 Alright, why don't we go ahead and get started. I want to welcome everyone to writing and revising narrative history with historian Megan Kate Nelson. My name is Taryn Edwards and I am one of the librarians here at the Mechanics Institute of San Francisco. And this event was produced in partnership with the Institute for historical study, which we will talk about in just a moment. For those of you who are unfamiliar with Mechanics Institute, we are an independent membership organization that houses a wonderful library. You can see it right behind me. The oldest design to serve the general public in California. We are also a cultural event center and host activities just like this, many times a week. And we are also a world renowned chess club that is the oldest in the nation. We are in the process of recapturing many of our alive activities at the Institute so we still do quite a bit of virtual things. 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. I should say we were founded in 1854 so we've been doing it a long time. I would like to introduce our speaker. I'd like to introduce Anne Harlow who is president of the Institute for historical study. Thanks for joining us and and for coordinating this. Do you want to say a few words about the Institute. Let's see you are muted and let me see. There we are. Here I am. Thank you, Taryn for co-sponsoring this and hosting it on zoom. And yes, we're the other Institute, the Institute for historical study started about 45 years ago. And many of our members either have written history or are currently writing history. So when I happened to cross Megan's stuff online I thought she'd be an ideal speaker for us. I encourage you to become a member of the Institute if you're writing history and or researching history, even for other purposes than publication. It's only $40 a year. You can find us online at TIHS.org. So thanks for coming today and I'll turn it back over to you, Taryn. Okay, and we'll put those relevant websites in the chat space in just a moment. Okay, so now I would like to introduce our speaker Megan Kate Nelson. She is a historian and writer with by way of Harvard and the University of Iowa. She specializes in the Civil War and the US West and general American culture. She's the author of four books and a wealth of articles for well known periodicals such as New York Times and Smithsonian magazine. She now writes full time but prior to 2014 she taught us history and American studies at Texas Tech University Cal State Fullerton, Harvard and Brown. Thank you Megan for joining us this afternoon and for sharing your knowledge with us. Thank you so much and thanks so much for having me thanks to Anne first for extending the invitation thanks to everyone for coming and to Taryn for hosting us as part of the mechanics Institute and this great series from the Institute for historical study. First, I think I will in addition to sharing my screen. I will give you a very brief history of my own kind of career trajectory I know all of us here have our own different stories and that's the most important thing to remember about this whole gig, whether you're in academia, whether you are out of academia, you've always been writing beyond academia. Everyone has their own story and their own situation, but it might be helpful to know mine so you kind of know where I'm coming from in terms of writing and research and the practice of history so I went to graduate school in American studies at the University of Iowa after teaching for two years at a private high school in the English department so before I was a historian I was an English teacher although really I'm an interdisciplinary scholar. I had been a history and literature major undergrad and, and then American studies of course is a profoundly interdisciplinary field. I graduated in August of 2002, which I can't even believe that that's like 20 years ago now which just totally blows me away that it was that long ago. My first job out was actually an adjunct gig back at Harvard in my own undergraduate department history and literature. I had some fellows or tutors but really adjuncts, contingent faculty, and then was on the job market the whole time ended up as Tara noted at first Texas Tech, and then Cal State Fullerton. The reason for that move, as I think you know all of you will probably have similar experiences is for family reasons. I went as a lawyer, he was somewhat mobile, but our goal was always to end up in the same city together. So, move to Cal State Fullerton and then we decided we needed to come back to Boston and this was going to necessitate my leaping off of the tenure track into really the unknown. And I could do that because I had, you know, a safety net of a partner who was making a salary so there's that to consider, but what that moment did for me which is really interesting. You know because one of the big themes I think in my career is their sort of unexpected moments of opportunity. And so when we decided we needed to move back. I was working on my second book, Ruin Nation so here's here's the kind of trajectory the story in books trembling earth was my dissertation turned into a first book. You know we can talk about that process if you'd like in the Q amp a really. It was not too terrible one for me I dropped one chapter from that project and it was pretty lightly edited before it came to press. I was working on Ruin Nation I've been thinking about it had done a little bit of research on this this project I wanted to do on destruction in the Civil War. But it was really the move back to the East Coast that really prompted me to apply for a bunch of short term fellowships all over the East Coast to go to all kinds of archives that stored important Civil War records and so I did that I ended up doing five or six short term fellowships which was fantastic got to do all the travel and the research for Ruin Nation there so that was that was an interesting opportunity. And I did manage to publish Ruin Nation while I was back adjuncting I was able to go back to Harvard and adjunct for another couple of years, and published Ruin Nation was very happy with it both of those two books were with the Georgia Press and, you know, loved what they did in terms of marketing the book and design and everything and then was on the job market and sort of belatedly realized that publishing two books and going on the market as an adjunct really made me unhirable. No one would hire me as an assistant professor because I had 12 years of teaching experience and two books, and no one would hire me on the tenure track because I was an adjunct. So, it was one of those horrible situations that I realized really later than I should have. I was probably in a little bit of denial. But really then had a choice to make in 2014 whether to go back to an adjunct position for another year or to just make the choice to leave and to start working on this new project about the Civil War in the desert Southwest and I have been thinking about this project for a little while. I thought it might be a trade book but I really didn't know what that meant, because I'd only ever dealt with academic publishing. I knew enough to know that I needed an agent before I could sell a book to a trade press. I also knew that I didn't want to just write the book for nothing to spend five years writing it and then either not be able to sell it or just go with another university press and make no money doing it. And I wanted to, you know, live the life of a working writer even if they weren't going to pay me, you know, tremendous amounts of money at least I wanted to have some sort of financial support from a publisher to do that. And so, I, you know, sort of made a deal with Dan my husband we thought give two years to this. I went off in 2014 did a huge research trip around the Southwest came back wrote a proposal, send it out to agents and I'm, I don't have a slide in the deck on that particular process but if you have questions about it and you want to talk about it and I'm happy to share my experience with that because it's a very. It's a different world I think I had assumed that there would be a lot of overlap between the academic world and the trade publishing world and there's almost no overlap. I had no idea really what I was doing in the beginning. And, you know, to much to the horror of my agent who was like, what are you, what, what are you talking about you have all these articles out there that's not what you should be doing. I don't want to talk about that that process to if you would like but I was lucky to, you know, pitch this project to an agent who understood my vision. I was making the transition into narrative history writing and taking a cue from the fiction books I was reading that use multi perspective narrative. So, even for narrative history books this was a kind of weird structure where I, you know was putting the reader down on the ground with nine different people and interweaving their stories together in chronological order. I had never done this before. I didn't know I thought I could do it but I also didn't have any experience doing it was lucky enough that an editor at Scribner Kathy Belden edits a lot of experimental fiction. She was willing to take a chance on this historian who had the sort of zany idea about how to structure a history book. And I began, you know, writing this book and published it turned it in in 2019 published it in February of 2020 just a couple weeks before the pandemic began and Taryn and I were talking before about you know the zoom and events like this and the pandemic has brought into our lives that really kind of stalled the promotion process for the three cornered war. In those first couple months, you know, if we remember back at all the events got canceled and took a little while for everyone to get back to zoom but zoom has been great because it had it allowed me then to kind of pick back up and share this book with a much broader audience and I think I would have had if everything had just stayed kind of in real life and in person events. So, that book was published in in February 2020 by really the previous may I had pitched saving Yellowstone which tells the story of the 1871 scientific expedition to Yellowstone and the Yellowstone Act which resulted from that expedition which created the first National Park in the world and I knew I wanted to publish that book on the 150th anniversary of the creation of Yellowstone National Park, which was March 1 2022 so that was my first experience writing a full book, researching a book on a deadline. And I did that pretty much during the pandemic about 80% of the research and writing of saving Yellowstone I did kind of from where you see me now, and in my living room. And that's also something that we can talk about during the Q&A if you would like about how everyone's doing with pandemic conditions and doing research and writing and the challenge is there if anyone has any, you know, good tips for getting that done so saving Yellowstone is not quite as intensive in terms of multi perspective as the three cornered war but it continues the narrative history, writing that I have really come to love. So I thought that would be the first thing I would talk about today would be kind of how to shift if you all out there have, you know, master's degrees PhDs you're kind of used to writing in a more academic mode. How do you then kind of switch into a narrative history mode what does that entail. What does a trade history book even look like how do you conceptualize a project like that as opposed to a project that is more academic and style. So, you know, so what I tend to think of as a kind of academic narrative style is an argument driven book that is often thematically structured, although many of them can be both chronologically and thematically structured. Where