All these things happened in the space of a week or so:
1. My friend Pat reported that the POD paperback of the book he’d co-authored with my friend Dick had gone on sale quietly at Amazon, with a score of copies sold in the first several days. (The eBook has already been selling for a month or so.)
The book is Bitter Medicine: What I’ve Learned and Teach about Malpractice Lawsuits (And How to Avoid Them), and I’ve been peripherally involved with it since Dick showed me some chapters he’d written several years ago. Dick is Richard Kessler, a retired surgeon and professor of medicine, with extensive service as an expert witness in malpractice lawsuits. Pat is Patrick Trese, also retired after a distinguished career as an Emmy-winning writer and producer at NBC News; in the course of it he’d also written and published a couple of books. I’ve known them both for thirty years or so, and they’ve known each other for about as long, and the partnership turned out to be a good fit. They put in a lot of hours over a couple of years, and wound up with a solid professional manuscript that told important stories in an accessible manner.
But nobody was interested. A couple of agents agreed to look at the manuscript, kept it forever, and then returned it. A publisher, in an uncharacteristic moment of candor, said essentially that every retired doctor wants to write a book, and many of them do, and nobody cares.
And then Pat had a revelation. Neither of the book’s authors was in it for wealth or glory. Dick had had a very important and useful tale to tell, and Pat had found a way to tell it clearly and forcefully, and what they both wanted was for it to be read. And Pat knew a couple of people who’d embraced the revolution of eBooks and self-publishing, and figured why not?
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