I’ve been away for a while, contemplating the life and death of my textbook: Culture and Context: A Basic Guide to Writing with Readings. When it first arrived, I was giddy in that euphoric moment of publication, awaiting reader interest (and, I hoped, universal praise). I scanned that section of Amazon.com where they chart the progress (always up, up, and away, I hoped) of my book’s sales. I sat taller, stood straighter, when I saw my name on the book’s spine, felt a little cozier when I stood in the cold, wrapped in my book’s jacket.
But, a few weeks ago, another reality set in. The returns were larger than the sales. There was no royalty check. Culture and Context, in essence, was dead.
Long live Culture and Context.
Granted, my book was never destined for The New York Times Bestsellers List. Or any bestseller’s list, for that matter. The thing wasn’t borne from some inner fire, reminiscing on a misspent youth or raging against the machine. It was just a textbook. A book representative just happened to catch me in my office one afternoon some five or six years ago, hawking some second-rate crap from a catalog of stale back stock. I didn’t find anything I wanted to use in my developmental writing course (or what I did find I knew I could never get past the tight-assed curriculum board or my department chair, each hell-bent on monotonizing the shit out of teaching). “Well,” the rep said. “You could always write one.”
And so I did. In the department at that time were two math teachers who had written a developmental math textbook together and, in my eyes, they had arrived. A significant number of schools all over the country had adopted their book (it was going into a tenth edition, I think, another truly cool feat), the publisher sent reps to their offices to wine and dine, and the department was using the book. How cool was that? That had been the path I wanted my book to take and, when it was finally published, I was excited.
The early buzz was strong. Teachers were excited about a three-in-one (a rhetoric, a reader, and a grammar text wrapped in a single, somewhat affordable, volume) that used pop culture as that ever-elusive magnet that would ???hook” students into writing. My colleagues deemed the book too advanced for our students and wouldn’t adopt it. (This I found strange because I had even offered to sign the royalties I made from the copies sold to our students over to the department’s coffers. It was a win-win situation, but I lost.) Other schools adopted it quickly. (I googled the book and found that a library in Australia had a copy in its shelves. I’ll have to visit it some day.) Soon, the publisher recouped their advance and I received royalty checks.
There were only about four, one for every six month sales cycle. The first, after taxes and savings, bought celebratory beer and comic books. The second helped pay for some house renovation (along with the beer and comic books). The third ended up in savings (my wife getting tired of the beer and comic books). I wasn’t getting rich, but I was getting paid, so that was cool. But then I started to watch the sales numbers rise and fall like the close up of a heart monitor in one of those hospital dramas, steady at first, then a healthy spike, then a sharp drop, then a struggle to get to get back to healthy.
My book never made it back to that point. Just a few weeks ago, Culture and Context flat-lined.
I had developed this now-embarrassing ritual of holding the unopened envelope from the royalty department at Longman, guessing the amount of the check and announcing some grand plans for all the green inside. (More novels and scotch, I believe I said, while my wife reminded me about the nearly crumbling foundation of the house.) But this time around, there was no check with the royalty statement. In fact, the sales number was negative. The number of returns exceeded the number of sales by quite a lot. (For a minute I almost flat-lined, thinking I would have to pay my publisher for those unwanted copies.)
That Monday, I called the royalty department and a soft-voiced woman on the other end of the line confirmed the bad news. There was no mistake. There was no check this time around. I thought I heard her ask where I had planned to have the wake so she could send flowers.
As crazy as it may seem, I was genuinely surprised and somewhat upset. I had lost a friend. Not that I suffered from any delusion that the book was going to change the face of education as we know it, but I honestly thought it would always sell. A few copies here and there, at least. I always thought that there would be a pulse. But I guess not. Culture and Context was just a simple textbook, for God’s sake, not the Quran. Nothing lasts forever. Billboard’s Top Ten lists rotate constantly. Blockbuster movies go from cinemaplex to dollar theater to cable in a matter of months. Even M*A*S*H, The Cosby Show, and Friends were cancelled. Nothing lasts forever.
But therein lies the rub. Some things do last forever. The trick is figuring out how that happens. Maybe the Clintons or Barack Obama know.