 All right, it is 2.03. So why don't we go ahead and get started? Welcome everyone to Making History, a panel discussion about writing and publishing history. This event is part of the San Francisco History Days, which is an annual event that highlights local history and connects the public with independent historians, local organizations, and the wider historical community. History Days has a full slate of fun and informative programs that has been scheduled for this entire weekend. So please check out sfhistorydays.org for more information. Many of the events that happen on Friday and Saturday are recorded and so you can catch up with those events that way. My name is Taryn Edwards, and I am one of the librarians at the Mechanics Institute of San Francisco who is hosting this event in partnership with the San Francisco Writers Conference and the San Francisco Historical Society. For those of you unfamiliar with Mechanics Institute, we are an independent membership organization that houses a wonderful library, a culture, we're also a cultural event center and a world-renowned chess club that is the oldest in the United States. Now, right now due to the shelter in place, all of our activities are virtual, virtually all of them, but I encourage you to consider becoming a member with us. It's only $120 a year, and with that you help support our contribution to the literary and cultural world of the San Francisco Bay Area. So we have a great lineup of professionals in the history biz to talk to you today. Let me introduce them briefly. Their longer bios are on the event website, which I will add to the chat space, and then we'll get started. So first up we have Lee Bruno, who is an author and a journalist with two history books under his belt. He is currently a developmental editor with the Collective Book Studio and Cameron and Company. Then we have Lana Costantini, who is director of education and publishing for the San Francisco Historical Society. She is the editor of the Argonaut, which is that society's award-winning history journal and its newsletter, The Pannerama. Then we have Frances Dinklespiel, who is the author of two best-selling history books and the co-founder and executive editor of Berkeleyside, which is an online news site in Berkeley, California. And then we have Chris Gruner, who has been involved in the publishing industry for most of his adult life. And since 2009, he has been the publisher for Cameron and Company. And then last but not least is Laurie Krill, who is the West Coast Acquisitions Editor for the History Press, which I'm sure you're all familiar with it, but it's a publisher that specializes in local and regional history and really culture from coast to coast. All right, so each panelist will speak for a few minutes about themselves and their publishing experiences and then we'll take questions from the audience. So please post them in the chat space and we will try to answer all of them because I think with this panel that the conversation is really gonna be the exciting part. All right, thank you so much for coming today and let's go ahead and get started. Let me introduce Lee Bruno. Hi, Lee. Hi, Taran. Thanks again for doing this panel and inviting me. And it's interesting, I'm wearing the same shirt that Chris Gruner is, so I guess I'm in line with the publisher that it's one of those hot days. So my background was early 1990s, I went and got a master's degree in journalism. I was actually working in a research laboratory doing bench science before that, but I needed, I just had this compulsion to go and get a master's degree and I got it with a concentration in science journalism and then the ascent of the technology industry was underway and so those jobs paid pretty well. So I found myself sort of following that path or all the way through the dot-com boom and bust and thereafter and it wasn't until after my great, my grandmother died that I came across a really interesting letter that had been sent by my grandfather to his father-in-law, RB Hale and this is a very simple letter and I kind of talk about it in panorama but it really kind of made me scratch my head and ask questions that I, at the time I couldn't ask my grandmother because she was already passed and we hadn't had those kinds of conversations. So I started digging into letters and books that I could find, not as a trained historian, but just trying to get to some of the sources and I found a large amount of great material at the California Historical Society. So dug into letters and speeches and over some sort of a broken period of eight years that wasn't really all working during that time but really was able to come together and create a series of stories. I think there was probably the core was somewhere around 10 to 12 but the first one really out the door was to try to sort of capture what did my great grandfather do as a director of the Pampas Civic Exposition Fair of 1915 at San Francisco's kind of officially first international fair. So that really began, you know, the research and sort of the curiosity and then at the urging of one of the editors that I was working with, you know, she said, I think you have what, I think you have the makings of a book here and I think you should pursue that. Well, that was a long odyssey and so it ended up that I ended up getting in touch with Chris Gruner through a friend that we both know. And so that sort of coincidence of kind of going all the way out to all these different publishers and then coming back into your backdoor to Petaluma was quite a quite, you know, I don't know, it's like it was just, it was just a wonderful sort of experience to be connected with somebody locally. And that began, that became the first book, Panorama, Tales from San Francisco's First World's Fair. That's probably not the sub-headline, but anyway, I feel that one of the things that I think I learned and I continue to kind of like pay attention to is really, you know, follow your curiosity. If you have something interesting, don't give up on it, keep hacking away at it and really try to find the essence of the story. I think it did help for me to have a journalism background into some writing experience, but, you know, not as a trained historian, I need to run things by historians and the other part was taking a couple screenwriting workshops, sort of to understand how to set scenes and try to do narrative journalism. I think, you know, those were some of the tools that I think helped, but I have to take my hat off to the Mechanics Institute for the great librarians and also just opening up and also at the California Historical Society in Vancouver for, you know, all their efforts in opening up a treasure trove of material that I don't think I would have been able to unearth on my own. So that's kind of my overview and intro and I'll switch it back to Taryn. Thank you. Thank you, Lee. All right, let us talk now to Lana. Okay, hi, everyone. It's Lana Constantina here from San Francisco Historical Society. Thank you all for coming and thank you, Taryn, for hosting and for including me in the panel. So I got my start in publishing actually through Creative Writing. I