interviews with publishing industry experts. we'll also give you updates on current nonfiction authors and books. the latest book reviews. and we'll talk about the current non-food auction books featured on c-span's book tv. in this edition of about books, we'll talk with a software salesman and first time author who self-published title is a book about writing a book. but first, here are some of the latest news from the publishing world. well, amid the ongoing controversy surrounding the college board advanced placement course in african american studies, the chicago based publishing house haymarket books is offering free ebooks on the subject of black history. the independent book publisher specifically pointed to a florida republican governor, ron desantis, and his objections to the college board's moves as the reason behind its moves. quote, the racist governor of florida continues to escalate his attacks on the freedom to learn and teach history. haymarket said in a release. quote, we know that books can be dangerous to those in power, especially when they're in the hands of folks who are organizing to fight for liberation. that's why we publish them, and that's why they're trying to ban them. the three e-book titles that haymarket is offering for free download are from black lives matter to black liberation by keeanga-yamahtta taylor. black lives matter at school by jesse hagopian and tanisha jones and 1919 by eve ewing. well, several of books by politicians and public figures continue to headline nonfiction in bestseller lists. in the early weeks of 2023. the latest wall street journal bestseller list includes former secretary of state mike pompeo's never give an inch. former first lady michelle obama is the light we carry. and prince harry's spare, which sold over 3 million copies in its first week and became the fastest selling nonfiction book of all time, according to the guinness book of world records. and this from a recent story in the idaho statesman newspaper. a proposed bill in the idaho house of representatives would allow parents to sue schools and public libraries for allowing children to obtain books and other material that depict sexual content. that's deemed offensive. the statement nos that a state law in idaho currently prohibits giving children under the age of 18 material tt features, quote, nudity, sexual content, sexual excitement or sadomasochistic abuse when it's patently offensive to prevailing standards and quote. but state schools, libraries, colleges and museums are currently exempt from that law. the new bill would remove that exemption and create civil liability for schools and libraries. if a parent were to prove that a child obtained harmful material. and now on about books software salesman bill whiteside wrote his first book while working on a research project about a deadly world war two naval incident. and while he's still hoping that that research project will be the subject of his second book. he joined us to talk about his self-published work titled everyone knows a salesman can't write a book. though. whiteside when did you go from research and wanting to write a historical book to actually deciding you were going to write this book? it was a gradual process. when i started, i was a salesman, software salesman. i did that for 30 years and this all started as something to occupy my time and occupy my mind while i was flying or spending a lot of time on trains. i was reading about history and a lot about winston churchill in particular. and as i dug into this one story, i just became fascinated and did more research and more research and reached the point where if i wanted to share the story with other people and if i didn't write a book, i knew i would have regretted it. and then i was working on what i think of as my my real book, the church of my kids, called the churchill book. i got bogged down. i was still doing a lot of research. i wasn't doing much writing. so i decided to decided to start writing about the adventures of a salesperson and somebody who had never written the book, never certainly never written a serious piece of history in learning how to research and write a book. so it started out i wrote about i made a pilgrimage to copy in france and that was the first thing i wrote. and it was just such a moving experience. i had to write about it. and i was thinking at the time that was just a one off thing and that i think is something like chapter 27 in this book. and then spend time in cambridge at the churchill archives. had to write about that. and as more and more of these experience came together, i started to think there might be a story there about how someone like me could learn to write a book and publish a book and i worked hard to turn it into a book. i didn't want it to be just random stories. i wanted to extend a thread throughout the book. one of my favorite winston churchill stories is he was at a dinner party and rejected the pudding that was served for dessert. and he said, take this back. this pudding has no theme. so i think of this as my pudding. i tried to inject a consistent theme into my pudding and hopefully i pulled it off. and the first line of your introduction during the course of writing my second book, i decided to start writing my first. so maybe we should focus a little bit more on that second book. okay. what happened on july the third of 1940? it was early in the war. we were, as officially declared the previous september. but the key kickoff point in the war was may 10th, 1940. that was when germany invaded belgium, luxembourg, the netherlands. they were in france the next day prior to