How to write a popular science book: PART II The Auction, Writing, and Promotion
Issue 111: Part II sharing our experiences and tips for selling and promoting a trade book
We are busy writing our next book proposal right now and thought it might be fun to let people get a sneak peak about how to write a trade book. If you have ever thought about writing your own book, here is our own experience and a few tips to get you started. Last week (in PART I) we wrote about how to go from an idea to a book proposal and this week we discuss how to auction, write, and promote your book.
DEVELOP A PROMOTION PLAN
A huge part of writing a book is getting people to actually buy it. Getting people to spend $20-30 for a book—and then invest hours reading it—is a unique challenge. In fact, most books don’t sell. A lawsuit last year revealed that 50% of published books from Penguin Random House sold less than a dozen copies. Another analysis from top publishers suggests that 66% of new books sell less than 1,000 copies in a year (and 93% sell less than 10,000):
Therefore, it’s critical to write a book that people will want to read and develop a detailed plan for how you will spread the news about your book once it’s published.
Thankfully we had already developed a solid profile on social media (alas, Jay spends far too much time on these platforms). This gave us a built in audience of colleagues and contacts who were already interested in our work and might be willing to read our book. We also had a large audience of potential scholars who might be interested in our book because they study similar topics.
We also listed all our potential contacts in this space, including book authors and journalists we knew. We listed potential target outlets where we could join a podcast or write an op-ed (we published op-ed about our book in the LA Times, TIME Magazine, The Atlantic, The Guardian, Quartz, etc). Finally, our book had some potential to be taught in psychology or business classes, and we created a syllabus and educational material to help it get into the hands of teachers. You should think carefully about your own contacts in this space and how you might connect with them about your book.
Another way to promote your book is by giving a series of talks or hosting a number of events (e.g., book readings). We probably gave over two dozen talks about our book to universities, conferences, festivals, and organizations in the past few years. If you have contacts who would be willing to invite you to talk about your book, add them into your proposal.
AUCTION YOUR BOOK
Once our book agent was convinced that our proposal and promotion plan were ready, he started sending them to various publishers. We had interest from a few publishers and ultimately got a meeting with Little Brown, Spark who had already published several books from academics based on big ideas (e.g., they had published Thinking, Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman). We had a meeting with their team, including the book editor, and promotions people, and discussed our book and its potential fit with their imprint. They had several ideas for promoting the book and had a few questions about the ideas in our proposal.
After the meeting, we got an offer from the publisher for a $100,000 advance. We discussed the offer and the excellent fit with the publisher and decided to accept their offer rather than continue to shop the book. When you get an offer, the first 15% or so goes to your agent. That left $85,000 to split between the two of us. However, we got it in three separate payments: one third upon signing the contract, one third upon delivering the full manuscript of the book, and the final third upon publication. This meant roughly three payments of $14,167 over a period of 2 years as we wrote the book (once you remove taxes it works about to about $30,000 each).
Of course, this is only the advance. But it’s relatively rare for books to earn each enough money from sales to pay back the full advance. As we noted above, very few books become best sellers (and publishers make most of their money from those few books that become huge hits).
Therefore, the vast majority of authors will never see another cent from their book even if they spend another year or two promoting it. In fact, we know several successful authors who have never earned back their advance. Even a modest advance like ours would require roughly 30,000 sales to earn back the full advance (and we are still a decent way from earning it back).
If you assume this entire process takes 4-5 years, from the initial proposal development through the writing and publication to promotion, then you are not earning a huge amount (for the amount of work involved). If we each spent 1000 hours on your book then it would work out roughly $40/hour. But our guess is that we spent a heck of lot more than a 1000 hours once you include book promotion. This is why it’s nearly impossible for most authors to earn a living off book sales.
WRITING AND EDITING YOUR BOOK
Writing the book was by far the most enjoyable part of the process for us. We set up weekly meetings and would develop detailed chapter outlines. We split up the book into chapters where one of us was more of the expert and that person would take the lead on writing those chapters. Once a chapter was done, we would send it to the other author for revisions. This went on for about 6 months and we wrote the book well under our deadline. In fact, when we send our editor the full book she was quite shocked.
We also had a very smooth process editing the book. We went through a couple rounds of revisions with our editor, but she had a fairly light touch and these were relatively easy (certainly much easier than editing a manuscript). One advantage of writing a book with two authors is that we had already gone through so much internal editing that our book was fairly polished by the time it reached our editor’s desk. We are both very comfortable editing one another—and we had several blunt conversations with differences of opinion about how to structure various chapters. This is why it’s crucial to have a coauthor who is open to serious criticism because you’ll have to kill one another’s darlings.
Another thing we loved about writing the book was the scope of creative freedom we had. In the academic world, we are often at the mercy of a highly critical editors and reviewers. But here, we were able to develop and produce our own vision for the book. We were also able to weave together the stories and studies that resonated with us.
Our biggest challenge was finding interesting stories that aligned with the lessons from our research. Some authors find a story they love and then cherry pick evidence to back up their narrative. Those books often make us cringe, so we went with a different approach.
This is why it was particularly gratifying when we received such positive reviews about our book. We were honestly quite terrified that it would be poorly received or excoriated publicly by a grouchy colleague. But when Alex Haslam wrote a glowing review of our book for Science and we won a few book awards, it felt incredibly validating—especially as first time authors. In fact, those stand out as the main highlights in the entire process.
CHOOSING A NAME!
