The colleagues who have been able to transition to writing for general audiences all had one thing in common: they were able to adopt (and to keep) what a Buddhist might call a beginner’s mind, what scientists studying neuroplasticity call a growth mind-set, and what I generally just refer to as an ability to bounce back from tough champagne lunches.

The colleagues who have failed to make the transition to writing for general audiences struggled for different and diverse reasons, but I have seen a consistent predictive pattern: those colleagues who ultimately did not succeed were those who became frustrated and defensive easily.

I use the language of observational claims and interpretive claims. An expository thesis starts with an arguable truth claim, which is usually an observational claim: something does something. It’s followed by a first-order interpretive claim: in order to do or because of something. That is followed by a second-order interpretive claim, which answers the question: and this is important because?

Research has demonstrated that the brain has considerable neuroplasticity and that there are neurological pathways related to inflammation and immune response that are implicated in PTSD (observational claim). Psychological interventions can leverage the brain’s neuroplasticity to alter the affected pathways (first-order). If you have experienced trauma (and what human hasn’t?), tools such as neurofeedback, meditation, theater, play, or yoga can be effective in improving your life and your health (second-order).

But ten thousand is a pretty good target number. Why? Put simply: it’s the economic reality of trade publishing.

Book publishing is a business with relatively tight profit margins. Most trade publishers aim for a profit margin of fifteen percent and hope realistically to end up with at least a ten percent profit margin at the end of a fiscal year.

What you need to do—because this is the first thing an agent or editor will do—is look at comparative titles.

The role of the reader is larger, the role of the author as explainer is smaller, and the structure is not necessarily linear. It is certainly not deductive. There can be, for example, circular or frame narrative (enveloping) structures when argument proceeds by leitmotif.

General audience argument offers readers the subtle repetition and deepening of a thesis through illustration (and often through story) and leaves the reader to draw the connection among the accumulating instances of repetition and variation. It is a “motivated” repetition that builds to a conclusion.

The Harvard professor argued, implicitly and correctly within the academy, that what is original about her work is the archival labor guaranteed by certain facts in her knowledge possession. She deserves, by the standards of the academy, to enjoy the prestige of acknowledgment as the mediator of this knowledge. The senior journalist, on the other hand—and correctly within the world of trade publishing—sees that what is original about her work is the judicious selection of material and the way she crafts the story.

Relevance (contemporary thesis).

Relevance (historical thesis).

Once you have your three genre categories and some initial ideas, it’s time to do some more in-depth research back at home to see if you can come up with a list of other recent books in each of those same categories that have something in common with your proposed title. … Most editors want books published in the last three years, four years at the very outside. Anything published more than a few years ago does not reflect current market trends or sales demographics.

But a publisher might not be aware that Dr. Astra’s book (as she believes) is going to be of keen interest to the estimated three or four million yacht club members across America.

You want to be thinking of your training and potential professional expertise from a wide lens, and your personal interests are also fair game. … For mid-career academics, especially, writing for general audiences is an opportunity to write about topics that interest you.

While legacy social media can be a tool to drive book sales in individual cases, publishers are increasingly recognizing that the relationship between an author’s social media presence and actual book sales is unpredictable and that, while there may be a correlation, it’s not clear there is causation. … I’ve been told by social media coordinators and publicists at Big Five houses as recently as 2023 that their advice to authors at this point is, if you don’t already have a large social media platform, it’s not necessary to try to develop those outlets.

For many authors, the idea of the book tour is steeped in a certain romance and glamor. … If you are struggling to let go of the idea, let me introduce you to the reality of the book tour.

Functionally, this means you are trying to do three things: structure a chapter with a narrative arc, open the chapter by reminding the reader of what happened in the preceding chapter, and—here’s the hardest part—end the chapter with something that is both a satisfying resolution to this chapter and looks ahead to the next chapter’s tension, creating momentum.

The delivery date that you are proposing is not the date of a first draft. It is the date by which you will deliver a publishable manuscript.

A book that earns out is a success. Modest successes are still wins. Losses are still losses.

The cockroach as antagonist is getting characterization. … As readers we’re invited into the joke. After all, what we’re talking about here is a fact-based science article dancing on the edge of epic. The clauses tend to begin with subjects who are agents and actors in this drama: the insect, researchers, cockroaches, manufacturers. The sentences tend to be paratactic. Perhaps more important, the sentences are varied and build in that first paragraph to a climax. Simple sentence. Simple sentence. Simple sentence with a prepositional phrase (“In the centuries long war”). Complex sentence. Compound sentence, but this one using a colon to connect two simple sentences, a device that accelerates emphasis on the final clause: “Cockroaches, like us, simply couldn’t resist their sweet tooth.”

You can see, I hope, the implication for writing narrative nonfiction: one way to think about chapters is to think about them as the narrative blocks in a panel and to think about the gap between panels as a chapter break. … However, you can also think about building narrative or character within a chapter using this technique of juxtaposition. Essentially, you offer one moment of, say, character, perhaps using a fish-eye technique to create subjective intensity. You write a gap, and then you follow up with the (unspoken but implied) narrative consequence.

I was able to purchase an original engraved map from the 1790s, long since out of copyright protection, for less than a hundred dollars on eBay, and in an antiquarian print shop in Paris I found an original nineteenth-century engraving of the portrait from the 1880s for about four hundred dollars.