By Tony Biasotti
Ventura County Star
November 22, 2005

Ventura County doctor Gosta Iwasiuk is not a urologist. So why is his recently published autobiography called "The Price of a Penis, And Other Tales of a Country Surgeon"?

The title is taken from Iwasiuk's brush with notoriety in the 1970s, when he had a general practice in Santa Paula. A man came to him with an infected penis, and despite Iwasiuk's efforts, it had to be amputated. The man sued Iwasiuk and two other doctors, eventually settling for $9,000.

The story made the pages of Playboy magazine, which was outraged at the paltry value the settlement placed on the patient's manhood, Iwasiuk writes. The relatively small settlement, however, was a vindication for Iwasiuk at the time, and 30 years later, it gave him the title of his book.

"I had a big fight with my wife about it," Iwasiuk said of his book's title. "She's still mad at me. She thought it was undignified."

Iwasiuk, 62, lives on a 100-acre ranch in Santa Paula and works as a surgeon at Community Memorial Hospital in Ventura. In September, he became an author and a publisher, releasing "The Price of a Penis" through his own company, Cutting Edge Publishing.

By publishing his own book, Iwasiuk joined a booming entrepreneurial trade. Last year, about 11,000 new publishing companies, most of them tiny self-publishing outfits like Cutting Edge, released books in the U.S., according to R.R. Bowker, the company that assigns each book an ISBN number, or International Standard Book Numbering.

The ranks of self-publishers have been growing for years, said Dan Poynter, a Santa Barbara-based author and publisher who has written 14 editions of "The Self-Publishing Manual." Close to 80 percent of the 195,000 books published in the U.S. last year were published by their authors, he said.

"The cost of entry has come down tremendously as technology has improved," Poynter said. Desktop computers, cheaper printing techniques, and e-commerce Web sites have all made it easier for the first-timer to publish a book, he said.

Iwasiuk's book is part memoir and part meditation on being a doctor. It includes anecdotes like the one that inspired the title; the story of Iwasiuk's parents, who immigrated to the U.S. in 1954; and reflections on some of the major issues in medicine to come up during his career.

"I've experienced some interesting things in my life," he said. "We came to America with nothing, and I succeeded beyond the wildest ambitions of my parents."

But it was his father's life more than his own that inspired him to write the book. Iwasiuk's parents were ethnic Ukrainians and lived in Eastern and Central Europe through both world wars. His father was a doctor by trade but a painter and storyteller by habit.

"Those stories were going to be lost if I never recorded them," Iwasiuk said.

He spent four years writing the book. By the time the 212-page hardcover had been edited, illustrated and printed, he had spent about $10,000.

Iwasiuk said he expects to break even, or earn a small profit, if he can sell his first print run of 1,000 books. He has sold about 500 so far, mostly to family and friends.

"I think I can sell those 1,000 copies and order 1,000 more," he said. If that happens, he'll try to publish another book: a coffee-table collection of his father's paintings.

"The Price of a Penis" is for sale on Amazon.com and at the Borders bookstore in Oxnard's Esplanade shopping center. It wasn't easy to get Borders to carry a self-published book, but the local connection helped. So did the eye-catching title, Iwasiuk said.

"If it has a chance --and it probably doesn't, most books fail --it will be because of the title," he said.