How to write a lot: a practical guide to productive academic writing - Silvia Paul J. 2019

Writing Books

People engage in many curious practices. Whether we’re reading essays on the Internet about how to spend less time online or watching nature documentaries in climate-controlled rooms, we humans have earned our reputation as nature’s quirkiest mammals. Writing scholarly books, this chapter’s curious practice, isn’t as odd as chopping down a fir tree, dragging it into one’s living room, and asking small children to hang fragile trinkets from its branches, but the more books I write, the more peculiar it seems.

This chapter is for people who are new to book writing. Some of you are wading through your first book, hip-deep and far from shore; others are watching from dry land, tempted to dive into writing but unsure of what the water is like. We’ll discuss the motivational and practical aspects of writing books that newcomers ought to know. This chapter focuses on scholarly books, the sort written for fellow scholars, students, or practitioners and usually published by academic publishers. We won’t delve into textbooks or mass-market books for general audiences because those rarely are (and probably shouldn’t be) your first crack at writing a book.

You may be tempted to skip this chapter, thinking “No way—I’ll never write a book.” But you’re probably doing a lot of things you never thought you’d do, like taking up jogging, avoiding gluten, or breeding Alsatians, so we capricious humans should never say never.

WHY WRITE A BOOK?

Why do people write academic books? In some fields of scholarship, writing books is simply what they do. For scholars in “book fields” like history, classics, religious studies, and literary criticism, books are the coin of their intellectual realms. Getting hired, tenured, and promoted requires coming up with appealing ideas, developing those ideas into big manuscripts, and persuading one of a shrinking number of scholarly publishers to publish it as a book. In the humanities, books are both noble career landmarks and greasy tools for staving off unemployment.

Outside the book fields, motives for writing books are murkier. In some departments, such as sociology or anthropology, you’ll find both book writers (e.g., social theorists) and article writers (e.g., quantitative number crunchers). In some of the sciences, where the grants are big and the articles are short, few people even consider the possibility of writing a book.

Exhibit 7.1 describes the most common reasons for writing books. Have a look and see if any of them resonate with you. A few reasons might seem surprising (e.g., discovering that you’ve been inadvertently writing a book) and others might seem scary (e.g., writing a book to learn a new field), but they’re all common ones. You don’t need a pure or noble reason to write a book, but you should think seriously about why you want to write one before committing to it. Writing books hurts like no other kind of writing. Unlike the acute pain of grant writing, which goes away once the deadline passes, the chronic aches and fevers of book writing will afflict you for years.

EXHIBIT 7.1. Why Do We Write Scholarly Books?

§ Because we want to make a difference in the real world. Practitioners—clinicians, educators, policymakers, and other people in the trenches—buy and read our books but rarely read our articles. Even if they could coax our articles from behind their paywalls, practitioners would rather read the big-picture, integrated view that a book provides.

§ Because our ideas are huge. As any philologist or medievalist will tell you, some ideas require a book-sized box. In non-book fields, people write books to integrate evidence across many disciplines, introduce readers to a complicated topic, or serve as a final statement on a long line of research.

§ Because we want to learn something new. In the writing to learn model (Zinsser, 1988), writing is a way of teaching ourselves what we know. If you want to learn a new area of scholarship, committing to write something about it forces you to read widely, critically, and thoughtfully. And after doing all that reading, you will surely have something worth writing about.

§ Because we were inadvertently writing one. Just as people can give birth without knowing they were pregnant, scholars can write a big book without knowing it. This often happens with course materials. An instructor who is unhappy with the textbook will write some supplementary essays, add another one the next semester, and eventually end up with 90% of a textbook.

§ Because we want to plant a flag. If you’re interested in public scholarship, a book plants a flag: It signals your expertise to journalists, policymakers, and community groups who might seek it (Stein & Daniels, 2017). Likewise, if you want to do consulting or public speaking, publishing a book on the topic attracts the attention of clients and audiences.

§ Because we’re intellectually restless. Some people are occasionally afflicted with intellectual wanderlust—the vague feeling that life would be better if they had a vast obligation looming over them for the next few years.

§ Because we wandered into the wrong side of campus. More than a few scientists have been infected with the urge to write a book after spending time with the philologists and medieval historians, hardened desperadoes known for their corrupting influence.

