Many years ago, my boss at the newspaper, a man long experienced in the ways of the world, gave me some sound advice: When you’re angry and bashing out one of those long, aggrieved, abusive, sarcastic missives to some fool who’s annoyed you, before you hit Send take a walk outside for ten minutes. Then, upon your return, delete what you’ve typed and write in its place a cool, calm, and collected letter. (An alternative is to just not send the original, angry letter, but then you end up like this guy. The Onion, as always, gets it right.)

Giles Coren, a restaurant critic who writes for the Sunday Times in Britain, could have done with such sage advice. Copyeditors (called subs, or sub-editors, over there) had the temerity to change a single word in his column and Coren went absolutely berserk. His furious, rabid email to the hapless subs was, of course, leaked, and resulted in their replying to him in — yes — a cool, calm, and collected manner. It all adds up to one of the more entertaining exchanges of recent years, a genuine comic classic of the journalistic trade. (I still refuse to count hackery as a “profession.”)

I can see both sides’ point of view on this one, having been both a writer and an editor. Certainly, writers have to fight to keep certain favored phrases and words from the editorial chopping-block; generally, if I write something then that’s what I intended to say, so please don’t start fiddling with it. In one of my books, I referred to a particular eighteenth-century comedy as a “frothy farce.” I’ve never understood why, but my editor hated the phrase. Hated it, hated it, hated it. He deleted it and told me so. On the next pass, I added it back in. He took it out, again telling me what he had done and not listening to my entreaties. So I put it back. He took it out. So I let him think that he had won by not telling him that I had quietly reinserted it into the final draft for the printer. It’s still in there.

On the other hand, everyone’s writing can use a touch of editing. Judging by his email, Coren’s certainly could. When I was editing copy for a newspaper and later a magazine, I would be amazed by how incompetent and sloppy some (very well-known) writers were. Others were simply thoughtless: There was one, a fellow of a Washington, D.C. think-tank who would always send his copy in some weird text-format — despite repeated requests not to. It would then take us a tedious half an hour to reformat it, and that was before we could even begin subbing it. Did we ever receive a “thank you” for all this hard work, from any of these guys we had labored to make sound smart and stylish? No. 

Occasionally, I’d get writers who really knew the business. These were pleasures to work with because they took care with their copy and didn’t leave it to the copyeditors to tidy it up for them. One, for instance, would submit 2,000 words on pension reform or something, I’d read it through, and find a single instance where a word-change might be in order. He’d take a look and say OK and we were done. 

As for me, I don’t know what I would do without the oft-unsung skills of the newspaper’s and publisher’s subs and proofers. They catch grammatical errors, typos, punctuation problems, and the like with amazing proficiency. Stuff you don’t even know about they catch. They even clear up inconsistencies and stylistic infelicities.

In Coren’s case, the copyeditors were wrong to have excised the word, but what I find incredible is that only now is he asking for proofs of the edited copy so that he can approve their corrections and alterations before publication. This implies that what he was doing before was submitting his piece and trusting the subs to not make a hash of it. This is a remarkably foolish thing to do, for journalists and historians alike. If they’re your words, you have a responsibility to make sure they stay yours, even if it means rereading the entire text four or five times line-by-line, word-by-word. (Much to my editor’s annoyance, for instance, I insist on seeing the second passthrough of manuscript drafts so that I can quadruple-check photo captions and other little bits-’n'-pieces.)

Still, this Coren thing is pretty funny. 

Posted by Alexander Rose, www.alexrose.com

A new article by Anita Elberse in the Harvard Business Review tackles the influential theory, advanced by Chris Anderson (the editor of Wired magazine), of the Long Tail. Said tail refers to the idea that these days, owing to the ease and cheapness of circulating obscure or niche-interest media (music and movies, primarily) on the Web, companies ought to rely less on a few big sellers to make their money. Consumers will be moved to purchase many products that mirror their tastes and interests rather than buy a few homogenized hits pushed by the big powerhouses.

Thus, the once-massive “market” is splintering into tiny shards, and if you, the producer of obscure music and movies, put out enough shards and if sufficient numbers of people are interested in those tiny shards, you can achieve significant profits — even if you never have a hit.

The Harvard Business Review, however, takes issue with Anderson, pointing out that in fact the so-called “blockbuster strategy” still holds. One terrifying statistic cited by Elberse notes that of the 3.9 million songs sold online in 2007 (most through Apple iTunes for 99 cents), 3.6 million of them were downloaded fewer than 100 times. A large number of these were purchased just once (presumably by either the artist or his mother).  The dominance of the blockbuster, she argues, is growing only stronger. 

