How to write a successful pop linguistics book
This is a question that I started getting periodically as soon as Because Internet hit the New York Times bestseller list in 2019, and after a while, I noticed that I was giving very similar advice each time. So I've decided to save time and write down my advice all in once place in greater detail than I can remember to do in a single conversation, and hopefully in the process demystify some of the hidden curriculum around book promotion and platform for the circle beyond people who know me well enough to ask for advice personally.
Disclaimer: This is really long. Think of it as the notes from the hour-long chat that you were hoping to have with me. And hey, you didn't even have to buy me coffee! (If this post is useful and you do end up writing a fabulously successful pop linguistics book, I will happily accept a hot or cold beverage though.)
Disclaimer 2: I've upped the snark level of some of the questions to hopefully make reading an incredibly long advice post somewhat more entertaining. Everyone who has asked me for advice has been much better mannered than this, and some of the strongest objections are things I thought myself at earlier stages. It's just that academia as a whole, and especially tenured professors, sometimes has a bit of an attitude towards other fields, and when you make that subtext text, well.
Disclaimer 3: This is an advice post! It will, therefore, assume that you are dissatisfied to some degree with your current situation (which I'm assuming is broadly speaking academia, somewhere around grad student, recent grad, postdoc, prof) and looking to change it. If you already have tons of people who are fans of your work and would totally buy a book as soon as you wrote it, you probably don't need my advice on how to make your book more popular! If you already have a lucrative and satisfying career outside of academia, you probably don't need advice on developing a different and much more speculative one! There are plenty of paths up the "getting people interested in your work" mountain, and this is not the only one, just the one that in my experience is both well-targeted for pop linguistics and something that you can take concrete actions to pursue.
Disclaimer 4: I'm assuming you want to write pop linguistics here. Much of this advice should work for other kinds of pop science as well, and maybe other subgenres of what the publishing industry calls "serious nonfiction" (which doesn't mean it can't be entertaining, just that it's stuff that's more ideas-based and in the journalism-to-book pipeline, not like, a cookbook), but most of it probably won't apply to fiction. I read a lot of "here's how publishing works" blog posts when I was a new author (strong endorse to Jane Friedman, Kate McKean, and Mary Robinette Kowal's Debut Author Lessons), and many of them were aimed a bit more at fiction, so it's my pleasure to contribute to the genre from the other side, both as nonfiction and as someone who's published a book. This is not a post about the writing or publishing process. There are plenty of other posts elsewhere about how to develop a writing habit, how to write a book proposal, and how to work with publishers and literary agents. You should google for them too. This is a post about the "successful" part: how to get people interested in your pop linguistics writing so that they actually want to buy your book when it comes out.
With all the disclaimers out of the way, here's how this question usually finds me:
Wow, Because Internet did really well! I mean, it was everywhere! You know, I'm a linguist too, and I've also been thinking about writing a pop linguistics book, and I'd really like it to do even half as well, do you have any advice?
If you want to write a nonfiction book, my best advice is to first start out by writing some short pieces. Op-eds, news articles, even guest blog posts. You don't have to start a whole blog or newsletter for yourself, but it might not be the worst idea.
This is not the advice that people who ask me for advice want to hear, but it is the advice that you should take nonetheless. Writing a book has a certain glamour to it. Visions of signing autographs, seeing your book on the shelves of a bookstore, getting to call yourself a "published author." Writing some short pieces can't compete with that. Nonetheless, writing some short pieces for a general audience before you try to write a big long thing for a general audience is a very, very good idea, and here's why.
First, writing a book is hard. It is much, much easier to write an op-ed. An op-ed is maybe 800-1200 words. You could knock that over in a week or two, tops, maybe even a day or two if it's a super newsy subject and you really put your boots on. If you're not willing to spend a few weeks to months writing some op-eds (for which, may I add, you will get paid, although not particularly splendidly), why should anyone believe that you have the stick-to-itiveness to spend years writing a whole book? In academic terms, this would be like trying to write a dissertation before you'd even written any course papers. Also, if you're coming from a technical background, writing some short pieces is excellent practice at figuring out how you need to adjust your writing to make it enjoyable for a non-specialist audience. You'll write a better book if you have experience writing short form and getting relatively quick feedback on it.
Second, publishing a book is hard. It is much, much easier to convince someone to publish your op-ed. Newspapers and news sites have a certain number of slots, and they need to fill them every day. There are a ton more news outlets than book publishers, the amount of time and money at stake for a short piece is much lower than for a whole book, so the whole process is much less involved and they're much more willing to take a chance on an interesting idea from a relative unknown. Which, as you keep doing it for a bit, will make you less of an unknown. Publishers will be more interested in a book from you if you've previously written some short form pieces.
Third, promoting a book is hard. It is much, much easier to convince someone to read your op-ed than a whole book. Once your book is out, if you want people to actually pick it up and read it, you will need to do things like...write op-eds about it and pitch to other people that they might want to write short-form pieces about it. At which point it is valuable to already have experience having written things in this genre â and even better if some people are already aware of you because they liked the short pieces you wrote. People sometimes randomly pick up, say, a mystery novel just because they're in the mood for a mystery and the cover looks intriguing, but that's fiction. For nonfiction, more people will buy and read your book if you've already written some short form.
Uhh, convincing a news site to publish my short article sounds hard. Can't I just start a blog or put up a few pieces on Medium, where I don't have to convince anyone?
It's true that it's harder to convince an editor, who doesn't know anything about linguistics or why it's interesting, to publish your article, compared to putting up on a website you control. And writing a few independent posts isn't a bad idea, especially at first!
But the goal of this entire process is to a) give you practice at articulating what's interesting about linguistics and b) to do so in front of a wider and wider audience. Editors are useful on both of these fronts: they'll spot points where your reader would probably be confused, and they'll help you gain access to a larger audience.
Okay, fine. You've convinced me enough that I'm willing to keep reading. But in that case, HOW do I write an op-ed? Like, should I just write a thousand words and send it in to the New York Times?
(Alternative lead-in question: Now that you mention it, I'm not so sure about this book thing, but I do actually like the idea of writing some short pieces! How would I go about doing that?)
If you want to write for a news-ish-type site, you need to send the appropriate editor a pitch email. A pitch email contains three things:
A brief, snappy description of what you want to write about (the pitch proper)
Indicators that you can actually deliver on the pitch you've proposed (clips)
Anything else that is requested / NOT anything that is specifically UN-requested from that outlet's pitching guidelines (which you will find by googling "how to pitch Name of Outlet" and "pitching guidelines Name of Outlet"). Common requests are things like "use this specific subject line format" or "no more stories about X, we get too many" (good news: linguistics is rarely on that list!).
I assume you can figure out the googling part, but let's break down what the other two things are:
THE PITCH
This is a short description of the specific thing you want to write about, with particular emphasis to why: why it's interesting to readers, why it's relevant to the publication, why you're the one to write about it. It's generally on the order of 1-3 paragraphs long, although pitches should be shorter if they're for a very short piece (if you're pitching for a 150 word "quick hit" piece, your pitch shouldn't be 149 words â or worse, 300 words), and can be longer if they're for a very long piece (though if you're a new writer you won't be pitching 10k word feature stories anytime soon, so this probably won't come up).
