I know the rule: Don’t draw conclusions from a small sample size. But I’m tempted to do so, given my experience with two types of publishers, a commercial publisher and an academic one.

I see the one, the commercial publisher, as similar to a rocket-docket court system: Move ’em in, move ’em out. The other, the academic publisher, is more like Flash, the sloth DMV clerk in Disney’s Zootopia.

My experience with the two types of publishers began in July 2020. That’s when Prof. Gianluca De Fazio at James Madison University invited me to write about Arthur Jordan’s death for a book he was planning about lynching in Virginia.

I wrote a 7,000-word essay, titled Impossible Love: An Interracial Romance in Post-Reconstruction Virginia. My story was one of about 11 De Fazio collected from fellow academics, historians and newspaper people like me.

He took his project to the University of Virginia Press in Charlottesville. They liked the idea and offered him a contract. Each of the contributors also received contracts. I happily signed mine in February 2021.

Then everything seemed to stop. It’s not clear to me why the process was so slow. One roadblock was a reviewer who had agreed to read and comment on the work but did not do so. Another reviewer had to be found. I also got the impression that U.Va. Press is a busy place, and that new books move slowly through its system.

In the meantime, I wrote a much longer version of the Jordan story, more than 30,000 words, and offered it to History Press, the company that published my first book. They liked it, and I signed a contract with them in October 2022.

I told History Press about my chapter in the pending U.Va. Press book, and they shrugged it off. They said, in effect, our readers are not the same as U.Va.’s readers.

And so, I entered again the rocket-docket system that is History Press publishing. Within nine months, I had a finished book in hand, Condemned for Love in Old Virginia: The Lynching of Arthur Jordan. I’m very proud of it and pleased with the work that History Press did.

As for the U.Va. Press book, there’s good news to report. Their representative told Prof. De Fazio recently that his book will be published in February/March 2024. It includes my chapter on Arthur Jordan.

Prof. De Fazio has done the introduction for the book. W. Fitzhugh Brundage, a University of North Carolina professor and noted lynching scholar, has written the afterword. The title is Lynching in Virginia: Racial Terror and its Legacy.

I’m pleased and proud to be part of the project. The story of Arthur Jordan’s murder will soon have a much wider audience.