The Broke Socialite Pens a Book

Shameeka Ayers goes for broke with her new tome
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“I want to be the Oprah of social media,” says Shameeka Ayers. The thirty-seven-year-old West End resident first stepped in that bold direction back in 2006 when she began the Broke Socialite blog after being laid off by a healthcare communications company. Ayers filled the blog with tips on living “a champagne lifestyle on a beer budget”—say, how to find men’s suits at a thrift shop, or how to shop smart on Black Friday—and during the Great Recession, her followers multiplied.

So have her ambitions. There’s now a Broke Socialite event series (the Sugar Coma sweets tour is the most popular), and last December she organized the Lavish! conference, a national social media event that focused on the likes of fashion, beauty, home decor, and travel.

Now get ready for the book. Ayers’s volume, Instantly!: How Quickly I Realized I Hate My Job, debuts this month under her own imprint, Miss Pinkie’s Press. The volume is a cross between The Devil Wears Prada and Who Moved My Cheese?, says Ayers, and alternates instant-messenger-style conversations with fictional prose about two characters’ travails with livelihoods they hate. As the fifteen-year veteran of corporate America writes on her dedication page, it goes out to “those who think they are held captive by golden handcuffs and oh-so-drab gray cubicles.” thebrokesocialite.com

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