Abstract
Mobilizing research knowledge can take many forms, each with its own strengths. Social work researchers, for example, are as well represented as other similar professionals among scholarly publications, with 23 in the top 100,000 most cited and influential academics worldwide (Hodge & Turner, 2022). While this showing certainly conveys the potential impact of our work within the academy, many researchers want their scholarship to have a broader influence in the social discourse that defines how problems are understood and the possible solutions that could be implemented. Publishing a popular press book is a medium for academic output with tremendous potential to shift public perception of the issues social workers deal with.
This is more than just knowledge translation, or making science palatable for those who are unfamiliar with p-values and the trustworthiness of qualitative data. For knowledge to be mobilized, it must be made both available and accessible, packaged in ways that stimulate conversations that change popular opinions held by those in the collective commons. To achieve that, research needs much more than infographics and plain language summaries. It needs to find its way onto the bookshelves at airport kiosks, circulate as excerpts in popular news outlets, be the subject of bloggers and ultimately become the topic of dinnertime conversation. As social work scholars, our work has the potential to be mobilized. Tenured professor Brown (2015) at the University of Houston has made a small industry out of the promotion of empathy, self-care, and courage through books like Daring Greatly. LaSala (2010) at Rutger's School of Social Work wrote Coming Out, Coming Home which brought attention to the ways families cope when a child tells their parents they’re gay. Scholars in fields closely allied with social work have also had an influence, like Robin DiAngelo, a Professor of education and critical race studies who wrote in 2018 White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism. Even social workers who are novelists like Hoover (2016), whose books like It Ends With Us have enjoyed runaway success, show how a social worker turned fiction writer can popularize ideas based on their understanding of social problems developed while they were in professional practice.
Turning social work scholarship into a popular press bestseller is different, though, from publishing an academic text. In this paper, I’ll explain the process of turning good research into popular press work that has the potential to get noticed beyond university classrooms. To do this I will discuss; how to extract a great idea from your clinical work or research; the ethics of writing about your work; how to create engaging books that draw an intended audience; how to find an agent (if one is needed); how to find a publisher (and the different types); what to expect when working with an editor; issues related to page proofs, layout, cover art and language; how to get your book noticed; and finally, the benefits financially and to your career when publishing your work in popular formats.
How to Extract a Great Idea from Your Clinical Work or Research
A successful popular press work of nonfiction rarely surveys an entire body of research. Nor does it report on a single study. I’ve reviewed manuscripts that have made both these mistakes and read either graduate theses or stupefying meta-analyses. There is a place for both of these products, but the shelf of your local bookstore is not that place. I prefer to be guided by the concept of N = 1 when conceptualizing a new title. Every popular press book I’ve published has its origins in one unbelievably poignant moment where someone has shared a story with me that says something profound about an issue that is either on people's minds or should be. This could be a participant in one of my many funded research projects, but it could also be someone I met briefly on an airplane or at a friend's wedding. When I wrote my first popular press book, Playing at Being Bad (Ungar, 2007), I used plenty of content from my doctoral research but it was a single episode during that research which inspired the book. Interviewing adolescent patients at a community mental health clinic about the connection between empowerment and well-being, I had begun to separate participants into two groups: those that were successfully coping with past trauma and those who were demonstrating delinquent and disordered behavior. My analysis might have stopped there if not for one of my participants, a 15-year-old girl, who practically grabbed me by the collar and corrected me when I shared with her my developing grounded theory. She told me I had misunderstood the lives of my participants. A child's choice of coping strategy, she explained, was a reflection of the opportunities they had to succeed, not a measure of their personal qualities alone.
Since then, I’ve looked for similar pithy examples as inspiration for my books. Of course, a full-length manuscript needs far more than one anecdote, but unless that one story is as compelling as Westover's biography Educated (2018), then we will likely use that story as the set-up for an argument we want to make using many stories and many studies. I like to imagine that the works of nonfiction that I write each have a central argument to which every part of the book is Velcroed. The trick is to move from the idiographic single case to the nomothetic generalizable message that one wants their reader to understand. Other authors do the same. Gutiérrez, a family therapist, starts The Pain We Carry: Healing from Complex PTSD for People of Color (2022) with Terrence's story as a way to illustrate the effects of persistent racism on one's body and mind. My work on resilience has tried to also move from the single case study to the bigger picture. I do this by shifting my reader's focus from individual grit to the social and ecological factors that make resilience possible. It is a message I started promoting in Playing and Being Bad and one I have continued to explain as the evidence has grown in my most recent popular press work The Limits of Resilience: Knowing When to Persevere, When to Change, and When to Quit (Ungar, 2024).