that, britain and france were very natural allies and they came to a very logical, no brainer agreement that neither would ever request an armistice with germany without the other's approval unless things started to go really bad, or when if things ever started to go really bad. well, after may 10th, things went very bad very quickly for france. and after about five weeks in early june, it became pretty clear that germany sorry, france was beaten. so paul rheingold, who was churchill's counterpart in france, he asked churchill to relieve france of their vow, and he said he would on two conditions. one was france held, 400 captured, german pilots and churchill demanded that france turn them over to britain. renewed agreed to do that. but never did. and that could be a book for somebody else to write. and another great quote from churchill in his history of the war, he said, they all became available for the battle of britain and we had to shoot them down again. and a lot of them, they did shoot down again. the other condition was churchill was horrified at the thought that the french navy would be consumed by the german navy and added to the german navy. great britain is an island. they depend for the life and death on command of the seas. so he demanded that the key ships in the french fleet either be sailed to britain, sail to the united states, become part of the royal navy, or scuttled by the french and the majority of the french ships were in either british ports or british controlled ports. so it was easy to take control of them. but there was a port on the coast of algeria, mazal behar and there were about a dozen ships there. two of them were the key destroyer. two of the key destroyers in the french fleet early in the morning of july 3rd, 17 british ships, including hms hood, the pride of the royal navy, one of the few aircraft carriers in the royal navy, the royal showed up over the horizon and they put those demands to the local admiral, marcel bruno, john, so that he surrender their fleet and he avoided negotiation for the better part of the day. part of it, he was he was trying to gain time. the other part was the british sent a mere captain to negotiate with this admiral. now, they happened to be great friends. they worked together. they had sailed together. the captain, cedric holland, had been honored by the french, but john still just refused to negotiate with them. so negotiations went on all day and they just went nowhere. and finally, about 530, the british fired on the french ships in a matter of 5 minutes, killed about 900 french seamen in that first volley. most of them were on a ship, the britannia and then other there were other fatalities in other ship. and then in a follow up attack three days later, the total death toll was just under 1300 french seamen. and you talk about the research that you've done, and it clearly shows through how many hours of research have you been doing because you write about it in this book that would be a scary number. i can't quantify that. a lot of reading, a lot of double checking, and i'll be horrified if someone comes back and says, you got this date wrong or you said this meeting occurred at 6:00. it actually occurred at 9:00. so i spend probably way too much time trying to pin down things like that. but it's been, i'm sure, in the thousands of hours i have, i wasted a lot of paper. i don't print out my research notes anymore, but at the time i quit, i had over 12,000 pages of notes. do you feel like a professor, professional researcher at this point? i, i do. i do. and that's the fun part of the project. it's it's not it's hard work is writing. writing is very hard work. so it's a challenge to learn when to stop the research, to decide when to stop the research and then really focus on writing. but then the writing sometimes reveals holes in the story. so i don't have to go back and research some of them. so, um, i, i could make a living as a researcher, but i'm proud of what i was able to find through my research. 35 years in sales, what kind of, what kind of product did you sell? it was computer software. i was director of marketing at an ice cream factory in lancaster, pennsylvania, and i bought a piece of sales forecasting software for the company and that software company had no sales force, did very little marketing. and i approached the owner of the company to see if he would hire me to be his sales force. and he was horrified at the idea he did not want to add to his overhead. but he suggested if you start your own business to sell the software, i'll support that idea. but then he added, you're a complete idiot if you try. nobody can make it. so i was ready to start the next day, but we had two young kids. i was giving up income to sell on commission. what could possibly go wrong and the first two years were an unintentional vow of poverty. but things, you know, finally began to work out. and i was very fortunate with the people i worked on at a different people to my company over time. and the nice thing was that we made money while helping companies make money by helping them forecast their sales and plan their supply chains, which is more important than ever today. you're an author now with this book, and you talk about feeling like you're a professional researcher. but you write about in this book feeling some imposter syndrome when you were starting that process of researching, especially in some very historic places, i, i felt like i was a genuine imposter when i started with not just the imposter syndrome, because my first primary source reached research visit was to hyde park, the fdr art archives, and i