A pitch is different from a topic or area of interest! A topic might be "internet linguistics" or "the development of hashtags". A pitch is a specific, focused proposal for one thing, with explicit information about the perspective you're taking and how you're going to execute on it. It doesn't have to give away the entire ending, and editors do understand that sometimes you learn more as you write a piece, but it should have a strong sense of direction.
You're not going to write and send the whole piece here â editors accept or reject based on the pitch. This saves you time, and can also affect the direction of the piece. Sometimes, instead of a flat-out acceptance or rejection, an editor will have thoughts on how you could tweak the scope of the piece from the pitch â for example, you mentioned two things, but they'd like you to focus on just one or expand to a broader piece with a third example. (Which is why it's generally not advised to write the whole piece before sending the pitch, as you may be wasting effort, though of course figuring out what you can write based on a pitch is its own learning process.) Cold pitching a new editor is the hardest kind of pitching, but once you've worked with an editor once, or even if they didn't go for a particular pitch but told you to pitch again, you can then gradually move towards a more relaxed kind of pitch.
Here's an example of the pitch portion of the very first email that I sent to The Toast, which became the Benedict Cumberbatch names article.
Ever since Benedict Cumberbatch Day, I've been wanting to write an article for The Toast in which I explain why, say, "Bumbershoot Cheeseburger" is a totally reasonable thing to call him, but "Umbrella Falafel" doesn't sound like him at all. I have acquired all the synonyms from the Benedict Cumberbatch Name Generator through nefarious means (aka "view source"), put them into a spreadsheet, annotated them for various tricksy linguistic factors, and I've love to explain to your readers what I've found.
This isn't a template for every single pitch: I was pretty new to pitching at the time and I might do things a bit differently now, especially depending on the venue (The Toast had a very informal tone, for one thing). But this pitch does indicate several useful things in a short space:
"Ever since Benedict Cumberbatch Day" - I've read your publication and I know how you've covered this subject previously
"I explain why, say, 'Bumbershoot Cheeseburger'...but 'Umbrella Falafel' doesn't" - the core argument/explanation of the piece
"I have acquired...put them into a spreadsheet" - I've done enough preliminary legwork that I'm confident I have something interesting here
"nefarious means (aka 'view source')... tricksy linguistic factors" - this piece is going to mix real research with a fun and lighthearted tone that fits well with the tone of the publication
The best way to get a sense of what an effective pitch looks like is to look at some sample pitches. Fortunately, The Open Notebook has compiled a database of successful scicomm pitches and the resulting news stories â you can look through their list for categories of writing you're interested in trying (I'd start with news and opinion/commentary) and also browse their blog posts about pitching (I'd start with breaking into science writing and pitching errors). It's also useful to follow some editors from publications you think you might like to write for on twitter â you can find them using twitter's search function by putting in "editor" and the twitter handle of the publication (it may help to restrict your search to people). It's not uncommon for editors to tweet about what they're looking for, and at the very least it'll give you an idea of the kinds of stories they're publishing.
THE CLIPS
Let's get in the head of an editor for a minute. They've read your snappy pitch, and they're intrigued! This sounds like a fascinating story that their readers would love!
Now, the question comes into the editor's brain: okay, but can the person on the other side of this email actually write an engaging article about this story? Or is it going to be overwrought, too jargon-y, needing tons of edits and rewrites in order to be publishable?
Part of the way you're going to convince the editor is the pitch itself â if it's engagingly-written, then hopefully the story will be too. But the other part is from your clips. That is, a small number of writing samples (probably 2-4 links) that show what your writing is like. If you wrote these other 3 pieces that are pretty readable, goes the editor's brain, then probably you can write a fourth, similar piece.
Okay, but wait. I'm supposed to use clips to get editors to approve of me, but I need editors to approve of me to get clips. Isn't this a catch-22 spiral? Can't I send my academic CV instead?
No and OMG NO.
The way you get out of the spiral is that there are places you can write for that you control, rather than an editor. Places like a blog, newsletter, or Medium. If you have some kind of connection, such as if you're at a university that has one or more blogs, newsletters, or student/alumni publications, you may also be able to get a nepotistic guest post there without a writing sample, but really, your own thing is fine. (Don't just write them for yourself and attach them as pdfs, no one likes getting attachments from strangers and also putting them somewhere public is also a way of letting random drivers-by of your social media pages know that you might be open for freelance writing work.)
Now, obviously a big fancy publication like the New York Times is probably not going to accept a few blog posts as clips, unless you're an exceedingly famous blogger. (In which case you really don't need my advice here.) But you also don't need to wait until you're a super established blogger, unless you're having fun doing your own thing or you can feel that you're still actively on the learning curve on your own. Write a few posts, pick the two or three that you feel are the strongest, most similar in style to the piece you're pitching, or that got the best response when you shared them with your friends on social media, and use that as your first clips.
You're going to want to aim for the most friendly, approachable layer of publications with your amateur clips. These are publications that occupy a particular niche, rather than being general-interest like big national newspapers, and ideally it's a niche that you (or your proposed article topic) also occupies. For linguists, an obvious niche is "publications that are already fully onboard with language being interesting" (my first paid clip was for Grammar Girl, which fits here). Academics sometimes go for The Conversation, which deliberately caters to academics (and doesn't pay, but that can be tolerable once or twice for a first clip), though I've heard it's gotten harder to get a story accepted here than it used to be when they were less well known, so don't feel like you have to go there just because you're in academia. If your linguistics story overlaps with science, you could check out some of the more accessible publications listed in this Open Notebook post. If your story overlaps with hobbyist topics (sci fi, birdwatching, food) or identity topics (race, gender, sexuality) you could pick somewhere that's interested in that topic and see if they might like a linguistics angle â heck, I got my first clip for The Toast because I knew from reading it that one of its editors was a big fan of Benedict Cumberbatch and I happened to have a linguistics tie-in, on the strength of one clip from my blog and one from Grammar Girl. Local news might also qualify here, especially if the story you're pitching has a direct tie to something of local interest, though depending on how large your area is, it might also be a step or two up (sorry, New York). Company blogs or trade publications can also work here, and can actually end up paying fairly well, though they may not let you get as fun and weird as the lower-paying niche indie blogs.
A good heuristic for whether a publication is approachable is also whether you'd expect all your friends and family to have heard of it, especially if they're not part of that particular niche or not very online. If your sentence starts "so there's this blog/website/podcast aboutâŠ" and your friend is going "uh-huh, okay, sure?" that's probably a good sign. If you just say the name of the publication and expect everyone to know exactly what you mean, that's too fancy, take a step down.
