One year ago today, I hit publish on my most recent book, The Rediscovery of Tobacco: Smoking, Vaping, and the Creative Destruction of the Cigarette. It was a risky time to release it. Although the book is not about vaping per se — the topic isn’t covered until the penultimate chapter — one of its main arguments is that e-cigarettes, snus, and other less harmful products have the potential to replace the lethal cigarette. The news that summer was dominated by a different take: that a mysterious epidemic of vaping-related lung diseases was killing people throughout the United States. While it’s always good to release a book with a relevant news hook, this was one that appeared to cast the entire project into doubt.
By September, as I was putting the finishing touches on the print manuscript, it seemed clear that the danger was arising from black market cannabis cartridges, not nicotine e-cigarettes. I ended up including this addendum to the chapter on vaping:
As this book goes to press in September of 2019, the United States is gripped by panic over vaping. Mysterious lung illnesses have appeared, teen use rose for another year, and the FDA announced its intent to ban flavored e-cigarettes nationwide. Emerging evidence suggests that the illnesses are mostly linked to cannabis products, though the causes are not yet known with certainty. In the long-run, I suspect that these incidents will reveal more about drug policy than they do about e-cigarettes, although it is a reminder that we do not yet know everything we need to know about vaping. Regardless, the damage has been done. Anti-smoking groups and politicians took advantage of the crisis to push bans through, with the likely effects of driving some vapers back to smoking, creating a black market, exacerbating misperceptions of e-cigarettes, and advantaging products owned by tobacco companies. In the midst of all this, one encouraging fact has been almost completely ignored: Preliminary figures show the youth smoking rate falling to another record low, down from 8.1% to 5.8% in just one year.
Looking back a year later, this paragraph has, for better or worse, held up. If you were looking for reliable information on the lung injuries in the fall of 2019, you were better served by the online cannabis magazine Leafly than by the Centers for Disease Control. Journalist David Downs had correctly identified black market additives to cannabis products as the source of contamination by August of that year. It took months for the CDC to catch up, and even today the agency continues to sow confusion by misleadingly casting blame on nicotine vaping.
As predicted, the result of this was a wave of new restrictions on vaping products, particularly bans on flavored e-cigarettes. Research from the NBER later concluded that misinformation from the CDC, along with associated press reports, did damage by failing to warn consumers away from contaminated cannabis products and by creating long-lasting misperceptions about the relative risks of vaping. Federal regulations taking effect this month are advantaging Big Tobacco over small producers, a topic I covered in-depth recently for Arc Digital. On the positive side, the FDA did partially back away from its plan to ban all flavored e-cigarettes, youth vaping rates declined in 2020, and the youth smoking rate continues falling to record lows.
Unlike my first and forthcoming third books, both produced under contract with a traditional publisher, The Rediscovery of Tobacco is self-published. This was also a risky decision since there was no advance, no sales team, and no PR push beyond my own emails to potentially interested readers. As a contrarian book in a fairly niche area of public policy, it was never going to be the next Harry Potter. So, was it worth it?
From a purely financial perspective, I didn’t expect it to provide a good return for the amount of time spent producing it. Given how long it takes to write a book like this, I’d have been better off working minimum wage. That said, spending long stretches of time in coffee shops reading and writing about topics I care about is how I spend a lot of my free time anyway, so I might as well have gotten a book out of it. The research was also subsidized by freelance pieces I was able to sell along the way: certain chapters draw heavily on articles I published in The Atlantic, Slate, and Reason. Lastly, writing a good book is gratifying, so the rewards aren’t purely financial.
The book has not sold quite as well as I’d hoped it might, but my fear was that it would not sell at all, so I’m happy to say that it’s doing reasonably well. It has sold in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, India, Japan, throughout Europe, and likely some other countries. It led to multiple radio and podcast appearances, a live event at the Cato Institute, some articles reconsidering the extent of smoking bans, and positive reviews at Reason, Spiked, and a variety of trade publications. While sales of many books taper off soon after publication, this one has continued to sell through the summer, with July coming in as the second-best month for sales so far. Feedback from academics who study tobacco harm reduction has been overwhelmingly positive.
In the process of producing the book I learned a ton about self-publishing, from the ease of using Vellum (very worthwhile) to the exorbitant cost of acquiring your own ISBN (perhaps not so much). Amazon as a company gets a lot of bad press, but as an independent author I have to say it’s amazingly empowering. Through their Kindle Direct Publishing platform I can get an e-book or high-quality print-on-demand paperback to readers all over the world with zero inventory or shipping costs on my end. And while I miss the advance that comes with a traditional publishing contract, at the margin I make about three times as much per unit selling through Kindle Direct than I do selling through a publisher. Unlike many books that never generate enough royalties to pay out their advances, every time someone buys The Rediscovery of Tobacco, they’re putting money directly into my pocket. Whatever else you want to say about Amazon, their self-publishing platform is a marvel of communication, and my book probably wouldn’t exist without it.
(That said, I do have some significant complaints about the Kindle publishing interface, including one inexcusable problem that forced me to cancel some of my digital pre-orders. I won’t bore you with those details here. The hardcovers are sold through IngramSpark, which I also recommend for self-publishing. The quality is great and they have international reach for retail bookstores. My return is lower on hardcovers except when selling them in person, but hardcovers are nice and I like having them available for those who prefer them.)
With more than a billion smokers in the world and the ongoing battles over harm reduction and prohibition showing no signs of letting up, The Rediscovery of Tobacco is going to be relevant for years to come. If nothing else, I’m glad that when people look back on this era of of moral panic and bad policy, I’ll have written one of the few books to get things mostly right.
If I’ve learned one thing as an author, it’s to take every opportunity to promote your book, so I’ll end with a pitch: you should read it now! If you want to understand the history of tobacco, how the modern anti-smoking movement lost its way, and how innovation and harm reduction can combat a deadly product that kills more than seven million people every year, this is the book for you. Buy it from any of the following retailers. Or if you’ve purchased and read it already, thank you, and any assistance spreading the word through reviews or social media would be greatly appreciated.
Purchase The Rediscovery of Tobacco from: Amazon | Kindle | Bookshop | Apple | Powell’s | Barnes & Noble
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