cellini's Diaryland Diary

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I will sell 100,000 copies of this book.

I am reading Simon Winchester's "The Men Who United the States." I am reading it because I thought that my new book has a bit of a Simon Winchester thing about it.

This fucking shithole book.

Not a single footnote appears in the whole thing. This book is a parade of shit that other writers have previously set down and done the work to research, and Winchester just pops in to point out that he did the tour one time thirty years ago and bought the T-shirt so is now totally qualified to define What It All Means in his Major Book That Explains Everything About America.

Because as he has explained in the Author's note, ahead of the Preface, which he also wrote, this book is organized according to the four or five or whatever elements. Earth and wind and fire and wood and metal but somehow not air and somehow that is an acceptable way to organize a book allegedly about US history.

I bought this book because I thought I would find some sort of inspiration while editing and beta testing my new book about the history of the H0bok3n Turtle C1ub. Holy fuck, was I ever wrong.

This book is a self indulgent pile of shit in search of a professional editor. I am on page 44 and want to cut this shit to about 18 pages.

Nowhere does Winchester attempt to validate anything that he says. His claims about Native American ideas of land ownership are naive. He just drones on and on without action or sources or fucking ANYTHING to validate anything that he says.

I looked for a lesson from this book, and the lesson is that after selling "Krakatoa," you can write 400 pages of any disconnected horseshit and people will buy it just to say that they have nominally read the new Simon Winchester book. I doubt that even 10% of the people who bought this steaming pile of shit actually read it. They just wanted to feel like they bought the new Simon Winchester and that they are Good People because this is now on the bookshelf or the nightstand and they have some vague intent of reading it.

This book is fucking self-indulgent shit. Switch back to your visit to The Land in 1974, Great Leader. Give me several pages of pointless bullshit about your visit before you move back to Lewis and Clark actually doing something, but not because you found anything new but just because you cribbed from some book that was actually informed by their diaries.

I am appalled that this piece of shit book made it into paperback. I don't believe that even 10% of the people who read this book actually read it all the way through. I never realized the extent to which Simon Winchester just coasted on Krakatoa with people buying his shit out of intellectual obligation.

I feel so much better now about my new book, which rests on extensive footnotes and specific sourcing. I had been thinking previously that 'I would like to be the Simon Winchester of 19th Century NYC history,' but I would no longer like that. |

His writing is detailed and compelling because he is making shit up all along the way. The fact that he includes no footnotes even several books after hitting the NYT bestseller list and having a bully pulpit to insist on it only demonstrates it.

Simon Winchester is full of shit. I never thought that I would write those words. After spending the last four years working on my own book and then reading how he wrote "The Men Who United The States," I think I have to. His work is lazy bullshit that I find fault with in every few pages of unoriginal glorp.

---

I thought that I was trying to be the new Simon Winchester with this book. No. He is a lazy dipshit incapable of doing original research. There may be something to learn from re-reading Krakatoa, but it is probably more in marketing than in writing. This guy did not deserve to break through the way that he did.

Mark Kurlansky is probably more of a lesson. His shit with The Big Oyster was amazing. Cod was also good.

I have been learning by going through my beta reading process about who my readers are and what makes them tick.

My first round of beta readers was through the r/NYChistory subreddit. Those were really smart, well-educated people. What I learned from them was that I needed to cut a lot of fat from the first 30% of the book. Get to the main action faster. I cut 9,000 words and several entire chapters, including my favorite chapter of the entire book. And fuck, that one chapter could be a whole movie unto itself.

The new cut is much leaner. Gets to the action faster. Less flab in the main action.

I posted a request for betas with a description f the book to the r/thegildedage subreddit. This is a constituency that has about 40 unique visitors an hour. Within an hour I had 12 requests to read it which resulted in email addresses shared.

When you buy a book, which is more important? The $20 or so to buy it, or the time that you assign to actually reading it? I think that the time is more important than the money.

About a quarter of the people on this forum who saw it wanted to read the book during the first hour that it was up. The next day, 30 more asked to sign up before I cut it off.

A neat thing about getting beta readers on Reddit is that I can see their posts. About 80% of my betas between both forums are women who have undergraduate degrees, and in about a third of cases graduate degrees. These are women who are well-read and whom participate in a lot of fandoms.

The fandom of The Gilded Age is, for at least part of my book, the same world that I write about. There are thousands of them.

Then there are the people who are fans of the book, "The Gangs of New York."

I have many of the same characters. Theodore Allen is chief among them. I have an explanation of the Bowery Boys, and the supposed Dead Rabbits, and the killing of Bill Poole. It is the next thing for any reader of The Gangs of New York to read.

Martin Scorsese is currently shopping a series based on his film, "The Gangs of New York," and he will sell it. And there will be a network series on HBO or Prime or whatever that sells millions of people on the fandom of streetgangs of New York City interacting with politicians of New York. And when that first season ends, they will be desperate for more. And this book gives them more.

The women who are beta-testing The Hoboken Turtle Club are telling me that I can sell over 100,000 copies of this book.

The readers are out there. Between the viewers of The Gilded Age and The Gangs of New York, and the Civil War obsessives, and the 5,000 or so people who will read something about Presidents Arthur or Garfield, and the people who will pick the book up just because it says "Hoboken Turtle Club," and the people who will became engaged because of the interviews that I do over the radio or on podcasts, I WILL SELL 100,000 COPIES OF THIS BOOK.

I have the stories and the sources and I will do it. I will sell 100,000 copies of this book in hardback that I have spent thousands of hours researching and writing. It is tough to imagine right now, when I am figuring out how many days until I have to bitch about what SPIN magazine owes me. But I will sell 100,000 copies of this book and I will make enough money that my bills are paid while I write the sequel.

12:37 a.m. - 2023-03-11

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

previous - next

latest entry

about me

archives

notes

DiaryLand

contact

random entry

other diaries:

metonym
mnemosynea
pipersplace
jendix

0 comments so far