She initially shared her stories with friends, and then decided to write a book with short, easily digestible chapters. “I envisioned it like a coffee table book for the oncology waiting room,” she said. The book was only partly written when she returned to work following successful cancer treatment. She eventually finished and self-published the book after realizing how difficult it can be to interest an agent and traditional publishing house.
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July 2022Hell & Back was released in 2018. Sales have been slower than she’d like—and promotion has been much more work—but publishing a book has led to some “amazing experiences,” she said, including dozens of public speaking engagements.
“I got to do something I dreamed about,” she said. “Writing was a great outlet for me.”
Read more: www.drtaliaronoff.com
Nina Shapiro, MD
Author, The Ultimate Kids’ Guide to Being Super Healthy: What You Need to Know About Nutrition, Exercise, Sleep, Hygiene, Stress, Screen Time, and More; Hype: A Doctor’s Guide to Medical Myths, Exaggerated Claims, and Bad Advice – How to Tell What’s Real and What’s Not; and Take a Deep Breath: Clean Air for the Health of Your Child
Director, Pediatric Ear, Nose, and Throat at the Mattel Children’s Hospital, UCLA
Dr. Shapiro’s path to publication is particularly unique: She honed her direct-to-consumer communication skills by appearing on TV shows such as The Doctors.
“As a clinician, I felt that I was discussing certain issues every day, all day, and thought it would be great if people had this information at their fingertips,” Dr. Shapiro said. “That’s how my first book, Take a Deep Breath, came to be.”
A book about airway health and ear, nose, and throat conditions in children isn’t a huge stretch for a pediatric otolaryngologist. Dr. Shapiro’s next book, though, was a bit of a reach. Hype, published in 2018, helps consumers recognize medical misinformation. “To this day, I get a lot of feedback—much of it negative—from the public about that book,” Dr. Shapiro said.
Her third book, The Ultimate Kids’ Guide to Being Super Healthy, published in 2021, is colorful, kid-friendly, and aimed at children ages six to 10. “I’ve found that the more you acknowledge what a child is going through and empower them, the better off they’ll be,” she said.
How has she managed to write three books while maintaining a clinical and academic career? Commitment. “Nights, weekends, and then there’s all that extra turnover time we get doing short surgeries,” she explained. “If you do 10 surgeries in a day and you get 20 minutes between each surgery, you have a couple of hours to do some writing.”