Background

Nan McCarthy was born as Nancy J. McCarthy on October 23, 1961, in Chicago, Illinois, United States. She is a daughter of Benjamin Augustus Johnson, Jr., and Dorothy Morris Johnson Moore.

Education

Having grown up in the suburbs of Chicago, Nan McCarthy graduated from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign with a Bachelor of Science degree in advertising in 1983. Then, she spent two years studying the Japanese language at the University of Maryland in Baltimore.

Career

Nan McCarthy began her career in Okinawa, Japan where she lived with her husband, a military man in the United States Marine Corps, and served as an editor of ‘This Week on Okinawa’, an English-language newspaper for Americans from 1983 to 1985. The job stimulated her desire to write.

Back in the United States in 1986, she found an entry-level job at an agricultural magazine, which fortuitously turned into a much more responsible job in the other magazine owned by the same media conglomerate. The magazine was Personal Publishing, the first magazine of desktop publishing, and as its managing editor, McCarthy wrote and edited hundreds of articles and shorter features. After leaving the periodical in 1991, McCarthy was then recruited by Quark, a software company, as director of creative services.

A year later, McCarthy founded her own company, Rainwater Press. Under that aegis, she has packaged, edited computer books, and written marketing and advertising copy for a variety of publishing clients.

In 1995, the author published her first nonfiction book, Quark Design, which was issued by Peachpit Press of Berkeley, California. It was the first four-color book for computer designers.

At that point, McCarthy was already well-versed in the world of computerized communication, and being an e-mail junkie, she soon got the idea that other e-mail junkies would furnish an audience for a novel about their special form of interaction. Partly inspired by the success of the Griffin and Sabine epistolary novels, and partly by a friend's comments about her own e-mail experiences, she got the idea for a love story told entirely through e-mail. As part of her research, she interviewed people who had met each other electronically and spent some time in various Internet chat rooms.

The investigation resulted in the appearance of ‘Chat: A Cybernovel’ the same year. After being rejected by traditional publishers, she published 2,500 print copies of the work herself and started selling it via the website of Rainwater Press. As a result, the book of 120 pages long with a glossary of computer terms and ‘emoticons’ became something of an online sales phenomenon.

Smaller periodicals began to express an interest in McCarthy’s work.

At this point, her second novel, Connect, had been published in 1996, its sales boosted by the list of thousands of interested potential readers who had contacted Rainwater Press about Chat. The third volume of the trilogy, Crash, followed in 1997. In September of that year, Nan’s agent sold the rights to the trilogy to Simon & Schuster publishing company. A year later, it issued the trilogy in trade paperback and distributed foreign rights to publishers in Germany, Turkey, Slovenia, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom. McCarthy acquired the publishing rights back in 2012. In a couple of years, unpublished ending to Crash appeared in the new eBook editions.

A book about military family life, ‘Since You Went Away’, published in 2017, is one of the recent works by McCarthy.

Achievements

• Working in advertising and technical writing at the beginning of her career, Nan McCarthy managed to enter the list of the first authors who were pioneers in selling their writings online.
  
  McCarthy’s book for computer designers, ‘Quark Design’ was the finalist of the 1996 Benjamin Franklin Award for the best computer book.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Chat: Book One

    (This revised edition of the acclaimed Chat, Connect, and ...)

    1995
  • Crash: Book Three

    (The unforgettable adventure chronicled in Chat and Connec...)

    1997
  • Since You Went Away. Part One: Winter

    (Set against the backdrop of the Iraq war in the year 2008...)

    2017
  • Since You Went Away. Part Two: Spring

    (The story from the first part of the series continues as ...)

    2017
  • Connect: Book Two

    (In the second novel of her acclaimed series about Bev and...)

    1996
  • Live 'Til I Die: A Memoir of My Father's Life 2001

Views

Quotations: "I wrote nonfiction, computer-related books, and magazine articles for many years before I wrote my first novel, Chat. I wrote Chat: A Cybernovel because I wanted to spread my wings as a writer and work on a project that allowed me more creative freedom than writing computer books."

Membership

Nan McCarthy is an honorary member of Epsilon Delta Pi, a computer science honor society.

Personality

Nan McCarthy loves to spend time with her family and pets.

Interests

• reading, playing piano

Connections

Nan McCarthy married a United States Marine Corps military man, Patrick J. McCarthy, on June 6, 1983. They have two adult sons named Benjamin Augustus, and Coleman Patrick.

Father:

Benajamin Augustus Johnson Jr.

Mother:

Dorothy Morris Johnson Moore

husband:

Patrick J. McCarthy

Son:

Benjamin Augustus McCarthy

Son:

Coleman Patrick McCarthy

References

• Nan McCarthy's Official Website