HOW MOVING TO MEXICO KICKSTARTED MY WRITING CAREER

 

I became an author after writing a travel memoir about living as an expat in a fishing village on Mexican’s Caribbean coast south of Cancun, long before self-publishing was a thing. As a former journalist, writing came easily to me.

When my husband and I dropped out of San Francisco’s corporate world to move to Mexico, friends and family thought we were crazy. But we’d traveled to Mexico for years and had fallen in love with it. Once settled, I opened a bookstore in our pueblo, Puerto Morelos, and named it Alma Libre Libros—Free Spirit Books. I had a tale to tell.

Every year we returned to the States to buy more books during Mexico’s low season, summer and early fall months when tourism is light. One year during our annual buying spree I decided to attend a writers conference. I pitched publishers, agents, and editors. Nothing gelled.

AHA MOMENT 

At the conference, self-publishing guru Dan Poynter packed the room to overflow at all his lectures. He’d even developed an “E-Reader,” long before Amazon’s Kindle. We all know how that ended up, not with Dan! But his self-publishing ideas were innovative and hands on. He’d had good luck self-publishing his own books and had developed a solid formula, from formatting and cover design to sales and marketing. His book, The Self Publishing Manual, covered everything a newbie like me needed to know.

Feeling empowered by his part cheerleader, part evangelist message on the new world of self-publishing, I took the the bull by the horns and decided to just do it. My writing group had two experienced authors who vowed to assist in editing, and the book nearly wrote itself. After all, it was a slice of life tale—how I bought land, built a house, and moved lock, stock and barrel to a remote fishing village in southern Mexico. After the conference I got serious about writing my memoir, Where the Sky is Born: Living in the Land of the Maya.

PRE-PUBLICATION BLUES 

Back then formatting wasn’t done with a Word or Pages program. It was done by a typesetter—a human! Someone referred me and I went with their suggestion. In about four weeks that was handled. For the cover, since I was writing about life amidst the pyramids, Paul and I took to the road, and with camera and tripod in hand, headed to Tulum, one of the most picturesque of Maya pyramid sites. He got some great shots for the front cover, and for the back cover, the wooden dock of our picturesque pueblo, Puerto Morelos, served me well. 

I found a cover designer from Dan Poynter’s list of designers in his self-publishing manual and she came through nicely. After the typesetting was done and proofed, I was ready to print. I located a printer, signed on for a thousand copies, and voila! A book was born!

THE EDITING CONUNDRUM

After finishing that long awaited first draft, I suggest setting the book aside for a few days. Think on it, dream on it, then give it another pass. When you have your i’s dotted and all t’s are crossed, pass it off to your content editor (if you write fiction). At the very end, after the editor has marked it up like your 10th grade term paper and you’ve folded in changes and suggestions, with your editor’s blessing, pass it to a line editor or proof reader. Some authors incorporate Beta readers into the process, and their insights can be beneficial plus you earn their reader devotion by asking them to help you out

For formatting, since I’m not super tech savvy, I hired a formatter for both paperback and e-format. And for covers on my two fiction books, part of the Wheels Up Yucatán Thriller trilogy, an artist friend in Todos Santos, Baja California, Mexico, allowed me to use two pieces of art that worked out incredibly well. I’ve long been a fan of her work and asked if she would consider my use of her art for the cover. I was floored when she accepted. We worked out a trade agreement—my books for her art, a win-win all around. She sells the books in her gallery. I sent her artwork to a graphic artist to design the title, back cover, and spine.

THE PR DRILL

After publication, next up was public relations and marketing. In those days, one sent PR releases to

newspapers and magazines for review. I snagged several, including one in United Air’s inline flight magazine, and waited for orders to roll in. I had an email list of friends and family—a must—and that helped a lot. Word of mouth was my biggest advantage, and since we owned the bookstore, people knew the book was coming.

But those long ago days have changed. Now most sales are online through Amazon or Ingram Spark, Barnes & Noble, or Apple. And regarding getting a book prepared to publish, tech savvy indie authors format their own work, sometimes even their covers, though I’d advise against that. Professional designers produce a professional cover. 

