So Are Nonfiction Books Dead or Not?

0:00Welcome to the Kicker. I'm your host, Megan Greenwell. Today, my guest is my very own book agent, Anna Sproul-Latimer. I wanted to have her on to talk about all of these narratives going on about how the nonfiction industry is in the toilet. Nobody's ever going to sell a nonfiction book again. And I really wanted her to kind of cut through all the noise and just tell us what it actually means for journalists. Anna Sproul-Latimer, welcome to the Kicker. Hello, thank you. We should say that you're not just the world's greatest book agent. You're also my book agent, which is part of the reason I wanted to have you on today. But a bigger part of it is you write the world's best newsletter about the publishing industry, which really effectively cuts through all the bullshit about narratives about the publishing industry. And I have learned a lot from it. So really what I want to talk about today is what the world is going on with nonfiction

1:02books, because there's all this talk about sales are up, sales are down, the markets dead, what do we actually have to know? Yeah, okay, you know, it's funny. I was just, you know, ironically talking about an offer, so things sales are still happening with an editor. And I was like, oh, I have to go because I'm going on this podcast to talk about the state of nonfiction. And she's like, you need awful, awful, I was like, no, I would like to put a difference bit on it. But I don't know if anyone with me to discuss his familiar with the sort of stories that are in the media about nonfiction, but there was a spike in nonfiction sales during the pandemic around 2020, 2021. And it was sort of go-go years, books about the first Trump administration were selling really strongly, great events books were selling really strongly. And then in the years since the market has been in practice. So while nonfiction books are still the biggest sector of publishing kind of by far, many, many more nonfiction books, sell them in the United

2:07States every year, sales have been less year up here. So it's seen as a contracting market, especially what we call serious nonfiction. So things like history, science, memoirs, who is certain extent. But at where a self-help and religious titles have done quite well. So books are still selling, but they're not selling in quite the numbers on the full that they have been in the past five years ago. And you do see that reflected in publishers acquiring decisions to the overall finances of serious nonfiction. And who's getting laid off if layoffs are happening at major houses. However, I'm still selling books. I am still selling a lot of books. There are a lot of books that are doing incredibly well. Like even against the prevailing wisdom, the quote unquote, quote unquote, Trump books don't sell. We have a book called like Rijing Change by

3:09a Medi-Taper-Generna-Johnathan slime, which has been the number one book in the United States for, I want to say for five weeks now, it's not more. So the tough thing about book publishing is things are always true until and unless they're not. It's an app-imposed industry and they're in notable exceptions to everything. So the most I can do is talk in friends. So how, like what do we know about what changed? I assume nonfiction sales were up during the pandemic just because people had nothing to do. I think so. And there was also that sort of desire to get away from the churn and the fear of the present moment and into a deeper quieter intellectual vote of thought. Different people will tell you different things about what has changed. I think a lot of people will say that ironically enough podcasts have broad some readers away. I do think that there are some data support that men are listening to a lot of podcasts and I have actually written about this. There was no data to support that men are going away from

4:15nonfiction at a rate that outpaces women. So it's a gender parity and in my left-hand fiction. Some people will say that dad books are dead that people are going away from with the people who are going away for nonfiction are men. There is no data to support that. It makes sense intellectually that podcasts might have something to do with it. AI might have something to do with it. You know people are asking AIBs, deeper existential questions that they used to get from books. But there's no proof of any of this. The really frustrating thing about book publishing is there really not a whole lot of data. There are meetings to be happy to that, in case. But it's also just very much the case that we can't break things down to really granular consumer of it. It's entirely possible that the downturn and nonfiction is attributable to the sort of books that have been on offer during this time. There is no data to prove or disprove this, but it's entirely possible

5:15that just leaders have not been interested in the particular books that have come out. It's really hard to say. Yeah, I think that Wall Street Journal article about like the supposed death of dad books was for people not in the publishing industry seem to be the one that really broke through. That was the one I saw everywhere. And you did a really good newsletter issue about this that we'll link to in the show notes. But the gist was basically like classic dad books that you would give to dad for Father's Day or his birthday or whatever are going away. And those are books about shipwrecks and books about wars and biographies of famous men. But also that Wall Street Journal article, I remember reading it and sort of being like they seem to be wrapping all quote-unquote serious nonfiction in dad books. I was like, oh wait, do I write dad books? That's exciting for me.

