Hello. Hello and welcome to Academic Book Writing Simplified. I’m your host, Jane Joanne Jones, and today we are going to conclude our discussion of academic book introductions by answering the most important question of all. What goes into one? If you’re feeling intimidated looking at that first blank page, wondering how on earth you’re going to write something that makes your reader want to keep reading, this episode is for you. I’m going to explain the four essential components of a book introduction so that you can get a strong start writing yours. Let’s get into it. Welcome to Academic Book Writing Simplified. I’m your host, Jane Joanne 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. There are four essential elements you want to include in your introduction. Now, I want you to keep in mind that this is not an exhaustive list. You might add some other elements to yours. These, however, are what I think that you must include based on the many books I’ve edited, the many authors I’ve coached, and the academic books that I’ve read. So let’s go through these four elements in order.

First, the puzzle or the problem. This is the foundation of your book. What is it about? Like, what is the curiosity that made you want to pursue this research and pursue this project? Here, you’re going to try to pique the reader’s curiosity too. So your introduction should clearly explain the central you might call it a research question, the problem, or the puzzle your book addresses. This might sound obvious, but being clear and straightforward is really important here. Please don’t bury your research question 10 pages into your introduction. Some readers think that holding out on the puzzle will entice readers to keep reading. It’s not going to.

It’s just going to frustrate them. So you’re gonna be like, what is this book about? So bring it forward. Say it clearly and help your reader understand why it’s important. This doesn’t mean it needs to be the first sentence of your introduction, but it should come relatively early. Now, when we talk about a puzzle or a problem, this might mean identifying a gap in the literature, responding to an empirical problem. It might involve addressing a historical question that’s been overlooked or that people didn’t understand, you’ll know what it is for your research, and it’s your job to explain it in a way that your intended audience could understand. All right, so once we pose the problem or the puzzle, we have the argument or the intervention. So you’re posing a question and the reader needs an answer.

So what does your book do? How does your book answer it? How does your book answer this question? What are you adding to the conversation that’s already happening? Or what new conversation are you starting that needs to happen? In the scholarly world, we call this your intervention, right? It’s your unique contribution. So of course you are not just summarizing what other people have said, you are telling us what you’re saying. You’re positioning your work in relation to others in the field or in different fields and showing how your book adds to complements that existing conversation or like I said, starts a new one. Now to revisit episode 30 for a moment. So if you haven’t listened to that, go back and listen to it after this. This is where you can introduce some of that secondary literature. In episode 30, we were talking about what to do with the literature review from your dissertation. If this is your first book, well, this is what you do with it.

You can put some of that discussion of the secondary literature here to compare and contrast with your intervention. So, you know, using the language of I’m building on, I’m challenging, I’m complimenting, you know, X, Y and Z literature, bodies of literature, key thinkers, et cetera. After all, you can’t explain how your contribution is unique unless you compare it to other contributions, right? That compare and contrast has to be there to build trust for the reader, to show, like, yes, I know this other literature exists. I’m doing something different, not just to prove that you know that literature, but to show that you have analyzed it and then can pivot from it in your contribution. Okay, so with the argument or intervention, this is where a lot of first time authors, and I would say even beyond first time authors, get nervous. You worry if your argument is bold enough, right? You worry if you’re. You worry about the scope of your argument. If the argument is meaningful enough to carry an entire book, that’s a common concern.

But remember, your argument is a reflection of your evidence and your analysis. I think sometimes we think about the argument in a vacuum, as if it’s kind of divorced from everything else that is happening in your book. The most important thing for you to think about here is does the evidence and analysis I have adequately substantiate the argument I’m making. That is a more important question than whether the argument is bold enough. Right? It’s like, can I carry through this argument in the text? Right? So I would encourage you to focus there and then as for whether it’s bold or big enough, that is something that comes through peer review, presentation, talking to other scholars and really thinking through, you know, the nuances and importance of the argument, but thinking of the importance of the argument, that is when we get to our third element, which are the stakes or the significance. So you’ve posed a question, you have answered it, and now it is your job to tell the reader why your answer matters, like why your argument or intervention is important. So what are the implications? What are they intellectually, you know, for how we understand the literature? Are there political implications, historical implications for how we understand history? Social implications, Right. This is for you to think about and then explain in your introduction.

And this is what can make an introduction and more broadly your entire book really meaningful and interesting. Right? So don’t, don’t assume your readers are going to connect the dots here. It’s your job to explain to them how does your intervention reshape how we understand something, whether it’s an event, a concept, a community, a set of text, right? So one question I ask here when I’m coaching book writers is this. If your reader didn’t care about your topic, why would they care about your book? This is not a rhetorical question. This is an intellectual exercise. I want you to do so. If you are writing about fashion, for instance, a reader may not care about clothes or what people wear. However, that same reader might be very interested in cultural sociology.

