#40: Writing an Academic Book for a Wide Audience with Allison Daminger

In today’s episode, Jane is joined by Dr. Allison Daminger, Assistant Professor of Sociology at University of Wisconsin. She is the author of the new book, What’s on Her Mind: The Mental Workload of Family Life. Allison is also an alumni of Jane’s book coaching program, Elevate (now known as Book Brilliance), where she worked on her book.

Tune in to learn: 

➡️ How coaching helped Allison bust the myths she was believing about how much time it takes to write a book. 

➡️ The three techniques she used to write a book that her “best friend from college” and other non-experts would find engaging. 

➡️  What was required to transform her dissertation into a book (hint: it’s more than what you think). 

To learn more about Allison, visit https://www.allisondaminger.com

To get her book, click below:

What’s on Her Mind: The Mental Workload of Family Life

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:09

Welcome to Academic Book Writing Simplified. I'm your host, Jane Joanne Jones, a writing coach and developmental editor who's here to give you some tough love about the way you write. This podcast is for women and non-binary scholars in academia who are writing academic books, but feel as if the process is a little or a lot like a mystery. If you're ready to trade your confusion and frustration for ease, clarity, and purpose, you're in the right place. Let's head into today's episode. Hello everyone, and welcome to today's episode. I am so excited because we have a guest today, Dr. Alison Daminger is joining us. She is an assistant professor of sociology and the author of the new book, What's on Her Mind: The Mental Workload of Family Life. She's also an alumni of my coaching programs. So I am so excited to talk to her today about the process of writing her book, her goals in writing a book that is accessible to a wide audience, and also some discussions about book writing timelines and the revision process. So if you are in the middle of writing a book, if you have just published a book, or you are getting started on writing a book, this is an episode you are definitely going to want to listen to. Allison shares so much insight and she is so generous with her advice in this episode. So let's get into it. All right, Dr. Alison Daminger, welcome to the podcast. We are so excited to have you today. Thank you so much.

SPEAKER_01 1:50

This is a delight to be reunited with you after my time in Elevate a few years back.

SPEAKER_00 1:55

I know. It feels like a long time ago, but it actually wasn't. I would say that you have finished your book very quickly, comparatively, you know, to just like general escape, not compared to elevate people, because I don't want anyone who's listening to feel like they're slow, but because you're not. But I feel as if you in general, you got your book done at a pretty quick clip. And we're gonna talk about that definitely on in this episode. But first, I just want to talk a little bit more broadly about the book, which, you know, as I said in the introduction, is called What's on Her Mind, The Mental Workload of Family Life. And it's great. I mean, of course, I'm biased because you were in my program and it's a sociology book. So I think it's a great book and it's your first book, right?

SPEAKER_01 2:49

It is, yes, something I've dreamed of doing when I was a little kid. I always said I wanted to be a writer and a teacher. And, you know, I suppose I'm I'm uh now doing both of those things. So living living the dream over here.

SPEAKER_00 3:02

That's amazing. And the book is so it's a good book. Like I really enjoyed reading it. It's very readable, and I know that it's based on your dissertation, but I want to ask you a kind of big question to start off. How much did it change from what you wrote as your dissertation?

SPEAKER_01 3:22

Yeah. So I would say that the core ideas are mostly similar from the dissertation to the book, but pretty much all of the text was rewritten. So it wasn't as if I was starting from scratch, but the genres are just so different that even if you feel like you know, the chapter structure is good, the core ideas that you want to convey are in there. The actual prose for me, my goal was to write a book that, you know, would appeal to my tenure committee, but that would also be something that I could hand to a friend from college who was complaining about her marriage and say, here, read this book. This might help give you some new insights. Um, the other thing that really changed between the dissertation and the book was I added a whole new set of interviews with queer couples. So the dissertation was based on my interviews with different gender couples. And when I was finishing up the dissertation, I started a new round of interviews. And so the final chapter in the book is all about that new round of interviews with the queer couples, and that wasn't in the dissertation at all. And that chapter is so interesting.

SPEAKER_00 4:34

It really does shed like put the other chapters into context. Would you see the differences? And you're like, well.

SPEAKER_01 4:40

Totally. That and that was my hope, right? So I, you know, this book is about inequality in relationships, right? Inequality in the mental load or what I call cognitive labor. And the majority of the book focuses on how that dynamic shows up in straight couples. But I kept getting questions when I would talk about this work, you know, what about queer couples? What happens if people share a gender, right, in a relationship? And so I was, I didn't quite know what I would find, but I was very pleased that, as you say, I think by looking at this different model, it sort of illuminates some of what we take for granted when we're, you know, looking at the heteronormative average, so to speak.

SPEAKER_00 5:22

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah. And I think it's very interesting because in the different gender couples, I love when you talk about how they understand their differences as personality driven, but they're gendered. Yes. You know, and they explain it as personality driven when you come in as the analyst and are like, exactly.

