Books
Books for pet owners, from a vet with 25 years in the exam room.
A puppy's first year, vet bills, surgery recovery, and itchy dogs in a long version and a short one. Real Amazon listings, with paperbacks you can hold. I wrote them with Claude, an AI writing assistant, the same way I build my clinic tools: I talk it through, it drafts, and I correct it until it sounds like me. The medicine in them is mine.
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New ยท for anyone with a puppy asleep on their feet
The New Puppy
A Vet's Quick Reference for Your Puppy's First Year
Most of a puppy's first year isn't an emergency. It's potty training, chewing, shots and a long list of "is this normal?" questions, and this is the book you keep on the kitchen counter for all of them. Look up what your puppy's doing in your own words and a colored dot tells you whether it's normal, a call today or a go now. Meatball the always-hungry Beagle keeps it light.
See it on Amazon -
For pet owners who think they're being overcharged
Why Are Vet Bills So Expensive?
What you're really paying for, from a vet who sets his own prices
I set the prices at my own clinic, so I can just show you the arithmetic. Where the money in an estimate actually goes, how to tell an honest range from a padded one, what to do when you genuinely can't afford it, and the red flags worth walking out over. The second edition adds a chapter on why prices jumped and who owns your vet now, and it argues against my own interests in a few places.
See it on Amazon -
For owners taking a dog home after surgery
The Dog Owner's Post-Surgery Survival Guide
What Your Vet Wants You to Know About Recovery at Home
The conversation I have in the exam room every week, written down. Cones versus surgery suits, what a normal incision looks like on day two versus day five, and why the fourteen days after a laparoscopic spay matter more than the two-centimeter scar suggests. My rule is in there: a few days of annoyance beats redoing a surgery.
See it on Amazon
The Itchy Dog, long and short
One to look things up in, and one you can read tonight.
The reference · for anyone up at 2am listening to their dog scratch
The Itchy Dog
Why Is My Dog So Itchy? A Vet's Real Answers on What Actually Works
Itchy dogs are a big share of what walks through my door, and the conversation is always too short for everything the owner needs to hear. So this one's the long version. Fleas first, then infections, then food, then the allergy itself, and what each of the itch drugs actually does and what it costs. Twenty chapters and 157 watercolors, including the one of Biscuit scratching at 2:07 in the morning.
You don't have to read it front to back. Start with whatever your dog's doing today and look the rest up when you need it. The reading extras are on itchydog.vet/book, next to a daily itch forecast for your ZIP code.
The quick read · for when you want a straight answer in two minutes
The Itchy Dog Quick Guide
What to Watch, What to Do, and When to Call Your Vet, in Pictures
When the proof of the big one showed up, I could see most owners would take one look at a 400-page book and leave it on the shelf. I don't blame them. This is the version I'd hand you in the exam room. Every page is one picture, a few plain sentences and what to do next: the 0 to 10 itch scale, the red flags that can't wait until Monday, my food trial list, and the itch drugs with real prices.
Every page points to the chapter in The Itchy Dog that has the whole story, studies and all.
For vets thinking about writing one
Anyone can do this, and almost nobody does.
Kindle Direct Publishing has been free for years. What changed is that the work between having something to say and holding a finished book, the drafting, the editing, the layout, the cover, stopped being a project you hire out. I talk through the messy version, argue with it, and correct it until it sounds like me. On the vet bills book I ran every chapter past two invented readers first, a skeptic and an anxious owner, and it grew from about 15,000 words to 18,600 because those two kept finding holes.
Amazon prints each copy when somebody orders one. No print run, no inventory, no money up front. It isn't a magic button. KDP rejected the vet bills interior the first time because a page number sat a fifth of an inch too close to the edge. All of that is fixable in an evening, and none of it needs a publisher.
Thinking about writing one?
Tell me what it would be about, or what is stopping you. I have made every mistake in the list above and I will happily save you the time.