Right? Or, for instance, how unprecedented access to. For some people, almost unlimited amounts of fast fashion allow people to shift identities, right? To use their clothing to display different identities nearly every day, or something like that. Like I’m making this up. But even if the person doesn’t really care about clothes, they might be interested in those broader implications about identity, about consumption, or about environmental degradation, right? By having all of these disposable clothes. So you can ask this question for yourself, and I’m going to say it for you again. If my reader doesn’t care about my topic, they would care about my book because we’ll make it into a matlab. Fill in the blank. Rather, they will care about my book because.

And then list as many as you can think of. Right? As many as you can think of. And then go through the list you made and think about which ones make the most sense for the literatures you are engaging for what you believe is the most important aspect of your book, okay? And this will help you get that intervention. And as I say that, I also want to remind you, on the other hand, interventions can also be quite nuanced, right? It does not have to be this broad, society wide global implication. It could be a very nuanced implication about the literature. Okay? Or about your topic. So don’t put pressure on yourself to think of the biggest implication possible. That’s not it.

It’s just to think about different implications that you can experiment with as you’re working through your introduction. And one tip here, or reminder, you have been with your evidence and analysis way longer than your reader has. So things that seem unremarkable to you may be fascinating for a new reader. That’s why I am reminding you to be really explicit. Even if something seems obvious to you, put it on the page and explain it. Because it may not be as obvious to your reader because they are engaging this book for the very first time. Whereas you have been with this book, you know, for probably for longer than you want to remember, okay? So be clear even when it seems obvious. All right? So finally, your introduction should include a roadmap for the rest of the book.

If you want the reader to keep reading, you gotta give them a taste of what they’re gonna get. So tell your reader what to expect. You don’t have to summarize every chapter in great detail, but you wanna give a clear sense of the overall structure and flow, right? So to use that roadmap metaphor, you know, you don’t have to give every turn by turn direction, but you want to give the reader an idea of where they’re going to end up and how they’re going to get there. So this might mean, you know, in very kind of common roadmap, at the end of books, I would say, especially social science books, there’s like a paragraph on each chapter. You don’t have to do it like that. It could be more, you know, just one or two paragraphs on the entire book. Walk the reader through how the book develops. If the book is divided in a certain way, explain that.

So, for instance, if your book is part one, part two, part three, explain why it’s in parts and what they can expect from each part. Okay? If it’s chronological, just say that in the introduction. This is a chronological account. Give your reader that information so that you’re giving them a little bit. You’re acting like a tour guide, a Little bit. You know, this is what. This is what you can expect. This is why it’s important that it’s here.

All right, so let’s review four essential elements. The central question, problem or puzzle, whatever you’d like to call it, the argument or your intervention. The stakes, which is why it matters. And finally, the roadmap. Now, just to provide some reassurance, as you know, these episodes are based on a survey I did of readers of my newsletter. And so many people were worried that the introduction would be the only thing the reader would read. They’re just going to read their introduction, and then they’re not going to read anything else that might happen sometimes. I mean, there are so many things to read, and people definitely are deserting with their time, especially overworked academics.

But I want you to not write your introduction as if it is this, you know, one shot. Yes. You want to entice the reader. Yes. You want to give the reader a reason to keep reading. Right. That is what the introduction is supposed to do. That’s why it’s called an introduction.

Right. So at the point you get hung up on this is all they’re going to read. What’s going to happen is that you are going to overstuff your introduction. Okay. And I want to caution you against doing that. You want it to have the most important elements. You want there to be some storytelling in it, if that is your style of writing, because that also will pique the reader’s curiosity. But please do not feel like you have to put every single important aspect of your book in detail in your introduction.

It’s not going to fit, and it’s going to be very disorienting for the reader because they’re not going to be able to figure out what the bigger story is in the book. Okay. So I just want to give you that caution. All right? So I hope that now that you know these four essential elements, that you have a little bit more confidence and clarity about starting your introduction. And if you need a refresher, go back to the previous episodes in this series where you will get all of the information you need about making sure your book introduction is something that you’re happy to have as the very beginning of your book. All right. I hope this was helpful, and 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. If you liked what you heard in today’s episode, please leave a review. This helps get the word out about the podcast so more people will listen and we can continue the conversation. Take care and tune in for our next episode.