What It's Like to Publish a Book

Media is all-important, but the book tour is largely for the author's vanity. I'll still enjoy this one after the pandemic denied me the opportunity last time.

As my faithful readers know, this past Tuesday my new book Lawless, which was conceived around the same time this Substack, came out. Like any author, I’m relieved finally to have this out in the world but, also like every other author, I’m anxious to see how it does—both commercially and critically. So especially on pub day, but also every day since, I’ve been repeatedly hitting refresh on my Amazon author’s page to see its overall sales rank and its rank in three assigned categories.

For the record, Lawless began in the low 2000s and in the top 5 in “Legal Education,” “United States Judicial Branch,” and “Conservatism and Liberalism,” and has climbed as high as 1,015 and #1 in each of those categories. I have no idea what this means for overall sales or bestseller lists, though currently if you pull it up on Amazon, it does have a “bestseller” tag. And as for the critics, thus far it’s been reviewed in the Washington Examiner (twice!) and Jewish Insider, with many more expected.

“But what about the book tour,” people ask, because that’s how you really sell books and get attention, right? Well, actually, what sells books these days is podcasts, TV (especially Fox News), and social media. So I made the rounds of all those, starting with Megyn Kelly on Monday and continuing through Ben Shapiro, Hugh Hewitt, Charles C.W. Cooke, Victor Davis Hanson, and on. I also wrote and published a fair bit in conjunction with the book release, including a special Sunday feature in the New York Post and a week-long guest-blogging stint at the Volokh Conspiracy. Broadcast media attention was consumed by the California wildfires and then confirmation hearings—hey, I can talk about Pete Hegseth!—but I finally got on Fox yesterday with Journal Editorial Report.