Life after magazines is looking pretty great: Publishers Marketplace has announced that Glamour‘s former executive editor Lauren Smith Brody has sold her first book to Doubleday in a “significant deal” (industry parlance for an advance that fetches over $250,000). The Fifth Trimester is, in Brody’s words, “everything new working moms need to get through their first few months back at work—the tools, advice, camaraderie, ideas, and humor to help them succeed at work and at home.”
In addition to writing from personal experience, Brody conducted dozens of interviews with women at all levels of their careers and polled nearly 1,000 additional women from all around the country. “I had both of my sons while at Glamour and had a great experience with supportive colleagues and bosses in a really positive environment where women’s big life changes were celebrated,” said Brody, who left the magazine at the end of 2014 after over a dozen years on top of the masthead. “But I was the first among my personal friends to go through the post maternity-leave transition and found the logistics and emotions of the whole thing really hard—and there were no good sources to turn to for support. I’d had so much information—too much, almost—while pregnant, and there were lots of books about my baby’s milestones, but there was nothing for me in this huge milestone moment of my own life when my identity changed so drastically and I became a working mom. And I knew it had to be even harder for so many women in less supportive work situations.”
The book will be edited by Doubleday’s Melissa Danaczko and published in spring 2017; Brody’s deal was brokered by Stefanie Lieberman at Janklow & Nesbit.
