Barbara Hudgins

Barbara Hudgins is best known as the original author and self-publisher of New Jersey Day Trips. This guidebook sold over 110,000 copies in several editions before she sold the rights to Rutgers University Press. She also co-authored the 10th edition put out by that press. She was the subject of a chapter in the book Make Money Self-Publishing by Suzanne Thomas, as an example of a successful regional author.

Barbara's travel column, which covers both local and foreign trips, has appeared in The Madison Eagle, the Bernardsville News and other newspapers in northern New Jersey. Her day trip articles have also been featured in Garden State Woman and New Jersey, Yesterday, Today & Tomorrow. National magazines such as Signature, Woman's World and Foreword have published her free-lance pieces on a variety of subjects.

The author has lived in New York, New Mexico, Hawaii and Virginia, but has made her home in New Jersey for the past 30 years. She holds a Master's degree in Library Science and has worked at the New York Public Library, Hunter College Library and the University of Hawaii. A former English major in college, she began writing music, movie and theater reviews before gravitating to travel writing. Her two children, Lani and Robert, now grown and with families of their own, helped her to research the many destinations that appear in her books and articles.

It was only after she had worked with a traditional publisher and gone through all the phases of working with an editor and a co-author that the concept for this book formed. Although there are several guides to travel writing on the market, they all concentrate on selling to magazine, newspaper and internet editors. Why not, she thought, create something geared to the book publishing? Barbara's background and knowledge of self-publishing give her the expertise to successfully market in the publishing world. Her experience as an author for a traditional publisher, as a self-publisher and as a freelance writer, positions her as a unique expert in all of these fields.