About Me

I have always had a passion for the written word. It didn't matter where I happened to be, if there was a book, a newspaper, a magazine, a cereal box, I was going to read it. As I got older, I found myself editing restaurant menus, newsletters, my parents' work memos... anything with text, line spacing and graphics. But it was during a school field trip to the Harcourt Brace & Jovanovich building in Orlando, Florida, that I really fell in love with the industry. Watching and learning how textbooks were made and seeing people working in offices that smelled of printer ink, glue and wax with that slight hint of stale coffee in the air pretty much did me in. When I got home I told my mother that I would one day work in the HBJ building.

In college, I pursued a mass communication degree and was the editor-in-chief of the college newspaper. Learning to edit, design and manage a weekly periodical prepared me for the work that was to come... a call from Harcourt School Publishers to come work for them! In the ten years I have been with the company, I have learned the "ins and outs" of the textbook production process while meeting and befriending folks from the various departments including the Editorial groups for the textbook divisions.

Realizing that the publishing industry was transforming and moving into the digital space, I started looking for a way to help friends of mine whose writing talent was shared only among the few of us in critique groups, fan fiction sites and writing circles. For many of these authors, the idea of sending their manuscripts to large publishers was not only daunting but practically impossible as their work did not fit the print niche. For others, the idea of making a living out of a passion was (and is to some extent) a pipe dream. Many of these authors have large fan bases in their niche of the digital worlds they occupy. I started thinking of how I could help them transition from writing for fun to writing for profit and soon after I started researching ways to represent their interests to publishers in the digital market.

Today, I am the first ePub Agent dedicated to helping those authors gain pub credits in the digital arena and wade through the waters of the changing Publishing landscape.