How Things Begin (Reading the OED)

Maybe this post should be titled How Books Get Written. A curious feature of the book industry is that it gets almost all of its key ingredient — book manuscripts — from amateurs. No other big industry is like this. If our economy is a giant experiment, this point is an outlier. A huge outlier. What does it mean?

To find out, it would help to look at specific cases. I asked Ammon Shea, author of Reading the OED (forthcoming), how he managed to write it. He replied:

The advance was plenty for me to live on for a year, which is approximately how long the book took. However, I live cheap. I moved in with my girlfriend, who owns her own apartment, and so the rent, or maintenance costs, are low. We cook at home, tend to not buy things that we don’t need, and our idea of excitement is to go to a new library.

I had wanted to read the OED for quite some time, but knew that I didn’t have the leisure to spend ten hours a day doing so. I wrote the book proposal to see if I could convince some publisher to, in effect, subsidize my hobby.

I’ve worked as either a musician or a furniture mover for most of the past twenty years – both are occupations which allow a certain freedom; freedom from both responsibility and security. Taking off time was not so much of a problem. In terms of circulating the proposal I had my agent send it out. He’s the same one that I had when I wrote several other books, some eight or ten years ago.

Ammon’s editor is the same as mine (Marian Lizzi), which is why I knew about his book. Reading the OED: One Man, One Year, 21730 Pages (= 60 pages/day) will be published in August.