The Southampton Press
June 1, 2006

No-Holds-Barred Website Births Similarly Blunt Book
By Jennifer Davis

Once Stacy Quarty received the news that she was expecting her second child, she decided to share it all—everything she had always wanted to know but that no one had told her the first time around—with expectant mothers everywhere on the web. Now, her story is available in paperback, too.

“No one ever told me everything I ever wanted to know,” she said during an interview at her downtown Southampton office. “Not even my sister.”
With hopes of getting a book deal, Ms. Quarty began keeping a detailed diary of her pregnancy. She didn’t hold back a single graphic detail, including several observations that many pregnancy books keep off the pages. She decided to bare all and posted it on the web. Her site, www. franklypregnant.com, went live in 2003.

“It was so nice to put it all out there,” she said. “It has taken a lot longer then I ever thought it would. It has been the longest pregnancy ever.”
The website, subtitled “the reality site of pregnancy,” was a smash, receiving up to 150,000 hits a day. A popular resource for expectant mothers, it has features like a searchable question-and-answer database that includes more than 1,000 entries. It is “the largest source of pregnancy information on the web, as far as I know,” Ms. Quarty said.
Still, Ms. Quarty wanted to publish her book and, even while receiving 200 e-mails a week generated by her website, she didn’t have an agent.
She decided that proving that people wanted this information was the only way to get noticed. To promote traffic on her site, Ms. Quarty, a web developer and graphic designer, offered weekly give-aways and constantly updated the content. Eventually, two years after her site went live, an agent took notice, and Ms. Quarty landed a book deal with St. Martin’s Griffin.

The chapter titles of the book “Frankly Pregnant” offer a quick glimpse at the kind of no-holds-barred, sensitivity-be-damned approach she has brought over from her website: “Week 14: Moles, Skin Tags and Third Nipples”; “Week 21: Cheeseburger Crotch and Flapjack Nipples.” Released in April, the book offers readers access to one thing that is not offered to web surfers: the expert advice of Dr. Miriam Greene, a practicing obstetrician and gynecologist in New York City.

Ms. Quarty knew that to get her book published she would need to include additional expert advice. Keeping her ears and eyes open, she saw Dr. Greene on the popular HBO television series “Sex and the City.” On the show, Dr. Greene played the doctor who treated one of the main characters, Miranda, during her pregnancy, and was also the medical consultant to the show’s producers and writers.

“Watching the show, I thought, I need a doctor like her,” Ms. Quarty said. Then, after a chance encounter through a client of hers, she was connected with Miranda’s doctor, Dr. Greene. “She helped me deliver this book into the world,” Ms. Quarty said.

Now, with “Frankly Pregnant” finally in print, Ms. Quarty is working on her second book, a compilation of embarrassing pregnancy stories. The book will include some of her own stories, tales from her girlfriends and also many anecdotes that were submitted on the “Frankly Pregnant” website.
“With a second book it was easier,” she said. “Just like a pregnancy.”

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