A Life-Changing Day

Announcing the pre-sale of the new On This Day in History Sh!t Went Down

That’s the fancy new cover design. I insisted we keep the train from the old cover, but there was no resistance. Bantam Books was in full agreement. Anyway …

Three years ago today, some important shit went down. Life-changing shit.

I was not in a good place. A year previous I’d had a science-based self-help book published with a big publishing house and a big PR campaign and the whole bit and it sold like 15 copies. Okay a few more than that but not nearly enough. My agent said publishers were no longer interested in me, because “You’re only as good as your last book.” And by that they meant sales numbers. That book was supposed to launch me to new heights. Instead, my writing career, which I’d been doing full time for nine years, was on life support.

With few other options, I figured I could make money by focusing on a speaking career, except then the world said ha-ha nope have a fucking plague. Kinda hard to set up speaking engagements when everything is locked down.

I was desperate, in a state of despair. So, I went for a bike ride.

I had one career asset: A Facebook page with 80,000 followers, people who mostly liked my writing regardless of the subject matter I covered. It took me nine years to build that following.

A quarter century previous I’d completed a master’s degree in history. During that bike ride I came up with a life-changing idea to write a profanity-filled history story in an “on this day” format and post it to Facebook.

My previous book—the one that didn’t sell—was an examination of the life-changing epiphany titled The Holy Sh!t Moment. This wasn’t such a moment. This was just an idea. The epiphany was two days away. But it was an idea I was excited about, so I rode home, looked up something for the following day (April 18), and chose a tale about Martin Luther telling the Holy Roman Emperor that no he wasn’t going to back down on his Protestantism stuff and to get fucked.

I posted the story the following morning and it was moderately popular. Having literally not any other work on the horizon, I decided to do another story for April 19 about Mae West being sentenced to jail for “corrupting the morals of youth” with her first Broadway play titled Sex that she wrote, produced, directed, and starred in.

That one blew up. Not only that, but there were people in the comments proclaiming, “You should do a full year of these and turn them into a book!” That was when the holy shit moment struck with an affirming “You’re goddamn right I should!”

And so, my life was changed, far more than I could have imagined at the time.

For the first time in my life, rather than writing what I thought the publishing industry wanted, I was writing exactly what I wanted and exactly the way I wanted to write it. In the first month, the daily column had a million views. A short time later that grew to five million views a month.

On April 17, 2021, on the one-year anniversary of the life-changing idea, Volume I of On This Day in History Sh!t Went Down was self-published. I hoped it would sell 5,000 copies, maybe even 10,000. I had a good following and thought just maybe I’d hit 10,000. That would be enough money to allow me to keep writing for a while.

After 18 months of sales the book had sold 31,000 copies, and publishers noticed. Bantam Books paid me an assload of money for the republishing rights, AND they let me keep on selling the self-published books for another five months, and it sold another 20,000 copies in that time. Oh, and in the three years since I switched to writing sweary history my Facebook following grew to over 300,000.

In planning the launch of the new version, I told my editor about how April 17 was an important day for me, and that’s why we chose today to launch the pre-sale of the new version.

For the last five months we’ve been reworking the shit out of the book. A number of stories have been replaced, and they’ve all been improved. The new format is in a unique 7-3/8 X 9-1/8 trade paper format; the extra width allowed us to display the stories in a two-column format which permitted including a lot more photos as well as pull quotes. The self-published version had 13 photos. The Bantam Books version has close to a hundred.

Publication date is October 10, but American readers can pre-order it now at JamesFell.com/books. Pre-ordering for other countries will be added soon.

Go get that mofo.