Stay Tuned: A Self-Published Book About TV Gets a Major Publishing Pick-Up

Jake Guevara/The New York Times “The Revolution Was Televised,” a book by the television critic Alan Sepinwall.

In the course of chronicling the modern-day history of television, the author Alan Sepinwall has made a bit of history himself, becoming the rare self-published author to be picked up by a major press. On Wednesday, it was announced that the Touchstone imprint of Simon & Schuster had acquired his well-regarded book “The Revolution Was Televised,” which Mr. Sepinwall put out late last year.

In this book (which is subtitled “The Cops, Crooks, Slingers and Slayers Who Changed TV Drama Forever”) Mr. Sepinwall , a television critic for the Web site hitfix.com, looks at the impact that shows like “The Sopranos” and “Mad Men” and show runners like David Chase and Matthew Weiner have had in reinvigorating the hour-long dramatic format. Reviewing “The Revolution Was Televised” for The New York Times in December, Michiko Kakutani wrote that Mr. Sepinwall combined “smart, fair-minded assessments meant to provoke discussion” and interviews with creative talent, producers and executives to provide “a terrific book”; she also named it one of her 10 favorite books of 2012.

As with many of the TV success stories he writes about, Mr. Sepinwall encountered several “no”s before he finally h eard “yes.”

Mr. Sepinwall said in a telephone interview on Wednesday that Touchstone had been one of the publishers he met with when he was shopping his proposal for “The Revolution Was Televised” about a year ago, though the project was turned down then.

“The proposal wound up being a little bit different from the book I wrote, and so I don't necessarily blame them for passing at the time,” said Mr. Sepinwall, who planned to draw mostly from reporting he had already done on his site.

“When I got mostly rejections and one sort-of offer that I wasn't crazy about it, I decided I'm going to go this route,” he said, referring to his strategy to self-publish the book. “The next thing I knew, I was doing fresh interviews with everybody â€" I'm not exactly sure how I had time to do that.”

After his book was reviewed in The Times and elsewhere, Mr. Sepinwall said he was contacted again by Touchstone, which was now interested in acquiring i t.

“I like the idea that the book could exist in brick-and-mortar stores, could be on college syllabi,” he said. “I was pleased with the idea of being able to go back to the very beginning of the project.” He declined to provide exact sales figures for the book's self-published release but said they were “well beyond my wildest expectations.”

Lauren Spiegel, an editor at Touchstone who acquired “The Revolution Was Televised” for the imprint, said of Mr. Sepinwall, “I was already in the bag for him, and have been such a fan for a long time.”

Touchstone is planning its release of “The Revolution Was Televised” “as soon as we can,” she said, with a paperback edition planned for the early spring and an e-book edition possibly coming earlier.