VERO BEACH — Bill Proctor has turned a lot of pages in his lifetime. A career writer and editor, he has worked on 90 books, evenly divided among those he wrote himself, those he co-authored and those he ghostwrote. In all, 10 million copies have sold in more than 40 languages, he says.
Only recently, though, did he start an entirely new chapter: turning from writing to publishing.
At 70, the longtime Moorings resident has started an e-book publishing venture, acquiring rights, formatting and making available for purchase books that can be downloaded onto Kindle and Nook e-readers.
What sets him apart from the pack of e-publishers is that he offers his writers his editing services. The charge to publish, while greatly reduced from traditional paper books, varies according to how much is involved in preparing the piece for publication.
“It’s been a learning curve,” says Proctor gamely, still fumbling somewhat with his own Kindle as he flips through a recent upload. “It’s an entirely different set of skills.”
At this point, the fledgling operation has six books on Proctor’s website, www.InkSlingersPress.com.
Several others, he says, are due up by the end of the summer.
They range from a re-issue of a travel book on Pakistan and another on Babe Ruth in Florida, to books Proctor has written, the rights to which have reverted to him.
The act of writing has always intrigued him, he says. It was enough of a passion to distract him from a career in law.
A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College in history, he went on to Harvard Law School, then joined the Marines where he served as a judge advocate in Vietnam.
Once home, he reconsidered his father’s urging that he “hang out a shingle” and start a law practice.
“I had always wanted to write books. I like the lifestyle. I like to write.”
In the end, he took the advice of a friend who edited books.
“He told me, ‘If you want to be a full-time writer, the best way is to get a job writing for a newspaper.’ ”
For the next three years, he worked as a crime reporter for the New York Daily News.
“Sure enough, by the time I left, I had two or three book contracts under my belt.”
Meanwhile, Proctor had married his Wife, Pam, a fellow writer and college application consultant, with whom he celebrated their 45th wedding anniversary with a trip to Paris and Normandy last month.
The two now work at opposite ends of a large, contemporary- style house near the ocean, the former residence of Vero Beach Museum of Art founder Jean Armstrong.
Along with a career in writing, the two share a profound religious faith. Both are evangelical Christians and members of St. Paul’s Anglican Church, a small congregation that meets at the Surf Club hotel on the barrier island.
Born in Georgia, raised in south Florida and then Minnesota, Proctor’s family were Baptist. But on a trip abroad as an exchange student just prior to his senior year in high school, he says his faith was challenged by a series of intense conversations regarding the existence of God.
“I couldn’t answer all the questions that the atheists and agnostics were hitting me with,” he recalls. “I really went through a crisis.”
When he came home to Texas, where his family had moved, his views were a jumble of logic and belief.
“I guess I considered myself a Southern Baptist agnostic at that point.”
In the year that followed, though, faith won out, reaffirmed in what he calls a “conversion experience: a simple sense of certainty that ‘Jesus was God’s son.’”
While that faith was challenged even more rigorously at Harvard, he held his own in theological discussions, maddening his fellow students, he says with a laugh, and winning the praise of his professor, an Orthodox Jew.
Years later, Proctor would write a novel on the second coming of Christ.
Called “The Last Star,” and described as a “political and spiritual thriller,” it prompted Publisher’s Weekly to suggest he might become “the Christian Tom Clancy.”
It was his faith that helped land him one of his early book contracts, when a publisher put him together with another fervent Christian, Dr. Kenneth Cooper, a physician and fitness advocate who earned the moniker ”the father of aerobics” for his 1968 book on the cardiovascular system’s response to exercise.
That early collaboration has continued through Proctor’s career, as the two became friends and conversations provoked new ideas for new titles, including one on children and exercise that developed when Proctor wondered how best to encourage his 6-year-old son to exercise.
The to and fro of collaboration has proved one of Proctor’s favorite ways of writing. In 2002, he co-authored a novel, a thriller called “Moongate,” with former U.S. Representative David Weldon, a physician fascinated by space travel.
As for his own theories on creativity, he follows the lead of Dr. Herbert Benson, best-selling author of “The Relaxation Response” in 1975.
Proctor collaborated on the sequel to that book, as well as “The Breakout Principal” in 2003. That book centered on how to turn stress into productivity.
“Writing three to four hours a day is pretty intense,” he says. “If I’m on deadline, then I’m doing eight, 10, 12 hours a day. If you’re sitting there working and it’s a grind, your ability to make mental connections and to think creatively is really going to downhill.
“You need to have facts in order for your mind to make associations, but if you keep doing that, you’re probably not going to have a ‘breakthrough,’ when you come up with creative interpretations. That’s when you take a break, take a walk, take a shower. You’ve broken those tapes and that’s where a lot of stress comes from.”
If a start-up at 70 seems an invitation to stress, Proctor has the antidote: a Marine-style workout. He runs intervals on the sand at low tide twice a week, plays singles tennis with a “very good” player 10 years his junior and does a regimen of calisthenics including 70 to 100 push-ups and 10 to 20 chin-ups.
He apparently keeps in mind one chapter from a book he worked on with Cooper on the subject of risk.
The idea came about when Cooper and Proctor were mountain biking.
Proctor was in his late 50s when Cooper, 10 years older, charged along a steep trail at high speed.
“He suddenly went over the edge,” said Proctor. “And when he popped up, we had the lead anecdote: As you age, don’t take unnecessary risks.”
