Sean Brosnan's Book on Newbury Park's Success

From Publisher's Weekly, Nov 15, 2024:

Atria Races to Sign ‘Redefining Fast’

In a preempt, Yaniv Soha at Atria Books has acquired world rights to Redefining Fast by Sean Brosnan, with Chris Lear (Running with the Buffaloes) and former L.A. Times staff writer Andrew Greif. Atria said the book tells the story of Newbury Park (Calif.) High School’s cross-country team, which Brosnan, who was brought on as coach in 2016, transformed into perennial national champions. Daniel Greenberg at Levine Greenberg Rostan brokered the deal. Redefining Fast will be published in fall 2025.

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From the article:

"Redefining Fast will be published in fall 2025."

What does this mean for people who pre-ordered the book?

So, the website is no longer taking orders, still says the release date is December 8th, but this article now says Fall of 2025? What is going on? What happens to all the people who bought books from the website? Anyone who has ordered the book been contacted? If so, what are they saying?

I was contacted and refunded. They said it was picked up by a major publication. The email said they were refunding half this week and everyone else next week. It sounds like you’ll receive an email next week with a refund. Good for him for getting it published. It’s difficult to make it self publishing.

This is far from a win for Brosnan and company. I'm sure they probably decided to go the self published route because authors can potentially make more than 50% of each sale in royalties and they thought they were going to sell a ton of $50 books. I'm sure it was a fire sale to the publisher because sales were not what they hoped and there was a lot invested, so they had to figure out a way to get the authors and other expenses paid and probably had very little leverage in the deal. If things were going well, they would have continued down the self publishing route.

Now they'll be lucky if they are splitting 10% of a $20 book among 3 authors (maybe $.75 per book, per author). Most books in the category the book will be in would expect to sell a few thousand copies, so Brosnan will be lucky to get $1000 + or - on this deal, when he was probably expecting this to be a huge money maker.

I don't think books like this are really about making money. Getting a big time publisher like that is a big deal no matter who you are. It must be a decent story if he got a deal with a publisher of that statue.

Jerry Seinfeld: So, what happened to the statue?
Kramer: What statue?
Jerry Seinfeld: The little statue on my desk. It's gone.
Kramer: Oh, the statute?
Jerry Seinfeld: No, not a statute. A statue. A little figurine.
Kramer: Statute, statue, what’s the difference?
Jerry Seinfeld: There is a difference! A statue is a small sculpture, a statute is a law.
Kramer: I didn't take your statute.
Jerry Seinfeld: Statue!

More likely, having two previously published authors got them a deal with a publisher. It was probably very low risk (cost) because they had no leverage and the authors already had a track record and relationships in the publishing world. I would guess once Brosnan and his cronies couldn't make it happen, Lear and Greif took over to get themselves paid.

If you think all books that are published are decent stories, you haven't read a lot of books or gone to many book stores to see the garbage on the shelves.

It's good that they're going this route.

(a) It was professionally a bit "off" that the author of Running with the Buffaloes was co-authoring a self-published project funded by the book's subject. Going with a real big-britches publisher makes a lot more career sense.

(b) All due respect to Brosnan and his very real achievements with his former team, but the self-published launch of this book was an absolute clownshow — complete with an overwhelmed and broken website, terrible/confusing promo copy, and publicity efforts that included putting flyers on car windshields at cross-country meets. It had all the hallmarks of something built by someone with zero publishing experience who thought it would all be easy and suddenly learned that making and selling books is an actual, challenging business.

(Either they built a site that would crash on purpose so Brosnan could tell a real publishing house the book was such a phenomenon that it “broke the internet” or Brosnan was trying to do it all himself and Lear and Greif were compelled to get their agent[s] to pitch the book to keep the project from absolutely embarrassing the hell out of them.)

Also, on the subject of the publishing business: Most books sell 2,000 copies if they're lucky. In many cases, books like this are a loss-leader marketing expense to promote a coaching career. Though Lear and Greif's pedigree and the subject matter almost certainly guarantees bigger sales than that if they're allowed to write a warts-and-all story. I wish them well and will certainly give it a read when it hits shelves/Audible.

