Sarah Wernick: A Tribute

by Pat McNees

Sarah Wernick, a popular and beloved member of the ASJA family, died November 6, 2007. This tribute to Sarah, by Pat McNees, was written several years earlier and has been adapted for this occasion.

I adapted this profile from my nomination for Sarah for ASJA's extraordinary service award in 2005. Sarah modestly turned it down. What the rest of us might consider extraordinary service, she considers normal behavior.

Many of us first came to know Sarah Wernick when she volunteered at the Contracts table at the conference with Dan Carlinsky, back when Dan was teaching us all that we were renting (not selling) rights to our writing. Sarah went beyond educating us about writers' rights. She has generously and patiently coached many of us -- informally, on Phorum, through workshops, on her Web site -- on how to make a better living from our writing. She has also been an important role model of how much you can do, if you put your mind to it.

Sarah graduated from Barnard College and got a Ph. D. in sociology from Columbia University. At one point, a professor criticized her writing, so Sarah bought a book (Analytical Writing by Thomas P. Johnson) and taught herself to write better. The next paper she turned in was so much better that the professor doubted Sarah had written it herself. Sarah taught sociology at (among other places) Washington University and Northeastern University, but left academia in 1978 and began writing professionally. She started with articles for a local tabloid, moved on to national publications, and collaborated with Dr. Stanley Turecki on Normal Children Have Problems, Too -- which Child magazine named one of the best parenting books of 1994.

Then Sarah made a conscious decision to be smarter about her next book -- to get more readers and make more money. After transforming her own writing career, she has generously shared the secrets of her successes and failures with ASJA colleagues and many other writers.

First she studied what kinds of books made money. Having decided her talent was writing, not marketing, and that her skills and background might be best suited to self-help books in the health field, she set about looking for a marketable expert with whom to collaborate. (Her advice: Don't wait passively for an offer to come to you. Develop an idea and create an offer, thereby gaining more control over the situation. Don't settle for the crumbs. ) She attended conferences, looking and listening for an expert with a platform, one who could hold an audience -- who could sell the book it would be Sarah's business to write. She found Miriam Nelson, a Tufts University professor and researcher who was saying that with the right kind of exercise, even elderly people who had suffered bone loss could regain bone strength. Sarah proposed a collaboration and wrote herself into a new tax bracket. Strong Women Stay Young (Bantam, 1997 and 2000), which quickly became a bestseller, was followed by Strong Women Stay Slim (Bantam, 1998) and Strong Women, Strong Bones (Putnam, 2000). Together the three books have sold almost a million copies, in twelve languages. She later collaborated with fitness trainer Rick Bradley on Quick Fit: The Complete 15-Minute No-Sweat Workout (2005) and with University of Michigan microbiologist Gary Huffnagle on The Probiotics Revolution: The Definitive Guide to Safe, Natural Health Solutions Using Probiotic and Prebiotic Foods and Supplements. She shared her practical wisdom about collaboration in a chapter of The ASJA Guide to Freelance Writing.

Although she has taught us about how to make more money as a writer, for Sarah it is not all about money. Although she knew it would not sell many copies, she collaborated with Claudia Henschke, MD, and Peggy McCarthy on Lung Cancer: Myths, Facts, Choices -- and Hope (2002) because she felt it had to be written. In 1997 Sarah had received the AMA President's Prize for Excellence in Tobacco Reporting. For Lung Cancer, she received ASJA's 2003 June Roth Memorial Award for Health and Medical Books and was first-place winner for trade books in the 2003 Medical Book Awards Competition of the American Medical Writers Association.

In recent years, she attended workshops on writing children's books, so that she could improve a children's story she was writing -- a story that captures her warm good humor. (Her advice: Keep improving your craft.) Those of us lucky enough to have participated in critiquing groups with Sarah know that her proposals and book chapters go through countless drafts, with her welcoming and responding to criticism until the structure, format, pacing, wording, tone, and title are right. She in turn is willing to critique other people's writing and, as her close friend Barbara Sofer says, "Her honest criticism is constructive and tempered with kindness," which also applies to her Phorum messages. She has organized and participated in both writing retreats and e-mail-based critiquing sessions, helping many friends revise and improve articles, books, and book proposals. "No matter how busy she is with her own work, she always finds time to respond quickly and graciously," says Sally Wendkos Olds. If Sarah were editing this profile, she would tighten it and check facts.

"ASJA members typically help each other out," says Anita Bartholomew, "but Sarah goes beyond most other members, and she does much of it behind the scenes, so that she doesn't get the accolades those serving on the board or chairing meetings or committees might get. But her pattern of helpfulness exemplifies what ASJA membership is supposed to mean. " She has provided hours of service on the Web Site and Contracts Committees. "Sarah Wernick has an eagle eye for detail, backed by common sense," writes Bruce Miller.

Not only has she been frank about her success and failures but Sarah is unfailingly generous with information on agents, publishers, platform, and so on -- both informally and formally. She has saved many of us hours of time by providing an outstanding Web site (www. sarahwernick. com) that answers many of the questions aspiring writers ask us, and we can just send them there; it's a wonderful service for writers everywhere. A search of her Phorum messages alone reveals how helpful she has been sharing information about agents and editors, coaching members on how to structure collaborations to their benefit, and above all recognizing that learning to say "no" may be as important as "getting to yes." After learning how to write a winning book proposal, partly at an ASJA workshop, she generously coached others on how to improve their proposals. And somewhere along the way she made herself become a good public speaker and facilitator.

"Sarah has done extraordinary service," writes Mary Campbell Gallagher. "She is a terrific role model, limitlessly generous. I can see her sitting outside the one-on-one meetings at the ASJA conference, taking names and sorting out appointments. She jumps into practical discussions on the forums and contributes the fruits of her own abundant experience, pithily. She is clear-headed and graceful. The year she won an ASJA award, I wrote to her off-forum when I felt bad about not winning an ASJA award I'd put in for, asking advice from her as a multiple winner. She responded kindly, saying she was not a multiple winner, she was a multiple enterer. Sarah also does great service to other writers in other venues. She did a wonderful job organizing and chairing the First Pages session at the Nieman Narrative Nonfiction Conference." She has organized similarly valuable sessions for other events and organizations.

But most of all, she has helped other ASJA members grow by sharing advice and information liberally and generously and by responding thoughtfully to specific crises and manuscripts. As Sue Russell says: "Sarah has done more than any ASJA author I know to make other professional writers aware of the crucial (in today's market) role of platform when trying to sell a book. She is the queen of collaborations and although I consider myself something of a pitfalls aficionado, I can still learn from Sarah. She also is like the quiet voice within that repeatedly drums home messages that over time steadily increase our own belief in our own professional value, and our sense of professional self-worth. She spots from a mile away short-circuits in our confidence and shines the halogen light on them. She constantly makes us re-examine our beliefs and thinking. She is an institution."

Sarah is survived by her beloved husband, Willie Lockeretz, her sons Ben and David Lockeretz and David's wife, Christina, and her brother Pete Wernick and Pete's wife, Joan.

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Pat McNees, a former ASJA board member, has written the history of several organizations -- most recently the NIH Clinical Center. She teaches life story and legacy writing at the Writer's Center in Bethesda. Her book Dying: A Book Of Comfort, a Literary Guild original, is available directly from Pat.