you gather a ton of evidence from all different kinds of sources. You know, like here are 57 examples like for my purposes and ruin nation here are 57 examples of the ways that soldiers destroyed trees, right and then shaping that into a chapter about the destruction of trees during the civil picking your best examples to prove your truth. Most of the time. It's an introduction five or six chapters a conclusion, all of those chapters begin with a descriptive really richly detailed opening, turn to historiography, and then a kind of well organized structured chapter that is argument driven. So that's, that's really the kind of template in academia for books. And that's the exact template that I wrote trembling earth and ruin nation and. So turning to three cornered war, I really had to kind of create some new muscle memory right because you you learn to write in that mode and you keep writing in that mode so so what are some of the, the ways to really do this how do you think about narrative writing or trade history books a little differently than than academic projects. The first and most important thing and you know, often there's a lot of talk, especially on Twitter and another forums about, you know kind of writing for the public or writing trade history and that you need to write a language that you use you know no jargon, you know, use you know very clear images. Not any like super complex sentences, and I actually don't think that's as as important and I actually don't think that's as much of a big deal like I think a lot of academic writers actually write beautifully and write really compelling books. But it's the structure that makes them really radically different from narrative history and trade history books so if you're thinking about your project and you're thinking is this a trade history book. Most books like this tell a story with a beginning and middle and an end. Most do have a kind of chronological propulsion, although not all of them. I've read some books, you know that came out with Scribner my publisher that are not in fact structured that way so it's possible to do that a little differently but most narrative history writing is chronological it has that kind of energy the kind of beginning, the beginning and the middle, and the end you're telling an overarching story. I, in the beginning, I loved a good flashback, and I wrote, you know much shorter chapters, and this is something I should have included here, you tend to have much shorter chapters and in narrative history writing then in academia so thinking more, you know, 15 to 20 pages instead of 40 to 50 pages. And I just, I loved a good flashback I'd start each chapter at the beginning at a later moment and then you know he like 10 years before blah blah blah and my editor which is like you need to stop doing that. You need to, you need to kind of put the reader in the flow of time and keep the reader there except at a separate moment, maybe a couple of moments where you do a flashback but not all the time and not always at the beginning of a chapter so I tried to get a handle on the flashbacks would be one of my, my pieces of advice there. And, you know, just because you are telling a historical story does not mean that your story does not have arguments. It's just that the argument is not driving the structure of the book. And you're not usually signposting as much right so you're not saying you know, in this chapter I will argue that, or, you know, it is ironic that da da da da da da. The historian so and so has argued that you're really your, your goal in narrative history writing is to immerse readers in the historical moment, as they might be immersed in a novel in that that sort of scene setting and that sort of transportation into the past, and then you have to really interweave the arguments in a subtler way. And this can make it a little harder actually for students to read the book and really understand what it is about because the signposting is sometimes very useful. So, you know all my two most recent books and the one coming up that I'm writing now do have prologues that are a little more explicit about what the point of the book is. I thought I didn't need to write a prologue. But again, my editor said, No, you can't just drop us in to this moment with no warning and no understanding of what's happening like a novel, right this is a history book. People need to understand the context so there are usually prologues or preface, something to kind of give the reader a sense of what is coming who is coming, and what the major arguments are and then you can interweave those a little more subtly kind of throughout the So structure is one thing that's very different. The use of evidence is also very different. You're compiling I find myself still doing this I'm still getting those 57 examples, but I'm using them in a different way. So to create action, not to prove an argument, but to create a scene. So, and that's what I mean in terms of plot sort of who's doing what and when, and then also what people said, and when they set it. So I'm going to give you an example of this hopefully you can read it with the, you need to minimize, you know, my face, you can definitely do that so this is just one example of how I was using a primary source how I might have used it in an academic book and how I actually used it in narrative history format. So the, the top here and usually I wouldn't overload a slide with text like this but this was the only way I could think of to actually demonstrate what what I mean here about using evidence differently so this is the Journal of Captain George Tyler who is in the second he posted at Fort Ellis in Bozeman, Montana, who was the officer in charge of the escort of the Yellowstone expedition under Florida and Hayden in the summer of 1871. So he kept a journal which is great it's logged in at the Yellowstone National Park archives. I was able I wasn't able to look at it myself because of COVID conditions but I was able to hire a graduate student who lives in Montana, who was able to access the archive and take photos of it for me so. So he writes this great this is a moment when the entire expedition has come upon mammoth hot springs, which they called the white mountain, which was the first time that any scientists, any government officials had seen that particular of Yellowstone National Park. So here's George Tyler saying that he you know he wished he had his journal, so that he could actually write down his first impressions in the moment but he had left it with the pack train. And then he gives this assessment you know that he thinks it's going to be the greatest curiosity in the country probably the world. Mr Hayden had turned to him and had said these things to him that he traveled all over the world. He'd been exploring all this time and he had seen a lot of wonderful things but all of them sank in in significance compared with this so if saving Yellowstone had been an academic book I would have taken that piece from George Tyler and kind of mind it to prove a point about the Hayden expedition's responses to mammoth hot springs right. So they looked upon the white mountain with awe. This wonder is destined to be the greatest curiosity in the country George Tyler wrote later in his diary right because we know he didn't have it with him in the moment. You know Hayden believed, you know, that the, all of those he had previously seen sink into and significant so that's how I would have used that quote in a traditionally academic book. The bottom is how I actually used it so this is from the first past edited copy edited PDF of the book. It's changed slightly in its published form. But this is pretty much how it made it into the draft of the manuscript and how it was published so after gazing upon this marvel the leader of the second cavalry escort Captain George Taylor reached into his pocket, groping for his diary so he could record his first impressions he had left it with the pack train however, so all he could do was stare. After a moment hidden turn to Taylor, I've traveled all over the world he told the soldier, I've been exploring 17 years. I thought I had viewed all the great wonders hidden paused, but all sink into in significance, compared with this. So this is how I was using and obviously you see there's a, there's a problem with the spelling that gets this is the first pass so there's some copy editing that needs to be done here with spelling and with some other things but I'm using this quote that sort of set up a scene where these two men are sitting there looking at the white mountain and mammoth hot springs, and they are reacting to it but I'm demo demonstrating that moment to you with this evidence as part of narrative history, instead of proving an argument with it. So, and we can talk about different kinds of strategies that this is one of the ways that you use evidence to create action, either with plot or with dialogue so here I had actually, you know this very nice piece of evidence that Hayden had actually said something to someone else. And so I turned that into dialogue as if you, you know, it were a novel, and you could see people speaking to each other and hear their words, kind of spoken out loud as action, instead of just words on the page as evidence of something else. So another way that narrative history writing is kind of different from academic writing and you really and this is the part that I really really really have loved. Because I'm an environmental historian. I love thinking about places thinking about landscapes thinking about my place in them. I noticed a lot of detail about them. And this is one of the best ways to really embed readers in a historical moment is to give them a sense of place and one of the ways you do that is through all manner of details. Historical details, color, any kind of sensory detail that you can possibly have. What are the sites that people are seeing what are their smells. You know what would these people have encountered in the past you guys have to be careful right and think, well what was actually here in this moment versus what has come later or am I using a source from a different date. And it's leading me to think that this building was in this place and actually it was not at this moment in time. So you need to be pretty rigorous about your research in these details but what they really do is create a vivid sense of the past for your reader and this is the stuff I really really love. I use photographs period photographs and also modern photographs to do this. I use all kinds of maps, including us GS eco region maps which are amazing they have done them for every single state in the United States and you can go in and look at a town level and it will see what kind of ecosystem is in that region what kind of soil it has what trees tend to grow what kinds of, you know, shrubs and grasses, typify that region. So you can kind of then investigate its status at that moment and see if there in fact would have been these kinds of bushes and what color were their, their flowers and if people are if you know from other sources that people are coming by and stopping and picking you can have them interacting with a landscape that is really rich in detail and and what I've given you here on the right hand side of the slide is an overhead photo of three forks Montana and this is from my current research project which is called the westerners. And one of the protagonists in that book is Saka Kawea, who most people know as Saka Julia. And she was taken from her people at three forks at this particular landscape in 1800 and forcibly removed to the Missouri River, where she was married off to a French trader, and four years later met Lewis and Clark as part of the court discovery. And this is where she was with her shoshone band when she was kidnapped and