THE NEXT STEP

Marketing, especially for indies, is a tough go and deserves a post of its own. I won’t go into it here, but be prepared to wear not only your writer’s cap but also a marketing cap if you want to see sales results. And find that lone brick and mortar bookstore in your town or city and ask them to carry

your book and host a book signing. Innovation, dedication, and consistency help, and networking is key. Get to know local writers and tap into the large community of writers worldwide through social media. Writers are no longer isolated, but part of a creative movement that stretches to all parts of the world. It’s an exciting time to write. Just look at it like this: Hemingway’s Paris cafe has gone global.

Happy writing! I continue to write, now penning a Mexico cartel trilogy, and I wrote a non-fiction book on the Maya 2012 calendar phenomenon, Maya 2012 Revealed.

Check out my website www.jeaninekitchel.com for information on Wheels Up—A Novel of Drugs, Cartels and Survival, and Tulum Takedown, books one and two in my Wheels Up Mexico cartel thriller trilogy. Sign up for future blog posts in the link above.

GRINGO MADNESS: ADVENTURES IN OPENING A BOOKSTORE IN MEXICO

 

Imagine transporting ten thousand used books from San Francisco to Puerto Morelos, Mexico, and then trying to clear customs without the proper paperwork. In September 1997 that was my first exposure to the world of owning and operating a bookstore in Mexico—Alma Libre Libros.

Yes, I eventually managed to clear customs. I can only believe that after three weeks of staring at two hundred boxes of books on their dock, some customs official decided to clear the deck and release them. Before leaving our nine to five jobs in San Francisco and making the move, we struggled with the protocol of how to bring the books in. Our contractor had lived there forever and at long last, we followed his advice. "Don't bother to go to the Mexican Consulate before you come down," he told me and my husband. "Just ship the books and see what happens. It's Mexico."

Although we could have received better advice, this wait and see attitude did do the trick. But clearing customs was only the beginning of the challenge to set up shop. We'd planned for years to be at this point in opening the store. Three years prior to moving we shopped for used books on weekends at garage sales, thrift shops, and Friends of the Library sales around San Francisco and even ran classified ads for books. We eventually ran out of space in our Half Moon Bay home and rented a Bekins Storage unit in nearby Redwood City to house them.

I attended a weekend workshop at a community college on how to start a used bookstore, and decided to follow a tried and true formula—for the US at least—on how to realize our dream. We set up the store on a Buy-Sell-Trade basis which would allow readers to trade in used books for store credit. It would generate new titles, buck up inventory, and allow customers to read new books for little, if any, cost.

We learned what percent to have in hardback versus paperback; how much fiction to carry along with mystery, thrillers, sci-fi, metaphysics, art, hobbies—up to twenty genres. Living near San Francisco proved fortunate in that we found an eclectic, wide-ranging mix of titles and customers commented on our selection.

Thinking ahead we contacted our eventual landlord two years before the move and asked if there were any shops on the town zocalo that might be coming available. He soon advised that something was opening up. We started paying rent on shop space in January 1996 even though we knew we couldn't escape San Francisco till late 1997. But location is important. On that note, one might ask why Puerto Morelos? (Easy commute). And we liked the idea of facing the town square.

Our work was cut out for us soon after we arrived from our 4,500 drive from Northern California down to southern Mexico. We immediately began the process for our FM3, or working papers, through a notary. Although it took only three months for our immigration certification to be completed, it felt like a lifetime as at times we had to make daily trips to the notary's office in Cancun to give and retrieve information due to his failure to properly inform us on various procedures.

Meanwhile, the books sat in our yet unopened store. We had the walls painted a bright mustard yellow and the window trims painted Maya Azul, a lovely shade of turquoise that mirrored the color of the Caribbean Sea.

Our next trauma was having bookshelves made. We needed to accommodate both hardback and paperback and decided to go floor-to-ceiling in pine. As luck would have it, by the time our carpenter purchased the wood, torrential rains had railed for two weeks straight. It was now early December and we were chomping at the bit to start alphabetizing and sorting books, all ten thousand of them. As we alphabetized, the carpenter began to bring in shelves but told us not to stack books on them for two days to let the wood dry completely. We waited, then cut strips of cardboard and tacked it onto the shelves first—for safety's sake—in case the shelves were still damp.

