrant emerging card brand and purchased Sunrise in 1999, which created another huge change for Mary’s career path. Mary worked for “Sunrise/Hallmark Cards” as their Creative Director, a position which increasingly involved conducting trend research and collaborating on creative strategies with several other Hallmark divisions. In this capacity, she covered the most influential trade shows that inform multiple manufacturers on current and directional trends in design, color, lifestyle and brands.

 

Life Abroad

Over the course of her spectacular career, Mary flew, drove, and trained at trade shows all around the world. Her adventures took her to Germany, France, Hong Kong, Italy, and more. She also served as the creative liaison and collaboration consultant to Hallmark subsidiaries such as Binney and Smith, Snapfish, Dayspring (Christian Greetings) Ensemble Gifts, and Greenwich Workshop, and ultimately acted as Creative Strategies Director for 7 different divisions of Hallmark.

Mary’s experiences travelling the world (most often alone), have given her great faith and love for humankind. In one of her adventures, she travelled to China, where she and her team had become quasi-superstars. One of the girls that travelled with them was six feet tall with long red hair which was quite a rarity. She attracted the attention of the people in one remote city they had driven seven hours to get to. They were the talk of the town and they often found themselves followed around by little children and other legions of people.

One thing Mary discovered quickly while there, was that their privacy and bathroom situations were quite different compared to the States. The locals kindly made her a sort of bathroom, which was basically just a folding chair with a hole cut out in the middle of it. When she went to use it, she ended up falling straight through it and with nothing to hold on to, she had to sit there yelling for help. The “door” to the bathroom was just an opening which turned out to be facing right towards their busiest street.

A woman heard her pleas and came to help her. In order to help make it more private for her, the woman gave her an umbrella to use as a makeshift door. That was an experience Mary will always remember, both for its comedic value, but also for how gracious and lovely that lady was for trying to help make her experience better.

On a train trip from Paris to Milan, part way through a three-week tour, Mary was reminded again of the kindness of the human spirit. When she boarded the train, she was very tired, had made her reservations online, and hadn’t realized that her room was only big enough for her and her purse. She couldn’t even get her luggage to fit, so she ended up having to sit awkwardly inside her room while holding her luggage in the aisle. At first, the train attendant was slightly angry, but then he decided to take care of her bag for her and told her to get inside of her room, just close her eyes, and not worry about anything. Later, because she looked like she had a rough day, he brought her a glass of champagne, crackers, cheese, and grapes.

It is the kindness of strangers and those extreme experiences that help drive Mary’s creative spirit. Inspiration comes from everywhere (yes, including sitting in a hole with her pants down). It’s that drive and her thirty years of experience that made her the perfect fit for Accurance.

 

Life at Accurance

At Accurance, Mary has been doing amazing work.

As Creative Director, one responsibility Mary has is that of author liaison for cover and page design, where she translates author’s visions into creative briefs for her design team. Additionally, Mary works with publishers on brand development and trade dress, and she also keeps illustrators and designers up to date on trends in design, color and motifs/themes in cover design.

Being the Creative Director for Accurance isn’t always so cut and dried. Mary’s ‘eye’ for trends and for what is hot, informs her guidance of her clients and artists. Whether readers will admit it or not, a book is judged by its cover, and having the right cover is important to both publishers and authors who want their product to sell. Mary has almost 30 years of experience that gives her the expertise to tell if a book cover looks right or not.

Recently, Accurance and Mary in particular, have been working with Internationally Bestselling Author of over 40 novels and nonfiction books, Catherine Lanigan, the author of Romancing the Stone and Jewel of the Nile. Catherine Lanigan says that her “decision to ‘re-fresh’ all my historical novel covers came after a long deliberation. I had worked with Accurance in the past to bring these books to electronic publishing (conversion to eBooks), but I was never happy with the (original) covers. This spring, my first cover, Sins of Omission, went live. Within twenty-four hours I had sales on Amazon and my rank zoomed. I wish I’d clocked the numbers. I will on my next covers, which amazingly, are more creative and alluring with each one. Thank you, Mary and team! I couldn’t be more pleased.”

Accurance is not your everyday self-publishing outfit. The Accurance team and family is made up of the best professionals. Please meet our brilliant and talented team.

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Accurance is the premier production services provider for the self-published publisher community, serving half the world’s ten largest P.O.D. publishers as their production backbone, among other clients in both the self-publishing and traditional publishing worlds. It was also recently named #1 in a client satisfaction survey involving 600 self-published authors in North America. For more information about Accurance, visit http://www.accurance.com.

Publish Wholesale is a self-publishing firm that provides high quality and low cost publishing and promotion services to independent authors. For more information about the company and its services, visit http://www.publishwholesale.com.