01:00 AM EST on Sunday, February 5, 2006

I had a humbling experience professionally not long ago. I spent several years writing a book, and almost as long making sure I got everything right.

Then came the bad news.

It turns out I got a lot of details wrong. Like dozens of them. That's more than humbling. It's embarrassing.

The book, which recently came out, is called Up and Running, a medical drama about a Providence boy named Andrew Bateson who lost two legs but now plays ice hockey. So there were a lot of hospital scenes, and I worked hard to get the technical terms accurate.

Apparently, not hard enough.

I wrote "sistolic" instead of "systolic." At one point, I said Andrew got an infusion of "coags" when it was really plasma.

I had a doctor saying "Give me a bolus of debutamine," but it was really a drip, not a bolus. And it should have been spelled "dobutamine."

I had a nurse mentally noting that the boy's pupils were "restricted." They weren't. They were "constricted."

I got all that wrong, and more. That's the bad news.

The good news is that in the final book, those things came out right. I managed to catch the mistakes and correct them.

I bring this up now because the book business is going through a crisis of credibility.

One of the year's big sellers, an Oprah-pick by James Frey about his addiction ordeal, was shown to be full of lies. Frey said he survived months in prison, when in fact it was only a few hours. He described a harrowing stay in the Hazelden rehab clinic in a way the staff there now says was untrue.

Frey still tries to justify some of this by saying it was a "memoir," which depends on memory, and therefore has looser rules about truth than nonfiction. Some publishers are saying the same thing.

If you ask me, that's nonsense. Most nonfiction depends in part on people's memories. Mine did. Does that release such books from verifying truth? Of course not. A memoir isn't different than nonfiction. It is nonfiction.

Publishers seem nervous now that books are facing a greater standard of accuracy. They say they don't have the money to fact-check all nonfiction. This is nonsense, too. One phone call to Hazelden would have been enough to reveal James Frey was a fraud.

And my own experience taught me a fool-proof way of getting rid of just about all mistakes. I relied on an accuracy team far better than even professional fact-checkers. I asked almost everyone in "Up and Running" to read the sections about themselves in advance.

At first, I wasn't going to bother. I had gone over all 97,761 words in the book -- Microsoft Word counted for me -- a dozen times. I was convinced everything was right. But it wasn't. The truth is, no matter how thorough you are as a writer, you're going to miss some things.

Some of the corrections were gray areas. At one point, I said a physical therapist was "demoralized" by Andrew's slow progress. Upon reading this, she told me it implied an attitude that didn't ring true. We changed the word to "discouraged."

If she had challenged me after the book came out, I'd have probably gotten defensive and insisted "demoralized" was close enough. But if a book subject winces and thinks, "that's not quite how it was," then it's likely a mistake.

Many professionals in both nonfiction and journalism say it's against the rules to have subjects read material in advance. It compromises editorial independence. I've never bought that. I'm not saying Nixon should have been able to "correct" Watergate coverage, or that you have time to show pre-published stories when on deadline. But when possible, it's the best way to make things accurate.

I'm guessing a lot of people are trusting the book industry less after the James Frey mess.

Publishing knows this, and is in a dither about how they're going to ensure better accuracy in nonfiction and memoirs alike.

It's easy, folks.

Just make it a policy, within reason, to get each book's "accuracy team" -- the people in it -- to look it over.

They'll catch all the little things.

And if authors know such a team is out there, they'll make sure to get the big things right.

Mark Patinkin can be reached at mpatinkin@projo.com