6:18So yeah, can you talk a little more about why people think there's a death in dad books, why you don't think there is? Yeah, well, something I like to tell people in really the lead. But whenever you see a tape like that about book publishing, it says far more about the projected anxiety is with the people writing it than objective market reality. Because again, we just don't have that much good gender-based data, consumer data in general, the data that we do get is very laggy and slow to come in. And it's really incomplete unless you happen to have full access to the endhouse metrics of a publishing house. So it's really, it's hard to say that for sure. I think a lot of it is, I really think a lot of it is just psychiatric psychological projection on this. Like I'm struggling to think of really objective data that backs up that idea that it is books for, you know, the male 65 plus reader that are struggling. And John New Bacon's book about the Edmund Fitzgerald has been a

7:23tremendous success this year. Swift and Shipwreck, I've actually told a bunch of clients that are kind of having a moment. There's more than one best-selling shipwreck book. I have a big shipwreck book coming out in 2027. That seems to be one of the only categories really clicking. But again, the data here is just so scattered. It's like, I compared it to looking up at the night sky from time square. You're only going to see a couple of stars and you can make whatever constellation out of a couple of stars that you would like. But I think what people are pointing to is there is a gender disparity in who listens to podcasts. So more men and women listen to podcasts on the whole. What podcast is good and down in the many specifics is peace. And again, there's also the statistic that when men do buy books, which they buy in far fewer numbers on the whole than women, they do tend to buy an overall proportion of nonfiction that is

8:29higher than women. So relative to their entire book by end diet, their nonfiction proportion is higher. But that doesn't really tell us much because women buy so many more books on the whole. I'm trying to remember, there's only one or two categories where it really looks like men bought more books than women in nonfiction. And I think science might have done the only one. So not politics, not current events, not history. Women buy the best of artiabooks. We live in such a data-saturated world. Like, I get more data than I've ever wanted to about it feels like everything in my life. Why is there so little data? It doesn't seem on one level all that hard to track. Here's who buys, buys books. We can track here's who buys everything else. Why is there so little data in this industry? That is a great question. And it's one I feel like I can't answer with any kind of experts. We more people should get involved with an organization called the book industry study group. I am friends with the outgoing president. By an O'Leary,

9:32there is a new president now that their entire reason for existence is to remedy these sort of cludge together in perfect, difficult systems. If I had to guess, again, this is not becoming as if this is a professional in the supply chain. I think it's due to the fact that there are so many different people managing different aspects of the book industry. So printing companies, shipping companies, editors, I don't know, warehousing people. I just don't think there's a whole lot of cohesion and data sharing among those players. You know, we have booksellers that are different from publishers. There's a lot of, there's a depression era practice in what publishing that is true in almost no other industry that retailers are allowed to return on sold stock. So publishers sell to retailers that they don't actually know how much sell through. It's going to result from that until you know, several, we'll be here in a half or two years later

10:39because returns come in from there's initial. But I am again, I am trying to educate myself more on all of this stuff, but my expertise and actually to speak to the problems with publishing, like most people's info publishing is very narrow and very deep as a literary. So most of what I'm doing is trying to create opportunities to the acquisitions level for authors. So I'm developing authors for readers and developing both proposals and trying to sell things. But if I wanted to never learn a single thing about supply chains, I wouldn't have to. I feel like that's a good opportunity to step back because not every listener of this podcast actually knows how the book industry works and what an agent does and what an editor does and when the supply chains come in and all of these things. So can you give us like kind of the basic like spiel about how it all works and how it all fits together? Yeah, sure. So in the United States, if you want to publish a book with a big commercial publisher, so I'm referring to what they call the Big Five, which is Tashette,

11:43HarperCollin, Mcmillan, Paywood Random House, and Simon and Chewster. And then what we call the Tony Indies, so WWNorton Bloomsbury, Gray Wolf, that's here. You have to work with a literary agent. These bigger houses will not look at work that is on agent's head. I'm sure there's some exceptions for that at Norman Bloomsbury and the academic space. But in their commercial trade, they look to literary agents to one really developed projects before submitting them and sort of put our informator on things that they are ready for commercial acquisition considerations. So what kind of gatekeepers in that way? And two, be a neutral third party. So they can focus on the sort of creative and subjective aspects and not so much the business with authors who preserve the sort of integrity and non-offeriness to be publisher or author-relations. Ideally, or we mediated back into a healthy place. So you cannot get a commercial book deal in the United

