Study Companions

Alert and Oriented Publishing Company
treats medical school subjects with a dose of simplicity.

MIOZOBIOt OC Y A 041, ANIGN

LYNNE MEREDITH COHN
Staff Writer

T

hey weren't even trying to
start a business. In fact, Joel
Topf and Sarah Faubel, both
29, simply wanted to make a
medical school class on microbiology a
little easier. So they wrote the study
guide that they wished they could have
bought while taking the course and, five
years later, it's an international best sell-
er.
But it couldn't have happened with-
out a couple of friends..Joel Smith, 28,
a friend of Topf's from undergraduate
days at the University of Michigan, who
was in U-M's joint law and business
graduate program, offered to help the
pair market their book.

and The Acid-Base, Electrolyte
The three formed Alert and
Companion.
Oriented Publishing Company (using a
"We do not pay authors to write,"
popular medical term), that now sells
Smith says. "When the book
out virtually every book it pub-
is partially written and we
lishes, at all 120 U.S. medical
Dr. Joel To
think it's good enough, we
school bookstores, in the
one of the three offer them a contract. The
Caribbean and around the
producing the contract buys the rights to the
world.
`Microbiology completed book, in return for
The trio, who spend the
Companion.
royalties. To date, we've never
majority of their time in other
done an advance — but we
careers, (Smith as a lawyer in
do tend to pay what we perceive to be
San Diego, Faubel and Topf as medical
double to triple the going rate for royal-
residents in Denver and Indianapolis,
ties."
respectively), have published The
The company is planning to intro-
Microbiology Companion, by Topf and
duce a new series called Moronic
Faubel; The Pharmacology Companion
Mnemonics, to help medical students
by Gary Gallia, Christine Hann and
memorize by way of funny cartoons.
William Hewson; and are currently in
They are doing nothing revolution-
the process of publishing The Pathology
ary. What works, however, is that they
Companion, The Pediatrics Companion

are the only ones doing anything sub-
stantial in the way of user-friendly, cre-
ative study aids.
"We always dreamed that it could
turn out extremely successful, but that
certainly wasn't the motivation," Topf
says." A lot of it just seemed to fall into
place step by step, not following a mas-
ter plan. It was, 'What crisis do we have
now and what do we need to do to
resolve this next problem?' We used to
joke that we were MCI — all friends
and family."
Another Detroit-based friend, Joe
Lash, who was then a student at Wayne
State University's law school and inter-
ested in intellectual property law,
"helped us make sure we weren't break-
ing the law, using sources for the book,
and also got us set up with copyright
and a Library of Congress number,"
Topf explains.
The first book was photocopied and
bound like a college coursepack. They
printed 200 and sold nearly four times
that many in the first year.
Initially, Smith helped Topf and
Faubel market the book at Wayne and
U-M. The bookstores were reluctant to
take even a couple of copies on consign-
ment.
"I tried to sell at Michigan [thinking]
`if it sells at Michigan, it will sell any-
where,'" Smith says. "I went to Ulrich's,
asked to put it on their shelves; after
much pleading, they agreed not to pay
for any copies, took three, and if they
sold, they would pay [us] some money."
To help things move along, Smith
went to the U-M medical school and
put fliers in the mailboxes of all the
medical students. The next day, Ulrich's
called Smith asking for more.
Over the course of the next three
weeks, they sold 75 books at Ulrich's
alone, at $22 a copy.
"As things took off at Michigan, I
told Joel and Sarah that this was a win-
ner, they should try and sell it more
places," Smith recalls. "We tried to
repeat what we had done at Michigan
in other places, so we needed people to
put fliers in mailboxes. We tried to
repeat wherever we had friends who
were at medical schools. Over that year,
we sold at 12 schools, including Duke,
Yale, Emory, NYU ..."
In the summer of 1994, they pub-
lished a more professional-looking sec-
ond edition. Another Detroit friend,
Jeff Zonder, came up with the cover art.
They sold 2,900 copies at 50
schools, for $27.95 a copy, which is the
current price of all the titles. They get
between 68 percent and 80 percent of
the profits.