My Mini Midwife – D J Kirkby

I’m delighted to welcome Denyse Kirkby, author of ‘My Mini Midwife’, to Romaniac HQ today; I have tweeted with Denyse, usually early in the mornings before work beckons, and as a  local to West Sussex, like myself,  it makes it even nicer to pass the blog over to her.  Sue x

Dear Romaniacs,

I have been a lurker on your blog for a long time now, and I feel honoured that you invited me to join you here for a chat about my latest book.

My Mini Midwife came about as a result of my years working as a community midwife. I thoroughly enjoyed my time as a community midwife because that kind of midwifery allows you to get to know the people you are caring for to a deeper level than those you meet when you are hospital based. Over time I began to develop a standard set of answers to questions expectant parents, and their families, asked of me about early pregnancy, what kind of care they will be given, what labour is like and so on.

Then one couple said they wished they could carry me around in their handbag so they could ask me questions whenever they needed to, and that was when I had a My Mini Midwife light-bulb moment.  I decided to write out answers to all the most frequently asked questions I could remember people asking me. When I had finished this the writer in me couldn’t leave it alone – it wasn’t pretty, there was no flow to the words, it needed chapters and so on. So I grouped the questions together and wrote chapters around them. I didn’t want my book to feel like a textbook or a self-help book so I kept the tone of my writing the same as I would use when chatting with people while caring for them in pregnancy, labour and in the first few weeks after birth. The result was a pocket-sized midwife that readers could carry around with them everywhere.

With this in mind I paid for a nice cover and a professional edit and self-published My Mini Midwife as an ebook. What happened next is the things my dreams are made of – a publisher bought it, read it and offered me a contract for it!  Summersdale put My Mini Midwife through several edits, including changes to the layout of the text and cover, which enhanced the content without changing what I had originally set out to do with it. On the 3^rd of February it will be available in all bookstores in paperback and an ebook version is available too.

There will be a My Mini Midwife-themed forum on my website (http://www.djkirkby.co.uk) from the end of February where you can ask questions anytime, as well as a postnatal support group and much more. Last, but not least, to celebrate the re-birth of My Mini Midwife Summersdale helped me make a video of my top ten tips from the book which you can watch here: http://youtu.be/pvSjI7Hj6Ys and if you have any other questions you would like to ask me then I would be very happy to answer them here.