12:47States without having a literary agent. And I am one of those. My job is to search for promising commercial work, develop it with authors I can help to the full extent of my ability, make it the most commercial possible iteration of what it is, and then match make it with an editor at the major house or independent house, negotiate all of the financial aspects of the deal, make sure that they're getting most favorite nations in terms of royalties and concessions and rights, then sort of do whatever needs to be done to make that a smooth experience for my authors and help them with long-term career planning as well. And for all of that, I and every reputable literary agent take a 15 percent admission. So I don't make money unless my authors make money. There's very narrow exceptions for that, which is if I'm selling foreign rights for an author, which is its own complicated alley. So if we reserve a right to sell those books in translation, I'm taking a 20 percent

13:49admission because we work with a network of literary agents abroad and split that 10 and 10. But in all other cases, I'm taking a 15 percent admission and nothing upfront. And so I suppose I'm kind of like a Virgil in San Tez and Fernos. I've somebody who's been in purkatory for a long time, and that's purkatory of, you know what I mean. Hell. For a long time, no-the-landscape, no-whose-screening-where, and what they did, and what they liked. And yeah, I helped authors navigate that to their long-term benefit, hopefully. And then what are editors doing? Because they're editing books, but they have to sort of synthesize all of this stuff about the market, et cetera. Editors are not generally buying books on how good do I think this book is, or at least not only how good do I think this book is. They really have to take the market into account when they're deciding whether to buy something and at what price.

14:56So can you like sort of explain how all of that works? Yeah, absolutely. Editors really have to serve as sort of an I don't know, an in-house clearing. How they do so many different jobs, but how they acquire books. There is a subjective element to it. They really have to feel in their debt that something is a good commercial process, but how they actually acquire it is buyers something, buy something called a profit and loss statement. So it's almost like a venture capital and representative income, a venture capital firm trying to figure out whether something is a good investment. They have these sheets. They are very closely guarded by every single house. They every publishing house has formulas for determining the cost of production for something, how much they want invested marketing and things like that, and they get to guard their algorithms very jealous. I have never actually seen a real T&L statement from any publisher. However, I did have one editor basically take his house's T&L statement lightly rewrite it to anonymize it and send it to me as an example of what it looks like.

15:59So you plug in how many copies you think you can sell that's based on sales data from books that are for a similar audience and have a sort of similar value proposition. You plug in things like how many pages you think it's going to be, what the production specs are, whether you want to create galley's, you know, advanced mailing, media mailing copies of the books that you send ahead of time as part of promotion. You plug in a bunch of numbers. A lot of it is kind of bullshit and you're making stuff up. You're attaching a quantitative value to a hunch. But you do have to attach quantitative values to things. And then they present that. I'm honestly not sure if a subjective discussion occurs at Edvard before that or after, but they have discussions with all of their co-workers about whether or not their crunches are accurate and whether their co-workers are enthusiastic about a project and then they get their losses signed off and make an offer. What's weird though is the range of what publishing houses think that the same project is worth

17:07is way bigger than with like most goods, right? Like if I have a shirt, maybe one retailer is going to price it at $50 and another is going to price it at $75. But I know from experience having sold two books now, thanks to you, you know, the offers were wildly different, like different universes kind of different. And I'm guessing that speaks to the lack of data, but like how do we end up in a spot where nobody can agree like even the universe of what something is worth? Well, it's again because a lot of those want numbers that people are putting into a profit and loss even are dispulsions. They're kind of drawn from sin air. So my sister works in cosmetics, she works for L'Areal and we have talked many times about the difference between our industry. But she, I mean, I don't, she is not in a role where she's like a choir made up or anything

18:12like that, but when they are thinking about new products, they have granular data on okay, what kind of lipstick are big? What formulas are big? What colors people are buying in what part of the planet, you know, they have very, very specific demographic data. Okay, this is what's working on all of these different sort of cross-channel, so like keywords, like okay, let's say black honey by Clinique is really popping. Is it like that sort of warm burgundy that is, is that like that color having a moment? If so, where? Let's look at the like the New York City area versus the Washington D. Theory and they can make decisions for product development that are based on all of those different. So again, I think that we've called with vertical categories or keywords of data, whereas in book publishing, what that looks like is more, oh, like this is an interesting red lipstick. Another red lipstick sold within the past five years really well in gross total numbers over the

19:17country. Let's just assume this will do similarly, you know, there's none of that like in New York versus in Japan versus or like these shades or formulations. There's none of that sort of fine data breakdown stuff. So what it amounts to is basically people making bimed-based gases. And yeah, I, as a, this is a little dishy, but as a literary agent, I almost never run my auctions as round robins for that reason. So this is next level, for people who are just trying to figure out what a literary agent is. This is sort of getting from level one to level six with nothing in between. But when you have lots of people who are interested in the book, there are two ways to sort of sell it. There's, there's this sort of e-day like auction where you started a floor or like an initial bid and you go up in five thousand dollar increments until people drop out. And then there's something called best fits where you say, give me what you think this is worth.

