This is Writing It, the podcast about academics and writing. I'm Rachel Gordon. Here, we aim to make the process of writing and publishing a bit more transparent and a bit less overwhelming. Through conversations with editors and academics at all stages, from full professors to graduate students, independent scholars, and postdocs, We share stories, lessons, and helpful habits from our writing lives. We're really excited today to get to speak to Samuel Friedman, who is an award-winning author, columnist, and professor, a former columnist for the New York Times and a professor at Columbia University. He is the author of nine acclaimed books and recently published his 10th, which was about Hubert Humphrey, Civil Rights, and the 1948 Democratic Convention. And we were so glad to get to have you here at University of Florida to speak about that during the fall semester. 
The main reason I was thinking of you, Sam Friedman, is this class you teach at Columbia called the Book Seminar, which I've heard has been really successful in terms of students going on to write what we call trade press books or just get published in general. So I wonder if you could tell us a bit about that class. Sure. First of all, it's wonderful to be with you, especially after having had such a great time at UF. Well, the class aims to teach people both the skill set of reporting, researching, and writing long-form narrative and ultimately book narrative, and has the very specific goal of having everyone develop a book proposal, which consists of two parts. One, an overview essay about a book, sort of the whole topographical map of what a book will contain, and 
And the other part being an actual sample chapter from the book, even though, of course, the book as a whole hasn't been written yet. And a book proposal is what you need to go and seek representation from an agent and what an agent will then use to submit to publishers to try to get you a contract. And the class started doing it in 1991. So I'm now doing it for the 34th time. And it has turned out to be incredibly successful. successful. You know, that's a big tribute to my Columbia Journalism School students over the years. But I've had 111 students get contracts for the books that they developed in the class. And of those 111, probably 90 or a little more than 90 have been published. 
Most of the others are in the works. I'm, you know, proud to say that there are only four of those 111 books that were abandoned by the authors before being completed. teaching these students that has been so helpful? Well, I think it's a combination of things. First of all, one of the great advantages I've always said is that it's an ungraded class. So I can edit incredibly rigorously because no one's thinking about what their grade point is or what their letter grade is going to be. Because I think those things are actually completely anathema to teaching people this kind of writing. You have to be able to try and fail and try again. In fact, that's, I think, the slogan of the Eugene O'Neill National Playwrights Center, which is one of my models for this class. 
So I really, and in fact, one of those lines, when I developed this class way back in the early 90s, I felt like my model was sort of the conservatory model. I was familiar with places like the Iowa Writers Workshop, which now does nonfiction, but for most of its history has been totally devoted to fiction. You know, in the Berklee College of Music, for its jazz program, and the O'Neill Playwrights Center for Working with Playwrights, and the Juilliard School. And all these are about creating a community of creative individuals and really mutually reinforcing, I think, each other's best work, being willing to try and fail, and really kind of giving over a huge amount of effort to the task. This is a class we meet for the 15 weeks of the class, about seven hours straight, with a couple of coffee breaks on Mondays. 
And Students are doing a lot of writing before they even get to work on doing two drafts of the book proposal. I'm having them do a half dozen narrative nonfiction assignments on a weekly basis. So those are intensively reported long-form narratives that might be anywhere from 1,500 words up to even 5,000 words coming in each week. So the other thing that goes with the class is my willingness to – line at it, you know, upwards of 40,000 words each week. And I think the other, another key component is that because I'm based in New York, I've been able over the years to get almost every author whose book I teach, because I sign six books a year or texts, and it's an ever-changing list, usually five works of nonfiction and one work of fiction that's really based on the kind of journalistic or historical research or reportage. 
So, I've been able over the years to get almost every author to speak to us in person. Now we do a little more of it on Zoom and also to get people from the publishing industry to come in because I think it's also really important if you're working on a book proposal to understand where your efforts slot into the industry as a whole and to kind of keep track of how the industry has evolved and changed over the 34 years now I've been doing the class. So a seven-hour class does sound incredibly intense. Are students... writing at all in class or are they workshopping? No, they don't write in class. The assignments come in at midnight on Sunday night and class starts 9 a.m. 
on Sunday morning, so on Monday morning rather. Each week is slightly different, but a typical seven-hour day would be the first two hours I'm giving a writing lesson based on my edits of the assignment they've handed in the previous week. And we also, during that two-hour period, will workshop on a rotating basis three pieces a week or four pieces a week. Then the second two-hour slot will have usually 90 minutes followed by a half hour for a frenzied lunch. We'll have the author whose book we read talking to us. And everyone got the reading list months ahead, has done all the reading. So this is a talk about the craft of doing the book. I sometimes describe it to our guest authors as them giving the biography of the book. 
how it went from conception through research and reporting, through organization, through composition, through revision. Then the next section of the class will be talking about the book without the author present, because a lot of times there are comments students want to make about a book that they may feel, particularly if it's a critical comment, a little bit insecure about stating in front of an author because they don't want to be a bad host or seem like they're being confrontational. But these are important craft points to talk about. So we'll spend some time on that. And then the last hour and a half or so is guests from publishing. So we'll have guests from every major stage of publishing, agents, editors, subsidiary rights, marketing, sales, promotion and publicity, book reviews, book selling. 