SPEAKER_01 5:44

Yeah. So I was I was finding, you know, this really interesting pattern where I interviewed couples about, you know, who does kind of the project management in your relationship? And things like noticing that we're running low on milk and are gonna need to stack up, or else the toddler's not gonna be able to have milk in his teos. Things like, oh, Thanksgiving is coming. What are we gonna do? Are we gonna travel? Who's gonna book the flights? Should we coordinate with the extended family? Things like, oh, you know, my mother is getting older and can no longer care for herself. What is the plan for dealing with her care as she continues to age? So all of that thinking work was really missing from a lot of the literature on household labor. And so my initial goal was to just sort of understand what is this work, how is it divided between men and women in different gender couples? But once I started doing the interviews, people kept saying things to me like, well, yes, she does most of this work. She's sort of the project manager for our household, but that's just because she's so good at it, right? She's just organized, she's type A. Meanwhile, you know, I'm over here, I'm I'm laid back, I kind of go with the flow, I sort of bumble my way along. And that was really striking to me. Like this was a very consistent theme. I didn't ask people about their personality, right? This was just sort of spontaneously emerging. And at the level of an individual couple, it makes a ton of sense, right? Why would you want the kind of disorganized, always late person in charge of your calendar, right? No, you put the type A organized person who you would expect to do a better job. But, right, based on what I know of the psychology literature on gender differences in personality, that explanation just didn't hold water, right? That I had magically sampled this group of type A women, right? It really pushed me to say, okay, this is an explanation that is doing some work for these couples. What work is it doing? And what might be underneath these personality narratives? And of course, you know, as you hinted at, it's it's gender, right? Gender is driving these patterns in ways that I try and unpack in the book.

SPEAKER_00 7:56

Yeah, it was it was so interesting. I recall one of the husbands being an actual project manager for their job. And falling back on the I'm not organized explanation. Or the man who was a surgeon. It was like, well, you know, they just like, you know, she just holds it all together better than I do, you know, whatever language he used. And it's like, you have achieved like the pinnacle of your career being a surgeon, but you're falling back on I'm not organized enough to do it. Yes. Or the conversation, like, I'm so busy at work that I can't also be doing these things at home.

SPEAKER_01 8:34

Yeah, what I found so fascinating was that when he had this big job, like he was the surgeon, he was the project manager, then the explanation was often, you know, oh, I used all of that up on the job and I have nothing left at home, right? I planned all day for my team at work. I don't want to come home and plan for the weekend. Whereas if she was, you know, the project manager or the surgeon, it was sort of, oh, this is what she does for her job. Of course she's going to do it for our home life. And so the same sort of factual situations when we change the gender of the person in that role becomes a totally different narrative for how labor is divided.

SPEAKER_00 9:55

So interesting. So interesting and depressing, but you know, so important to know because as you say, this labor is incredibly time consuming. You know, and something that's hard to clock. Like when you gave them the time studies, it was hard for them to say, well, you know, I sit down an hour every night and do it. It was more along the lines of, I'm at work and I'm thinking about what we need to have for dinner. I'm thinking about if we like the daycare that we visited. You know, so it's it can be a 24-hour situation that it's always in the back of their mind, right?

SPEAKER_01 10:32

Absolutely. And, you know, before we started this podcast, you and I, you know, checked our phones, they're on do not disturb, we put them away. But I talk in the book about how they're sort of metaphorical pings that you cannot shut off. You cannot put your brain on do not disturb. And women would say to me, I wish I could just focus on my paid work while I'm at work. But instead, I am remembering, oh, gotta call the babysitter, oh, gotta order this new thing, oh, gotta ask my son's teacher about X, right? And those are things that, yes, they're time consuming, but it's also sort of exhausting in a way that I think many of the women who were doing this work for their families struggled to understand. I have this involved, supportive partner, right? Why am I feeling like life is so challenging and difficult? And when we head in this other layer, I think that helped a lot of those women understand. Yes, my partner and I are doing a decent job of sharing the physical chores and childcare, but I am the one who was holding all of this in my head. And that is burdensome.

SPEAKER_00 11:38

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah, for sure. It's, I mean, it's incredibly burdensome. No wonder people are tired all the time. Right? Like, no wonder. Okay, so I want to talk a little bit about first your time in Elevate and the program, and then we're gonna talk about some of the writing decisions you made for the book because you do want it to be something that a friend could read, or you know, a woman who's in a marriage where she feels where she wonders, like, why am I tired all the time, can pick this up and read it and understand. But when you started in our coaching program, you were at the point where you had a contract, but a lot of the book you were still in the early phases of. So tell me a little bit about that experience.

SPEAKER_01 12:23

Yeah. So I was in Elevate the second half of 2022, which also happened to be the time that I graduated, got married, moved across the country, and started a tenure track job. So there was there was a lot going on in my life at that moment. And you're right, I had an advanced contract from Princeton. I had, I think, maybe two chapters drafted at that point. But as I said, the rest of the book was still to be, you know, adapted from the dissertation. But really, I was opening a new blank Word document and sort of did some occasional copy-pasting, but most of it was written from scratch. So that's sort of where I was when I began the program.

SPEAKER_00 13:08

Okay. And then what was your goal when you came to the program?

