Flash back to Bayview Hospital, St. Petersburg Florida in August, 2005—and I do, I often do. My mother, the author, Jill Stern, is sitting up briefly in her critical-care chair, which is a vertical hospital bed. She is wired to monitors, her strawberry blond hair a little matted after eight days in critical care, otherwise looking very much as she always did, certainly not as if this were to be the last day of her life.
Out of the blue, she says, “ I think this is it, I think today’s the day.”
“Are you sure mom? Maybe you’re just feeling that way right now? Your heart is so strong, even the doctors are starting to have guarded hope.”
Suddenly Jill pulls herself up,
“That’s right, I can’t die yet, because we both have books that have to be published!”
Sadly, very sadly for me, my mother did die that day, after having turned 90 a month before. Jill died, however, not from complications due to old age, but as the direct result of carbon monoxide poisoning. I’ll be sure to report more about that in a later issue of WestView News. For now, I’ll say only that the end result of her awful death is a law in Florida requiring all new high-rises to equip each apartment with a working carbon-monoxide detector.
Among other wry, philosophical comments Jill made during her final week was, “Let’s face it, they only managed to cut my longevity short by a few years.” That may be true, but she had been working on her fourth novel, The Wayward Lovers, when she died. Best Time for Love, her third and last completed novel, is the book I’ve just published. The rest of the story is all about this venture into the unknown: book publishing on the Internet.
First, a little about how Best Time for Love came to be written when she was 81 years old. A few months after her 80th birthday, a gentleman from her past, an acquaintance, called and asked her out on a date. He flew over from the east coast of Florida to the west. They dined by the water under a full moon. Jill developed quite a crush on this fellow, who was both manly and courtly. She hadn’t thought that pining, waiting by the phone, was still possible, but pine she did.
The creep never called. However, what is blessed about the artist’s life is one’s ability to retreat into the imagination, where it’s possible for everything to turn out just fine. Like a Bronte sister besotted with her drunken brother (one of my mother’s favorite back stories), Jill wove her golden book from the dross of longing. After several decades of having not lifted her Number Two Mongol pencil, she produced what is now a 382-page novel that so far readers report they can’t put down.
When it all began, I had recently come out of the Graduate Writing Program at Columbia, and fresh with my M.F.A., felt highly qualified to edit her first draft. We argued fiercely and frequently, and sometimes I did win. The result is a page-turner. Her agent, Mary Yost, thought so and tried valiantly to sell it to a series of junior editors who mostly asked, ‘Who would want to read about people in their 70s doing anything, let alone falling in love?’
That drove Jill wild. ‘Who? All the underserved seniors, that’s who! Nobody’s writing about them or for them.’ She couldn’t comprehend this failure of imagination.
Self-publishing was not much of an option in the 1990s and early 2000s. No professional fiction writer then or now was interested in vanity publishing. Back in the day, the only way to get a book out there was to go through the maze of editors, many of them young and unseasoned. Frustrated, thwarted (as a lot of us fiction writers were), Jill wrote a letter to the editor at AARP magazine and otherwise tried to bypass the junior sentinels barring her way. It meant everything to her. As I mentioned earlier, getting Best Time for Love published was her final wish.
Now flash forward to 2013 in the West Village. I’m part of a writers’ group that meets weekly in the hood. Most of the writers, present company excepted, are frequently published, and at least one is outright famous. All the rage at those weekly enclaves is talk about self-publishing. Whereas I am still longing for the formal recognition for my novel that traditional publishing promises, my colleagues snicker, saying it’s a sucker’s game. The future is self-publishing on all the electronic platforms and as print-on-demand trade paperbacks. At first it sounded a lot like vanity publishing to me, but I was assured that epublishing amounts to nothing more than cutting out the middleman.
I was daunted by the myriad technical steps one has to take, and then there’s the specter of marketing—distribution—getting the word out to your target audience, in this case seniors. The scariest part was that my fellow writers kept saying the business is changing every day—nothing is codified, because it’s one big, open frontier. I am no pioneer, or at least I didn’t think so, until it hit me. My mother’s book, Best Time for Love, lively, mainstream fiction, exactly the kind of book to benefit from word of mouth, is an ideal candidate for Kindles, Nooks, iPads, and print-on-demand. I had to publish it, for sentimental reasons sure, but mainly because my mother believed her novel could be a commercial success. I’m betting a lot of time and energy, if not much money, that she was onto something.