So, you pitch a few friendly niche publications, especially ones that you were already reading. You write a few pieces for them, forming a bit of a relationship with editors, learning more about how to write, and building clips. You might have fun hanging out around here for a while, as you can often write stuff that's nicher and weirder than you can write for more mainstream publications! It's also perfectly fine to stay here indefinitely if you're in it more for enjoying what you write about than trying to develop a journalism career or portfolio as a freelance writer! Niche is by no means an insult â it can be a fun, relatively low-stakes place to hang out as a writer, and as a reader some of my favourite, internet classic stories have been published by more niche publications.
But if you do want to move to something fancier, your next target can be something around a medium level of approachability. Some examples in this group are a) web publications for a general readership (skewing younger) or b) local print publications without a ton of web footprint or footprint outside the area (skewing older). Web-first publications are places like Slate, Vox, The Verge, Buzzfeed, and so on; your local area will, of course, depend. Basically, these are places that some people you know have probably heard of, but probably not everyone. They're on the radar of lots of budding journalists, so it's easier to stand out from the crowd by having clips from somewhere else with some level of editorial oversight, even if that place isn't as fancy. (And in fact, having a few clips from places with zero-to-minimal editing can actually give an editor a really good idea of what your piece is likely to be like before it's edited, which some of them really like.)
You can also stick around at this level! Some writers make perfectly decent careers out of writing for places like Slate or Buzzfeed! If you get an editor you like, you might just want to keep working with them! But for a lot of freelance writers, it's useful to aim for at least a few clips from the fanciest tier of publications, if only as a status signal to editors at the mid-level, meat and potatoes level of publications that they might want to pay you more.
The highest layer of publications is roughly national-level publications (which are also read to at least some degree internationally) and which have substantial presences both online and in print. To be honest, I didn't fully crack this layer until I already had a book coming out, so I don't actually think this level is necessary before you start thinking of a book if you're really keen on writing one. But that was partly also because I didn't have time for much short-form writing when I was actively working on the book, so I had to take a raincheck from some editors who approached me while I was working on it. In either case, it was my writing for mid-tier and niche publications (in my case, Slate and The Toast) that led to both interest from literary agents and publishers in a book from me, and also to interest from editors of fancier publications (Wired, NYT).
Do some deep googling of any short-form writer you admire and you'll see that they were writing for more obscure places before you started hearing about them â even the ones who primarily mention their academic or book-writing credentials in their bios. In fact, those more obscure places that a journalist you admire used to write for are a great way of compiling a list of more accessible places you could also pitch. It's important to keep in mind that when you're writing for the public, you're not an academic who's "slumming it" â you're a person attempting to join one or more other industries (journalism and/or publishing). It's relatively common to learn journalistic skills on the job with a background in something else, much more common than the formal requirements of academia, but that doesn't mean there aren't still skills and trajectories. The reason why I'm spending all this time on journalistic skills, even for people who are hell-bent on books, is that there's a much bigger pipeline between journalism and popular nonfiction books than there is between academia and nonfiction books that make a popular splash without spending some time with journalism.
Okay, but I've tried pitching pieces to places, and they didn't go for them!
Without knowing you or the pitches, I can't say for sure, but I have three suggestions:
Did you actually pitch pieces to places, or did you pitch one piece to one place once? Rejection is part of the game here, and a certain amount of it is to be expected. If you're getting a reply like "not this topic, but do feel free to pitch us again on a different one" that's actually quite positive and you should take them up on that!
You pitched somewhere too fancy for your level of notability/writing, try pitching a notch or two less fancy (or just to a different place or person in case you've accidentally been emailing a defunct email address, there could be all sorts of administrative reasons going on behind the scenes that have nothing to do with you, but the only thing you can really do about it is try somewhere else).
Your writing isn't quite convincing or compelling enough yet, try writing on a blog or somewhere else you control and pay attention to which things people respond to. Asking a non-linguist friend for feedback or trying writing exercises like up-goer five or "half and half again" might also be useful.
You keep saying op eds, but, I dunno, that sounds a little sketchy to me. I'm not trying to write an opinion piece, I'm actually an expert in my own field, if I'm going to do this whole news pitching thing, shouldn't I be writing some other style?
I get it, I used to be confused too, but op eds/opinion is actually exactly where subject matter experts belong, at least at first. The big difference between an op ed and a conventional news piece is that conventional news is reported. That means that the journalist goes out and talks to various people, such as experts on the topic, official sources, people who've experienced something relevant, and so on, and then compiles all of this new stuff they've learned as a non-expert into an article. This takes a lot of skill of its own, respect to any journalists who have gotten this far reading this post, but it's a different prospect from "hey, I know a lot about this topic and I'd like to make a case for this particular aspect of it". If you're coming from academia, you're more likely to be in the subject matter expert category â if you're able to assert analyses of complex topics on your own authority, from your own understanding of the field rather than calling up an expert to analyze it for you, you want to be hanging out in the op ed section.
Now, eventually you might find yourself itching to go out and do reporting, especially once you've written about all the low-hanging fruit that you have more direct expertise with, and in that case you can absolutely shift over to more conventional reported journalism, but for starters, op ed/opinion is exactly where you belong. Plus, even though you still need a pitch and clips, editors for op ed/opinion sections are more likely to be open to working with writers who are new to them. This section is increasingly being rebranded as "ideas" which in my opinion makes its purpose much clearer, especially as online it's no longer meaningful to say that something is opposite the editorial page (the origin of "op ed").
Actually, maybe I'm intrigued. How realistic would it be for me to maybe try to make this a proper career path? Like, how much money are we talking for short-form pieces, anyway?
This is the part where I issue the disclaimer that I don't fully know what it's like as a career, because I've never done exclusively freelance journalism writing for an extended period of time. What I can say from experience is that writing short-form pieces fits well with a portfolio public-facing career that contains lots of different parts (in my case, book, podcast, blog, speaking, etc) because the timeframes are really flexible, you can dip into and out of it as you have time among other things, and it can put you on the radar of a lot of interesting people.
There are absolutely people who make a career out of freelance writing though, especially if you're a faster writer than I am, and my sense is that, while the overall pay and workload at first might not be a whole lot better than adjuncting in academia, the occupational prestige and potential for growth is a lot better: freelance writing is a respected, known type of experience for other writing jobs (staff writer, editor, book deals) in a way that's opposite to how being an adjunct traps you in a loop of never having enough time for research to become eligible for a research job. If you're interested in making a job of freelance writing, I'd suggest following freelance writers on twitter, especially in domains like #scicomm and #sciwri, plus resources like The Writer's Co-op and Who Pays Writers.
Okay, I get that you followed this process when you didn't know anyone, but I know you, right? Can't you just like, introduce me to your editor?
I do, believe it or not, actually get versions of this question that are only slightly more subtle. The problem is, if someone has few enough clues to be asking it, then I literally can't do anything for them in their present state. I can't send someone to my Wired editor who doesn't have any clips and who's never written a pitch email. I just can't. It would be like trying to recommend someone for a PhD program who hasn't done a Bachelor's degree. It wouldn't work, and I'd be the one who looked foolish â and worse, it would mean that my endorsement wouldn't carry as much weight when someone comes along who has actually done the legwork.