have an MFA in Creative Writing from University of Montana. The problem with that was that when I started looking for writing jobs in Creative Writing, they really weren't there that I could find. So my other love was education and for me, educational publishing was sort of the perfect meeting place of publishing, writing, editing and education. So I was in educational publishing for about 25 years and all kinds of capacities from writer to editor to project manager to business owner to director of product development. So I sort of seen all the sides of this and I guess one of my messages to you who are interested in publishing in the history space is that educational publishing has a lot of opportunity in it. And I'll explain a little bit about what those opportunities are. There are major publishers in the United States like Pearson, McGraw Hill, Hogan Mifflin Harcourt, Discovery Education, Pearson and they create massive social studies programs on a cycle of a new one, every say five to eight years. And when they're embarked on a development cycle, it's usually a two year or three year cycle for a program that would be a K-8 or a K-12 or some subset of that and they need content and they need historians to write that content. And the challenge there is that a lot of people who are professional historians who have the knowledge and the skill don't necessarily write for kids because to write for kids is a whole different thing. They're unforgiving audience and if they're bored, they will let you know. So it's sort of like learning to write with a bit of a twist and getting some more engaging stuff in there so that you can hold the younger audience's attention. So some of those opportunities include either writing articles for a series or oftentimes they'll hire people as content developers and editors for that whole two to three year period as a freelance job. So there are some opportunities there that are, and also you get your name out. You get listed as authors in some of these programs and it can help boost your profile in the world. In addition to social studies programs because cross-curricular content is so big now in education, history, history articles, primary source materials have made their way into all the other curricular areas. English Language Arts. If you read a typical English Language Arts book today, you'll find a lot of history. You'll find science. You'll find all kinds of things that you wouldn't have found 25 or 30 years ago. So that's another opportunity. And then there's the world of children's magazines and I've worked for a number of them too. Some of the ones that are big, now or at least big when I was in educational publishing, cobblestone magazine, cricket magazine, reading rockets, National Geographic Explorer, which is their kids' magazines. So they have kids' magazines in both science and social studies and I've written for both of them and they pay pretty well. And again, they're always looking for content. They've got all these magazines at different grade levels and so that's a place worth looking similar to that. They're websites. Right now we've got a lot of websites, PDS, Time for Kids. I mean, the list really goes on and on and they need content and that's not really written content. It's more, it's the content you find on the web, but they still need somebody to conceptualize it and write the scripts or write the content for it. Who knows what they're talking about. So these are just sort of like little niches that are available for people who wanna write in the history space. And one, what other is adult magazines. I did a quick look before this call on the internet. There seem to be 50 or 60 solid history magazines published today around the country. And one of those is The Argonaut which I've been editing for about 15 years. I think historical journals are great in a lot of ways. One is that you can get published in there if you haven't been published in a lot of other places or maybe you haven't been published at all. A lot of the larger trade book publishers look for people who already have a name, they're already a published writer. But like The Argonaut, it doesn't really matter to us. I mean, we're really looking for original writing and research on aspects of San Francisco history that have been either not explored as much as they should be explored or what's been said is wrong or just, there hasn't been extensive research done. For instance, our last issue of The Argonaut that a really great article in the history of Germans, the German community in San Francisco, very, very scant had been done about that. So it's really great to find somebody who's got a passion in that, who's willing to write for The Argonaut. And then once you've got a couple of articles, you can use those to move forward with larger things. For instance, we had an author, Jim Hass, who used to be on our board, who wrote two articles on the history of Civic Center and two different issues of The Argonaut. They were both long media articles, but with professional editing that we provide and professional design and a very nice published piece, he's able to take those two pieces to publishers and say, look, I've got these and they're great and they've been well received. And he actually, about a year ago, published a book on the history of Civic Center. So there's just a lot of different ways to get into it. And I mean, we'll talk and share later about self-publishing as an option. If what you're doing doesn't necessarily need to go through a traditional publishing process. But, and I guess my main message is there's a lot of different ways to get your work out there in front of people. And a lot of them, everything I've mentioned, they're not super money makers, not like if you wrote a big, big, best selling, but they could be a source of income, especially if you get hooked into a, like a children's magazine, they'll call on you again and again to write as often as they can. So anyway, that is what I have to offer. Thank you. That was wonderful. Let's go through the alphabet. Francis, welcome. Thank you. So I just have to respond, Lana. I love that article on the Germans in San Francisco. I read it by myself when I was eating dinner one night, the whole thing, it's very long. Excellent. Thank you. But, you know, my book about Isaiah's helmet, he was a German Jew and there was a very strong German Jewish community in San Francisco. So it was very interesting to learn about other aspects of that. And I also just have to say, Lee, like I could just go ditto what you said, and that is my own personal story, which is really funny. And another thing about how small San Francisco is, I know you wrote about Hale in Panorama. Well, my relatives also served on the PPIE board. And, you know, so there are always connections when you're doing history and you've learned so much about the place you come from. So my story is that I was a history major in college and when I got out of college, I started to be a newspaper reporter and I was a traditional newspaper reporter. I worked at the Mercury News for a long time and I started to want to try to do some longer pieces at a certain point, especially after I'd started to have children. And I decided I wanted to write personal essays as a way to do that. And I started to do that. And I realized I didn't know much about my own family history. I'm a fifth generation Californian and I knew my great-great-grandfather, Isaiah Hellman, had come and had been involved with Wells Fargo Bank. And I want to learn more. So like Lee, I went down to the California Historical Society and thought I'd just poke around and find a couple of anecdotes that I could read into some personal essays. But the archivist, when I asked to look at some papers of I.W. Hellman said, which box would you like to look at? We have, you know, 40 boxes of his documents. 