taken into enslavement and so I wanted to start that scene with her and so I needed to know what three forks looked like I had driven by it but I've never been there so and I will go there before the book is published but I wanted to gather as much visual information to see what this place looked like, compared it to the Lewis and Clark journals and got a sense that it was fairly similar the all of the, the riverine tracks are very different, because as we all know water moves through places in different ways and changes the landscape around it, but all of these rock formations were there in situ at this time and so I was able to use this and some eco region details to really place her in this particular landscape at that moment to set up that scene of the kidnapping. So, the, this is the cutting and I have, I did not anticipate I was going to love this part of narrative history writing as much as I do but I have, I have gone down rabbit holes for days at a time trying to figure out using you know city maps. What color Brecca building may have, you know, been at this at a particular moment in time and you know it's not an important argument of detail but it is, it is something that really enables you to convey a vivid sense of the past and this is necessary in narrative history writing. And the other thing that's necessary is biography. People want to read about people. And this was always my my biggest complaint about academic history writing and even when I was writing it myself. You know you had all these great quotes from people but they seemed, you know you'd identify the person who wrote the diary or wrote the letter, but they were always just kind of hanging out there as just a name, right and for me a military rank. I had a sense of them as a real life person, you know, living in 3D in the past with a life with complicated feelings. And unfortunately I think that's academic writing structure kind of leads you into that you are, you know people express ideas as if they're just a kind of brain and a, you know, a hand to write out the letter rather than a full living breathing person who is writing that letter in a particular context. So, all of you know the past two books and the one that I'm writing now are all very rooted in biography in the lives of individuals who are taking action at a certain moment. And these are the kinds of stories that people I think general readers really want. They want to be rooting for someone. They want to be compelled to turn the page to find out what happens to these people. One of the first questions my editor asked me before she bit on the book on three cornered war was, who is the heart of this story. And at the time, I didn't really have an answer for her and I thought that I had blown it. Ultimately, I kind of figured out that the heart of the story was Juanita, who is a Navajo woman who gets embroiled in the Civil War in the Southwest in a really unique way and at a pivotal moment for the Dine, the Navajo people. So, I now have an answer to that question but I always think about that now, right, because the question we usually ask about academic books is what is its argument, and what is its intervention, rather than who is the heart of the story. But in narrative history writing, it's always going to be the who the big ideas matter, and the big developments matter, but it's people who are doing these things, you know, and so we want to know about them. We want to know about the people who were important in the lives of their families and their communities, you know who made change in the world. You know, even the people who didn't, the people who just went and lived their lives, and maybe didn't do anything particularly remarkable, but still their lives tell us something really interesting about the past. So, you know, you write the narrative history and you write the book. I just wanted to talk a little bit about revising because revising is actually my favorite part of the process. I know it's painful for a lot of people, you know, that you write all of these words and then you have to cut or rearrange them, but I actually find it a really interesting and fun challenge to revise. And I also am more much more relaxed about it because I'm like well I already I have the words there. Now I just get to play around with them or maybe you know cut some and add some others and do all kinds of things. So my usual process is that I revise actively while I am writing. I write a chapter. I sit down I write the first section I don't actually write by word count I know a lot of people do, and they find that challenging and very useful. I don't as much I find it a little anxiety producing to say, you know, I have to write these many this number of words today so instead I write by chapter section. So I know when I go into writing the chapter that I want to have a certain pacing that I want, you know, four sections and this is what they they're going to do. And so I write by section, and if I finish that section, then I usually kind of leave the first sentence of the next section for myself for the next day. So I have a place to start. But that next day I come back and I actually start reading the chapter, and I revise and I edit and I usually change some things sometimes I think oh that section is not really working, or I need more information here I add details I may put in a few more footnotes. So that by the end of maybe a four or five section chapter, or four or five scene chapter, I have revised that chapter five times that last section hasn't been revised very much. It usually gets dumped into the draft and then gets gets revised later. But I find that really helpful not only to really immerse myself back into the chapter but kind of reread what I've written, edit as I go and kind of see how the chapter is taking shape from the beginning. Yes, I have written all the chapters usually in a part. I will go ahead and look at it and read it as a whole, and see if it's working as a structure, sometimes an overhaul is necessary sometimes one chapter will have to go and you'll only be able to take a little bit of it and put it somewhere That's happened in both of my projects. Three cornered war the submitted manuscript was 160,000 words, and the published book was about 100,000 words so I cut 60 that like almost a third of the project, or more than a third of the project. And, you know, ultimately, and you know I don't regret any of those cuts. A lot of it was just sort of detail that I loved and wanted to write about that wasn't really essential to the, the telling of the story, but I got to use other pieces of it. You never should delete that entirely just put it in a file, the equivalent of your, your desk drawer, and bring it out again for either promotion time or if you have an idea for a spin off op-ed or feature, something like that. And I also in three cornered war that book has three parts. The first part I overhauled and restructured probably four or five times before we hit on the current structure and it's published form. And that necessary that necessitated because it was chronological and necessitated rewriting the beginning of all the chapters that had been reorganized. One thing to be mindful of with all of this revising is to be very careful about your footnotes and your end notes. I learned that lesson the hard way. I cut a big section, didn't really think about it went back and had some missing footnotes. And, you know, luckily the copy editor caught it and we got things going but I was just like, Oh, no. No problem. So, so be mindful of that and also do all of your cuts create another document for editing so that you have the original document that you can refer to later when things like that may happen when footnotes or end notes get lost. Then there is so there's the kind of after writing restructuring which is the big overhaul but then there's also just kind of cutting when you go through and if you have to lose words sometimes you don't have to lose words and that's great but if you really need to edit down. I go into all of those editing sessions thinking these are not my darlings. I'm not killing my darlings they are words. And if they are not doing any service, then we're going to get rid of them right. Okay, I have very little remorse while editing and I will cut. Sometimes I'll cut entire sections and sometimes I'll just cut words or phrases in order to get the word countdown. And that's a really good discipline to kind of go through and say do I really need you know this particular advert here do I really need this adjective can I restructure the sentence to be more streamlined and lose a couple words in the process. I enjoy the challenge of that too I know it's very perverse and strange. Most people do not enjoy this part of it at all but, but I, I really do because you are, you're taking what you've already created and you're reshaping it, which is a really kind of interesting challenge. And finally, and I think this is the last thing I'll talk about before we open it up into a more general discussion. You know, and I had discussed kind of my talking a little bit about pitching op eds and features, because this is something you may not have as much experience with as writing longer, longer format kind of books. So, you know, a lot of times I get the question, you know, why would you ever do this, why would you write op eds, why would you write features. There's a couple reasons why if you have an anniversary coming up of the event that you're writing about. Or if you have something like Father's Day or Mother's Day you're writing about parenthood things like that. Those are what newspaper magazine editors call having a pin or a peg and they, they'd like to have those sorts of pieces because they they create readership because people are already interested oh this is you know July 4 this coming up oh here's this piece on the July. Often, you can write an op ed, or even a feature in response to current events, different things that that happen like the January 6 insurrection or the flooding in Yellowstone. When that event happened, Smithsonian magazine reached out to me and asked if I'd like to write basically like a 1500 word piece about the flooding and some aspect of it and so we kind of discussed how I might write that what I might write and hit on a topic for that and I just pounded out over the next couple days and they had reached out to me on Tuesday and they published the piece on Thursday so that was a kind of crazy experience and I'll talk about that here in a second about the speed of this kind of writing. If you have a book to promote your publisher would like you to do a lot of the promotion and this is one of the ways that you do it is that you pitch some related op eds or features to newspapers or magazines, and you'll see in the sample pitch here on the right that is what I was doing to promote saving Yellowstone was pitching the New York Times a piece about the debates about the Yellowstone act so this was more of a political part drawn from just one chapter of the book. And so, when you're thinking about things that you're maybe cutting from the project overall these can be really great subjects for op eds that you can use as promotional material for your books publication and you always want to do that a little bit in advance kind of pitch them about a month out and see if they're interested. That gives you some time that gives them some time to consider your pitch and for you to pitch it to a number of different places. Another reason is if you just want to experiment with writing in this forum. This is a very different kind of genre op eds are usually about depending on the outlet from anywhere from 800 words to 1500 words. And those are that's those are two very different kinds of structures for these pieces. And depending on what the outlet is