LONG DISTANCE PUBLISHING
By Karen Blue

What a wonderful invention the Internet is for foreign residents.

After escaping the high-stress rat race of corporate America nearly five years ago, I moved to Ajijic, a small cobble-stoned village near Guadalajara, Mexico. At age 52, I wasn't ready for a life of bridge games and tea parties, so I began to write. The local writers' group helped me realize I wasn't as good a writer as I'd like to be. For two years I devoured every on-line writing class I could find. I ordered books from Amazon.com on writing and publishing, and then immersed myself in learning a new craft.

My first book, Midlife Mavericks: Women Reinventing Their Lives in
Mexico", is a result of hundreds of discussions and scores of interviews with
Women aged 40-81, who came to Mexico's beautiful colonial villages alone in the second or third part of their lives.

After beating the odds and obtaining a well-known New York agent (over
The internet) I thought I had it made. A year later, my agent gave up.
The publishers liked the book but didn't feel there was a big enough market. "How many older women really want to move to Mexico?" they asked. I told her she should have responded by asking, "And how many men who read Mt. Everest really want to climb the mountain?" She suggested I self-publish. So, I began to study self-publishing. It was a world in tremendous flux. Two years ago I couldn't have done it from Mexico, because properly managing the printing; order processing and distribution remotely would not have been viable.

Now, however, with the advent and maturing of print-on-demand and
Assisted publishing services, it is possible. I researched the largest; best financed org-annexations and eventually settled on upublish.com in Florida. They provide the interface between me and Lightning Press printers, manage the order processing distribution, and take care of some marketing details like obtaining ISBN and LCCN numbers, registering my book with Books in Print and with the major on-line bookstores. They also provide a page on their website and an e-book version of my paperback. I selected upublish.com because of their reputation, because I had total control of the look and feel of my book, and because their royalties are better than their competition. The account rep I had waswonder-ful. We communicated almost daily via email. I used Microsoft Word and Acrobat to provide him with a camera-ready pdf file. I hired a professional cover designer and via the Internet and traded the services of a professional editor and proofreader for a two-week stay at my home in Mexico. We are great friends now. I knew I'd have to do the marketing myself. I built a website using free hosting and development software from homestead.com. It took me about a week. I've held or scheduled book-signings in Puerto Vallarta, San Miguel de Allende, Ajijic and Guadalajara. Now the hard part begins. Getting book reviews and press releases in stateside and Canadian publications, getting my book into the libraries and bookstores. I'm still waiting to hear from Oprah that she's selected my book. Waiting...waiting... Early book sales have already covered my initial costs, so the rest will be frosting, less the 15% I'm donating to local lakeside charities. I've been blessed with wonderful feedback from readers.

This was a great project and truly, if I had to choose now between traditional publishing with a 7% royalty and self-publishing with 20-40% royalties, guess which I'd choose? Now what do I cal myself? Retired? An author? A retired author?

My original goal in publishing Midlife Mavericks was to have the book make a difference. To help women who are stuck in unsatisfactory lives understand they have choices and to give them the courage to make those choices. Moving to Mexico isn't for everyone, but the process we women go through in evaluating where we've been and what we want for the rest of our lives is the same. My personal journey in leaving high-tech management and heading south was to discover a purpose more worthy than padding stockholders' portfolios. I don't know, is there something bizarre about fulfilling one's purpose over the Internet?