Presenting... A LITTLE HISTORY
New name! "Official relaunch"! Read on!
I began this newsletter in July 2022, a couple months before William Morrow & Co. published BLOOD & INK, my authorial debut and a good excuse to start building an email list. (Shoulda thought of that sooner.) Earlier in the year, I’d profiled Substack for Vanity Fair (a reporting exercise that involved a few phone calls and text chains with PATTI FUCKING SMITH, who is every bit as nice and cool as you’d imagine, but I digress!), so the platform was fresh in my mind as I set about the shameless, strenuous, anxiety-inducing hustle of first-time-at-the-rodeo book promotion. I figured that, at the very least, Substack would be a useful gadget in my toolbox during book launch, and I’d see where things went from there. Why not? Nothing to lose. As a placeholder, I titled it BLOOD & INK+ (very au courant with the trend of tacking pluses onto media brands) and figured I could always change the name in the future.
Two years and forty-seven installments later, it’s time. Not just for a name change, but to formalize things. It’s been rewarding to create my own little niche and watch it grow, slowly but steadily, week after week. (And frankly there really is something satisfying and frictionless about using Substack, which makes it sound like I’ve got a mouth full of Kool-Aid but whatever.) I’ve come to think of this newsletter as a destination for people who love to read and write the type of stuff that I love to read and write: juicy, page-turning, painstakingly-researched historical narrative nonfiction, whether it’s a Jazz Age mega-mystery, a World War II espionage thriller, a Victorian-era tabloid trial, an 18th Century shipwreck, you get the idea. If you’re the type of person who loves timeworn tales of murder, mayhem, scandal, spycraft, warfare, invention, adventure; who can’t put down bangers like THE DEVIL IN THE WHITE CITY or KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON, then you’re in the right place. Welcome to….
Don’t be fooled—that’s just some stock template I customized on Canva. But I think it does the trick? FYI re: the name, it’s a lyric from one of my favorite songs by one of my favorite musicians. And it lets you know what you’re gonna get when you open an email from me. (If I told you some of the other names I was mulling you’d be happy I went with this one.)
The newsletter will be anchored by two rubrics already familiar to anyone who’s been with me for a beat…
Pub Day: The first Tuesday of each month, you’ll get a roundup of the latest books in the genre at hand, coming out over the course of the month. (Tuesdays, as I’m sure many of you know, are the days when new releases hit shelves, aka “pub day.”) You can check out previous installments here.
Source Notes: Heretofore, this feature has been a bit sporadic. But going forward I’d like to try and get one out the door at least once a month. It’s a fun, breezy, conversational Q&A wherein I gab with historical nonfiction authors—often those with current works to promote but not necessarily—about how their books came together: the conception, the process, the research, the discoveries, the visiting of age-old buildings and scouring of dusty library archives, etc. I’ve been fortunate enough so far to have hosted a bunch of top shelf writers—David Grann, Kate Winkler Dawson, Lisa Belkin, Damien Lewis, Helene Stapinski, to name a few—and there are lots more to come. You can find the full roster here.
What else? I’m thinking about a recurring roundup/link-dump of stuff on my radar that’s relevant to the spirit of the newsletter: articles I come across, podcasts I’ve been listening to, book reviews of note, news about book-to-Hollywood deals, the latest in streaming period dramas, and whatever else comes over the transom, really. Plus I’ll of course keep you updated on all of my external projects; there are some exciting ones in the works that I hope I can tell you about before long, knock on wood.
Also! If all goes well, I’d love to publish my own serialized historical narratives here—stories from the vault that aren’t going to be a next book or magazine article or podcast, but are nonetheless yearning to be told. I did one of these for shits and giggles back in December—“A True Christmas Murder Mystery”—and it was a lot of fun. But before I get too far ahead of myself, I need to build a large-and-engaged-enough audience to make it worth the amount of legwork that goes into crafting such features. So if you wouldn’t you mind forwarding this email to all your friends and telling them to subscribe, that would be great.
On that note, A LITTLE HISTORY will remain free for now. But I envision adding a paid component if and when it feels like a) the demand is there and b) I have the bandwidth to add enough subscriber-only bells and whistles to justify asking my most loyal readers for, say, five dollars a month? Until then, I hope you’ll stay along for the ride. More soon…