Happy February, Manuscript Workers!
This year, I’m planning to devote my first newsletter of each month to new books by Manuscript Works clients and readers. Every month I hope to feature a behind-the-scenes conversation with a writer I’ve worked with whose book is soon coming out. In these conversations we will try to probe some of the lesser-talked-about aspects of writing and publishing a scholarly book.
If you scroll down, you’ll also see a collection of new releases from scholars who have taken my programs, used The Book Proposal Book to write a proposal and land a contract, or simply benefited from reading this newsletter. If you have a forthcoming book to share, please drop a note to support@manuscriptworks.com so we can feature it in a future newsletter.
This month’s conversation is with Dr. Robert Drew, a professor of communication at Saginaw Valley State University (in my home state of Michigan). Rob is the author of Unspooled: How the Cassette Made Music Shareable, coming out next month from Duke University Press. Here’s a summary of his book from the Duke website:
Well into the new millennium, the analog cassette tape continues to claw its way back from obsolescence. New cassette labels emerge from hipster enclaves while the cassette’s likeness pops up on T-shirts, coffee mugs, belt buckles, and cell phone cases. In Unspooled, Rob Drew traces how a lowly, hissy format that began life in office dictation machines and cheap portable players came to be regarded as a token of intimate expression through music and a source of cultural capital. Drawing on sources ranging from obscure music zines to transcripts of Congressional hearings, Drew examines a moment in the early 1980s when music industry representatives argued that the cassette encouraged piracy. At the same time, 1980s indie rock culture used the cassette as a symbol to define itself as an outsider community. Indie’s love affair with the cassette culminated in the mixtape, which advanced indie’s image as a gift economy. By telling the cassette’s long and winding history, Drew demonstrates that sharing cassettes became an acceptable and meaningful mode of communication that initiated rituals of independent music recording, re-recording, and gifting.
Rob and I worked together on his book proposal first in 2019 and then on a revised version in 2020. I wanted to share Rob’s publication story here in part because it’s not the standard dissertation-to-first-book-on-the-tenure-track narrative we often hear.
Not only is Unspooled his second book, but he wrote it as a full professor at a teaching institution. I think his story will also interest anyone who has ever had a moment of panic when they find out someone else is writing a book on a similar topic. If you can relate to that (or the fear of it happening to you someday), please read on.
(This conversation has been transcribed and edited for length and clarity.)
Laura Portwood-Stacer: Thank you for making the time to speak today, Rob! I want to start by asking what motivated you to write this book. It’s not your first book, and you didn’t need to write this book for tenure or promotion because you were already a full professor. So what made you want to take on the project of writing it and trying to get it published?
Rob Drew: I’ll start by saying that the ideas behind this book started maybe thirty years ago, when I was in graduate school. My first book, Karaoke Nights: An Ethnographic Rhapsody, was published over twenty years ago, and my thinking for both books started around the same time. I took a lot of notes in the 1990s, and when I finished and published my karaoke book in the early 2000s, I planned to go on to something about cassettes. Originally the idea was mix tapes; that’s what I was fascinated with. Over the last twenty years I’ve been playing with these ideas about mix tapes and mix CDs, which eventually turned into a larger project about cassettes and independent music. It became a historical project, I might mention, which I had never done before. I was trained in ethnography and personal interviews.
So I didn’t suddenly in 2019 decide to write this book. They were ideas I had been playing with and evolving with in my own kind of muddle-headed way. I was also raising a family and I have a pretty heavy teaching load where I am. I like to get into projects and take a long time with them. That’s my M.O.
I didn’t need to write this book for my job. But I couldn’t imagine not writing it, because it’s part of who I am. I will keep writing for as long as my health and my sanity allow. It’s a passion. The word “amateur” comes from love, and I really do write books for the love of it. Around here I’m expected to do teaching and service. Scholarship is tolerated. So I didn’t write this book for any good, practical reason.
LPS: I think the love of it is a good reason! Your book is coming out with Duke University Press. Could you say a bit about how you landed there?
RD: Well here we can talk about the summer of 2019 when I first came to you as I was trying to work up a book proposal. I thought I had a pretty good proposal, and you were pretty ruthless. I don’t want to say ruthless. You were honest. You were really thoughtful and very direct and very to the point about what needed work. And you were right.
I took a year to work on the proposal and the book. I had a lot going on that year. I came back to you with a new draft of the proposal and an introduction chapter, which I hadn’t written with the first draft of the proposal. In the summer of 2020 you said it was much better, and that’s when I sent it to Duke. I did not expect Duke to publish it, but they were one of my top two choices. I had a specific series in mind, Sign Storage Transmission.
Duke has an online submission system, but I also contacted Jonathan Sterne, one of the editors of the series. We were acquainted from the conference circuit. We didn’t go to grad school together or anything, but one time he told me he liked my first book, so I thought it was worth reaching out to him. He made Ken Wissoker (the acquiring editor at Duke) aware of my proposal and a couple weeks later Ken asked for the manuscript.
