Writing A Book Part I

As the 4.5 of you who read this blog have noticed, there was an 18-month gap in my posting. It wasn't that big of a deal since only a handful of people know that this blog exists and even fewer even care. Mostly, I use this blog as a cheap form of therapy to write random things that pop in my head.

I'll explain what happened during that break. Back in 2018, I was contacted by a representative from the University of California Press. She asked me if I were interested in writing a book. If you read my post on "Chasing Tenure", you know that publishing keeps us academics from perishing. However, in my discipline of economics, books don't carry the same weight that they do in other fields like the humanities. Still, me and the rep kicked around a few ideas. I just couldn't think of anything worthy of an entire book. I had some ideas that might be a peer-reviewed journal article, at best, but we couldn't find anything. The idea sort of died on the vine and I went on with my life.

Fast forward to 2022 when I'm thinking about an idea which explains how different people look at the same economic circumstances differently depending on their mindset and position. I asked a few of my co-authors about writing a paper on the subject. It became clear that the idea wouldn't work the way that we normally do stuff with a bunch of math equations which is then followed up with a bunch of statistical analysis of some dataset. This idea would need to be more descriptive and we don't do descriptive. 

At that point, it occurred to me that this idea might be something better suited for book form. I found the rep at UC Press and sent her a message. She semi-liked the idea but didn't completely understand what I wanted to do. She did ask me to write up something more formally. That required me to seriously think about what it was that I really wanted to say. I knew that this idea would have to be conveyed so that the general public would understand it. That was clear after having tried to "math" it out with my co-authors and we got nowhere. I also needed to know if this had been done before and if not, was this really a "thing". I needed to do some background work to see if others would care about my idea. 

Writing out the proposal took a few months. Funny enough, the proposal was only about three or four pages long. I was worried that if it took me that long to write a few pages that I'd never be able to write an entire book. It needed to be revised and edited a few times before the rep and I were both happy with it. The way that these things go is that the proposal and a bit of a biography about me are sent out to external experts for their opinion about the viability of the project. The rep sent the proposal, which had stuff about what would potentially be in each chapter, out to some people to review. I'm fairly certain that I know who one of the reviewers was simply by the tenor and language of the review. The other person, I had no idea. Regardless, the rep said that the reviews were mostly positive but that I'd need to write a response to what they had said. Would I change the book to adjust for their concerns? Had I thought about this or that? I wrote my response which was basically stuff like "I've already thought about that, look on page 3 where I address it" or "That idea is for a different type of book. It doesn't fit here because..."

The rep was satisfied and then I was sent a formal contract. It had the basic stuff about how long a time that I had to deliver the book. How many words they were expecting (in my case I had a limit of 70,000 but I've only used 57,000). It also had language about what the royalties would be if the book sold more than certain amounts. Apparently most academic books don't sell more than a few hundred copies and those are mostly to libraries. The publisher doesn't mind since it only takes a few hundred copies sold for them to break even on costs. The contract had stuff about if you sell more than 5,000 copies you get this and then more than 10,000 gets you that. The publisher doesn't mind since most academic books sell about 900 copies anyway. They also don't give out those advances like you see in the movies. You aren't getting money up front unless you're a pretty big name.

I guess not getting an advance makes sense. The rep told me that they hand out contracts all the time. She said that only about 15% of authors they give those contracts to ever turn in a finished product. She also mentioned that almost none turn it in by the contract date. I was a bit surprised but then again, I had never written a book. I wonder what happens if they give out an advance and don't get a finished product? Probably rarely happens because they reserve that for stars who they know are going to produce. 

The rep did say that what I had proposed was a "trade" book meaning that it was meant for the general public and not an "academic" book which only libraries would buy. Later, I found out that some academic books sell hundreds of thousands of copies, but it is rare. The reviews were done. The responses were written. The contract was signed. All I needed to do was write the book. 

I signed the contract in June of 2023 and got to work. What you all who read this blog probably have noticed is that the last blog post was in June of 2023. I still had my full-time job along with teaching in Germany and running and blah, blah, blah. I simply ran out of time for some stuff and this blog was one of them. Plus, no one reads this thing anyway. It was interesting that some of the things I wrote about in this blog made it into the book. I just needed to formalize the language a bit.

In October of 2024 (a full 2 months before I was contracted to be finished!), I turned in the final draft of the book Ladder or Lottery? The Economics of the Social Contract. Like I said, it's up to 57,000 words at this point and that includes the graphics, bibliography, and footnotes. I needed to pay a professional to put the references in something called "Chicago Style". Ugh. 

It was out for external review by experts as of December 2024. More dang review! I don't think that the publisher used the same people from the proposal. I suspect that when the reviews come back, I'll need to make corrections, revisions, or write a response to why I'm not doing either. I suspect that additions, corrections and stuff will add another 10,000 words to the manuscript so I'll be right on target. I will say that I enjoyed the time off from seeing the book. It took 15 months to write, and I promise you that I worked on it 25 hours a week in addition to my 55 hour a week job. I was exhausted when I turned it in. I think the book really says something and turned out better than I expected. 

In October of 2024, I was invited to Fayetteville State University to give a public lecture on the book. There were over 300 people there. If you have LinkedIn, you can see a bit about it here. I was amazed. Me and the publisher had a bit of a tiff about this trip. The publisher didn't want me going out talking about the book without a link to get pre-orders or copies of the book that I could sign on the spot. I told them that you simply can't turn down invitations. Sure, the book wasn't supposed to be available until July of 2025, but the invitation came in 2024 so that's when I went. In fact, I was invited to talk about the book at another school in January of 2025 and then again in April of 2025. What was I supposed to do, decline the invitations? My advice to the publisher was to hurry up and get the book out. It was clear that there was a good deal of demand for the product.

So, I'll clearly be writing a second post about this book. Did it cause me to stop blogging again? In the post, I'll detail how I responded to the reviews and then the steps that were needed to get the manuscript to production like getting permissions to use graphics, fact checking claims made, copy editing my horrid grammar, etc.