What is it like to have a book in print?

My first book was published in February. For an academic, this is an entirely normal event: to progress in most humanities fields, you need a book. But it’s also a big deal. I started the book in 2008, as my doctoral dissertation, and it was a big part of my life for a long time. Now it’s finished. It’s out there. I don’t have to (or get to?) work on it anymore. Since it’s an odd feeling, I wanted to share some thoughts about what it’s like.

The biggest difference is mental. I’ve been thinking about children’s moral tales and the history of the novel for the better part of a decade, and constantly had that topic in the back of my mind: I read every new work of scholarship through that lens, looking for arguments I felt myself in conversation with, or new theories that might be relevant to my argument, or mentions of some relatively obscure tale I was writing about. It’s an attitude that’s hard to turn off, and I still find myself considering roads not taken.

To give just one example: Jesse Rosenthal’s forthcoming Good Form: The Ethical Experience of the Victorian Novel argues that “when Victorians discussed the moral dimensions of reading novels, they were also subtly discussing the genre’s formal properties.” That’s pretty close to the conclusion at which my book arrives — albeit, from a different direction. While I argue that children’s moral tales shaped Victorian reading habits, Jesse links those habits to Victorian moral philosophy. My book has quite a bit to say about moral intuition (my dissertation’s outside reader was Jonathan Haidt, a psychologist who worked in that field), but one of the manuscript’s reviewers found the moral psychology part a bit extraneous. I wonder if Good Form might have helped me integrate it a little better, and at the very least it would have bolstered the historical argument. Now that my book is in a fixed, unchangeable form, I’ll never know.

Greg Colomb, an important mentor to me, was fond of saying, “perfection is the enemy of finished.” New scholarship will keep appearing, and I’ll keep thinking about how I might have incorporated it into my argument. But I’m learning to let it go.

And a sense of freedom comes with publication, too. Not having the moral tale always in mind means I can start another project. While I was on the job market, I had a “second project” about Victorian psychologies of learning. I made fitful progress — a couple conference presentations, some blog posts, lots of miscellaneous notes and scattered paragraphs. I still like the idea, but it was a “second project” for so long that it still feels secondary. As I’ve freed myself from constantly thinking about the moral tale, I find myself pursuing another project that interests me more.

Just because the book is out, though, doesn’t mean I stop thinking about it. Instead, my relationship with it has changed: now that I’ve written it, I’m supposed to promote it.

Self-promotion comes naturally to some people. I have a friend who, at a conference we both attended, encouraged others to ask their university library to purchase his book, even checking WorldCat to make sure they’d done so (and following up if they hadn’t).

Many academics are uncomfortable with that level of self-promotion, even while recognizing its necessity. (The issue, like everything, affects some more than others). Some at the conference were put off by my friend’s insistence, especially when he brought it up a second (or third) time. I recognize the importance of self-promotion, but I’m also sort of uncomfortable with it. I tweet about my work when it gets published (and write posts like this one), but I don’t take a sustained or systematic approach.

Luckily, publishers do. My book is published with the University of Tennessee Press, who put me in touch with their marketing assistant and an event coordinator (“events” in this case means sending out review copies; the global book tour presumably comes later). They make sure university libraries have the book, distribute copies to reviewers, advertise it in various venues, help me target some prizes to submit to, and send books to personally relevant publications like my college magazine (which will feature the book). Their work helped me realize that others have a stake in the book as well, which takes some of the “self” out of the self-promotion.

Last but not least, there’s an element of ego: I have a book out. You can buy it on Amazon (don’t ask me where the used copies come from). It just feels good.

Do you have a first book our, or coming out? Or do you remember your first book? How does (did) it feel? Is it different with a second (or fifth) book?