Celebrating One Year of "Jimmy"

​Yesterday marked one year since the publication of Jimmy: The Secret Life of James Dean. I was planning to mark the occasion yesterday, but my son had another day off school for a teacher conference, and I ran out of time. I suppose it’s something of a win that the new revelations reported in the book have been accepted to the point that they are now referred to as common knowledge that everyone already knew. I can’t count how many YouTube videos have referenced them, typically without crediting me, and the new information has made its way into magazine articles and features the world over, notably earlier this fall on the seventieth anniversary of James Dean’s death.

​After a year of publication, there is now an audiobook of Jimmy as well as a Polish-language edition. There are also some exciting new opportunities that the book has made possible. At the moment, I can’t talk about them because they have not yet been finalized, but I hope that in the coming year there will be something really special to share with all of you.
 
Nevertheless, while I am proud of the book and the impact it has had on the historiography of James Dean, I would have liked its sales to be commensurate with the amount of discussion my reporting received. It sold better than my previous books, but it didn’t really break out the way the publishing house and I expected. It wasn’t terribly surprising, given the Dean Estate’s disapproval of my book’s subject matter, that I was not invited to the seventieth anniversary festivities this fall where many of the other living Dean biographers appeared, but it has been genuinely surprising that not a single journalist, researcher, historian or museum has ever asked to see the previously unknown historical documents in my possession that shed so much light on a previously unknown chapter in Dean’s life, as documented in Jimmy.
 
My book’s one-year anniversary comes in the middle of a season of anniversaries for me. October marked the twentieth anniversary of my first book, The Cult of Aliens Gods. This year was also the fifteenth anniversary of my website and my blog, and a few months from now will mark my twenty-fifth anniversary writing online, which I began doing on my original website back when I was in college.
 
I’m not sure whether I will be writing any more books in the near future. Each book is an enormous undertaking, involving significant research, months or years of intense writing, and a lengthy production and publication process. After two decades, my books seem to be cited more than they are read, and it’s deeply unsettling that if the Anthropic copyright violation settlement goes through, more than half of my books will have made more money by being stolen for A.I. training than they did from actual sales.