20:21And I'm gonna knock out everyone but the top two or three bidders and give them a second chance to bid. But if you were not in the top two or three, you're gone. And that's a more chaotic way. And it is who's off publishers a little more, but you tend to see huge differentials in how people are valuing things a lot at the time. So I almost always do it for that. Because I want to smoke out. Who's, who's valuing it on? Right, right. When you're looking for, you know, either going through proposals that have landed in your inbox or looking for people that maybe you want to proactively sign, how does this changing market and lack of data like change how you approach that? Yeah. So I always, I have operated my business in sort of irrational ways and it's worked out for me, which is not a very satisfying answer. But I get spidey senses about things. I always have,

21:23it is one of my few real ingrained talents is that I become obsessed with things about not everything that the general population loves. But when I become obsessed with something, it almost invariably becomes a big cultural thing to one to two years later. So for example, I was obsessed with Chapel Rowne in 2021. I went to a more curine concert in 2011 when there are only like 40 people there. I just, I trust my own taste. And it's again, it's not comprehensive. And I think it can be, I don't know, I'm sure there are things I miss all of the time. But I am looking for more than just a number of things when I look out there. So I, it's kind of not replicable. I will look around and see if somebody is writing something I really like, if something makes me cry, if something really feels like it is changing my worldview in a way that lots of other people would be trying to similarly

22:30inspiring or transformational, I trust my instinct there. So a lot of the time, the proof of that is somewhat in the audience numbers. But I have also signed a lot of people quite early in their careers before they had what I would call a logical platform for getting a book deal. In that case, usually you were still, you were already quite, I don't know, far along in your career. This is not really satisfying it to the question. I am sort of not thinking about editor's decision making process, like that's their problem. I'm thinking about what I want to see in the world, what I think is going to be really interesting to the four years from now, because books take a long time between when I'm thinking about them and when they sell and when they actually come out to the general public, then I'm looking for those sort of like painfully feeling sounds perverse and fun. And you've been doing this for 20-ish years now.

23:40How has the shifting market changed your job over that longer period of time? I would say so. First of all, I do tell people that I've been in this industry for 21 years, and it is technically true, but I am dating it to my first college internship, with those between sophomore and junior year, I'm 41 now, and this is the only job I've done with adult, basically. I would say that all of the truisms that I was introduced to in the first couple of years are just are still true just on acid or on crack or whatever, like just exponential. So I was taught from a gecko, you need to look for people who have a platform, you can make a demonstrable case that these people are going to be able to reach a significant but discrete finite target audience. You need to look for books that have there there, so not just a really

24:41interesting argument, a structure, but enough storytelling and enough depth to justify the book format as opposed to something like a magazine article or series of articles. You need to look for books that really connect with their readers that seem to exist for a social purpose beyond the author's ego or the author's own sort of psychological inner wrestling. And yeah, books have to like it should be a flat yes or a no or an myelotic or some traffic, okay, fantastic. So when considering work it needs to be something I'm really enthusiastic about or else it is probably not worth pursuing. All of that is only is just more true than ever, so the major changes that have occurred since I first started out. There are a lot more houses, I mean it was still post the age of the most rapid consolidation, but for example,

25:44Penguin and Random House were two different companies, Houghton-Mifflyn Parkport, which is now part of Hartford Collins, was its own company. Actually it's a very beginning of my career, Houghton-Mifflyn and Parkport were two different publishers. That was only for the first couple of years, but a lot of workmen was its own company. I was selling to on sublists probably I don't know 16 to 20 imprints at 10 to 12 different publishers, whereas now it's as many imprints but fewer parent companies. And there are fewer editors, especially in the nonfiction space now. So again, things just have to be even more special on both the platform and storytelling and line level writing levels than ever. You just you can't get away with sort of throwing something together and hoping editors see potential and are willing to work with you on doing sort of

