Local author uses book to share his experience
Wooster resident Ed Rocha used his long career in business as the basis for his book “The Quality Letters Season 1, Lessons from 35 years in Quality,” which came out in December 2024.
Whether or not it’s the Great American Novel, just about everyone has a book in them somewhere. It’s just a matter of getting it out.
For some it’s about finding the time or the right moment to write. For others it’s having the right subject. For Wooster’s Ed Rocha, it was probably a bit of all of that. With the calendar having flipped into his 60s, the timing was certainly right.
And thus, “The Quality Letters Season 1, Lessons from 35 years in Quality” was born.
“As I get older, I felt it would be a waste to take with me what I learned in all those years, in many cases through my mistakes,” Rocha said. “So I started being very purposeful in sharing timeless concepts every time I have an opportunity. I admit that is sometimes quite annoying.”
The self-published book, which hit the shelves Dec. 21 of last year, is 116 pages. It features short stories about problem-solving, project management, quality techniques, leadership and more. Rocha combines his experiences with his beliefs, mixing in some humor — often sarcastic — to make the pages turn a bit faster.
Rocha said he started out with the intention of his book being mostly for young professionals who could lean on his experience. His early feedback, though, came from more experienced people who saw themselves in his stories and kept coming back for more.
Wanting to share his experience while he still could, Rocha began with a list of topics and developed their delivery system from there. He first sent them to colleagues in the quality department where he works. Other people started hearing about them and wanted to be included.
“After that, I started posting on professional social media platforms, and the feedback was great,” he said. “Someone said that if these were collected in a book, he would distribute (them) to his quality team and make it a mandatory reading.”
Each of the stories is written in the form of a letter from a friend, the kind that used to come in the mail (ask your parents, kids). Each “letter” is just a couple pages and a quick read. Readers can enter the book at any point and will find something from Rocha’s 35 years of experience in quality control management.
He suggested reading one or two at a time and that reading too many would make readers “lose some of the message and get bored with the format.”
“I hope people enjoy reading them as much as I did writing them,” Rocha said.
While it is Rocha’s first book, it is not his first time being published. In 2020 he took part in Main Street Wooster’s Short Story Contest, and his entry “It’s Tough To Be an Alien” was selected for publication in “Wooster Tales,” an anthology that came out in 2021.
Spoiler alert: The “Season 1” in the title of Rocha’s debut is an indicator he might have more in him.
“I am working on the second volume with another 50 stories,” he said. “I have already written 30-some of those for ‘Season 2.’”
Rocha’s book is self-published through Amazon, which has the book available for less than $10.