50,000 pages. And so I didn't know what to say. I said, you know, how about box number one? And he bought it out to me and I opened it. And the first thing I saw was something that was like a report card from Germany in the 1850s. The next thing I saw was something, was like a land contract from Los Angeles in 1860. And the third thing was a letter from a guy named Herman to Isaiah's Hellman talking about he was living in Wilmington, Los Angeles. And it was so boring. And he thanked his brother for sending him a book cause he finally had something to do. And like these were three documents that I had no idea what they meant, but, you know, they immediately caught my attention. And I want to know more. And I found myself going back to the California Historical Society day after day, whenever I could to go through these papers of my great great grandfather. And, you know, the more I read, the more excited I got cause I felt like I had, I had a story in those boxes about a man who'd come to California as sort of a penniless Jew, settled in Los Angeles, moved up to San Francisco, had along the way been involved in about the creation of eight different industries in California. The last one probably he's most famous for for is being president of Wells Fargo Bank. And so I decided I want to write a book about this, but likely, you know, I was a journalist like, you know, the inverted pyramid is my form of writing. So I actually had to teach myself a lot how to write a narrative nonfiction book, a book that had characters that had narrative arc that had tension that had drama, all these kinds of things in order to make somebody really want to read a book. And it took me about 10 years from the idea to the publication of the book. I did have children in between. I had been working at the Mercury News. I eventually left that job. And my first book was called Towers of Gold about Isaiah's Helman and the creation of California and the role that Jews played in the creation of California, which was a very under discussed issue because when people think about the Jewish settlement in the United States, they often think about the factories in New York City and people living in tenement houses and stuff. But what happened in California was very different. From the beginning, Jews were embraced and accepted in California. They were actually considered white being in California, whereas in Germany and Central Europe, they were considered other. And so after that book came out, when you write a book, there are always certain things that remain in your mind. And one of the things that I found out about was that Isaiah's Helman in 1901 had purchased a big interest in something called the California Wine Association, which was a monopoly that controlled about 80% of the wine production and distribution in California for many years. And I had never heard of that. And I was really intrigued by that. And then one day, so Isaiah's Helman was also involved in making of wine. He bought a rancho in Cucamonga in the 1870s and he made wine from there. And one day there was a big warehouse fire in Vallejo that destroyed four and a half million bottles of wine. And some of the wine that was destroyed had been made by my great-great-grandfather and my cousin had put it there or someone had put it there for her as a storage place. And when I discovered that there was this wine arson and it had destroyed this wine by a W. Helman, I remembered the California Wine Association. I thought, this is my opportunity to write a sort of a story that has some crime in it and has a lot of California history and I can talk about the California Wine Association. So that led to my next book, Tangled Vines. And I just wanna say that the thing I love the most probably is the research. There's something called research rapture where you just can't stop researching because there's so much fun things to find. I love going through those documents at the Historical Society. When I was doing Tangled Vines, there's a big murder in there and there was a man in the 1870s who kept a set of journals and he had documented that murder and I went to the Bankcroft Library and I was able to look at the journal he had created with the newspaper articles of the time and his hand drawn maps and all that kind of thing. And I just was like shivering in my seat, thinking I am connected to this past through this document. And that's really what I love about history, writing history is trying to connect today to the past and do it in a way that's interesting and that people want to read about. So that's really my story. So, oh, but I'm still a journalist so I haven't had time to do as much history writing as I'd like. So, thanks. That's wonderful. I remember years ago you must have been working on The Wine Book but I saw you at the California Historical Society in the library and I had just finished reading Isaiah's Hellman but you were deep in rapture and so I didn't want to bother you. All right. Hi, Chris, there you go. Can you, am I here now? I can hear you. All right, hi everybody. Thank you, Taryn for the invitation and nice to hear everybody speaking. You guys seem like the real experts. I just like to publish books and you guys are writing them making beautiful things and telling beautiful stories but just for a brief introduction, my name is Chris Gruner. I run a company here in Petaluma called Cameron and Company. I've worked in publishing my whole career after a brief stint of teaching high school English down in Los Angeles. Quickly lost that bug and had no desire to do that anymore. Figured I'd chase the big cash of book publishing. The big reward there. So I danced around with different publishing companies and distributors for several years, always here in the Bay Area. And then in 2009, my wife and I got the brilliant idea to take over her grandfather's business Cameron and Company which he had started back in the 60s. Her grandfather was Robert Cameron and he published a book in 1964 called The Drinking Man's Diet which was sort of on a whim and turned him into a book publisher basically overnight. Once Herb Cain wrote about it and sort of put him on the map. And as I say, the rest is history. He sold two and a half million copies published in 13 languages. And then he wrote that way for a few years and then in 1969, he published his very first book of aerial photography about San Francisco, which he did with his friend Herb Cain. And then went