26:48building the airplane as it's going down the runway to use a business pool cliche. You have to come with a fully formed airplane or at least like a fully thought out blueprint for one and demonstrable evidence that you could serve the parts. Okay, so yeah, that's a good segue into like what journalists should know, what they should take from this in like a I guess, advicey type of sense. I would say most most of the listeners to this podcast are journalists, most journalists, either you know some number of them probably have a specific book they want to write right now. And the bigger number of them are like I would like to write a book someday, right? Because certainly if you are a writer, you know, it feels like a natural advancement of your career, even if you don't know yet what the book is. So let's talk to those people for a second and like I absolutely I've got stuff ready to go. Okay, good. Yeah, like how and this was very much me when I signed with

27:52you as my agent. I had no idea what kind of book I would ever write and it did take me 10 years to actually publish my first book. So yes, how should those people be thinking about their desire to write a book at some point? Sure, so none of this is personal to you. I mean, I get their elements that overlap with our editorial process, but this is I'm speaking in generalities here of what my journalist clients struggle with the most. So the first thing is the difference between a great new story and a book. A lot of journalists clients think it is enough to just have scoops in a book or one big scoop. It's not and the there's an academic equivalent of this in place any of you listening are academics, which a commercial book is not does not exist to plug holes in human knowledge or even offer an original thesis. And again, if you're a journalist, it does not exist to break news.

28:52In I would say 99.99, 9 continuous percentage of cases. It exists to offer transformational value to a large yet discrete target audience. And it just to do something for your reader. My really will we're way of putting this is it's an active intimacy with its target reader. So you kind of have to be in the book and you have to not just report facts, but tell people how to think about them. Even if the book is not in the first person, there's a lot more of that sort of contextualization work that readers expect. There's an extent to which a good nonfiction book overlaps with the advice and James B. Stewart's follow the story, which is wonderful reading for anyone who does log for journalism or nonfiction. Now, if you're conceiving a book topic, it's using the word about. So it's about private equity. In your case, there's something long with the

29:57pitch that's not interesting. It doesn't show what the reader's transformation is going to be or what our relationship is to what you have to say. Why it's going to be so engaging. So you have to reformulate your pitch and play you figure that out. The other thing I would say is that books especially in the phase where you're working heavily with somebody like me, so you're not under contract yet, you're trying to figure out how to structure your book, what the soul of your book is, what value it produces for what reader. You cannot put that on deadlines. Journalists come to me all the time and say, give me a deadline and I'll do it. I work best on deadlines. And because I'm a people's pleaser, I do it. And it's always laughable how much it does not help. It creates a false sense of urgency. It does not help them do the deep thinking that it's necessary to actually create this sort of thing, which again, is not figuring out your value for

30:58the target audience. It's not a thesis statement exactly, but it is some kind of thing where I compare to a root goldberg machine, right? A really good root goldberg machine does something. So it gets a ball from one side of a warehouse to another, exactly the big picture. And it's really interesting and pleasing for a certain type of person. It also does the little things on the way to get it there. So it's not just one big machine. It's 10 little machines that move the ball for point A to point B in a really interesting way. In distinct ways within each little machine. If you have no idea what a root goldberg machine is, Google OK Doe video, root goldberg machine, and you'll say important. That's how a book needs to function. So not only do you have like the big thesis statement, again, of demonstrable value, or a very specific target audience, you need to be able to articulate how you are going to umpule that argument in, I don't know, 10 to 15 chapters that each have their own arguments that iteratively, iteratively advance or task the thesis that

32:00you've come up with. That is a really, really hard and nonlinear thinking process to go through. It's like solving a root cube. Like if a root cube has just one square that's out of place, anyone who does root cubes all the time knows that means you have to unwind the whole fucking thing to start over. It's just as being that it's one click away, editing a book proposal or coming up with a book structure is similar. And you really, it's like growing mushrooms. Mushrooms pop out of the ground when they pop out of the ground. You can't help them wind up pop out of the ground. And that is crazy making for a lot of people, but it is what it is. It does feel like, and maybe I'm wrong on this, so tell me if this is absolute nonsense. But it does feel like there was a certain moment where a lot of journalists got their first book deal because they wrote X big story. And then all of a sudden editors were just sort of descending on them saying, okay, great, write the definitive book about X big story, whatever it was, something of