After four tiresome days of alphabetical sorting, we began placing books on shelves. We were eager to see the fruits of our labors shelved on the beautiful new wood. We had begun early in the morning that day and pushed ourselves to finish putting all fiction in place, along with spy-thriller, another large section genre. Around six that night we were breaking for dinner and Paul happened to touch the cardboard under one section. To his horror it was soaked—lying in wait to reach our books. Nightmare on Elm Street! Like two maniacs who'd just seen Freddy Kruger, we tore our books off the shelves desperately trying to keep some semblance of order after all those days of sorting. Tension was high. Tourist season was upon us. We had bookshelves but they were unusable in the state they were in.   

So we did what any normal thinking person would do—early the next day we brought out hairdryers and began drying shelves like a shag haircut. When that didn't work, as soon as the sun made an appearance, Paul broke the shelves down and pulled them into the streets to dry the old-fashioned way—with solar power. We can only imagine what the locals were thinking—Crazy gringos! We dragged wet planks of wood into the street, at one point creating a traffic jam. Picture Laurel and Hardy. What a backwards way to begin a business! 

Since patience was neither of our virtues, the next week painfully dragged along. We cut more cardboard and re-tacked it to the shelves. A couple days later all our books were off the floor and on display. On December 20, just in time for winter solstice, we opened our doors. 

We were astounded at the goodwill we received on opening. Even though most of our books were in English, many locals read both Spanish and English. We immediately started trading books, requesting more Spanish language books along with German, French and Italian.

The next week we searched Cancun for a humidifier for the store. Equipped with a relative humidity indicator and now a dehumidifier, we managed to control the store humidity to the perfect temp for books—about fifty percent—as explained to us by the manager of Green Apple Books, San Francisco. Any more humidity and the pages don't retain their crispness, any less and the crowns of the books begin to crack and break.

In those days, summer travel wasn't a thing in the Riviera Maya, so we'd close shop and May through August—low season—we headed back to the States for more books, gathering around four thousand additional titles per buying spree. After the first couple years we were up to sixteen thousand books and began to offer new books on the Maya, Maya culture, pyramids, Latin fiction, ecology and the local environment, birds, mammals, fish, and guide books on the region.

We received many accolades as our reputation grew and were written up in numerous travel guides. We were one of six bookstores in the state of Quintana Roo, the only one with a cache of books so large, both in English and Spanish. My favorite write-up came from the Rough Guide to Mexico, stating we were "the largest English language bookstore from Mexico City to Guatemala." Our local customers came from as far away as Chetumal, and we were a common port stop for sailboats sailing down the Caribbean Coast. Though we no longer have the store, it's now in its third rendition, with owners Caleb and Nicole Moss. Twenty three years in business, and a true gem of Puerto Morelos.

                                                                 ***

Check out my website http://www.jeaninekitchel.com for further adventures on life as an expat in Mexico, Where the Sky is Born: Living in the Land of the Maya. Wheels Up—A Novel of Drugs, Cartels and Survival, and Tulum Takedown, are books two and three in the Wheels Up Yucatán thriller trilogy. Sign in above to keep up with my next tale from the Yucatán.

MY JUNGLE KITTY AKA MIRACLE CAT IN MEXICO

When we moved to Mexico long ago we took our three-month old cat with us—Max, born on the Fourth of July. We got him from San Francisco SPCA on Union Square where they'd set up a tent to unload kittens. A bevy of little charmers peered at us from the cage—Max was the most bodacious of the bunch. Even when a two-alarm SF fire truck went roaring past, he didn't back away while I petted him through the wire. He was the one.

He's been neutered and had his shots. That was his life story, the SPCA authority told us. So what was ours? Well, we explained, we were leaving for Mexico in a few weeks and wanted to take a cat with us. We were cat lovers and trusted the SPCA when looking for a kitty.

