books – Karen L. Cox

books, Historians, Publishing, Uncategorized, Writing

The Fruit of Preparation and Opportunity

January 14, 2023by Karen L. Cox2 Comments

What a week! When I wrote my book No Common Ground: Confederate Monuments and the Ongoing Fight for Racial Justice (UNC Press, 2021) I could not have anticipated the opportunities that have come my way–from speaking engagements to being a talking head in documentaries to invitations to contribute essays in other books. Sometimes I think I’m lucky, but I also think of luck in the way that Oprah does. “I believe luck is preparation meeting opportunity.”

A year or so ago, I was presented with opportunities–for which I’ve prepared most of my adult life–and they all bore fruit this past week.

325305809_1414362125968434_1700213639048886674_n The first was to contribute an essay to a book about myths in American history, edited by Princeton historians Kevin Kruse and Julian Zelizer. I wrote about Confederate monuments as an expression of the Lost Cause myth. This past week that book, Myth America: Historians Take on the Biggest Legends and Lies About Our Past, became an instant best seller on the New York Times bestseller list for nonfiction books, coming in at #8.

The second was to be interviewed for a documentary on Stone Mountain that was being 324560266_503042738633123_9033108230684294788_n produced by the Atlanta History Center (AHC) and its VP of Digital Storytelling, Kristian Weatherspoon. This past week I got to attend the film’s premiere at the AHC. It was such a wonderful event and a real celebration of the work that public history institutions can do, plus I got to meet a personal heroine of mine, Sally Yates, the former United States Deputy Attorney General and Acting Attorney General who stood up to former President Trump’s so-called “Muslim ban.” She was dismissed for doing so, but I regarded it as an act of moral courage. We need more of that in today’s world.

Then last, but not least, I just received my copy of the re-released book White Terror: The Ku Klux Klan Conspiracy and Southern Reconstruction by Allen W. Trelease. It was a book I campaigned to have placed back in print, because it remains relative to historical discussions about Reconstruction but also to our contemporary understanding of domestic terrorism. It was an honor for me to write the foreword since Dr. Trelease was a professor and mentor while I was a student in the master’s program in history at UNC Greensboro.

I’ve worked hard for what I’ve accomplished, but sometimes it feels like an embarrassment of riches. This week was one of those weeks.

books, Historians, Publishing, Writing

Dixie’s Daughters almost never happened

July 20, 2018May 26, 2020by Karen L. CoxLeave a Comment

Confederacy Daughters Unveil Monument — Members of the UDC gathered at the Confederate monument in Arlington National Cemetery, located in Jackson Circle. ca. 1913, Courtesy of Getty Images

I want to share a story about my 2003 book Dixie’s Daughters: The United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Preservation of Confederate Culture (University Press of Florida), which will be issued as a revised edition with a scheduled publication date of January 2019. Woot!

When I drafted the new preface, I thought it would be interesting to provide a little background on the publishing history of Dixie’s Daughters. My justification for including it was that I wanted all of you out there who have struggled to get something published or may end up in that struggle, particularly graduate students and junior scholars who follow my work on Twitter and elsewhere, to know that you aren’t alone.

The struggle is real!!

My own road was such a bumpy one, I despaired that it might never happen. On the advice of my editor, however, what follows will not be in the revised edition. Nonetheless, I want to share it with you, in case it is of some comfort or inspiration.

So, for your amusement and edification, here it is:

“It may come as a surprise that Dixie’s Daughters was almost never published. Despite the fact that no less than twelve university presses expressed interest in publishing my dissertation, it was rough going. Three different university presses received the manuscript at various points in time. The editor at the first press I sent the manuscript to never sent it out to readers. Perhaps it served as a very robust coaster for whatever was in his coffee cup. A second more prestigious press did due diligence and I received readers’ reports. One of them supported publication, while the other demurred, citing scholarship that I should engage. The only problem was that said scholarship had yet to be published and remained a work-in-progress. A third regional press took it in for a proposed series that never materialized. After revisions, this press sat on the manuscript for an entire year, only to box it up and mail it to me with the note that it was no longer of interest. At my wit’s end, I reached out to Marjorie Spruill who suggested I work with Meredith Babb at the University Press of Florida. Meredith laid out the process for getting the book published, so I took the boxed up manuscript that had been returned to me and mailed it to her. Unchanged. Within two months I had the readers’ reports and a book contract and, it turned out, a new tenure-track job with the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.”