I typically do suggest to people that they try writing for somewhere more niche to start out, whether that's a blog of their own or pitching a more approachable publication, from which it is absolutely possible to build a portfolio that gets you somewhere fancier, but if I can't say to an editor "here's so-and-so, they've written these three absolutely delightful pieces which are in line with the tone of your publication" then there's no point in me even starting the email. (But if someone has already written three delightful pieces, they've probably written at least a dozen less skilled pieces as practice, and in the process has possibly also picked up that a better question to be asking is "I've written for X and Y so far, and I'm interested in topics like Z. Do you have any suggestions on where I might want to pitch next?" This is the version of the question I or another person with experience might actually be able to help you with!)
Knowing the email address of an editor isn't the useful part. I really do like introducing people, but I have an iron-clad rule that I only make introductions when I am confident that both parties will be happy about them. A referral is most useful when there's evidence to back it up. Editors get tons of emails they ignore and pitches that they reject. The rejections are, to some extent, just part of the game. But you can minimize the number of rejections you get â and maximize the number of pieces you actually get to write and learn from â by working your way up an approximate ladder of prestige rather than mule-headed-ly aiming for the top and only the top. You don't expect to become the vice president of a big company as your first job out of school. Journalism also has a pathway, and that pathway goes from niche to mainstream via pitching.
Okay, fine, but what if I have some other kind of expertise? Do I really need to work my way up entirely via other kinds of freelance writing? Aren't there exceptions?
Look, it's not impossible. If you develop a reputation in another field, you can sometimes port over a degree of that reputation into short-form writing. But you'll still generally need something resembling a pitch and clips in some form.
For example, if you're already a university professor, you may be able to start around the mid tier, especially with local or regional news publications which often like having ties with local universities (make friends with your university's press officer or PR person for contacts). It's still useful to have at least one writing sample, holy internet just have at least something you can point to, which shows that you can write in an accessible and interesting way, because the biggest worry that editors have about professors is that they'll be dry and jargon-filled. But there's definitely a genre of "I'm a Professor of Recent News Story Topic, and Here's What People Are Getting Wrong About It", and you could possibly write something in it for local news. (I believe the Op Ed Project has resources and training for profs in this direction.)
If you're thinking about trying to make yourself into more of a public intellectual, the kind of generalist academic who has a column they write about various topics in their field on a regular basis, you might be able to get an ongoing feature in a friendly-level publication, but I would expect that you'd still need to do some leapfrogging from one publication to the next before getting something like this in a fancy publication. And even then, you're going to be sending some kind of pitch email to your editor for every column that you write, even if it's a more relaxed "hey, I'm thinking of doing this month's column on X, I'm thinking of looking at it from the direction of Y, maybe with a bit about Z as well" once you have an ongoing relationship. The pitch is the basic first unit that the whole industry runs on! Don't be afraid of the pitch!
Where a book really fits in this process is in letting you jump maybe half a level, maybe a whole level, depending on how well-received the book is. But what it means to jump half a level varies a lot depending on what level you start with! If you haven't written for anywhere at all in short-form, a book might let you jump past the part of developing a solo blog and into niche friendly publications or regional news. If you've written for a few smaller places, a book might help you jump solidly into mid-tier. In my case, a book did help me get from mid-tier to well-known publications, but it was building on a foundation of me having already written a bunch of solid mid-tier pieces and learning how the system worked. (And I might even have gotten there faster by pitching directly, if I hadn't been distracted for several years by...writing that same book.)
The surest way to shortcut this entire process is by becoming super famous, famous enough that a publication will be so thrilled to have your name in print that they're willing to extensively edit â almost ghostwrite â whatever it is that you want to say for them. But I don't really consider a process that begins "Step 1: Become famous" to be particularly useful or replicable advice, so I will not be devoting more time to it here.
But I've been quoted in some media! Journalists approach me for comment sometimes, surely that means that editors would think I'm interesting too?
Ye-es, maybe, with some reservations. To use an academic example, journalists view sources kind of like how professors view students: Are they an essential component of the system? Absolutely. Do they have a complete view of how the system works? Absolutely not. If your student says to you that they want to become a professor, you'd be able to describe a fairly detailed set of steps for them to take, but you definitely wouldn't just be handing them an entire course to teach next semester, let alone an office and the keys to a lab. Similarly, if you've been developing a good rapport with a journalist who's interviewing you for an article, they may be able to give you some useful advice about whether there are any places they'd suggest you pitch or general advice they might have, but they're likely not in a position to offer you a writing gig on the spot â that's an editor's job, and it might not even be their editor, depending on whether they're a freelancer or a staffer.
If you're an academic, it's probably much easier to get yourself quoted as an expert in a news story than it is to publish a whole piece of your own, because in the second case you're trying to join a whole new industry with its own norms that you haven't learned yet. So don't be offended if the journalist suggests somewhere that they used to write for, which is maybe a notch or two lower in prestige than the publication they're interviewing you for.
Same goes for if you've done lingcomm in some other area, such as a podcast, a youtube channel, public lectures, and so on. It's certainly not a bad thing to have a track record showing that you can talk interestingly about linguistics! It's just also not exactly the same as having a track record showing that you can write interestingly about linguistics. You might be able to bulk out a first pitch or two with an interview ("I've written for X, and I've been interviewed for Y and Z"), but generally speaking, editors are looking for clips from the same genre, which means writing for the public. Where other formats are more likely to help you is as the first step in a longer sequence: an editor comes across you in a podcast (say), then follows a link to your pop ling writing, and thinks ah, maybe this person would like to write for us too!
Okay, but you mentioned that some editors approached you. That sounds way better than pitching! How do I get editors to approach me? I could do a great job!
You're not going to like this one. It involves...clips and pitching.
A thing that started happening to me after I had written for my first few places is that I started occasionally getting emails from editors at other places. Those emails would generally say a longer version of "Hey, I'm an editor at X, and I really like your pieces at Y. You know, if you have any more ideas that might suit us at X, I'd love to hear from you." This is delightful, don't get me wrong, and it does feel really good (and is part of what makes me think that there is still a ton of appetite for good pop linguistics, because there have been more of these than I've been able to fulfill).
But notice how this email is still the same clips + pitching, just inverted. It was still me having written something elsewhere that provided the writing sample that made the editor think I might be able to write something good for them, and I would still need to follow up by actually coming up with a topic and pitching it to them, which still they might not go for! (This has happened.)
Sometimes, an editor will actually come up with a topic that they think I might be able to write about, which you'd think would be great, but is actually not necessarily all that helpful, because then you have a whole back and forth about how to flesh out this vague idea they've had, which still might not work out. (While it is very helpful for the editing process itself that editors have the same minimal knowledge of linguistics as the general public, it doesn't necessarily lead to them coming up with topics that a linguist would be excited to write about. Plus, this only happens when you've written enough articles that an editor can have a good sense of what you can write about, which... oh hey it's our old friend clips again.)