The Ethics of Writing about Your Work
One of the thornier issues that confront researchers popularizing their work is that we are bound by research ethics boards in ways that journalists like Malcolm Gladwell (author of Outliers [2008], David and Goliath [2015], and many other books) are not. This creates a challenge that I have found has four possible solutions. The first, and most obvious, is to adhere to the conditions of one's research ethics board and publish research in ways that are compliant, meaning that any data you have for which consent was given can usually be included in your book as long as it is sufficiently anonymized to avoid identification of the person. This can be a little tricky if an individual has a unique social location or story.
A second way of talking about your work without approval from an ethics board is to write on your own time (if you are employed at a university). You’ll still have to disguise the identity of the people you include in your book (see below), but many academics are permitted to spend a portion of their time beyond their university contracts doing other professional work (e.g., private practice, consulting, and lecturing). Writing a book without relying on university resources may avoid the legal requirement for approval from an ethics board, though one should carefully review your employment contract before assuming this is true.
The third solution is also an obvious one. Seek permission from individuals themselves to share their story, obtaining in writing or via a recording, their consent following a detailed explanation of how their story will be represented in your work of nonfiction. Sharing the part of your manuscript that relates to them with them before publication is a legitimate way to ensure they are able to control their narrative.
Fourth, and a solution that makes a great deal of sense when sharing clinical data, is to create case studies that are amalgamations of facts but do not represent any single individual. Again, caution is required not to share a story which would relate to just one or two individuals. When I use this technique, I generally have in my mind at least three separate individuals with reasonably similar accounts of a problem and use those accounts to build a different and nonidentifiable case study. Factually, my writing reflects real lives (i.e., a 17-year-old girl with an addiction to heroin; a girl growing up in an abusive home who spends her time on the street to avoid her mother's abusive partners; a boy in a homeless shelter with a severe learning disability) but each case study is common enough to avoid identification of the specific client. When I use this technique I preface my books with some version of the following disclaimer: In order to protect the privacy of all the individuals with whom I have had the privilege to work, the reader must know that the stories I share in these pages are both real and imagined, based on bits and pieces of lives lived, cobbled together from anecdotes common to the many young people and their families that I have met through my research and clinical practice. Each of the composite sketches of youth and their families that appear are substitutes for individuals whose identities must, of course, remain confidential. None of the people portrayed actually exist as I describe them, though some readers might think they recognize in these pages someone in particular. I would suggest the resemblance is more coincidence than fact.
How to Create an Engaging Book that Draws the Intended Audience
A single story, though, does not create a bestseller. Instead, a single vignette needs to become part of a narrative arc, a storyline that draws readers through an argument and introduces them to ideas they hadn’t yet considered. Like all good books, there has to be a plotline. For this, I have turned to my experience with fiction (my novel, The Social Worker [2011], was a small press bestseller in Canada). According to Christopher Booker, there are seven basic plots, each a possible thread for a great piece of writing, whether fiction or nonfiction. These plots are:
Overcoming the monster (e.g., Star Wars; Dracula) Rags to riches (e.g., Cinderella; Great Expectations) The quest (e.g., Monty Python and The Holy Grail; Watership Down; The Da Vinci Code) Voyage and return (e.g., The Lion King; The Hobbit) Comedy (e.g., Midsummer Night's Dream; Bridget Jone's Diary) Tragedy (e.g., Citizen Kane; Bonnie and Clyde) Rebirth (e.g., Pride and Prejudice; A Christmas Carol)
Even nonfiction needs a narrative arc. Furthermore, great nonfiction needs to see the development of an idea that reflects one of these plotlines. Harari's bestseller Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (2015) is about human evolution over time, a variation on the “rags to riches” plotline that seeks to distinguish our species from others that inhabit the Earth. One of my most recent and successful books, Change Your World: The Science of Resilience and True Path to Success (2019) may not sound very literary but it is just as much a story about overcoming a monster as any version of the Dracula story. Only in my case, the monster was the self-help industry and the overconfidence it sells regarding individual solutions like meditation to systemic problems like social isolation.
