Writing an academic book is challenging, but it doesn’t have to feel like torture. Join me, Jane Joanne Jones, writing coach and developmental editor to women and non-binary scholars in academia, as I teach you how to write your academic book with ease, clarity, and purpose. Let’s bend the rules, expose the hidden curriculum, and write your book the right way, your way. 

Welcome to today’s episode, part of Season One of the Right Prose Podcast. In this season, we’re discussing 10 lessons I’ve learned in 10 years of working as a developmental editor and writing coach. 

Today we’re going to discuss a structural issue, why it’s so hard to write a book in academia. I have some observations about the environment academics work in and the expectations they face. I’m going to explain what this environment is and what these expectations are, and I’ll tell you why they make it so challenging to sustain long-term projects like books. 

I’ve worked with over a hundred writers who are working on books, and during that time I’ve identified some patterns and the challenges that they’ve faced. I’m going to discuss several patterns that I see frequently in the hope that we can normalize discussing them so that you don’t feel like you are uniquely incompetent when you face one of these challenges. 

Let’s get into it. 

The first challenge is that nobody has enough time, and you’re probably like, “Jane, I already know this”, but let’s go into it with a little bit more nuance. We’re all aware that academics have to divide their time between teaching, research, and service. Now, in a perfect world, you should be able to divide your time according to how your various activities are weighted for tenure and promotion. So for instance, if research is valued at 50% for tenure, you should be spending 50% of your time on research. 

Unfortunately, there are two issues here. One is that junior faculty are rarely given transparent guidance on what matters for tenure. Second, in academia, you’ll often be acting from a sense of urgency attending to the issues that are right in front of you rather than those that are most important. This is especially detrimental to book writers who have to sustain a long-term project over years. 

The writing of the book will outlive any class you teach, most committees you serve on and the articles you write. But unlike something like an article where I’ll revise and resubmit, it’s often difficult to create urgency around book writing because you have so many other urgent matters to attend to. There are grades you have to submit, hiring committees you have to sit on, and students knocking on your door.

So you end up delaying book writing only to realize that you haven’t given yourself enough time to write the book that you really want to write. Also, the structure of the average academic term doesn’t allow for a lot of deep work.

Now, when I was in grad school, I saw faculty that were able to buy themselves out of teaching with grant money, push a lot of their grading to teaching assistants, and earn sabbaticals based on their publication records. I did not realize how rarefied a world this was until I started my tenure track job where no such allowances were granted, you could not get out of teaching. And then I started teaching and coaching faculty who were in similar situations, they were expected to write a book to earn tenure, but they were also expected to teach multiple courses every term, to mentor many students, and to serve on committees.

Now, I’m not saying that in order to write a book you need two or three years without any other professional commitments. I’m not telling you to go into a cave and write your book and not talk to anybody. Instead, what I’m arguing for here is simple math. If your teaching and service occupies 30 plus hours a week, that doesn’t leave you much time to work on your book. If your schedule changes every term, maintaining a consistent writing schedule will be a struggle. 

Alright, so now that we’ve talked about the time constraints that make it difficult to write a book, let’s talk about the second obstacle, which is that it’s hard to create a close community of peers. Now, given the size of most departments, you likely won’t have many peers who do work that’s very close to yours. In some ways, this is great. You’re exposed to a diversity of perspectives. Students have more courses to choose from, and those are great, but it can feel isolating when you’re the only person doing one type of work and you don’t have mentorship around that line of research in your department.

If you’re a junior faculty member writing your first book, you are likely looking for some fresh mentoring aside from your dissertation advisor. Now, one way departments have tried to address this is through manuscript workshops, and if you’re unfamiliar with those, a manuscript workshop is where you as a faculty member are allowed to invite a group of subject matter experts to come read a draft of your book and give you feedback, to workshop it with you. 

And I think that these manuscript workshops have their place, but I would argue that they come rather late in the game given the structure of these workshops where reading a full draft and your desire to make the most out of having several experts in the room at once, it makes sense that you want to have that full draft mostly complete, but that means that you’ve been writing the book on your own.

So these manuscript workshops, they don’t make sense as an intervention to help you write the book in the first place. They don’t teach you how to write a book. They give you feedback on a book you have already written, which leads me to the third and final obstacle that I’ll discuss, which said, nobody teaches you how to write a book. So here’s the way many academics write books. You cobble together resources from your department, your university, professional organizations, friends, mentors, and publishing professionals to create your own book writing process. 

It is expected that you’ll cobble all of these things together to write the book, which is the project that will determine whether you get to keep your job. There’s no system, there’s no set of best practices, there’s very little established common knowledge. This is madness. You’re expected to basically wing it and hope for the best. And of course, because I know if you’re listening to this, you are a conscientious person.

You are working hard to get the resources you need to write the book that will earn you tenure – to write the best book you can. So this is not an indictment of you trying to go find all of these resources, but think about some of the advice that you’ve received about book writing, both solicited and unsolicited. Has there been any consensus? Think about your search for resources to write your book. Have you found everything you need? 

I’m guessing the answer to both of those questions is no, and it’s not for lack of effort. It is definitely not because you haven’t tried. If you’re listening to a podcast like this, you are clearly invested in getting what you need to write your book, but that template that you want, that guide that you want to write your book, it doesn’t exist in any very obvious way within the confines of academic professional development.

Most likely not the development offered by your university or your professional organization, and this is not because they are malicious or because they’re trying to hold something from you, but simply because nobody’s created it. We believe in academia that searching for things in solitude is part of what marks you as intelligent. If you’re able to go and figure things out on your own, that is for sure important, but you are already doing that with your original data, your original analysis, all of the literature you have read, all of the work you are doing to make sense of all of that information. Guidance on how to actually put it together in order to write a book is something that would simply accelerate your process, not mark you as a person who doesn’t know what they’re doing.

Now, in closing, the reason that I point out these three obstacles to writing books is so we could normalize discussing them. I talk to so many academics, particularly women in academia who believe that they’re bad at academia because they aren’t able to work on their book for 20 hours a week (insert whatever number of hours you have in your brain), or because they’re not sure how to write a book chapter. These aren’t things that you should naturally know. You should not naturally know how to write a book chapter. You should not be expected to create 20 hours to work on your book if you’re teaching three classes and serving on a hiring committee and mentoring grad students. So it is my hope that by listening to this episode, you can shed some of the shame or embarrassment you may have as you learn a way to write your book that works for you. 

Thank you so much for listening to today’s episode. If you like what you heard, please share the podcast with a friend. Or if you’re an Apple listener, leave a review. It helps other folks find the podcast so we can continue the conversation and make sure that when it’s time to write your book, you could do it on your terms, your way.