Beauty from Afar

I’m Jeff Schult. I wrote Beauty from Afar: A Medical Tourist’s Guide to Affordable and Quality Cosmetic Care Outside the U.S. in 2005 and 2006; it was published by Stewart, Tabori & Chang, an imprint of Abrams Books, New York, N.Y., in July 2006. BFA, as I came to call it for short, was the first book about medical travel and tourism published in the United States. I became known as something of an expert on the subject of medical travel and made a small career out of that. The book sold thousands of copies.

Unfortunately, it did not sell the tens of thousands of copies that might have earned it a second printing and, in July 2009, the rights to the book reverted to me. I have no regrets. I did a good job on the book and therefore, most likely, will get to write another one — and I am working on that.

In the meantime, however — what to do with BFA? You can still buy the book itself online, new or used … but it will become increasingly unavailable as time goes on. The logical thing to do is to make it available as an e-book, and that I will do.

For now (Jan. 2013) about the first third of the book is online here. Eventually, the full text of Beauty from Afar will become available, paragraph by paragraph, chapter by chapter, on this web site. This way, I can comment on it myself and update where necessary. Though I think the book holds up well over time, inevitably I will have more to say.

Here is what I had to say when the book was first published:

Since I wrote the book, I have consulted for various medical travel companies both in the U.S. and abroad; I was editor of a medical travel newsletter;  and I have conceived, executed and written web sites and blogs for medical travel companies and web sites. I am webmaster and editor of the Prisma Dental blog for my Costa Rican dentists, and their site has become the most trafficked site of any dental practitioner in the world, according to Alexa rankings.

I am available for work. I’m less expensive than you might think, but I’m not cheap.

I expect that this book site will, in time, become one of the most popular sites about medical tourism on the web. I am open to advertising and partnership ideas. You can contact me at:

jss at beautyfromafar dot com.