Approval Preferences

I signed up in early May, and the Approval Preferences for this book are likely to swing dramatically over its six-month presence on NetGalley. One reason is that the book has gotten off to a deliberately slow start, publicity-wise, for a variety of reasons. For example, only in the first week of May did I upload the book's details and cover to Barnes & Noble.com: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/ty-cobb-unleashed-howard-w-rosenberg/1128581868?ean=9780972557443 By contrast, it is not unusual for baseball book covers to appear on Internet purchase sites six months before their release. Even though Amazon.com is the best-known one for books, as of early May – weeks before my planned release – I had yet to feed my book's cover or other details there. As of now I prefer to highlight Barnes & Noble.com, which, overall, treats small publishers much better, on their ink-on-paper books. My four prior ones were done in that manner; this one is a print on demand, which has a range of advantages and disadvantages. To compensate for unexpectedly chewing up extra time into 2018 on revisions, including some newsy additions, I am initially taking one unusual step publicity-wise to try to catch up: making the book's cover and basic details visible to all NetGalley members. (If I don't take this step, members may never come across my book if they monitor only the newest books on this site.) Initially, I will be limiting access to the actual text to a subset of "media requesters." In part, I am doing that to give some the chance to be the first to write about the book. For requesters especially in any other category that contact me and provide an e-mail address, I would at least be glad to send, as an interim step, links to articles related to the book that appear (and that will potentially disappear fast behind newspaper paywalls) henceforth. Because my book is graphic-intensive, requesting readers will need to have their downloaded-to computers be compatible with Adobe Digital Editions (NetGalley's Web site provides instructions on the few steps that would need to be taken). For those potential downloaders who absolutely cannot make their computers compatible with Adobe Digital Editions, I may be able to offer a Kindle-compatible (but unflattering to my original layout) version in a brief interlude during my book's stay on this site. Another option, NetGalley has advised me, is that requesters who have trouble installing Adobe Digital Editions on their computer can seek help from support@netgalley.com.

Publisher Profile

Book Author

I'm a native of Roslyn, N.Y., now living in Rosslyn, Va., better known as Arlington. A graduate of Cornell University, I was in the same Cornell Daily Sun graduating class as New York Times (NYT) national editor Marc Lacey, now-ex NYT (and bounced from CNN) two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Eric Lichtblau, and libertarian Reason Magazine senior editor Jacob Sullum. I did daily journalism for close to 5 years in Washington, D.C., right out of college. My greatest influence was Gregory Gordon, head of United Press International's D.C. investigative unit when I was a college summer intern in it. Gordon is now an investigative reporter for McClatchy Newspapers in D.C. (Coincidentally, I wrote a string of 19th-century-themed baseball freelance articles for the then-McClatchy-Tribune wire service mostly around a decade ago.) My four prior books were all definitive on the relatively unpopular era (by today's warped standards) of baseball in the 19th century. But with the benefit of living near the Library of Congress, by far the largest U.S. source of newspapers on microfilm, as well as books and serials, I was able to come close to accounting for all available sources. Ty Cobb Unleashed is the first major Cobb biographical work to be from an author in the D.C. area. If it succeeds in one of its missions, in accounting for the vast majority of remaining key sources on Cobb, it may be the last, whether or not researched mainly from D.C. In Ty Cobb Unleashed, I always try to credit other authors for particular detail (whether in a positive or negative light). The transparent crediting also serves a larger purpose that some readers may find refreshing: its side-by-side comparison of two 2015 Cobb books, from well-known publishers Simon & Schuster and Sports Publishing, for their technical quality. Although baseball history books are not as popular as other types of history ones, most baseball subjects lend themselves to relatively easy analysis for a larger purpose. After all, the sport's history is not rocket science, especially when not swimming in computer-driven statistical analysis. I stumbled across Cobb in the summer of 2016, when Rolling Stone magazine lumped Cobb with Cap Anson (my main 19th-century baseball subject of expertise) as having been rumored to be members of the Ku Klux Klan. When Rolling Stone expunged Cobb from a later version of the article and kept Anson in it without responding to me (despite my providing argumentation showing how flimsy the claim was), I was inspired to read up more on Cobb.

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