to some someplace like made by history for the Washington Post really likes the the historical sort of pin. So if there is something going on right now as a current event and you have something, you know, really useful to say about the historical context that created this moment. It's pitch right so they really love that kind of thing your times isn't as much interested in in the current event pin. They'll kind of think about and look at other sorts of things, same with Smithsonian magazine. So, you know, these are different kinds of formats. And if you, you know, just are interested in writing in different kinds of ways then op eds and features might be for you. They're not even pitching one. You can use the site submission form. Sometimes these are extremely hard to find and so my advice is always to go instead through a personal contact. If you know someone who is written for the outlet you want to write for. And, you know, I've written for the New York Times and the Atlantic and the Washington Post and Smithsonian magazine and time magazine and I have those contacts if and I'm going to have to post my contact information here at the end so if you would like that contact information just reach out to me and I can get it to you and that's that's always much more useful because it goes directly to them right into their inbox and you're not dealing with some weird submission process. So what do you include in your pitch email, you may have written the piece already. You may have not written the piece you may just have an idea for the piece I've done, I've pitched in both of those scenarios. This piece that I pitched to the New York Times I actually had not written it yet, but I had all the material from the book. So I figured if they took it, I would, you know be able to write it fairly quickly, but I didn't include it in the email. But what you want to include pitches are very short they're usually only like this three very short paragraphs. First paragraph out of the gate is just I'm writing to pitch a piece for you. That argues this, or that does this kind of work. And then the second paragraph kind of gives a little more specificity to that kind of elaborates just a tiny bit on it. So first paragraph on your biography, and then basically you're out sort of either the pieces included below, or, you know, the pieces not included but I'm happy to send it to you. I'm happy to make edits I'm happy to do, you know, do whatever. That's it. That is all you want to send. Don't use an attachment if you have the piece don't use the attachment because they won't open the attachment they're going to want to read as it was described to me and I'm not sure how much this is true now and pandemic times. As it was described to me, the editor will be standing in line waiting for a coffee, and they want to be able to scroll through your piece. They're not going to click on attachment and read it in a PDF format so include any hyperlinks that you think would go with the piece any footnotes if you would that the New York Times has a very, very intensive fact checking department and so I included end notes on this piece so that they could fact check and I would have them because I knew that already about them. If you want to just include all of those different elements you want to give them a chance about 48 hours to consider your pitch if they don't get back to you within that time usually that's a no. Although sometimes I'll kind of circle back if I really really want their attention and then figure it may have just slipped by them. The hardest thing to do in this scenario is to just press send. You just have to kind of close your eyes and do it. And the more you do it the more comfortable you will get with it. Because, you know, there will be rejection so I've been rejected many more times than I have actually published pieces in office and including this one this one got rejected by the New York Times. So you will always want to pitch just one outlet at a time it may feel more efficient to pitch four of them but you never want to do that because what if all four of them say yes. Then what are you going to do, I mean it's a very good problem to have. But one of the things that you're doing here not only is getting a really good publication and getting good writing experience and editing experience in this format, but you're creating a relationship with an editor. And so you don't want to pitch them a piece, have them take it to their, their kind of board of editors and, and, you know, kind of rally for it, and then say oh yeah no sorry, I'm taking it somewhere else. Right. So, this, this moves fast enough that you will have most of the time you will have time to actually pitch it to at least two or three other places and if, if three places say no, it really depends on the piece sometimes I've kept on pitching and sometimes I've just been like, Okay, no one's interested in reading this. I'm just gonna, I would have again put it in a desk drawer, maybe at some other point. I will come back to it but no one wants to read this right now. So, one of the things to get comfortable with is rejection. It will happen fast. Usually it is very polite. Sometimes they just ghost you, and that's just the way it is. The other another thing to get comfortable with is writing quickly. So, you either have to write again write the piece beforehand and I guess I did do it with this one I read it beforehand but others I have actually pitched, and then written the piece while I'm waiting for them to respond. Other times I don't write it at all until they respond. Other times, it's especially if it's breaking news, you're going to need to write really fast. The fastest that I have ever done anything like this was a piece for Washington Post. The day after the January 6 insurrection. I pitched the piece to them at nine in the morning. And by noon, it was ready to post. I pitched it in a slightly longer form than here because I was working out some ideas, and I, and I know them pretty well, but that was, that was definitely the fastest, and they didn't actually end up posting it until the next day at 5am because of everything they had lined up, but they did have it ready to go and so you have to be able to respond when the editor says yes. You have to be able to see it and then you have to be able to respond when the editor gets back to you with the editing, and there will be editing there oftentimes quite heavy editing. And so you have to really think about you know what are you willing what hills are you willing to die on for this piece and they're different for every piece. You will have no control over the headline. And if the headline they give it is wrong, then you can say this headline is wrong or misleading but for the most part they will give it the headline they want to give it. And you have no real control over that at all. But the editing will be heavy often there will be fact checking. And so you need to be prepared. I had to give once photocopies of my own book as evidence. And there are some things that you know as historians we all know, and, and many journalists do not know and so they'll be like well, you know, could you please provide evidence that the Battle of Antietam took place in September 1862 and you're just like, So you just provide you take a picture with your phone of of a textbook that has that date in it and then that's good enough for them but whatever they ask for you need to be ready to give it to them. Whenever they decide to run the piece the fact checking process will happen within about 48 hours of publication and the editing to so it does demand that you are fairly flexible and that you would have the time to dedicate to that kind of process. And sometimes you do and sometimes you don't. And sometimes and this form of writing may not be for you it's not for everyone. There's no, you know, requirement that we go out there and, and write in this format. But I have found it really fun not only from a writing perspective but also in just being able to write for a larger public where there are, you know, 10s of thousands of readers reading this piece you wrote the short piece about this historical moment and, you know, sometimes readers, you know, will write extensive comments in response or write you personal emails about it. But for the most part my engagements with this format have been really, really positive. And really, my final comments here are just that, you know, finding your voice in new genres, whether you're moving from a more academic book format to a trade history format or whether you're experimenting with op-eds or features kind of writing in new kinds of ways. It takes time. It takes some time and it takes some practice. I'm going to kind of get into the groove of this new style of writing necessarily right away if you do. Hooray. Awesome. But for the most part it takes a while to get used to it and to again kind of create that new muscle memory for yourself. But also it's just really fun. It's really fun to be able to kind of turn your mind and your writing talent to this different kind of challenge. So I encourage you all to do it. And I have this contact information up for you. This is my personal Gmail. Feel free to reach out at any time if we don't get to your questions during this session. And then you can always reach me also through my website. www.SyntaxSyntax.com. That also has links to a lot of the op-eds that I have written and other kinds of writing that I've done including blog posts that give advice on agenting, finding an agent, selling a proposal. Yeah, all that good stuff. But I will stop there so that we have some time for questions and any comments that you guys have. All right, great. Well, thank you so much. That was so much material that I'm glad that we recorded the event so we can go back and catch up. The first question I have is from Jim Gasperini. He asks, when your agent told you that writing articles was not what you should be doing, what was she or he suggesting that you do instead? Okay, so the context for this was my agent, Heather Schroeder, a Compass talent, represents very few historians. Mostly she represents journalists, she represents fiction writers and cookbook authors. So, I was her first academic historian. And when I pitched Free Cornered War to her and when we sold it to Scribner, you know, I think we had just discussed the project and it hadn't really occurred to me because the academic tradition is to publish articles out of your project. And I had already published one, two in an edited collections. I had one kind of in production for an edited collection and then I had a journal article that was in production. And all of them were about the Civil War in the Southwest. None of them had had the kind of style of Free Cornered War, but they all had some content. So, so when I got the contract for Three Cornered War, the contract explicitly states that you cannot have any material from the book out there in the world until a couple of months before for promotional purposes. So I was like, oh, oh, and so I called my agent and I said, here's the deal. Before I knew this was going to be a trade book. This is what I did because this is what we do in academia and she, I could hear, I'd never met her before actually in real life at this point, and I could hear her brain like explode on the other. Like she was just like, what? She's like, what do you mean you have articles out there? I was like, look and academia, this is the way you do it, you share your research, like, and she's like, well, she's like, at least did you get the copyright? And I was like, we don't do that either and she was like, and so, and especially when she heard about JSTOR, I thought she was going to lose her mind. Like she was like, okay, you don't hold the copyright on your intellectual property and the people