Writing a Book Part IV

As the 4.5 of you who read this blog know, I wrote a book. It took years to complete and I did not write in this blog while I finished it. In December of 2025, I wrote my third blog post about the saga that dealing with the publisher had become. They simply did not know what they were doing. Maybe they did know what they were doing; ignoring me and my book!

My blog post from March of 2026 was about the alumni award and dinner that the University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee held for which I had been selected as one of the Distinguished Alumni winners. That was a super cool evening. If you haven’t read that post, I’d encourage you to go back and find it. I also mentioned that I was able to do a formal book talk the day before. I thought I was rolling.

I don’t know if I mentioned that UC Press, my publisher, had absolutely nothing to do with arranging that talk. My book (see here) was released on February 17th of 2026 so I thought that doing the talk would run in conjunction with a few press releases or some media appearances which would be arranged by the publisher. Nope! Had I not done that book talk, there would have been no mention at all of the book.

What did they do? They said that they sent out emails to lots of national and regional media outlets to announce the book. Yeah right, like a spam email to some intern at CNN was going to move the needle. I could have done that. As I wrote in my last blog post about this, I knew that any real advertising would be the result of my efforts, so I got to work.

I was able to get myself on the program for Tulane Book Fest. That one wasn’t so hard given that I was working at the university at the time. There was a bit of a stink given that I had the expectation that I’d be on stage by myself, but I ended up sharing time with another author. By my estimation, I’d say that there were 120 people in the audience. Not too bad. After the talk, I went over to a tent to sign copies. About 5 people came over.

If you go to my blog post about my media appearances, you’ll see that I was interviewed by an online outlet titled “Word in Black”. (See and listen here) The piece that they interviewed me about was on the devastating impacts that the Trump presidency was having on black women employment. Admittedly, the piece was not about the book, but I was able to relate my comments to the book and they featured the book cover and link in the article. I ended up getting several emails from strangers about the piece. I don’t know if they ended up buying the book though.

To their credit, the publisher got me booked on three podcasts. I’d suspect that the audience for those podcasts are probably about as big as the readership is for this blog. Two of the blogs are called the New Books Network and the New Books Network African American, the other was Kick the Dogma. The podcasts were fun to do but I don’t know how much reach, if any, either of them ended up having.

Heck, I called in a favor and got myself on the podcast of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas. I think I got more mileage out of my own effort than the two that the publisher found. (Click here to listen to that one).

I was also able to get myself interviewed by the local paper in southeast of Louisiana, The Times Picayune. It was rather a puff piece but when you’re trying to move copies, you have to take what is given. You can access that piece by clicking here.

In late April of 2026, I traveled to the University of New Mexico to speak to students in their BA/MD Program. I asked them to arrange a separate time so that I could do a book talk and signing. It was probably a bit obnoxious to turn that talk into a book event also, but I had to use my small connections given that the publisher was doing squat. I reached out to friends and colleagues at Northeastern University, Michigan State University, my alma mater Washington University in St. Louis, Northern Illinois University, West Virginia University, and more. I made some progress in getting some of them to bite. As of this writing, the only confirmed speaking gig that I lined up for the fall of 2026 was Wabash College. The list will probably grow to over 35 places before it’s all said and done.

To be honest, I’m happy that anyone at all read and engaged in a conversation about the material. I tought that the work was timely and spoke to the times. Heck, I even got myself invited to a local black bookstore in New Orleans in May of 2026 to do a book signing and talk. It wasn’t like me to be so pushy but I had to do something to counter the big nothing being done by the publisher.

I don’t think I’ll write a follow up about the book in this blog again. The book is out and will be out. Copies are being sold. How many will be sold in total? I can’t say. I know that there will be more than 1,000 but I’m never getting to a million.  What I can say is that I’ll never work with UC Press again.