And so when you add those things together and again, have a couple of coffee breaks and a half hour for lunch, it takes you basically from 9 a.m. till 4.30. And when we get into publishing, the latter part of the semester where we're working on the book proposals, then the entirety of the class. And on those days, class might run more like five hours than seven and a half. But the whole day is nothing but workshopping in alternating weeks, eight people's overview essays, then the next date, then eight people's sample chapters, then the next date. Wow. I mean, I'm sure listeners will feel like I do. That sounds so interesting. And many of us will wish we could take that class with you. 
I'm wondering what some of the common mistakes or challenges you find with your writers in your class to their nonfiction book writing. It's a great question. I think my answer will probably be very unusual for an audience of scholars like many of your listeners are because I'm dealing primarily with people from a journalistic background. And the two big leaps for them are the difference between what's in the news today or next week or or at the end of the month, and what subject has the staying power for a book that's going to come out at best three years from now, and quite possibly five or seven years from now. That's a cognitive leap that a lot of journalists have trouble making. And the other big leap is in terms of the writing. 
Well, no, I'd say three leaps. The second leap is the difference between the conventions of a lot of journalistic reporting, which is based on interviewing and observation of events in real time, versus really learning how to do primary source research and making people understand that book research doesn't mean just going to the secondary sources, except maybe to find their footnotes to lead you to primary sources, that even though some of the students who've come out of my class do books of immersion reporting that map pretty closely on journalistic skills, my own first two books were that way also, what I really want them to do is to get bitten by the archive bug is to really learn the joys and the challenges of primary source research, because that's another big change from what most journalists do. 
And the last one is the aesthetic challenge of really taking ownership of a subject, not just as a journalist, knowing who to Google or knowing who to email, or in the old days, we would say having a good Rolodex of experts to call, but really taking on the burden of expertise yourself, and have a real mastery of the subject and having an informed point of view of subject. So that's one part of the aesthetic. And the other is a kind of a storytelling or argumentation over a large canvas, which is very different, again, from the way a lot of journalistic writing or broadcasting is front loaded. There's a kind of sardonic joke among journalists that every article falls into three parts. Part one, you tell the reader what you're going to tell them. 
Part two, you tell them Part three, you tell them what you just told them. And aesthetically, particularly long-form narrative, depends on not revealing everything at the start, engaging the reader, getting the dramatic tension set up, developing the characters, but engaging the reader so that the reader stays with you until what needs to be revealed is revealed, until that dramatic tension, having been established and orchestrated, gets resolved. So I think those are the main... areas that I'm working on. And, you know, when I teach workshops for scholars, which I sometimes do, particularly through the Association for Jewish Studies, a program called Writing Beyond the Academy, I'm sometimes working in the opposite direction and working with people who already understand and know full well how to work with primary sources, how to make an argument, how to have mastery. 
But working with them in the opposite direction, how do you tell a story to engage a non-expert reader? How do you get out of writing in the jargon that's the lingua franca of your own discipline, deservedly so, but can be off-putting to a lay reader? How do you, the way I sometimes put it, is how can you make things simpler without making them simplistic? We did get to speak with someone who had been in your Reading Beyond the Academy workshop who mentioned how wonderful it was. And it sounded like it had been really inspiring, too. I couldn't help but wonder what you told the class that it sounded like got them so fired up. She was explaining that it seemed like everyone like charged ahead and got something published in a popular site. 
Yeah, go ahead. I think a lot of it is having the right people in the room, to be honest. I mean, I've done that program in person twice in 2016. And then last summer, 2023, I did it actually one day on site. And I think 2018, that was just one day was rather different. I'm going to try doing a version. four days online this summer. By the way, if any of your listeners are interested, they should look for information coming out from the Association for Jewish Studies. But I think part of it is having people who really bond. And the 12 people, the scholars who participated last summer, some of them knew each other personally beforehand, some knew each other's work, some had no exposure previously, but they really connected. 
And I think having the right chemistry in the room is a big, big part of it. And I think also when people who were in the program started to adapt work that they had been unable to place in, you know, mainstream publications or websites and began to revise it and get it sold. And we were sharing all of this in a listserv and, or Google doc and other people saw, wow, so-and-so is getting published. It's more and more reinforcement. And I think the sense that this can be done, that this is doable is, has been vital to both the Writing Beyond the Academy program and also the book seminar. With the book seminar, I talk about my former students. I call them the ancestors, you know, and I talk about the idea that we're engaged in ancestor worship, which if you know the original true African theology, it doesn't mean you're worshiping the ancestors as deities. 
It means you're calling on them as intercessors, you know, kind of the way a Catholic person might call on the saints as intercessors. And I always say we've got to propitiate the ancestors. But understanding that there is this tradition of people getting published, some of whom had barely had a word published anywhere before getting their book contract and bringing in a lot of the ancestors to talk to the class, I think makes this feel achievable. That's really interesting. People who've barely published before and then get a book contract. Was that a matter of finding the right story and finding their writerly voice? How do you explain that? I think you're right. You're exactly on point with that, Rachel. It's having the right subject and also having the right skill set. 
And when I admit students to the class, I never take recommendations from other professors. I never look at how anyone has done. Because to me, it's all about having the right subject. If you don't have, in my subjective view, because everything in publishing is subjective, a viable and doable book topic, it doesn't matter how great your skills are. But what that means is that it's sort of potluck for me what the skill set is with the people I take. And I've sometimes taken the same students I put on academic probation in the first semester in my own class in second semester because they had a strong enough idea. So that's part of the risk that I take. But often enough, the things have meshed that someone has a really strong idea and also has the right skills. 
