What kind of book am I writing?
Spiteful question number 3
In my last post, I spoke about coming to terms with the who am I and why am I doing this questions of writing a book. In this post, I’ll talk about the rest of the five W’s and the one W that matters more than others.
The Five W’s of Writing Outside Academia
Once I faced the who and the why, a third spiteful question rounded the corner at great speed and shouted: what kind of book are you writing?! I’m not ready to answer this one yet, but any scholar thinking of writing for a wider audience could benefit from just the process of getting to this question alone.
Writing an article or book while inside academia means that you have a pre-made audience: your field, your students, and, if you’re going for tenure, your tenure committee. This might seem stifling but it gives most academics a pretty straightforward answer to some otherwise difficult questions, like “where should I publish?,” “what topics should I write on?” and “how long should I work on this project?” In a word, the five W’s—who, what, when, where, and why. All of that is determined regardless of your interests and life before you even start writing if you’re anywhere near the tenure track.
If you’re writing outside the academy, though, you have considerable freedom over the when, where, and what of your book: it’s up to you to decide how much or how little time to spend writing it, where you want to send it for publication, and what you want to write about.
The tricky part for writers moving out of academia is figuring out which of these questions matters most.
The answer is what. The what determines who the audience will be, which drives the entire enterprise of writing a book.
What—The Only Word that Matters
When I first tried to think about what kind of book I wanted to write, I couldn’t stop my mind from thinking about where this book might be published. I had a tough time making sense of why these questions were so inseparable to me until I realized that the topic of the book and the way it is written depends on the audience it’s written for. The question of publishing came up so earlyfor me because I was already trying to decide whether or not to write for an academic audience or a wider public.
I couldn’t focus on the what of the book without acknowledging who it would be for.
This dilemma will be familiar to academic authors to a degree, especially those who have published articles in academic journals with very narrow scopes. But even though I’ve written about this before in the academic context, it kind of took me by surprise just how much the audience determines and how early on in the writing process I started to think about its impact.
The what question demanded that I think about which conversations my book will contribute to and who is already part of those conversations, questions that fit more squarely into the where category of where will you publish?
It also forced me to consider the kind of language and tone I’ll use to write the book and what kind of topics or evidence I’ll need to make my point, all of which point to the when of how much time I need to write and research.
I could have chosen to leave the what kind of book question for after I started drafting to get a sense of what direction the book tended toward on its own. But there were so few questions I could answer without knowing who I would be speaking to that it felt uncomfortable to leave this decision until later. The main roadblocks that I encountered because of it also formed into questions:
How much does my audience already know about my topic?
How long a book will my audience tolerate?
What references will resonate with my reader?
Should I use footnotes?!
Side note: I’m very much undecided about the footnotes. Even if I pitch this book to a non-academic press, the reader will be better served by having additional resources and research pointed out for further reading if they want it. We’ll see what the publisher says!
The what bleeds into all the other serious questions about writing a book because it gives those other aspects life. If the audience is a secondary thought to the book’s development, why on earth would anyone read it?
While I have decided to write for a wider audience and not just an academic one, I’m still deciding what kind of press makes the most sense for this book. Do people who aren’t academics read books published by university presses? I’m not sure. I’ll explore that conundrum in a post of its own.