With the release of my new book, Suds Series, I thought I would give people some insight into how the book came to be. It is an arduous process and not one that will likely make me a lot of money, but it was something I wanted to do and I’m glad I did it. Please note: This is not a “How to Write a Book” post, this is a “How I wrote my book” post and there is a big difference. I am not claiming to be an expert and I absolutely made a lot of mistakes. I am hoping that those who would like to write a book may find this helpful and those who are simply interested in the process may enjoy the “behind the scenes” look.
Jeff Pearlman sent me this message on Twitter when I was working on my first book, Phinally! In addition to being a tremendous writer, Jeff is also very supportive of young or, in my case, inexperienced writers. He recommended someone for me to contact and I was off on my journey. After some research, I began soliciting agents and I made a spreadsheet to track replies.
What I quickly discovered is that getting an agent to represent you, especially for a first book, is very difficult. It is kind of like trying to find a job and a spouse online at the same time. Several of the agents I contacted were interested at first but quickly bowed out with excuses such as “too regional” “not right for me”, etc. I’m not blaming them, but I was operating in what a friend described as a “zero feedback loop.” Rejections kept coming but I didn’t know what I could do to better my chances.
Finally, an agent told me, to paraphrase, that he thought my book was a good idea and that he liked my writing, but he didn’t think he could sell the book to a publisher. It was a bummer, but I was also grateful that someone had leveled with me. It was nice to have someone in the industry confirm my suspicions. I abandoned my search for an agent and began soliciting publishers directly.
Shortly thereafter, I signed a deal with McFarland Publishing to do my first book, which came out in 2018. Fast forward to the end of 2019 and, with one book already out in the world, I thought it would be a lot easier to get an agent for my next project. I was wrong. More rejections followed but this time I stopped chasing. I figured it would be best to go the same route and solicit publishers directly.
In early 2020, right before the world shut down, I sent a query (essentially a short summary of the project) to the University of Missouri Press. They responded and asked to see more so I sent them a full proposal. If you are soliciting an agent or a publisher, they will often ask for this. It is a longer document that contains information about you, why you feel you are the right person to write this book, how you plan to market the book, any information about who you know that may help in selling the book, including, social media followers, a list of comparable books and why yours is different, a summary of each chapter, and a sample chapter.
The elements vary, but the point is you need to prove that you are serious and that you know what you’re doing. Depending on your status, you may be offered an advance, which is up front money that comes out of any royalties you may earn once the book comes out. In my case, I didn’t receive an advance and I was fine with that. I figured that would be the case and I wasn’t expecting one. Missouri agreed to do the book with me and sent me a contract, which I signed and returned. The original plan was for me to deliver the book in the spring of 2021 so that Suds Series could be released in the spring of 2022 to coincide with the 40th anniversary of the 1982 season.
In most cases, it’s best to spend a lengthy amount of time (6-12 months) doing research before you begin writing. Unfortunately for me I didn’t have the time for that because my finished manuscript was due only a year after I signed my contract. I would need to research and write at the same time. This is not ideal because if you have most of your research done beforehand, you can do a much better job of mapping out the book and deciding what you are going to write about and what you can skip. The other drawback to researching and writing at the same time is that you can finish a draft of a chapter and later come across something that would be great for that chapter. Now you face the task of figuring out how to incorporate the new information into what you have already written. Sometimes that is easy but sometimes it isn’t.
The nice part about writing a book like Suds Series is that the organizing takes care of itself. Just write a chapter about each month and move on. What I began to do was to write each chapter in chronological order beginning with the offseason. This is where the fan part comes in for me. I spent hours reading old biographies and looking through old newspaper articles. What I ended up with at the end of the project was a folder with nearly 1 gigabyte of clipped articles and notes. I made a folder for each team and a folder for each month within those folders.
