For You Fans of The Book…

… I am told that there are less than 60 copies of the first edition left, and they're only available at one place.

(Click on the book cover for the purchase link.)
 

For those of you unfamiliar with the history, the book was published by Emergency Publishers in fall of 2005. It was written in first person, present tense narrative, much like a journal. My wife left me unexpectedly in September of 2004, and in the next four months I needed some way of passing the nights on an ambulance between calls, without driving myself crazy over the demise of my marriage.

The book was it.

The blog started in December 2006, mainly to promote the book and to polish my writing style. About a year after my blog started, an editor from Kaplan Publishing, a dvision of Simon Schuster, happened across my blog, and offered me a publishing contract. When told that I already had a book in print, he asked if I could get out of my contract with Emergency Publishers, and allow Kaplan to publish the book under their own imprint.

Lou Jordan, my friend and publisher, gave me his blessing and terminated my contract, and I signed with Kaplan. Lou had accomplished his stated goal, which was to give me my start, and get me noticed by the big boys.

Kaplan cleaned the book up a bit, changed everything to past tense, and published it in hardcover as En Route: A Paramedic's Stories of Life, Death and Everything In Between. They included a story from the blog as an epilogue, which I think really wrapped up the book well.

But they also deleted a dozen or so chapters, because my editor at the time (since gone from Kaplan) felt that they were too controversial, and that their deletion would not hurt the book.

I disagreed, because I felt that a) the chapters on the chopping block weren't that controversial, and b) they contained most of the narrative thread that wove the rest of the chapters together. Without them, the book read like a collection of short stories.
 

I was overrruled, and the book was published without the deleted chapters. Since then, my concerns were validated because most of the criticism of the book centers on exactly what I and Kaplan's own proofreaders warned; it felt like pieces of the book were missing.

A year later, they released the book as a trade paperback under yet another title, A Paramedic's Story: Life Death and Everything In Between, causing some of my readers to buy it, mistakenly thinking it was a new book.

So if some of you out there have two copies of my book, I apologize. I just wrote the darned thing, someone else markets it. If you'd like to have your copies signed, drop me a line and I'll tell you how to send it to me for an autograph, provided you pay for the shipping.

I don't make any royalties from sales of the original book, but if you've already got a copy of En Route or A Paramedic's Story and wondered what was missing, this one will answer that question. 

And you can't beat the price.