who do on the copyright have just sold it to an aggregator that can infinitely replicate it for money that you don't get. I was like, well, when you put it that way, that sounds really bad, but it's the sharing of knowledge and she was like, they're going to steal your ideas and I was like, that's ridiculous. Like nobody, why would anyone, but she comes from a different world and this is what I mean about like the trade world and the academic world is not, they just do not overlap. So really, when you are working on a book project, when I was working on saving Yellowstone, I published nothing. And I didn't even present on it at conferences. I would talk about it in general, but I didn't publish anything until the promotion process when I published for op-eds and features to promote the book. And so that's the way that the trade industry, publishing industry prefers to do it. Just be mindful that if you are thinking that you have a trade book project and you have pieces out there, either go out and I actually successfully negotiated for those remaining two pieces I negotiated for the copyright, because at least then I had that in hand. But so negotiate for the copyright for all those pieces if you have them out there and you're able to do that. And then, you know, otherwise just kind of make your editor possible editor and agent aware that those pieces are out there floating around. So yeah, it's just not the way it is done in trade publishing. Yeah, which is one of those hard lessons. Yeah. Great. Well, I think we're all frantically taking notes. James Clement has a question that kind of dovetails without last one. In finding an agent what would you say was your top mistake and what advice would you have for a first timer. Okay, yes, because this is always an interesting question because I didn't know how to do any of this. The biggest mistake I made is that I queried five agents at one time. And that some some agents including my own current agent now only told me later she had no idea I was talking to other agents. And she was like, Why are you talking to other agents, and I was like, Well, because I thought that's what you're supposed to do. And some of them will say explicitly on their websites if they're fine with you, like doing multiple queries, and some agents are it just so happened that Heather was not. I was not on board with that, which, you know, I didn't figure out until you know it was too late so I would say what my the usual process that I recommend to people is if you're looking for an agent. Go and look at the acknowledgments in the books that you really admire. History books in your field, people you might know, and see who their agents are if they have an agent, who their agents are, and then contact those people and just ask them how they like their agents, did you know did the agent do a good job representing them would they recommend them. And then if they could have if if you could mention them in your query to the agent so basically when you write a query to an agent what you're doing. And I have some longer blog posts on this and on my website. And that basically you write to them you say this is who I am so and so recommended that I speak to you about my book project which does this. And then that's the big that's the one sentence pitch sort of tells the story of this. You know, as part of the larger, you know, really important moment in the making of America or whatever whatever your big cell is right. Then talk a little bit about the book itself how it's structured the kinds of sources you're using what's new and interesting about it. And then again, one sentence bio, and then, if you would like to see a book proposal, I'd be happy to send them to you, and then So before you send that email you know do your research figure out who who are the agents who are representing the people who you the writers you really admire. And then usually they will have their contact information there they'll tell you if they're accepting new clients or not they'll tell you what kinds of things they tend to to represent. And then go one at a time, make a make that was the big mistake I made, but go one at a time in order of who your preference would be so if you have like, I really want, you know, like David Blitz agent, like that agent seems great. You know, and seems to also be representing a bunch of other historians in the field who are doing work that I admire. So I feel like this agent will get it right and we'll have the right contacts to to really talk to editors of the presses that I would dream of for myself. And, and then, you know, go one by one and and again, you know agents will they will either not get back to you at all and they'll usually say on their website if you don't hear from us in two weeks you're never going to hear from us right. So that's enough. But usually they will get back to you within a matter of days. And so again this moves very fast. So if you know your number one agent is like no I'm sorry I'm not taking any new projects or no this project doesn't seem right for me then you can move on to the next one. So that would be my, my big piece of advice, aside from like how to find an agent who might be a good fit for you. Go do not query simultaneously. And the agents will give you a really good sense that they think that your book, you know, you might think that your book is a trade book. And it might be or it might not, you know, they have a they have a very good read on the market and what they're what they're seeing and what they think that they can sell. And you know I talked to an agent who said, I like this idea but I don't really understand what you're doing with multi perspective and I don't think I could sell it. And I was like, well, then you're not the agent for me. That's fine, you know, and thank you for chatting and have a nice day. So that was the, that was the extent of the conversation on that one so you know you're not going to have a good fit with all of them. And but they, you know, they have a very specific job which is to get you a, you know, the kind of editorial relationship that you want and money in advance. And so they are in your corner you are perfectly aligned with them, which is great. I'm jumping up on time but I did want to ask one question related to craft. Louis asks, or I should say he quotes, reached into his pocket, groping for his diary. Does that quote resonate with you. And then he asks, is this documented or some sort of interpolation or speculation. And that was more speculation. That was more my kind of reading the diary and he's saying I wish I had the diary with me but then I, you know, like kind of realized I left it in the, in the pack train so how, how did he realize that, then I figured he probably went for it, and was like, I left it so I'm just going to sit here and stare right at this at this piece and you know that kind of. The narrative leap is something that happens more often in narrative history. You know, and all of it is, is grounded and all of it is sourced from either a diary or a letter or a battlefield report or, or something like that. You know, I would never just sort of make up a color or, you know, make up a destiny say someone died when I don't know that they died, you know, you always want to be careful about about things like that but I think there are ways that kind of look at a source and think about that moment and really imagine the action that's taking place and then also any kind of emotional resonance right I mean the their words have emotional resonance. And so you can make a pretty good guess as a historian, especially if you're reading the whole source and you get a sense for the person. Also, and you kind of pull these things together into the creation of that scene. Right, and of course, however, whatever you say is going to be relevant to the scene that you've already created so right. Okay, so then let me see what else that we have that is not just a lot of thank yous in the, in the chat space and asks, what about blog posts that might have content that you might use later in a book how do you, how do you get around that. So if it's your if it's your own blog post like if it's on your own website then that's totally fine because you own the copyright to that. That's all yours. Sometimes you know the, the, it depends on how much content there is. If it's just a blog post of 800 to 1000 words like that's not, that's not a lot but if it's a whole if you have published like basically type of thing with a lot of you know analysis or or things that you're going to actually take whole cloth and put it into the book. You're going to want to maybe flag that for your editor, or just kind of, you know, figure that their their main concern is selling books right so their main concern with having that content out there is that if you're already giving away the content for free. There's not going to be any reader by it right so they don't want too much content out there to dissuade readers from buying the book if you have some content out there some of it won't be a big deal. Some of those you know my editor didn't care about the academic pieces because she didn't see that the book was going to. She wasn't concerned about academic readers. She, you know she was she was like well the academic readers will come to your book because you have an established reputation in academic history. What we're trying to get are the general readers right who don't know who you are, but they really love the topic, and they want to read the book. So, you can't just have, you know, all of your research out there and all of your arguments or else, why would, if they can get it on your website then why would they do that. If you've written something for someone else if you've written for a magazine or newspaper or blog post for another website. Often that website will have copyright on that for about a year. That's sometimes you sign contracts for those sometimes you don't but it's sort of embedded in the business that they will keep it for a year so just think about that. Before you maybe write for for someone else and give them a lot of your content, especially you know if you are, if you're writing a book where you have, you know, you found like a trove of documents that no one's ever seen before. If you, you know, that kind of stuff I'd, I'd keep, you know, pretty much under wraps. Because that's the kind of stuff that editors love, you know, they want they're like, oh, this is never before seen documentation of this particular moment like this is this is something that we can use in the book and it and it and it makes for a great story to that you can tell when you're doing promotion for the book, you know on radio or podcast or things like that. And, and then also you know informs the argument of your book. So, I would say, you know, a lot of that is more judgment call on your part but just be aware that trade book contracts explicitly do say like no direct like no actual content from the book itself out of the book publication. Okay, here's another question about craft. Rob says he is working on a narrative history that involves multiple perspectives. And he's asking for some advice on how to communicate the different perspectives that the one. So the book I wanted to recommend to him and sorry for my librarian head coming into being but the book about Henrietta locks. Yes, she's a braided she calls it a braided technique but that's one book that I know of that uses that that outlines several perspectives into one narrative story. But take it away Megan. Yeah, no, I completely agree that the Henry relax book is great. They're a book like the warmth of other sons by is about Wilkerson, which tracks three different people through different great, great migrations, you know and those those people never met. And they weren't really in the