I will be speaking on behalf of Good Samaritan Medical Center of Brockton, MA at the event entitled “Stronger in Mind, Body and Spirit — A Cancer Survivor Celebration” on June 9.

What follows is an amazing letter from a 4th grader in a class to which recently spoke. It is incredible and speaks for itself.

Dear jothy,

Thank you for coming to our school. I really think that you can do anything as long as you put your mind to it. I know how you felt back then when people doubted and made fun of you. Because when I was little I was overweight and I still kind of am. People kept on calling me fat. Sometimes they would call me names like chubby. But I ignored it. And I loved to play sports like baseball or basketball. People told me I couldn’t do that because I was fat, and that I was a girl. Some people said I couldn’t do anything because I was black. And I got sick of it. So I started riding my bike, to play sports, to going to the gym to work out. And I proved those people wrong. And because of you I know that as long as I put my mind to it, I can do anything.

Who Says I Can’t

With this first business post, I am, in conjunction with The Good Men Project (http://goodmenproject.com), launching an occasional blog post, here and on their site simultaneously, I am calling “The Incorrigible Entrepreneur” about my experiences as a, well, incorrigible entrepreneur. From 1988 to now I have been involved with 9 startups either as part of the founding team or as part of the management team (or both). ALong the way I had many experiences that can be considered “learning experiences” that might be interesting and/or useful to others. Who knows, this might end up being a book some day…so here goes, my first business post.

In 1999, I started WorldCert with long-time friend and business partner Dave; we were fortunate to sell it seven years later for $125 million (of which I saw very little). Very little else about this experience could be called fortunate.

For WorldCert I was initially COO and Dave was CEO. The company was bi-coastal between Boston and Portland, Oregon. I would do most of the traveling. Every other week for eighteen months, I flew to Portland. (I know what you are thinking but nope, I never do things the easy way.)

Dave had agreed to be WorldCert CEO for only eighteen months knowing that as it got going, since he was a “big picture” guy not an operating guy, he would no longer be the right kind of CEO. But when we reached that milestone and it was time for me to step up and take over, I realized the company was not in good shape. We had overspent and overbuilt. Worse, the technology was not ready for the market. And the product we had thought we were building was too early to market. (Later we would look back and realize we were something like 15 years too early to for a market that had a long way to go.) It seemed like WorldCert needed my technical full-time attention to get anywhere. In addition, we had no effective sales, so sales and marketing needed someone’s full-time attention too. I decided what we really needed was a CEO from the outside who had strong sales and marketing instincts with whom I could collaborate on finding a market that we could be more successful going after. I needed to focus on building the right product while he focused on sales and marketing. What I needed was a true business partner. I found someone I thought would be a perfect fit with me, and Dave agreed. The proposed CEO was a division manager at a large company with whom we had partnered and done much work. He was thrilled. He had already prepared his own business plan to start a company from scratch, and joining us gave him a platform that was much further along. It was to be his first time as CEO. For discretions sake in this story let’s call him Dick — just a fake name for what you will see is a bad actor.

♦◊♦

Dick did have a lot going for him. He had great business instincts and figured out a good way to get us revenue quickly on a business model that was simple and proven: sell security to web sites that accept credit cards over the web so people’s credit card numbers stayed safe and secure. He went back to the company where he used to work and offered to buy outright the little division he had been running. Because they knew him, they were willing to make a very sweet deal. It was a brilliant move that gave us a way to get revenue fast and is the reason the company survived. But there was a huge price to pay for that and was it worth it in the end? Would it have been better if I had not hired him and the company had gone under? My unequivocal, and perhaps somewhat surprising, answer is Yes. Some people are so greedy and so insecure that they should not be put in charge of a company. What happened to make me say this?

Dick was taking charge of the company and moving it in a new direction with strong support of the new VC we had brought in. This VC was new to the investing game having gotten his role at a VC firm because as a Sales VP he had made these same investors very rich when his company was sold. He told Dick and me that he did not like or trust founders. Why would he say that to me—the founder? That was pretty jaw-dropping. Then he told Dick that to get the necessary hard work and attention of his staff he needed to lay one person off a month for six months. Shockingly, Dick did just that. In other things Dick looked to me to be his mentor. He checked every step he took with me coming into my office easily ten time a day. I showed him how to craft a “pitch” deck to raise money. I coached him on how to present to potential investors. He got a lot of practice as we had to pitch to more than 20 firms before we found the one who agreed to come into our C round of funding. What had at first seemed to me understandable trepidation about being first time CEO and not “knowing the ropes,” I ultimately came to realize was extreme insecurity. It made him listen to this apparently psychopathic VC for one thing. Dick’s insecurity evolved into a pathological paranoia that I and others of his management team were conspiring against him. He started to withdraw and hole up in his office with the door closed. He stopped asking for my advice and counsel. What would in most teams normally be considered healthy debate and discussion among the company management team, became expressions of disloyalty to Dick.

