Case Study: Writing books

Audience group: Upper secondary or High school, Sixth Form or Junior College, Young Adults, University Students, Adults, Retired

Audience interest level: Receptive, Engaged, Expert

Topics: General maths

Origins of the Project

I have written two mainstream science communication/popular science books: Things to Make and Do in the Fourth Dimension and Humble Pi.

Before this, I co-authored a book self-published by Queen Mary of London when I was working there about using magic tricks to teach mathematics. That was great fun - like a mini-version of writing a book as a practice run.

I enjoyed this and took on my first mainstream book as an exciting challenge - I wanted to give it a go and find out if I could do it. But there are two other key motivations for me.

First, I sometimes have ideas that are too long to make into a video or stage talk. Writing a book is the ultimate long form approach where you can build up complex ideas or arguments or whatever you want to do.

Second, a book is a whole new audience. A big part of the appeal for me is that the book will sit on shelves in book shops and people can stumble across it in a way that they can’t with anything else that I do. People will recommend it and pass it around, and the way it’s promoted brings it to a whole new audience. And then it gets translated and sent around the world, so the reach is different and unparalleled.

In terms of audience, Things to Make and Do in the Fourth Dimension is a bit nerdier, whereas Humble Pi is easier reading. That was a conscious decision, I wanted Humble Pi to be for people with no maths background knowledge and people who are just generally interested in things. At the same time there has to be enough in there to cater for hardcore nerds.

 

Practicalities

The publishers want to know if there’s an audience for the book and whether the author has a bit of a platform already, so I had a lucky rolling start with that. If you’re starting from scratch, you’ve got to convince publishers that there’s an audience for what you want to do.

Having written for newspapers is what did it for me; that’s when literary agents started contacting me because they are always looking for where the next authors are going to come from. A literary agent is incredibly important in the process because publishing is a very antiquated and publishers are big industrial machines. The publisher does not have the author’s best interests at heart so you need someone who knows this ridiculous system and is on your side. Publishers will accept manuscripts directly and approach authors out of the blue, mainly because they want to get a cheap book, but they generally use literary agents as a filter.

So I started by having a chat with some agents. The agent is your first editor and will continue to be actively involved in the writing of the book - in fact, your book will be heavily edited by several people who aren’t you.

Then you work up a proposal that includes a sample and an outline of what the rest of the book will be. For first time authors, you might write a chapter or 10% of the book - I wrote about 10-15 thousand words - which demonstrates you can write long form. You can either do a first chapter and a description of the rest of the book, or a meandering proposal which dips in and out of chapters. You give a list of what chapters the book will be made up of and what ideas will be in them. You’re not forced to adhere to that; things change, chapters come and go, but it proves out of the gate that you’ve got a whole book’s worth of ideas and the ability to write it. Your agent will shop your proposal around to publishers, and hopefully you will eventually get one or more offers from publishers of an advance to write the book.

My writing process is in very discrete stages. I start with the word-generating stage. I go through my text document of ideas, and I pull out the ideas one at a time - all ideas are equal. I’ll research the idea and write between 100 and 1000 words on it, save those in their own little text document, write the name of it on a post-it note, stick it on a wall and go onto the next idea. By the end of this, I will have generated tens of thousands of words and have my wall covered in post-it notes. The second phase is chapter-assembly: rearranging those post-it notes into chapters, and actually getting those text documents back up again and trying to mash them all together.

I found writing the second book way easier because I learnt a lot writing the first. Often I didn’t know if something was interesting or would work in a book so I wrote it anyway, meaning I hugely overwrote. The first book was 110,000 words and my first draft was 150,000 words. The second time around, I knew I had to overwrite and cut it back, but I had a much better sense going in of what I would actually be able to use. And I cut stuff sooner. I would overwrite earlier on when I was generating content, but I wouldn’t put the effort into honing it into book quality before cutting it, so I got more efficient at generating and polishing words.

In terms of level, you don’t see some of the best bits of maths until you get to university, so I want to use my writing as a bit of publicity for university-level mathematics, but not in a way that means people can’t read it and follow along.

My advice to new authors is: as soon as you’ve finished your first manuscript, you’re half-way there. The other half of the effort is in edits, revisions, changes - and everything takes forever! Part of the benefit of a big publisher is the amount of attention you get from your editor.

Once the book is published, you have to go out and promote it. This means book talks and media, convincing people to read your book. Publishers will first release it as a hardback because they make more money on a hardback, then they release it as a paperback and once again you try to convince people to buy the paperback.

Writing a book dominates your life in a way that other things don’t. When I wrote a book about maths mistakes, a huge chunk of everything else I did for five years is also about maths mistakes - live shows, stage shows, YouTube videos, newspaper articles. It’s nice if you’re totally freelance because the book defines and informs your other work for a period of time. My goal is to write a book once every five years, give or take, since I do a lot of other stuff as well.

Evaluation

I get emails saying thanks and I’ve read your book, but they make up a trivial percentage of the readership. As a whole, publishing is terrible at data. I could tell you to the nearest view how many views a video has had, but I could not tell you even to the nearest thousand how many readers a book has had. I get six-monthly reports at best, and even then they’re fuzzy numbers. You might know how many people bought the book, but you don’t know how many people read it or whether they lent it to other people. And some people will borrow it from libraries.

More information

Project website: Matt Parker at Penguin Books UK

Twitter account: twitter.com/standupmaths