Thirty Books & Counting: Meet Local Author Lauren Baratz-Logsted

Editor's note: Lauren Baratz-Logsted is the mother of HamletHub intern and Wooster School student, Jackie Logsted. Here, Jackie gets candid with her mom about her writing journey and ultimate succss as the author more than thirty books. A Book Launch event for Lauren’s most recent book, I Love You, Michael Collins, will be held at Byrd’s Books in Bethel on Saturday, July 8.


Lauren Baratz-Logsted is a local author, living and working in Danbury for her entire career. She has published over thirty books since her first was purchased fifteen years ago, spanning across all genres, age groups, and even languages, selling versions of her books internationally.

Baratz-Logsted has written stand alone novels, such as The Twin’s Daughter, a victorian era mystery, and series, such as The Sisters 8, a nine book children’s series she wrote with her husband and daughter. This is all done from the basement of her home, where writing is a full-time job.

Her success did not happen overnight. After graduating from UConn, she worked at the independent bookseller, Klein’s, in Westport for eleven years before deciding  to try to make it as an author in 1994. While writing, publishing,  and trying to sell, she worked as a book reviewer, a freelance editor and writer, and even a window washer! She sold her first book eight years later, and has not stopped since.  


Why was writing the thing for you?

When I was in 8th grade, my english teacher gave us an assignment where we all had to use the 3 same elements in a story: a priest, a nurse, and a camel, and I wrote a Thorn Birds-esque  story where the priest and nurse fell in love while taking care of this camel while they were all stranded on an island, and as the camel was airlifted to safety on a helicopter, the priest and nurse had a clinch on the beach, and my teacher liked it so much that he read it to the class three days running. At the end of which time, I was lucky I still had friends, and for the first time in my life it occurred to me that maybe I had stories to tell that other people would want to hear.

How hard was it to go eight years before selling your first book?

It’s not easy. My path is not dissimilar to that of most other writers I know - it’s rare that you meet someone who actually sells their first book. When I first left my day job to take a chance on myself as a writer, and I announced to my family that that’s what I was doing, everyone was excited, and of course, not being in the business themselves, want(ed) to know, “When does the book come out? Do you know John Grisham? I’m sure it’ll be a New York Times Bestseller,” but of course in publishing, nothing happens overnight. I’d say the next 8 years were increasingly more depressing Thanksgivings in that regard, where in the beginning people are asking lots of questions and they’re really excited, and by the end you’re say(ing), “Oh, but I’m talking to this agent or I wrote this new book and I really think this is the one,” (and) you can actually see people looking at you like, “Oh you poor diluted little fool you.” It’s no knock on other people, but that’s one of the tough things about being a writer or trying to knock into the writing career, and that’s that there’s the perception that if it doesn’t happen quickly, then you must not have what it takes. So I guess what one of the most important ingredients someone needs as a writer is resilience, and that no matter how many times the world says no to you or how many times other people lose faith in you, you have to keep working and getting better and believing that someday it’s going to happen.

What is it actually like to be a writer? What is your daily life like?

It’s a combination of wonderful and occasionally boring and hopefully not too often awful. On the best days, I’m writing most of the day. Hopefully that’s why you get into something like this, because you love the actual writing, not because you’re looking for some kind of very specific end goal. I love it when I’m working on a new novel, and it’s that kind of falling in love at the beginning stages where everything is glorious and exciting before you realize that the other person is capable of occasionally getting spinach stuck between their front teeth. In addition to actually writing, especially when you have a career like mine which had over 30 books published, there’s a lot of other things you have to deal with on a day to day basis, whether it’s things to do with marketing or editing the next book that’s coming out or proofreading pages for a publisher or doing interviews like these; hopefully not spending too much time checking things like your amazon rankings or your reviews on goodreads; networking with other writers but also supporting other writers, whether it’s celebrating their successes or consoling them on things that they’re commiserating about.

What do you think when you hear people say they would “totally write a novel if (they) had the time”?

*laughs* Well it’s funny, because writing is one of these things that people think, and it’s understandable that they would, that as long as you have a pen, or access to a computer, you could do this, too. Of course, no one would ever say to a brain surgeon, someday when I have the time I’m going to do what you do, with the clear thought that they’ll do it better than you’re doing it. The polite response, though, is, “Well, one day I hope you get the time and the opportunity to do that.”

What is the most meaningful part about being an author to you?

I don’t write to have a large audience, necessarily, but outside of the writing itself (which is it’s own reward)  the most gratifying thing in my career has been the fan mail that I’ve received for the Sisters 8 series which I created with Greg Logsted and Jackie Logsted, and not because they’re fan letters, or how many of them there are, but because of the contents of so many of them. When a little kid writes to you and says, “I didn’t know when I took book 2 out of the library on Tuesday that I would finish the whole 9-book series in a week. I don’t normally like to read, I loved reading these books, these characters felt like my friends, you made my summer.” That kind of makes your whole career. You only need to get one letter like that to feel like what you’re doing is worthwhile, and I’ve been fortunate so many times over to receive letters like that from kids.

Would you ever want to diverge from writing?

As I get older, I think sometimes that it would be nice to have a career that is more straightforward in terms of demands and guaranteed outcomes. It would be nice to have a career that came with benefits like paid vacation times or medical insurance, but I’ve lived my entire adult career in books one way or another, so it’s hard to see myself doing something that doesn’t involve books in some way, whether it’s editing or becoming an agent. Probably the one non-book world fantasy I have is to be Mayor of Danbury. And I understand that that job may be up for grabs sometime soon. So I guess we’ll see.


Lauren’s most recent book, I Love You, Michael Collins, a story about the first moon landing in 1969 from a 10-year-old girl’s perspective, published last week, and can be found here. A book launch for I Love You, Michael Collins will be held at Byrd’s Books in Bethel on Saturday, July 8th, with more information found here.

To learn more about Lauren and to buy her books, click here, or go to laurenbaratzlogsted.com.  

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Submitted by Stamford, CT

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