By: Michael Beas
At some point in a long career spent making other people’s visions happen, it becomes impossible to ignore the vision you’ve been quietly carrying for yourself.
DeVasha Lloyd hit that point and decided to do something about it.
The result is Elevation Publishing Group, a New York City-based boutique publishing company that brings together everything she has spent twenty years learning about media, strategy, storytelling, and what it actually takes to build influence in a noisy world. It is, in many ways, the most complete expression of who she is professionally. And it arrived exactly when the industry needed it.
A Career That Prepared Her for This
DeVasha’s professional history reads like a deliberate education in every dimension of the content business. She co-founded Real Savvy Media and scaled it to the point where Disney Interactive Media Group came knocking. She built health system sales divisions at WebMD and Everyday Health, developing partnerships with institutions like Mayo Clinic, Cleveland Clinic, MD Anderson, and Memorial Sloan Kettering. She spent three years at Forbes Books as VP of Business Development, personally publishing over 80 books.
Every one of those experiences taught her something she couldn’t have learned any other way. How content gets built. How it gets distributed. How it gets ignored, and more importantly, how it doesn’t. How the gap between a good idea and a visible idea is almost always a strategy gap rather than a quality gap.
She carried all of that into the founding of Elevation Publishing Group, and it shows in how the company operates.
The Author Comes First, Always
The thing DeVasha is most insistent about at Elevation Publishing Group is ownership. Not just ownership of the book itself, but ownership of the author’s narrative, platform, and future opportunities.
Authors who work with Elevation Publishing Group keep 100 percent of their rights and 100 percent of their royalties. They work with a dedicated team that treats their project with genuine investment rather than assembly-line efficiency. And they leave the process not just with a published book, but with a strategy for what the book can become.
That last part is where her career in media and sales becomes most visible. DeVasha understands, better than most, that a book without a plan is just paper. She has watched too many strong ideas go unnoticed in a crowded market to treat publication as the finish line. At Elevation Publishing Group, it’s the starting point.
The Opera Singer Who Orchestrates Businesses
There is one detail about DeVasha that tends to surprise people who encounter her primarily through her business accomplishments. Before she was a media executive, she was a trained classical opera singer.
She studied at Rider University’s Westminster Choir College, earning a degree in Music with a focus on Classical Voice Performance. That training never left her. She describes her approach to business as orchestration: bringing together the right voices, the right timing, and the right dynamics to produce something that holds together and moves people.
It’s a metaphor, but it’s also a method. And in a publishing company where the product is ultimately human expression, it turns out to be exactly the right way to think about the work.
What She’s Building Next
Elevation Publishing Group is already in its first year, bringing more than a dozen titles to market across a range of genres and voices. The company’s partnership with Forbes Books gives select clients access to one of publishing’s most recognized imprints. And DeVasha is actively expanding the network of editors, ghostwriters, designers, and marketing professionals who make the process work.
But the bigger ambition, the one that runs beneath all of it, is about something more than titles and imprints.
She is building proof that publishing done right is a platform-building tool, not just a product. The authors who succeed in today’s market are the ones who treat their book as a first move rather than a final one. And that a boutique publisher with the right instincts, the right relationships, and the right level of honesty with its clients can make that happen consistently.
Twenty years in the making. Just getting started.
Discover more about DeVasha Lloyd and the vision behind her work at Elevation Publishing Group.