There are occasionally people who violate my image of how people should behave. But I’m naturally optimistic; I assume the best in others, and am trusting. In business, some people have taken advantage of that. Dick was paranoid, insecure, suspicious and assumed the worst in others. Once he’d learned what he felt he needed from me, he wanted it all to himself and would do anything to get me out of the company I founded. In fact, he declared himself “founder” when he had joined when the company was already two years old. He wanted to keep me from getting the stock in the company I’d earned as founder, COO and now CTO not to mention two years of hard work and a ridiculous number of cross-country trips. But with him being secretive, and loudly expressing that I was being disloyal and the company taking a direction that had nothing to do with the premise I had started it with, I was feeling it was time for this founder to depart. So when when I sat down with him to tell him I thought it was time for me to part ways, his response was that he wanted me out of the building that afternoon. He considered my expression of wanting to part ways as a resignation and on that basis he refused to honor the severance agreement I had with the company. I ended up with only a fraction of the stock that should have been rightfully mine and he got rich which is all that mattered to him no matter what it took to achieve. It was a horrible experience. It felt like failure. It also felt like I had bumped into a really bad person and that felt horrible especially since I was the one who decided to hire him as CEO. I needed to move on and try to put this behind me. I needed to learn from this fast because I liked starting companies but I sure didn’t want a repeat of this horror.

 

 Two weeks ago, I had fairly routine hand surgery on my right middle (bird flipping) finger to remove a cyst that had the potential to cause trouble because it was in a joint. That surgery seemed to go well but then after stitches were removed it suddenly got inflamed and soon was a swollen, infected, painful mess. As soon as the hand surgeon saw it he knew he had to go back in and redo that surgery and clean it all out. He said 1% of this type of surgery gets infected. (I’d rather apply that kind of luck to, say, lottery thanks.) If the infection gets into bone it becomes extremely serious. The surgeon felt bad. He takes pride in his work and this felt like a mistake on his part. But mostly he took the risk this put on my finger and its joints very seriously and wanted to move fast and be aggressive. Infections can easily get out of control and cause widespread problems. At the very least arthritis becomes almost a certainty. This second surgery was yesterday (Thursday) and it went well too. Last time it was outpatient surgery but not this time. As an inpatient I have been on IV antibiotics from the start and may even have to stay in the hospital another day. Actually, I will need to be on IV antibiotics for weeks and to make that possible they put in a PICC line. PICC stands for peripherally inserted central catheter. It is a long thin “straw” inserted on my arm into a vein going all the way (50 cm) to just above my heart. These lines, with little valves on the ends, stick about 3″ out from the insertion into my arm just above the elbow bend. An IV bag can attach directly to the valve and give me my dose. I’m off of swimming and hard sweaty working out as long as this PICC line is in. That is going to be really hard. I’ll have a lot of catching up to do when it comes out. One of the major reasons I’m being held captive here in Newton-Wellesley Hospital is that they need to match the antibiotic precisely to the little bugs doing me so much harm. 

So I’ll be home free soon. And for many weeks to come I’ll look even more like a human cyborg than usual with lines and valves hanging out of my arm in addition to the titanium, carbon fibre, and computerized knee I normally feature.

No such luck with record setting warmth and lack of snow. But on my recent trip to Jackson Hole we took a day off from skiing and went into the back country on snowshoes and boy did I get to test these things. I had created an invention of my own about 3 years ago but they were incredibly heavy and I would get so exhausted that I would count 50 steps knowing I had to even push myself that far before I would allow myself to rest. They were brutal and my limit was 2 miles and that was pushing it. These are light round baskets that just swap out for the standard crutch tips easily. The crutches themselves are carbon fibre light anyway and since they are forearm crutches even lighter still. I never had to stop and rest and the two-leggers with me were the ones that cut the hike short. I felt no limit at all. The freedom to be able to continue to hike even in deep snow is incredible. I highly recommend these to anyone who can (and does) hike on crutches anyway as a cool new thing to add to what you do during the winter.

 Below is a little video of me using these babies!

