Taylor H Lunsford

I published my first book, The Myth of the Thucydides Trap, in July 2024 through Amazon Kindle Publishing. But this decision came after almost a decade of pushing on the door of traditional publishing.

The inspiration to write a book first hit me sometime in 2014, when I was a young soldier studying Mandarin Chinese at an Army schoolhouse. Acquiring the Chinese language spurred a new interest in East Asian history even as it gave me access to more sources on the subject, and I felt a whole new field of study opening up for me. Using what I’d already learned in my undergraduate history work, I threw myself at books, academic articles, and primary sources, which I was able to read in the original language for the first time.

As I learned more over the next few years, I gradually focused in on the period from about 500 BC to 500 AD, which is familiar in the Western framework as the era of classical Greece and Rome, but was also the age of the warring kingdoms and early empires in China. These civilizations, situated at opposite ends of the Eurasian landmass, underwent many similar developments over a run of nearly one thousand years. As I dug further into the subject, I learned that a team of distinguished historians, many of them working at Stanford, had been leading a massive research project on “comparative empires” for the past decade, and that Roman-Han comparisons were one of the most fruitful areas for study they had yet identified.

I knew I was on to something. Greco-Roman history is one of the most popular and widely-read nonfiction genres (as we all know, millions of men think about the Roman Empire every day). China’s rising geopolitical importance is driving increased interest in Chinese history and culture. Leading experts were producing groundbreaking new comparisons between Rome and China that had obvious signficance for world history and even for modern issues, but none of them had the time or the inclination to write a mass-audience book that would take their findings beyond the academy. It was (and still is) clear to me that a great history book on this subject could be the next great nonfiction bestseller.

So, I got to work. I wrote a detailed, annotated outline. I drew up a full book proposal, which included comparisons to related titles that had performed well in recent years. I drafted (and revised, and rewrote, and revised again) my sample chapters to show an agent or a publisher. I queried many literary agents, and even had the opportunity to recieve in-person feedback from an agent at a writing convention in Seattle.

Through this process, which played out over the better part of ten years, I learned a great deal about the publishing industry. I learned about the economics of the industry, about the timelines from an initial deal to actual publication, and about the processes that agents, editors, and publishing executives follow when choosing what to publish. And by the end of this process, I decided that self-publishing was a better path for me. For now, at least.

Why? Let’s start with the first step to traditional publishing: finding a literary agent. Almost all publishers- especially the ones you would most want to work with- do not consider any book that is not represented by a professional agent. This means that agents play an important gatekeeping role, filtering out the many, many book proposals that obviously don’t fit the needs of traditional publishing and which would therefore be a waste of time for a publisher to review.

Note that their job is not necessarily to filter out the bad from the good, but rather to think about the bottom line. Will this book make enough money for the agent and publisher to be worth the opportunity cost of representing something else, something potentially more lucrative? Some good books bomb, and some bad books become bestsellers.

I learned that at this stage, nonfiction authors are at a serious disadvantage compared to fiction authors. If you’re a novelist, your agent (and publisher) will be concerned with two main questions: 1) which genre your book would fall into, and 2) whether readers of that genre would enjoy your book. You don’t need to bring much else to the table aside from a well-written and reasonably marketable book. There are no ‘qualifications’ for writing fiction.

For nonfiction authors, especially those of us working with history, social sciences, or other academic fields, that’s simply not enough. We must also bring impeccable credentials (such as a doctorate or even a professorship in your field), a pre-existing audience of tens or even hundreds of thousands of followers, or even both, in order to be seriously considered.

The reasons for this are simple. There are so many academic fields and subfields that no agent or editor can possibly become enough of an expert in them to consistently tell good nonfiction from bad. Taking my case as an example- the only people in the world who could fact-check my Roman-Han history book themselves are all tenured professors with much more important things to do. Literary agents won’t even try. So instead, they have to rely on outward signifiers of your credibility (usually in the form of a doctorate from a prestigious university). Likewise, they have no idea what the readers of each specific field and subfield will like or find interesting, so they have to rely on the size of your pre-existing audience (measurable as things like social media followers, or audience sizes at events you host) as a yardstick.

These reasons are perfectly sensible, and it’s hard to imagine how it could realistically work differently. But I find this protects agents and publishers from financial risk at the cost of depriving readers of many, many good books that they would enjoy and learn from, but which are either not comprehensible to the traditional publishing system or else don’t seem lucrative enough for the publishers to bother with.

University publishing houses are a little better, since they have the expertise to check for quality in a way that commercial publishers can’t, and they have the stomach for small runs of books on specialized topics. But they are still largely closed to everyone who is not closely affiliated with a major university and has not devoted years of their lives to producing peer-reviewed academic articles. I investigated this option (even reaching out to scholars like Ian Morris and Walter Schiedel, who very graciously responded to several of my emails on the matter) and found that, in order to have a reasonable path to academic publishing, I would most likely have to embark on the 5-or-so-year process of obtaining a doctorate first, then give it another shot.

For those who aren’t familiar, pursuing a doctorate in any field generally entails quitting your day job to throw yourself into exceedingly long hours at the university, for very low pay, for half a decade. If it were any simpler, if the personal sacrifices required were any more manageable, I would have already done it by now. But for a working parent like myself, it is unimaginable to make a commitment like this just for a chance- far from a guarantee- of getting a book published, a book which may net me little more than an advance of a few thousand dollars.

It is simply not good for readers or for writers that the simple act of publishing a book in a field you’re passionate about requires leaping over so many hurdles and barreling past so many gatekeepers. It wasn’t possible for me to jump through those hoops, but I knew that I had something worth writing about and worth sharing. I needed to find another path, at least for now. This realization led me to self-publishing, and finally to Amazon Kindle Publishing (AKP).

What was the catch? Next post, I’ll have more to say about the tradeoffs that come with self-publishing, and why this is not a decision to be made lightly. But the results speak for themselves- I spent ten years trying to get one book through the traditional publishing path, then I published two books in the space of just one year of self-publishing. Books that I’m proud of, and that I’m happy to have shared with an audience, however modest. I’ll have more to say on this soon.