GOIN' SOUTH? MAYBE NOT

Not so fast! we were told. How could they be sure we'd provide a good life for the cat south of the border? In Mexico!

Wait a minute, was this really happening? Were we being questioned about our capacity to provide a risk-free life for our new kitty by the San Francisco SPCA? Apparently so. By this time we'd bonded with newly named Max and just thinking about him not in our lives was almost unbearable. Paul, my husband, did some real fast-talking because within the next half hour we were trotting away with Mr. Max.

In looking back over the years, Ms. SPCA may have had a leg to stand on. Max endured some unbelievable ordeals, many man made. Allow me to elaborate. He didn't get his nickname Miracle Cat, aka Milagro Gato in Spanish from our trusted Cancun vet, por nada.

OFF THE GRID

First off, Quintana Roo in those days was unsettled and downright wild as far as critters go. Much of our pueblo, Puerto Morelos, was literally a jungle and our house sat a mile from the town zocalo. Back then we had very few neighbors and the mangroves across the sascab road were full of, well, varmints: gray foxes, crocodiles, boa constrictors, monkeys, and coatimundi. Also, added to the neighborhood combat list—beach dogs and stray cats. Non-neutered cats.

As life rolled along I came to realize Max was probably the lone neutered cat in all of Quinatana Roo. The strays still had their testosterone. I could tell by the midnight cat fights that woke me. I'd jump out of bed, open the screen door, and clap my hands a few times to curtail the fight. That usually worked and Max would haul his battered buns inside the house to sleep off his late night wake-up call, only to once again realize he was indeed a stranger in a strange land.

 

 

OUT AND ABOUT

By this time he was tri-lingual: English, Spanish and Mayan. But somehow his Fourth of July birthday must have given him away. Every stray seemed to know he was gringo through and through. He'd cat around in those early days, and often when we went back to the US for a visit, I'd hear reports on our return from the neighbors—Max was over, or we saw Max in the mangroves. Once we had to go back to the US for a few months and we left him with caretakers. Basically their only job was to feed him. I received a concerned email from a neighbor that said he'd lost all his hair and was as skinny as the pink panther. Obviously something was amiss.

NEIGHBOR ALERT

She administered to him. We'd assumed the simple task of feeding Max was taking place but on our return home, we saw a raggedy cat with no fur from his mid-section to his tail. The caretaker said he wasn't eating. After checking his food supply—now Whiskas—what happened to the bags of pricey Science Diet?—I discovered it was moldy. We dragged him to the vet. Malnutrition had caused the hair loss and the ungas. Ung-what? It was a fungus, the vet explained, and if we applied a topical cream it would go away.

From then on we asked the neighbor to check in on him if we were gone. Although Max was usually an outdoor cat who used a flapper door for easy in and out privileges, for a while he shrank from any open door. We were flummoxed—he loved being outside. A few days later the gardener found a four-foot boa in the front yard. We assumed that was Max's reasoning for avoiding the great outdoors. We marveled at what he must have seen on those dark jungle nights, and how he managed to stay alive.

INSIDE THE WALLS

But there was no way he'd stay inside full time. Not his style. Early on he'd cavort inside and out of our gated property, throwing caution to the wind as he ran across the street. But a few years later he started avoiding going out of the gate as the road, now paved, got busier and busier. He hung back and restricted himself to a life within the high walls of Casa Maya. His nine lives must have come knocking. Over the years we understood why our vet named him Milagro Gato. When he made his first visit to the vet at the tender age of six, he'd earned that nickname. 

"Why milagro gato? Miracle cat?" I'd asked. 

"Oh," replied our savvy vet. "No cat can live in the jungle that long. He's un milagro."

Truer words were never spoken.

Footnote: Max retired at the age of 17 to the central coast of California.

WHY WRITE ABOUT MEXICO?

Back in the 80s I fell in love with Mexico. When I began traveling to Mexico’s Caribbean coast, first stop was Isla Mujeres, an island just twenty minutes by ferry from Cancun.

