News and Notes

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• Twice a year, I teach an online course on writing nonfiction book proposals. The next one will be in January, and you can sign up for it now! New Year’s Resolution solved. The other day I woke up to an email from someone who took the course last year: she is now under contract with a film production company who wants to use her book as IP, and she has a fancy agent sending out her proposal now. She says it’s all due to me!¹ So you too can get free Hollywood money even before you have book deal if you sign up.
  

• We have a cover for the book I’m editing and which will publish next summer, to help celebrate the 250th anniversary of this fallen nation.

We had a harder time than usual with this cover, and I made David go through a second round of mocks, putting me officially into that dreaded category of “difficult author.” The photo is from the Library of Congress but not the specific collection that holds the oral interviews (by the way, many people conflate the American Guide series with all the work of the WPA/FWP. This book uses material from a different project, American Lives, which consists of oral interviews with workers about their specific working conditions. I think I’ll be having to explain this over and over!). I like the photo for its depiction of a woman in manufacturing, and the strangely contemporary feel of it. After resorting to voting on the options internally and then forcing my friends who work at other publishing houses to reply to my texted screenshots with their vote, we decided on this one.

• Phoebe and I had a blast at the Brooklyn Book Fair. I got to say hi to many friends (Sam! Rumaan! Meg!), meet new folks, and sell some books. The people watching while sitting at the booth was phenomenal: much fashion! A surprising amount of football and other merch, which made it easy for us to catcall passers by (“Hey you with the Browns shirt, over here.”) . Book fairs have their own weird logic: this time, in the morning, everyone who came by, it seemed, bought a book; we sold out of many titles. In the afternoon, it seemed, everyone stopped by, looked for a long time, and walked away. Was it the absence of those morning titles? Are morning people simply more serious? Wealthier? Did the titles we still had in the afternoon suck? Who knows?! Someone should do a sociological study of book fair behavior. With a fashion component.
  

• My book fair travel for this year is over, but I will be doing the conference circuit early next: you can find me at the AHA in Chicago talking about trade book proposals in January, and at AWP in Baltimore on a panel about publishing in March, and of course I am forced to go to Winter Institute as they are holding it here in Pittsburgh. A party, perhaps?
  

• I think the uptick in novel submissions we have been receiving, which I’m reading for work, is leaving me less interested in reading novels for fun, which sucks! At any rate, I just read The Racket by Conor Niland, which I found an interesting, quick read. He’s basically the Josh O’Connor character in Challengers and it may be that being a non-top tier tennis player today is just as bad as being a journalist or freelancer or adjunct prof. I picked it up after listening to the LRB Podcast, which I’ve been enjoying. Also been liking The TLS Podcast.
  

• I watched The House of Guinness which is not great but fun and mainly: James Norton! I am of course watching each episode of the Bake-Off as it airs (I’m rooting for Toby).
  

• I read this piece in the Walrus with which I agree (and I used gambling as the metaphor for publishing in my 2020 book about the industry). I certainly agree with everything Norm says (hi Norm!) about these changes and what small presses are seeing. We are receiving a huge uptick in agented and unagented queries—so much so that we need more help to vet them—but most of the ones coming to us after being struck down elsewhere (I assume) are not a fit for us. The books we’ve been signing up lately remain from folks who have not taken the conventional path to writing them, are not from the demographics that dominate in Big 5 publishing. Most don’t have MFAs, etc etc. It’s lovely, actually. One of the best parts of my job. Send us your quirky, Belt-y, smart book proposal anytime.

1. My brilliant advice? “Just send it out. Stop fiddling.”