Now, some of the people I've taught over the years are just purely sentence to sentence exceptional stylistic nonfiction writers. I mean, people like Leah Hager Cohn and Kelly McMasters and, you know, Casey Parks. These are people who just, by almost any aesthetic, write at a high literary level to begin with. And that's value added. But I've also had a lot of students who've gotten published who I would say are, you know, more serviceable writers, which I don't mean as a term of diminishment. But because they had great ideas and they were tenacious researchers and they really labored over making the writing do the work it needed to do to tell the story they wanted to tell, those books also got published, found audiences, got careers going. 
And, you know, so I get a different kind of satisfaction from there. And in a way, it's kind of a liberating insight to share with the students, which is that it's wonderful if you can write like Leah Hager Cohn or Kelly McMaster's or Casey Parks, but that's not the mandatory requirement for being able to be published. Since you do teach this writing beyond the academy class, I'm wondering how you are able to help academics loosen themselves from the academic jargon, at least for this kind of writing, or how you pull out maybe some more storytelling kind of style. How do you instruct them on that kind of writing? Well, it's a little bit different from the book class in the sense that with beyond the academy, it runs pretty much within a week. 
And in that week, although we, you know, when we do it in person, we're there for six or seven hours a day again. But I try to cover a few basic forms, op-ed essays, personal essays, cultural criticism essays, and then also book proposals and talk to them about the condition of the publishing industry these days. So the work that we workshop there is work they've submitted in advance as part of being admitted into the workshop. So everyone is asked to submit either an op-ed or a personal essay of about 1,000 words apiece or a cultural criticism essay of up to, I think, 1,500 or 2,000. And those get workshopped, one piece of writing apiece from the dozen students. You know, with the book proposal, and most of these people have written books already. 
They've done their dissertation. They've often written their tenure book. So this is just trying to help them along if they want to write a book that can move into a trade press or... work for some of the academic presses like Oxford, which I publish with now, that kind of wonderfully straddle the academy and the broader readership, because that's been one of the really positive developments in publishing. Actually, a lot of my students from the book class, probably 20 to 25 of the 111 book contracts have gone to academic presses, even though these people aren't credentialed PhD holders, because academic presses have begun to be interested in broadening their readership and I've really picked up a lot of great writers who trade presses, being risk averse as they're increasingly getting, find too commercially uncertain and pass on. 
And so a lot of really good writing for a broad audience ends up with academic presses. In any case, so with the writing for the Academy, we're trying to work with everyone with one piece they've already got and then give them the tools for moving on to write others. And it's also a case, Rachel, the kind of person who applies for this program is someone who's already interested in reaching a broader audience. And some of these people have already published or at least tried to publish in venues, whether it's the Chronicle of Higher Ed or Religion Dispatches or the Forward or Haaretz. And so they're inclined in this direction already. They don't need to be persuaded that this is a good thing to do. 
And I think that one thing you and I have talked about, is that one of the positive changes in the world of getting tenure that we've both seen, and in my life at Columbia, I've sat on tenure committees, is that whereas if you went back 20 or 30 or 40 years ago, one of the terms of disapproval was to call someone a popularizer, that if your work can be understood outside the sanctum sanctorum of experts in your own discipline, then there must be something deficient in it. This is why, incredibly, someone like Alan Brinkley got denied tenure at Harvard In the same year, he won the National Book Award. So now that's changed a lot. And I think higher education looks in many cases, maybe not in every single institution, but fortunately in many, at a young scholar's ability to be a public intellectual. 
As you've alluded to, there has been a lot of changes in publishing. And I'm looking at your list of books here. These include Small Victories, The Real World of a Teacher, Her Students in Their High School, in 1990, Upon This Rock, The Miracles of a Black Church from a few years later, The Inheritance, How Three Families in America Moved from Roosevelt to Reagan and Beyond. Then there was Jew vs. Jew, The Struggle for the Soul of American Jewry in 2000. I remember this book being everywhere. It seemed like everyone was reading this book. Every book club was talking about it. And then Who She Was, My Search for My Mother's Life in 2005, Letters to a Young Journalist in 2006. Breaking the Line, the season in black college football that transformed the game and changed the course of civil rights. 
And there's been a few more after that, too. It's a lot of books over a lot of time. What have you noticed changing about what editors and publishers are interested in? Well, one thing is that the need to write a really thorough and persuasive book proposal, a book proposal that really answers any reasonable question. about the book that's going to be done. That's more imperative now than ever. I think when i wrote my first proposal back in 1987, even though my proposal was a fairly thorough one, that was a time when if you had, you know, kind of demonstrable talent and a pretty good proposal but had some holes in it, your agent would be able to get publishers to take things on faith and to say, okay, you know, those gaps will be filled in in the doing. 
There's enough here that will take, uh, a chance on it. And I think that now there's an expectation that everything should be addressed in the proposal. And like my first couple of proposals, there was no need to write a chapter outline. I could talk in general terms about what I thought the narrative arc of the book would be. But in the last 10, 15 years, for sure, it's imperative that every proposal have a fairly detailed breakdown chapter by chapter of what will be in the book, even though, of course, everyone in publishing understands that books change in the doing. But they want to know that an author has a really thought through grasp of the whole book. The other thing that's, you know, something that's changed in some unexpected ways that it used to be when I started, that once you'd written your first book, you were in the club, you knew the secret handshake, and that the hardest contract to get was your first contract because as an author, you're an unknown quantity. 