In 1983 Cancun hadn’t become the tourist hotspot it is today, and getting there from San Francisco took eighteen hours. My husband and I flew Mexicana Air which was a drama in itself. Though the flight was said to have a lone stop— Mexico City—before we reached our Cancun destination, Guadalajara became a port of call along with another airport we stopped at in the dead of night and never learned the name of.  

With so many starts and stops, we lost time and ended up arriving to Cancun so late we nearly missed the last ferry to our little Mexican island. By sheer luck we reached the dock in time to board the empty boat, enjoying the warm Caribbean breeze as we chugged towards our tropical destination.

This was the beginning of my love affair with Mexico, and years later after we’d moved there from California, I opened a bookshop and began writing travel articles for local newspapers and Mexico websites, eventually writing a travel memoir about my life in a foreign land, Where the Sky is Born. 

After finishing another non-fiction, Maya 2012 Revealed, a journalistic overview of the 2012 calendar phenomenon, I began my research for Wheels Up—A Novel of Drugs, Cartels and Survival. I’d lived in Mexico and owned a business there long enough to see the creeping dominance of the cartels and their effect on the daily lives of citizens. I'd kept news clippings and written notes in a journal on various incidents I'd heard about.

Obviously it would have been folly to write non-fiction about the country's overlords. I was well aware of the cartels' swift carriage of justice to any Mexican journalist who dared write about their exploits: 119 assassinated and 30 missing since 2000.  My personal heroes—journalists Anabel Hernández and Lydia Cacho—had both undergone their own dramas by daring to be so bold. Hernández was targeted for writing Narcoland, a scathing exposé of government officials cozying up to the Sinaloa cartel. In a raw display of power to detain her, cartel henchmen dressed as federal agents cordoned off an entire Mexico City block, checking for her door to door. Luckily she was not home. 

Lydia Cacho was not so lucky. After reporting on the sexual peccadilloes of Cancun politicos, she was kidnapped, thrown into the trunk of a car, and driven to Puebla where her attackers planned to stage a kangaroo trial to put her in jail indefinitely. Through luck, friends in Cancun discovered where she was being held and secured her release. Afterwards she went back to reporting at Por Esto in Cancun. When asked about the attack she replied, "I don't scare so easy."

For me, I decided to write cartel fiction that pulled stories straight from Mexico papers. Using current news as prompts for stories is an old ploy. If Dostoyevsky could do it, so could I.

My Mexico notebooks were filled with outlandish, unbelievable tales. Since my love of Mexico goes deep, I wanted to expose cartel corruption and mirror the chaos and destruction they've created. By writing fiction, I felt I could reach a larger audience and make readers aware of the social injustice taking place in my adopted homeland. Thus I began my research for Wheels Up—A Novel of Drugs, Cartels and Survival. Four years later it was finished. Tulum Takedown came out in March 2020, book two in the Wheels Up trilogy.

I view the trilogy as historical fiction, an insider's close-up of a disastrous situation. As the quotation by Charles Bowden at the beginning of Tulum Takedown states, "Underneath the cartels lies the disintegration of a nation." 

For more writings about Mexico, the Maya and the Yucatán, check my website at www.jeaninekitchel.com. Subscribe above for my bi-monthly blog posts.

HOW THE MARGARITA GOT ITS NAME

Was there a Margarita behind the Margarita? Of course. But contrary to what you may have imagined, this woman was not a Mexican beauty, but instead a fledgling Hollywood starlet. And though other Margarita namesakes have surfaced and vied for the distinction, this starlet has all the trappings of the real McCoy.

Years ago I heard a eulogy aired on NPR's All Things Considered for a man named Carlos "Danny" Herrera, who passed away at ninety in San Diego. Although the name rang no bells, he left a legacy known far and wide. He had created one of the world's most iconic cocktails, the Margarita. On a wistful note in respect of the man's passing, the host unraveled a tale of how Herrera came to invent the drink that is synonymous with Mexico. It was 1992, and San Diego was paying homage to Herrera who had been born and raised in Mexico City at the turn of the century and moved to Southern California five years before he died.

