In 2001 I woke to a fact now so obvious to me I am puzzled how it ever escaped me: if you write and publish a book, people will read it. And they will make decisions about you, your politics, the depth of your thinking, and whether they want to read you again, based on what they read. In webspeak, every book you publish brands you.

This realization was prompted by my first published book. The project had begun in 1999 when a journalist friend who kept a file on cougar attacks happened to find out I was writing an article about cougar researchers for a magazine. We quickly – perhaps too quickly — decided to write a book together.

Both of us were working writers — he the editor of a smallish newspaper, me a magazine and newspaper freelancer — but neither of us had written a book. Our preliminary market research said that the book that hadn’t yet been written would focus on cougar encounters and attacks. It would “sell like that!” we told each other, snapping our fingers.

And it did. Agentless, we took our proposal and sample chapters to ten publishers. St. Martin’s, Johnson Books in Colorado, and Sasquatch in Seattle all said yes.

Then we went back to the agent – I’m going to call her R – who’d told us she didn’t see a book in our proposal but if we happened to convince a publisher otherwise we should let her know.

She agreed to represent us. On her advice we went with the regional publisher Sasquatch because they offered the largest advance, $10,000. The editor at St. Martin’s – name of Marc Resnick — told my writing partner and me that we were idiots to go with a regional house when a national publisher was offering, but he wished us luck.

Fast forward two years and the book was on shelves. The publisher insisted on calling it ‘Cat Attacks: True Stories and Hard Lessons from Cougar Country.’ I’d been arguing for an approach and title that didn’t slam us squarely into the Outdoor Life scary animal story camp, like maybe ‘Track of the Lion,’ but in the end what I wanted most was to see my name on a book jacket, so I hadn’t kicked up much fuss.

Almost as soon as it was too late to change it I realized I hated this book. It not only looked like a bunch of scary animal stories, it mostly was. They had been fun to write, sad and exciting and disturbing. But was that a good enough reason to publish them? Surely we could have been more responsible with our subject matter, I thought. Even though we cautioned against being frightened of cougars because of stories about rare cougar attacks in our book, even though we wrote that the biggest reason we were telling these stories was because they were simply great stories, the implied message was clear: Cougars must be a problem or there wouldn’t be a book.