I’m not going to go into too many details here (make sure to buy Anderson’s book — coming out soon in paperback — or visit his blog), but it would be interesting to apply these concepts specifically to the History-Bookwriting Field.

Publishers, who are very big on the blockbuster strategy as a rule, devote the vast majority of their marketing muscle and advertising dollars to a very small number of the tens, dozens, or scores of books they crank out each year. The others, mostly, sink without much trace. Now, some of the lucky few flop big-time while others more than earn out their large advances and publicity budgets. It’s very difficult to predict which books are going to hit and which miss. Indeed, sometimes a no-name, no-advance book unexpectedly takes off and turns into an immensely profitable phenomenon. This once happened to a book about some boy wizard who flies about on broomsticks, but I can’t remember his name. Beatrix Potter? Harry Lime? Something like that. 

Anyway, in the Harvard article, the author points out that “in 2006 just 20% of Grand Central’s [a publisher] titles accounted for roughly 80% of its sales and an even larger share of its profits.” The following year Grand Central published 61 hardcover titles, each of which turned in an average of just under $100,000 in profits. But two of those were “make” books (i.e., the titles pushed to the limits), one of which cost $7 million to market, produce, and acquire but achieved net sales of $12 million, making for a $5 million gross profit, or fifty times the average. 

Personally, I’d be very surprised to find any trade publisher, let alone an academic one, turning an average $100,000 profit on a history list, so I’m not sure this example truly applies to our particular field. Which begs the question, can historians make money from the Long Tail?

The answer is Yes, But Not Very Much, And With Conditions Attached. The Long Tail only comes in useful, as in profitable in terms of money, once you’ve already had a blockbuster, or at least seen relatively significant sales. At that point, the value of your back-properties jump as readers try to find anything else you’ve written. The key thing is to have those back-properties readily available, which is where the Web comes in. In the old days, a publisher would have to reprint, at no little expense, copies of your previous books and ship them to retailers. Nowadays, Amazon keeps large stocks of used and new copies of pretty much anything, so people can get a hold of whatever they want within a day or so. Your collected works no longer disappear forever, which is all to the good — though keep in mind that if readers are buying used books, you don’t see any royalties. Also, this scenario hinges on you having a backlist of previous books. The Web, nevertheless, offers other opportunities to hop aboard the Long Tail.

Most authors have at least several bits-and-pieces of articles scattered on their hard drives. Now, if you’re an A-Lister, you can eventually clean them up, collate them, add an introduction, and flog them off as “Collected Essays,” but for beginners and midlisters, these dessicated pieces remain skeletons that will never get fleshed out or finished.

Well, that used to be the case. It turns out you can resurrect the dead, for Amazon now runs a program called Shorts that allows historians to package their work and sell it. My contribution, so far, to Amazon Shorts was once a 5,000-word sample chapter for a proposed book on the fate of Benedict Arnold after he scarpered to the British side during the War of Independence. I never quite finished the chapter, and never followed up on the book, so Benedict_Arnold.doc lay forlorn for years in a folder buried deep in Alex/Documents/Book Ideas/War of Independence/Traitors/American/. 

About a year after Washington’s Spies came out I thought, hmm, well, maybe a few people would be interested in finding out about Benedict Arnold, so I rejigged the piece, added some new material, rewrote the beginning, and sent it off to the Shorts people. The only cost, to me, has been several hours of my time making sure the copy read OK. Remember, all the real work was done years before, so it’s long been discounted. Amazon hosts the article on its website and makes sure to link my books to it. The Short itself sells for 49 cents, of which I receive about 20 cents. It’s a pretty good deal, but let’s face it, I’m never going to get rich from it. 

On the other hand, if I had 250 of these Shorts up on Amazon, all of which were based on work I’d previously done and had abandoned, I think we’d be talking about a nice income stream here. Let’s say each Short was downloaded an average of five times a month (some, following the blockbuster strategy, would be much higher, some none at all), then that would net me $250. 

That’s better, as they say, than a kick in the head, but then again, how likely is it that I would have 250 potential Shorts lying around in the first place? I would have to start devoting days and weeks to writing new ones, which would suck up time from that spent writing actual books — which bring with them potentially significant advances. I think the problem with the Long Tail, therefore, is that in the history-writing field it’s difficult to make any kind of living from it unless you have either a gigantic built-in backlist or enjoy a blockbuster hit and readers download any and all Shorts you’ve written.

