The Baby-Sitters Club series originated when Jean Feiwel, an editor at Scholastic, saw the popularity of a novel called Katie's Babysitting Job by Martha Tolles and realized there was a market for novels about babysitting. She contacted Ann M. Martin, who took the general idea of a babysitter's club and created the characters, plots, and settings for the series. It was initially planned as a 10-book series; however, the first 10 novels were only moderately successful. Scholastic ordered 100 more, followed by 20 more as the series grew in popularity. By the time the 11th novel was published, the first printing was up to 100,000 copies. When publishing ceased in 2000, there had been 213 novels published in the series. Of these, Martin estimates she wrote from 60 to 80.