The long and painful story about my new book

The story of how my new book came to get published is long and tedious – too long and tedious to be told here in full. Let me therefore try to give you just a very brief summary:

• The ‘Apotheken Umschau‘ is a journal with a circulation of 6m in Germany.
• As it has a history of being very much pro-SCAM (so-called alternative medicine), I was surprised to be invited some 5 years ago to write a critical article about the subject.
• I was even more surprised to be invited weeks later to write a book along similar lines.
• I submitted a full book proposal and suggested the title WER RECHT HAT HEILT which is a play on words; the German dogma for SCAM practitioners is WER HEILT HAT RECHT [He who heals is right] which I turned around into He who is right heals. In English, this does not work very well but in German it is – I hope – quite funny.
• The proposal was swiftly accepted and I got cracking.
• When I had almost finished writing the book, I was informed that my suggested title was disallowed by the publisher’s lawyers.
• The publisher then changed the title and, as I had written the text around the agreed title, I had to rewrite much of the text.
• I nevertheless managed to meet the contractual deadline and submitted my manuscript on time.
• After a few months the first proofs arrived, and, to my surprise, the publisher had altered several crucial sections of my text. These alterations made my text less critical about SCAM.
• We then exchanged many emails and had several video conferences. Altogether I must have exchanged some 200 emails with this publisher of which about a third remained unanswered (my estimate).
• Eventually, we agreed that the publisher had the right to correct my (often rusty) German but not the content or gist of the book.
• It followed a long period of finalizing the wording of the text, the subtitles and of proofreading.
• When this was finished, I was told that the book’s publication was imminent. That was around 3 years ago.
• Looking on Amazon one day, I was struck to see my book advertised under yet another title. It had not been agreed with me. In fact, I had not even been informed about it (and hated it).
• I asked the publisher what was going on and was not given a satisfactory answer.
• Now followed a long period of silence where nothing at all happened, despite me sending increasingly angry emails from time to time.
• Then, suddenly, it was all ‘go’ again and work on the book restarted afresh.
• One day, I was told that now even my original title, ‘WER RECHT HAT HEILT’ was acceptable.
• I thus revised large sections of the book a third time.
• Now, things seemed to advance smoothly, and my book started to be advertised on numerous websites with the title page depicting ‘WER RECHT HAT HEILT’.
• But now, another surprise awaited me: I was informed that my book would need to be ‘peer-reviewed’ by two ‘experts’. I have published plenty of books and never had encountered peer-review apart from that on the initial book proposal.
• Eventually, I received the reviewers comments which were both worryingly incompetent and intensely annoying.
• I nevertheless addressed them all, if only by explaining why the reviewer was, in my view, mistaken.
• When this process was over, I was informed that the last touches were now being made on the graphics and that publication was imminent.
• However, nothing happened and my many emails asking for an explanations did not result in satisfactory explanations.
• Finally, at the end of 2024, I was informed that my book would not be published. The alleged reason was that I had not adequately responded to the comments of the reviewers.
• In my view, the whole painfully long process was marked by a level of unprofessionalism on the side of the publisher that, in my extensive experience as an author, I had never encountered before.
• Luckily, the copyright was returned to me.
• Now I was free to contact another publisher, the ALIBRI VERLAG, and they accepted to publish my book.
• I then revised and updated my text yet again and, within just 4 months, my book finally saw the light of day.

In retrospect, I quite understand that publishers who are into promoting SCAM and heavily rely on advertising cannot afford to publish a book criticising SCAM. This would, of course, be bad for business! What I don’t get, however, is

why ask me and accept my book outline in the first place? 

PS

As the book is in German, I will soon post a translation of a short section that explains what it is all about.