According to the San Diego Union-Tribune, Herrera had worked his way across Mexico as a young man, settling just south of Tijuana in 1929. He and his wife built their house in the rugged Baja California countryside. They added a bar in their home to entertain friends.

RANCHO LA GLORIA

More and more people dropped in so they decided to open for business, and a few years later, they added a restaurant. Then came ten hotel rooms and a pool along with a booming clientele from across the border. Rosarita Beach just down the road was becoming a fashionable getaway for the Hollywood crowd and Carlos' place was an easy pit stop for a quick refreshment on the dusty Baja road.

By 1935, traffic was heavy. Carlos was a friendly guy with a quick wit and his bar-restaurant, named Rancho La Gloria after his daughter, attracted stars and socialites who stopped in regularly before continuing south to Rosarita or Ensenada. 

A STARLET IS BORN

Among the bar's clientele was an actress named Marjorie King. While her friends took advantage of Carlos' talents as bartender, Ms. King did not partake in the afternoon revelry. She had an unusual problem. She was allergic, so the tale went, to all alcohol except tequila. 

What luck, Carlos cajoled. Tequila is the national drink of Mexico, he said as he poured the actress a straight shot of the clear, potent liquid, brought out a plate of fresh limes, and set a salt shaker on the bar in front of her. Marjorie wrinkled her pretty nose, gave Carlos a "not so fast" look, and informed him she hated the taste of it. 

What was a girl to do? In those wild and reckless days not long after Prohibition's last gasp, how could one sit idly by and not join in the fun? Herrera was determined to put an end to Ms. King's misery. He went to work. 

ULTIMATE CONCOCTION

Herrera decided he would create the ultimate concoction for the attractive actress. He started experimenting and came up with a winner: three parts white tequila, two parts triple sec, one part fresh lime juice, a pinch of sugar. As the day was hot, he added shaved ice and blended the mixture with a shaker. Ms. King liked the looks of the drink immediately, Herrera reportedly said. 

But how to serve it? Marjorie King was no ordinary gal, and Herrera wanted to pay tribute to her sense of style. Something special was needed. He grabbed a champagne glass, dipped its rim in lime juice, and twirled it in a bowl of salt. Re-shaking the contents, he then poured the frothy liquid into the champagne glass and presented it to the starlet. The result—the soon to be famous Margarita, shaken, not stirred. And by coincidence, the drink included all the ingredients of a traditional tequila shooter—tequila, lime and salt, but in a more appealing package. 

NAME RECOGNITION

How did the cocktail become known as a Margarita? Since Marjorie and her gang of friends often came to Rancho La Gloria, whenever their car caravan pulled up outside the bar, Carlos would spot the bunch, see Marjorie, and greet her with a hearty, "Margarita! Margarita!" the Spanish equivalent of her name. Then he'd start preparing her special drink.  

It was instant name recognition. What else could it be called? Margarita was the perfect name for this sexy new drink. Meanwhile Marjorie—aka Margarita—went back to the States where she hung out with all her swell friends and introduced the drink to bartenders at some of the finer dining establishments in Los Angeles and San Diego. When asked its name, she explained bartender Danny Herrera, the inventor of the cocktail, called it a Margarita. 

The name stuck and by the 1950s Margaritas were being served everywhere in Southern California. Soon after that, the Margarita began to make its way around the world as Marjorie's Hollywood friends were globe trotters and took their love of the cocktail with them wherever they went. So the next time you're taking a sip of that marvelous frothy concoction known as a Margarita, think back on a time when Baja California was just a rugged strip of sandy desert and Cancun didn't even exist. Think about a little bar with big views of the Pacific Ocean and thank Carlos "Danny" Herrera for paying homage to a Hollywood beauty by inventing a delightful drink to brighten up her day. Salud!

For more information on the Maya, Mexico and the Yucatan, check out my website, www.jeaninekitchel.com. My travel memoir, Where the Sky is Born: Living in the Land of the Maya, is available on Amazon.com. Also on Amazon, are books one and two in my Mexico cartel thriller trilogy, Wheels Up—A Novel of Drugs, Cartels and Survival, and Tulum Takedown. Subscribe to my blog above for my writings on Mexico and the Maya.