Jill didn’t have any pretensions to literary greatness. She was something of an intellectual, very well read, but her background was in the theater, and she leaned toward moving the story along with a lot of spirited dialogue. She came from a newspaper family where the reigning motto was, “Never use a ten-cent word when a two-cent word will do,” and the philosophy behind that may have also influenced her style. She liked writing for a broad audience, calling herself the thinking woman’s Rona Jaffe (Love Is a Many Splendored Thing). Her book about divorce when that was still a hot topic, Not In Our Stars in hard cover, Nine Miles to Reno in paperback, was well received and sold a lot of copies for a first novel. (I remember watching her on a daytime interview show when I was around eight.) Her second novel was maybe too controversial for its time, and anyway, she had mixed feelings about it, so she never pushed it. She wrote a wonderful novella, Alabama, about riding down on a freedom bus by herself to Selma to march with Martin Luther King. It’s actually very irreverent. She loved to make fun of herself as well as everyone else, which makes the sincerity of the romance in Best Time for Love all the more poignant for me.
First, I had to scan the darn thing. All I had was a manuscript, and it needed a lot of work—the typist Jill hired in St Petersburg was pretty terrible. Through fellow writers, I found someone to format the book for the e-platforms: Kindle, Nook, iPad, Kobo. Together, the formatter and I created the cover, which I love, because the oldsters featured there are plainly in love, and that’s the whole point! The two main characters are not looking for companionship; in fact, they’re not even looking when they meet and fall in love. (By the way, I know of at least one attractive couple, both in their 70s, who recently fell madly in love, undeniable evidence that it does happen.)
The first part of the publishing process took a long time, because I had to keep proofreading Best Time for Love over and over. I was dragging my heels. Once I saw it up there on Amazon, however, I began to warm to the whole enterprise, until now I am obsessed. Things eerily started to fall my way too, enough to make me wonder who is running this show.
For instance, a friend, Elizabeth Heldrich, graphic designer par excellence, generously offered to build the website for me. The site has many live links, which means you can go to “besttimeforlove.com,” click on any button, and it will take you right to the book page! In this issue of WestView News, the ad for Best Time for Love is the generous contribution of George Capsis, the publisher, who gave me the space, and two other neighbors who live and work in the hood, also marvelous graphic designers, Jayne Hertko and David Litman. All this good will is spooky huh? In a town where most of us don’t have time to eat, it is wonderfully strange that these friends have come forward, donating precious hours to the Best Time for Love cause.
The last production step was creating a trade paperback for what is called “print on demand.” If you don’t want an electronic version, you can order an actual book on Amazon, which will then be produced and shipped. I found a fabulous trade paperback book designer, Rosamond G., on Elance. The result is a book that looks as if Random House published it. Now Elizabeth Heldrich and I are working on a state-of-the-art eblast announcement, which will go out to everyone in my mailbox through a free email distribution company called “Mailchimp.”
As part of my marketing campaign, I am attempting to connect to senior communities everywhere. I’ve already sent iPad and Nook review copies to an activities director in Miami and the booking officer for the Lexington Social Club in Del Ray. I want to go on the senior circuit, give readings at places like Sun City and Villages.
Then there’s Mother’s Day. The graphic designer, David Litman, who works in the office at Village Digital on Horatio Street off Eighth Avenue, is making a Mother’s Day postcard, with the ad on the front and glowing blurbs on the back. I’m planning to airdrop these postcards into every café in the hood and across town too. Like the junior book editors, I don’t expect young people to be interested, but my headline will remind them that parents and grandparents would be. On and on…the opportunities for marketing are practically infinite. I learn as I go. I’ll keep you all posted.
The best time for love is now, because Best Time for Love is here. That’s besttimeforlove.com.
Yes, I think my mother would be proud.