For each month, I made a timeline of what happened. Big performances for individual players, key series between teams, fights, milestones like Gaylord Perry’s 300th win, etc. I also like to incorporate pop culture events into the story, so I added them to the timeline as well. I’m such a fan of 1980s culture that I wanted to include damn-near everything. The problem is that a lot of it had nothing to do with baseball and would appear to be just tacked on to the final product. A few of them survived, but I had to eliminate others, including a section about the film Diner which came out in May of 1982 and is a personal favorite.
Once I had my framework, I again went through newspaper clippings to put a story together. I knew basically what I wanted to write about, but I needed more information. After finishing each chapter, I would send it to my editor, Adam Criblez, at University of Missouri Press and he would offer suggestions. This was extremely helpful and made for a much better “finished draft.” Having someone talented look at my stuff objectively well before it was time to turn it in offered me a safety net and made the editing process much smoother.
I hit my deadline and emailed a finished manuscript to Adam and his boss, Andrew Davidson, at the end of March 2021. We were on our way! My book was on schedule to be released in the spring of 2022 and much of the heavy lifting was finished. The next step in the process is peer review. In this step, the manuscript is sent to a few people who offer feedback. I skipped this step in my first book because my editor at McFarland told me it would delay the process. At that point, I have been working on Phinally! for about four years and I just wanted it to come out. That was a mistake. This time around it wasn’t optional. The book headed to peer review, and I waited. I’m new enough to the process that alarm bells did not go off in my head when I received an email from Adam and Andrew asking to set up a Zoom meeting with me before they sent me the peer reviews. We scheduled a meeting, the email containing the reviews arrived, and I was floored.
The two reviewers definitely offered a lot of “suggestions.” I was extremely upset when I first read them but once I calmed down and re-read them, I realized that many of their suggestions were right.
Adam and Andrew were great throughout the process and still supported the book. We just needed to come up with a plan to make it stronger. What we decided to do was to eliminate many of the ancillary pop culture references, as painful as that was for me, and weave in more of an overarching beer narrative throughout the book. After all, this was The Suds Series, the Brewers against the Budweiser-owned Cardinals. I remember being disappointed that we wouldn’t hit the spring 2022 deadline but encouraged that the book would be much better, regardless of when it was released.
With a new plan, I researched as much as I could find about the relationship between beer and baseball and how I could make that a thread that ran throughout the book. I went back to the Beer and Whiskey League of the 1800s to trace the origins of the relationship between alcohol and baseball and brought the story through to 1982. One big advantage I had was that Bud Light (then called Budweiser Light) was released in early 1982 as a competitor to Miller Lite. I found an excellent book about the history of Budweiser and pulled a lot of material from that and talked about the origins of Miller Lite and the wars between Anheuser-Busch and Miller. The result was a tighter story with fewer distractions. Then it was time for Peer Review Part II, Electric Boogaloo. This time, the process was a lot smoother, and we were back on track. My manuscript was essentially finished but there was still plenty of work to do.
In my first book, I purposely didn’t do any interviews. I had multiple reasons for that.
First, I work full-time and had two sons playing baseball at the time. In a perfect world, I would have tracked down and talked to lots of players from 1980 but I didn’t have the time or the contacts to pull that off. I was also concerned that if I began doing interviews I wouldn’t want to stop and I’d still be chasing guys.
I began Suds Series with the same philosophy but when I had a bit more time I began to reach out to people. Most declined, which is their right, but I was able to talk to a few people, including Doug DeCinces and the famed artist Dick Perez. The interviews I did with them gave me insight I wouldn’t have had otherwise (duh) and makes for a better book. Lesson learned. Take the time to talk to as many people as possible.
One thing many people don’t know is that authors are responsible for securing photos to use in their books. That responsibility includes not only getting permissions but also paying any fees associated with those permissions. That can get very expensive, as this example shows.
This single photo from the 1982 World Series costs $499 if purchased through Getty Images, one of the industry leaders. I wanted to include about ten photos to help tell the story, but if I spent $5,000 on photo rights, I would lose A LOT of money. It’s simply not an option for most people. The trick is to find alternate methods to obtain photo rights.
