6 tips for academics planning books for a broader market

Academics and researchers have the luxury of working deeply for years on a topic. Often, in their work, they discover truths that have the potential to excite a more general audience, breaking out of their tight academic circles.

But to succeed with a book on these topics, they need a very different approach than has worked in their academic settings. Here are some things to keep in mind if you’re a professor or researcher hoping to broaden your reputation and benefit from a popular exposition of what you’ve discovered.

Some tips for academics writing a general market book

Here’s are some essential shifts you’ll have to make as you prepare your book for a broader market.

1. Aim your prose at a naive audience, not your peers. Academics are often consumed by the collegial infighting that takes place in their journals and conferences, where the audience is rich with colleagues and competitors. They habitually focus on resolving the finer questions about where they stand and preemptively fending off criticism from fellow experts in their field. This is a completely wrong approach for a general market book. Most of your readers will have no idea about your history and where you stand on the narrow controversies that consume a score or two of your closest colleagues and students. Remember: you now have a green field of new potential readers unsullied by that infighting. So start with a clear exposition of your most powerful ideas and leave the parochial controversies for the footnotes.
2. Stories count. Academic readers criticize stories about individuals and what happened to them as “anecdotal evidence” — generally not worthy of publication. But in popular books, anecdotes are called case studies, and they make dead prose come alive. Rather than being ashamed of the anecdotal nature of your evidence, use clever storytelling to put it front and center as you write. You can then use solid academic evidence such as statistics and research results to prove that the points from your case studies are valid.
3. Explain things your colleagues already know. General audiences are ignorant. You’ll need to ground them in the basic concepts of your field, whether that’s economics, cardiology, political science, or litigation. You can get these explanations out of the way briefly before you get to the insights that are unique to your research. If you’re worried how your esteemed colleagues will judge you for dealing with the basics, just add a note telling your fellow experts they can skip this block of expository material.
4. Front-load your chapters. Academic reasoning is deductive: It starts with a clear description of assumptions, goes on to describe methods, analyzes data, and only then reaches conclusions. No lay reader wants to wait that long for the punch line. Start with your most interesting conclusions. Once you’ve used them to capture your reader’s attention, you can explain the reasoning that led to them in the rest of the chapter.
5. Ditch the long sentences, jargon, and passive voice. Academics are used to reading and writing complex, jargon-filled sentences to reflect their expertise. And passive voice is a requirement for both research papers and literary criticism. If you keep those habits in writing for popular audiences, they’ll fall asleep. Say what you mean simply, clearly, and directly. This is a hard habit for academics to adopt; a good editor can show you the difference between what you’re used to writing and what general readers are more willing to enjoy.
6. Embrace writing in the first person. It’s practically a sin to write in the first person in academic prose, which leads to bizarre locutions like, “As this researcher first noticed in 2015, . . . ” General readers want to hear what you’ve found, and you’re welcome to write about yourself. (Don’t go overboard, though: Unless you’re writing a memoir, the book is generally about what you know, not about you.) Even when they do write in the first person, academics often write about themselves in the plural as if they are a queen or editorial board, for example, “We recommend a different approach.” If you’re only one author, don’t say “we.” Use the one word that’s verboten in scientific writing: I. It’s perfectly fine to write, “As I will explain in detail in the next chapter . . . ” And it will draw readers in as they imagine you speaking directly to them.

Your editor can help

When I help brilliant academic minds make the leap to popular books, I frequently find myself citing these tips to give them permission to actually say what they mean. More often than not, they find the resulting freedom exhilarating. Go ahead and break free from academic prose habits in your popular book. Just don’t get overenthusiastic and start writing the same way when you send a memo to the dean.