The Birth of Music Book Club

Tamara Palmer has been a freelance writer for three decades. The Bay Area-based scribe has specialized in music the longest, followed  by food and reality TV. Her byline appears regularly in the Recording Academy’s Grammy.com and San Francisco’s independent source for news and culture, 48 Hills. Her book, Country Fried Soul: Adventures in Dirty South Hip-Hop (Backbeat), is the definitive tome on the subject. She is a key contributor to Singles: Six Decades of Hot Hits and Classic Cuts and the writer behind One to Five: One Shortcut Recipe Transformed Into Five Easy Dishes.

With a longstanding career and proven credibility, Palmer had a particularly nasty shock when her recent book proposal about Bay Area rap music—a topic on which she has extensive knowledge—was offered an advance of $1000 by a major publisher. Not only that, but any future projects stemming from the book, e.g. podcast, documentary, the publisher would claim 80% of.

“I thought it was a typo,” Palmer says from her home in San Francisco. “Did they mean $10,000? $1000 split, as most book deals are, with 50 percent upon signing and 50 percent after your book is done and approved, you cannot cease other work for that six-month writing period. I’m talking publicly about this deal because I don’t like to kill dreams, but I’m trying to bring some realism. People know how crappy it is right now, but this deal was especially bad.”

Palmer’s book proposal was in response to an open call by the publisher as part of a prominent music book series. Her proposal followed the publisher’s guidelines. She presented the topic of Bay Area rap music based on her 30-year archive of interviews and personal experience as a working DJ. She wrote a sample chapter, laid out a table of contents to illustrate the book’s structure and put together a 16-page marketing and promotion plan. The publisher selected it out of hundreds of submissions. She counteroffered with $5000 and the publisher told her that they could go up to $1200.

“It’s interesting to me that a large publishing company found some value in doing my idea, but to offer such poor terms makes me wonder, ‘What’s the point?’” she says. “There are so many great reasons to write a book, but money is not one of them.”

No stranger to self-publishing, Palmer has successfully crowdfunded and published four issues of her high-quality food fanzine, California Eating (plus a limited edition toast recipe for the 2022 San Francisco Zine Fest). She has applied that same self-starter ethos to her latest venture Music Book Club, where she is cultivating a community that will, hopefully, become the built-in audience for future self-published books, among them, the aforementioned Bay Area rap book.

Music Book Club launched with a bang on January 10 of this year. Within the first 24 hours, Palmer had matched the publisher’s offer with $1000 in paid subscriptions. Several newsletters, blog posts and social media mentions name checked the club, with Palmer receiving a few interview requests about the venture.

As the name suggests, Music Book Club is an online club for music books, new and classic. It is free to join without any obligation to purchase or even read the books—although Palmer is using it to keep herself accountable to read every book in the club. She encourages using the local public library, but if participants would prefer to purchase the books, she suggests doing it through the club’s partnership with Bookshop.org, which supports independent bookstores. (Music Book Club receives 10 percent commission on each title.)

Palmer already has a stacked calendar of author guests,  including the world’s most famous groupie and bestseller, Pamela Des Barres, Danyel Smith (Shine Bright: A Very Personal History of Black Women in Pop), Scott Woods (Prince and Little Weird Black Boy) and me, speaking about my chapter “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, It Will Be Taped: Popular Music Acquisition in Pre- and Post-Revolution Tehran” in the anthology, The Life, Death, and Afterlife of the Record Store: A Global History. She will host these conversations live on Zoom, with subscribers to Music Book Club having the opportunity to submit questions ahead of time—even if they haven’t read the book.

“Reading is not required,” Palmer emphasizes. “A lot of book clubs are just an excuse for socializing. I want people to have a chance to discuss and politely debate and commune with other nerds. Considering how much work and years go into these projects, the fees authors are getting are instantly gone or not economically worth their time. A lot of authors spend extra money so their cover looks great or to get photos. If they’re lucky enough to have any kind of press interest, it’s over right away. It’s nice to have a space to talk about books that are older as well.”

Music Book Club has some choice ancillary products such as a fun newsletter, a listening component in partnership with 1 Album A Day Art (whose creator, Carly Eiseman, is a producer of Music Book Club) as well as special DJ mixes from Palmer, and will soon announce more.

With such a promising start, Palmer is far more jazzed about moving forward with self-publishing than having the marquee of a recognizable publishing giant. “I want the distribution. I want to be in libraries. My ego loves that. My first book is in a lot of university libraries of schools I could never have gotten into like Princeton and Oxford,” Palmer admits.

“But,” she continues, “in this current age of self-publishing, you can submit your ebook to library systems. And maybe I can go to my favorite bookstores like Green Apple Books in San Francisco and Book Soup in Los Angeles and individually hand them the book, which is very true to the Bay Area rap scene being independent and the reputation of when our scene started and people like Too Short were walking around selling tapes hand-to-hand. I love that it has come around to do it yourself.”