Don’t Write “Public Philosophy”, Write Public Philosophy (guest post by Tamler Sommers)

This is the third installment of our series on publishing popular philosophy books, written by Tamler Sommers, University of Houston. 

Helen De Cruz invited me to write a post on writing for non-academic audiences in connection to my 2018 book Why Honor Matters – to give advice to early career philosophers about the process of writing and promoting a trade book.

Unfortunately, that experience isn’t the best model for this purpose. First of all, the “how it got made” story behind Why Honor Matters is too idiosyncratic. My podcast Very Bad Wizards (which debuted in 2012) attracted the interest of Russell Weinberg, an agent at a top agency for popular science books. Russell reached out to me sometime in 2014 and asked if I was interested in writing a trade book. I pitched him some topics – and the only one that excited the agency was honor. Next, I had to come up with a proposal. Trade book proposals are excruciating to write – for me at least. I tried and failed for more than two years to come up with a viable way to do a book-length exploration of honor. The topic was too broad, too amorphous, to bring into focus. I struggled with the tone too - I didn’t want to write an alarmist screed, I wanted the book to be upbeat, informative, to make readers rethink core convictions they take for granted…but also fun to read. I can’t stress enough how often I wanted to give up on this project, but Russell kept pressing me to get it done. Without that external pressure, along with a bunch helpful of ideas for revision, I would have quit years earlier. This was not a project I could’ve brought to fruition on my own.

And that was a big part of the problem. I’m convinced my struggles with the proposal were because I decided to write a piece of public philosophy without having anything specific in mind at the outset. I was doing this backwards, I knew the genre before I had the argument or even an idea of what I wanted to write about. I won’t do that again and I don’t recommend this approach to writing for the public. Before Why Honor Matters I started with a project I wanted to pursue, and the “for the public” side of it was almost incidental. My podcast (which led to the book) is a prime example. I wanted to do a moral psychology podcast not for public engagement purposes but because I loved podcasts, and I thought we could do it well. We do reach a wide audience - Very Bad Wizards gets well over 100,000 downloads per episode, and over 25 million in total. But we’re doing the show the way we want to do it and have from the beginning. My other public philosophy work, my interviews for The Believer magazine (which eventually led to two books of interviews), came about the same way. I wanted the chance to talk to researchers doing exciting work in science and ethics. My friend had just started a new magazine and she offered me the opportunity. I’m happy the interviews got some public attention but that wasn’t my goal at the outset.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve always been interested in reaching audiences beyond the small professional world we inhabit. I just think that the project itself should be your primary motivation, not its value or appeal as public philosophy. This is why until now I’ve mostly stayed out of the discourse on public philosophy on blogs and websites. “Should we write public philosophy” or “what is the value of public philosophy” are not good questions to discuss in general terms. The real question comes when you have an idea for a project, one that might count as “public philosophy” - should you devote your efforts to making that particular thing happen? And if you’re excited about the project, and you think you can pull it off, then who cares what people think about value of public philosophy in general?

I think debates like this are part of a more general tendency among younger academics to overstrategize or overthink their careers. In my view, success in this profession is too unpredictable to try to game the system. So do work you’re happy with and hope for the best. Back when I was publishing interviews and small popular pieces, some professors warned me the field wouldn’t take me seriously as a scholar if I did too many of them. As it turns out, my non-academic work was a boon for my academic career. The first person I interviewed for The Believer, Galen Strawson, ended up as the external member of my dissertation committee. My first academic book Relative Justice came about because Rob Tempio at Princeton UP reached out to me after reading 2005 Believer interview with Jonathan Haidt. The advance contract he was willing to give me helped me land the job I still have and love today. Why Honor Matters was the centerpiece of my file for full professor. Many of these connections were flukes, lucky breaks. It would’ve been crazy to undertake those projects as part of some sort of career plan.
Having said all of that, let me at least briefly perform the task that was requested of me: give some concrete advice to early career philosophers about writing for the public, and writing and promoting a trade book in particular.

1.  Start a podcast back when not everyone had a podcast, which will hopefully attract the interest of a good agent who will drag you kicking and screaming through the process of writing a proposal and crafting an argument that might appeal to publishers.
2. If you can’t do (1), then hopefully you have an idea in mind already that you can turn into a proposal yourself. Ask anyone you know who has written a successful proposal to share it with you, so you have some idea of structure and tone.
3. Use every connection you have. Agents are often willing to have a conversation with you even if they’re unfamiliar with you and your work. But it helps to have someone who can put you in contact with them.
4. Respect your audience. Don’t just take some aspect of your academic work and write a dumbed down version presented in patronizing kindergarten teacher style. That stuff is dreadful. Assume your audience is intelligent, reasonably well-read, and knows to use the internet if they come across an unfamiliar word or concept. Obviously there’s a line – you can’t assume readers know or care about “subject-sensitive invariantism”. But I think many philosophers in their public prose err too far on the side of talking down to their readers.
5. Don’t lose your voice. For the first draft of Why Honor Matters, I got a ton of helpful substantive comments and suggestions from two editors at Basic Books. But a crucial tip came from my agent, who wanted to see more of my “Tamler in it. As I got deeper into the philosophy of the book, I had lost too much of the life and personality that had characterized my other public pieces - at least the ones that were good.
6. When you get stuck, try writing as though you were giving a lecture. I struggle writing chapters and essays, but when I write lectures I can get in a kind of improvisational flow state that lasts for hours. In one of many excruciating bouts of writer’s block for my book, I tried to write a chapter like a lecture. I used bullet points instead of paragraphs and imagined myself delivering what I was writing. It actually worked! The ideas started coming, the life went back into my prose, and I got into groove again. I’ve returned to that strategy often, including for the writing of this piece.
7. Start meditating now to prepare yourself for when your proposal is out to publishers. That was the most stressful time of my life.
8. Keep your expectations in check. For reasons too involved to get into, agents will often make you feel like you’re about to get rich when they’re shopping your proposal. They do the opposite of what you might expect: they get your hopes up so high about a bidding war that you’re likely to be let down when it doesn’t happen. This happened to me. If you had told me even weeks earlier that I’d get a $25,000 advance to write the book for a respected publisher, I would’ve been very happy. Instead I felt disappointed or ambivalent at best.
9. Once your book is published, spend some time developing strong talking points for promotion. I sucked at this. I never figured out how to present the book’s argument in a concise way. People would ask me at the beginning of interviews to define honor, and I couldn’t – nor could I come up with an informative and entertaining explanation for why it was impossible. I hate promoting my work, I’m really bad at it, and I’m sure I missed some prime opportunities to get people interested in the book.
10. Appreciate the unexpected benefits. In the end Why Honor Matters was not a huge success sales-wise, but I still get emails from readers who felt a personal connection to the book. I got invitations to speak at places I’d never been to, public lectures with audiences from all walks of life. I loved all of that. It’s a different kind of experience than presenting at academic conferences (which I also enjoy). If this pandemic ever ends, and I get an idea for another project that I can pull off, I would do it all again… I think.

Comments

[asking for a friend]

Thanks, Tamler-- super-interesting post! Just curious: did you sign a contract based on the proposal alone, or did you have to submit a first draft of the book (or some sample chapters, or draft material) along with your proposal?

[Tamler Sommers]

Just the proposal but the proposal was about 24 pages long with a long introductory description and somewhat detailed chapter outlines.

[Assistant Professor]

Thanks, Tamler, for sharing your experience and advice.