And the thing is, while I do sometimes manage to pass on editors I don't have time for, the problem is that if an editor has approached me because they like my pieces X and Y, I need to be able to send them to someone else who's written these other great pieces A and B (even if it was only on their own blog or for somewhere relatively niche). I can refer someone for an interview based on other interviews I've seen with them, maybe even just based on talking with them, but I can't refer someone for writing without clips.
If you have experience with academia, you can think of it as like an academic conference. It's true that conferences will invite plenary speakers, that departments will invite people to give talks, and that people organizing a panel will invite others to be on it. But the way you get any of those invitations is through already being a person who does talks at conferences, for which you need to submit an abstract. You don't get invites to the fancy things until you're already doing the thing at a lower level. Pitching is to journalism what submitting an abstract is to academic conferences, and a clip is along the lines of "Oh I saw this person's poster/talk/paper, they'd be totally relevant to our panel."
I know that a new format can be scary and it feels easier to keep doing what you're already doing, which you can absolutely do if you're satisfied with the results it's currently bringing you! But if you're trying to break into pop linguistics writing, especially short form, and you're wondering why all of your other lingcomm in other formats isn't bringing you there, especially when other people seem to be combining the two no problem, well, the answer is something that other people are doing behind the scenes: pitching and clips.
But I don't want to become a journalist, I want to write a book! I have this academic press which says they'd be interested in putting my book in their general audience section. They've even got this short introductory series that they want me to write a book for!
Look, I mean, I can't stop you. You don't actually need my permission to do anything. But since you're reading my advice postâŠ
My experience with academic presses, even their pop arms, is that they're mostly good at getting you academic points within academia, not with actually reaching an audience of any size. If you have a tenure-track job that's already paying you a decent living and you mostly need the academia points, look, I get it, go for it. But if you're looking for anything other than academia points from your book, like money or readers (which are entirely legitimate things to want!), I don't recommend them. What I've heard about academic presses is that even when you like the editor you're working with and are proud of the book you end up producing with them, they just don't have the publicity staff or budget to do things like send out advance copies to journalists and podcasters so that you have a hope of getting reviews of your book in places that people might hear about it. This means that a) you won't make real money off an academic-press book and b) you won't have much of an impact on the non-academic discourse with one.
Special note about those academic short series, like "A very short introduction" and all of its copycat series: they're not an exception here! I've been idly tracking this type of book ever since 2013 when a publisher first approached me about writing one, and I've never once seen a review of one (even just a blog post), received marketing materials from publishers about one, nor received a personal-ish recommendation from anyone to read one. In fact, all of these things have been more likely to happen to me for regular pop crossover books from an academic press! The very detailed guidelines may make it feel like an easier, paint-by-numbers book, and it may make sense for you to write one for other reasons (academia points), but I cannot suggest these series as a way of getting your name out there for pop writing unless you already have your own capacity to promote them.
At any rate, your best chance of breaking out into popular consciousness from an academic press is if people have already heard of you somehow, for something other than your book but related enough to your book that they think "hmm, this person again? with a book? great!". Which takes us back to writing for news places, even if you do go with the academic press.
That being said, working with a mainstream "trade" press is not a guarantee that they'll do a good job on publicity, but they'll at least give you a fighting chance. At minimum, you can probably expect a mainstream publisher to produce advance copies of your book and send it out in good time to the trade magazines (Publisher's Weekly, Kirkus, Library Journal) as well as any journalists or influencers who you can attract on your own steam. You as a general book-buying person may not really know or care about the trade reviews, but they're super important to booksellers and librarians in deciding what to stock, which has a big trickle-down effect in terms of what people see on shelves. A trade press should also assign you a publicist who tries to pitch your book to media (send advance copies to journalists, try to pitch you as an interview guest or op-ed writer). Whether the publicist actually gets any uptake from this pitching process depends on a lot of things, including how busy the news cycle is with other stuff (sorry, pandemic authors), whether the people they're pitching to already recognize your name or think your topic is interesting from a cursory glance, and how many books the publicist has been assigned to do the same publicity for at the same time.
In any case, you will need to allocate your own time and effort to doing publicity. If you have an awesome publicist and tons of uptake, you will need to allocate time to actually doing the interviews or writing the op-eds that you've been pitched for. If you end up needing to do more of your own publicity, add the pitching itself to that list. Hey look, we're back at why you should write some short pieces for news places before trying to write a book, because if you want media to cover the book when it comes out, you'll need to understand how news pitching works anyway. Pitching a normal story is pitching on easy mode compared to pitching "hey I wrote a book that you should be interested in". Plus, if you have already written short form, you'll have some amount of network from that: editors you worked with, other journalists who were writing for the same place at the same time (follow people from your publications on twitter and if your common byline is in your bio they might follow you back!), and generally people who read and liked your short pieces when they came out.
(For some "be careful what you wish for" context, my publicist for Because Internet was fantastic, and when it came out, I did 200 media interviews that year, over half of which were in the two months surrounding the book's release, plus several op-eds, a few events, and general social media. Promoting the book was my full-time job for about 3 months, and my part-time job for several months on either side of that, and that's with really excellent support from my publisher. I don't regret doing it, but what you're wishing for when you're wishing for a lot of book promotion is 200 people asking "So, why did you write this book?" and you sounding excited about answering every time. This advice post is about the process of getting to a position where dozens of media outlets are interested in responding to that "hey, would you like to cover this book?" email in the first place.)
Whew, this whole caring about publishers thing sounds like a lot of work! What about self-publishing? I hear that's all the rage now.
Self-publishing can be good for some genres, especially fiction. I think it may also work quite well for very practical advice (programming, business) if you already have a platform where you give such advice.
For popular science, no. Don't touch it. Pop science is an authority genre, and I just don't see a way to self-publish a book containing your theories about X in a way that doesn't make you look like a crank. Perhaps it's an unfortunate stereotype, but all I hear in my head when I think "self-published pop linguistics book" is "let me tell you about my theory of how all the languages are descended from aliens". Either self-publish in a shorter format (running your own blog, podcast, youtube channel, etc is fine! I don't know why the reputation economy works like this but it does!) or go back up to academic presses, at least they won't give you negative reputation points.
Besides, self publishing is actually setting up your own independent business, and if you don't like the idea of doing your own promotion, hoo boy do I have some bad news for you about just how much self-promotion is involved in self-publishing, in addition to literally all of the other business skills. Hope you like wrangling Kindle's highly specific formatting requirements! Again, some people like this and do a great job at it, it can totally work for other genres, but my imaginary academic or academia-adjacent linguist reading this piece already has a zillion other things on their plate and doesn't need to start another sideline.
You've talked a lot about pitching media, but should I also be promoting my book on social media? How???
Yes, somewhat. Definitely make some posts on your existing social media, whatever you have, letting your friends and followers know that you've written a book, and most importantly, what your book is about.
