CORONELLA: Bestselling book docs are ruining my day at the beach

As a self-published writer with a comic novel and three column collections to my name, I have little time for the precious sensibilities of the traditional publishing industry, now competing with a new generation of DIY authors as well as a resurgence in library users.

What moves me to despair instead — especially at this time of year, when many people are reclining on a sun-baked beach, book in hand — is the number of bestselling authors who consider the application of pen to paper (or fingertip to laptop key) their secondary vocation.

These include the usual suspects: athletes, politicians, actors, and celebrity chefs.

The medical profession, however, harbors a high percentage of these double-jobbers, as any visit to a sandy shoreline will confirm. 

On the fiction side, the bestseller lists regularly feature the medical thrillers of Patricia Cornwell, Kathy Reichs, and Tess Gerritsen — all of whom dabbled in mortuary work, forensic anthropology, and family medicine, respectively, before hitting the keyboard full-time.

On a more local note, Waltham-born and Harvard-educated neuroscientist Lisa Genova tapped into our anxiety around neurological disorders when she self-published her first book, “Still Alice,” in which a 50-year-old college professor is afflicted with early-onset Alzheimer’s.

In subsequent novels, Genova has dealt with autism and Huntington’s Disease.

But the granddaddy of literary MDs has to be the legendary and now departed Michael Crichton, who chose not to practice and instead became a one-man entertainment industry whose catalogue of accomplishments includes the TV series “ER” and the multi-media phenomenon “Jurassic Park.”

Not to be outdone, the non-fiction list also offers an intriguing line-up. Here we have medics who do indeed handle their words with a surgical precision: Lewis Thomas, Jerome Groopman, and perhaps the dean of medical writers, Oliver Sacks, whose 1973 book “Awakenings” provided the material for the Oscar-nominated film of the same name.

But there’s one moonlighting MD who really worries me. His name is Atul Gawande and he’s a general surgeon at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston as well as a professor at Harvard Medical School and the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health.

Dr. Gawande is also a staff writer for the New Yorker and has scooped two National Magazine Awards. Plus, he was featured a few years ago as one of Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People, a position a literary wannabe like me will never occupy no matter how many people I desperately attempt to befriend on Facebook.

The good doctor is primarily an essayist, a form I, too, have come to favor in recent years for its brevity and versatility. His writing is so good and displays such insight and understanding that I’m tempted to turn the tables and perform a couple of routine surgical procedures. (I’m sure there's a YouTube video I could consult.)

The exalted status of Dr Gawande and his peers is exceptional, though.

Most writers are happy to plod along in a different sphere.

According to U.S. Labor Department figures, the median annual income of a freelance average writer is $72,275, or just shy of $35 an hour. The ZipRecruiter website, on the other hand, says that $48,412 per year (or roughly $23/hr.) is the average income for writers. 

Now, given the cost of living, either sum might seem a bit paltry. But when you consider that a writer might spend half of every working day surfing the internet or heading to the kitchen for a snack or staring out the window for inspiration — so I’m told — that wage starts to look pretty good.

As for the average income of Irish writers, that’s harder to pin down. But the fact that there’s a tax exemption scheme for creative writers here — introduced in 1969 by then Irish finance minister Charles Haughey — seems to me a clear admission that the returns are going to be pretty slim if you decide to pen a novel, a play, or a short story.

The way I see it, then, traditional versus DIY publishing isn’t the issue. Nor is it online shopping versus the face-to-face retail experience.

For literary practitioners like me, it’s those darn bestselling book docs.

So please, gentlemen and ladies of the healing arts, look at it from our side. Despite what I said earlier, struggling writers can hardly go out and earn a little extra cash by performing life-saving surgery or overseeing vital psychiatric therapies.

Whereas the way the world’s going, practicing medics will never be out of work.

Medford native Steve Coronella has lived in Ireland since 1992. He is the author of “Designing Dev,” a comic novel about an Irish-American lad from Boston who's recruited to run for the Irish presidency. His latest publication is the column collection “Entering Medford – And Other Destinations.”