Welcome to the Mary's Cup of Tea podcast. I'm your host, Mary Jolkowski. I'm an author, speaker, and all-around self-love advocate. And this is the podcast that will inspire you to love yourself.

Hi everyone.

Welcome to the Mary's Cup of Tea podcast.

You will not believe the news that I have to share with you today.

I mean, maybe you'll believe it because you already saw the title of this episode,

but this will be my first time saying it out loud to the public.

Okay, are you ready? I wrote a book,

a real actual book that is getting published and put on shelves and it'll be available in stores

and online like Amazon and Target and Walmart and a bunch of indie bookstores and lots of small bookshops. And I am just so

excited. I am holding it right now, the real actual first copy printed ever of this book. It is called

The Gift of Self-Love. So this has actually been in the works for over a year and I have been

keeping it a secret, which

I've been exploding inside because I am the worst secret keeper in the world. I mean,

you know, I share like mostly everything online. So keeping this a secret for over a year has

been a battle and now it's finally out. So I just wanted to tell you a little bit about the writing process,

like how this came about, how I got the book deal, my publisher, what that's been like,

and how I feel now like finally announcing it out into the world. So, well, let me start with

how I feel. I feel nervous-sighted. You've probably heard me use that word

before, but nervous-sighted is a term that my little sister came up with to describe nervous plus

excited. And the way I talk about it is like, I don't know, I've never had a child, but for some

reason this book feels like my baby. So I call it my book baby. And I'll say, like,

oh, I just birthed like this book baby that I've been growing and developing and obsessing over

...