I worked with the Hall of Fame for my first book and got images that worked at a very reasonable price, but they weren’t exactly what I was hoping for. Through social media, I was able to get in touch with a few photographers who were working in 1982. When the University of Missouri Press asked me about photos, I was ready. I talked to one of the photographers and we agreed on compensation. He sent me the photos and they simply wouldn’t work. I won’t get into the reasons, and I don’t mean to disparage this person, it simply wasn’t a fit. That was fine, except now I was really under the gun. I needed to secure images quickly and on the cheap. Then I got an idea.
During the pandemic, Brad Balukjian released a wonderful book called The Wax Pack and he used photos of Topps baseball cards so I thought I would give that a try. I went to the Topps website, found a phone number, and called. I explained I was interested in using photos of cards from the 1982 Topps set for a book and asked how that process would work. The person said to email them and gave me an address. It was a generic email address, literally, Support (at) Topps-Dot-Com. My first thought was, “I’m sure they’ll get right on this,” but I sent the email anyway and by some miracle, I got a release a week later from Topps giving me permission to use their cards in my book. Big thanks to the folks at Topps!
After that, the process got a lot easier except for two things: the end notes and the index. Every time I quoted someone I needed to cite the source, even if it was someone I personally interviewed. On top of that, the bibliography needed to be in the correct format. It’s a pain in the butt, but it has to be done. With a book that relies so heavily on contemporaneous media accounts, this can be daunting, as the last few notes from Chapter Seven show.
That chapter alone contains 106 citations. I don’t even want to count how many there are in the entire book. After that, it was time for the index. I had to make a list of every person I mention in the book, and on which pages they are mentioned. I did this on my own for my first book, but I found some software to do a bulk of it this time which was well worth the money!
Then came the (sorta) fun part, figuring out how to get the word out. Once again, the people at the University of Missouri Press, specifically Robin Rennison and Megan Casey, have done a tremendous job with this. Heading into the process, I assumed most, if not all, of the publicity work would be up to me. I have been active on Facebook and Twitter for a while, so I’ve built up a bit of a following and built a decent network but I’m not famous. Aside from my mother, very few people have been anxiously awaiting the release of my next book. I need to let people know the book exists. If they don’t like it, that’s one thing but if they don’t know it is a thing, that’s another.
The University of Missouri Press built some graphics for me, bought me business cards and bookmarks, and, most important, assigned Robin and Megan to help. I contacted people on my own, but I also sent Robin and Megan a wish list of people to talk to and they went to work. I also got a big boost from Dave Jordan, who shared his list with me. Thanks, Dave!
Soon, I was appearing on podcasts and radio shows and getting the word out. Prior to the release of Suds Series, I had already done more media that I had total for my first book. That helped a lot. I also scheduled a bunch of tweets counting down to the release of the book. It can be a bit gross to promote yourself so much, but it’s part of the process and if you don’t promote your book no one else will (except Robin and Megan).
Wednesday, February 22 turned out to be a nice day. I got a call from Robin and was immediately booked to do a podcast that afternoon. It was my first official interview. When I got home, my copies of the book were waiting on the front porch. I’m certain my dog, Tess, barked a lot at the UPS driver who dropped them off (sorry about that, she’s a dork.) At long last it was real. For nearly four years, Suds Series was a concept. It was a series of ideas, emails and word documents that were sent back and forth. Now it was real. I was holding it in my hands, and it was pretty damn cool. I was especially happy that the book was a hardcover. It’s a vanity thing for me, but hardcover books feel “more legitimate” than paperbacks. I also had someone refuse to buy my previous book because they only bought hardcover books. I thought that was weird.
The next few weeks went by quickly. I did interviews, a book signing, continued to work on my website, and posted lots of social media content begging people to buy the book. A process that began in 2019 finally saw the light of day in 2023. I hope you enjoy Suds Series. It was a labor of love and I’m happy with it. You can get your copy here:
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