§ Because books are amazing. I’ve never heard someone say, “I just love downloaded modules,” “I really should spend less time reading real books and more time online,” or “I’m looking forward to having kids so we can cuddle up and read information and content together.” Only books are books—cherished, respected, beloved.

PLANNING YOUR BOOK

If you’re thinking about writing a book, the first step is to keep thinking about it. There’s no rush—books will still exist when you’re ready, and the hardest part of writing a book is figuring out what it’s about. Unlike articles, books have a huge scope and scale. They have a thesis that gets developed across many chapters, a framework for organizing the freakish amount of information, and an audience that the book must reach and convince to be a success. Not surprisingly, writers have written books about writing books, so you can start your planning by reading. For scholarly books, I particularly recommend Getting It Published (Germano, 2016) and Developmental Editing (Norton, 2009).

You have to solve three planning problems. First, who is your book for? Who do you expect to buy and read it? Notice that we aren’t asking who will notice it, who will find the idea interesting, or who will be glad to hear that someone wrote a book on that topic. Your book can’t be all things to all audiences. It’s better to serve a small, core audience well than to write a diffuse, generic book that no group in particular finds relevant or satisfying.

Second, what’s the point of your book? What is it arguing? When they close the book, what will your readers believe or know? What, in short, is your thesis? Your thesis isn’t simply your topic or concept. It’s the point you want to make, the argument you want to develop, that serves as the organizing force for your book. As Norton (2009) put it, “A thesis can beguile, inspire, enrage—whatever works to grab the readers’ attention. . . . A thesis is a gauntlet thrown down before readers, daring them to think back” (p. 48). To lure readers through your book, you need an appealing and intriguing thesis that can be captured in a couple sentences.

And third, what is your book’s skeleton? What are the book’s parts, and how are they arranged? What’s the length, scale, and scope? Take your time: These early choices will dictate many seasons of research and writing. Once you have mapped the size and scope of your book, you’ll see fissures in your ideas that suggest distinct chapters. And once you have a set of chapters, each of roughly equal length, and outlines for each chapter, you’ll have a table of contents—the book writer’s version of seeing the baby on the ultrasound monitor.

CONSIDER COAUTHORS

In some fields, all books have only one author. The abstemious humanities, for example, have an entrenched cultural taboo against coauthored books. I wouldn’t want you to be stigmatized and driven from your department in a hail of reusable water bottles and sensible shoes, so conform to your local culture if it discourages coauthorship. But in more profligate fields, it’s common to see two or three authors band together for a book. If coauthorship is an option, should you consider it?

If you haven’t written a book before, teaming up with an experienced book author makes sense. The “mentor model” of coauthorship, common in the social sciences, pairs a grizzled book-writing veteran with a junior colleague. Their goal is not simply to write a book together, but for one person to teach another how to do it. Two productive writers with good writing habits and charitable and forgiving temperaments can write well together. It won’t be much faster than writing alone, but it will give camaraderie to the lonesome task and polyphony to the book’s ideas.

Binge writers, having some inchoate self-awareness about their writing struggles, love the idea of having a coauthor, so they’ll latch on to anyone with strong writing habits. Be wary. If someone wants to write a book with you, ask if he or she has the writing habits that could yield one good manuscript page a week, every week, every month, be it in the summer or semester, every season, until you are both a few years older. Mentoring a new writer in the craft of books isn’t the same as carrying someone. And when two binge writers decide to write a book together, needless to say, they risk a disaster of the sort described in ancient epigraphs.

WRITING THE THING

Writing a book is like writing anything else: a gallimaufry of reading, thinking, typing, and complaining, speckled with sparkles of intellectual delight. But books, with their menagerie of arguments, are much more complex than articles, which usually house only one pet idea. These different scopes and scales lure writers into an irrational like-goes-with-like style of thinking: “Sure, short articles can be written in short blocks of time during the week, but a big book requires a big block. I need a sabbatical.”

You don’t need a sabbatical. If you wait two years for a sabbatical and then write your manuscript in 6 months, did you write your book in 6 months or 30 months? Waiting for a sabbatical to work on a book is the same old “Big Blocks of Time” specious barrier (see Chapter 2) magnified from “I should stay home all day Friday to write” to “I need to go into hiding in rural Alsace for a year.” Indeed, if anything, we should avoid what Wymann (2016) called “the horror of the sabbatical” (p. 28), the cycle of false hope, dashed expectations, and bitter regret that book writers usually experience.