I pretty much had the full manuscript written at that point. That’s another thing about my M.O. I don’t like the idea of getting an advance contract and then having to write the book. I like the idea of having a finished product. I don’t like to be indebted to people, and I don’t like risk. So even though I ended up having to do more revisions later, I did have the full manuscript ready for review when Ken asked for it.
This was during the first year of the pandemic, so the review process took quite a while. The reviews were pretty positive, though I still spent another year and a half revising after peer review. I was flabbergasted that they even took an interest, and I still am frankly.
LPS: Did you have to go through peer review again after you made those revisions?
RD: Yes. In the first round of reviews they both recommended publication but one review was more positive than the other. I got a conditional contract at that point. The feedback from the reviewers was super super helpful, as was yours. I mean, you know, you look at the feedback at first and you’re like, “oh no, I’m gonna have to do all this.” But then you’re really glad you made the cuts as well as the additions.
The second round of peer review, after I spent a year and a half revising the manuscript, went much faster and the reviews were both quite positive. I did a few additional things here and there to the final draft, but that was it. Then it went to the faculty editorial board of the press for final approval—about two years after I initially submitted the proposal and first draft of the manuscript—and then we all celebrated!
LPS: Is there anything you would want other authors to know about the process, whether first-time authors or scholars at a similar career stage as you?
RD: When it comes to this thing I care about—my book—I just think slow and steady wins the race. This is your life, and if you really care about something—if it’s not just something to get tenure or get promoted or whatever it is—then treat it seriously and give it the time it takes. People might look at my career and pace of publishing and think I’m very lazy or very slow, but I hope the proof is in the pudding. I think my book reflects all that time I took. This could easily sound vain, but I put a lot of stock in word choice and sentence structure and even things like not being boring. I don’t know if my book is going to sell at all beyond academics and their graduate students, but I like to think it’s a well-written, engaging book. I did write it as a book to be read. I did not write this book to go on a shelf or into a page count on a form for tenure.
LPS: Another book on cassette tapes came out from a different university press just recently. I don’t want to put you on the spot to talk about your feelings or anything, but could you talk about what that was like for you? I have so many people writing to me in a panic when they discover that another author is writing a similar book. They’re sure it means they won’t be able to find a publisher for theirs or they fear they’ll have to compete directly with that other author for readers and attention when the books come out.
RD: The other book (Marc Masters’ High Bias: The Distorted History of the Cassette Tape, released in 2023 by the University of North Carolina Press) is a different kind of book. It’s more of a popular crossover type book, written by a music critic. My book is more academic. Even though we’re drawing on some of the same materials, and he’s much more savvy about music than I am, I really do think of my book as more of a media studies book than a book about music. There’s a lot of music in my book and there are a lot of characters who come into my book—musicians and different people involved in the music industry—but the main character of my book is the cassette tape itself.
In some ways, the other book coming out has been a relief, because his book does things that mine doesn’t do. If someone approaches me with a question I can’t answer, I can send them to Marc. The two of us are actually going to be coming together, along with Jerry Kranitz who wrote yet another great recent book focusing on the 1980s cassette underground, for a joint online session with the Popular Music Books in Process speaker series next month.
So much gets published, and whatever your good idea is for a book topic, other people are going to have that same idea. In some ways, finding out that Marc had gotten a contract for his book—he got the contract prior to writing most of the manuscript—motivated me to get to work on mine. There have been a number of other books on cassettes that have come out in the past few years but mine is different.
LPS: I think it’s really helpful that you’ve figured out how your book is different from the others. You might be writing about the same kind of object, but you’re approaching it in a totally different way. And you might be speaking to different readerships as well. I also like that you said you are doing a joint session with the other author to promote both your books. Sometimes those opportunities only come your way if there are multiple books on similar topics. Your books might get reviewed together too, in venues that might not have published a review of just one new book on cassettes.
RD: Yeah, there was a little piece in the Guardian a few months ago in which both Marc and I are quoted. I think when people see a critical mass of work being done on a topic, they take interest. That was something you mentioned to me back in 2019 when I was writing my book proposal and already aware from Twitter that Marc was writing his book. In my book proposal, I included his book in my list of competing titles and I asked you whether it was a bad thing that this other guy is writing a book on the same topic and it might come out before mine. And you said, “no, it’s a good thing. It’s a good thing because it shows this topic is important. It’s something worth writing about. And if there are other books coming out about it, people are going to pay attention. This book may even help you get a contract.” And I did get a contract, so that worked out.
LPS: Can we talk about what you’ve been doing as far as promoting your book since it’s available for pre-order and officially releasing in a few weeks?
