Professional Wordsmith, Jan McCracken

Jan was born and raised in a small farming community in the Midwest. Adopted by her grandparents, she grew up gardening beside her grandfather and canning and cooking with her grandmother. She spent most of her early life in the heartland of America learning to appreciate good food, good health and good friends. In the early 1980s, Jan opened a country Bed and Breakfast in Branson, MO. It was during her innkeeping years that she wrote her first self-published book, the Ozark Mountain Christmas Recipe Collection. She single-handedly sold over 150,000 copies!

The success of her first cookbook led Jan to write and publish a series of miniature gift-books she calls her "little books of recipes." She ended up completing three different serial sets; nine books in the Garden Recipe Collection, nine for the Fruit Sampler Collection, and 18 gift-set books for the inspirational Little Books of Tea series.

Over the years, Jan's interest in health and nutrition grew, and she spent years researching the best ways to convert good, old-fashioned, traditional recipes into leaner, healthier versions. In the late 1990s, Jan had great success on a low carb diet. From this personal experience she decided to write and self-publish the fun, humor-packed and well-received Low Carb Christmas Cookin' with an Old-Fashioned Cook, followed by her 40th self-published book, Carb Countin' Holiday Cookbook.

Jan has become a staunch advocate of preventative medicine through diet, exercise and lifestyle. As a result, in 2005, Jan authored Wiley Publishing's Healthy Carb Cookbook For Dummies®. It was a breakthrough platform that opened her work to an international readership. Subsequently, through her New York literary agent, Jan landed a contract with Adams Media Publishing to author her healthy lifestyle cookbook, Everything Lactose Free Cookbook: Easy-to-prepare, Low-dairy Alternatives for Your Favorite Meals (Everything Series), released February 2008. Jan is currently freelance writing, and researching her next book project ...stay tuned!