Sometimes I circle a distant date on my calendar, and it seems to never arrive. Monday, July 17, was such a date, and, praise be, it finally came. History Press has officially published my new book, Condemned for Love in Old Virginia: The Lynching of Arthur Jordan, and it’s now available from your favorite seller.

To mark the occasion, I offer two takeaways:

1. Writing a book is hard.

If you divide the job of writing a book into two principal parts, gathering and writing, my lengthy newspaper career was good preparation for the first but less helpful for the second.

When I set out to gather information for this book, I felt like a carpenter strapping on a tool belt. I had what I needed to accomplish the task. In the courthouse, I knew how to trace land ownership back in time. I knew to mine the footnotes in other’s works. I had loaded microfilm on a reader. I was comfortable sitting in a stranger’s living room for an interview. And I knew that librarians are the best people on earth.

I knew I could do the research, but writing the book was a challenge. The typical newspaper story I wrote was maybe 500 words. From assignment to publication was usually a day or two. Maybe once or twice a year, I would work on a long-term project that lasted for weeks. And I was happy if I built my stories on the backs of two or three good sources.

This book was so much more. The word count topped 30,000, a modest amount compared to other books but a mountain for me. As for sources, I stopped counting at 150.

The book required that I ask and answer questions I usually didn’t consider when writing for a newspaper: How do I assemble this much material into a readable whole? Who are the main characters, and do I know enough to portray them accurately? Was there a dramatic scene to open with? How common was the racial prejudice that Arthur Jordan and Elvira Corder experienced? How common was lynching in 1880 Virginia? How do I deal with gaps in the historic record? Could farm life in Fauquier and especially the county’s unique landscape be “characters” in the story?  What role, if any, did slavery play? How do I end the book?

These questions give hint to the main difference between writing for a newspaper and writing this book. Time. I answered all of the questions, but it took time. A newspaper story took hours or days to complete. This book took years, almost five of them.    

2. Book authors work cheap.

I’ve been told not to write about this topic, that it makes me seem like a whiner. But the issue has bothered me since publication of my first book, so here goes.

It bothers me how the publishing business treats the book author. I compare it to being the groom at a wedding. The author is essential to the proceedings. He or she is the creator, the one who begins the publishing process, often investing considerable time, money and effort in the task. But once the author finishes the book and signs a contract with a publisher, he becomes a minor character. Like the groom, he’s told, “Stand over there; we’ll get to you in a minute.”

The publisher decides which portions of the text to use, what the front and back covers will look like, the title, when the book will reach the public, its price, who will sell the book, and how, what and when the author will be paid. The writer may be consulted on these points, and even get to argue them, but, as the contract states, the publisher has final say.

This question of pay is the one that surprised me the most. I soon learned that authors have no market power, which accounts for their reduced status. When the proceeds from the sale of a book are divided, the author stands third in line behind the publisher and retailer.

Local retailers have offered to sell my books if I supplied them. This has happened three times, and all three offered what is apparently a standard 60/40 split, with 60 percent of the cover price going to the author. I refused two of them and wished I had refused the third. My reason was that after buying books from the publisher, I earned about $1 for each sale, compared to about $8 for the retailer.

I’ve also learned that royalty payments from the publisher arrive up to nine months after they’re earned. If a publisher needed an electrician to repair one of the presses, would they say, “We’ll pay you in nine months”? Probably not. So why are authors treated this way?

I also was surprised to learn that two author friends earn royalties only after hundreds of copies of their books are sold. How does a partnership survive this kind of treatment? Again, the answer is market power. There are too many writers like me, writers who are delighted to be published. Just delighted.