Now, because there are these metric services like BookScan that, you know, can capture 70% or 80% of book sales or so they claim, and everyone in publishing can see approximately what any previous book sold, it actually can be much harder to get a second or third contract depending on how your first book sold. Whereas as I tell my students in the book seminar, they're actually in a better position than I am because I have a number of my books in the book scan era with metrics that anyone can look at and decide whether they do or don't like those metrics. A first-time author has no metrics to be held against them. On the other hand, I tell them, you still have to prove that you can write a book. 
And you have to prove it even more than I did on my first book for some of the reasons I was talking about. So that's the yin and the yang if you're a first-time author. And the yin and the yang if you're a career author like I am, which is that no one doubts that I know how to write books. But people are looking at the hard numbers in a way that, frankly, they didn't at an earlier point in my career. So for the first time authors or people who are hoping to be first time authors of trade presses, would you, trade press books, would you advise that it's the, is it the writing strength and the subject matter that has to sort of capture the heart of an agent or what's been your experience? 
I think it's both of those things. And also, you know, we live in a capitalist economy. And so there has to be some argument to be made that this book has readers. And fortunately, the numbers for a country as vast as America are kind of shockingly modest. But I think for a book of serious nonfiction, obviously, it depends on how much a trade press will pay for it. But I think in a lot of cases, if a trade press can envision a solid way to sell 10,000 hardcover copies, they're willing to make a moderate offer on a book. With an academic press, they can see a way to sell 3,000, 4,000 copies of many of their hardcover books because their advances are smaller. 
that'll be sufficient for them to go to contract. But you still need to make the case that that readership is present. And that means that even if you write brilliantly, even if you conceive a book brilliantly and do a great proposal, you're still at the mercy of forces that you can't control, you know, such as what topic is perceived as being hot or not hot right now. What did books on the subject recently do? And if one was a big success, the argument might come back, well, that subject matter has been dealt with in this hugely successful book. People aren't going to read two books on that subject. And alternatively, if the book didn't sell well, people come back to you and say, well, I looked at, as they call it, the comp title, meaning the comparison title, and the comp title on that subject didn't sell well. 
And also all the quirkiness of what's in the news, I always say, and this is true of trade publishers, not academic publishers, trade publishers really shouldn't be affected at all by what's in the news now. Because anything that's in the news gets saturation covered in real time more now than ever. And if a book comes out in three or five or seven years, what's in the headlines now is totally irrelevant. And yet, because publishers are human beings, they can't help but be affected by what's in the news. So whether it's how many books, you know, we're probably being signed up right now about Christian nationalism, or how many books are being signed up right now about Israel and Palestine, or about Hamas, or... 
whatever it is, realistically, publishers probably should be wary of those books, but they can't help themselves. And on the other hand, what will be in the news five years later when a book comes out can't be predicted. And a lot of times books become hugely successful, not only because of their real quality in terms of the research and the writing, but the pure quirk of the timing. You talked about how my book, Jew vs. Jew, really got traction, which it did. part of that had zero to do with the book. The week the book was published, Al Gore named joe lieberman to be his vice president. And even though my book had explicitly nothing to say on that subject, suddenly people in the media were looking for people to have on radio and tv shows and quoting articles about american Jewry. 
And I benefited pure luck from that. Or like susan faludi's exceptional book, Backlash, that was signed up for a very moderate amount of money, as i understand it. I mean, Sue Faludi is a superb journalist, has won two Pulitzer Prizes, but that wasn't seen as a future bestseller. But not only was it a terrific book, which could have been predicted given her talent, but it was released just about the time of the Needhill-Clarence Thomas confrontation in the Supreme Court confirmation hearings. And all of a sudden, all this heat and light attached to backlash. And then what happened is then there's another thing that happens in publishing. Then there was this stampede of writers trying to do backlash-type books on other subjects, and foolishly, a lot of publishers buying them. 
And that's how you then end up three or five years later with a glut of books on a subject that no one is that interested in anymore. Thanks for sharing those stories. It's a reminder, the success of a book, some of the ingredients to that success are things that we can't control. Absolutely. You mentioned the comp titles part. This is a section... of the book proposal, many of us include other books like it. And I guess as you're pointing out, there is this fine line or dilemma of what books to mention, because as you're pointing out, if it's too similar, then it becomes an argument for why we don't need yours because we already have. But I guess, you know, maybe a solution as you're intimating is books that suggest an interest in this type of book, but don't seem like duplicates. 
Right. And sometimes I tell my students it can be a book that shares a rhetorical approach or or an aesthetic to what you're writing on, but doesn't share the subject matter. And the other thing I'll say about the comp title section of proposals is that I always tell my students, put it at the end. It's really not that important. Publishers are going to look at comp titles regardless. And I think that a lot of the how-to books about book proposals, with the exception of a really terrific one, it's called either How to Think Like Your Editor or Thinking Like Your Editor, which is co-written by an editor whose name I don't recall, but also the literary agent. Susan Rabiner. That's a really smart book on writing book proposals. 
