When we were first trying to articulate the kind of books we wanted to publish “rigorous” and “readable” was the most succinct form of words we could come up with. As you can see from how often our website and other public facing materials use them, they still are.
So what exactly do we mean by them?
Perhaps it’s worth starting by saying we originally formulated them as “rigorous but readable”. We had in mind an emphasis on balance, with the implication that rigour and readability were at odds with each other and what we wanted to do was find a perfect half way point. We reflected on this for a while, and decided this wasn’t quite what we wanted to convey. In fact our philosophy is that you can be rigorous in substance while being readable in style and these are not necessarily trade-offs.
Another point worth stressing at the outset is why these two point are so important to our vision for our publishing. Our aspiration is to publish books that will be of interest to sophisticated readers who are not necessarily experts in the specific topic of the book already. They might be quite well-versed in the broad theoretical frameworks, disciplinary debates and (normally) unspoken assumptions of your particular area of specialism, but equally they might not. We assume they are either formally well-educated, or dedicated auto-didacts, with a strong level of general knowledge, but that they may need context an clarity to help them engage with the topic of your book.
For us this is a question of marketing and brand-positioning, but it is more fundamentally a question of what we want to put out into the world. Good quality, well-written scholarship, that is accessible to curious, interested, intelligent readers.
Rigorous
One of the most important elements of academic publishing – which distinguishes it as a form of non-fiction publishing – is the emphasis on rigour and reliability. It is essential that a reader knows that the books they are reading are based on robust experimental evidence, and that they can both understand (and potentially replicate) the methodological working of the author and confirm their reference sources.
The most important mechanism for ensuring this degree of rigour is peer review. Sometimes this will be focused mainly on the book proposal and sample material ahead of a complete manuscript. Other times it will also be appropriate to have a full manuscript receive peer review feedback – above and beyond the feedback from our editor. The key element is that readers (usually two) who know what they are talking about have had a chance to evaluate the text – in whole or in part – raise any questions they may have about accuracy, reliability and clarity, and to make suggestions for improvements. It’s not perfect, but it has proved to be a very effective way of ensuring the quality of academic books.
This is a question of quality assurance that really matters in a scholarly environment where readers need to be assured that what they are reading has been judged to meet the standards of serious academic research (or analysis or both). It is a more aggressive standard than is usually applied to non-fiction books more generally, where the primary concern is whether anything asserted in the book could be defended in a lawsuit. It is also a standard that academic authors often require, in order that their work is recognised by their home institution and department as having met the requirements for promotion.
Our motivation for maintaining this standard is slightly divergent from these priorities. As a new startup press we don’t expect many of our authors to be publishing books with us primarily in order to receive formal departmental recognition. It will take time before institutions and departments will recognise us the way they do our more established competitors until we have a much larger catalogue by which to be judged. No, our main reason for wanting to maintain academic standards of rigour is assuring our readers that what they are reading is worthy of their time and money.
In the social sciences, humanities and arts, there are frankly very low standards for books aimed at a “Trade” market (that is, the kind of books you’d find in a high street or airport bookshop, on the front tables). They tend to be dominated by authors whose celebrity has eclipsed whatever seriousness they may once have had, often pitching big eye-catching ideas based on evidence which is insufficient, unreliable or misrepresented. I won’t name names here, but the generally incisive “If Books Could Kill” podcast does a solid job of eviscerating many of them. Of course there are some excellent non-fiction books in popular social science, but sorting the wheat from the chaff can be a tiresome process.
As a reader this is tremendously frustrating, we see a book on the shelf, think it looks interesting, perhaps even read it, only to find that its thesis is shakily demonstrated and lacking in substance. In a world where so much of our media is full of malicious disinformation, clickbait, and ragebait, it is also dangerous. We want our readers to be confident that what they are reading is robust analysis grounded in properly-conducted research. This is why rigour matters to us, and it is also why readability matters to us.
Readability
It really should go without saying that books ought to be readable. I can’t imagine any publisher saying their books should be unreadable. So what do we really mean here?
When it comes to academic writing it’s partly a question about who the imagined reader is. When, for instance, you write a PhD thesis, you understand that your readers will be a select group of experts, passing a critical eye over your work and looking for indications that you have or have not demonstrated that you have met the requirements of the academy. That means showing all your working with lots of references; using lots of insider-coded terminology; and fully explicating your choice of research methods. You are, in a sense, telling a story not just of the piece of research you have undertaken, but of why this work merits your elevation to the doctoral ranks of academic accreditation.
If you’re writing for someone who doesn’t have to read your work, but is choosing to do so in their own time, and driven by their own curiosity, your priorities should be rather different.
- You need to tell a coherent story. Just like with any novel, your reader needs to understand what kind of journey you are taking them on and what is at stake.
- It is best to avoid specialised technical terms unless they are necessary. If they are necessary then you should ensure you define them properly, so that your readers are clear what you mean by them.
- References and citations are an important part of demonstrating rigour through transparency, but they should be used sparingly where your reader will find them useful. This is in contrast to the kind of writing for formal assessment where you might want to insert every possible citation in order to demonstrate how much work you’ve done.
- Write in a voice you are comfortable with. If that’s the traditional academic third-person impersonal then that’s fine, but if you’d prefer to write in the first person, or with a less formal tone, then you should feel free to do so. Science is often about trying to remove the personal and subjective, but those are often precisely the things that engage readers. If you’re comfortable with the voice you’re using, it’s likely your readers will be too.
That’s not an exhaustive list, but it is a pretty comprehensive summary of the kind of advice we offer to authors with regard to readability. In the end what we want is for our books to be genuinely informative, providing meaningful analysis and good quality information, but not be a chore to read.
Rigorous and Readable are the watchwords for our editorial process, from initial discussion all the way through editorial discussions during your writing process, and feedback during our copy-editing. We want to help you ensure your book is both as robustly argued as it can be, and as lucidly written as it can be.
That’s it for this week. As always, if you have any questions don’t hesitate to contact simon.bates@tbarnpress.com. Next week we’ll be looking at the most fundamental question of why you should write books at all.
