About Fetch! Director, Suzanne Delzio
Why would a writer choose to specialize in veterinary hospitals? Why, the possibility of seeing puppies on a regular basis, of course!
Growing up on a 300-acre farm in Pennsylvania attuned me to the unique and wondrous quality of all kinds of animals. My father, a business owner, moonlighted as the town's de facto veterinarian, called often by neighbors near and far to come deliver a turned around lamb or suture a calf that had tried to vault a barbed wire fence. While he left the complex cases to the degreed veterinarian, the Merck Veterinary Manual and an Omaha Vaccine Supply catalogue helped him successfully treat a good portion of local pet and livestock cases.
Born with plenty of energy and curiosity, I was his eager assistant on nearly all of these missions. During high school, I even interned with a veterinarian some afternoons. After fainting during one too many surgeries, the kind veterinarian advised me to seek another profession.
Luckily, I found that words enraptured me as much as animals did. I took a circuitous route to that discovery, however, picking up a business management and marketing degree from Cornell University along the way. Yes, I lived in Baker Hall, in a nest of you veterinary students, and some of you became my best friends. After graduation, I started writing on a freelance basis for magazines. Most interested in pet issues, I sold articles to Cat Fancy, Dog Fancy, Dog World and San Diego Pet Magazine on a regular basis.
One of those articles had such a positive response that, with the help of dog trainer Elizabeth Fisher, I turned it into a book proposal, So Your Dog's Not Lassie: Tips on Training the Difficult Dogs and Independent Breeds. After going to “auction,” (where multiple publishers bid on the proposal), HarperCollins bought it. So Your Dog's Not Lassie went on to win the San Diego Book Award for best how-to book of 1998.
My HarperCollins editor then encouraged me to submit other proposals for “fun” books about pets because she found the first book funny and engaging. She wanted a book on dog IQ. Flattered but a bit concerned with the topic, I came up with Canine Einstein: Unleashing Your Dog's Genius. I did my best to turn what was supposed to be fluff into a meaningful discussion of how owners could give their dogs an interesting, challenging life. Happy with that book (although they concatenated the name to Canineinstein against my better judgment), my editor asked me to write a similar book for cats, resulting in Felinestein: Pampering Your Cat's Genius. Adding to my book win, the editors of Cat Fancy, without my knowledge, submitted a piece I wrote for them to the American Cat Writers Association/Tidy Cats annual award where it won for best article published in 2002. You can easily find several of my books on Amazon.com.
Besides my pet writing pursuits, I've written a book on Ethiopia for Capstone Press and ghost-written five books for WS Publishing.
Despite that fact that I grumbled through my business management and marketing courses, it's that degree, rather than my master's in American Literature that has guaranteed my success as a writer and my good fortune to work with words all day. Sure, writing books is gratifying and challenging, but it is also isolating and exercises only limited intellectual muscles. I genuinely look forward to working with the well-meaning and interesting professionals I have found veterinarians to be, promoting their small and medium-sized businesses, helping them build client base and loyalty through affordable and effective digital routes.
I am lucky to work with two established and talented writers who have proven their ability to create results-generating copy and web content. These colleagues also conduct preliminary interviews and perform background research. Sarah, our assistant, keeps us in inks and bagels!
