She Spent 30 Years Writing FDA Submissions. Now She Publishes Books About Older Women & Sex

Stella Fosse turned three decades of biotech writing into her own publishing imprint — and a collective rewriting who gets to be the main character.

It was in a kindergarten classroom. The teacher handed out construction-paper hearts and doilies so the kids could make valentines for their mothers. Every other five-year-old was gluing lace. Stella Fosse took a plain sheet of paper, drew a row of boxes, and filled them with the only words she knew how to spell, connecting them with little lines.

The teacher thought it was weird. Stella, looking back, agrees it probably was. But she also knew something the teacher didn’t.

“I fell in love with words before I even understood them.”

By seven, she’d decided: she was going to write books. Then life did what life does to women.

The Thirty-Year Detour

Stella spent three decades writing FDA regulatory submissions — the dense, technical documents that get medicines approved. Her longest ran 32 volumes. She raised four children, one of them severely disabled. She ran teams. She lived the kind of life where a four a.m. email carried the expectation that you’d answer by six.

The novel stayed in the back of her mind the whole time, the way these things do. There just wasn’t room for it.

“That’s really typical for all of us women who are in this sort of second-shift life where we have the big career and then we have the big home life.”

If you’ve ever shelved something you loved because the calendar said no, you already know Stella. The interesting part isn’t that she waited. It’s what she did with everything she learned while she was waiting.

When she finally sat down to write fiction, the technical writing didn’t vanish — it transformed. Her first novel is set in the biotech industry. Her second is about a 500-year-old vampire who starts as a medieval healer and ends up running a blood bank outside Chicago—yes, really! (And see the link to it below). The science was still in there. It just grew up and learned to play.

That word — play — is the one Stella keeps returning to. After a career of head-to-grindstone precision, relearning how to play didn’t come naturally. So she went looking for it on purpose: a writing coach in Berkeley who built his whole practice around it, tarot cards spread out beside the keyboard, writing prompts to kick her mind in directions it wouldn’t have chosen alone.

“You start with what you know and you progress into imagination.”

Why She Decided to Become a Publisher

Here’s where Stella’s story stops being about writing and starts being about building.

She didn’t just want to write books. She wanted to publish them. Her first two came out through traditional publishers — one a not-great experience, one genuinely lovely. But during a marketing meeting for the second, she brought along her partner, a retired marketing executive she started dating in her sixties. He did some quick math out loud.

You could keep 85 percent of your revenues, he said, instead of taking 15 percent in royalties. Just do it yourself.

That’s how Baubo Books was born — named, fittingly, for the bawdy older woman in Greek myth who lifts Demeter out of her grief and brings spring back to the world by making her laugh.

The result? Six books out now. Two more this year. A daughter who designs the covers. A network of writer friends who swap editing and proofreading.

The tools, Stella points out, simply didn’t exist twenty years ago. No print-on-demand. No distribution channels like today’s. Independent publishing has gone from a compromise to, in many cases, the smarter financial choice.

The Part Where the Boat Became a Fleet

Then Stella got a breast cancer diagnosis, right after her essay collection Rock On: Power, Sex and Money After 60 came out. The full marketing plan she’d built — recorded conversations, in-person events, a review campaign to wake up the algorithm — none of it could happen. Surgery and complications came instead.

Most people would call that the end of the launch. Stella turned it into a question: I’m not the only one facing this. What if we did it together?

“What if we pooled what we learned, what works? What if we got together and supported each other, invited each other onto our podcasts?”

That’s Crone Authors Together — a collective of women writers over 50, 60, 70, building a brand-new playbook for reaching readers the publishing industry has decided not to see. Older women buy most of the romance novels in this country. Almost none of those novels put a vibrant older woman at the center. The market is enormous and ignored. The longevity economy — everyone 50 and up — would rank as the third-largest economy on earth. And the fashion catalogs and the algorithms still mostly pretend these women don’t exist.

So Stella stopped asking the industry to notice. She’s building the alternative, one guest blog and shared podcast and swapped review at a time.

Stella’s Playbook for Building the Boat Yourself

If you’ve got a book — or any creative project — sitting half-finished in a drawer, here’s what Stella’s learned the hard way:

1. Find your real rhythm, not the one you’re told to have. Stella can write 50,000 words in a month but can’t do 30 minutes a day. She blocks out whole days, a couple times a week, and ignores every “morning pages” prescription that doesn’t fit her brain.

2. Negotiate with your inner critic — don’t fight her. Stella calls hers Icky (for “I.C.,” inner critic). The deal: You’re great at proofreading. Hold off until line edits. The first draft is supposed to be garbage.

3. You are not starting from zero. Thirty years of disciplined writing was an asset, not a detour. Whatever you did before is your edge.

4. Build the fleet, not just the boat. Writing doesn’t have to be a lonely garret. Swap skills with friends. Pull people in close.

5. Stop waiting for the gatekeepers. Traditional publishing’s “launch window” is mostly a relic. When you own the imprint, the book has no expiration date.

If Not Now, When

I asked Stella what she’d say to the woman listening right now who’s been carrying something for years — the book, the business, the thing she shelved — and is quietly wondering if she’s missed her window.

“You’re right on time. This is your moment. This is your should now.”

I think about Stella turning three decades of documents that disappeared into file drawers into books women can actually hold in their hands — books where the heroine is powerful, funny, sexual, fully alive, and not remotely sorry about any of it. As Donna Cravotta likes to say, that’s not reinvention. For Stella, it was the thing she was always rowing toward.

So What’s In Your Drawer?

Hit reply and tell me — I read every one. And if this made you think of a specific woman, you already know who she is. Send it to her.

Subscribe to Build Your Own Boat for more stories of women building wealth, freedom, and possibility after 50.

Check out the podcast of this interview, or those of any of the amazing women that I’ve interviewed.

Check Out Some of Stella’s Books

Rock On: Power, Sex & Money After 60

Vampires of a Certain Age: Five hundred years of loving

Write & Sell A Well-Seasoned Romance