Just got my refund email.

definitely not contacted here. these kinds of things really make me grumpy.

What is stopping them from immediately refunding everyone? I have a hunch it's because they've spent the money. Maybe I'm wrong. Is there any other possible reason?

This type of book probably got a 30-50k advance, based on Leer and Grief.

It's good they went this direction. It will make the book much better.

But these types of books are like the 7th round draft pick for a NFL team. You pay someone a bit, are happy if they make the practice squad, but every once in a while you get a Brock Purdy.

It's a good sign for readers. Much better than the self-published route. Though with 3 authors not going to be financially lucrative for anyone. They would have made more off self-publishing, unless somehow this book sells hundreds of thousands of copies, which it's got little to no shot of doing so since it's very niche topic. Split three ways, they'll make about 75 cents a book. Self-published, they would have made around $5 a book each, depending on pricing and structure.

Is there any way to see how many copies of Running with the Buffaloes sold?

I think this will sell 10% of that total, maybe less. That was a unique story with him following the team, tragedy striking, and a cool story.

Brosnan's book does not have the same intrigue. There already plenty of workout Wednesday videos and interviews on YouTube already. The Young's have a YouTube page where they provide content for free, nobody wants to pay money for this book.

If Brosnan couldn't get another college job, he should have started a podcast or a YouTube channel. That would be better than a book.

I do have some questions about the timeline here.

If you've ever worked in publishing or self-publishing, the chronology here is a little confusing, though it may be easily cleared up:

Up until about a month ago, there was a release date of Dec. 8 for the self-published edition of Redefining Fast, in both black-and-white and color editions. The big round of Instagram reels with affiliate pre-order links went out about four months ago.

If they were planning to offer a prestige color edition, that suggests the self-published edition was going to have photos.

Producing an illustrated book is a much more complicated enterprise than producing a straight prose book. There's securing the photos, maybe securing releases for the photos, getting all the captions right, and then paginating the whole book so it flows with the photos, getting it to a printer (likely overseas to save costs), checking proofs, maybe doing a press check, and then shipping the completed books to a distribution center or someone's garage before the long, tedious process of putting each book in a mailer to ships to the dozens, hundreds, or thousands of people who ordered the book.

It's a serious logistical task that requires months of pre-planning, and all of it happens on top of promotion tasks — setting up interviews and media appearances, etc.

If they were even remotely going to have a chance of shipping out all those books on Dec. 8, they should have had them back from the printer way before Dec. 8.

So my questions are these:

When were the self-published books printed?

When the publishing house acquired the title (officially announced Nov. 18, and probably negotiated several weeks in advance) did they agree to cover the costs of all those printed books now (presumably) sitting in someone's garage?

Is Atria Books — an imprint of Simon & Schuster — going to go with the self-published cover and interior design, which may or may not be up to Simon & Schuster's standards?

Were the books never printed, in which case they were totally going to blow that announced Dec. 8 deadline?

Why is the One Athletics website still listing this book for sale, even if the "Buy Now" buttons don't work?

Why doesn't the One Athletics pre-order page announce the new publishing deal?

Did Brosnan ever line up any December promotional and media appearances to help sell his self-published book?

And this is where one could get a little conspiratorial, but not unreasonably so: Was this whole self-publishing thing always really just meant to drum up a commercial publisher's interest?

The simple answer is probably Brosnan et al were sworn to secrecy by an NDA as they negotiated a deal, which would put them in an awkward spot, presuming negotiations began after soliciting pre-orders in August. Still. There's a story there.

These are great questions. Did everyone who pre-ordered get their money back or payments still being disbursed? Anyone who bought a book still waiting for their refund?

I'm also curious on what price the new publisher will land on. The initial pricing of the book on the OneAthletics site seemed outrageous. By the way, why is that website still active? I would think the new publisher would want it gone.