Many academics contact editorial consultants like us because they want to write a trade book. They’ve watched a colleague make the leap or have read a few success stories and have a big idea. A reality check at this early stage – before you shape a proposal – can help academics with their sights set on mainstream publishing build the strongest possible book for the right audience.
Aspiring best-selling authors should be prepared for a journey that can go in many directions and be ready to recover and pivot. A book proposal may get a five-figure offer that feels life-changing; it may even spark a bidding war. Or the agent may struggle to sell the book, and the academic author ends up at a university press after all (with the agent still taking their percentage).
Here’s what to think about.
How to find an agent
Major trade presses generally don’t accept unagented proposals, so for most books, you’ll need an agent to reach the big houses, and for almost anywhere else, having one helps. Sometimes an editor will reach out after spotting your brilliant work on a hot-button issue. This is what happened to one of our clients, American studies professor Daniel Martinez HoSang: a piece in The New York Times drew attention to his research on the multiracial right in the US and an editor came calling.
Landing an agent can take time. A generous colleague might connect you with theirs, but the more likely route is to research agents who represent books like yours, then query them directly with a pitch and sample material.
For a literary agent to sign you, your book doesn’t just have to be more compelling than the average academic monograph; it must have commercial appeal. Is there a clear audience for your book beyond academia? Would enough readers care about your subject to buy the book, rather than simply encounter your ideas in an article or on a podcast? Prepare to shift from impressing peers to projecting sales figures. Here’s how an agent thinks: “Will the advance be big enough that 15 per cent covers my time?”
Your model book is probably a five
At Scholars & Writers, we place books by academics on a one-to-10 continuum based on audience size. (Books by non-academics aren’t included.) At one is a monograph that matters deeply to a few dozen specialists. At 10 are titles like Grit, The Body Keeps the Score and Sapiens, which have sold millions. That end is often dominated by self-help, so make sure you feel intellectually comfortable there if that’s your goal.
Between two and five on the scale lie the books that an ever-widening circle of colleagues cite and celebrate. At six to nine are books that generate radio, television and press requests. To get a feel for that range, consider what writers such as Jill Lepore, David Olusoga, Peter Frankopan and Hannah Fry do. They don’t just write books; they write columns, make documentaries and advise politicians and organisations, in essence taking on a second job. The wider the readership you want, the more the book will depend on your platform. If you want to publish a book that reaches more people, be prepared to promote both the book and your work.
To help people figure out where their book might land on that continuum, we ask one question: what books are like the one you want to write?
Many name books we’d place around five: engaging, well-written academic books. Sometimes they protest that “everyone” has read the model, by which they mean everyone they know, and they mostly know academics. In reality, no one outside academia has even heard of it.
Others seek the opposite extreme, naming nines and 10s, but written by journalists, not scholars. Interviewing sources and shaping other people’s research into a riveting story is a different craft, however, from doing the research and then translating it into engaging case studies, breezy takes on previous research and witty anecdotes of the scholar-at-work.
Before you start querying agents, make sure you can name three books like the one you envision. Look for books published in the past five years by experts with careers like yours, not the outliers.
Control, judgement and money
Your level of autonomy as an author is another consideration when dealing with mainstream publishing houses. Many academics are surprised to learn how few decisions remain theirs, and how many people are involved in moving a book from idea to dust jacket. Agents may encourage you to write more like the self-help best-sellers. The marketing team may insist on a title you don’t like. Copy-editors may delete your cleverest turns of phrase. They should all be focused on the same thing you are: creating a great book that reaches more people. So, if you plan to debate each suggestion as though it were an academic seminar, a trade book might not be your best path.
It’s also a mistake to think that a trade book is a way to avoid peer review and speed up the process. In reality, agents reject proposals. Editors reject proposals.
Perhaps mainstream publishing is not your path
You don’t need to go the trade route to make an impact. Being a high priority at a university press, instead of a low priority at a major trade press, has its advantages. University presses, after all, routinely publish best-selling, award-winning books by and for academics and non-academics. Harvard University Press sold more than 2 million copies of Capital in the Twenty-First Century, and Princeton University Press made a New York Times bestseller of Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism.
Go into trade publishing with your eyes open. Talk to academics who’ve tried it, especially about what surprised them. Learn to be a more flexible person and to accept how little of the process is in your hands. The surprise isn’t that publishing is slow but that the entire clock belongs to other people. A proposal can sell in a week or sit for a year, and a months-long silence is rarely the rejection it feels like.
Most importantly, don’t think of trade and academic publishing as a binary choice; it’s a spectrum. Take time to read and research your models, then decide where on that continuum you feel most comfortable. That will determine your next steps and ensure that you’re putting your precious time exactly where you want it to go.
K. Anne Amienne is founder and director, and Daniela Blei is lead editor, coach and public scholar mentor, both at Scholars & Writers, a consultancy that provides coaching, editing and public scholar support for European and North American academics.
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