But most of the other how-tos wildly overemphasize the marketing plan and comp titles. And to me, that's just a grace note. If you don't bring the quality in the rest of the proposal, you could have the best marketing plan in the world. And in fact, my agent always takes out my comp titles and marketing section and says to me, I don't want you to look like you have to do the selling. That's my job. But So I'm sort of writing that for him to give him some ammunition. Yeah, we were lucky enough to have Susan Rappiner join us in episode 18 for listeners. Please take a listen to that great conversation. And like you were saying, Susan was pointing out in that marketing section, it doesn't feel so helpful to say, this is what I will do. 
Unless you have the New Yorker already saying, we want to excerpt this or we plan to excerpt this, it can feel a little empty. So that's interesting that you're also suggesting you might not put that at the beginning or not really do it much. Well, the other thing is all the, you know, everyone in publishing has heard all the hype and read every adjective a zillion times. So you're not going to kind of bluff your way by them with adjectives. I think, you know, what you can do is instead of promising things you can't promise is talk about who are the self-interested readerships for your book. Like one of my book writing students many years ago, Carrie Sheridan, who's now a radio journalist at 
In Florida, WUSF, Kerry wrote this exceptional book called Bagpipe Brothers about the September 11th attacks through the prism of the bagpipers banned from the fire department in New York, which had two of its members killed. And the bagpipers played all 343 memorial services and funerals for their fallen comrades. And Kerry was an unknown writer. She'd done a little writing for Weekly Irish American Paper in the Bay Area of San Francisco before coming to Columbia. And she was pitching a book on a subject that David Halberstam, September 11th, I mean, not the bagpipers, David Halberstam was writing about, Stephen Grill was writing about, Dennis Smith was writing about, Lawrence Wright was writing about. And her book actually found a wonderful home at Rutgers University Press and sold extremely well. 
But the thing Kerry did really brilliantly is she said, here is the audience for my book. There are X thousand firefighters in this country. Who's going to read a book about firefighters, other firefighters? This is a book a lot about Irish Catholic culture. How many members are there of Irish Catholic fraternal groups like the Ancient Daughters of Hibernians? How many subscribers are there to Irish American newspapers around the country? This is a book about dealing with grief. How many colleges teach classes in dying and death? How many social workers specialize in grief counseling? So with hardcore reporting, And hard and fast data, Kerry made a great case for the readership. And I think that's the way you do it rather than making insupportable claims of what will happen in the future. 
I mean, the one odd thing about the future that publishers in some cases have begun to ask for is for an agent to get blurbs from authors to go in with the proposal. So before the book is even much into the doing, before the book has even gone to contract, they want blurbs. And I've done some of those because I'll do anything to help an author I want to help. But it is kind of perverse. Yeah, I've heard about that too. I guess what's your guess there that it's just we – I mean because as you're saying, it sounds like friends and supporters, people who like this author and affiliate of talent will feel inclined to do it. Why is that helpful? I don't understand it frankly, Rachel. 
I feel the same way as you do because when the book comes – is coming out, what a lot of us do is go to our friends and colleagues and – you know, authors read meyer and get words from them then. So it's not like you would normally have a doubt about whether a book will get any blurbs at all if you don't have them in hand at the outset of the process. So I'm not sure why the industry seems to be emphasizing that. And it's not particularly useful. You know, in academic publishing, as you know, if the proposal comes in, the proposal itself, like mine with Oxford, would go out to peer review. And that's different because peer review That was my experience and the experience of many of my students who have gone through it with their academic press books. 
It's really helpful because you're getting, you know, expert analysis and expert critique of your work at a time when you can still correct errors. I always tell my students this is like getting the mixed review before the book is out so that you can magically address it. But getting a blurb ahead of time, I just don't understand what that adds. You recently had the experience of working with, I think, the trade division of Oxford University Press. This is something some of our listeners might be interested, not sure when or if this might be a good choice and what you get out of doing that. What was your experience of working? I had a great experience. I think that there are pros and cons if you end up with a choice between a trade press and an academic press. 
Look, if you get a big offer from a trade press, significantly more money and you need to pay rent and your research expenses, as we all do. I'm certainly not going to argue against that. Most of my career was spent with trade presses. But the dilemma is that if you're a so-called mid-list book, which means a non-blockbuster or presumed non-blockbuster work of nonfiction, it's also true fiction, and you're coming out from a trade press that's publishing 20 or 40 or 70 books in a publishing season, you're you're not going to get much attention. There's, I think, an erroneous assumption that if you get published by a trade press, you'll get more marketing and attention than by an academic press or a small indie press. 
Not necessarily true. The trade-off is if you go to a wonderful small indie, you know, place like melville house or gray Wolf, let's say, and others, or you go to an academic press as i did with Oxford, the upfront money is going to be a lot less. But if you're their lead title, or one of their top titles, and this was absolutely my experience, you're going to get a lot of attention and that's going to help downstream. So, you know, when Oxford's sales reps went out to present the list of books that Into the Bright Sunshine, my book about Humphrey and civil rights was on, I was one of the top one or two titles the salespeople went out to. And that means that whether it was talking to Amazon's buyer or talking to the book review editor at the New York Times and Wall Street Journal, 
that my book got heard by those people. If the sales rep comes from Simon & Schuster, where I used to be, and you're the 10th or 12th book down the list on that season's list, the meeting isn't going to go that long. Your book is never going to be heard by the buyer or by the book review editor. I mean, hopefully they'll scan the information about it in the catalog, but it's not going to get a big push. And so I got wonderful review attention on the Humphrey book, even at a time when review attention overall has been contracting. And I completely attribute that to the fact that I was a priority title for Oxford. And I can say for sure that that would not have happened with any trade press. 
