Booked Solid

As former United Nations speech writer Bettina Polydor-Kallins prepared to receive her master’s in business administration from Harvard Business School in June, her career plans were anything but traditional.

Though most of her fellow MBAs were headed for corporate-world jobs in investment banking and management consulting, Polydor-Kallins had something else in mind: starting a small publishing company.

“It’s not sort of the plum Wall Street job, so I was definitely an anomaly at Harvard,” she conceded with a laugh. “But fortunately there were a lot of resources and professors who were very willing to help.”

At 26, Polydor-Kallins is publisher of Village Healer Press, a Laguna Niguel-based specialty publishing house dedicated to women’s health and wellness issues.

Her company’s first book has just been published: “5 Steps to a PMS-Free Life,” co-written by Polydor-Kallins’ husband, George J. Kallins, an obstetrician/gynecologist and former director of the Center for Women’s Mood Disorders at the Keck School of Medicine at USC; and Gloria Keeling, founder of a mind-body fitness institute in Maui, Hawaii.

The book, which combines the latest medical breakthroughs with proven mind-body practices, grew out of Kallins’ work with patients who suffered from PMS. The five-step program includes the mind-body connection, fitness, diet and nutrition, nutraceuticals (vitamins, minerals and herbal supplements) and prescription medications.

“It’s really a proven program to help you stop the monthly roller coaster [of PMS] through using the latest in medication as well as lifestyle modifications,” said Polydor-Kallins, whose upcoming books also will be written by medical experts and will have a mind-body aspect to them.

The Canadian-born Polydor-Kallins earned an undergraduate degree in ethics, politics and economics from Yale, where she served as editor-in-chief of the Yale Political Monthly.

She came up with the idea of starting a publishing house in 1997, after serving for a year as a speech writer for Boutros Boutros-Ghali, secretary-general of the United Nations. After Boutros-Ghali lost reelection, Polydor-Kallins said, she planned to write a book about famous speeches by women.

“I just couldn’t find anyone who would publish it, but I found plenty of people who wanted to publish a sort of trashy expose of what I saw behind the scenes in the U.N. and how the secretary-general lost the election,” she said. “I thought this is really not what I want to be doing. I felt there had to be a market for more quality books written on better issues.

“That’s when I got the idea to look into starting my own publishing company, so I could publish quality books on issues I felt weren’t being represented in the mainstream or that I felt were important.”

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While at Harvard Business School, she created her business plan and secured seed funding for Village Healer Press, which was incorporated in January.

“Even though this wasn’t the typical career choice, I still found professors willing to listen and help me with the business plan and put together pitches for investors,” said Polydor-Kallins, who also made an important contact while at Harvard: James Lyons, president of the National Book Network, a large U.S. book distributor. “He’s sort of been a mentor to me and he definitely very much encouraged me to pursue my interest in publishing,” she said.

Polydor-Kallins said it is difficult for first-time independent book publishers to get their books into bookstores, but her contact with Lyons paid off: The National Book Network is distributing “5 Steps to a PMS-Free Life” to all the major bookstores and also to online sellers at https://www.amazon .com, https://www.borders.com and https://www. bn.com.

“The whole reason for doing a publishing company was to create something that helps people and makes a difference,” she said.

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In choosing to focus on women’s health and wellness, she said, “I was looking for a niche, something I could really start to develop a brand in, and women’s health appealed to me for a number of reasons. Foremost was just the fact that I felt like there was a need. What’s happening is the medical establishment is looking for cures for cancer, but everyday health issues that impede daily functioning are really not addressed.

“Our motto at Village Healer Press is ‘Heal yourself and you can heal the world.’ ”

That, she said, was inspired by her experience at the U.N., where she worked on a number of initiatives to help women in developing nations--”things like giving business loans to local women to start businesses or teaching the women in the local community about preventive health.”

“It was an interesting approach and it really made an impact on me. Women are wives, mothers, sisters, co-workers and CEOs and they have such impact on the people around them. I just realized how true it is if you heal yourself as a woman it’s only then that you can go out and take care of your family, your business and society in a larger sense.”

Polydor-Kallins, who is now dividing her time between publishing and working as a financial consultant at Salomon Smith Barney in Long Beach, plans to publish her next two books in the spring: “The Busy Woman’s Guide to Menopause” and “The Busy Woman’s Guide to Post-Partum Weight Loss.”

But she doesn’t plan to publish a set number of new titles each year.

“It depends on finding the right author and the right subject,” she said. “I want to make sure each book is really practical, proven and can really improve the target reader’s life.”