I began to realize that speaking was the only way I could really drive exposure for the book and for my messages. So I began to focus hard on the second leg of the Who Says I Can’t stool: a real speaking program. Long before the book came out I had done plenty of speaking. I spoke for my profession at conferences. I spoke to a high school or two about “my story”. But specifically speaking from the book itself just started happening organically from friends who knew me and had a venue where they wanted “an inspirational” speaker. First up was a call from the head of orthopedics at Boston Children’s. Joanna was the concierge in his department and as was always the case wherever Joanna went, people liked her and were drawn to her. Joanna had a habit of bragging about her dad and since Mark Gebhardt actually focused on surgeries for kids with osteosarcoma he became very interested in my story. He finally decided having me come talk at a Grand Rounds might be beneficial for both his department as well as the oncology service. And this would be for all the Harvard institutions and be held at Mass General. A Grand Rounds is not really a “rounds” at all. It is a formal presentation by an expert for a highly specialized medical audience. They rarely invited people like me to come speak at these. But invite me they did. I warned Mark that I wanted to really tell it like is. I wanted the theme to be Here is what it is like to live with all the decisions you as medical practitioners make and never see the results of. A sub theme was going to be to talk about amputee sports and how when they do one of the new limb salvage procedures–where instead of amputation the diseased bone is cut out and replaced with artificial or cadaver bone–the young person is prevented from playing almost all sports because the salvaged limb is so fragile. Since Mark was the main proponent of limb salvage, this must have been a bit hard for him to agree to.

Joanna and Carole were not going to miss this. Carole especially knew that to be invited to give a Grand Rounds at the infamous and world-famous MGH was a rare and huge honor. We all arrived early for the 7 am talk. The room filled up quickly and I began to notice a number of kids which seemed unusual to me for a heavy duty medical talk. It was hard hitting. I talked about poorly done amputations, phantom pain, the difficulty of learning to walk with a prosthesis, the poor state of prosthetic technology, and I talked a lot about sports and my concerns about teenagers with high body image issues making a good decision about limb salvage.

Mark loved the talk and told me right in front of Carole that is was the best Grand Rounds he had ever had at MGH. Then I found out who all the kids in the audience were. These were Mark’s limb salvage patients. Each one had had osteosarcoma and had not had an amputation. Instead each was walking with a cadaver bone in their leg. They all looked completely normal–that is to say, biologic–and walked limp-free. And none were put off by my comments about sports. In fact Valerie whom I became great friends with, was planning on doing the full 192-mile PMC bike ride soon.

My first non-medical talk was at DuVine Adventures. I knew Andy Levine, the CEO of this biking tours company from meeting him on a Pan-Mass Challenge ride. He is an over-energetic, ADD-inbibed,  exaggerator and told me I was amazing; naturally I agreed to do a talk for him for free. Then I thought I had hit the big time when my brother Bryan asked if I might agree to talk for the national sales meeting for his company First American Title Insurance. This would be in Florida to about 500 people and they would pay my full fare fee of $5000. I was very conscious of making sure I did not embarrass Bryan or let him down and I didn’t. In fact my speaking helped his career at that company. To me this seemed like the first of a steady stream of corporate type talks. It wasn’t. But First American was a great experience and helped me improve my speaking. The reaction was great. I got people in the front row to cry, then to laugh really hard and then to stand up and cheer and finally to give me a standing ovation. Dozens of people came up to me afterwards to say I inspired and motivated them. They said I was the best speaker this annual meeting had ever had. Many wanted to tell me stories of people they know who are also inspiring. All this feedback as well as the reactions during the talk gave energy back to me. I sold every book I had shipped down for the event. Clearly this was going to be the best way to sell books for the time being.

I spoke at a friend’s Unitarian Church where I gave the entire sermon. I had to even give the benediction — I had to look up the word to know what I was even being asked to do. I got a few gigs here and there. I spoke at ESPN thanks to meeting an ESPN exec at a fund raising event. I spoke at Netflix because the head of HR had worked with me at Borland. There was a personal connection for all of these–none of them were because they found my web site or my name on some sort of speaking bureau site. I took each speaking opportunity seriously and really tried to keep tuning the presentation and improving my messages. A highlight of each one was a video of the sports I had managed to get good at over the years. People liked the video so I kept showing it.

For speaking, as I had for finding a literary agent, a self-publisher, an ebook format, an actor for audiobook, I decided I needed to make a super hard concerted effort to “break into” the business if I was to make a go of it. As I began to explore I saw speaking bureaus galore. These sites mostly had really famous people who were getting six figure speaking engagements. But there were others where it was a home for full-time professional speakers who had nothing else to say for themselves except that they were full-time professional speakers. That I did not get. How could you speak unless you had something to speak about. But I read lots of things about how these people spoke several days per week and it was their full time living. I just wanted to speak as part of my overall goal of getting a message out that I had already gotten a lot of feedback saying it was valuable. I had no interest in making speaking my profession–it had to be additive to what else I was doing.