was astounded at how welcoming they were. i mean, basically just had to show my driver's license, fill out a form, let them know whose papers i was interested in seeing, and they presented them to me. and the most intimidate visit was to the churchill archives at the university of cambridge. and i spent three days there, and i think the first day and a half i was looking over my shoulder that somebody was going to figure out that i was still a software salesman and say, go out, get out of here. but they were supportive. welcoming. and i finally realized that the purpose of the archives are to share these stories and i'm sure there's somewhat of a vetting process, but if you're serious and can prove your interest, you'll have access. so as i began to accumulate the research and pulled the story together, i started to feel more like i belonged. i was an author. you taught yourself to read french during this research project? poorly? yes. just enough to be able to make sense of an article or of headlines. i'd take in two years in high school to two years in college, but that was 40 years ago and i was horrified at my inability to make sense of french. so i tried a couple of internet sources and made a lot of use of google translate, which i know is is not the source for reliable translations. but it helped me prove if something was interesting and valuable and then i would get some additional assistance for the specific translation. how did you turn that collection of facts that you found during your research into an interesting story? how do you do that? what's your advice for other would be authors? i wish i had two things i wish i learned earlier because i didn't start doing this was number one, begin with an outline. i started just trying to write the story from pieces of research. it was just all over the place and for a long time till i didn't have a really valuable story. and i actually took the train to dc, went to politics and prose bookstore. so our presentation by the historian rick atkinson and he talked about his actually i asked him a question, the q&a process and he talked about his outlining process that he spends almost as much time outlining a book as he does, writing it. and he mentioned that the outlining feature in microsoft word is the greatest invention since the plow. and i had never i use word every day. i had never seen that. so when i got home that night, i tried that. that was a savior. the other piece of advice would be is to write your story chronologically, which makes perfect sense. but i started to far in the middle of the story, then work my way back and there's just too much explaining going on. so you write about knowing that you had an interesting story about a salesman turning into an author when you came across the story of richard m what? who's richard and what? that was quite a revelation. he was a businessman. he was the type of businessman and i would have tried to sell our forecasting software to. he worked for a flooring supplier company in new jersey, and i read one of his books about the treaty of versailles, and i was looking for just confirmation of some facts from my trip to copy, and which is where vici was and sign there. but the armistice for two wars were signed there and i thought i would read maybe a page and a half. i ended up reading his entire book, which i think was about 500 pages. it was just so fascinating reading. so i wanted to learn about him as an author and any time i would find a new source, i would do that. i wanted to find what other books they read and on his amazon page, i learned that unfortunately he had died, but it left the contact information for his daughter lynne. and i wrote her two letters, sent her in, let write her two letters, and it took a while. and it was actually while i was sitting on a plane, i received an email from her that she had made her day by writing to her about her father. she told me that his papers were in the archives at boston university, which i never dreamed of going there for research. i was usually going overseas or traveling pretty far, so that was an easy trip for me. so i went there twice and learned about his research process. the people that that helped him. general edward louis speers of britain, william wiltshire complimented his work. the editor michael korda really helped him quite a bit. so when i read and he wrote two other books in addition to the one that i read initially when i learned his story, it wasn't that there were secrets that i gleaned from his approach, but he did this. and even though i wasn't lacking for confidence at that point, i was absolutely sure i could pull this off. he taught himself to read french. he did, too. he we both actually made, um, flashcards with french words and french phrases. so that was the other thing. i wrote a software manual. he wrote a manual for a weapon in the, in the us navy. we taught ourselves to read french. we both started off as english majors and did absolutely nothing with our degrees. didn't read at all during college. so there were a lot of interesting parallels there. so i certainly flatter myself by saying i have a lot of things in common with him, but that was it was a relief. and when i read his story, i, i, i knew i had a book, this book, the title of your book comes from a richard m what quote and it's only part of the quote, the full quote. everybody knows a salesman. a salesman can't write a book. and i wasn't going to tell anyone about it. and look, ridiculous. you wrote the book. i did that. yes. and i didn't tell anybody what i was doing it. even my wife. i mean, she knew i was writing. she thought i