Proofs Positive

The lightest labors can be the sweetest

This week I will complete one of my favorite rituals: reading page proofs. After conceiving, drafting, revising, and reviewing a copy-edited book manuscript—as well as filling out a bunch of mind-numbing paperwork, collecting photos, and writing captions—I get to take a victory lap. That takes the form of a set of printed-out pages that show how the book will actually look when it’s bound between covers. I use a red pen for the dozen or so corrections that inevitably spring up, scolded in advance that I can’t make big changes that will require major resetting of type. I always have a few regrets—it’s shocking how many times you can read through your own work and miss stuff—but I usually enjoy what amounts to a dress rehearsal.

This particular book, New Jersey Vanguard: Famous Figures Who Shaped the Nation, is a minor project for which I have limited expectations. I hate the title, which was foisted on me—I wanted “Made in Jersey: American Lives at the Crossroads.” But I decided not to wage a battle with hard-nosed salespeople that I was unlikely to win.

To me, the most interesting thing about my publisher this time around, the History Press, is its marketing approach. This is a house that specializes in local subjects and has what I regard as a truly amazing distribution network. These days, Amazon.com is pretty much everything in the book business. Not History Press. Instead, the company penetrates deeply in places like Walgreens, CVS, and stationery stores—they also have a notably visible presence in retailers like Barnes & Noble—in ways that are very unusual in the book trade these days. (The paperback revolution began a century ago in drug store racks, though that chapter in publishing history is largely over, though you can often still find Stephen King’s latest at the back of your local CVS—which is struggling, by the way, thanks—you guessed it—to Amazon.) The catch is that this distribution is highly localized. You may well run into my book while looking for toothpaste—or I’d like to imagine, make an impulse by when you spy it at the cash register—but its relative omnipresence will disappear once you cross into New York, Pennsylvania, or Delaware. As you may have inferred, the audience for the book is quite different than the refereed scholarship, textbooks, or trade (a.k.a. full-bore commercial) writing I’ve done over the last thirty years. As someone whose career falls between the academic and commercial cracks, I’ve gone where the winds blow me. I decided a long time ago that the reward is the work. Page proofs are the whipped cream in the dessert phase of the process.

There are of course other pleasures in publication: opening the box with the finished book (posting videos of this has become something of a custom for authors); coming across an occasional nice review; receiving an invitation to speak at a venue; finding an unexpected deposit in my checking account. But I still regard page proofs as the reliably best part of the process.

Followed by the toughest: figuring out what to do next. Fortunately, I do have another project underway. Lately the idea of just stopping has become more alluring. We’ll see if its appeal grows.

New Jersey Vanguard has a pub date of March 11. Springtime for my autumn.