And the rest, as the saying goes, is history.

books, Publishing, Writing

Anticipation: Waiting for a Book’s Release

July 2, 2017May 26, 2020by Karen L. CoxLeave a Comment

Whether you’re a fan of Carly Simon or The Rocky Horror Picture Show, you are familiar with the word “anticipation.” In song, it refers to waiting for a lover, but for the writer, it’s the anticipation of a book’s release. And for scholars, the wait seems like a lifetime.

c635f6d503f5547578e0748886296821ea804ec159294e725fbc524f3454920c Consider, for example, my forthcoming book Goat Castle: A True Story of Murder, Race, and the Gothic South, which comes out October 9, 2017. I finished a draft of the manuscript on April 30, 2016, nearly four years after I began my research. (I will offer a separate post on why it takes time for scholars to complete a manuscript.)

Over the summer, I revised the draft through a back and forth with my editor. Then, in August 2016, I submitted the “final” draft of the manuscript to my press.

At that point, it was sent out to two reviewers–specialists who can provide feedback and critique to assess what works and where I, as the author, might find ways to improve or expand certain sections of the book. This part of the process, while scheduled for two months, can take more time given the already busy schedules of the reviewers. In my case, it took three months to get the reports, after which I responded to any necessary changes and by November I had the final contract.

Now it goes into the copy editing phase. A professional copy editor pores over the manuscript to correct errors of grammar, suggest word choices, and ask questions. Mine was so terrific, I refer to her as the “fox terrier of copy editors.” And I mean that as a compliment, because she rooted out errors that I would never have seen. After I receive the copy edited manuscript, then I have to fix all of the errors and resubmit it to the press.

Almost done? Not quite. Now the book needs an index. Some of my colleagues in the history world do this part themselves, since hiring a professional indexer costs money. I don’t have the patience for this kind of tedious work, so I pay up. More time goes by, the index gets done, I delete or ask questions about the final result, and now there’s an index.

At this point, we are about seven months in since I submitted the manuscript, and nearly a year since the original draft was completed. Along the way, I must also complete a log of images and illustrations, and get permissions from various repositories to use them.

Now we’re rolling!

Next stop: book jacket. I’ve written about that process here. That’s the time when you realize that this is going to be a book. But, we’re still four months out!

That means it’s time for the publicity team to help you kick this thing into high gear. And marketing is doing its job, too. This is where an author can help herself and the press by assisting with the book’s promotion on social media. I do this through Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and this website. You are not a press’s only author, and in the case of university presses, they have a limited budget. So, do your part and let there be no shame in your game. (I’ll be posting about that, too.)

anticipation-cat-oh-pleeeeease-let-me-read-it-now As of this writing, the book is three months out. But I can see the light at the end of the tunnel. All of the online retailers (Amazon, Barnes & Noble, IndieBound, Powell’s ) have the book listed. Now we wait. And by we, I mean me, my family, my friends, the many wonderful people who assisted me in the research of my book, and so many others who ask: when will the book be out? And why does it take so long? I hope this post helps you understand.

Uncategorized

Book Covers, Design Choices, and the Author?

April 10, 2017April 22, 2017by Karen L. Cox5 Comments

Note: This post primarily applies to university presses, since this is where I’ve published.

The design of a book cover should convey the essence of what’s inside and intrigue potential readers (read: buyers). As an author, I’m interested in how a designer visualizes the title and the ideas I’ve expressed in a book I’ve written or edited. This can be both exciting (“The designer got it!”) or worrisome (“Whoa, that’s really off the mark!”). It’s a process that I didn’t pay much attention to with my first book, and one I am far more invested in at this point in my career.