After a lot of exploring I decided one of the best possible groups for me to speak to was students at the university level. The “experts” said it was easy to find the right person at each school and that they did have budgets to pay for speakers. I used Wikipedia to get the list of all colleges and universities in a given state and I decided to just focus on NY, NJ and the six states of New England plus a tiny slice of Canada. In that set, not counting the tiny ones, there were 800 schools. I created a little marketing piece and sent it out to all 800 targeting the head of student activities or the Dean of Students. Just like with the literary agents, I got exactly zero positive response. But before giving up I also sent them an electronic piece a few months later. Nada. I tried joining speakers organizations to see what I could learn. I joined some speaking listing services where my name and credentials would be on some site where meeting planners would come. I created a whole sub-site on my web site for speaking. The only consistent speaking I was getting was the free kind to the local elementary schools.

For years a neighbor had been trying to get me involved with a program at our city’s elementary schools called Understanding Our Differences. I had just not been in the right frame of mind previously but now I saw it as consistent with what I was trying to do already. Their program went to all the elementary schools usually 4th or 5th grade levels and talked about all sorts of “differences” from physical disability to diabetes to blindness to learning disabilities. They have been so successful that they have managed to export the program to over 200 other school districts throughout the country. I went to the fall orientation session where various possible speakers like me would meet with the parent volunteers who are ultimately responsible for who speaks about what at each school. I talked about the topics in my book and showed my sports video and they seemed taken. Very soon I started getting scheduling calls to nail down dates throughout the school year for me to come to each school. I ended up speaking that first year at 10 schools to an average of 75 kids at each. Getting a strong positive message effectively out to 750 kids at that impressionable age is an important accomplishment.

I quickly learned what would work and what wouldn’t.  Here’s the scenario. The kids come in and sit on the floor and as it is close to the end of their day, they are kind of antsy. I have 30-40 minutes and have to grab them fast. I stand in front of them and start off by saying, “Since this is an Understanding our Differences program there must be something different about me. Can you tell me what you think that is?” They immediately begin to squirm but are well trained and raise their hands and rarely blurt out their comment. I’ll call on someone randomly and get a variety of responses.

“You have a beard.” (True when they said it.)

“There is something funny about your right leg. (Sharp eyes on these kids.)

“I saw you limping.” (Getting warmer.)

“You are handsome.” (My favorite. But no one actually ever really said this.)

I give in at this point and slowly begin to lift the pant leg on the right side. They all have to lean forward or prop themselves up to see but either way, its stops the ants in their pants. Pretty soon the leg is revealed enough for them to see shiny metal and I tell them it’s a real bionic leg with a computer in it, it speaks bluetooth, and there’s an app for that on my iPhone. They are now glued to the floor.

Next I take them down a bit. I tell them the story of losing the leg. I have been told they really love the part where I had to use the umbrella to drive the car for some reason. Then I tell them about relearning to walk and how none of my friends stuck around. I lighten the mood with the foot falling off date story and with the bees chasing me story. I take them back down with the round two loss of the lung in college. But now is the time to try to get an important positive message embedded in their young brains. I talk about how I built myself back up in a way that they hopefully can remember if and when they have a life crisis they need to bounce back from. I point out the importance of finding something like a sport to get really good at in order to regain self-esteem. Before it gets too soap boxy I stop and let them ask a few questions. I never know what I am going to get. I have kept track of the full range of questions from the sublime to the ridiculous. I’ll list a few here.

How did they cut it off?

What did they do with it afterwards?

Did the amputation of your leg hurt?

How do you balance? On a bike?

Can you still ski?

What can’t you do on 1 leg? [Answer: cross my legs]

Do you have any trouble going up and down stairs?

Is there are place where you can buy only 1 shoe?

Has anyone ever made fun of you or made you feel bad because you were missing a leg?

Do you ever fall down?

What is the scariest thing you have ever done?

Can you take your shoe off of the prosthesis?

Does it hurt when you put the prosthetic on or take it off?

Do you feel nervous when you jump rope?

How long after the amputation did it take for you to feel like you were living a “normal” life?