Once one has a brilliant idea that can be expressed eloquently in a few sentences and a plotline to walk an audience through the story you want to tell, then it is time to start writing. There are many fine treatises on the nuances of the creative process. Among my favorite are King's (2000) On Writing, Saunders’ (2021) A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life, and LaPlante's (2007) The Making of a Story. Some of the best advice I’ve ever been given, though, is first, to read great literature, especially the kind of books you want to write, and second, to identify a template book that you admire and that you can imitate. When I wrote my first trade book, Playing at Being Bad, I placed Pipher's (1994) Reviving Ophelia next to my computer. Pipher's book is a groundbreaking work based on her psychological research that in the 1990s brought forward an insightful look at girlhood in a way that had not been done previously. While my own book never made the New York Times bestseller list like Pipher's, her approach to her craft provided a roadmap for creating a publishable piece of work. Following her structure, where she introduced data, I introduced data. Where she told a story, I told a story, and so on. It made crafting my first popular press book much easier.
Regardless of how you start, the book you write will reflect the voice you want to use. Writing nonfiction for a general audience is very different than writing for an academic audience, children under ten, or a manual for gamers. One of the biggest errors I see in the manuscripts is I review (many people send me their books related to resilience) is that they forget to consider the needs of their audience. Everything from pacing to the way data is reported will suit some audiences better than others. Any topic, however, no matter how complex, can be the subject of a trade publication with little attention to the craft of writing. Reading Smil, for example, is a testament to how knowledge can be shared. As Smil (2022) demonstrates in How the World Really Works, reams of statistics about the environment can be presented and a manuscript still remains engaging.
Writing for a general audience, one also has to be conscious of how your voice as the author appears in your nonfiction work. Almost all popular distillations of scientific knowledge share some details about the author's social location and proximity to the topic being discussed. In academic work, we refer to this as positionality. In popular works, this positioning helps to establish both the credibility of the author's experience of the phenomenon and their authority as a subject expert. But voice is also about the type of language we use (what level of literacy do you expect your readership to have?) and your readers’ social locations (will they immediately care about the topics you cover or will you have to bring them into the conversation slowly?). Too often, books are written by authors for their own amusement rather than making their work accessible and engaging for their intended audience. With all of this in mind, the next usual step is to write at least three chapters. You’ll likely need them to find an agent and a publisher.
How to Find an Agent (if One is Needed)
Not all authors need an agent to represent them to publishers. It depends on the publisher and the kind of book one is writing. I’ll discuss this more in a moment, but if you are thinking about publishing with any of the larger publishing houses like Penguin Random House, they will only accept solicitations from agents. The actual mechanics of finding an agent involve a great deal of online sleuthing to find one who represents books like yours. Networking helps too. Agents get thousands of submissions so anything you can do to get your work recognized as likely to sell will help. If you know an author and they can put a good word in for you with their agent, all the better, but more typically, you have to send in your work and hope it reaches the top of the slush pile. Adhering closely to the instructions listed on an agent's website will help (this can mean taking the time necessary to adapt each letter of introduction and book proposal to each agent's specifications). In the end, finding an agent is a combination of skill, luck, timing, and persistence. Even famous authors receive rejections.
To get sorted to the top of an agent's slush pile, remember that agents are looking for a great idea that is shiny and new…but not too new, and definitely not too adventuresome, or different, or ahead of its time, or innovative, or…risky. There is, in statistical terms, a regression toward the mean in publishing. Most agents have success with a particular product and build a reputation for bringing publishers that product. They are, understandably, hesitant to start fresh with something entirely new.
Enticing an agent to take you on as a client begins with a succinct summary of what your book is about, delivered in the time it takes to ride an elevator ten floors (thus the euphemistic “elevator pitch”). A simple case example and a meaningful lesson learned go a long way to explaining what is special about your project. Even a good idea, though, may not be enough to get your book represented. If one wants to get noticed, it's helpful to already have a huge online and offline profile, which means a blog with plenty of followers, a history of publishing short pieces in magazines and other media, or a public persona that ensures visibility for your book. Remember, while your motivation to write may be to change the world, agents are in this for the money. For that reason, one has to consider the size of the audience your book can attract.
