Getting Ready for Baby:
The Practical Parent’s Organizer
When I was pregnant with our twin girls, way back in 1997, I felt a bit overwhelmed with all the tasks and purchases required to prepare for their arrival. When I couldn’t find a book that gave me all those tips and to dos in one place, I did my own research and created my own comprehensive lists. Believe it or not, list-making is a great anxiety reducer for me!
I was lucky to be able to quit my job in marketing when we had our babies but had a hard time transitioning from my corporate job to sleepless nights and endless diaper changes and feedings. I needed a project. I’d been sharing my pregnancy lists with my expectant friends and getting rave reviews—that’s how the idea of my book came about.
After crafting my book proposal, I set out to find an agent. I knew, as a first-time author with no credentials besides being a very organized new mom, that I needed an experienced person in my corner. Months and countless rejections later, I finally found an agent who was willing to take a chance on me. Amazingly, we got three hits pretty quickly and two publishers extended us offers. I chose to go with Chronicle Books out of San Francisco.
Now I had to actually write the book (when you submit a non-fiction book proposal, you only include one or two sample chapters). I really enjoyed the writing and research process and couldn’t have been more proud and excited when the book was published in 2001. Here is what it looked like back then: 
Getting Ready for Baby did very well, selling 80,000 copies in the 12 years it was on the market. I didn’t know this at the time, but most non-fiction books end up losing money for the publishers when they can’t sell enough copies to recoup their costs.
In 2013, I approached my agent and Chronicle Books to propose a second edition. By now, the language (e.g. pagers rather than cell phones), product and safety advice (e.g. syrup of ipecac,no longer advised) and resources (no websites!) were woefully out of date. Chronicle liked the idea and offered me a new contract. I was not happy with their terms and decided, after much research, to try my hand at self-publishing the second edition.
I published a new, fully updated edition in spring of 2014. I loved being in total control of the content and design. I hired a Amy Lorenti, to update the cover and interior layout and published with Create Space, Amazon’s self-publishing arm, and later on Kindle. I’m thrilled with the end product and hope you’ll keep it in mind when thinking of a great gift for a newly expectant parent.
Finding the Right Colleges for You:
7 Steps to Researching & Evaluating Schools That Match Your Needs
Fast forward to 2015, and you’ll find our daughters, seniors in high school, now fully immersed in the college application process. As they’ve grown over the years, I’ve enjoyed being at home but have also been very involved in various school and community volunteer activities. When we moved back to the city from suburban Chicago, I started mentoring high potential under-resourced public school teens applying to college, mostly the first in their family. It struck me how much focus we put on the “getting in” part of the college process rather on the initial, and most important, first step: figuring out where to apply. The media scares us with a focus on highly selective colleges with single-digit admission rates, when the reality is that there are thousands of colleges to choose from. But if we’re going to cast a wide net, how do we determine which of these colleges should make a student’s final list of 6-10 top choices?
The more I learned with my students, and the more I researched, the more I became convinced there was a need for a step-by-step guide to casting a broad net, then narrowing down the options, based on each student’s self-assessed needs as well as a thorough investigation of potential colleges. And that is the genesis of book two, Finding the Right Colleges for You, published in 2015 on Kindle Direct Publishing (in order to allow for easy access to the hundreds of links it includes). Check out my book online for more information about my 7 steps and the huge array of resources I provide.
Moving to College:
What to Do, What to Learn, What to Pack
When one of my daughters committed to her college early, in November 2015, I started getting advice from my girlfriends who had teens in college, such as: Have you booked your hotel rooms for move-in day, parents’ weekend, even graduation? Really? This is something I should be looking into now? Being a big planner and organizer, these suggestions sent me into a bit of a frenzy of research and list-making, my typical way of soothing my anxiety when I’m feeling overwhelmed. And not unlike my other two book-writing experiences, it did not take me a long time to figure out that a book was not available—but sorely needed—to help high school seniors and their parents prepare for the move to college.
After six months of work on this book, I’m excited to publish it on May 1, national college decision day. I made it an ebook, once again, because it’s chock full of links to information, resources, product reviews, books, and more, with the aim to organize information in an easy to digest format with everything you’ll need at your fingertips.