33:02national or global importance. That feels to me like it is happening a lot less now, where like the biggest story of your career transitions naturally into writing the book length version of. Does that seem true to you and is that a result of the shifting market? Yeah, I would say so. So a lot of people are still absolutely doing that model. It's tends to be people who are you know major investigative reporters for big national papers, people who are on air talent like major on air talent for networks. People with big platforms, in other words, but there is a certain genre of book that's like the expanded article by the French journalist that we're seeing less and less of. And honestly, a lot of that I think of why we're seeing less and less of that is those books should never have been books. And there

34:04is zero tolerance among readers for being bored now or feeling like they're not really getting something deep and immersive and transformational out of a book. Zero tolerance. There's just too much other stuff you can spend your money to be entertained. So no, the cynic in me thinks that a lot of that dipping market for nonfiction is just one used to be able to get away with boring nonfiction. Add it out nonfiction, nonfiction where there are 10 pages where there's something really like awesome. And then the others 280 are still there. And those books do not build it. Which is, I mean, no journals wants to write anything boring. That said, there used to be, you know, when I was a first and newspaper reporter straight out of college, we would talk about like the dull but important. Right? A lot of like covering the school board meeting, covering city hall,

35:06whatever sort of fit into that category. And it does feel to me like there are potentially a lot of really worthwhile books worthwhile in like editorial sense, right? Like they would be good that are just no longer going to be able to come out because they're not exciting enough. Does that, I mean, does that, that feels like a loss to me. Does that feel like a loss? I do want to say something completely unrelated before we proceed, which is that I am turning B red right now. And I want your listenerships to know it because I forgot I had this podcast and did a micro need-edling appointment six hours ago to stimulate collagen production. So for the uninitiated, you get your whole face numb and then you have like this sort of thrill machine run over your skin. I tried to cover it with makeup, but as I get more into this conversation, it's showing. So enjoy. I'm not mad. I'm not embarrassed. It's just my pink head. Okay. Beyond that, the good news about this decline in

36:14nonfiction era is that there are a lot of really, really high quality non-profit and academic presses that absolutely still do those books that are really important reporting, but maybe quieter or doing a public service that are not going to make a ton of money. And they're really stepping up like beforehand when it's something that was sort of straddling the serious academic and commercial world. I would always submit it to a variety of publishers. And if a big five publisher was interested, my academic presses or my nonprofit presses would just drop out because they were like, come on, you know, I can't pay more than $12,000 for a book. Why would I even go to the trouble? Because it's actually, it is really difficult and time consuming for any editor to make an offer. It is not just they call it people up and say a number. Again, it is a coalition-building process in involves paperwork, making numeric projections. It's a lot to ask. So if you don't think

37:19somebody that eats food, who you sent a submission is going to be able to compete, it's actually a really good and merciful thing to just let them drop out. But now in this era, when more and more of these big five publishers are declining to offer on book team that category, these non-profit presses are actually stretching a little more. They're making an effort and they're paying a little more than they used to get these books. So there's not as much money in doing that important work as they're used to be, but there are still book deals to be had. There are book deals come publishers that would be similar when major prizes, you know, the two presses on the top of my header, Beacon Press, which is owned by the Unitarian Universalist Church, and operates at a Boston and New Press, which is a wonderful nonprofit, left of center, political press. There's also a pay market, a versatile ton of academic presses. MIT Press is doing really exciting work right now, Oxford University for Attyale. So I don't know, those are really good options and then there are,

38:26fewer fellowships than sort of grants than ever, but they're still out there, the writing, which becomes my new America foundation. So I would say that it's not that those books are not important, so they can't be written. It's just more of a nonprofit effort than ever. You mentioned platform, which journalists are always very stressed out about. I get asked a lot, I'd say, by like, you know, local reporters or people writing for smaller niche publications, who are sort of like, you know, I think correctly, are like, I'm as good a journalist as anybody writing for the New York Times magazine, or the New Yorker, or whatever, but I don't have that kind of platform. Will that keep me from ever writing a book? So what do you tell those people? It depends on the book. What I like to tell people about platform is that the word itself is

39:30of misnomer. I personally, when I hear platform, I think of something that sort of perfect built like a parade stage or like the scaffolding that goes up next to a building in New York that you can build in a day that is maybe a little brittle, but it, you know, holds. That's not really what I'm talking about when I talk about platform. What I am talking about is something closer to a mountain. In the sense that it comes up slowly over the course of an entire lifetime. It includes things that you probably don't realize are in there, but it is harder to build on it. It's not impossible to build on a dime. Anyone who is, I'm flanking out on the name of this children's book right now, but there's a famous children's book about a volcano in Mexico that springs up overnight in the middle of some guys' cornfield. And that happens sometimes. Mountains come out of nowhere. There are also, as they're set, classic, subrant, motivated, Englishmen who went up the hill and came down a mountain about a guy who, in listen the entire thing is sitting. I can't remember,