Let me elaborate. I can't even tell you how many times I've gotten a tweet retweeted into my timeline that says "My book is out today! Wow, it's been such a long journey getting here and I'm so excited to finally share it with you, thank you all for your support!!! [LINK TO BOOK]"
This is all very nice, and maybe it makes sense to people who have been following you for years, but the problem is that when you make a book tweet like this, lots of these people who have been following you for years will supportively retweet it. This is also very nice of them, but then I, a random person who doesn't follow you, see it in my timeline because I follow one of your friends and I think "oh that's nice, my friend knows someone who's written a book". But I don't know whether this book is fiction or nonfiction, young adult or academic, let alone anything that might give me a clue whether I might want to click on the link. Are there dragons? Are there linguists? Are there both linguists and dragons? No one is telling me, and there are a lot of links on this here internet, and so in all likelihood I will just keep scrolling.
Instead, you need to write a retweetable tweet, like a little mini pitch in 280 characters: "My book, WORDS OF FIRE, is out today! I'm so excited to share the adventures of Glossa, the time-travelling linguist dragon, and her sidekick Diacritic. Give it to any YA readers, fantasy fans, or linguistics enthusiasts you know! [LINK]"
Honestly I just wrote this description as a demo and now *I* want this book.
It's really hard to write a 280-character description of your book that you poured years and tens of thousands of words into. It's really hard and you need to do it anyway. The good news is, you can get help. Maybe your publisher will make a good blurb that you can borrow, or one of your blurbers will produce a good quote that sums up the book, and you can definitely workshop potential descriptions with your friends and even followers. In the leadup to your book being out, you can try out various ways of describing it to see which ones make people's eyes light up, and then reuse that for your biggest please-retweet-this tweet.
At minimum, for retweet's sake, you need to refer to your book as "TITLE OF BOOK" rather than just as "the book". If it's nonfiction, it probably also has a descriptive subtitle. Put the subtitle in the tweet too. I know, it's in your head as "the book". Mine is too. But you need other people to recognize and remember the name of the book when they come across it or want to recommend it to someone, and that means getting in the habit of referring to your book by its actual name. Plus, this will come in handy if you ever write a second book and need to distinguish them!
People don't buy a book just because you wrote it, except for maybe a small handful of your closest friends. People buy a book because it looks interesting, or it looks like it'll help them with a problem they have, or because they enjoyed previous things you made and this one looks similar.
So, you need to articulate this: what's in your book that might be interesting or helpful to someone? Writers are often reluctant to do things that might appear "salesy" because we all have seared into our memories the times that other people were salsey in an extremely awkward, clunky way. So, yes, don't imitate the bad salespeople! What we don't tend to even register as sales is that time that a super relevant and interesting thing happened to cross our paths at the exact right moment and we were delighted to find out about it. Instead, think: who are some people that would be delighted to find out about your book, and how can you a) come across their paths and b) signal to them that they're in the right place? For your own social media, you're already across some people's paths, so you just need to do the signalling part. What in your book will make people delighted to read it?
However, while it's a good idea to tell people on your social media what your book is about, and do it several times so that they don't miss it, it can be a long, hard slog to build up a substantial audience on social media, and people generally won't follow a feed that's entirely promotional, so you also need to come up with a mix of compelling posts about things that are similar enough to your book but not directly selling it, and that takes effort (not necessarily less effort than pitching a few pieces for bigger audience!).
If coming up with witty memes about linguistics or livetweeting your favourite linguistics articles with commentary is your idea of an enjoyable Friday night, hey, welcome, I hope I'm already following you on Linguistics Twitter? So I'm definitely not saying don't do fun social media posts about linguistics (which would be extremely hypocritical of me), and I'm definitely not saying that if you do manage to accumulate a decent following you shouldn't tell them about your book (if I'm following you and you've written a book or even just an article, I want to know about it!), I'm just saying that if you're only on social media to promote your book, if you suddenly start posting to a long-dormant account the same day your book comes out, or if you're expecting social media to be a primary source of buyers for your book without doing any other ways of reaching people, I think you're setting yourself up for disappointment.
The thing is, even if you do have a decent following, only some percentage of them will actually pay money for something from you, whether it's a book or a witty t-shirt or supporting your patreon or whatever (Patreon estimates that 1-5% of fans are likely to convert to patrons. I don't know if anyone's done a similar stat for book sales but I'd be shocked if it was as high as 20%). So that means that if you have, say, 10,000 followers (which is really quite a lot!), you're selling them maybe 100-1000 copies of your book, and probably on the lower end of that. Sure, if you have like, a million followers, that percentage could add up nicely, but I really have no idea how you go about getting a million followers for Quality Linguistics Content, please let me know if you figure it out. Which is to say, you need to think of multiple ways of coming across the paths of people who might be interested in your book (some of whom will probably turn around and follow you on social media, which does make promoting your subsequent projects easier.)
So if social media isn't the be-all, end-all, does that mean I should start a podcast instead to promote my book? Or maybe a youtube channel? What about a TikTok, I hear people are into TikTok?
Okay, okay, hold your horses. Starting all three at once would be biting off a bit too much, but you could certainly do one of these if it appeals to you. The thing is though, like with twitter or instagram or any other social media, starting up a linguistics media project is also best viewed as a long game. It takes time to develop a following, time in which you need to be posting other things that are also interesting because no one wants to follow a feed that's entirely promotional. (Yes, even for TikTok, even if the fabled algorithm mysteriously picks you up for one video, it can drop you down just as hard again if people don't like your others.) If making content for one of these channels appeals to you generally speaking, then developing a following is certainly not a bad thing for selling a few more copies! It just also might not be the most bang for your buck thing that you could be doing with that time.
But like, what else can I do to promote my book besides trying to build a following online? What else is there?
Social media sites want us to think that the way to get people's attention is by getting followers on their platforms. But that's not the only option. Please allow me to introduce you to a small bit of helpful jargon from the world of public relations and marketing. The three kinds of media are: owned media, paid media, and earned media.
Owned media is the platforms you control. Largely social media and website traffic, these days, though if you have a well-travelled physical location, putting up a sign or a poster where people would see it also counts (this is how, for example, most yard sales do marketing). It's the most durable once you have it, but it's also the hardest to build. (And a social media algorithm change can cut it in half overnight, so that's fun.)
Paid media is advertising. Pretty straightforward, I think we've all been advertised to, at the most basic level it's just someone paying for access to someone else's audience. Most books don't have huge ad campaigns unless the author is already really famous, so the light version that generally happens instead is sending out free copies to people with large social media followings and hoping that they like it enough to talk about it.
Earned media is the non-obvious name, and it's the most interesting of the three. Earned media is when you earn free media by doing something so interesting that a journalist notices and decides "hey, I need to cover that!" (This is the strategy behind the tactic of things like marches and protests â if a journalist sees a ton of people with signs in the street, they're going to think "I wonder what's going on?" and also "other people are going to wonder what's going on" which adds up to "we should cover this".) So, yes, you still need to be interesting, but the rewards are potentially much greater for being interesting to a journalist or two than they are for just being interesting to people generally on social media.