After a good ten minutes of these types of questions I show them the 3 minute sports video with fast rock-and-roll music which gets them pretty fired up. I then sit down and press a little button on the side of the knee that allows the entire lower leg to swivel around as I ask them if they can examine the bottom of their shoe for bubble gum as I am. They love it and all try to look at gum on their shoes which, because they are only 10 and their joints are make out of rubber, they can still do. But then I take out the key which removes the entire lower leg including the knee and I pop it off quickly and hand it to the closest kid to me. They all just heard that this leg cost more than their parents car plus it might seem pretty icky so they cringe and lean backwards but I insist and finally the closest kid takes it. I say  “Pass it around,” and they do. While they are doing that, I get out my jump rope and tuck in the loose right pants leg. I ask them if they think I might be too old to jump rope or if they think I can still remember how to. I proceed to get up and start jumping rope. Fast and with crossovers which they are not yet able to do at their age. Before I get too winded I stop and ask who is the best rope jumper in their class. At this age it is always a girl–the boys coordination and time with a rope is just not yet far enough along for them to be the best. The entire class always agrees on who it is and I ask her to come up. She starts jumping and I stop her and say “Oh no, I meant on one foot.” She is always a good sport and gives it a try and I have yet to see one fail.

I take a few more questions and it was at this point that the most memorable question I have ever been asked came my way. The boy actually holding my leg raised his hand and I called on him. He pointed to the foot with my sock and shoe on it attached to the hunk of metal in his hand and asked “Is that a real foot on your prosthesis?” I am rarely speechless. I was then. I looked beseechingly towards the back of the room where the volunteer parents and teachers were standing with their hands in their pockets or with their eyes averted. Some had dropped their jaws the way I had when he first asked his question. Finally, I composed myself and all I could come up with was the completely lame retort “No that foot doesn’t have any blood supply so it couldn’t possibly be real.” It only occurred to me later as I was driving home that a generation raised on Star Wars and Star Trek who all witnessed the reconstruction of Darth Vader with only a small amount of him actually being human makes the line between fantasy and reality a little hard for the 10-year-old brain to discern.

I end a session by giving them all blue rubber wrist bands that say “Who Says I Can’t”. I am told that the kids typically come back the next day and ban the use of the word Can’t from the class room. It backfired on one occasion with a younger age group. Those kids started to say “Who Says I Can’t” as they set off to do things they knew were strictly against the rules. Can’t win them all I guess. At the end of a session the kids mob me for autographs. There seems to be a culture of autographs of anything they can find to write on with these kids. I am asked to write on random pieces of paper their notebooks. A little girl asked me to sign her sneakers and a boy asked me to sign his forehead. No worry, I refused both.

After 10 schools and 750 kids the first year of my doing Understanding Our Differences was over and I was as fulfilled as I could have been. In many ways it was better than the speaking I thought I was trying to find. It resulted in my receiving the Most Inspirational Speaker of the Year Award in my town awarded by the mayor.

 A cool site from a friend of mine up in Nova Scotia dedicated a recent post to Who Says I Can’t.

In the picture are the kids from Norex all wearing Who Says I Can’t logo gear!

Visit: http://224workouts.com/2012/02/02/who-says-i-cant/

I think I did pretty well, considering I started out with nothing but a bunch of blank paper.
— Steve Martin, comedian

It is quite an ordeal getting a book out into print and into people’s hands. But this one really had some extra special twists, turns, bumps and detours along the way! It all began in about 2003 with people who heard my anecdotes and stories and advice telling me I needed to write this stuff down. So, back in the very early days of blogs, using Google’s blogspot free blogging service, I started to do just that. The blog posts were really long for a blog–they each had a major theme and were more like chapters. From the start I wanted my writing not to be a cancer or disability blog–I wanted this to be valuable to a lot more people than just that. I had realized the common themes between what I had had to deal with and how I dealt with it and all kinds of hardships others go through. After a while this collection of blog post vignettes looked more and more like a book. I had written two technical books up to this point so I knew what the process entailed–at least with a technical book and a publisher signed on from the start. I liked the process, I liked getting something I had written into the final form of a beautiful book, and I enjoyed the feedback I got from getting a book published. Besides, once again, it’s a challenge a rare few attempt so as always, that appealed to me.

It was Arthur Graham, my prosthetist, who had been following my blog, who said “This is a book! And you need to publish it so I can give it to my patients.” That was a pretty strong affirmation of the content I had in the blog posts so far and it was all the encouragement I needed to get started. What helped was that right at this time in 2005 I was signing up for the one-year assignment at Petabric in Portland, OR which meant a lot of flying time and a lot of alone time in an apartment across the country from Carole every other weekend. Something all consuming like writing this book would be a perfect antidote to the dead time and loneliness of being there on my own.