But you do need to prune your obligations when you’re writing a book during the normal work week. Few people will have the luxury of writing only their book, forswearing all other projects, but all of us can set wiser priorities. Your writing time is precious, so some kinds of writing are no longer worth your time when you’re writing a book. You should decline marginal writing projects, such as invitations to write entries for scholarly encyclopedias and dictionaries, book reviews, newsletter essays, guest blog posts, and other book brambles. And think carefully before agreeing to write chapters for edited books—feed your own book before feeding someone else’s.

You’ll need to find a way for your short-term writing projects to coexist with your book. One strategy is to divide your weekly writing time. If you write every weekday, for example, you might devote Monday and Tuesday to articles and the other days to your book. If that seems too Solomonic, another approach is to pause the book occasionally, such as when a revise-and-resubmit decision for an article arrives, and then resume the book. Avoid pausing the book for more than a month, lest it go into hibernation for a whole season.

Your book is made up of an unbearably large number of paragraphs sorted into sections that are sorted into chapters. It’s tempting to skip from chapter to chapter, working on the fun paragraphs and easy sections, but the chapter is the basic unit of your book. An author flitting between the pieces of low-hanging fruit could write a hundred pages without completing a chapter, so finish one chapter before moving to the next one. Many authors start with the second chapter and plow ahead in order; others write chapters out of order. However you do it, it is wise to save the introductory chapter and preface for last. Books usually wriggle away from their authors, maturing and evolving, so you should wait to see what you wrote before saying what you’ll write.

FINDING A PUBLISHER

Authors write manuscripts for publishers to turn into books for readers to buy. It’s easier to find a publisher in some fields than others. Each field has a ratio of its authors’ supply of manuscripts and its readers’ demand for books. In most of the humanities, the ratio is grim. The audience is small but every scholar wants to (or has to) write a book, so editors can be picky and fickle. Germano (2016) offered wise advice about how to find, approach, and work with publishers that writers in the humanities should take to heart.

But in other scholarly fields—humanities scholars should probably avert their eyes—supply and demand are flipped. Fields like psychology and biology, for example, have enormous audiences but relatively few authors. Because the market is huge but no one wants to write books, many editors are fishing in the same small pond of authors.

When it’s time to find a publisher, start with your informal networks. Ask your book-writing colleagues about a good home for your project and any juicy gossip about publishers that they can dish. Then browse your shelves. Who releases books that you read and admire? Who published the books that your book talks about? Beginners often fear that publishers won’t want a manuscript that’s similar to their recent releases. To the contrary, publishers can’t be all things to all readers, so they seek to build reputations for excellence in some areas. While there is surely a point at which your book overlaps too much with another, publishers are more likely to want to see your manuscript if it would slot nicely into an ongoing book series or area of excellence.

You’re ready to talk to an editor about your book when you have a clear concept, a tight thesis, and a solid table of contents. The best place to cross paths with editors are at conferences, where publishers show their wares. Some of the nicely dressed people surrounded by tables and shelves of books work in sales and marketing, hoping to sell copies and encourage course adoptions. Others are acquisitions editors. They spend the conference meeting with prospective authors like you, attending sessions to see what topics are hot, and tracking down authors with long overdue manuscripts like flinty-eyed bounty hunters. Editors book much of their conference time early, so it’s worth getting in touch via email to briefly describe your project and ask if you could meet at the conference to discuss it. But there’s nothing wrong with a cold call. You can always wander up to a table early in the conference and ask if someone from acquisitions is there.

If intrigued by your book, editors will encourage you to send them a book proposal. You’ll get proposal guidelines from the publisher, but you should read up on book proposals (Germano, 2016) and ask your friends in the department for advice and feedback before submitting it. The typical proposal asks the author to describe the book’s thesis, intended audience, and major competitors. You’ll need a detailed table of contents, usually with several paragraphs that describe each chapter, along with sample chapters. The publishers will want to know a lot about you, too, to see if you’re a credible and marketable messenger for the idea.