These three types of media aren't mutually exclusive, either. In particular, being covered by someone else's media can bring in more social media followers, and doing something interesting on social media can sometimes bring in the attention of conventional media. But you don't have to wait around passively in hopes of media attention â you can also be more direct about looking for media coverage.
Right, so in that case, how do I actually get media to talk about my book?
A time-tested way to get your book in front of a large audience is to borrow one from someone else. Preferably several different medium to large audiences of people who are interested in the general category of things your book is related to. Other audiences can include people with larger followings on social media, sure, but it can also include indie-ish web things like podcasts, blogs, and newsletters, and conventional media, especially print/web and radio (there's not a lot of book-related TV in English-speaking areas, but radio apparently sells books a ton).
The tricky thing is that, the larger the audience a person controls, the more other people are trying to also get their things â their books, their startups, their kickstarters â in front of the same audience. You can mitigate against this by being more targeted â if your book is about linguistics, you could try pitching linguistics blogs or linguistics podcasts (Superlinguo has a list here), but also consider expanding a circle or two outwards, into general pop science or "interesting things" blogs/newsletters/podcasts (there are many more of them, they don't hear from linguists as often, and they may have larger audiences, but they're still not necessarily as inundated as major international newspapers).
Another way to mitigate against this is by having a compelling pitch. (By the way, it's also really helpful to have a track record that makes the person receiving your pitch email perk up and say "oh! the person who made Other Thing! I like Other Thing!", which is why you should, say it with me, start with short form writing first. At the very least, if you get some early media requests for interviews before you've finished the book, make sure you take them even if you don't think the outlet is particularly fancy â they're good practice for you, plus budding journalists often go on to work for fancier places a few years later. But media is most likely to find you to interview through other media pieces, of which the only piece that you can really control is, again, whether or not you pitch places.)
You make a compelling pitch by doing your homework â what else has this person or platform covered? How does your thing fit into it? We've gotten some hilariously mistargeted pitches for Lingthusiasm for people who are clearly just sending out a generic podcast pitch to a whole long list. You can do better than that. (Protip: if a podcast rarely or never does interviews, your proposal to be a guest is much less likely to succeed than one where they're putting out a new interview every week â that's just math.) Of course, you should also check to see if the person or publication has any publicly posted pitching guidelines, and if so, follow them.
You also need to, you know, actually send the pitch. You make a list of people who you know who already follow you and maybe have a larger audience than you do who you wish would talk about your book, and then you actually figure out the way they prefer to be contacted and ask them if they'd be interested in a copy of your book. Yes, it's awkward. My experience is that generally people are pretty nice about it though, if you're not a complete random to them, and the worst that is likely to happen is just...no reply. Or they do take a copy and never get around to it. You can live with that. You do this before your book comes out, preferably months before, so they actually have time to read it. Not the same week it's coming out. And really not after it's already come out. That's why your publisher produces advance copies in the first place, so potential reviewers can get it, you know, in advance. There aren't really all that many perks to reviewing other people's books â it takes hours to read a whole book and everyone suffers from "so many books, so little time" â so the two main reasons people do it are for the benefit of the whole ecosystem that they're a part of and because it enables you to find out what's going on in a book no one has read yet! The further you are away from pub date, the more alluring that is as an offer.
Again, learning how to pitch editors on an individual story is pitching on easy mode compared to pitching your whole book. And writing some short form pieces â op-eds, guest blog posts â about topics that are related to your book or an adapted excerpt from your book is a primary way of demonstrating to prospective readers that they'll get a similarly interesting or enjoyable experience when reading it. I don't really understand how publicity for fiction works at all, and it seems to me that it must be very difficult, because nonfiction is extremely heavily reliant on the journalism-to-book pipeline (and while short stories do exist, they're much less common than news articles). Here's a simplified version of that pipeline:
Person reads article
Person thinks "wow, that was super interesting!"
Person thinks "where can I learn even more about this?"
Person sees at bottom of article "this person has also written a related book"
Person buys book
In reality, it might be more like:
Person sees three interviews, an article, and a review related to a book
Each time, person is slightly more interested
Person sees someone else they sorta know on social media talking about the book
Person comments "oh, I've been hearing about that book, how are you finding it?"
Other person says "omg it's so great!!"
Original person actually buys it
But you get the idea. People generally need to hear about a book (or anything you're trying to sell them on) from a variety of different sources on different days to be convinced to buy it. So your job is figuring out how to get upstream of those different sources, to get into the kinds of things that people don't take as much convincing to check out, like a short written thing or a podcast they're already listening to (even then, think of all the podcasts you've heard of and not listened to, or the links you scroll past on a given day and don't click).
That's why so much of book promotion is about reducing the barriers for people with an audience to check out a book, by trying to get free copies in the hands of bookstore employees, journalists, bloggers, podcasters, booktubers, and generally anyone with a following, who can seed that feeling of a personal recommendation that converts random members of the public from "someone who's heard of a book" to "someone who buys the book". One someone loves a book, it's hard to get them to shut up about it! But everyone who gets sent books for professional purposes can tell you that they get, in the most "I'm on this lovely yacht and my free drink is the wrong temperature" of problems, too many free books to review. "So many books, so little time" doesn't go away when the books are free (as anyone who has access to a library can attest). For nonfiction to get media attention, your best bet as a non-famous person is to have a book on a compelling topic that media wants to cover, for which they can then interview you as an expert. But also! You don't have to be mega-superstar-famous in order to be somewhat well known for a few articles in a niche, which is a good start.
So, I buy that I need to promote my book somehow using other, shorter, things. But couldn't I just skip to doing this media pitching step for my book directly without trying to do short form writing myself first?
Or, couldn't I just create my own blog or podcast or videos or whatever and direct people to my book from there, where I don't need to get anyone's permission? Surely there are multiple paths here, why are you so bullish on writing short form media in particular?
There are indeed multiple paths, and I certainly can't stop you from trying them if you have other reasons to prefer them. But the reason you're somewhere near the end (I promise) of my incredibly long advice post is that you are (presumably) looking for the best advice that I am able to give, not just a menu of options. In my own experience, the best effort-reward ratio comes from doing some short form writing for media outlets.
Let's think about this in terms of who and how many people you need to persuade and how transparent it is to figure out where they are and what they're motivated by.
Being in someone else's media article, being asked to speak or guest somewhere, those are all ways of getting coverage that rely on impressing a small number of relatively hidden gatekeepers. They do have quite a high impact once you get in, but the challenge is figuring out how to do so, especially if you're aiming to get in on a consistent basis, which is generally a better approach to building a durable platform. Once you have a good network, being recommended and approached for things is great! But "just wait for people to approach you" isn't a good kind of advice to give, since there's nothing you can do about it directly â it's better to aim to do things that you have some level of control over, things that increase your visibility (which might in turn lead to people approaching you as well).
Creating your own thing is the ultimate in freedom in terms of what you create â you don't need to convince an editor that your topic is interesting, just an audience. But an audience is, hopefully, also a larger number of people than a few producers or editors, and figuring out who might be interested in your work and how to appeal to them is a long process. Once you've put in the work, having a substantial audience of your own is also very handy! But it's also a slow and not especially transparent set of steps (if you google "how to get more followers on social media", the advice is either pretty obvious, like post interesting things and engage with people, or incredibly scammy).