In The One Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth about Extraordinary Results, Keller and Papasan (2013) show how to estimate the size of an audience. One has to decide if one's market is an ocean or a well (see Figure 1). Both have their merits. An ocean means the book has a potentially very large market and that many people, in general, can see a need for a book like yours. A well refers to a context where the market for your book is small but those who would read it are passionate about the topic. Oceans may have many potential readers but how motivated will they be to buy your book? Oceans are well suited to the largest publishers and only the most commonly discussed topics. Wells are ideal for an innovative book that breaks new ground and will be passionately supported by a small but motivated audience. Small publishers are typically better for these books but sometimes ideas catch and wells turn into oceans after a single positive news story. Agents may take a risk on a well, but they prefer dipping into oceans.
A book's potential market.
How to Find a Publisher
Just like agents, publishers want a book which is likely to sell, with the largest houses typically expecting to sell tens of thousands of copies just to reach profitability. Smaller presses are less risk-adverse, but almost all presses like authors who bring them a brand new idea, but not too new, and definitely not too adventuresome, or different, or ahead of its time, or innovative, or…risky. They are often wrong. Rowlings (1997) was rejected many times before she found a publisher for Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. There are other similar stories. Austen and Grahame-Smith (2009) created an entirely new genre of literature with his first book Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, an idea that was so new that it was only accepted by the very small press, Quick Books in Philadelphia. That book and others like it have gone on to sell millions, which suggests that publishers tend to like what they like and need to be convinced to try something new.
This leaves an author with choices to make. The first is whether to self-publish or to continue to seek a publisher after being rejected numerous times. Whereas self-publishing was once synonymous with vanity presses where authors paid to get their book in press, new platforms for self-publishing and the ubiquity of online reviews to promote a book has made self-publishing more acceptable. It is now understood by readers that a self-published book is exactly that: the product of the author themselves. A vanity press used to confuse readers, making a book look like it was well-vetted when it wasn’t. The transparency of self-published works nowadays has made them more acceptable. And of course, remarkable stories of successful sales (like Howey's, 2011, Wool) have helped to make self-publishing much more acceptable.
If you are fortunate enough to get a publication agreement, though, you’ll need to negotiate an advance (typically a few thousand dollars; your agent, if you have one, will help with this) and royalties. First-time authors may be surprised to learn that they will earn as little as 5% of the cover price, maybe 8%, and if they are really lucky, a full 10% royalty. There are exceptions, of course, but industry standards are creeping down, not up. Negotiating international rights and translation rights can be equally disappointing, with very little of the income likely to return to a first-time author. There are, though, other financial benefits to publishing your research and becoming a best-selling author, which I’ll discuss below. Whenever negotiating a publication contract, be sure to talk to someone with knowledge of the industry. One's initial indignation at being given so little may turn to appreciation when one realizes how poorly all authors are compensated. Working with a publisher can be very exciting but it also means you are largely powerless as an author to control the process, at least until you become very successful. An author like Perel (2017), whose breakout success with Mating in Captivity resulted in millions of books sold and translations into more than two dozen languages, is an example of an author who likely has far more bargaining power because of their success.
What to Expect When Working with an Editor
You may think you’re an excellent writer until you encounter a great editor. An editor, if you are courageous enough to listen, will mold a manuscript into something better than it was. They will edit at two levels. The simplest is technical, sniffing out inconsistencies in tone, or content, straightening out grammar, and helping to make the manuscript more understandable. At another level, they will challenge you on structure (asking that entire chapters be reordered or deleted), pacing, and the way a subject is discussed. A good editor helps to make a book a better, more saleable product while still honoring your voice. You have the right to reject an editor's changes, but you do so at the peril of making your book less readable and your publisher less happy.
Page Proofs, Layout, Cover Art, and Language
As you enter the final phase of publication, you’ll have a chance to review page proofs and decide on cover design, layout, and other esthetic details related to your book. As with every other part of the publication process, you’ll have some say over what your book looks like but it is a shared responsibility. Humility is a virtue at this point. Just because cover art doesn’t look good to you, doesn’t mean it won’t sell. You will most likely, though, be given a few choices. You can even choose (in some cases) to pay for the rights to an image you prefer and ask your publisher to use that as the cover.
Even a book's title might change at this point based on the publisher's market research (Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone was published in the United States as the “Sorcerer's Stone”…the American publisher thought its audience would find the word philosopher too sophisticated for young adult readers). The entire process is likely to feel less and less under your control. That can be a good thing if the people handling your book have the experience required to get your message out into the world and heard.