Yeah. You know, it reminds me, one of the things that Susan Rabiner mentioned when she was talking with us was about how this might not be the best time to go with a trade press. She said these things go up and down. But she felt like now wasn't one of those great times for academics who want to do serious nonfiction with the trade press. What do you think of that? I agree. I think that partly because of the changes in academic publishing, it's become much more nimble and entrepreneurial about publishing books that can straddle. And if you think of like Kate Ballou's book that Harvard did about the Vietnam veterans and the faction of them who became part of the Aryan nations and far-right movements like that. 
That got a ton of attention, and I'm sure sold well. My former student, Sasha Sanderovich's book about the making of the Soviet Jew, also a Harvard book, that's gotten a lot of pickup and a lot of attention. My friend Althea, or rather Ashley Brown at University of Wisconsin wrote a biography of Althea Gibson, the breakthrough black female tennis champion. That book got a lot of attention all over. So I think that and this is true of many academic presses. I mean, Oxford, Cambridge, Yale, Princeton, NYU, Rutgers, University of California, University of North Carolina, University of Chicago. That's not the exhaustive list, but it means that there are a whole bunch of imprints that can do this kind of work really well. I mean, Natalia Melvin Petrozzella's book about fitness culture 
which University of Chicago did. That book was all over the place. So I think that there's no reason to think that if you're with an academic press, you're going to be consigned to less attention and potentially smaller sales than if you were at a trade press. And similarly, some of these indies, like I say, like Melville House, Graywolf, Chicago Review Press, Milkweed, places like that have really projected books out, sold well, gotten a lot of review attention, won awards. because they can give those books a lot of attention. Yeah, and we've heard from others that it seems like the academic presses are doing some interesting books that in another time we might have imagined with trade presses, but they seem willing to take a chance on some of this exciting nonfiction. 
Right, and look, the other thing is if you build big numbers with an academic press, you can vault to books the trade press. I mean, look at a career like beverly gauges bev gage started with my own editor at uh oxford tim bent who's a superlative editor, and did one or two books with him, and they sold well enough that she got the contract for gmail for, you know, Magisterial Biography of j. edgar Hoover, and that was published, I believe, was a penguin press or FSG, I don't recall, but that's a good example. I mean, the uber example, of all uber examples, There's another one of Tim Ben's former authors, Heather Cox Richardson, you know, who now, you know, got like a seven figure contract for the book that came out that I think Viking did that came out of her newsletter, Letters from an American. 
I mean, the one thing I'd say to people, though, is that when you look at an experience like Heather Cox Richardson's, it's important to know that's completely anomalous and that there are tons of people who start up sub stacks and never catch on or catch on at a far more limited level. And the idea that if I, do a sub stack, that's going to be the likely outcome is completely wrongheaded. I mean, I saw the same thing when blogging started and there'd be a few people who, you know, built up audiences on their blogs and vaulted to book contracts. And all of a sudden there was a stampede of people in my tribe of journalists thinking I should start a blog. Look at what happened to, you know, Anne-Marie Cox with Wonkette, you know, 
All of a sudden, she's a star. And I think the problem is that by the time the breakthrough has happened, the curve, you know, we're on the downhill slope of the curve of that technology. It's also happened, you know, not so much with this type of podcast, an informational podcast, but the kind of narrative podcast that Serial typified. Serial was this phenomenon. And then everyone stampeded in to do true crime and particularly either unsolved case or wrongful conviction. podcast series and it got glutted and it didn't give the results that people thought it was going to yield because everyone modeled on that one thing that had broken through to an enormous extent. And I'm quite sure that anyone involved in serial would have told you they had no such expectation. 
Right. With the part of getting an agent, which is something that our listeners have asked about, any takeaways or good lessons from your students? I suppose being introduced to agents is very helpful, but But in terms of those who have to go with a cold call, who don't have someone who can introduce them, what have you found has worked? Well, the main thing, first of all, is you need to have a proposal first. That once an agent represents you, an agent will absolutely have blue sky conversations with you for book number two and three and four because that's part of the ongoing relationship. But agents do not want to have a blue sky conversation about book number one unless they've approached you. I mean, if they've seen something you've written – 
or heard your podcast and they reach out to you, then there can be that blue sky conversation. But that's a relative rarity. So you really need to have the book proposal complete before you even seriously go searching for an agent. And the thing I always say is if you can't make a connection through a friend or colleague who already has an agent and can introduce you to their agent, the best way to find an agent is think of a book that you admire that feels in some way similar to the book you're working on. Look at the acknowledgements, find the agent's name. And these days it's so simple. Google that agent and you'll find the contact information. And it also gives you instantly a great way to write a pitch email, which by the way, should be very brief. 
I always tell my students three paragraphs, no more, because that email is going to be read by the agent's assistant. And it's going to be one of scores, if not hundreds of emails to be read that day. So, you know, paragraph one, I see you represented, you know, Susan Flutie's book, Backlash, and I'm working on a book about the backlash against blah, blah, blah, that I feel might be of interest to you as a result. Paragraph, that right away tells that agent you've done some research. That paragraph alone separates you from probably 90% of the pitches going to that agent. Paragraph number two, a synopsis of the book, one paragraph max. Paragraph three, your best credentials and how to reach you. No more than one paragraph. 