Whether on the plane (in first class thanks to Delta frequent flyer upgrades) or in the sparse second floor apartment with a view only of other apartment buildings, I always wrote to loud “concentrate” music particularly my new favorites of the time of Aria, Delerium and Lisa Gerrard. I had the original ideas in the blogs but I was just using them now as reference material. I wrote on yellow pads. As high tech as I am about most things, I still prefer to do original writing in long hand until I have a full chapter on paper. Then I do the first pass edit also on paper before I type anything into a word processor. I would totally lose myself in the writing not noticing that six hours had gone by and I would suddenly realize I had not gotten up to pee, eat, or drink. I started to find the writing very cathartic. The peace and quiet—and frankly, the solitude and loneliness—enabled me to dig deep in the dusty vaults of my memory and experiences of over 35 years and pull out details, stories, experiences, and insights that would be helpful to readers. I was spilling my guts. Some of what I was writing was deviating a lot from my goals but I let myself go precisely because it was proving to be so cathartic. But, I was writing too much about bad experiences. Luckily, the multi-pass editing process went from a personally cathartic book to a generally useful (and hopefully much more interesting) book.

From the middle of 2005 until about the end of my one-year assignment in Oregon I was writing, editing, tuning, typing, editing more, and constantly filling in details and messages to get the whole package as good as I could get it. In mid 2006 I started to think about a publisher. I checked but none of the technical publishers who had published How Debuggers Work or much more recently, Securing Web Services with WS_Security would touch a book like this. I was in the memoir category and neither J. Wiley & Sons nor SAMS dealt with those and didn’t have a sister house that did either. So next step was to see about finding a publisher directly by myself. That was a quick exercise which immediately determined one does not, under any circumstances, as an individual author go directly to a publisher. They only want to deal with literary agents, period. In many cases the point was made emphatically as in “if you send us submissions we will discard it with a snow shovel out into the back dumpster.” I’m not kidding. I was learning a whole new industry and like any industry it certainly has it quirks. Ok got it. So on to finding a literary agent.

Naturally, I used the Web to search for literary agents. There are nice sites that list all known literary agents and I found the one of those that seemed the most thorough, easy to use, and up to date. Here you could filter down to agents that cared about memoirs and were still taking in new clients. There were 58 that passed through that filter. Each one had very specific, and very different requirements for how to send them a “query” to ask them to represent you. Some wanted only email some said never send me email. Some wanted just a synopsis, others wanted a full sample chapter. I listed out the 58 distinct sets of requirements and followed them all to a T. Out when 58 packages requesting a literary agent. I don’t pray but if I did I would have then. I just waited. Ultimately I got 57 responses. One didn’t even bother to respond. All 57 that did rejected my request. The responses were all over the map.
“The world doesn’t need another cancer book.”
“The writing is not good enough.”
“The story is not that compelling.”
“Thanks but this is not for me.”
And the most common was just, “Thanks but no thanks. And good luck.” By the way, they all ended with good luck. That way of saying good luck really is “go away, don’t bother me, I hope to never see or hear from you again.”

I am resilient but I hate rejection. It slowed me down from dating in the early days. And it’s why I could never really do sales at any of my companies. Sales people have really thick skin and deal with rejection as a standard part of their everyday work life. So this much rejection was a real setback for me and I decided to put myself in a time out. I put the whole idea of publishing this on the shelf for a while. I knew I just needed some time to think of a new approach–I was not giving up by any stretch of the imagination. It really is true that the brain keeps working on a gnarly problem even if we don’t focus our frontal lobe on it. When on a long training bike ride I also tend to think pretty deeply about things that are “on my mind.” It was on such a ride that I had a Homer Simpson Duh! moment.

I know from lots of experience that who you know and connections you can make through people you know can make all the difference in life, in business, in what ever. So why I took the hard route on literary agent I will never know. But I realized that I knew someone who had an agent and they should be the focus of my inquiries not 58 complete strangers. Dan Kinlon had been the co-speaker to the Topsfield High boys several years previously but then he had written a book where a chapter had featured me. This was plenty of “in” to proceed so I made my pitch to Dan. He was not completely blown away saying that it would be a hard sell to get an agent much less a publisher interested. But sure, he would introduce me to his agent as long as my expectations were low because Kenny would probably not agree to take me on. I spoke to Kenny Wapner right away and while he too was skeptical at first he asked me to send him the manuscript. I did and the next day he called back and introduced himself as my new agent.

