by Maria Koropecky
the Peninsula News Review newspaper
Wednesday, September 2, 1998, page 17
Just getting your foot in the door is not enough. Sometimes you have to find another door.
Saanich Peninsula author and editor, Dorothy Jane Mills (formerly Seymour), whose career has spanned three decades, couldn't secure a publisher to print her new novel, The Sceptre. So she decided to try an alternate route. Her book can now be found on the Internet.
After working on the book for more than 10 years, "I tried a number of publishers and agents and gave up on that." Though she has published many freelance articles and helped her late husband research and write a highly respected trilogy documenting the history of baseball, she found, "the fiction market extremely tight."
Mills discovered the possibilities of Internet publishing on her own while she was surfing the net. At 70, she admits she has only been computer literate for five years. And to learn more about the innovative publishing market, Mills read several articles on the subject before choosing FirstBooks Library as her Internet publisher.
And for Mills the Internet is proving itself to be a profitable marketplace.
She says First Books, who has the luxury of maintaining a low overhead (as it doesn't have to pay any printing costs or keep hundreds of hard copies in a dusty warehouse), is already selling numerous copies of The Sceptre.
The process of buying a novel over the Internet is quite simple. When you reach www.1stbooks.com, follow the instructions starting with key word search. There is an opportunity to read a free preview. If you decide to buy a copy, the links will send you into a secure site which will ask for credit card numbers. Then, with a click here and a click there, the version will download into your computer.
Inspiration for The Sceptre came by way of Mills' mother, an Austrian immigrant. "I developed my main character based on her."
Key characters in the story are two women who immigrated to the U.S. in 1920 and were excellent seamstresses, but Mills' main character, Katya, was able to hone her talents to become a top-notch designer while Mills' mother never had the confidence to explore such career opportunities.
In The Sceptre, Katya find two ancient Celtic symbols which she incorporates in her fashion design. Mills explores the meaning of the symbols that date to 600-500 BC, when the Celts were ranging all over Europe. Katya re-discovers the symbols in a salt mine outside of Salzburg Austria.
Mills weaves an intricate plot and takes the reader on a historical journey, primarily outlining the dangerous, covert and sometimes explosive missions many Austrians undertook to sabotage the advancing Nazi army.
"The purpose of the book is to help dispel the belief that all Austrians were Nazis or Nazi sympathizers," she said.
Now that the novel is available on the Internet, Mills has found a publishing company, Ex-Libris, who is willing to print her story in both hard and paperback copies. The paper version of The Sceptre should be available in bookstores in October.
Mills is also currently working on a new cookbook highlighting the joys of soy protein, and she's starting a sequel to The Sceptre. The local author and her new husband, Roy, of three-and-a-half-years have decided to move permanently to Naples, Florida, to be closer to family and friends. During her last few months on the Island, she'll enjoy walking down to the water, finding unusual plants, and being fascinated by the size of the slugs.