Should, then, historians stay away from the Long Tail and dismiss it as not being worth the candle? Yes, but only if you think of writing in terms of dollars (as most Long Tail analyses seem to do). Historians, however, often trade in a currency worth more than cash: reputation. A more business-y term would be “brand management.”

Much as one historian will regard another as “sound” and of good judgment if he’s read one particularly sensible scholarly article on JSTOR, readers tend to recognize beloved writers’ names and stay loyal to them — even if their new tome is on a subject initially not of much interest to them. Take David McCullough, one of the finest narrative historians around. Now, that guy knows how to write a book (as did Barbara Tuchman). Specialists may disagree with their approaches and conclusions — Tuchman’s Guns of August, let alone her history of the fourteenth century, A Distant Mirror, are way, way out of date — but McCullough could publish a volume consisting entirely of his macaroni pictures and stick figures and it would still go straight to Number One. With a bullet. So long as it had his name on it in BIG LETTERS. (I mean the book, not the bullet.) 

Historians can run a monetary loss on the Long Tail while reaping greater, intangible benefits by getting their names out in the wide world, creating interest in their work, and stimulating sales of their books by letting readers first sample their work in cheap, or even free, snippets. So, when you’re writing your book, always keep an eye open for material you can use for the Long Tail. 

Posted by Alexander Rose, www.alexrose.com

I quite often get asked how one writes a book. Well, I reply, it all depends on what kind of book you want to write. That’s why I can’t speak as to how a novelist writes a novel, for I am not one of their kind. One does read anecdotes, however, of how the Greats did it. Anthony Trollope, if I recall correctly, once wrote half-a-million words in less than a year — in longhand — but that was a freak occurrence. Usually, I guess, he cranked out 365,000 words, simply because he wrote 1,000 words each day before breakfast. Apparently, when he had reached his quota, he put his pen down and just stopped, mid-sentence. Twenty-four hours later, he would spend 15 minutes reading the previous day’s work and pick up where he left off. If you can that, you too can write a book. I don’t know whether it’d be any good, but you’d certainly be writing something.

Me, I’ve always wanted to know whether Trollope just made up his plot as he went along (which might partly explain his books’ prodigious length) or if he had it all worked out in his head before he started. P.G. Wodehouse, perhaps the greatest novelist of the twentieth century (some might think that’s a minority opinion), was of the latter persuasion. He used to tack hundreds of index cards, each containing one beautiful, crafted sentence or paragraph, in precise order on a wall. When the entire book was plotted out, word-by-word, line-by-line, page-by-page, only then would he write it. He invariably turned out gems honed to perfection.

As I said, though, I’m not a novelist. So how does one write a history book? Well, I’m going to explain a few things in a series of postings. What I’m not going to do is give you lots of inspirational advice. I’m going to be a bit more techie than that, mainly because I think the process of writing has changed considerably in the last decade owing to the influx of new technologies. (Note: Many of the apps that I’ll discuss in due course are only for Macs, though others will be PC-based as well. Services available on the Web will inevitably be for both Macs and PCs.) Along the way, I’ll no doubt also bore you to tears with monologues on the art of history-writing. Or maybe I’ll leave that stuff for a separate series.  

Anyway, getting back to the point, in Ye Olde Days, when one wanted to write a history book, one went to the library, looked up a source in the card catalogue, ordered it up from the stacks, went to lunch, came back, and picked up the book from a surly librarian at the desk. Then you pulled a battered pile of ruled, 5″x3″ index-cards out of your bag and scribbled down a note on each one. Sooner or later, when you had a couple of thousand of these, you would shuffle them into some kind of logical order and start writing. As for scholarly articles, you would leaf through the new journals as they came in and if you found an interesting article you would photocopy it, jot the title down, throw it into a folder somewhere, and proceed to forget about it. What you ended up with was a half-dozen plastic boxes crammed with near-illegible index cards and a towering stack of unread photocopies. 

All I know is that we historians were always greenishly envious of novelists. The fiction guys, we thought, could live anywhere they wanted (on a mountain in Vermont, by the pool in a gated community in Orange County, at the North Pole, etc.) and just write their stories with nary a care in the world. They could do this because they didn’t have to check anything; all they had to do was put a bunch of words together and make up stuff. We hard-core non-fiction writers, on the other hand, were forced to live in cramped, diabolically expensive apartments near large university libraries in order to take advantage of the five million books on their shelves. Without access to a major library, we simply could not write. (By the way, I have now been made aware that most novelists do not actually live in idyllic rural retreats sipping martinis and knocking out the odd short story for The New Yorker.)

