I became an author twenty-five years ago because I like to wander through libraries and look up odd facts.

Before that, I’d been a literary agent and an editor. The agency in which I was a partner had been founded by my mother, Nancy Colbert. She, along with a woman who started another excellent agency at about the same time, changed publishing for the better in the 1970s and 1980s.

My father had been an agent in the 1950s and 1960s, so when I started working with my mother he left his job as a television executive and joined us to make it a family affair. After several years we moved, en masse, to the opposite side of the table, becoming publishers at HarperCollins. I worked for HarperCollins in New York, Toronto, and San Francisco as an editor and an executive.

Speaking of books and family, one of my two sisters was also an editor and a literary agent. She worked for Scholastic, then started an agency around the time my parents and I moved to the publishing side. The other sister is a published author and a children’s librarian.

Their help and the work of some great publishers are the reasons there are more than two million copies in print in almost thirty languages. Thanks, everyone!

colbertbooks [@] gmail.com