Write Your Book

Hannah Alpert-Abrams bio photo By Hannah Alpert-Abrams halperta@gmail.com @hralperta Comment

Last weekend I asked you whether you think of the academic monograph you’re writing as a passion project or as your job.

Just over one hundred of you responded, and the answers were telling. A little more than half of respondents said they are doing this for some reason other than employment obligations.

In a follow-up question, which got twenty-two respondents, about two thirds said they were currently writing a monograph without pay.

Monograph feelings

I asked because I’ve been struggling with my own monograph, based on my dissertation. I drafted a proposal last month and began work on the first chapter, which has reinvigorated my love for this research. I’m excited about this project! I think at least some of you will be, too.

Before I began writing, I mapped out a general timeline for the book manuscript. I’m looking down the path of a 2-4 year project.

This isn’t my first project of that length. This isn’t even my first book. But every time I think of this particular 2-4 year timeline, I hit a wall.

Because my postdoc ends in August. And I’m not sure that I would continue working on an academic monograph if I wasn’t employed by an academic institution.

So I wondered: how many of you see the future of your book as separate from the future of your career?

Monograph money

We all know that academic monographs don’t make money for the author.

But I had always assumed that this was okay because the author was being paid by their institution to write.

Universities pay faculty, and part of their contractual obligation in return for that salary is to produce scholarly writing. That’s the deal. And for all that we worry about overinflated performance expectations for young academics, and overwork in the academy, it’s a deal I can live with.

I really wasn’t aware of how much scholarly production is voluntary and it’s giving me pause. I’d love to know more about this. I wonder how many academic monographs are being written by authors who are not being paid by press or institution. And I wonder what that means for the way we understand, and read, scholarly work.

I also wonder what it means for me. Should I think of this book as something separate from my academic future?

Freeing the book feels risky, because I feel that scholarly work should be paid work, and because it threatens to tear down the carefully guarded wall I maintain between my career and my sense of self. As a few of you mentioned, there are a lot of feelings involved in both continuing and abandoning a book project.

But as @sharonleon commented, there are other ways to write and publish if we are not bound to the book. Maybe there is energy to be gained from imagining other futures for the book.

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