on, many of you maybe have seen his books over the years. He did Los Angeles above New York, above Chicago, Paris, London, always partnering usually with some sort of renowned sort of the face of the city. And oftentimes that wasn't historian of some sort. So he worked with Alistair Cook, Pierre Salinger and then of course in the San Francisco books. He worked with Arthur Hoppe after Herb Cain and then kind of fast forward and I'll come back to this but then a couple of years ago, we had the idea of publishing a 50th anniversary edition of Above San Francisco, which I have behind me here if you can't see. And that was with Carl Nolte providing the forward for that book to kind of bring a full circle and tapping into San Francisco sort of at least from the chronicle standpoint their history expert in-house. So anyway, in 2009, when we took it over we moved it up here to Petaluma where we had settled, started raising our children and just kind of decided to go bullish on book publishing which not a lot of people were doing in 2009. There's a lot of talk of the death of Prince and we just naively kind of just decided to give it a go and think what could we do in this 21st century that would be fresh and unique and what works and what doesn't. Obviously we've hit some bumps in the roads and taken a while to figure it out but really what we have honed in on for us at Cameron & Co. Company is this tagline that we use called books that need to be books. And that can go both ways. That could be about books that need to be physical books like books that really don't translate in the digital space because obviously there's a time and a place for digital books. If you're going on a vacation or you need to be mobile but the types of books that we publish tend to be those that are visual and illustrated type projects that really don't translate the same in that digital space but also just books that need to be books in the sense that these are books that canonize a moment in history or they put in the archives forever some point in time that wouldn't otherwise happen if it weren't for a book. And digital feels a lot more ethereal much less permanent obviously whereas a book and I know I'm preaching to the choir here so I won't lament this too much but the book holds a special place in capturing a moment in time like nothing else really can and it's a better technology in many ways than all these high tech companies think they're working on. So anyway, we've been publishing books with Cameron & Co. for 11 plus years now had a great fortune of connecting with Lee and I love how Lee and I met he didn't give the specifics but our mutual friend is this woman, Patty Norman who is a good friend of ours and Patty Norman is the children's book specialist at Copperfield's books in Petaluma and also a part of the swimming club that Lee is a part of in San Francisco. And so I just love how things kind of connect that way. And then so Lee kind of pitched us his book called Panorama about the 1915 exhibition and we also had a good fortune of, you know here in the Bay Area obviously we're rich in history but we also have people who are patrons of the arts who appreciate the arts and preserving history in a way that, you know, maybe wouldn't happen otherwise if it weren't for their support. So Lee and I connected with a wonderful company here in town who are here in San Francisco who just really loves to support the arts and support San Francisco specifically and Northern California and generally with history books and so we've done several projects with them as well and that's been wonderful. So with Lee we've done Panorama, we did Misfits Merchants in Mayhem, which is another beautiful book. I know that Show and Tell isn't usually great on Zoom calls but this is another fun project we did with Lee. And then just the beauty of publishing and networking, you know, Lee connected us with a gentleman, Jim Shine who with his wife run Shine and Shine. I think it is a map store in North Beach. Although I think I just heard from Jim that they're moving things up to Sonoma just recently with all that's going on. But we did a book which I don't have here at home and I feel bummed about that. It's a beautiful book called Gold Mountain, Big City, all about Chinatown based on this map that Jim has by this wonderful, not very well known San Francisco cartographer back in the 40s called Karen Caskart. Oh my gosh, I mean, Karen's got a book there. That's great. It's really a beautiful book. And it was fun just because this map tells so many stories in and of itself. And so we just use that map as a jumping off point to tell the whole story of the book. So you know, there's so many fun, interesting, fascinating, sad, dark, heavy, as you can imagine stories that come out from this map. But it's beautiful. And the book includes a foldout map of course as well. So as you can see from some of these books too, we're big on production quality. We love, you know, bells and whistles. We love using foil, the foldout map in the book, you know, a special paper that's probably 20 cents too expensive, but we just do it anyway. And, you know, just sort of focusing in on that has been our joy. And then just recently, so we focus on visual books. We do have an imprint called Roundtree Press, which is a little bit more of a hybrid publishing model. And we have done some text-driven books there. We did a book about the Stanford Men's Basketball Program, which was a history book in a way, of course. And then we did a book with Lowell Cohn, who's a sports writer, all of the texts. But anyway, just earlier this month, and we're sort of fresh on the heels of it. So we actually just got acquired by a company called Abrams Books in New York. It's a wonderful art book publisher who's been our distributor for the last few years. And we're really excited about that because they see in us this West Coast presence. They love that we're in the San Francisco area. They're investing in us. And I bring that up because I think that one of the things they like about what we do is that we're, you know, with feet on the ground and we are privy to what's going on regionally here. Again, it's such a rich region that we're living in. And there is a future for regional publishing, which, you know, in a way is shocking. I think in this, you know, 15 years after people started predicting the death of the printed book, now people, you know, there's companies that are getting venture capital to support their micro regional book publishing program, which just seems like shocking to me, but also very exciting and encouraging. So, you know, one of the things that Abrams saw in us and bringing us on was the fact that we publish in this space that we're aware of what's going on, you know, in areas that they're not because they're in New York. And so we're excited about the future of it, excited about publishing more books in this space, a ton more books with Lee, hopefully. And yeah, we're in a good spot right now. We're very excited. So thanks again for having us. You're very welcome, Chris. And I just, both Lee's books are very, very beautiful, but I think you really topped it