Hello. Hello. I hope you’re all doing well. I am so excited for today’s episode because I finally get to tell you about the new program that I am offering this fall. So the program is called The Fundamentals of Academic Book Writing. And what I’m going to do in this episode is tell you a little bit about why I decided to create this program, why I’m offering it now, and also what’s in it and what the benefit of taking it would be. So we’re going to get into all of that right now.

Welcome to Academic Book Writing Simplified. I’m your host, Jane Joann Jones, a writing coach and developmental editor who’s here to give you some tough love about the way you write. This podcast is for women and non-binary scholars in academia who are writing academic books, but feel as if the process is a little or a lot like a mystery. If you’re ready to trade your confusion and frustration for ease, clarity, and purpose, you’re in the right place.

Let’s head into today’s episode.

Okay, so first let’s talk about why I designed this program and why I’m offering it right now. So first, from a structural perspective, like we all see what’s going on in academia now with funding and hundreds of millions of dollars being stripped from academia and people losing grants, all sorts of funding, professional development, and it’s dire out there. And there is plenty of great writing on this topic and I’m not going to spend too much time talking about it in this particular episode. But I’m just like you. I am seeing it, I am horrified.

And I think it’s important to make sure that you’re still able to write, that you’re still able to write your books. Because number one, as I’ve said before on this podcast and in my newsletter, the reason they want you to be quiet is because you have something important to say and you need to have the resources and support to say it. Which is why I’m offering a program that is significantly less expensive than Book Brilliance at this exact moment.

And creating a different program, something in addition to Book Brilliance, has been on my mind for a while, even before these bigger changes have been going on. Full transparency — it takes a long time to develop a new program. I am mostly a one-woman shop over here. You know, I have a team who helps with administration. Of course, Kali, who’s been on the podcast, helps with developmental editing within my programs. But in terms of the creation of the programs, it’s me.

And I always want to make sure that if I am going to ask you to pay for something from me, that it is absolutely top-notch. So I take my time, I don’t rush, and I make sure that it is going to be something that is going to serve you. And my time has been spent on making sure that first Elevate, and then Book Brilliance, and the Book Brilliance alumni program Refine and Revise are top-notch.

And after being in business for now 10 years — right, I started this podcast around the 10-year anniversary of the business — it was time to create something else. And I wanted to create something that was more self-paced and asynchronous so that academics didn’t have to depend on being available for the coaching call times, that they didn’t have to make sure they could start it at a certain time, that they could do it on their time. Right? Like not just on the times that it’s available.

I always hear from people, every cohort, you know, this is a semester where I’m teaching three courses. It’s not the right time for me, or I teach during the call times, so I can’t do it at that time. And those are valid. I don’t love it when people join the program and can’t make calls. So creating something that gives you a little bit more flexibility was important to me.

But I wanted to make sure that even though it is a self-paced course, that you would still get the level of guidance that you needed to do the work required for the course.

So let me tell you a little bit about the course — about Fundamentals. So the name is pretty self-explanatory: The Fundamentals of Academic Book Writing. In this course, what you’re going to learn is what I believe to be the most important assets that you need to write a book, which are the overview, framework, and outline. Right?

The overview, which is that brief description of what your book is about — your argument, why your argument matters, right? And how you got to your argument, like your approach and method — that is the overview.

The framework involves who you’re in conversation with. Right? Like when you build your framework, you are staking your claim in the body of literature, in the body of work, and the intellectual conversation you’re having. You’re mobilizing your concepts, right? The terms that are important for your research — the schools of thought, the disciplines. Right. The fields. All of that is part of your intellectual framework.

And finally, your outline. We all know what an outline is, so I’m not going to go too in detail. But there are ways to do an outline — especially if you are a person who generally doesn’t outline — or even if you are a person who outlines. Learning how to organize your entire book will help you figure out things like the through line, will help you figure out if your argument holds across chapters, right? Will help you figure out if that concept that you thought was really important is actually really important.

All of that happens when you work on your outline.

Another reason — well, another way in which I have noticed that these three assets are so important — is because when I talk to people who have taken Book Brilliance, right, who have been in the coaching program or have been in Elevate, and I ask them what they go back to when the program’s over, time and again what I hear is: I go back to the overview. Every time I write a chapter, I go back to the overview lesson. When I write my book proposal, to write my chapter summaries, I go back to the outlining lesson. Every time I start a new chapter, I look at my framework. Every time I decide I need to decide if I need to read something — right, like do I need to read that? Do I need to engage that body of literature? Let me go back to my framework and remind myself what this book is about.

Okay, so these are assets that you use multiple times throughout your book writing journey. Whether it’s your first book, second book, third book, fourth book. They are things you can return to over and over.

Especially because when you enroll in the program, you get lifetime access. So these are lessons within the program that you can use time and again. And I think that that’s really important because writing a book is never a one-shot deal. Right? Like we don’t sit down, start at page one and go straight through.

We should first build a foundation, really think through the big ideas that are animating the book — the concepts that are animating your argument — the organization, like how are you getting the reader to where they need to go? Right? Who am I in conversation with and what am I trying to do in this conversation? Am I building on literature? Am I challenging literature? Am I offering a completely different perspective than what the literature currently does?

Those are all questions that you should have a working response to early on in the process. Your response will evolve, but those are questions you need to ask and decisions you need to make at the beginning.

So going through this process of creating your overview, framework, and outline pushes you to ask and answer those questions.