RD: I’m not good at social media. I’ve been sending personal notes to a lot of people. Duke gave me a set of postcards with the book’s cover on one side and the description on the other side, so I’ve been sending those out. It’s probably a little weird for people to receive these snail mail USPS notes at this point, but I often write something like “I’m using the postal service to promote this book just like we used to send mix tapes in the mail.” Certainly for me it’s a lot more fun, a lot more of a joy to send these things out than posting on social media.
LPS: I think that’s very fitting! An analog technology you can hold in your hand! It’s great Duke provided you with that. And I think it’s great you’re doing something you actually take joy in that might lead people to pay attention to your book.
RD: Honestly, if people pay attention to it, if they buy it, if they read it, that’s great. If not, I’m going to move on to something else. Either way, I feel good about it.
LPS: That’s a great attitude to have.
If you’d like to get a copy of Unspooled, you can pre-order it directly from Duke University Press (use code E24DREW to get 30% off). It’ll ship on or before March 5th.
More New Books by Manuscript Works Readers & Clients
Susanna L. Sacks’ Networked Poetics: The Digital Turn in Southern African Poetry (February 2024):
From the University of Massachusetts Press website:
Simultaneously transnational and local, poetry in the twenty-first century is produced across digital networks, shaped through local communities, and evaluated on a global scale. It might start on social media, where a video of a poet circulates and goes viral, gaining international attention without ever going through traditional modes of publication. In Networked Poetics, Susanna L. Sacks introduces readers to the southern African poetry scene in Malawi, Zimbabwe, and South Africa, illustrating how contemporary poetry is shaped, from inception to canonization, by the influence of digital media publication.
Kyle Edward Williams’ Taming the Octopus: The Long Battle for the Soul of the Corporation (February 2024):
From W.W. Norton & Company’s website:
Recent controversies around environmental, social, and governance (ESG) investing and “woke capital” evoke an old idea: the Progressive Era vision of a socially responsible corporation. By midcentury, the notion that big business should benefit society was a consensus view. But as Kyle Edward Williams’s brilliant history, Taming the Octopus, shows, the tools forged by New Deal liberals to hold business leaders accountable, such as the Securities and Exchange Commission, narrowly focused on the financial interests of shareholders. This inadvertently laid the groundwork for a set of fringe views to become dominant: that market forces should rule every facet of society. Along the way, American capitalism itself was reshaped, stripping businesses to their profit-making core.
Maeve McKeown’s With Power Comes Responsibility: The Politics of Structural Injustice (February 2024):
From the Bloomsbury Academic website:
What is structural injustice, and who ultimately bears responsibility for it? In answering these questions Maeve McKeown goes beyond the widely accepted narrative of unintended consequences and blameless participation to explain how power and responsibility truly function in today's world.
Drawing on case studies from sweatshops to climate change, McKeown identifies three types of structural injustice: the pure and unintended accumulation of disparate activities; the avoidable injustice that could be ameliorated by the powerful but nevertheless continues; the deliberate perpetuation of structural processes that benefit powerful political and economic agents. In each of these, the role of power is different which changes the allocation of responsibility.
Use discount code GLR AT5 at checkout to receive 20% off.
Nasima Selim’s Breathing Hearts: Sufism, Healing, and Anti-Muslim Racism in Germany (January 2024).
From the Berghahn Books website:
Sufism is known as the mystical dimension of Islam. Breathing Hearts explores this definition to find out what it means to ‘breathe well’ along the Sufi path in the context of anti-Muslim racism. It is the first book-length ethnographic account of Sufi practices and politics in Berlin and describes how Sufi practices are mobilized in healing secular and religious suffering. It tracks the Desire Lines of multi-ethnic immigrants of color, and white German interlocutors to show how Sufi practices complicate the post secular imagination of healing in Germany.
Please use discount code SELI1982 to receive a 50% discount on print copies when purchased directly from Berghahn Books’ website.
Thanks for reading, and I’ll see you next week with an update about the future of this newsletter!
Thanks for this, Laura. Very informative! So much respect to Robert for pursuing his vision. In a weird way, I think, working on a passion project (i.e. something not directly or immediately career-enhancing) can take the stress off, since there's less pressure to compromise for the sake of publication; you're okay with waiting until everything's in place. In this case, the slow and steady approach does feel appropriate. A good reminder for those worried that they need to move fast, fast, fast!
One question: Robert said he knew he wanted to submit a full MS to publishers, not a proposal. In your experience, how common is this approach in the university press world? Obviously in the trade world it's much more common to submit a proposal, and lots of agents and/or publishers won't even look at an MS until they've seen (and liked) a proposal first.
I enjoyed this interview very much. For a start, the book is on a topic close to my heart; I just gave my annual 'format theory' lecture to students on my Popular Music & Media module yesterday (and will be adding Rob's book to the reading list for future years!). Also, the points about taking time, writing with the love of the 'amateur' and not getting thrown by other publications on the same topic all resonate. Some good tips here.