with Jimmy Shine's book. And I just wanna tell the audience that I hosted Jim Shine on Friday for a talk about his beautiful book, and I'll include the, oh gosh, I haven't actually processed the video yet. The video will be available on our YouTube channel, the Mechanics Institute's YouTube channel, shortly. It's been a busy, busy history days for me. All right, so thank you, Chris. And now I am thrilled to introduce Laurie Krill. Take it away, Laurie. Hello, everyone. Thank you for having me. I am the West Coast Acquisitions Editor for the History Press, which is under the umbrella of Arcadia Press, which you've probably seen everywhere. They're the CP atoned picture books with the history attached to them. The history presses are more text-based imprints. So we do a lot of longer books with, yes, there they are. And we have about 15,000 books in our back catalog. So we've done quite a few. Those are mostly those CP atoned-covered images of America books. So the History Press was acquired by Arcadia in 2014, and we do more of the narrative-based side. So we look for books that are more text than pictures, but we still use illustrations and photographs, usually historical photographs, as an important part of the narrative in our books. And we're really focused on the regional and local aspect of all of our books. We do have a lot of different, what we consider a series, that each city kind of fills its own niche in that series. They're all very different from each other, but they're all about the same topic. Like we have a series, American Palate series, that all covers like regional foods or restaurants in a particular area. So we do try to find regional themes that work nationwide to kind of tie all of our books together. So I know that a lot of times, when people come to me, they have a really great idea that is a very big idea that we have to kind of make sure that we're focusing on their community. And I know that sometimes that can be a little difficult to kind of find the sweet spot between just talking about a family history and then talking about a national era that happened. So we're kind of the publisher that looks for the book in between those two kind of books, those kinds of history books that more of a community narrative and community memories that bring other people from your town into the book and help them understand more about their own local history. I have been working for the History Press for about four years now. I'm a graduate of the Denver Publishing Institute and before that I was a police officer. So my personal preferences tend to lean towards true crime, but there's tons and tons of really interesting other series that I really enjoy. I just really love working on those ones in particular. I've gotten to work with a couple of judges in California who had some really great old cases that they wanted to write about and that's always a lot of fun for me. But I love learning about where I grew up in California and then all the areas around there even though I'm out here in Charleston now. But I know you guys have a lot of questions and I think probably you don't need to listen to me talk as much as maybe have some of these questions answered and talk to some of these great panelists. So thanks for having me and now I'm happy to answer any questions anybody has. Well, thank you so much, Laurie. I have to say I am fascinated by your background. Do you ever employ your police training when working with authors? No, luckily. Luckily, there's no need for that now that I'm working in editing. I was an English major and I was only a police officer for five years. So it's just kind of more of a diverse kind of background that I bring into it. It's fun to work with ex-cops or retire cops or retired judges because I can usually tell when they're pulling material directly from a police report because the language is very, very specific and I always recognize it. And I'm like, can we make this a little less police report and a little bit more conversational? That would be great. But other than that, no, everybody is very well behaved. Well, I'm glad to hear that. I know us authors can get a little excited sometimes. All right, well, why don't we go ahead and take some questions? There are a lot of goodies here. Let's see here. Nicole asks, and if you just want to unmute yourselves then just go ahead and jump in. We'll answer questions as, you can each answer a question if it appeals to you. So Nicole asks, says she's an aspiring long format writer with lots of articles under her belt. And she's curious about where she should start if she's thinking of a bigger, I assume she's thinking of a bigger project like a book. Well, I guess I'll start. I mean, you have to have a topic or a subject. You have to decide if you have something that is sufficiently interesting that it could actually be a book topic. And you also have to figure out if you have something that is sufficiently interesting that you don't mind spending five to 10 years on. That's very, very important because writing a book takes much longer than you ever expect. It's much, much harder than you ever dreamed. And so you have to make sure that you really have a topic that you're interested in. You also ask this question down below about how do you take large subjects that might be dry and make them approachable? I think I would give some information about that that is also relevant to your first question. I think learning to be a long form writer is definitely a process. And when you start to write a book, you don't always know what you're writing about. And you might have a lot of different themes or historical moments or different characters. And you're trying to figure out how to put something together in a coherent way. And I think a very helpful thing to do when you're starting a project is to write every scene you can think of. If you're writing about some architectural history, you could write about the origins of a building. Who, what was the personal life of the architect? Who was the person who hired that person to build that building? What was the economy like? What was the society like? And you just start writing things down that are specific and that are rich in detail. And sort of by doing that, you start to better understand what possible book or larger project you have. And writing is so process driven and you have to let the process work. You can't just go in saying, I wanna write a book and expect that it's gonna happen right away. It does take a lot of learning. Yeah, and just to comment on that, you really have to make sure that you have the primary sources to actually make a story. You know, if you only have a handful of letters, you're gonna have to do a lot of digging in order to have enough skeleton there in order to put your scenes on. Well, thank you for that. Anyone else have any further comments on? Yeah, I just wanted to say that we work with people who actually are often a community like newspaper journalists, local paper, who actually have written hundreds of articles and usually about their local history. And we structure our books in a way that a lot of our books are about one subject, but