Kenny liked my story and my writing. He thought the world could use a book like mine, that it was different, and he especially liked the fact that I was not someone famous which made the story, and its approachability, even more compelling. However, what neither of us knew at the time was how much that same facet would work against us in the book publishing business. As much as he liked what he saw, he still said it needed his expert “book doctoring” to make it acceptable. And that was going to cost $10,000. An agent takes a cut of the ultimate deal they can get so they never charge up front. But Kenny was wearing two hats and his book doctor hat did have a fee. I had the money but its never easy parting with that much of it. I wanted this to be perfect so I finally agreed. He started to do major surgery. He turned chapters two, three and four into a new chapter one. He deleted a chapter or two and changed the emphasis. He wanted much more of a focus on amputees thinking that would make it original and unique.

Once the book doctoring was complete–a process which took two months–we moved to the book proposal process. A book proposal looks to me just like a business plan for a new startup. It includes the niche this book is going to fill, what books it will compete against, the credentials of the author, a sample of the writing and a full marketing plan for how the author will work tirelessly to make sure the book is a success. This proposal, including all of chapter one, ended up being a 62-page tome and took us another two months to complete. Now Kenny felt he could start to approach the huge trade publishers; we both felt they were who we needed to try to get interested in this book.

The trade publishers demand an exclusive so Kenny had to work them serially. None of them seemed in a hurry to respond to his inquiry so the process was excruciatingly slow and painful. Week after week he would say, “Well so-and-so has our inquiry and is considering it and I have to wait long enough for them to give us an answer.” But eventually the answer from each one was the same. He would hear “We like the story. We like the author. We like the writing. But he doesn’t have enough of a platform so we can’t move forward with this. Good luck.”
There was that frigging good luck again. I asked Kenny, “So what do they mean by a platform?” Kenny’s response was that a platform is when someone is either a national politician, an olympic athlete, or a famous actor. “But you said the whole attraction of my story is precisely that I am not famous,” I said. “It defeats the whole point of this story being approachable by everyone if I am not an everyman they can identify with.”

“I know,” he would say. “We have to move on to the next one and see if they have a different reaction.” But they never did. Publisher after publisher all said the same thing: not enough of a platform. Sarah Palin, with all her idiotic proclamations and scary politics while Tina Fey constantly skewered her definitely had a platform and could sell 500,000 copies of her book in short order but we could not get a publisher to give us the time of day.

For a solid year Kenny patiently worked Random House, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster and so on down the list getting the same answer in every case: you need more of a platform. So how was I supposed to get a platform? I was not going to suddenly become famous. Kenny could tell I’d had enough of this strategy and wanted to try something else. He said it before I asked: “You know,” he said, “I originally told you self-publishing was a dead end…and it was. But times have changed and successful self-published books do get discovered and picked up by traditional publishers. Maybe that is the best option now.”

It was 2009 and I had been trying to get this book in people’s hands for five years and was seemingly no closer. I agreed with Kenny’s new-found support for self-publishing; I just wanted to get the book out there after all this time. Kenny and I parted ways after a long, intense publishing tour of duty together.

I set off to learn about the self-publishing business as if it was a new market I was building a startup in. And like most startups, first I had to make a mistake or two. I got sucked in by Lulu.com who has alluring positioning, marketing and web site. It’s great if you have a cookbook you want to publish for all your friends but they have no business with someone who wants to really put out a quality book and wants professional editing and cover design. I realized all this in time to get out of any contract and before any books were produced. I went back to the Web and started looking carefully for people’s recommendations and finally got the list down to four or five finally choosing Mill City Press. With professional editing, cover design, a Web site for sales, and real distribution, this felt right but I would have to pay for it. This was going to run $5,000. Mill City evaluated the manuscript and immediately suggested it go through an imprint of theirs called Bascom Hill Books that looks to the outside world like a small publisher not like a self-publisher which is supposed to help.

The cover design and editing processes were fun and successful. Just before the cover was final I sent the final manuscript to Jonathan Alter at Newsweek. He was a friend and a professional writer as well as a cancer survivor. It was a long shot but I asked him for an endorsement we could print on the back cover. He read it over the weekend and called me first thing Monday morning. I expected a polite brush off. But instead he said it was fantastic and he would be thrilled to write me a blurb. What he wrote was incredible:

Jothy Rosenberg is not a celebrity but an Everyman, which gives his wrenching story of astonishing grit its inspirational power. After being told when he was 19 that he had no chance of surviving the cancer that had already cost him one leg and one lung, Jothy made a decision. He would ski until he died. Instead he became one of the first beneficiaries of then-primitive chemotherapy, a champion one-legged, one-lunged skier, swimmer and cyclist, and an early model of how to triumph over cancer and disability. For anyone trying to turn a cancer diagnosis, major disability, or even a major life challenge into a character-building experience, this well-written book is indispensable.