Consider the design of Dixie’s Daughters: The United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Preservation of Confederate Culture, published in 2003. I didn’t have any quibbles with the font and the designer tried to incorporate some element of Confederate symbolism in the reddish bar below the photograph by adding stars. Stars and bar, anyone? There’s also a Confederate gray, one might say.

The photograph, one I found, is from a girls’ school in Texas where the students wore Confederate-inspired uniforms and are all standing at attention with rifles cast over their left shoulders, as though they were members of the CSA. This conveyed a theme in my book, which is that it was women who took on the cause of Confederate memory and, in a sense, they were soldiers in the Lost Cause.

The only issue I had with the cover was that the initial gray color in the title muted my name and it couldn’t be seen. This was upsetting, since it was my first book. It has since been corrected.

My second book Dreaming of Dixie: How the South Was Created in American Popular Culture came out in 2011. A lot had changed since 2003. I was a more mature scholar and while I was open to the designer’s interpretation, it turned out that I needed to weigh in on this decision.

Because there were hundreds of songs written about the South by Tin Pan Alley lyricists, there was an equally large number of sheet music designs from which to draw from. The art of Tin Pan Alley “Dixie songs” were, as you might expect, rich in color and design. Like a book cover, the sheet music art was intended to convey the story told by the song, so the designer had plenty to draw from.

Some of the covers, however, should come with a warning: “Beware of racist caricatures!” It should be implicit, really, but for some reason the initial design for this book actually drew from one of those racist covers. That was when I said “hold up!” The designer clearly misunderstood the implicit message.

The revised design got it right, because this was a book about how the South had been romanticized in American popular culture prior to the advent of television. Here’s Miss Southern Belle strumming her banjo, sitting on some oversized cotton bolls and gazing out on a bucolic southern landscape. Even the clouds look like cotton. The art work is adapted from the sheet music for the song “The Whole World Comes From Dixie (When They Play That Dixie Tune).” No problems with seeing my name here.

My latest book, which presumes there’ll be another out in the ether, is Goat Castle: A True Story of Murder, Race, and the Gothic South. It comes out in October, but I’ve already got a jacket design, because marketing! (Speaking of marketing. . . reviewers, book bloggers, librarians, and other avid readers can now request to see the galleys on NetGalley.)

It’s a true crime story that drew on my skills as a historian, but it is written to be accessible to a broader audience. Set in Depression-era Natchez, Mississippi, it offers insight into the decline of the Old South and southern families, but also about the Jim Crow South and the racial justice that sent an innocent woman named Emily Burns to one of the most notorious prisons in the region at the time, the Mississippi State Penitentiary, better known as Parchman.

This book is very personal to me and so I really wanted the cover to reflect something of the southern gothic drama that unfolded that year, which resulted in national headlines. I also wanted to recognize Emily Burns, who family members called “Sister,” since she was the other victim in this crime. She had to be on the cover. It had taken me five years to find a photograph of her and, more to the point, up until now, community memory had virtually erased her from the story.

First take on the design? No Emily. “It didn’t work. It was confusing. Looks like she was the one murdered,” I was told. “We can put her on the back cover.” No, no, no. This perpetuates her place in the story as being in the background. No. I also worried about the font of the title, so I pushed back. Next take: New font, Emily, and two of the other principals in the case. Much better. Then I gave consideration to the original font design, because I was wrong. It was right on the money, because the font had been adapted from a ticket to Goat Castle (also known as “Glenwood”) in the 1930s. You’ll have to buy the book to learn why there were tickets to Goat Castle.

The final take on the design pushed all of the buttons–southern gothic, image of Goat Castle, the two white principals Dick Dana and Octavia Dockery, but Emily “Sister” Burns was there, too. There was also the font that drew from the ticket. Success!

I’m not suggesting that an author be involved in design. In my case, I’m a historian and so just as I wouldn’t want a designer to correct me about history, it works the same in reverse. At the same time, the book represents you and your work, so when the situation merits your involvement, I believe that you can and should have a honest conversation with your press. Be willing to compromise, however, because your press is responsible for marketing your book.

Feel free to share your own experiences in the comment section below.