40:35but the whole town, you know, comes, brings rock up to the top of their local hills to bring it over the minimum definition of a mountain. That's possible. Most mountains come up a lot more than that. So your platform is the sum total of your life experience and your professional experience and access. And it is a lot easier to figure out a book that you can retrofit to your existing platform than it is to build a platform for a book. So again, it's not impossible to build a platform for a book. It's just much easier to think about what you can do for the audience you already have. So for example, this book, the Johnny Bacon book on the Edmund Fitzgerald, a major early driver of those sales. Certainly not the only driver in the end with the University of Michigan alumni community. Depending on where you went to college, unfortunately, Megan, I both went to Columbia Barnard. I would not say that this is the most closely

41:38rallied alumni community. It's pretty scattered, especially in the cities. Yeah, oh my god. Anyway, but the University of Michigan, my husband grew up in Flint and went there and is a complete fanatic. As I want to say, those people who went there, just like Ryder guy, they really rallied behind this guy. He's closely affiliated with the community. The book takes place on the great lake. They have him on Michigan alumni podcast. They did events. It's a huge community and another thing that I like to say, which is taken from Derek Thompson's book The Hitmaker. So it's not my own metaphor. It's that popularity spreads much more like Polarova and a virus. So virology is a misnomer. You want to get the proof in a big town well early on. And so alumni communities are a fantastic town well that exposes your book to a lot of people at once. So professional organizations that you're in alumni communities,

42:42even if you had a college acquaintance who now works for Hello Sunshine, if you're writing the sort of book that Hello Sunshine would get behind, that's part of your platform. So you have to think expansively about what that term means. And if you're writing a book that is about something that you were not particularly well known with a lot of people for, and you're not currently on a plan to figure out how to connect with that audience, that is a problem. So it's on you to figure out a way to connect with those audiences. So full publication time, you're not looking at a sales total in the dozen, which would be like a best-paced scenario. You want to spare yourself that pain, I promise, even if it means, I don't know, not going all out to try and get it with deal in any cost at the road. So for folks who don't know, book advances are generally divided into quarters,

43:46which means that even if you've done really well and you've gotten a $100,000 book deal, that's $85,000 because your agent has gotten 15% of it, and it's split into four chunks. So you are not the number of people who can make a living on writing books, even if their books are way more successful than the norm is tiny. And yet, most, you know, many journalists want to make writing books, at least a component of their career in the long term. So how do you advise journalists think about the economics of writing books? Because there are also, if you're trying to do a reporting book, there can be real questions about like, am I going to lose money on this book, right? Like between reporting costs, you have to pay your own fact checker, you have to take the time. And so if you have that $100,000 book deal and you're making $20,000 for each of four years,

44:46how do you tell people to think about that? Well, circling back for a second or like going backwards, advanced payouts vary. For a six-figure deal, they are most often pamphled quarters in the most six figures. For less than that, they are probably going to be two to three payments, for a lot less two, for like 50 to 75,000, probably three. And generally the payments occur when you sign the contract, that's always when something that occurs. When you deliver the manuscript and it's accepted. So when all of the edits are done, the legal read is done, all of anything substantive. That's always another station of the cross payment wise. Usually when the first initial hardcover comes out, there's a payment there. And then if there's going to be more than three payments, there's going to be one year after that or when the paperback comes out, whichever is the sooner. Or if the paperback comes out, I should say. If a book deal that's over like

45:51$400,000 or $500,000 now, you're probably going to have the publisher at least try to divide it into five payments. So there's a fifth payment a year after the paperback or one year for a pub. So it's even more dilute. My first thing that I like to tell people is that publishing success, however you define the term, is like a gut microbiome in the sense that I can point to bacterial colonies that are common across populations. I can tell you what probiotics generally in hemp.health for most people, you know, what diarrhea lettuce generally makes it worse. What I can't tell you is exactly what yours is going to look like in its optimal state because this is a true biological fact. In the aggregate, every one step microbiome is as distinctive as a fingerprint. It is like an end of one. So how it's also the case that how everybody makes a living around and within their books career is an end of one. A lot of my clients teach in addition to

46:52writing books more than one of them has a very wealthy spouse or a partner or just somebody doesn't bring in a just like a consistent income. Many many many of them have day jobs, whether they're in the academy in some way or they just are physicians or something like that. Still more of them have patreon and sub stacks where there's make a lot of money on podcasting and publishing news letters and things like that. Almost everyone has some kind of diverse intents for him. Actually, I want to say everyone to a lot in my client base, which is because I don't have Stephen King on my list, for example. So there's always some other kind of cash coming in. On the other hand, the other thing I like to say is that as a gig job, book publishing is among the better ones, especially related to the law for a freelance market. For example, it is one of the only outlets left that regularly pays more than a dollar a word.