a lot of our books are actually kind of like a compilation of articles. Every chapter is about a building, for example, and then the next chapter would be about a different building in your area. So you can take your library of past articles and come to us with a very strong idea of what your favorite thing to write about is. And we can often figure out kind of how that might fit our particular press because we do so many different topics within the regional history framework. Then a lot of times we're able to come up with something that can be a lot of fun for the readers that might not be about one person or one building, but it might be about a collection of people or buildings that all have a very similar background or same era, something along those lines. So it's not necessarily a huge jump from being an article writer to being a long form writer on our end. But you still have to have kind of a concrete proposal, idea, ready to publish your. Yeah, it's always really helpful. I give feedback on tables of content sometimes. So if you think that you are close, I've often brainstorm with authors to kind of figure out exactly where they might fit on our list. And that's just something that I do with a lot of my current authors also. I work with a lot of debut authors as well. So it's not necessarily a roadblock to me if you haven't done a long book yet. Or to any of my colleagues, we work with a lot of different people who this might be their first book, even if they have writing experience. Here's a question that I'm sure you all have a little bit to comment on. Do you recommend going through an agent with your proposal or do you think it's better with history to just propose directly to the publisher? I can sort of jump in on this one since it's so interesting when Chris was talking about regional publishing because at the time, so when I was putting together my book proposal for my book about the Pampas of the Guest position, it was really pegged to the 100th anniversary, which is coming up in 2015. So I knew I kind of had to rush. And as it turned out, there were already some books that had already been started or had been sort of committed, the publisher had been committed to. Heyday had already made their commitment to it. So this point about agents is, I think it's better to really learn how to write a very short proposal and very much get at the essence of what the book is about. Like what Francis said already, I think it's just that it has to be compelling and it has to really feel like there's something, there's layers to it. It isn't just a single magazine article, it's something that has more complexity and layers. I mean, this is something Taryn can talk about. She's been researching a particular Mechanics Institute founder for years and it just, she keeps turning up more and more interesting things. I think making sure that you have, can put together a chapter or 2,000 word essay that just really gets people excited to say, I want more. I think that's really where to focus. And if that piece of writing is good, a publisher is going to find, is going to want to engage because it's the writing, it's the subject matter, it's the way that you're coming at it. Those are the things that will put you apart from others. I'm not saying that isn't good to get an agent but I think so many people worry. The funnel for the major publishers is really, really skinny and you're competing against a lot of other people for the agents as well. If you have an agent that you know or you can work with and they will actually review your material and tell you where it is or if you have people that are great readers that will go after your material and not be frank and being honest, not brutal and really help you kind of get that material into really good shape. So I really highly recommend working with an editor. I worked with Laura Frazier who helped me with just getting some of my essays off the ground and I think editors are really helpful in that way because they allow you to, they just give you a different perspective and they examine it as a really, really good reader with but they give you the instructions to kind of say, okay, this is how you have to set this up because you're mixing this with this and it's just not working. So anyway, those are just a couple of points I think might be helpful. I'll speak to this really briefly. I agree with what you just said Lee. It really depends where you're seeking to publish. If you're seeking to publish with one of the big five publishers in New York City, you have to have an agent and it's daunting to get an agent but we are blessed in the Bay Area to have so many excellent writing conferences and places like the Mechanics Institute that have writing conferences where agents come and they wanna meet writers. I mean, one of the things about agents is they need clients. So I would partake of San Francisco Writers Conference has like a meet and greet. I know women in publishing does. I myself met my agent. I went to the community of writers at Squaw Valley and I met him up there and getting an agent can also be like building a relationship. It doesn't necessarily happen immediately but I think the best way to get an agent and the best way to get published is exactly what Lee says. You have to produce some compelling writing and working with someone like Laura who's written a couple of amazing books herself or you have a writing group. I personally have a writing group. We've been together for 15 years. Like I really trust what they say. You need to surround yourself with people who give you good feedback to make your writing the best it can be before you go and try to sort of sell your work to agent or publisher. You gave some really great references. I'm just gonna put the Women's National Book Association link to the San Francisco chapter in the chat space because they host meet and greets all the time and the San Francisco Writers Conference does as well and Mechanics Institute hosts all kinds of events with agents, with editors. So at least you can get some names. So I'm gonna put all that in the chat. Did anyone else have any comments about agents, editors? One thing I'm curious about is, let's say, do you consult an editor before you finish your book proposal? Do you send that draft proposal to an editor or do you just go for it, send it to a publisher and then work with an editor after that? I'll take that one. I work with authors who do both. We actually have our own proposal form. So when an author sends me a proposal that's already finished, it's very easy for me to see how they could slot that into what kind of information we need to get the book approved. So that's always really, really helpful if you have a very strong idea of what you're looking for. I really encourage authors to have, as was mentioned, a writing group or some kind of person that they can work with while they're writing. We do a lot of books per year, the history press does. So we're not able to give a lot of really super one-on-one personal attention, even though we would love to. It's just not something that we have the time for. So it's always good to have a