This isn’t bungee jumping or hang-gliding, but to me it was an adventure. A learning adventure. In 2002 I published my first book, Women Who Could…and Did. It’s an inspirational book based on interviews with older women who had made a name for themselves in the arts and in science way before most women ventured out of the home sphere. I did almost every publishing piece myself with the “kindness of strangers,” many of whom I met on Internet listservs. How did I do this, a person in her fifties, who never wrote a book before, much less self-published? Here’s the story.

In the early 1990s, I was fresh out of a doctoral program in social work, where I was forced to do the kind of research study that my dissertation committee deemed worthwhile. I vowed I would do what I wanted to do after I got my PhD.

I applied to the Wellesley College Centers for Women to be a Research Scholar, though I wasn’t a researcher or a scholar. My colleague and sometime mentor, the late Jean Baker Miller, who contributed so much to the psychology of women, marshaled my application through channels. A Research Scholar there for 5 years, I attended stimulating discussion groups about women and psychology and therapy.

For one of those five years I was part of a special Scholars group. Special because we gelled. Each of us was respectful and collegial, committed to the group, and helpful to each other in every way. We met for an entire day once a week for the whole academic year, more so than any previous scholars’ group had done. The other women were professors, educators, an attorney, and a couple of psychotherapists. Each of us was working on a project – research or writing. It was there that I dreamed up the work that became Women Who Could…and Did.

I first read the literature about creativity, achievement, and the history of women in the hard sciences and in arts such as music, painting, sculpture, writing, dance, and photography. These were the women I targeted for interviews. I wanted to find out how they explained their extraordinary achievement, having risen in their fields at a time when most women were expected to stay at home and nurture children and spouses. Their life stories reflected a personal struggle to overcome sexism in schools, workplaces and families. The women were inspirational to me. Many became my role models.

Next, I analyzed all these stories using what’s called a Grounded Theory technique, a labor-intensive method of finding common themes and explanations for these. This involved painstakingly going over each interview transcript numerous times and making decisions about the meaning of different stories the women told me. For example, I heard from many that they were passionate about their work, sometimes to the exclusion of everything else. Others were passionate people who got intensely involved in lots of experiences. Sometimes, their passion came upon them suddenly. For others, it evolved slowly over many years. Each of these kinds of passionate experiences was coded differently. There were dozens of examples like this, so the analysis of the whole set of twenty-six interviews took hundreds of hours.

Once I had a finished product, I decided I couldn’t merely publish a couple of articles to lie in the dusty archives of academic journals, but must make these stories available to a non-academic audience. This marked the beginning of a saga of learning how to write for the intelligent reader who is not an academic. I couldn’t write in long convoluted sentences. I had to use action verbs. I had to delete all adjectives and adverbs, because most did not add to the meaning. I didn’t entirely succeed in all this.

I worked for several years with writing consultant Marcia Yudkin, who patiently red-marked my manuscripts in every other line. Although I was a grammar maven in my high school years, I realized I did not know when to use “which” and when to use “that.” Still don’t.

I spent a year writing a book proposal and sample chapters which (or that?) I sent to 35 agents and publishers. Several agents were taken with what I had written and kept the manuscript for almost a year before telling me that it had to be less academic to appeal to a wider audience, or it had to be more academic and I had to go back and interview the women again. When I heard these reactions one too many times, I decided to publish on my own.

This decision, although I’ve never regretted it, challenged me yet again. I had to find out, step by step, what I needed to do. First, I joined 2 different self-publishing listservs  (or chat rooms) and lurked there for a while until I absorbed a lot of basic information. I learned how to use Microsoft Word to compose text in book form so I’d know just how my manuscript would look as a 5.5 x 8- inch paperback book. I figured out what kind of font I wanted, the weight of the paper, and how to include the charming photographs the women had offered to me. I selected a book cover designer (Robert Howard) and an indexer (Jean Middleton), the only 2 tasks that I outsourced. I had to send out requests to printers to get the best value for my buck. I had to figure out how to get an ISBN number, how to get permissions from publishers to quote from their books, and how to compose the copyright page. I had to compose arresting material for the back of the book, that crucial place that people look when they pick up the book for 20 seconds in a bookstore. I had to get blurbs by well-known people in the field.

This online listserv community of self-publishers, publicists, printers, and public speakers supplied me with everything I had to know to produce a professional product. Their generosity was exceptional. I discovered that this was, and perhaps still is, common on listservs for all different specialties. People sometimes wrote 3-page single-spaced responses to my naïve questions with no apparent intent to sell me anything. I couldn’t wait to get back to my computer to see who had answered my last question.

Finally, I had boxes of books arriving at my door. I had to send a hundred of them out to reviewers, gratis. A portion of them went to a distributor.  I’ve since realized this was not cost-effective. I could just as easily have done the packaging and mailing from my home office.

I got many good and better reviews from magazines, alumna newsletters, newspapers, and online publications. I had to then use these reviews to get other exposure and new reviews. I did book signings. I carried books around with me wherever I went, should I pass an independent bookstore who might want to take some books on consignment. I became an avid online promoter of Women Who Could…and Did.

I went to see a speaking consultant who videod, then critiqued, my crude attempts at public speaking, a skill I needed to promote my book. Although I had previously spent a year in Toastmasters International, my voice was still too monotone. I discovered I had a verbal tic, a little repeated “pss” sound that I was not aware of. And, the video demonstrated that I also kept blinking my eyes, especially at the beginning of a talk, a habit that my consultant Gary Genard said betrayed my anxiety. All of these deficiencies had to be addressed. I learned how to use the space around the podium, to practice voice variability, to make eye contact with people in different parts of the room, and to use my body and facial expression to convey meaning, connection, and enthusiasm.

After speaking to university groups, adult education centers, employee assistance programs, women’s programs, senior centers, and corporations, I became comfortable and even a bit loosy-goosy in my style. My favorite thing to do is to show photographs of the lovely “older” women in my book, who don’t seem old, as I’m catching up with them. Now I seek out and enjoy public speaking and never get anxious when I talk. I do put pressure on myself preparing for the presentation, wanting to do the best possible job.