Those three paragraphs in the email will give that agent enough information to decide if they want to pursue things with you. Because they may already have a client working on a book like that. They may not be interested anymore in that subject. Whatever the case is, it'll let them, if they say no, quickly say no. And it'll let them, if they're interested, say yes. And the other thing I'll add about pitching is that it used to be really frowned upon to do a multiple submission to agents, but that's changed some. It's now... more kosher than it used to be as long as you tell the agent you're doing multiple submissions so if you're submitting to multiple agents at once with this pitch letter you need to say it you need because that's the only way that people can understandably get bent out of shape is if an agent really responds positively of your work to your work thinks that you're that that they are the one agent you're going to and then they find out you've you know submitted or pitched five other agents they're going to be perturbed and already broken trust 
You don't even have a relationship and you've already degraded the trust level in it. Whereas if you say from the outset, just so you know, I'm submitting to other agents as well. Everything's transparent from the get-go. If someone has a pretty good draft of a book proposal, might they attach that in that pitch email or do you think not? No, don't do it because it's too much for someone to read. Because any good agent has so many proposals that they've asked for to read at any given time. And it's a huge time commitment to read and think about those proposals. And it would tie up, suppose someone's answer ultimately is, gee, sorry, no, I already have an author working on a book about the rise of Christian nationalism. 
If you would send your proposal, it might take the agent six weeks reasonably to get to it just to say that. And you've been, you know, spinning your wheels for those six weeks. Whereas if you send a three paragraph pitch letter and just let them know you have a proposal, Then if they say, gee, sorry, this is of interest, but I already have a book on Christian nationalism by one of my clients, they can get that back to you in maybe a week. So it's a big help to yourself not to append a lengthy book proposal until you know someone says they would like to read it. Since you do teach students about how to write sort of popular pieces that aren't book length, but essays or op-eds, and I know this is something that you do too, I wonder if you suggest that or find that that is helpful 
for your students and first-time authors to get the first contract, either because someone actually sort of tries to get in touch with them if they've read it or just being able to say that in their pitch? I think it cuts both ways. I can think of, look, if you already have visibility as a journalist covering a subject, even if it's not exactly what your book will be about, that's an advantage. Dana Goldstein, who is now a national education reporter for the New York Times, took my book class. while on a fellowship, Dana already had a lot of visibility for her education journalism. And then when she came forward with a book proposal on the history of America's very ambivalent attitudes about teachers, or ambivalent to negative, really, the fact that she already was known as an education journalist helped. 
But I don't think it would have made much of a difference if she'd been unknown up to that point and done one op-ed. Sometimes if people have not been published at all, it can be helpful. I had a student named Dina Hampton. who wrote a wonderful book called A Little Red, which was about this famous, very radical school called Elizabeth Irwin School and Little Red Schoolhouse. One was the K-8 and the other was the high school in New York. And it was a very red diaper baby kind of school. And Dina was mostly an editor and had worked in trade journalism, but hadn't been published broadly. And her agent, Betsy Lerner, was having trouble getting a contract for Dina and said, you know what, I think if we can get a big chunk of this book proposal published, 
you know, kind of transformed into a long news feature, kind of magazine length piece and get it published. That can get us over the hump. And so Dina was able to do that and get it published in the city section of the New York Times. And that satisfied enough people in publishing that she was of a publishable caliber and she got a contract from Public Affairs Press with her imprint. So it can work positively in that way. But the other problems are You know, there's a great black American idiom that says, don't put your business out in the street. And as soon as you write an op-ed or even a narrative piece on your book topic, you're putting your business out in the street. 
And I don't mean that authors are looking to rip off other authors, not at all. But every author, including me, consumes journalism every day, partly to know what's going on in the world and partly because they're looking for the next book topic. And anything you write might excite another author. The other dilemma is that depending on how close to your publication date you'd write an op-ed or kind of a spinoff piece, when the book comes out, that's when you want to be writing op-eds and spinoff essays to draw attention to the book. And publications might say, hey, look, we published an op-ed by you on the same topic two years ago. I'm sorry we can't do it again now. But when you really want to publish it is when it's the week your book is coming out. 
Good point. One question we've been asking all guests is whether there's something – You wish you had known about writing or publishing earlier in your career, and this might be something that you've noticed your students or people in your workshop or classes that, oh, they're just realizing this, or it's been really helpful for them to discover this. I don't think at the very beginning it mattered to me that much that I didn't think about what an author should be doing to help bring attention to a book, because my first two books, Small Victories and Upon This Rock, had really sizable contracts, had a lot of support from my publisher, harper collins and at that time publisher and as a result the publisher did book tours and took ads and i didn't have to do that much myself. 
I think by the time it got to my third book which came out in 1996, The Inheritance, I hadn't realized how much the world was changing in book promotion and the amount of money publishers could put behind it and how much was really important for the author himself, herself, themselves to Try to devise their own promotional tour, you know, in concert with the in-house publicist to try to write spinoff pieces of their own and place them. And again, doing all this with the knowledge of your publisher, but to really take a lot of initiative. When I went out through the auspices of the Jewish Book Council to do this whole amazing circuit of Jewish book fairs for Jew versus Jew, that helped awaken me to the fact that even though that was the book council doing it, that there was a way to get yourself in front of readers that 
could be above and beyond what reviews you did or didn't get and above and beyond what money your publisher would or wouldn't put into it. And so particularly, you know, so i think like with the inheritance, I was kind of taken by surprise and it was really difficult emotionally because the book got absolutely superb reviews. It was viewed all over the place as a finalist for the pulitzer Prize. And yet it really never caught on with sales. Some of that was it was a book about the rising conservative ascendancy that came out as Bill Clinton was, you know, winning a Lancet over Bob Dole. So my premise for that moment in time didn't look like it made sense, even though it held up, has held up very well. 
