I felt deliciously scared—and happy. We were friends again. Things were okay with Watson. The Baby-sitters Club was a success. I, Kristin Amanda Thomas, had made it work, or helped to make it work. I hoped that Mary Anne, Claudia, Stacey, and I—the Baby-sitters Club—would stay together for a long time.
* * *
Dear Reader,
Now that you’ve read Kristy’s Great Idea, I thought you might like to know a little bit about how this story and the Baby-sitters Club came to be.
In 1985, I had just left my job and started to write books for kids full-time. That was when my editor suggested that I write a four-book miniseries entitled “The Baby-sitters Club.” I had to figure out what a baby-sitters club might be, and decided on a business run by a group of friends. Then I created Kristy, Claudia, Stacey, and Mary Anne. I wanted to create a group of kids who are very different from one another but work well together. I based Kristy on my best friend from when I was growing up, and Mary Anne on me. Kristy was the outgoing one with all the big ideas, and Mary Anne was the quiet one. She and Kristy were best friends even though they were opposites. Eventually Claudia and Stacey would become best friends, too.
Baby-sitting was easy for me to write about because I did so much of it when I was growing up. (In fact, right through college.) So I thought I would enjoy writing about it, too. And I do!
Happy reading,
Ann M. Martin
* * *
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ANN MATTHEWS MARTIN was born on August 12, 1955. She grew up in Princeton, New Jersey, with her parents and her younger sister, Jane. There are currently over 176 million copies of The Baby-sitters Club in print. (If you stacked all of these books up, the pile would be 21,245 miles high.)
In addition to The Baby-sitters Club, Ann is the author of two other series, Main Street and Family Tree. Her novels include Belle Teal, A Corner of the Universe (a Newbery Honor book), Here Today, A Dog’s Life, On Christmas Eve, Everything for a Dog, Ten Rules for Living with My Sister, and Ten Good and Bad Things About My Life (So Far). She is also the coauthor, with Laura Godwin, of the Doll People series.
Ann lives in upstate New York with her dog and her cats.
Copyright
Copyright © 1986 by Ann M. Martin.
Book cover from Nancy Drew: The Secret of the Old Clock by Carolyn Keene. Copyright © 1987, 1959, 1930 by Simon & Schuster, Inc. Reprinted by permission of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
Cover art by Hodges Soileau
All rights reserved. Published by Scholastic Inc. SCHOLASTIC, THE BABY-SITTERS CLUB, and associated logos are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of Scholastic Inc.
First edition, 1995
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this publication may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher. For information regarding permission, write to Scholastic Inc., Attention: Permissions Department, 557 Broadway, New York, NY 10012.
e-ISBN 978-0-545-53247-1
Kristy's Great Idea Page 10