NEXT

INDIE AUTHORS AND THE IMPORTANCE OF REVIEWS

NEW REVIEWS

New reviews are essential for indie authors striving to remain relevant after the excitement of the launch is over. Fresh reviews can keep one's name in the spotlight through social media and serve as an easy topic for newsletters to subscribers—Hey, look! Another five star review! Indies need to constantly remind the public they're still out there writing, producing, and getting attention.

With my first book, a travel memoir about life in Mexico,  I simply put out a press release to gain exposure. I published the book in 2003, a life time away now in how books are marketed. Back then I bought a copy of Writers Market, identified all magazines and newspapers that might run a review of the book, and mailed out copies to anyone interested.

OLD SCHOOL

A handful grabbed the bait. Most reviews were published soon after the launch. Basically, along with a newsletter to friends, I sold directly to bookstores and at book fairs. That was it. Afterwards, the book got some attention through Mexico websites as I'd pen a travel article here or there. Always included at the end was a sentence about my book and where to find it. And when Amazon got going, I listed it.

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY AUTHOR COUNT

Getting noticed isn't easy. Publishers Weekly reported there were 1.6 million self-published books in print in 2018. Even authors who've landed traditional deals say they must do their own leg work if they want to stay relevant. Publishers allow six week's marketing time for new books. Then they pull the budget.

REVIEW TYPES

The best way for indie authors to stay in the limelight is by getting book reviews, and there are various types: Reader reviews on Amazon or Good Reads, book blogger reviews, those prized reviews in newspapers, magazines or websites, and paid reviews like those on Kirkus.

One way to encourage readers to add a review on Amazon or Good Reads is to put a suggestion at the end of the book, requesting a short review. I make it easy for them by placing a link directly to the review page to encourage them to take action. 

After a review's been published, I place a line or two of it on social media, in the hopes of encouraging new readers to take the plunge.

BOOK BLOGGERS AND MORE

Another way to gather reviews is to single out book bloggers in your genre. This is laborious and oftentimes not so fruitful. But the beauty of landing a book blogger's review is myriad: They have a healthy list of followers and their review is blasted out to the faithful. I've learned to cull book bloggers through google searches, books on bloggers (though they tend to be outdated), Twitter and Facebook. I've become friends with most of them, and when I launched book two in my Wheels Up Yucatán trilogy, they were happy to review it. 

My favorite review is one that appears in a publication, be it newspaper, magazine, or website. These are tough to land, but depending on the media outlet, can gain an author a great deal of attention. These require pitching the publication after making sure the fit is right. 

MANY USES

Reviews can also provide quotes used in back cover blurbs, social media posts, and in  newsletters. Landing them is a tough go but without a doggedly determined attempt on your part to gain the spotlight, your star will fade into oblivion. Look at it this way: If you've spent all those years knocking out your treasured prose, don't let it lose its luster without a fight.

"DISORDERED TIME" — THE REAL MAYA PROPHECY

Quite a ruckus erupted last week over a tweet that suggested the Maya end of the world prophecy was off by eight years. That, dear reader, catapults us right into the cross hairs of—gulp—2020. The prediction, however, was not made by an eminent Maya academic or even a calendar researcher, but by plant biologist and Fulbright scholar at the University of Tennessee, Paolo Tagalogquin. His Twitter account has since been deleted. 

With recent global events, that very fear—the world ending—may have already entered your mind. 

You no doubt remember the 2012 Maya calendar kerfuffle. As a Mayaphile and long-time student of Maya culture, I wrote a book titled Maya 2012 Revealed: Demystifying the Prophecy, to quash false information about the end date of their Long Count calendar, one of twenty-eight in the time-obsessed Maya system.