same place or same time in many cases, although that their time frames overlapped. I'm very interested there are lots of different ways to do it and sometimes what I was doing for three cornered war I really was taking a lot of inspiration from fiction and multi perspective narrative in fiction. So my, my chapters were very much, I'm putting you here on the ground with John Baylor, this Confederate Texan and you're going to be with him through this certain length of time as he kind of marches toward El Paso and, and you know, forces the Federal Fort to surrender and then creates the Confederate territory of Arizona, you'll be with him for the next 18 pages when he does that. And then, and the chapter is entitled Baylor, right and then the next chapter is is someone else, and then you go and I, I thought about kind of changing my narrative voice slightly as a fiction writer might, but then I was like, I don't know that might come off as a little gimmicky. So I ended up not doing that and just letting most of the, the protagonist in that book had left just immense records in their own voices, and so I was able to use their words again and the, in the kind of way I was showing in the slide deck, using their, their words as dialogue, and they many of them were very vivid speakers and so you're really getting a kind of sense of them in their individual chapters. And then there are chapters in three corner where there are three of them, they're all battle chapters were multiple protagonists come together. And what I would usually do is have them in each within those chapters you would have you would know you were coming from a, from, you know, Alonzo Ickes perspective as a, as a US soldier and then you were getting kick Carson's perspective leading another regiment in that same army and then you were getting, you know, Bill Davidson the Confederate, who was across the battlefield, like facing them, and you, you knew that was happening just because I was usually doing a section break. And then giving you their voices from their own accounts of how that battle went down. So there are, there are different ways to interweave. And most of the time I just do it through section breaks or chapter breaks. And because I haven't had a situation yet where the two protagonists are actually talking directly to one another, although I did I think I had like one or two moments in three cornered war like that but they were rare but they were exciting because I was like oh look here these two people who, who, you know, have these very different lives and suddenly they're together and they're actually having a conversation that's amazing. And so you kind of set the scene for the two of them to be together in that moment. But for the most part, you're either putting them in the same place, or you are kind of giving them the same context if they are living in the same historical moment with kind of larger developments how one, how two different people may have reacted maybe to like, in my context the news of Gettysburg, right. And one did it. One did not. And so you get a sense then that oh these are two people whose lives maybe didn't intersect but they are, they're living in the same moment and responding to the same kinds of things. But there are there are lots of of an increasingly more kind of books like that that take I mean the devil in the white city does that a little bit because you get the intensive kind of point of view from the serial killer. And then you get the views from the architects and then a more general kind of historical view overall of what's going on in the moment. And did you have any other books that you think of when you think of that kind of bringing multiple people into play. Not a fan. I don't, I don't spend enough time reading history books I think. I was going to say that that that was an excellent recommendation devil in the white city. I did read that one. Everyone read that one. Well, I mean, I like it and he does it really well. I have to excuse myself but and it's going to continue to pepper you with questions. And I just wanted to reassure everyone that the, I will send and the link to the video. And that should happen next week. So, thank you Megan nice to meet you and I will duck out and you all can continue. Okay, thanks. Karen, thank you Megan. Yeah, and other people who want to put questions in the chat, please do. I have sort of a mundane one our chapter titles, other than the date range essential and if so why. And it seems like a pain in the ass to try to make up a good title for each chapter for each chapter yeah. The, I think again it depends on the book. I mean my. I think chapter titles are more certainly more traditional in history books right, they aren't as much in fiction you'll get a mix in fiction sometimes they'll just be numbered sometimes you'll have a descriptor. Sometimes you'll just have a phrase or a date or something like that. Three cornered war was interesting for me because those chapters are just the names of the people you're going to be following so you know chapter one was Baylor but then chapter nine was or eight or to remember was also Baylor right because you came back to him later and each protagonist had at least two sometimes four chapters. And so when you look at that table of contents it looks like, what is this is just all people's names and then, except for the ones where it's a battle. And so those are you know Valerde and Gloria to pass and say you which was Canyon to Shay in the DNA homeland. So, you can choose to do it whatever you want I think a table of contents actually was signals to the reader some interesting things it signals your approach. Saving Yellowstone, I had phrases as titles, just to give the reader a sense of where things were going. Probably about a third of those chapters will were just single people chapters and then the rest of them were more combined chapters where the there were three main protagonists in that book. And sometimes they were together, kind of in a larger chapter about a particular moment. Sometimes there was just a focus on one of them sometimes there's a chapter on the passage of the Yellowstone act that didn't really have it had all all three protagonists in there but not as main figures the US Congress was the sort of main figure there. And so, you know the title of that chapter was in relation to the text of the Yellowstone act itself. So I think it's really up to you. I will say that in a trade book proposal you usually provide a chapter outline. And that that is usually about a paragraph or two of description for each chapter. You don't have to provide a title at that time, but your editor may have thoughts about what to do with titling or, you know is is just a kind of big space and a page turn enough to give your reader a sense that oh we're in a different space now we have started another chapter and and then the book I'm working on now. These are just numbers. So it's just and it'll have multiple parts and then it'll just be 123456. So it'll be interesting to see if your editor says oh but you have to have titles for each chapter. Yes, and she will have opinions and I, you know I usually sometimes there will be things that I fight for but for the most part I take my editor's feedback because she's she's great and she also has the best interest of the book at heart. And, you know, really wants it to be the best book that it can be. So, if that means that the chapters need titles then this is you've sort of settled in with this one publisher for a third book is that right. Yes, same editor. Yes, and that often happens and actually I don't know if anyone out there has been watching like I've been watching the. It's actually being live tweeted on on I'm not sure you can get it any other way but it's the antitrust trial where random houses attempting to buy Simon and Schuster which is my publisher. So, the guy in the government is saying no, because those two publishing houses are two of the of the big five. And so to the government that means less competition about everything so that the trial has been fascinating. Yeah, and and many times entertaining including when Stephen King who is a Simon and Schuster author was called to the stand and they said you know can you please tell us your name and what and you know what you do and he said, I'm Stephen King, I'm a freelance writer. I was like, he's one of us. Array for Stephen King. Um, but yeah so what usually happens is that you'll sell a book. And I mean, well it depends if you have a really good experience with that editor. And, and most people do most people develop a really nice relationship with their editors and so, and I did with mine and so I submitted the manuscript. My agent feels very strongly that you pitched the next book before like basically between your submission of the manuscript and when it goes into production. So the, you know, the editor is feeling good about things you know they know that they're going to publish the book it's gonna be great. So I did that for both the other ones I submitted in February three cornered war pitched and sold saving Yellowstone in May and they get the right of first refusal like they want to see it first and they could they could have always said no. No, we're not interested in this book. You can either take it elsewhere or whatever. And then but they took saving Yellowstone and then once I had submitted that, and it went into, and I think they accepted it into the production cycle in June and I sold the, the next book I'm working on the Westerners in September. And, you know, you, you develop a rapport and I think the press also kind of has a feeling about it that, you know, you are an author that they would like to continue working with. You know they would like you to be, you know, and for those of us who write history were sort of known as mid list authors were kind of not probably not ever going to be on the best seller list even though we'd all love to be. You know, it's really solid sales that lasts a long time, and you know the books get good reviews and you provide a lot of kind of shine for the press. And so that I never. It would have like freaked me out a little bit to go try and sell like the most recent book to another press. I wouldn't have done it unless my editor was either said, No, I don't want that or, you know, I'm leaving the business somewhere else that I would have been sort of forced to I think. But yeah. Okay, I have another question from Jim who's writing a very interesting book about the cultural history of fire. He says, I've been, I've been told that publishers on the level of Scribner's will not consider nonfiction books unless you can present them with a marketing platform, likely to sell 10 to 20,000 books off the bat. Did you have such a platform when you approach Scribner's and of what did your platform consist. You know the platform thing is so weird, I have to say. So when I sold to Scribner was 2016 so I was already on Twitter I had about 10,000 followers, but as we all know about social media about half of those are bots and not real people and the other 5000 are, you know, who you actually engage with on Twitter is a very different sort of thing. And I think I was on Instagram at that point I was on Facebook I'm no longer on Facebook. But that was really it. When they took their first bet on me, it was solely because of the writing and the proposal. And that's what my editor told me so they never know I mean and I think this is what this is what the trial is also telling us because they're, they talked to a lot of editors they talked to a lot of kind of heads of the imprints, and then also the big wigs at the, at the actual trade publishers. And for the most part they don't actually know what's going to sell or not. They have good ideas about things if someone's an established author