The story behind Baby Dust
Fourteen years ago, a book saved my life. I had just lost my baby, inexplicably, when a sonogram five months into my pregnancy showed a motionless baby floating in his amniotic sea. No one could give us a reason. They told us just to have faith, to hope, and to try again.
I didn’t have that faith. I didn’t have any hope. My life had become consumed by fear.
The book was Empty Cradle, Broken Heart by Deborah Davis. My then-husband and I read it together and worked through everything she told us about allowing ourselves to grieve.
In the years that followed, as I developed my own web site to help other women in the same predicament as me, I sold hundreds to thousands of copies of Deborah’s book. It was one of the few I could whole heartedly recommend. And I still do.
But publishing changed during those years. Books I read and suggested to grieving mothers became rarer. The midlist shrank, and with it, niche books like ones about miscarriage and stillbirth disappeared. I found I had little to tell these women to buy.
In 2007, I could see a big hole in the market but wasn’t sure what to do about it. I had been a journalistic writer all my life, but anything longer than ten pages was a stretch for me. Still, I knew there were women who needed stories that would help them, and the anthologies of anecdotes, while wonderful, all dealt with the acute stage of grief—the actual miscarriage and its immediate aftermath. My site was almost ten years old and no one was helping the women over the long haul, most especially those who never had children at all.
And so, I started a little blog (it is still up!) where I asked women for their stories. As I put together the characters in Baby Dust, I took those real accounts of pain and despair, and success and joy, and shaped what I hoped would be something that would not just tell the story of loss, but of surviving it.
Many times along the way, I didn’t think the book would go anywhere. The agents I submitted to believed in the book, and complimented the story and the writing and the message. But it was too small a market. A publisher wouldn’t want it. It wouldn’t sell well enough. All I heard was, no, no, no, no.
So I did the only thing I knew to do. I started my own publishing company. And since then, Baby Dust, and another title I put together, a memorial book for babies for whom traditional “Baby’s First Year” books would never work, have been the basis of my new life.
Since I published Baby Dust in 2011, I’ve had the amazing pleasure of corresponding with Deborah Davis about her book and mine. When I see on Amazon our two books “frequently bought together,” I am overwhelmed by gratitude that she was there to lead me through my dark days, and that with her help, I could move forward to help women through theirs.
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Learn about Stella & Dane, two characters from Baby Dust who got a book of their own, to be released July 15, 2012!
