Beauty from Afar

We have reached that part of the project where I am finally posting what most people would consider to be the actual book part of the book, by which they would mean: The Introduction. Chapters. Etc.

We’re done with the packaging, the excusing, the thanking, the congratulating, the greeting, the Buy-Me-Take-Me-Home part of the ordeal. We are back where I was in mid 2005. I had signed a contract in January of that year to write a book about traveling abroad for plastic surgery and dentistry and medical care; but I did not really start working on it for a few months, because it took that long for my publisher to actually write me a check for the first half of my advance and I was otherwise sort of broke, or at least broke enough that I couldn’t afford to do the travel I needed to do for research until I saw some money.

I finally sat down to start the actual writing of BFA in June of 2005. I wrote an introduction. Then I wrote another introduction.

I hated them both, and I started panicking. What had ever made me think I could write a book?

Finally, I retraced my steps. I reread the original proposal I had written for the book, which I had liked, and which my agent had liked enough to represent me, and which my publisher had liked enough to give me an advance.

And I found the right tone, and the third try at an introduction was … well, you know. It was fine.

Introduction: How I Got My Smile Back

I added Curtis J. Schroeder’s Afterword for Beauty from Afar today, along with fussing with links on the table of contents page and updating the “About” page to reflect the fact that I am available for work and that I am open to the partnership and advertising possibilities inherent in this site.

Curt, as far as I know, is still group CEO at Bumrungrad International in Bangkok, Thailand; and I am still grateful for his kind words, written in 2006.

Yes, putting up the Afterword now is out of order. I thought about putting it up last. But I decided that anything that was really about the book and gives people the reasons why they might want to read it, ought to go up before I started posting actual chapters.

Besides, I love the Afterword and it makes me feel good to read it again.

So … next, I’ll put the jacket copy up, somehow; and then the Introduction … and then, I’ll probably start letting people know about the site and, little by little, post the 12 chapters. I’ll make pretty ebooks, in various formats, once I have pulled all the text out of the Quark file and massaged it sufficiently.

There are all kinds of precedents for blogs becoming books, and all sorts of ways, even, to turn a blog into a sort of a book … software that will suck up all your posts and headers and produce, from a blog, something resembling a book.

It seems a little backwards, doesn’t it? The trend is away from books, and toward blogs.

I’m still trying to come up with something that lets me post Beauty from Afar a little bit at a time, and comment and update as I go, in a way that makes sense both for readers and myself. I have the book copy digitized, that’s not a problem. I can produce pretty little ebooks if I want … though there are so many formats for THAT, it’s ridiculous. I’m not a Kindle lover but will probably make a Kindle version at some point.

Anyway, bear with me for a bit. I’ve been very busy with content for Prisma Dental … which is all related, but not the same.

Beauty from Afar: A Medical Tourist’s Guide to Affordable and Quality Cosmetic Care Outside the U.S. will be going out of print soon, and the rights to the book have reverted to me, the author. This is a good thing, because I plan to offer the book online.

You can look for substantial changes to this web site by later on in the summer.

I’ll be using the blog format, obviously. I am leaning toward offering the entire book online, supporting it with advertising; and also offering an ad-free e-book. I’m interested in the experiences of other authors who have put their books online after regaining the rights from a publisher. Thousands of copies of Beauty from Afar are already in print, and sold; nonetheless, I have learned that most people want to research medical travel and tourism from in front of a computer screen, not from in front of an open book.

In the meantime, I still recommend that people interested in getting affordable major dental work abroad check out the Prisma Dental blog, which I edit. The story of my visit there in 2004 remains at:

http://www.tftb.com/beautyfromafar

If you wish to write to me directly, the email address is jss (@) beautyfromafar (dot) com; or you can use the form at: http://www.jeffschult.com/blog/contact.