secondary person as your eyes on that. We rarely work with authors who have agents. In our press, it's just kind of a smaller press. So we just don't end up with a lot of those agented authors, but I have in the past worked with agents as well. It's not required for us. So most of the people that we work with don't have one. That's great advice there. And that's heartening too, because it's kind of stressful to consider. Not only do you have to get yourself all gussied up to meet an agent, but then you also have to, you have to woo the publisher as well. And I know that's the agent's job, but it's all pressure for the author. Okay, let's see. Let's ask another question from the audience. CJ Verberg asks, are any of you involved with historical fiction or specifically historical mysteries? Is that part of your purview? Not mine really. No, we don't do any historical fiction or historical mysteries. Really, we're very nonfiction true crime in that genre, if you're looking at that. Now, Lanna, here's a question for you. How, if one has an idea for an article, do you require a proposal of some sort or are you a little more free form or tell me about the acquisition process for the Argonaut? That's really the San Francisco Bay Area's, if you're an aspiring author, I'd say try to write an article for the Argonaut because it's easy and fun. So we do want a written proposal. It doesn't have to be a really elaborate proposal, but it has to be enough to give us a good sense of what you wanna cover and that you have the background that is needed to cover it. It's also helpful to have a little bit of text, even if you do an introduction and a few hundred words, just to give a sense of the writing. So put that together in the process is there's a committee that reviews proposals that come in and that committee is me and Charles Frockia who's the publisher of the Argonaut and Lori Angareti who is an editor. Basically we will take a look and the criteria again is really, it's gotta be San Francisco focused and we like articles that are approach topics that haven't been overdone by so many people that everybody will know. So it's really the notes and the crannies. So I would say the quick answer is yes, a proposal and a sample and that's all what we would need. Great and touching on that also Chris, can you describe the book idea, the concept that really lights your fire because the materials that you've produced with Lee's two books and Jimmy Shine's book, those are just the ones I have on my shelf but it looks like you really go for books that have potential for beauty. Yeah, I think for us again with Cameron and company specifically, it's visuals like a story, obviously it needs to be a great story but our books tend to be driven by the visuals. So if it's a history book, the countless hours I know that Lee and our team put into scouring the archives of Mechanics Institute libraries throughout the Bay Area. If you have that supporting work and also looking into what the costs are for those assets, sometimes there's some hefty licensing fees or just scanning fees, which add up if you've got 150 photographs that you're scanning. But really, I don't have a magic formula by any means. Obviously doing your homework when it comes to what we call comp titles, so comparable books where you can really convince the publisher and say, hey, this book did well and I think my book sort of falls in that same category. Obviously not, it doesn't have to be a perfect comp because then you probably shouldn't do it if it's the exact same book but something that had success where we can look up the numbers and then get some feedback from our sales team and say, hey, this book sold quite well and we think this book will do similarly. And then it goes without saying it's sort of frustrating, I know, but anytime you can get some kind of big name blurb or endorsement or forward or preface, that always helps. It gets a foot in the door at places that helps book buyers at our local bookstores, raises their eyes like, oh, this is a debut author but they have somebody of notability or notoriety endorsing the book, that certainly helps. So yeah, there's no, obviously not a perfect thing, we're small. And so sometimes it just has to catch my eye or catch somebody on our eye. And I will say just on the agent thing, we work more and more with agents but obviously it's almost as hard to get an agent these days as it is to get a publisher. And so I think from a business standpoint, agents can be extremely helpful in letting the writer be the writer and let the agent handle sort of the business side of it so that you don't get bogged down in that. So we personally, a camera company, almost, you think it's the other way around but we tend to prefer working with agents just so we don't have to educate an author every time a clause comes up in a contract that they're nervous about or things like that. So agents certainly, good ones really are worth their 15% but again, it's hard to get there. So maybe you get published and that will help. My first job in publishing, I was an intern for Amy Renert who's a wonderful agent here in the Bay Area. She's based in Tiberon. I was in charge of the slush pile. I was killing everyone's dreams left and right by sending rejection letters. So sorry if that was one of you. But it's a lot and she was getting gods and gods among them. And I imagine she's getting probably 10 times more now just because it's mostly all digital. And so it's so much easier for people to email manuscripts than it was to mail them with a self-addressed stamped envelope. So anyway, that's just my two cents. So sorry, I don't have a perfect response for what we're looking for but those are hopefully a couple of tips that might help. Well, sometimes you don't know what the secret sauce is gonna be until you taste it, right? That's right, yeah. I do have a question about your philosophy regarding comp titles because as a librarian I get a lot of questions from writers who are struggling over this aspect of their proposal. Sometimes you hear that the comp title should be books that are similar but different, like where your book would be on the shelf in relation to these other books. But maybe it sounds like you want a little bit more publication data behind the titles that you submit as your comp titles. Yeah, I mean, I think if you can point to two, three, even four books that you feel like are really in that same, it doesn't have to be, again, it doesn't have to be the same genre necessarily, but something hitting on a similar story, subject matter or maybe a geography, a region, you know, right now we're looking into doing a Warriors book about the Golden State Warriors and there isn't a perfect comp for the book that we're working on, but there are other, obviously Warriors related books, maybe a Steph Curry biography or something where you can show that, man, the same market, the same target market that's going to be interested in your book would most likely also be interested in this book and like, wow, they sold 30,000 copies of that book so that can convince an acquisition team that there is a broad base of people who are interested