work out of a home office. she is the most patient woman in the year of the in the world, putting up with me, doing that. but it wasn't until i had that book almost ready to publish that i shared it with her and with my kids and they're surprised. what did you learn about the publishing process? not just the writing and researching process. it it's a business. and fortunately i enjoy that part of it as well. i initially started off thinking that, okay, i will get an agent and you need an agent in order to find a publisher. and i compiled a list of agents who deal with memoirs, who deal with history, and probably sent proposals to about 50 were slightly over 50 agents. majority of them did not write back at all. but the remaining five sent generic rejection letters. five sent kind and helpful rejection letters. and i realized this. this book is as much as i love it. it's a mutt of a book. it's about 60% about churchill and his contemporaries, about 40% about research and writing. and where would you put that? in a bookstore. there's no natural shelf for that. so there was no natural place for no natural reason for a publisher to be interested in that and in their in business, to sell books, in that's actually understand to be as important, at least as important to them as good writing is. so i had to self-published this and that was a fascinating experience in itself. there printed on demand. so i did not have to order a thousand copies of the book. they go up on amazon right away. one of the highlights so far, i took it to our local bookstore, aaron's books in lititz, pennsylvania. and there, as far as i know so far, the one independent bookstore that carries my book. but every once in a while i get an email from the owner and i get to go over and sign copies of my own book, which is more exciting than i would have ever dreamed. who was the first person that you signed a copy for. oh, good question. i don't actually, i don't remember. it would have been a friend or a relative, and i forget which one, but it's not. and it's not that i've signed so many copies. i just don't remember publishing perfectly adequate press is the name of your press. how did you come up with the name and i can tell people i own a publishing company now, there's there's a story that. we talked about, the story at mears el kabir, and it was in some ways a tragedy. and so out of character for winston churchill because he loved the french. french. but what really made it interesting was, were the people involved and the key player on the british side was admiral james somerville. he had actually been invalided out of the navy several months before the start of the war. then he made himself very useful and worked himself back into the navy, and he was the admiral in charge of the fleet that went to al kabeer. so when i went to the churchill archives, i obviously wanted to read his papers and they were very helpful. before i went there, i sent him an email saying, these are the papers i'm interested in these collections. churchill, general spears, admiral somerville and they said, well, they're all accessible except for one private folder for admiral somerville. it's restricted and it's the letters to his wife and the family diary and the only way you can have access is if his grandson, christopher somerville, who's a writer in the uk, provide grants you that. so i said, well, how do i do that? and he said, well, send us, write a letter, send it to us, we'll let you know if it's okay. so i drafted a letter to mr. somerville, sent it to the archivist at cambridge, and she wrote back instantly and said, your letter is perfectly adequate, which i thought was just a an endearing british term. and at one point i thought about calling up until i found richard, what story i was thinking about calling that book perfectly adequate, which it had been totally meaningless. but that story stayed with me and decided to have it live on as the name of my business research publishing, marketing. a book is another part of the process. you're a salesman for 35 years. has that come most naturally to you? it has. and you know, i've read that for a lot of authors there are horrified by the thought of having to sell and market their book. and i understand that that's just not something that a lot of people are interested in. but that was my life for 35 plus years, i'd sold i'd marketed fish sticks and ice cream before software. the biggest change was marketing myself. i was used to talking about somebody else's product and a obviously not shy about marketing myself, but it's very different and i try to retain some humility as i do that. but i enjoy that part of the process and there's, you know, a wholesale level of marketing with i haven't done any advertising yet, but promoting it through my newsletter. but then very local retail marketing, one, one independent bookstore at a time. and it's a never ending process. so i'm enjoying that as well. how much of your money do you think you've put in to this book so far? not counting the travel, maybe $3,000. so a fairly minimal investment. what do you know about sales figures so far? i've i get them from ingram sparc is the company that prints the book and there's a slight delay, a little over 300 copies. so it's you know, it's not burning up the new york times bestseller list. but i hope to improve on that. and i'm happy with that for where i am today. what does it tell for the the paperback sells for. 1695 because it is easy to upload a hard copy as a paperback to ingram sparc. there's a hard copy of it sells for 29, 95 and then they make an e-book available right away, which surprised