Once the initial draft is ready, it will need several rounds of editing. In my experience, a good writing day will add around 500 to 1,000 words. Good time management is essential: set aside specific evenings, weekends, and holidays for the book. Researching, interviewing, and writing take a lot of effort, which must be balanced against academic work. Interviews should be on the record, and you should record your conversations to ensure accurate quotes. However, it’s still important to follow good journalistic practice. Your job may work in you favour here: researchers can be happier to talk to a fellow academic than a journalist. It helps to interview people who are involved in the subject area of your book. Just as facts in academic papers can wander astray over the course of several citations, well-known quotes and stories may turn out to be apocryphal. When researching a topic, it’s worth tracking down the primary source when possible. Depending on the focus of the book, you might need to sift through archives, newspapers, and biographies or even run simulations and analyse data. However, behind those words lies a mountain of research and interviews. If you agree to deliver the first draft in 18 months, that works out at about 1,000 words a week on average. Ī typical 250-page popular science book will contain around 75,000 words. As the old media adage goes, never overestimate the knowledge of your readers or underestimate their intelligence. Although they might not know scientific jargon, they should be able to grasp the concepts if you describe them well. In popular science writing, it’s particularly important to avoid condenscending to the reader. Some writers have very distinctive, and possibly even distracting, voices. Your writing will also have a personality-your ‘voice’ on the page-and this will influence the feel of the book. If you can show the conflicts and struggles that shaped the science, it will help draw your readers into the research. You might want to follow certain characters or include anecdotes and history to motivate the scientific content. In the proposal, you’ll have outlined the overall book structure, but you’ll also need to decide how individual sections and chapters fit together. On the plus side, however, there is often potential to sign foreign language deals as well as English ones.įirst person or third person? Narrative driven or explanatory? Lighthearted or serious? Popular science books allow for a much wider range of writing styles than academic papers. So, a big headline number may ultimately be split over three or more years. Publishers typically offer an advance against royalties, with the money spread over several payments, e.g., payment on signature, manuscript delivery, hardback, and paperback publication. Then, if all is well, the offers will start coming in. If an editor is interested, they’ll often get you on the phone to find out more about your plans and give you the chance to find out more about theirs. Or they may like the idea, but their sales team-who will eventually be pitching the book to retailers-do not. Some editors may have recently acquired a book on a similar topic or had a bad run with that genre in the past. Despite the classic stories of vicious rejections (Knopf famously called Orwell's Animal Farm ‘stupid and pointless’ ), rejections are often polite and reasonable. This will likely lead to dozens of rejection e-mails. Once the proposal is ready, your agent will send it to dozens of editors at different publishers. Based on my experience of writing and contributing to popular science books, the following rules summarise the main points a budding author needs to consider, from initial proposal through to postrelease publicity. Writing scientific papers is a central part of academic life, but there are some notable differences when it comes to publishing books for a wider audience. They can also provide new skills and opportunities, and in some cases a second career, for their authors. By communicating ideas and discoveries to the wider public, popular science books can generate debate, influence culture, and inspire future researchers. Scientists have a long history of writing for a general audience. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.įunding: The author received no specific funding for this work.Ĭompeting interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. PLoS Comput Biol 14(2):Įditor: Scott Markel, Dassault Systemes BIOVIA, UNITED STATESĬopyright: © 2018 Adam J. Citation: Kucharski AJ (2018) Ten simple rules for writing a popular science book.
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