than they know. If someone's like Stephen King of course they're like, the next book of course is going to sell like a million copies. You know, minimum, right. But also the topic just the general topic. They're going to have some idea of how broad an appeal that's going to have a lot of us are writing, you know about pretty narrow stuff you know local Bay Area history or whatever. Whereas Jim's cultural history of fire. People keep making jokes about how that's going to catch fire. Yeah, and that's great and that's great and. Yeah, I mean I think that a platform, they would like you to have a platform. They would like you to Twitter is worthwhile I guess. And I think they do think Twitter is is worthwhile for promotion purposes but I think they also know that it can work the other way that most often, if the book does well then people will come to you on Twitter. Right, it's a it's that weird thing and they will come to you they will follow you on social media because they read your book, they will not follow you on Twitter and then by the book. And you can't really. You can never count on your Twitter based actually sell books for you and that there was actually a New York Times article about this a while back where they were talking about. I don't even know what publisher may have been Simon and Schuster gave Billy eyelash the singer, like a $6 million advance for her memoir, her memoirs like 20 right like. And, and they were thinking because she has millions of followers on social media right and she's a rock star right she sells millions of copies of songs, and her book sold 60,000 copies. So, and in publishing terms that's that's not good, like for that much of an advance that those sales which would be amazing for us right like are not good. And it's because who's her social media platform for social media platform, like who who's actually following her, like teenage girls, did teenage girls read memoirs. Apparently not right so read books, probably. Yeah, and so it is it is not necessarily a matter of how big your platform is and how much reach it has but the quality of it. So are you do you have like a, the vast majority of my Twitter followers who are actual real people are writers and journalists and historians. Right, so they are people who will buy history books, right they will teach them. They will talk about them they will they will do things so so that is all part of that consideration but never have I heard that someone's book was rejected because the author did not have a platform. The editors are primarily concerned with whether they think the book idea is a good idea, and that it's original. And they want to see in the book proposal, not only the writing sample but in the entire proposal. How good your writing is. And that's what they're really assessing. At least as far as I can tell the feedback that I've gotten from my own editor is, is that. But yeah I have never heard of anyone, you know, not getting a book contract because they were like well you really should be on Twitter. Right. Okay, we're almost out of time but did you did you have an editor edit your books before they went to publishers. No, I didn't. You mean in terms of a developmental editor or. Yeah. No, I. So basically for readers what I do. I don't really show anything to anyone unless my, like my editor and my agent want to see pages. And so I usually send them, I usually send them like part one. My agent wants to read the whole thing she's and some agents are more involved and like that and some are not. My editor wanted to see pages she wanted to see part one of three cornered because she didn't, you know she had not worked with me before so she wanted to actually read pages, and she gave me some really good editing feedback on that and I revised that was part of the first overhaul was in response to her comments and, and, you know they don't give developmental editing kinds of comments though they don't give like really they don't give line editing comments until much later. But what I do do is when I finished a draft, and I go through it myself and do a revision, and I am about ready to submit. I actually hire to readers in. Well, for three cornered I only did one because I didn't have enough time, but a reader in my field to read the book and give me comments so for three cornered I hired a Civil War person to read it and turn it around really fast that's probably why I was, I was paying them a fair amount to turn it around in about a month. And then for saving Yellowstone, I had a reader in reconstruction history, and a reader in Lakota history, because sitting bowl to talk at your talk is one of the protagonists in that book and I wanted to make sure that I was getting that history right. And so I hired those two as readers. They were not, again, not really giving me line editing they did give me some overall comments, you know about the flow of the book and how it was fitting together. But mainly I was using them as as a kind of peer review, because trade publishers do not have peer review. You're just dealing with the editor, but you know my editor is really great, especially with the, the big structure issues and sort of saying, you know, I love this chapter but it's not really fitting in here can we, like there used to be in saving Yellowstone an entire chapter devoted to the painting of the painting you see on the cover Thomas Moran's Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone. And it was from Moran's perspective, and she was just like, I love this, but it's too long. We haven't really gotten to know Moran before this. So like, what can you do with this. So, and so I actually turned it around and made it from Hayden's perspective, because I had enough documentation that he had come to see Moran during the painting and all of this. And it and it went from a chapter to about six pages in that so so she gives those really great kind of structural comments and that's in the editorial phase at the end. I have not hired a like kind of trained developmental editor, it's more of a peer review process but I do have them look at it and I also have several writing groups, I love. I will always argue for and campaign for writing groups I love them. And I will show them individual chapters along the way, and they often give me really good comments, I'm getting like encroached upon by the sun. And at the end of the summer, my my zoom, like, events, let me see. Yeah, here we go. My zoom my zoom events. Earlier in the summer never had any sun problems. I know the sun's getting lower in the sky. There we are. Well, mentioning writing groups is a great segue into something I guess I neglected to mention which is that the Institute for historical study has a writing group that once a month. And then we've all gotten used to meeting on zoom for the past couple years. So, that has been a good draw for new people to discover us. I think it's a history related writing as opposed to some writing groups that are a lot broader. When I first joined there was they were specifically biography writers, but it's expanded from that. Let's see there. Yeah, I'm looking over at the chat to. I mean, I always say I could go on with this forever, but it's 330 and we probably should stop let you go go get some dinner, I guess, because it's 630 your time. Okay, we're, we're late eaters in this household. Okay, here's somebody who says do publishers prefer that the book not be completed yet. Oh, why would they. Yeah, I mean I think that depends I think there are a lot of editors who like to shape the book or help shape the book and the idea of it. It's a different I think I mean, I haven't experienced this because all the books I've sold. I have only on proposal and I've only written like one chapter basically. And this last one I didn't even do a writing sample, the advantage of working with the same press is that they know you're writing already so you don't have to do a writing sample, you don't have to do the rest of the proposal and make a good case for it but you don't have to do that because they know that you can write you can complete the book. Wait, I'll ask track of the question. What was the question. Do publishers prefer that it not be completed yet. Yeah, I mean I think they take it either way. I think agents. I think they sell books maybe a little differently in their completed form, rather than a proposal form that is all kind of a perspective right like you're like well it'll probably turn out like this and I know that. You know, all of our books change from the proposal stage to the final product. So it must be interesting for editors to kind of see that happen like in the proposal you said you were going to do this or like my proposal for three cornered I was going to have 35 chapters I ended up with 23. I told you to the book will necessarily. But they do kind of expect that it's still going to remain the same general book right and the same kind of as you imagined it in the beginning if that changes they're going to want to talk to you about it, especially if it changes quite radically. But I think in terms of how the agent sells it that just means the editor has an opportunity to read the entire thing, rather than just a proposal. I think maybe the approach, they might approach the offered slightly differently, but I don't know if there is a preference, actually, I'm not first time author, I would think probably the more you have done the better so they really can. Yeah, so they can really good sense and they know, especially if you're I mean, this is why I feel so lucky that my editor took a chance on me because, you know I'd written the first two books, but they were very academic and in tone and in writing style and so proposing to do was very different and so I think she was like well that doesn't. I'm not sure I can really think of that as a writing sample because, like you're a good writer and a strong writer in those books but what you're going to try and do is totally different so I'm going to need to see some proof that you can actually do that but but yeah and I would agree like if you have a lot. Definitely send it because then that will give them a greater sense of you as a writer and then the book project itself. I mean don't they often say all we want to see is one sample chapter, don't send us your manuscript or. I mean if if they say that, if there is that directive, then follow whatever their director is if they don't want to see the whole thing. And then your agent will help you with that particular process and if the agent. They're fine with getting the whole manuscript because then they get a sense of you as a writer. Yeah, you gave us some tips on finding an agent. Okay, well we had some comments about 60,000 would be good for a small press or whatever any small presses that don't require an agent and have lower sales expectations. Yes, yes, and there there are some. What I kind of refer to as the, as the kind of mid trades like the academic trades like basic, you know, Knopf Norton some some presses I mean Norton does a broader sweep than that but a lot of presses that specialize in kind of Scott the scholarly book field they publish more history than other things. Those presses yeah you can go to without an agent, and they prefer it, because the agent will try and get them to pay more money, right. Because they want to make money right again. Yeah, the people in our organization probably are mostly just hoping to find a publisher. Because they don't have to self publish and not worry too much about the money but but it's it's it's exciting to hear from someone who is, I guess making significant money, doing history writing. And it's nice to get paid for your work right like like so much of so much of academic publishing you either have to pay for, or, or you just get paid nothing right and, or you may get back later