Unlike journal articles, book proposals can be submitted simultaneously to several publishers, but it isn’t always worth doing so. You should inform publishers that you’re shopping the proposal around and let them know if another publisher offers a contract. But if you have a clear favorite, you might send your proposal only to that publisher and note that you aren’t sending it elsewhere. The world of scholarly publishing is small, and good manners will help you develop long-term relationships with publishers.

After the proposal is perused by peer reviewers, the editor may offer you a contract—another milestone for a book. Contracts specify a great many things, but the most important for us here are the length and the delivery date. The manuscript that you deliver to the publisher should roughly be what you promised. If it’s too long or too short, or if it has many more figures, maps, and illustrations than promised, the book might fall outside the range of what the publisher can effectively print and market.

And your manuscript must be delivered on time. You and the publisher will negotiate a delivery date, and you better meet that date. Faculty grouse about students turning in work late, but professorial tardiness is legion in publishing. Academic authors so rarely deliver their manuscripts on time—one imagines that unrealistic optimism, binge writing, and waiting for sabbaticals have something to do with it—that your publisher will be surprised and impressed.

DEALING WITH THE DETAILS

Your manuscript’s end will be anticlimactic. When that last paragraph is written, the clouds won’t part and fireworks won’t go off. Instead, you’ll face a pile of humdrum tasks: gathering permissions forms, making high-quality electronic figures and illustrations, and tracking down obscure sources. The publisher probably has an extensive author questionnaire for you that asks for information about you and about your book that they use for cataloging, marketing, and promotion. You may be asked to suggest cover art and scholars who might provide blurbs for the cover.

When your book enters production, you might get a copyedited manuscript—an edited manuscript to review before it is typeset—and you will surely get page proofs. These page proofs are urgent. Your perfectionist academic mind will realize that this is your last chance to tinker and fiddle with the text, but the publisher needs those back quickly and with only minor corrections. It’s worth asking (or hiring) a keen-eyed friend to scour the proofs, just in case the typo imps changed assess to asses again. Your book gets indexed at the proofs stage. Some publishers will index the book for you; others will ask you to do it or give you the option, should your heart be inclined toward indexing’s dark allure. And eventually a box full of books arrives, your bubble-wrapped bundle of joy.

THINKING ABOUT THE NEXT BOOK

Even if you swore you would write only one book, even if writing that book harmed your relationship with your pets and with caffeine in equal measure, you’ll think about writing another one. You will. Once you hold the bound book in your hands and your memory of writing it becomes gauzy and sepia-toned, you’ll think that your book might want a sibling to hang out with on the shelf. And people will surely pester you about your plans. Acquisitions editors will notice your first book and get in touch. If you work in a book-writing field, your friends in the department will display an unseemly and lurid curiosity about your next project.

Writing the second book is much easier and much harder than the first. You’ll have the confidence that comes from having done something hard, and you’ll know more about how book writing works and what publishers want to see. But you’ll also have bigger intellectual ambitions. Second books usually have a larger scope, a more daring thesis, or a wider audience, so they’ll vex you in ways your first book didn’t.

Your mind might drift to thinking of writing a textbook, the oddest creature in the book bestiary. The textbook market, for better or worse, isn’t what it once was. Textbooks are huge risks for publishers and authors. If you’re inclined to write a textbook because of daydreams of untold wealth, you would probably make more money regularly selling your plasma. A few textbooks make big money, but most textbooks fall flat and fail: the book is published, few instructors adopt it, the publisher declines to develop a second edition, and the loud whoosh of dreams deflating fills the halls. The best textbooks—books that are integrative, ambitious, and forward looking—are more likely to meet this ignominious end. Because these failed books vanish into history, aspiring textbook writers don’t appreciate just how speculative textbook writing can be.

But whatever you choose to write, you now know how to write a book: weekly, according to a writing schedule.

CONCLUSION

Writing a book is like injecting anabolic steroids: If it doesn’t kill you, it’ll make you stronger and hairier. But I know you can do it. When your book is going slow and looking bleak, go to the campus library and gaze upon the rows and rows of books. Some of those authors were more stylish and diligent writers than you and me. But some of them were duller and flakier than us, and they finished their book. There is no mystery to book writing, only the ineluctable routine of following your writing schedule.

More people should consider writing a book, but books aren’t for everyone. If while reading this chapter, for example, you thought “I’m way too busy with grants to write a book,” you might be right, as our next chapter shows.