Business

1998 LAND ROVER
DISCOVERY LE

starting at 35, 125

"Anything that requires mass dissem-
ination, you have to pay the stores and
distributors more," Smith explains.
Says Topf, "Now its a great hobby,
it's a great tax-deductible excuse to talk
to my friends. All three of us live in dif-
ferent time zones, and we still talk on
the phone a lot."
They hear good
things about their
work. Once,
Saginaw native
Faubel's father was
on an airplane,
"sitting next to a
med student, so
my dad started
bragging, 'Oh my Joel Smith
daughter is a doc-
tor now, she wrote a book,' and the per-
son sitting next to him said, 'Oh, I have
that book' That's happened a couple of
times — people around the country
have recognized our name," she says.
Topf has heard positive feedback
from medical students, and people have
written enthusiastic letters. "It's kind of
strange getting fan mail from medical
students [saying], 'You made me look
like a star in my microbiology class,'"
Topf says. They even heard from a pro-
fessor of microbiology from Modena,
Italy, whose letter "in broken English"
raved about his copy, bought in San
Francisco.
In its third year of production, Alert
and Oriented sold 3,700 copies and
linked up with national medical book
distributors. They also started getting
queries from authors "who were trying
to mimic our book, but for pharmacol-
ogy," Smith says. Of course, The
Pharmacology Companion came out the
next winter, selling 3,700 copies in its
first year.
The three offer their writers a "flat
number of dollars" per book instead of
a percentage of royalties. "It's less debat-
able, no one can ever argue what it is to
recover cost," Smith says. "We try to
make everything simple — the materi-
als are simple for students; we deal with
our authors in a way that makes them
comfortable,". paying them about $4
per book.
In his "real life," Smith specializes in
venture capital law, helping people start
businesses. "Frankly, they're bigger busi-
nesses than ours, seed investments of
$500,000 or $5 million. Still [it's] oddly
related," he says.
"It feels somewhat surprising, espe-
cially since we didn't set out to start a
business. On the other hand, we think

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STUDY on page 136

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