Key Tips for Academics Wanting to Write for the General Public: A short guide for post-ac, alt-ac, or academics
In this five-part series, I am sharing insight on the path for post-ac, alt-ac, and current academics to create a book for a general public or trade audience. Writing a trade book can be an important stepping stone in an academic career or used as a pivot point for those interested in transitioning out of academia. Below is Part 2 of this series. You can read Part 1 by clicking here.
In Part 1 of this series, I talked about working backwards from your goal to envision your book project. Now, I’m going to extend the question of goals to include choosing content to write about. There also are a few things to consider when choosing your content. If you want to turn your research into a book for the general public, why would someone from the general public want to read it? This aligns with what I talked about in Part 1 with identifying what need your book fills in society. What skills or benefits can readers gain from your research? For example, one chapter from my book, Biology Everywhere: How the science of life matters to everyday life, is related to my research. Rather than talk about my findings or summarizing research the way one would do in a formal literature review or as part of theoretical framing, I show how it applies to the readers’ daily lives (which is the overall goal of my book) and how to practically use this information.
If you want to write about your research, can you frame it in a way that allows people to use insights to provide some benefit during their lives? Another interesting application of this can be seen in Brené Brown’s work. Her research on vulnerability led to her book, Dare to Lead, which is about being an effective leader. It isn’t an exhaustive description of her research, but provides tidbits that the reader can then use.
I also recommend considering where your content is coming from. For example, some universities have policies on the ownership of materials you generate for use in your classes. Let’s say you want to write a book of case studies that you developed as part of a course that would be useful for a specific non-academic population. Your university may have intellectual property rights to those case studies since you originally developed them as part of your university position. These policies can vary, so you’ll need to either go back to your university for guidance or choose to exclude any content that you generated as part of your role at a university.
If you developed content as part of a federally or privately funded grant that you’d like to use in your book, you may also wish to check with your program officer first. For example, let’s say that you received a federal grant to hold a series of workshops. You then want to take the insights gained from these workshops and important best practices and turn them into a book. Depending on the funding agency, you may or may not be able to sell these insights for profit. They may need to be released open source (which, if your goal is to get your name out there and not make money, could still be okay). Writing a book could also be an important dissemination strategy and/or broader impact for your proposal.
Next, how do you wish to release your content? If you chose to self-publish, the expenses associated with creating a book add up quickly, something I’ll talk more about in Part 3 and 4 of this series. Therefore, going through the entire process to release open source material may not be financially feasible. One possible model is to sell books for profit until the costs are recouped and then release the material open source, a method used by Barbara Sarnecka in her book, The Writing Workshop. If you view her website, you’ll see her expenses broken down by item with a thermometer that serves as a gauge of how close she is to “freeing the book.” The open education movement, which provides and promotes free education resources, is growing in popularity and reaches a wide audience (although typically an academic/teaching audience).
However, and this is an important consideration to make when deciding pricing, “free” or “cheap” can also send the wrong message about the quality of your work: it’s cheap because it isn’t quality. Some open access resources are of very high quality, and others are not. If you release your book open access from the beginning, will you be able to achieve your ultimate goal? For example, releasing Biology Everywhere as an open access textbook didn’t make sense given my target audience. I did not set out to write a textbook, plus I wanted to get my book into the hands of people who are not associated with universities or taking classes. The best way to do this was to get my book sold in venues where my audience would be: bookstores, both physical and online. It was important, therefore, for me to get barcodes, ISBNs, and have a well-designed cover that would facilitate marketing. Given my goals with pivoting my career and getting placements in local bookstores, I needed a physical edition (which is more expensive, more on that in Part 4) that I could bring to events and use as a vehicle for connecting with my audience.
In this part, I extended our previous discussion about goal setting to include considerations around content. Once you’ve decided on your goals for the book, the targeted audience, the niche it fills, and the bespoke content, it’s time to begin creating your book, the subject of Part 3. Be sure to sign up for my mailing list at www.biologyeverywhere.com so you don’t miss the next installment in this series!
Dr. Melanie Peffer is the author of Biology Everywhere: How the science of life matters to everyday life. She is interested in how people learn, understand, and engage with biology content. Visit www.biologyeverywhere.com for more information about her book, advice on writing for the general public, building an Alt-ac career, and upcoming speaking engagements.