Happy Book Birthday! My Fighting Family turns one

A year ago yesterday I woke up four hours before dawn, vomiting. I staggered downstairs to keep from disturbing my wife’s sleep, then lay down on the hardwood outside the bathroom, just to save steps.

The floor felt unsteady beneath me. Nausea would rise like the tide, then I would scramble to the toilet and puke, every 45 minutes till I emptied my stomach.

Then came some dry heaves. After that, bitter tasting yellow stuff because now I was squeezing the juice out of my bile ducts. By then I was waiting on an ambulance. This illness wasn’t a problem I could solve with Gravol and ginger tea.

Later, at the hospital, I scrolled through my phone while sitting in a cramped holding room, tethered to an IV stand, waiting on some test results. I scrolled through my phone and made mental notes for the rest of the week, because the remote work era means you can be productive from anywhere. Even a holding pen at a hospital. I had no time for a stomach bug but I had a phone and an internet connection, so I kept working.

In two days I was scheduled to fly to Montreal to broadcast a boxing card.

In one day, My Fighting Family, my debut memoir, and the most significant project of my professional life, was set to hit stores. I’d had the publication date circled on my calendar for months. There was no changing it, no matter how badly this virus kicked my ass.

Just before 4:30p.m. a message arrived in my LinkedIn inbox from Vikram Chitkara, my good friend from Northwestern, a fellow Foster House dweller and an awesome guy. He attached a photo of my book on his dining room table.

“Delivered a day early,” he wrote. “Congrats, man. Awesome that your book is officially out.”

That’s how I learned I was finally a published author. A day early, in a hospital, with an empty stomach and a half-full bag of saline solution, waiting for the doctor to give me the green light to head home. It took four more hours. Eve of the biggest day of my writing life, and I was in the hospital from can’t see in the morning till can’t see at night.

The following day I trudged out of bed and made it to Indigo Ajax to get a first look at my book in the wild. Twenty four hours later I landed in Montreal, where, in addition to covering the fights, I Ubered over to CBC for an Sunday Magazine interview with Piya Chattopadhyay.

It’s all a microcosm of my first year as a published author — full of plot twists, chicanes, hard work, and happy surprises. Some things happened sooner than I expected, and others developed more slowly than I’d have preferred, but everything unfolds right on time.

The transition from journalist to published author is a lot like taking a big step forward in a boxing career. Writing for newspapers and magazines is akin to fighting on network TV. Your work is one of a number of attractions, and sometimes it’s hard to tell if people are tuning in for you specifically, or because they always watch ESPN and your fight is on.

But writing a book? That’s like headlining a pay-per-view. If people buy it, they bought it for you. And if you want them to buy, you have to promote. In retrospect, I should have picked a public fight with a big-name author, just vault myself into the spotlight and we could both cash in on the beef. But in the absence of a red-hot rivalry, I did a lot of interviews and a handful of public events.

Is it a lot of pressure?

Sort of. It’s about as stressful as you let it be, and a lot less aggravating if you just consider it part of the job. Some days going to work means writing 10 pages. Other days it means doing a dozen interviews with CBC Radio Syndication.

It all pays the bills, just very indirectly since we’re talking book publishing.

At the same time, non-famous authors like me are also a lot like the neophyte pro fighters on your local arena show, selling tickets in person, knowing they won’t get booked on the next card unless they drum up revenue for this one.

The big takeaway for me?

Act like you don’t have a book deal. Instead of waiting for opportunities to meet readers and sell my book, you need to create them, just like a self-published author would. And always keep a copy on you, and have your sales pitch ready. You never know who’s searching for their next favourite book.

And takeaway number two?

Patience.

In the newspaper world, 95 percent of the people who will ever read your story see it in the 12 hours following publication. After that, the print product is fish wrap, and nobody’s revisiting it on microfilm or PDF besides researchers, but they might not show up for decades.

It’s very different with books, as any book nerd will tell you. Somebody might buy your book and add it to their stack, but never get around to reading it until 2026. They might leave you a 5-star review on all the book sites, and that feedback might entice the algorithms to suggest your book to more people, which could energize your sales, but that process unfolds over months and years.

Maybe you’ll snag a contagious reader, whose recommendation prompts a dozen people to buy your book.

Or maybe an NFL playoff broadcast will catch a disgruntled wide receiver reading your book on the sideline mid game. If that happens, you’ll have a year’s worth of sales by halftime, and might be cashing royalty cheques by Super Bowl Sunday.

For a non-famous author, that’s like hitting the jackpot. But, despite what sports books and other online gambling outfits keep telling us, you can’t build concrete plans on your number coming up. You can only strategize and network and get out there and hustle.

If you believe in your book, advocating for it won’t bother you. If your sales are sluggish, maybe you concentrate on finding your audience. And if you think people are sleeping on it, it’s your job to wake them up.

I learned all that in year one as a published author.

In year two, I’m putting it into action.

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