December 2024 – Home of The Creative Nonfiction Podcast

Pre-order “The Front Runner”

By Brendan O’Meara

Hey, CNFers, what you’re seeing is the beautiful, brilliant book cover of The Front Runner: The Life of Steve Prefontaine, set to come out by Mariner Books on May 20, 2025, ten days shy of the 50th anniversary of Steve Prefontaine’s death (spoiler alert).

This is the pre-order link: https://www.harpercollins.com/products/the-front-runner-brendan-omeara?variant=43044900962338

You can use it to pre-order from your favorite online bookseller be it Bookshop.org or … Amazon¹.

We all know that pre-orders help determine to what extent the publisher is willing to invest in their talent². I suspect you’re plenty sick of getting barraged by authors like me begging — and make no mistake, it’s begging — for pre-orders. Not only is it expensive ($32.99) but you have to then wait five months.

Anyway, consider pre-ordering a few copies. If you order five or more for your reading group, I’ll be sure to do some kind of Zoom chat. Email me the receipt and we’ll coordinate a time.

So many people make a book happen. Editors, designers, sales team, media teams. I hope you’ll consider buying it as it supports the entire enterprise, not just the little keyboard troll.

Thank you so much.

Here’s the thing: We can all agree that Amazon sucks ass for authors, but most people buy their books from Amazon. I still buy books (Kindle primarily … I hate clutter) from Amazon. I’m never going to hate on anyone who buys one of my books from Amazon. No sense in shaming any book sale. ↩︎
Here’s the thing: We can all agree that this is ass-backwards. The publisher, seeing a robust pre-order binge then doubles down on the talent. It’s a chalk-eating-weasel (horse racing term) move, betting the house on an even-money favorite. ↩︎

Episode 444: Stephanie Gorton Embraces the Messiness

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Promotional support is brought to you by the Power of Narrative Conference, celebrating its 26th year on the last weekend of March 28 and 29. 300-400 journalists from around the world are coming. Keynote speakers Susan Orlean, Connie Schultz, and Dan Zak will deliver the knowledge. Listeners of this podcast can get 15% off your enrollment fee by using the code CNF15. To learn more visit combeyond.bu.edu … and use that CNF15 code.

By Brendan O’Meara

On the tracking of the podcast, I said that Stephanie Gorton hadn’t been on the podcast in 2.5 years. It’s been 4.5 years. But she’s back! This to celebrate The Icon & the Idealist: Margaret Sanger, Mary Ware Dennett, and the Rivalry That Brought Birth Control to America (Ecco).

It’s a tremendous book and one that has received a lot of positive attention in places like The New Yorker, The New York Times, and The Washington Post.

Episode 443: Jared Sullivan and the Subtle Art of the Cold Call

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https://combeyond.bu.edu/offering/the-power-of-narrative-conference/

https://brendanomeara.com/episode-281-susan-orlean-tackles-ledes-generating-story-ideas-and-on-animals/

By Brendan O’Meara

Jared Sullivan is here. https://jared-sullivan-kisp.squarespace.com/about

He is the author of Valley So Low: One Lawyer’s Fight for Justice in the Wake of America’s Great Coal Catastrophe. It’s published by Knopf.

https://bookshop.org/book/9780593321119

Jared’s book has gotten a prime review in The New York Times and was one of those four featured books in a recent issue of The New Yorker. You know the Briefly Noted section toward the back. It doesn’t matter what issue. What matters is that it was THERE.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/14/books/review/valley-so-low-jared-sullivan.html

Episode 442: Steven Hyden Revisits Springsteen’s ‘Born in the USA’

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By Brendan O’Meara

We’ve got Steven Hyden today (@steven_hydenwriter on IG). He returns to the show to talk about There Was Nothing You Could Do: Bruce Springtseen’s ‘Born in the USA’ and the End of the Heartland. It is published by Hachette Books.

Episode 441: Seth Wickersham Gets Them Out of the Building

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By Brendan O’Meara

Seth Wickersham (@seth.wickersham on IG) didn’t always want to be a sports writer, but he found his way to it by being a high school quarterback, covering the University of Missouri Tigers, and “crashing the party” at the Super Bowl with fellow writers Wright Thompson and Justin Heckert.

This episode was a chance to revisit his amazing story on its ten-year anniversary, “Awakening the Giant,” about Y.A. Tittle. Seth also is the author of It’s Better to be Feared about the New England Patriots dynasty, a book twenty years in the making. He’s a senior writer for ESPN.com and often collaborates with the Pulitzer Prize-winning Don Van Natta Jr. — he of The Sunday Long Read — on deeply reported pieces on the NFL.