As we got to the end of 2009 it was finally coming to fruition: the book would be in print and available to the world as of December. I was beside myself. This felt so good. I organized a book launch event in the offices of the PMC that was so tied to this book.

I was nervous as it first came out as to what the reaction would be. But people said it was really well written. I even heard people say they couldn’t put it down, something an author just dies to hear! Other comments were placed in the reader review area on Amazon such as these:

This book has helped me to realize that in life, when we are pushed hard and life throws us curve balls, how we react defines us. In choosing to fight back and overcome we set the stage for anything to be possible. This book was a pleasurable read throughout and an important reminder that we have this choice in so many circumstances in life. Jothy’s never give up attitude is a model of how we should all strive to push ourselves to our limits each and every day.

This book was both an inspiring and a painful reminder of what life can throw at us. Jothy provides us with a great role model of what one person can do to both overcome their personal struggles and — even more important help a broad community. I think this book should be required reading.

“Who Says I Can’t” is a powerful story told well by author Jothy Rosenberg. This book falls into my “couldn’t put it down” category and I have gifted it to at least 6 friends who have all thoroughly enjoyed it. Jothy’s positive attitude and determination are inspirational not just to those who have faced life-threatening illness but to anyone facing daunting situation. Read this book and the next time you are faced with difficulty you will find yourself thinking, “who says I can’t?”

Not a day passes when I don’t think of this book and Jothy’s life story. Every time I think there’s nothing to do or do better, in the good life, there always, always is.

I turned to getting the book out in other formats. I have worked in technology long enough, and I myself am a heavy user of all things technology, so I knew this needed to be out in ebook format as well as in audiobook format. My publisher was too small and of limited means to handle these so I was on my own.

Since the Kindle was the first of the ebook readers Amazon seemed like a good place to start. And they do have resources for the self-publisher. They have a tool to take a book in PDF and convert it automatically into Kindle format and they have a simulator that pretends it is a Kindle in your browser so you can test and see how your book will look when someone buys it. Their tool should not ever have been released. It made my book look horrible. OK so next I used Amazon to look for a book on how to do this and I found one. It made the point that this was tricky stuff. Indeed, it is. Each book reader has a different format. Each of them is really acting like a browser and uses the same basic language called HTML but a different dialect of it. They all support choices of text size so they have to “flow” the text from page to page depending on how much of the chosen text size fits on a single page. The hardest part was the beginning of each chapter where there is a picture and some quotations. But even the running text needed careful scrutiny. You cannot, for example, just use quotation symbols like “. They distinguish between left double quote and right double quote. And they use the obscure HTML codes to do so which are ‘“’ and ‘“’. If you use the standard punctuation mark it will show up on the Kindle as a big ugly splotch mark. And because my book manuscript did just use the “ symbol I couldn’t just do a global substitute; I had to manually go in and change each one. In the end I got it to look good on the Kindle, Nook and iPad.

Next up was an audiobook format. I read that the fastest growing part of publishing was audio books. I also read that the author who narrates his book himself has an idiot for a narrator. They all said narrating is basically acting and someone with acting training had to be reading. So I shopped around. Boy was this going to be another huge expense. I was already $15,000 in the hole for this book and it looked like another $6,000 for this next format if I used a pro. So I proceeded and had John Farrell read all eleven hours of it. That audiobook is 455 megabytes in size. Amazon’s Audible book store sells it but very few have ever been sold.

In general sales were slow. Viral is a word everyone likes to throw around but a minimal starting point is necessary for something to “go viral” on the Internet. Little pockets would take off. A small rabid following kept buying more and more copies that they gave to their circle of friends but that still did not ignite self-sustaining sales. I was continuously over-optimistic thinking the next thing I did would make sales take off big time. I pushed Barnes & Noble for a book signing. I had to push and push. They probably agreed just to get me to stop calling. They let me do a week-day evening event in the largest Boston area B&N store in Burlington, Massachusetts. Most of the people there were my friends and family. By the end of two years a total of 3,000 copies had sold. That is considered pretty good for a self-published book but no where near what I had hoped given how many people could really benefit from it.

Next up, I’d like to talk about some of my experiences trying to get more opportunities to speak publicly.