Getting Your Book Noticed
In 1997, Daniel Stoffman, a magazine writer, and David K. Foot, an economist, published Boom, Bust & Echo, which at the time was an innovative look at how demographic bubbles influence economies. The book initially received almost no attention, but Stoffman and Foot toured the country hawking copies from the trunks of their cars, willing to speak to any audience that would have him. The result was eventually a bestseller sold more than 300,000 copies.
There is no one strategy that will get your book noticed but all books take work to sell. These days, social media can be very useful if you have built an audience. There are plenty of blogs and podcasts looking for content and with a little self-promotion one can garner attention. For academics, there are also many conferences where our work can be featured, though the real goal is to move from the concurrent sessions to the plenary sessions, and then to delivering a keynote on the mainstage. A good book with robust sales is your ticket to bigger and more influential audiences. Traditional academic forms are also valuable as one segment of any book's market is the members of your academic discipline who are interested in your work and might appreciate the opportunity to read a popularized version of your research. Finally, there are the more conventional forms of knowledge mobilization. Print media, newscasts, long-form journalism, radio programs, all still command large targeted audiences that are constantly looking for people who can distill leading-edge research into understandable sound bites.
If you have never had experience with being a “talking head” don’t be shy to ask your university media department (or equivalent) for coaching. Having three minutes and thirty seconds to summarize your life's work and make it appealing to viewers and listeners requires practice. I like to record myself and as painful as it can be, listen to my answers to the questions I anticipate. These interviews pass very quickly, and what we find interesting will often be far from memorable for our audience. It's the same for the endless talks we may be fortunate enough to be invited to give. Watch the audience. When do they look at their phones? When do they look bored? What do they remember from your talk? Capturing your talk on wide angle video and dissecting it afterward is a great way to learn how to be a better presenter. Watch other presenters as well. One advantage to attending conferences is not just learning subject content from world-leading experts. It can also be very instructive watching how the best in the world present, how they use visual material and how they engage their audience. Those skills are not taught in graduate school but become essential to good community-based knowledge mobilization.
The Financial and Career Benefits of Writing for a General Audience
Despite the perception that authors can make a lot of money from book sales, the truth is that the advantage of publishing is seldom the earnings from the book itself, but the profile the book brings to your work. A book becomes an introduction which can make your work much more accessible to a wider audience who will often pay to hear you talk about your clinical practice and research. Getting picked up by a speakers’ bureau can help too, though most authors start building their profile by self-promoting. Speaker's fees can range from a nominal $300 for a talk to a community group to many thousands of dollars when keynoting major conferences or speaking at business and policy forums. Speakers like the New York Times writer Malcolm Gladwell can command over $100,000 per talk. The astronaut Hadfield can earn as much as $40,000 for a talk focused on leadership (his book, An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth [2013], was a bestseller). Even fiction writers tend to earn far more through speaking engagements than from book sales.
While the financial rewards of presenting may be attractive, and make publishing worthwhile monetarily, there are many other career advantages to publishing. Though tenure and promotion committees will seldom consider a trade publication as scholarly output, in an applied field like social work, mobilizing knowledge is valued and the network of relationships that form through your readership and presentations can be very helpful when developing research projects or seeking invitations to policy forums where your research can be used. These activities are worthy of note as most universities now insist that researchers demonstrate that their research is relevant to policy and practice. For clinicians who want a national voice, the same holds true, with a bestselling book opening doors to many forums where your understanding of a social problem will be heard.
Publish and Thrive
The science of knowledge mobilization continues to advance, with more and more refinement to the process of knowledge sharing and adoption now occurring. Packaging scientific outputs in ways that can be newsworthy and engaging should be valued as a part of academic praxis. Publishing peer-reviewed papers and scholarly books is a large part of that knowledge-to-action cycle, but it doesn’t necessarily engage the wider audience our scholarship as social workers deserves. Publishing a trade book that is well written can be another voice that academics use to engage a wider audience. The book itself, though, is not the only product that is produced. It becomes a means to draw attention to the science, building a bridge through popular media for lay and professional audiences, and hopefully, policymakers who are more likely to accept an idea that has a large and popular following. To the social work clinician or scholar, working toward publishing a bestseller may be one of the ways to ensure our work has an enduring impact.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
