Rebecca Bratspies is an award-winning author, scholar, and speaker. She’s a professor at CUNY School of Law specializing in environmental law, environmental justice, and human rights. Her book Naming Gotham: The Villains, Rogues, and Heroes Behind New York Place Names explores the stories behind New York’s roads, bridges, and landmarks. She also collaborates with an artist to create the Environmental Justice Chronicles, a series of comic books available for free download at RebeccaBratspies.com.
Host: Richard Lowe | Guest: Rebecca Bratspies
Interview Transcript
Richard: Today I’m interviewing Rebecca Bratspies. She’s an award-winning author, scholar, and speaker, a professor at CUNY School of Law, and author of Naming Gotham: The Villains, Rogues, and Heroes Behind New York Place Names. Tell me about yourself.
Rebecca: I’m a professor and scholar of environmental law, environmental justice, and human rights. When I’m not wearing that professor hat, I’m a New Yorker, and I love this city. That’s where I started — endlessly curious about it.
Richard: When I think of Gotham, I think of Batman. Are they related?
Rebecca: Gotham City in Batman was intended to be a fictionalized version of New York. But my book has nothing to do with Batman.
A Book Born in Traffic
Richard: How did you decide to write that book?
Rebecca: It began in a traffic jam. My parents live in Pennsylvania, and my husband and I would drive out of the city on the Major Deegan Expressway, which goes past Yankee Stadium. Anyone who’s ever taken the Major Deegan knows you sit, possibly for hours, in traffic going nowhere.
The Major Deegan leads to the George Washington Bridge. Obviously everybody knows who George Washington is, but nobody has a clue who Major Deegan was. I used to curse him when stuck in traffic, wondering who he was. My family got sick of hearing me say that, and they said, “Why don’t you find out?” So I did.
He turned out to be a lot less impressive than you might think. That sparked my curiosity about who the other roads in New York are named after. Who was Bruckner? Who was Hutchinson? And the bridges — who was Kosciuszko and Pulaski? Pulaski Skyway is in the opening shot of The Sopranos. I started doing research, and it eventually led to this book.
Richard: You’re also interested in environmental justice and human rights. How did you get started in that?
Rebecca: I grew up always being an environmentalist. I love national parks and preserving green spaces. But what really interests me is where people live. What’s the air like where people have to breathe it? What’s the water like where people have to drink it? What’s the land like? Are they living on land that’s going to make them sick? When you ask those questions, it leads you to environmental justice and human rights.
I do a lot of research in New York City, but also across the country and around the world. I collaborate with a very talented artist to make a series of environmental justice comic books. They’re available for free download for any nonprofit or educational use from my website, RebeccaBratspies.com.
Environmental Justice Chronicles
Richard: Tell me about the Environmental Justice Chronicles.
Rebecca: They’re a fictionalized version of New York, a little less frightening than Gotham City. They take place in Forest Hill, New York’s alter ego. The story follows young people as they organize themselves and the adults around them to make things better.
In Book One, they prevent the siting of yet another polluting facility in their already overburdened community. In Book Two, they intervene in the relicensing of a dirty electricity-generating facility and get it to clean up its act. In Book Three, they enter electoral politics, running a candidate for mayor on a climate change plan.
The art is spectacular. You can read them just because they’re fun and beautiful, and if you’re interested in environmental justice, they’re a teaching tool for how to organize communities.
Marketing a Book
Richard: How do you market your book?
Rebecca: That’s been the biggest learning curve. I’m a law professor. When I write scholarly stuff, it doesn’t get marketed like a book for a broader audience. This book is aimed at anyone interested in history who wants to know more about New York. It’s taken me out of my comfort zone.
Talking on podcasts is new for me. I speak to reporters in my professor role, so I leaned on that and asked them for advice. I wrote a lot of blog posts, which was fun because there was more I wanted to write about than could fit in the book. Unlike a law review article, when a popular publisher tells you there’s a word limit, they mean it. I had all this extra material, so I’ve been writing blog posts for different blogs.
Richard: Does that bring in sales? In my experience, blog posts don’t bring in sales directly. They bring in some fans. Sometimes you can build a fan base. But Google’s not very friendly to smaller sites. It’s more friendly to corporate sites with money to spend on advertising.
Rebecca: Marketing is a bit of a mystery to me. Not really my forte, but I’m having fun. And I have a day job.
Richard: My job is ghostwriting, and I have to market or I don’t eat. I had some nice big fat contracts for a couple of years, so I got lazy on the marketing and I’m paying for it now. I’m coming up to speed — hired a marketer, writing blogs and LinkedIn articles, got a lead generator, doing lots of other things. These podcasts are one reason. This isn’t going to generate a lot of leads, if any, but it’s out of my comfort zone. Because I’m an introvert.
Rebecca: Really? Well, I think you’re doing great at it.
Richard: I’m interviewing different people partially to stay out of my comfort zone and partially because it’s fun. We promote each other. You promote the podcast, I promote you, and we help each other. If not, we had fun for a few minutes.
The Challenge of Engagement
Richard: One thing I run into, common to every single author except the big names — they write a great book and don’t know how to market it. So it sits there. The publisher doesn’t do the marketing except maybe a little upfront. The first question traditional publishers ask is, “What’s your following?” They want at least 50,000 followers. If you don’t have that, they usually won’t talk to you.
My three traditionally published clients always had an in — they knew someone at the publishing house. If you don’t have that, you’re in a catch-22. How are you going to sell your book? You have to learn to market. How are you going to market? Well, you have to sell your book.
Rebecca: It is a skill. People go to college and major in marketing. If you don’t know that, it’s tough.
Richard: It’s interesting how just the first sentence can make the difference between nobody looking at it and a ton of people looking at it. That opening line, that opening hook. If it’s lame, you’re not getting anybody. How do you come up with a really good opening line? I keep trying. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.
Rebecca: I naively thought the press would handle marketing. I learned that’s not how it works.
Richard: The engagement is what’s hard. Getting people engaged. That’s the challenge — getting them to ask you, “Where’s your post this week?” That’s the hard part.
Rebecca: In a classroom, I can keep students engaged for two hours. But when you’re competing electronically against thousands of others and algorithms, it’s tough.
Richard: Well, this has been Author Talks with Richard Lowe. Rebecca, thank you for coming.
Rebecca: Thank you very much.
Learn more about Rebecca Bratspies at RebeccaBratspies.com.
Find Richard Lowe at TheWritingKing.com.