The set of steps that's the most transparent and at the same time exposes your work to a larger potential audience than you could reach by yourself? For my money, that's pitching short articles. Publications really do publish pitching guidelines and appropriate editor email addresses for writing short freelance articles in a way that they don't for PR-style pitching of interview media coverage, and you can control how many pitches you send out in a way that you can't control whether or not people approach you or even follow you.
I'm also particularly keen on suggesting pitching short pieces to other platforms because it's a lingcomm trajectory I don't see linguists following very much, whether because it seems mysterious and intimidating, because it's less obvious how to do it compared to posting on social media or saying yes if someone asks you for an interview, or because it's not as clear what the benefits are. There are general freelance writers who write pop language pieces, and some of them are even really good, but I also think that more people with a linguistics background could get in on this!
Again, if you're currently focusing on a different path and you're satisfied with how it's working for you, go ahead keeping on doing it! It's just that if you're not satisfied with how things are going for you in terms of lingcomm visibility, the highest impact strategy that I can advise is pitching short pieces, plural.
Okay, I'm sure this advice would probably be very effective if I had time to actually implement it, but I already have a job as a professor and this sounds like developing a whole nother job in media!
Yes, yes it is. It is in fact my job. And the jobs of a lot of other people. And while there are aspects of other people's jobs that a person from a related path can do as a casual sideline, it's hard to do the full thing (I've done some talks at universities and even co-authored a few papers as a non-academic, but I'm not suggesting someone should give me tenure for it). If you take nothing else away from this incredibly long post, let it be that when you're asking me how to make your prospective pop linguistics book do well, you're asking me how you can join my career, and that's a long answer. There is no secret easy "one quick trick" that makes a book do well â if there were, then everyone would do it and it would stop working. It's a gradual process of reputation building (what publishers call "platform"), and even then, there are no guarantees.
Here's another example: after the Crash Course Linguistics video series that I worked on came out, I was talking with a prof at a conference who said "those Crash Course videos are really great! I'd love it if you gave us some sort of talk on how I could make my class videos more like them!" And I had to say, "I mean, I'm glad you liked them, but you realize that it took a production team of about a dozen people, including professional animators and videographers, over a year to create them, right? I think it might be more efficient for you to convince your university that they need to hire some production help for you if they really want high quality video lectures, rather than you trying to cram more hours and skills into your workday." (Furthermore, my back-of-the-envelope calculation for how much these 16 videos cost to produce was well into the 6 figures.)
Many people who do more work than seems possible for one person actually have a team of people helping them out behind the scenes, whether it's a professor who manages to co-author so many papers through hiring student research assistants and postdocs and a lab manager, an author who has an editor and an agent and a publicist and an assistant, or anyone who has help with life admin tasks through a supportive partner, paying for house-cleaning or premade meals, or even getting a robot vacuum or a dishwasher. Hiring help isn't always feasible for everyone at every time, but studies suggest that paying someone else to take care of your most loathed tasks can be worth it, even if that means you spend the same amount of time working on a task you don't hate as much.
Another option might be forming a partnership or group with other people interested in lingcomm who have complementary skills and interests, or trading off your tedious admin tasks with a friend's long-procrastinated tasks that you don't have a built-up feeling of guilt over, which can be a good swap for both of you.
If you're someone who does already have one area that pays decent money and you're trying to branch out in the direction of more lingcomm, it's especially worth figuring out which things you're currently doing that you could delegate instead. (For example, when we started Lingthusiasm, even though it initially wasn't bringing in its own revenue, we hired people to help with audio editing and transcripts out of money we were earning from other sources, the same sources that meant that we didn't have time to do the production side of the podcast all by ourselves. But this is also why I'm suggesting writing, which takes less equipment, over audio/video, which takes more.)
Other ways that some academics manage to balance doing academic and public-facing work, including picking a specific niche (e.g. doing media interviews but not trying to maintain a written presence), somehow getting away with not doing as much admin (I don't know the internal politics of this, but I don't seem to see many active lingcommers who are also chairs of their departments), writing up their lingcomm process or the public's reaction to their lingcomm as research papers so they can still get academia points for it, getting grants or recognition for training students to do lingcomm, and probably more. But I'm not an academic, so I'd suggest talking to other academic lingcommers about this side!
In other cases, it may be more sustainable for profs to incorporate lingcomm as a course assignment, and encourage linguistics students into lingcomm careers like linguistics journalism and other kinds of media or communications jobs that can involve language. SciComm is a whole field and most of the people in it aren't professors! I've written a more comprehensive guide about what careers like mine can look like and my advice for other people who may be interested in entering them.
Well...you have an audience now! And I've written a book! Can I send you a copy?
I am broadly interested in books that are linguistics for a general audience, so any offer to send me a pop ling book needs to clearly articulate both a) how it is linguistics and b) how it is for a general audience.
That means that if you're writing a pop ling book and you don't have an obvious linguistics background (one or more degrees in linguistics), you need to explain to me how it is that your book still has adequate linguistics in it. Did you work with some linguists, that you can name, preferably who I've heard of? Did you cite some linguists, that you can name, preferably who aren't dead or retired? Do you know a linguist, who has read your book and can vouch for its linguistic content and can introduce you to me? (I really do know a lot of linguists, and many more linguists would have at least a mutual acquaintance or are affiliated with a conference or society that I've heard of.) Did you write a short form pop linguistics article quoting linguists and which made its way across my feeds with positive comments from linguists? (I really do try to pay attention to bylines on articles that do a good job at pop linguistics.) Is your book avoiding obvious red flags like language snobbery, fake etymologies, and other common myths? (If you don't know what the common myths are already, that's a sign that you need to do more consulting of linguists.)
That also means that if you're writing a pop ling book and you don't have an obvious track record of doing lingcomm, you need to explain to me how your book is suitable for a general audience. Being published by a trade (non-academic) press is a good signal. (That's why I recommend it above!) Or if you're published by the trade arm of an academic press, having done other things that demonstrate that you know what it looks like to actually write for a general audience and not just be an academic who thinks they're writing for a general audience (oh look it's our old friend "write some short form pieces first" again). By "general audience" I also mean "not just American" audience: I am not American, my podcast has a multinational team and international listenership, so books that lean hard on "the American story of X" as a pitch are...just not something I get excited about, even if other people may be interested.
There are really not that many books per year that meet both of these criteria, and I would like to help there be a day when there are more, so yes, you can send my publisher an email (which they will forward to me) if you are midway through the process of writing a pop ling book that fits both of those criteria, especially if it's a first book and/or you belong to any of the many demographics that are still underrepresented in lingcomm. Keep in mind that more lead time is helpful and I make no guarantees about my own schedule, but if you've been following even a fraction of the advice above, the linguistics corner of the internet is very tiny, so it is highly likely that I will already know who you are :)