on on royalties but it is nice I think if they give you, you know what would be considered a small advance of $5,000 or $10,000 like that would pay for your for some research trips right that would pay for you to go and, and do some things for the book and so that's always nice to have that. And that kind of sense that you are getting paid for your writing. I mean that's an important thing. I didn't realize, I didn't realize that there was that big a difference between academic and trade. Oh, believe me and I didn't either. And I was like, Yeah, my poor he was just, she didn't know what to do with me for the first two years. Now I'm a little better about everything. Let's see, are there any other new questions. There was isn't your bio considered part of your platform, your credentials expertise previously published books are those part of your platform. They are, they are, and that is a way that you've established your reputation, you know, if you write pretty regularly for, you know, a magazine column or newspaper you have that kind of expertise and you have that kind of publishing record under your belt for general readers I mean I think for trade publishers, what they want to see is that you're engaging a kind of larger reading public beyond the classroom. I mean they think classroom sales are great they love that that's you know consistent sales over time and so they're never going to they're never going to be sad about that but but they do want to you know it's always good when you have any kind of piece of public writing out there that gets you know 10s of 1000s of reads I mean that's great because then people are introduced to you they may follow the link to your website they may, you know, kind of understand you as an author. So, yeah, I mean and that's really good and they also, again, like those those kinds of pieces of writing are part of the promotion process and so you know they like you to give it a try sometimes it doesn't work again like anything about saving Yellowstone into the New York Times like it just was not happening. I tried twice and on two different topics and they were like no. No, I was about to say we didn't. We haven't really touched on author websites. Oh yeah, you have trouble getting people to like, did you work at getting people to read your website and follow your blog. I mean I, I used a very basic kind of WordPress template, and had the blog which is called hysterica, which I was pretty active with from 2014 till about. Maybe 2019. I use it to to for a lot for a couple different purposes. If I have a piece that I wanted to really wanted to write and had written but I couldn't post it anywhere sometimes I'll post that on the blog. Usually it's more either advice pieces or if if I'm talking about something on Twitter and people like can you write this up somewhere so that I can have it and I don't have to search for it on Twitter, then I'll do a post about that. I do a roundup like I did a roundup of all the January 6 insurrection pieces that historians had written. So that's that's a piece on there which is more of a kind of bibliography it's not my intellectual work product but it's just a resource that people can have which is good. But the website is really important for you as an author because that's how people find you right like if you if you pitch an agent your agent is like who is this person, and they Google you. You're going to want them to find your website and you want that website to look good and you want that website to kind of give a sense of who you are as a writer and then also give examples I think the most important pages of my website are the speaking and writing pages that give you links to either so there will be a link here soon with the link to this YouTube so that people can watch it later. So that becomes a resource and I actually did have. I was contacted by an editor for preservation magazine and I can't remember what she had read of mine, but she wanted me to write a piece for them and so we talked about it and I ended up writing something on Adobe architecture in the Southwest for them a little bit random article but but it was great they like it was the first time I've ever been paid to travel somewhere and interview people and that was super fun I've never done that before. She told me when I was talking to her I said well how did you find me and she said well I read this piece that you wrote and whenever I read a piece that's really interesting I sort of clip it and put it in my author file, and then I kind of come back and and she said but the essential next step is that I can find you to contact you. She's like you would be shocked at how many writers do not have websites, and you know sometimes you know many historians, especially if you're teaching you'll have a website with your university. But often if then you leave the university that website goes away right so you never want to post content on that often can't post content on that it's not very usable. Now I think I know people who like Squarespace there are lots of places where you can kind of launch your website and what I would recommend for that if you haven't done one yet is to for the website to be in your own name, not the name of the book. Because you'll want that to remain stable, you'll want people who are looking for you to be able to find information about all your books there and be able to find links to other writing and be able to contact you through the website itself. And so that I highly recommend an author website and and these days you know I'm not a I'm not a great computer person I don't have good instincts with any of that stuff. I still have my WordPress I have friends who have hired people to do kind of a little more sophisticated websites that you know have the like book in 3D like turning in space and like things like that and I am. I'm not sophisticated enough to like figure I barely figured out how to link to my like Instagram and my Twitter on my main page and that took some doing so I felt like a genius after I was able to do that but. But I think just the basic stuff just to have a page that's an about you page and then a page for your most recent book. You know here are the other things that I've written with hyperlinks that people can use to find it because they want they want to find you and find out more about you and that's what the website should be doing. Wonderful. One more question from Jim Gasperini your first book was a cultural history how does that genre fit into the difference between academic and trade publishing worlds. Oh, yeah. Well that was I mean, you know, trembling earth was my, was my dissertation, and so to sort of announce that book as a cultural history of the okay for an okay swamp sort of staked my claim in environmental like environmental and cultural history together, which is what I also have done I mean what what connects all the four books where the guy showed you all four covers. And that's all four of those is my interest in kind of weird places, right places that people have fought over they are contested landscapes people use them in different ways. They've entered the American imagination in different ways. And so to use cultural history and the title is just kind of signaling to the reader into the academic community that I am a cultural historian, but that I'm also an environmental historian. I don't know that I would ever use that phrase in a trade history title. Usually, they like titles are so weird. You know, saving Yellowstone actually you can find its original cover art and original title out there. If you look for it. It was originally called this strange country. We thought was a very nice poetic title but really close to the last minute. There was an objection to it in the publishing house and we had to change it. It was a stressful time for me, because we had to think of it right and you and so what you want to do with the titling is not only have a title that is easy to pronounce for radio show hosts and podcasts people and everyone who's going to be introducing an event like this. And also one that gives readers a really good description of what the book, you know, kind of contains right and so for the most part trade histories will have. I was looking them up when I was trying to figure out what to call saving Yellowstone and, and often they will have a verb in the title like saving will have like a jaren verb to create action in the title. And then the secondary title, I think what I did is I looked up all the Pulitzer prize winning books and I was like what, what are their secondary titles what do they tend to have, and the most popular format was X and y in either the making of America or in the something something era, you know kind of a time period sort of thing or a more general historical claim. So those are the kinds of subtitles so that's why saving Yellowstone is exploration and preservation and reconstruction America, because it's, it's telling and that doesn't encapsulate the whole book. You know that the chapters on sitting bowl are not encapsulated in that title necessarily but it is signaling to the reader that this is a book about reconstructed a book about Yellowstone. It's a book about exploration and knowledge and saving the environment, but it is positioned as a reconstruction era book. So, I mean there are all sorts of like weird things about titles and why we make those choices but at the, at the trade houses the title is almost always about marketing. Right so authors don't have much control, ultimately over there you have some control I mean they they consult you. And it is a back and forth and in fact both of these both three cornered and and saving Yellowstone are my titles which is shocking to me because I'm terrible. And three cornered war originally was called the path of the dead man, and my my editor from the beginning hated that title so I knew it was going to have to change. And so then we went on a hunt for a possible title and we went back and forth about it for a couple of weeks was saving Yellowstone we had less time was like a matter of two days trying to find that. Yeah, so they will always have ideas you you have some input. You have all, and you have some input on the cover art and font style and stuff but most of the time you are presented with like, here are your options. Which one do you like best right, because they know they're they're the experts they're the design experts they know what sells they know what people tend to look at on a shelf. What will pop out like not only on a bookshelf in a bookstore, but also as a thumbnail, like on bookshop.org or on the author website, how is it going to really pop. You know, in these certain ways and they, they know what they're doing so I tend to trust the design people on those matters although I do like what I like and I'll say, you know, that font seems a little, you know, muddy it up or can we do it or can it be it can it be in another color, you know and then they they'll send things back to me and then we'll see how it goes but my editor usually expresses her preference right off the bat, which is a helpful guide. Because I'm like well I know she likes this one best. See how I feel, but. Okay, well we really are going to wrap up now. You can see all of us applauding and read all read all the thank yous but appreciate seeing you in in virtual person. Everything you've had to say and it'll be written up in the Institute newsletter. You can go ahead and pass along in that and the other roundups my, yeah my website and my email address. Yeah, yeah and everyone out there you should completely feel free to to reach out. If you have any questions more specific questions and just say that you were here so I know what the context is. Yeah, and have a chat I'm happy to help. Thanks so much Megan bye bye. Thank you have a good night.