me that i was able to price my own book. so i priced it at 9.95, but amazon sells it for 895, so i wanted to keep it reasonable enough so that would hopefully be an easy decision. if somebody is interested in the story. and i wasn't looking to make a lot of money per book. we've seen books take off on book talk. have you ever used book talk to market this? i have not used it in my self. i had an intriguing experience. i talked about independent bookstores and i spent a lot of time, especially early in my research fees, going to use bookstores and i would spent hours going through the shelves looking at french history, british history, navy history and there was a great bookstore in pittsburgh, city books and i spent a couple of i visited there a couple of times and i talked about it in my book. what a great experience. it was and the fact that my daughter brittany still lives in pittsburgh. so after i wrote the book, i did some research on the store and that the store i visited is no longer open, but a woman, arlyn hess, bought city books and moved it further outside of pittsburgh and they said on their website that they do not carry self-published books. they prefer to carry used books, but i fear what the heck, i'll send her my book and i put in two post-it notes showing it to two places where i mentioned city books and she sent me back the kindest rejection note i've ever received in my life. i'm a salesman. i'm used to being rejected. but she also mentioned that you probably don't know this, but i'm on tik-tok. and so brittany found the video on tik-tok and arlen videos herself opening her mail and it was just so delightful. she seeing her reaction. she thought it was just, you know, another author standing, just another book. but she saw the sticky notes for city books and she was genuinely excited to see that. and she was it was that was actually worth more to me than having her put my book in the store. it was such a delightful response. well, this book, everybody knows a salesman can't write a book is out now, when does that other book come out, that one you're researching for about the last two years, i've been telling people it will be done in a year. i think it's finally safe to say it will be done at the end of this year. so at the end of 2023, i it's i think i have a good chance of finding an established publisher if i have to self-publish, very willing to do that. but i would certainly hope to to find an agent and the traditional publisher, salesman and now author bill whiteside. thanks for joining us on about books john. thank you very much. really appreciate you having me here. and you're watching about books, a program and a podcast produced by c-span's booktv. well, each tuesday, dozens of new books are published. here's a recent sampling. on this president's day weekend, the most written about president in history has won more title about his life and his career. abraham lincoln historian edward acorn. this week released the lincoln miracle inside the republican convention that changed history. and at a time when classified documents and who's holding on to them are very much in the news. matthew connolly is out with his new book, the declassification engine what history reveals about america's top secrets. and finally, climate activist greta toon berg released her latest work, the climate book the facts and the solutions. also each week, national publications release their reviews of newly released books. here's a few from law and liberty magazine. an early review of israeli political theorist yoram barzani's conservatism, a rediscovery which is set to be released in may. quote his only learned and lucid book aims to rediscover the history and philosophy of conservatism, as well as the practice of conservatism or the moral necessity of being a conservative person and leading a conservative life. and the washington post's book world section took a look at malcolm harris's palo alto, a history of california capitalism and the world. the book takes a critical look at the history of the region and that region boasts stanford university apple headquarters. hewlett packard and facebook. according to the review, quote, harris reconsiders 200 years of history that many in the town would rather forget. palo alto is a skeptic's record, a vital, critical demonstration of northern california as two centuries of mixing technology and cruelty for money. and finally, the new york times took a look at a book from their reporters, james stewart and rachel abrams. the duo penned unscripted, the epic battle for a media empire, and the redstone family legacy. it's a study of media magnate sumner redstone corporate practices, his media holdings, includingbs. the authors write, quote, none of his major corporate decisions, such as whether c and viacom should merge, were made with an eagle eyed focus on the best choices for the companies and their shareholders. these decisions were made by hollow men seeking to curry the increasingly erratic favors of their patron, sumner redstone, and, quote, you'll see these books and authors featured in the near future. here on book tv. and finally, we want to know what you're reading. share with us your reading list or the books that you're looking forward to in 2023. simply record an audio file and email it to us at booktv at c-span dot org and we might use it on a future about books. well, thanks for joining us on about books. a program and a podcast produced by c-span booktv. we'll continue to bring you publishing news and author programs so you can get this podcast on our c-span now app and you can also watch online anytime at booktv dot org.