and that's what's shocking about the regional side of it, which has taken me a little while to wrap my brain around, you know, Bob Cameron who started our company made his business on just regional publishing and you think, oh, you're selling yourself short by just doing a book about San Francisco when you're not gonna sell books outside of San Francisco, but obviously, again, most of you probably know this, but when there's a book about a specific region, then you're automatically, you know, elevated on the radar, you're getting great merchandising at bookstores, you're getting faced out, you're getting the attention of the local stores and that can then obviously bleed into, you know, outer geographies at the same time. So yeah, hope that sort of answers your question, maybe not. It does, it just provides a little more anxiety, that's all. Yeah, sorry. That's all right. Hey, Richard has a question for the historians here. Can you offer any tips to researching and publishing eventually about your famous relatives without offending their direct descendants, especially if they are on the wrong side of the law? Obviously, you can't use a pseudonym for them. So yeah, that's always, it's almost like a memoir question. I mean, I think people who are writing memoir are grappling with this all the time and I think it's really a delicate dance. You have to, I think chances are good you could offend your relatives. I think the thing that I would do would be to alert them that you're doing this and this is the point of view you're taking and this is the information you've discovered and you plan to publish it and give them an opportunity to give you some feedback on the work you're doing. You don't want to give them permission to sort of say you can't do the project. But I think if you have material that reveals something unflattering about somebody in your family, you just gotta go with the truth. I mean, if you're writing a nonfiction book you have to go with the truth. You just have to think of a way to delicately involve your family so that they feel heard. You don't have to do what they said but you have to make sure that they feel heard. That would be my advice. I would agree with Francis. It often comes up in even in Argonaut articles that people are talking about their families and somebody was arrested or somebody made a bad business deal or they went broke or they maybe killed someone. I think that's partly the role where the editor comes in because the editor can sort of help you to use language that is truthful but isn't offensive. You can tone it down a little bit. So I think between contacting the descendants and relatives and making sure that they're aware and making sure that you're talking about it in the best possible way, I think that's about all you can do. Well, you can always get legal advice and sometimes that there's no way around that. Paying for an attorney for an hour is a lot cheaper than getting sued, right? Just to chime in a little bit on that. I mean, I didn't encounter that issue when I was going through the letters and material of my great-grandfather but it is kind of interesting, that's a great-grandfather. I had around family members and everybody surviving, to that extent, great license to kind of go and do this. I mean, I wasn't telling people that I was doing this book before I did it. However, once it came out I was just like, there were so many things that people learned from the family that they never knew and they would never know. And so I think exactly what Francis says it's that tapestry of how the truth fits in. It has a way of actually exercising some of those demons. I mean, to a certain extent, my great-grandfather was an anti-progressive in where it put him in a certain camp but there were certain aspects to him. I mean, I didn't even get into all the political aspects of his, how he ended up working through some of these big issues around the fair, the commerce, with some of the powerhouses of the day that were like Hearst and Spreckles. I mean, it's, so there's certain things that you can never get to in historical nonfiction because you're not in the meeting room with where they were and you can get hints from letters and whatnot but I think as you relate to that as the writer, I mean, you are doing a service. I mean, I really do believe that that's an important point of how you undertake this. Cause if you are sort of gun-shy about undertaking that then you should probably think twice but I do think it serves future generations and your family. So that's my idea. Thank you for that. And let's answer, let's ask one last question from Mary. Do people, maybe this is directly to Lana, but do people ever write the whole article or do they, do you prefer that they send a proposal and then you work together to actually finish the article? So sometimes people write the whole article and it's also happened that sometimes an article that's been printed in one journal we want to repurpose in the organata. They'd liked it, maybe expand a little bit on it. So yeah, that happens too. And it's not that that shouldn't happen. I mean, if somebody has a, if they've gone to the trouble to write an entire article and they've got it and they want to pitch it, they should certainly do that. But what I would, one of the word is is somebody had high hopes for getting something in the Argonaut. And instead of running it by the committee, they took all the time to write it and it wasn't really right. So that's the reason for doing the proposal first. But yeah, somebody's got one that's written. Great. Let's heartening. All right, we are bumping up on time but I want to thank Laurie and Chris and Lana. All three of you have made your respective publishers so much more approachable to us aspiring, emerging authors. And Francis and Lee, thank you also because you have such experience under your belt that you can, that I really appreciate you sharing because it puts our, again, emerging authors, our struggles in perspective. Everyone has these struggles. So thank you all for attending and sharing your knowledge with us. I really appreciate it. And the thanks are coming in through the chat space. Of course, you can see it too. Thank you, Taryn, for organizing it all. Awesome, Taryn. Yeah, thank you. Really well done. Thank you, Taryn. One last thing to say, I would just say, and it goes without saying, read, read, read, buy books at your local bookstore so you can see what selling and what book buyers think is going to sell and usually what they face out will sell and so just visit your local bookstore all the time. And read Publishers Weekly, that's what I tell people to do because it's so interesting. Little tidbits and yes, it's all, it's directed towards, it's about the publishing community, but you need to start thinking about that even though you're lost in the rapture of research, you have to always be thinking about what the product is that you're actually working towards. All right, thanks, you all. Hope you stay cool on this hot day and thanks for tuning in, Lori, from Charleston. Thanks for having me. All right, bye, everybody. Bye, boys. All right, bye, bye.