47:57That's nice. And then 90,000 words, so up to your dining and advance of like 100 to 50,000 dollars. That's relative to what you could earn for that number of words in the freelance market place. It's pretty great. It is to my understanding, one of the only market lepreth or adurter list where you can accept payments to come on time, most of the time, from most players, unless you're working with a very small sort of one guy and the filing cabinet style outlet. And there are a lot of those outlets, including some places that are quite prestigious. You're going to get your checks when you expect to get the chest or within a week or two. And in a rare instance for that doesn't happen. There's some kind of incidents that has happened and it's swiftly recognized. Like you don't have to, no one gives anyone the final round here. So it's a pretty sweet gig as did work goes, but it is generally one gig among many for the vast majority of people. And I mean, I don't know. It depends on the standard

49:01of living or the cost of living where you are obviously. But I like to tell people that in order to get to a point where you are making as much as maybe a first year or so, it's just the end of the law firm without benefits. Obviously, this is 1099 work. And net of agency and taxes, which you are taxed on the gross amount you make. So including your agency, you just take the agency as a deduction on your taxes. You really have to get a book, you look like $600 plus $1000. And again, Amor Pysdown in four or five payments, net of taxes and agency is in an area like New York. That's livable if you're single or don't have kids. All right, well, I was going to end there, but that's too bleak a note to end on. So give us some excitement because you still love this work. I still love this work.

50:07For journalists who are like, oh, I don't know, like this seems hard and scary. Like, why should they still be thinking about writing books? Well, I believe that in an era of e-shedification and the sort of crumbling of institutional knowledge, AI could slap everywhere. The traditional print codex book format is more important than ever. And also like deleting things, fascism, it's incredibly important. I do this work not to get all existential, but because I'm acutely aware of it, I'm going to die, that human beings die. And that books are the best sort of time travel, countervailing vector we have available to us against our own mortality. There are way to be remembered past and outside of our own time and place. So the satisfaction that essentially is writing one is incredible. Like, even if you don't sell that many books today,

51:08who's to say someone who's going to pick you up in a library 200 years from now and it like feel like this is quoting the movie history boys at hand, those reaching out through space time to grasp theirs, that's an incredibly profound thing. You know, they are a way to recognize and be recognized and find other people in the dark. It's incredibly satisfying to open and it's a dream come true to open a carton of the finish book. I mean, I'm sure you had an incredible experience opening your heart covers for the first time. I mean, I want to turn the question back on you. Like, why do you write this? All of that. I, yeah, it, there is something, I think I didn't expect this when I went into the process of writing my first book, but the feeling of, yes, having contributed something that is lasting that will always be in the files of the Library of Congress. You know, like,

52:11yeah, journalism is so fleeting, even the best stories, you know, people forget about them in a few weeks or a few months or whatever it is. I've forgotten plenty of the books I've read, but they're still there, right? In a way that especially in the era of all journalism being on the internet, they're there in some sense, but there is a deeper sense in which they kind of vanish. So yeah, I mean, I think everybody should do it at some point. At least all journalists. You can take life and also your book in particular brought everyday heroes into the sunshine, like you gave those people dignity, you gave them, I mean, they gave themselves dignity, but you know, you like really brought institutional power to their door, you highlighted their heroism, you validated them in a really important way. And I think that's like one of the best things you

53:12can do with a human life. Like, what, why else are we here? Again, it all comes down to like, we're all aware we're going to die. So like, what else are you going to do with your, your one, wild, repression life? And if the answer is something different, that's great. You don't have to write about it. Totally. That feels like a good note to end on. And I thank you for doing this. It's such a delight to talk to you. All right, again, about the Canadian base. Wow. The kicker is a production of the Columbia Journalism Review. Amanda Dera is our producer, and I'm your host, Megan Greenwell. You can like and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, and we'll be back with you in two weeks.