And I guarantee you, when you do that in the beginning — even if it seems incredibly time-consuming, incredibly tedious — you will notice that writing your drafts will become quicker because you won’t be stuck in indecision for the entire time. You won’t be writing in circles because you feel like you’re going to write your way into the argument. Right? That’s not going to happen because you’re going to have a structure to work with.

And that’s why I think it’s important to have this in a course format. Because usually, for many people, what ends up happening is that you write and write and write, come up for air, and then suddenly either you have to evaluate everything you’ve written, or you ask somebody else to — through maybe a peer, a writing group, a developmental editor, a manuscript workshop, what have you — or you’re looking at it yourself and suddenly you have to make sense of this large amount of writing. Right? Like a full chapter or multiple chapters.

And because you didn’t really have a direction to start with, number one, you’re not even sure what you’re trying to make sense of. And number two, you don’t have a sense of how to fix it — like how to revise it. Right? Like what are you aiming for? Versus if you give yourself some goalposts in the beginning, in terms of: I want my overview to be this. I want to be in conversation with these scholars. I want to be in this conversation. I see the logic of my argument unfolding this way.

Then you have some standards by which to evaluate your writing. And not only evaluate it, but actually do it. Like you have a goal in your writing. So you’re doing some goal-centered writing there — not in terms of word count or something quantifiable, but in terms of what you actually want to achieve on the page.

And I think that’s the benefit of a program like this — is that it gives you that structure, which we often unfortunately don’t have. Because nobody teaches you how to write a book, even though you need one for tenure, right?

So who is this program for? It’s for anyone who’s writing a book. Generally, the type of scholar who tends to gravitate towards this is a person who is writing a book based on a dissertation, right? Or a person writing a second book or third who did not enjoy the process of writing their prior book because they felt that there was a lack of structure. That is the type of scholar who normally gravitates to my programs.

Another question is, is this a program for people who are midway through the process? Right? Like maybe you’re not starting a book, but you’re halfway through, for instance. And I would say then it depends. It depends on if you’re satisfied with your argument and your framework. If you are satisfied and you’re like, all systems go, this is on point, this is what I want, then this probably is not for you.

But if you’re like, I feel like this is a little unwieldy, like I don’t know how to rein all of this back in, it feels very disorganized. Or like, I’m not sure my argument is strong enough. I feel like there’s some missing element here. Then yes, this would work for you because it’s going to help you figure that out. Right? It’s going to help you rein it back in, get to the heart of the book, and then be able to adapt and revise your writing so that it fits what your vision is for the book.

And of course, if you’re starting from the beginning, I would say if you’re starting a brand-new book that is not based on a dissertation, wait until you have your evidence collected. Right? Because this is a writing program, not a research program. So have the evidence, make sure you’ve done your analysis of it. For a social scientist, make sure you have the majority of it complete. It doesn’t need to all be complete, because research is an ever-evolving and ongoing process. But overview should not be your first step in the book writing process.

It should be — well, in the book writing process, yeah — but in the book research process, no.

All right, so that explains what is in the program. And it will be complemented by three coaching calls with me. So these are going to be more along the lines of open Q&As, ask-me-anythings, where you can come, ask me anything about the curriculum, ask me about your book in particular, and I am going to be able to give you some answers, of course, and also give you some ideas about your own book.

In order for these calls to make sense for you, you have to actually have done the curriculum in the course. You know, like be going along. It’s organized in a specific way for a specific reason. You go: overview, framework, outline. There’s a method. There’s also a guide at the beginning to show you, like, this is how you should proceed through this course in terms of how much time you should spend in certain places, the expectation for what “done” looks like, and of course, worksheets, workbooks, so that you know you are on the right track.

Again, offering a program asynchronously — for the most part, there are those three coaching calls, but like I said, they’re more open calls — offering a self-paced course is a different intellectual exercise. Right? Because you want to make sure — and you all know this because you all teach — you want to make sure that everyone who takes it has enough guidance to get through it without you there.

And speaking for myself, as an incredibly nosy human, I like to know what people are doing in my programs all the time. Right? And I won’t know that here. So I took extra steps to make sure that you have a system — that the course itself creates a system — for you to complete the course.

And I’m going to give you a little bit of gossip and say that, you know, this was an ego thing. I was like, ooh, a course without Jane there. And I had to really think about it, think about what that would look like, and how that support could be offered. And that’s something I can get more into if anyone’s interested. But we’re not going to go too deep into, you know, Jane’s self-coaching process to create a course here.

So to kind of bring this to a conclusion, because I like to keep these episodes under 20 minutes if possible:

This is a course that’s going to — if you’re listening to this at the time it is released — we are opening it for enrollment at the end of August. So probably as soon as next week. Right? It’s going to be open for enrollment for a short period of time. This time, we are managing the enrollment very aggressively to make sure that we give you support as you’re enrolling. Make sure that you get the schedule for the coaching calls, that people attend the coaching calls, right, so that you can get the full experience of the program.

So it’s not going to be something you can join anytime you feel like it. We have a closed enrollment period. So the best way to enroll is to join my newsletter. There is a link in the episode notes of every single episode of this podcast. So go there, sign up for the newsletter, and you will be the first person to know when it opens for enrollment. That is how you know. It will not first be announced anywhere else besides the newsletter.

And of course, you will be able to view a full written program description so that you can make the right decision about enrolling.

All right, so that’s what we have for today. I would be super excited to see you in the program, and I will be sharing more and more about it in the newsletter and probably on the next episode of this podcast.

So be well and I will talk to you then. Take care. 

Thank you so much for listening to today’s episode. Remember, writing an academic book is challenging, but that doesn’t mean you have to overcomplicate it.

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