Like having a baby, choosing a name for your book is far more difficult than you imagine. We went through a long process of discussing—and arguing—the name of our book with various people. From the very beginning, the two of us struggled to agree on a name. Jay’s favorite was “Social Chameleons” and Dom’s was “Architects of Identity”. Our agent didn’t like either of these. He changed it to “WHO ARE WE” for the auction. Then, our publisher wanted a completely different name. We must have bounced around 20 different titles and none really resonated with everyone.
Eventually, they came to us with THE POWER OF US which felt like a compromise at the time. It wasn’t our idea, but it’s grown on us :)
This is where we felt the least amount of control over the process. It was similar to writing an op-ed for a newspaper where you have very little control over the headline. The name of the book was also different in various translations and we had no control over those names either. So, if you want to publish a book, get ready for losing control of the title (and try not to judge other authors if you don’t like their book title!)
PROMOTING THE BOOK
Once your book is finished, you embark on a long process of book promotion. In fact, this process starts about 4-5 months before your book is published because it takes a long lead time to set up interviews, op-eds, talks, etc. Your publisher will often have a PR team or publicist with a vision for promoting your book. And this is where a big advance can help: if the publisher is willing to pay a lot for your book, they want to recoup their investment by promoting your book to ensure it’s a success.
However, the most common complaint we’ve heard from our friends who are book authors is that the publisher often does a lot less book promotion than they anticipate. Therefore, the burden is largely on us—the authors—to promote our book as widely as possible. We promoted the book heavily for about three months after the publication date before we both burned out and fell badly behind our other work responsibilities.
As part of book promotion, we decided to create this newsletter. It allows us to share news about the book with an audience of people who have read it (or might read it). Of course, it eventually developed a life of it’s own and we still love to post and share content long after our book promotion period ended.
We tried basically everything we could to promote our book, including TV appearances, radio, tons of podcasts, op-eds, a book launch party, talks, meetings, a conference, various festivals, a TED-Ed video, this newsletter, videos, book club meetings, endless social media posts (we sincerely apologize for those!), and book giveaways. We even contemplated taking a stack of books and selling them in Washington Square Park. Vanessa Bohns, who published a great book on the exact same day as us, put it best when you she wrote on Twitter that you need to write an entire second book worth of content to promote your book.
Book promotion is endless and we doubt much of it makes any difference. In fact, the futility of most book promotion activities is the most depressing part of the process. Most people don’t know what works, which is why you end of doing all of it. There is an incredible amount of luck involved and it feels largely outside your control. For instance, someone who posts a TikTok crying about how your book changed their life is probably more effective than everything we did.
We looked at our book sales and a few things did seem to matter: having our book featured on Hidden Brain and Freakonomics, as well as writing op-eds in major outlets like the Atlantic seemed to lead to a big spike in sales and attention. Likewise, giving a talk to a highly engaged audience where you can sell copies of your book also seems to work. Everything else we tried had a trivial effect.
Yet you need to share the word about your book if you want any hope of writing a second book. If your book flops, most publishers will be unwilling to give you an advance to publish a second book. So you desperately agree to everything until the rest of your life falls out of balance.
The best advice we got was from our friend, Jamil Zaki, who said:
“The great thing about sending a book out into the world is that you don't get to tell people what it is any longer. They tell you, in the way they respond and the community they form around it.”
Finding these people and connecting with these communities was one of the most gratifying parts of writing our book.
THE PERKS
In light of all the effort, why write a book? In addition to the joy of writing a book and the money you get from the advance, we think there are lots of other great reasons to write a book:
You are forced to think deeply about an issue. With all the distractions in the modern world, it is hard to find the time to do a deep dive into a topic. Writing a book forces you to step back and look at the forest and see how things all fit together.
Your develop a new identity. One of the most surprising things about writing a book is that you develop a new identity—author—that brings you into a new community. We found an entire group of book authors who were incredibly supportive and we have tried to pay that forward to future authors with this newsletter.
You earn a special credential. Writing a book serves as a business card for all kinds of other opportunities, from consulting to media interviews to paid speaking gigs, that are not available to people who have not written a book on the topic. In fact, many people write a book just to get this credential.
You share your ideas with a wide audience. Writing a book gave us access and connections to people in other fields who we would otherwise never encounter. This was often a gratifying process and opened the door to all kinds of other possibilities and opportunities (too many to name here).
You can have an impact. Our book has already been cited a good deal by academics, but it also gave us the chance to talk to people who play major roles in government or organizations who were trying to solve real problems and make the world a better place.
News and Updates
This week, we want to shoutout Sophie Tarnowska, director and founder of Versus, a dialogue-building project that aims to empower citizens to replace polarization with constructive communication. She emailed to let us know that her organization has created a depolarization workshop based on some of the ideas in our book! In the spirit of the book writing journey, it is always great to hear that the book is making an impact.
Learn more about THE POWER OF US
If you like our newsletter, we encourage you to check out our award-winning book “The Power of Us: Harnessing Our Shared Identities to Improve Performance, Increase Cooperation, and Promote Social Harmony”. You can learn more about the book or order it from the links on our website (here or scan the QR code below). We keep the newsletter free, but are extremely grateful if you have a chance to purchase the book or buy it for a friend who wants to learn more about group psychology.
Catch up on the last one…
Looking for part 1? Check out last week’s newsletter for insights on how to approach a book proposal from idea to pitch.
As always, you do a fantastic job in giving insight into areas that are of interest (but not really understood all that well). We are anxiously waiting on your next book and very appreciative of the brain fodder we got from this for our "future" book. Thanks!
This was great. Thanks guys. More transparency only helps everyone. Thanks for being the model.