I’m glad to say that the score has evened somewhat in the last couple of years thanks to the advent of Google Books. I only began using Google Books when I was about two-thirds of the way through American Rifle, but it soon proved a marvelous timesaver and a vital resource. These days, historians aren’t inextricably tied down by the necessity of having to live near a first-rate university.

The service has digitized roughly a million books — for the most part, in the public domain — held by a number of major research institutions (the New York Public Library, my usual hangout, has partnered with Google) and made them available to anyone with a browser, gratis. Anything that’s out of copyright — basically, books published before 1923 — can either be viewed on the screen as they were originally printed or downloaded as a PDF.

The real lifesaver is the ability to search the full text. There were several occasions when, finding a quote in someone else’s book, I would call up the original source, type in a few words from the quote, and see what else was there. Surprisingly often, I would discover either that the quote was slightly wrong, or that it had been taken out of its rightful context by someone decades ago and replicated unquestioningly by subsequent authors, or that there was a far more arresting sentence on the next page. Previously, I would have had to skim every page to find the quote in question and proceed from there. What used to take hours now takes just seconds. 

Now, keep in mind that by no means everything in, say, the Harvard University Library, has been scanned in. This is a project that will require many years’ work before it will come anywhere near replicating the true library experience. That said, I was able to find incredibly obscure eighteenth- and nineteenth-century sources with a few clicks. (You try getting hold at the local bookstore of something like J.R. Bartlett’s Personal Narrative of Explorations and Incidents in Texas, New Mexico, California, Sonora, and Chihuahua, Connected With the United States and Mexican Boundary Commission, During the Years 1850, ’51, ’52, and ’53 (D. Appleton and Co., New York, 2 vols., 1854) or Benjamin Church’s The History of the Eastern Expeditions of 1689, 1690, 1692, 1696, and 1704 Against the Indians and French, originally printed in 1716.) Thanks to Google Books, I was rapidly able to add a host of vivid anecdotes to my own work and cite sources that had been overlooked for more than a century. If that facility can’t help historians write books, then nothing can.

One dilemma did crop up almost immediately: It’s impossible to read a 600-page book online. Quite apart from the lower-back and red-eye problems associated with sitting in an office chair for hours squinting at a monitor, you can’t annotate it or easily skim sections. At the same time, you rarely have to read the entire manuscript; most often, you just need a couple of chapters. What to do? 

I decided that the optimum strategy would be to download the PDF from Google Books and manipulate the file on my computer. The problem is, quite a few of the otherwise serviceable PDF applications (like PDFpen) I tried out tended to choke on such large documents. Crashing was a constant problem. After much experimentation, I settled on Adobe Acrobat Professional, the big brother of the ubiquitous Acrobat Reader. Unfortunately, it’s by far the most expensive app out there for this sort of thing. Then again, it handles massive 600-page PDF documents with aplomb and I’ve never had a problem with it. 

What I do is open up the downloaded PDF in Acrobat and extract — saving as a separate file — the required pages. Then I junk the rest of the PDF. This saves an enormous amount of hard-drive space and cuts down on paper otherwise wasted on printing, while allowing me to more efficiently manage my inexorably growing collection of PDFs. (We’ll be getting on to that subject another time.) Once in Acrobat Professional, it’s simple to add comments, stickies, and notes to the document, as well as search within the text. 

Additionally, since whatever’s on Google Books is long out of copyright and has, moreover, been scanned in at a relatively high quality, you can scour old texts for fabulous illustrations for reproducing in your own book. I found, for instance, an excellent sketch of the famous shooting range at Creedmoor, Long Island, in a journal dating from the mid-1870s. I merely downloaded the entire volume, extracted the page, converted the PDF to an image, and transferred it to iPhoto. Voila!, a previously unseen photo of Creedmoor that cost me almost nothing in time, effort, or dollars . . .

OK, well, that’s my top history-writing tip for today. I’ll be covering a variety of topics in coming posts. If your heart thrills to read about bibliography-management systems; if your pulse skips whenever some nerd talks about multi-sync notetaking applications in polite society; if you weaken at the knees at the thought of database maintenance . . . Then stay tuned!

Disclosure: I have no financial or personal relationship with any product or service I discuss or recommend. It’s possible I’ve previously emailed the developers about a bug or something, but I don’t profit in any way if you purchase an application.