But it's also because I didn't realize how much I needed to be doing. And I've tried not to make that mistake again. And I talked to my students and other writers about what you can do to try to help your own book along. And so with Breaking the Line, And with Into the Bright Sunshine, I've really started like nine to 12 months before publication. Pretty much as soon as I handed in my finished manuscript and went through my editor's edits, at that point, I've started to reach out and make contacts about speaking engagements, about writing spinoff pieces. And I think it's also to be humble and understand, unless you're a star writer, people may not want to hear you. You need to think, what are institutions that have their own audience? 
Like when I came to Florida, I mean, you approached me, which was wonderful, but it was through a speaking series that Jewish Studies does at UF. That's your audience. It's not people who came because it was me. It's people who like all the programming you do and will come to all of your events. And that's the type of thing I'm always looking for. Libraries that do lecture series, museums that do lecture series, university departments. And also to always look with who you can partner up with. Can you do events with people you've written about in the book? Can you do events with other authors? Maybe sometimes you'll be the speaker, but other times you should be the moderator of a panel discussion. You know, to me, whatever will bring people to interest in the book is good to do. 
It doesn't matter whether the limelight falls on me or not. That's really kind of irrelevant to me. That's great advice. That reminds me, because many of our listeners are in the Jewish studies world, that Jewish book council circuit, my understanding is they don't say pay their speakers, but you get the chance to present the book. And I guess you're saying you find that worthwhile. Well, it definitely was with Jew versus Jew. I mean, I can't speak for everyone, but, you know, that was one of the places where I came up with this idea of do, you know, one plus one equals three, go with another author. So Ari Goldman, my friend and my longtime colleague, first at the New York Times and now Columbia Journalism School, also had a book out that publishing season called Being Jewish, which even better was also published by Simon & Schuster, which was then my publisher. 
So we went to the Jewish Book Council and said, how about if we go out together? And it definitely helped. bring a bigger audience. And right, we didn't get paid for any of the about 30 appearances we did, but it jolted sales a lot. And downstream, it led to a lot of paying book talks later. And that's what you can't totally calculate is that if you do some of these things pro bono, or in some cases, if you're working for a small nonprofit for a moderate honorarium, you're still hoping that eventually it's going to yield you know, more lucrative speaking engagements later on because it helps spread the word of mouth. Another question we ask is if there is any writing practices or habits that are working for you. 
Well, I think knowing that this is your job and that I don't think scholars need to hear this, but I think some journalists who think about moving into books and a lot of people in MFA nonfiction programs need to hear this. It's not about whether you feel inspired on a given day. you know, the days when you're in the flow and in the zone are magical, you know, and like all writers, I have them from time to time. You look up and it's three hours later, you know, but you can't wait for that. And you actually increase the odds of that happening by having a practice of working every workday, no matter how you feel about it. And I think that's been really important for me. 
I think with my teaching schedule, I can't always set my own writing hours but i think like many writers i know for me the golden hour is the morning that the less clutter is in my brain earlier in the day the better it is for writing so i try to work my writing days so i can have a couple of hours in the morning before anything else starts to open up my way it's really important not to get distracted by what's on the internet or in your email I keep a window open because sometimes I need to check a fact or even in the midst of writing, look at background on something. And I want to have my internet connection up, but I try as much as possible to stay off anything that would distract me, whether it's the news or email or social media. 
And I'm a huge person for making outlines. With Into the Bright Sunshine, the Humphrey book, sometimes my outline would be even longer than the chapter. But I might spend a week putting together a 20,000 word outline for a chapter that in the end would be 15,000 words long. But to me, that frees me up when I'm writing because I already know the structure. I already have all of my primary source material in the outline. I already have my footnotes in the outline. And now I can just concentrate on making the language beautiful. And the other thing I really like, this is ascribed to Hemingway, but that may be an urban legend. But no matter who, whether it's true or apocryphal, The idea of ending one day by writing the first sentence of what you want to write the next day, or if not literally the sentence, leaving a post-it note to myself with just kind of a flow chart of where I'm going next. 
Because the thing that you want to avoid, especially if your writing time is finite, so maybe I have two hours in the morning and I'm teaching class, you know, is that I spend the first hour of that two hours struggling over how to begin. But if I have that sentence written or that post-it, I can come in and sit down and get right to work and in fact often for me my walk to my office which is about a mile mile and a half is part of really beginning to write knowing what i left for myself at the end of the previous day in fact sometimes i'm relieved when i find out i haven't been hit by a car on the way to work because honestly i'm so much in the zone as i'm walking to work that i really forget when i've crossed streets or sometimes even looked at traffic lights 
Luckily, I'm still here to tell the tale. Right. That is great advice. Thank you, Sam. It's been so wonderful to talk with you. I really appreciate your taking the time. Well, I'm so delighted to be with you, Rachel, and to talk to people who are serious about this work is always a real joy. Thanks for listening to Writing It, the podcast about academics and writing. Sponsored by the Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Florida.