CALENDAR CONVERSION

Let me explain how the Maya 2012 end of the world "prophecy" made waves in June 2020 news. Even the New York Post took a shot at it. Apparently Tagalogquin did a math check between the Julian calendar, that dates back to 8 CE, and the Gregorian or Christian calendar that first came into being in 1752. After his re-calculations, he came up with this tweet:
"Following the Julian Calendar, we are technically in 2012. The number of days lost in a year due to the shift into Gregorian Calendar is 11 days. For 268 years using the Gregorian Calendar (1752-2020) times 11 days = 2,948 days. 2,948 days / 365 days (per year) = 8 years.” With his calculations, the date is June 21, 2020, summer solstice.

The subtext: I assume you have your affairs in order.

END OF THE WORLD?

Back in 2012, some believed December 21, 2012, might be the end. The media blared non-stop that this was when the Maya Long Count Calendar completed a 5,125 year cycle known as the 13th baktun. The ancient Maya, an advanced culture of mathematicians (they invented zero) and naked eye astronomers, viewed this moment as consequential.

Why is this even important? If the Maya code had not been deciphered a few decades ago, we wouldn’t even have known that an end date to the Long Count calendar existed.

In researching the Maya end date, I realized that converting both Julian and Gregorian calendars to the Maya calendar had been no easy task. Spanish speaking priests were used for the conversion and needed to interact with the Maya who had their own language. Not only was there room for error in language differences, but the Julian calendar had gone through several trial runs over the centuries as the world coped with a one-time-fits-all calendar system. During the conversion, some countries used different calendar renditions simultaneously, and sometime in the 1500s while trying to play catch up, eleven days were lost in a single month. My overall impression: whoever had been relegated to configure dates from Julian to Gregorian to Maya had stared down an impossible undertaking. And furthermore, who was their fact checker?

RIGOBERTA MENCHÚ TUM

As the end date became a media phenomenon, I took a wider view of the “Maya prophecy” as it came to be known. Great change can span decades or even centuries, and as with all things Maya, the present is determined by the past. Everything repeats. Everything is a recurring pattern.

In 2012, Nobel laureate in literature, author Rigoberta Menchú Tum, a Quiche Maya from the Guatemala highlands who was forced to leave the country when her government disappeared thousands of indigenous Maya, said this, “There are a lot of people speaking for the Maya with little respect for the sacred Maya calendar or the culture.

“For us, the Maya, during this phase, time does not exist. Time is completely dispersed. It is ‘disordered’ time,’ when the greatest breakdown of humanity will occur, plagued by loneliness, stress and fear.

“The Maya elders say if we do not take right actions today, one-quarter of the people of the earth will perish.”

Menchú Tum’s prescient words have cast her as a Cassandra-like figure in light of the Covid pandemic. And though world-wide protests over the death of George Floyd and an impending economic crisis may not kill thousands, the stark reality of both drive away any hopes for a soon to be bright future.

2012: THE TRUE MAYAN PROPHECY FILM

In a documentary film, 2012: The True Mayan Prophecy, by Dawn Engle and Ivan Suvanjieff, founders of the non-profit PeaceJam, interviewed Maya elders along with Menchú Tum. In the 2012 interview, Menchú Tum said we’re living in a moment of chaos, and though there is global disorder, 2012 would usher in a more balanced period, if only we allow it.

“A new time is drawing near so it is important to maintain the light shining in these days, our personal and collective light,” she said. “We are passing through a period of disordered time which began in 1992 and will last forty years. There are things that happen that are not merely caused by people. It is the age, the energy, the cosmos.”

MAYA ELDERS

In the film, Menchú Tum references her spiritual advisors, Maria Faviana Chocoy Alva and Pedro Celestino Pac Noy, who state that apocalyptic predictions misrepresent the meaning of the end of the Maya Long Count cycle known as the thirteenth baktun. Their position is that this would be a time of great transition.

And who cannot agree that this is a time of transition, said Menchú Tum. “For humanity, it is the darkest of times … humanity is being called to a great responsibility, affected by our actions. We call them natural disasters but they are not natural. Much pain is already occurring.”

Again, Menchú Tum's sagacious predictions are synonymous with what we are presently living with—the human pain endured by the Covid pandemic, the earth's pain due to our disconnect from Mother Nature, and the atrocities humans have unleashed on the planet. Time, as the Maya might say, will tell.