SPEAKER_01 13:13

I mean, my hope was to make as much progress as possible on, you know, getting words on paper. And I remember, I think my expectations were a little bit unrealistic, right? My my initial goal was to finish the book in 2023. And I remember you and Kelly when I was feeling stressed about, oh my goodness, I feel like I'm making no progress. You sort of reality checked and said, you know, hey, you're on your first year of the tenure track. You know, this is something that is going to take multiple years. Maybe you could depressurize this a little bit for yourself. So I'm not quite sure what I had in mind, but I remember feeling like I was moving so slowly. And so it's kind of funny for me to hear you say, oh, you wrote this quickly, because it it felt when I was in the thick of it, like, oh my gosh, this is taking forever. I am making so kind of snail's pace progress because it was just, you know, an hour a day, an hour a day trying to make a little bit of progress on the book alongside learning how to teach and be a professor and do all of those other tasks.

SPEAKER_00 14:23

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you were, you had a lot of transition that year.

SPEAKER_01 14:29

Yes. Yes. That is the understatement of the century. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 14:33

A lot. I remember when I was in grad school, a faculty member saying to me, This is this is the most free time you'll ever have. And I was like, what are you talking about like that? What a thing to say to a grad student who feels so overcommitted and has this dissertation looming over their head. And then when I started my 10-year track job, I understood it. I didn't feel like I had an abundance of free time, but I understood what they meant by saying that, that you are pulled in more directions than you were as a grad student. So everything, and also I think moving from the urgency of the dissertation, where you're very much pushing yourself past your limits in a lot of ways to finish it for some people. And then getting into the tenure track position where the urgency is there, but it's different. So you feel like everything's slow because you're not like sprinting to you just sprinted to a finish line, like as fast as you could. And now you don't necessarily have to sprint the minute you start your tenure track job. So it just by comparison, it just feels very, very slow.

SPEAKER_01 15:38

Yeah. And I think, you know, as I look back in retrospect, I think I was maybe a little bit burnt out when I started because I was, you know, I had just finished the dissertation, I had just done this job search, which is stressful and you know, emotionally a lot. And so I think it was hard to then be like, okay, and now we're gonna write a book, right? And so some of you know, what I wish I could sort of go back to my 2022 self and say is is like, it'll, it'll happen, right? Do you don't need to do it overnight? Like take it little by little, put one foot in front of the other. And and that was something that I really appreciated about the program was accountability, right? So that I felt like, okay, to get the most of this, I want to be submitting new pieces of writing. I want to be getting feedback on things. I want to take advantage of the resources that are on offer. But there was also a lot of kind of myth busting around, okay, this is a multi-year process. You can write a book, even if it's in small chunks, right? As long as you keep plodding along, being strategic about, you know, carving out tasks. That was one of the hardest, I think, transitions in grad school to professor life was when I was writing my dissertation, I would have, you know, I don't know, six hours at a time writing chunks, right? I probably wouldn't write for all six hours, but I could if I wanted to. And then when I got on the tenure track and I was teaching that first year especially, it was okay. I have, you know, 30 to 60 minutes in the morning. And I need to be able to get into this quickly. So finding ways to sort of get myself into writing mode more quickly, that was a new skill that I think the Elevate program helped me to build.

SPEAKER_00 17:22

Awesome. Yeah. And I mean, I think, and I think ultimately you did write your book in a very speedy, you know, you wrote your book in a relatively quick time frame. Like you came to us the second half of 2022. We are now in the second half of 2025. So three years later, and you have a published book. Like I am holding your book in my hand. Yes. You know, so given like the time for production, we could talk a little bit about that. So let me ask you, when did you first submit the full manuscript? Do you remember?

SPEAKER_01 17:57

Yes, I want to say it was early 2024 that I submitted the full manuscript. Peer review happened that spring, and then it went into production summer 2024.

SPEAKER_00 18:12

Okay. So you had your two sample chapters at the end of 2022, and then you spend about 15 more months, if you're saying early, early 2024 to finish the full manuscript. Yes, that sounds that sounds right. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. So probably 18 months total, if we say like, oh, September 2022, like March, you know, 2024. That's that's great.

SPEAKER_01 18:43

Yeah. I mean, that I again, I when I was in the thick of it, it didn't, it felt very slow. And so it's it's nice to to hear this feedback now. But I think part of it too is taking the long view is is sometimes helpful. Like when I would, you know, wake up, do my one hour in the morning and be like, okay, I I added 200 words today, you know, of my 80,000-word manuscript. I'll never get there. But that that adds up, right? And I think remembering that if you just show up day after day, right, that will eventually produce pretty good results. Another resource that I discovered around the same time that I was in Elevate was a book called, I believe it's called Advice for New Faculty Members by Robert Boyce. And one of the things that he talks about is these brief daily sessions, right? And then when we sort of get into this habit of saying, oh, I need two hours to make any progress on anything, when you're in the midst of, you know, a tenure track job, you you are probably not going to have two hours very often. And so the key was, okay, you can do brief sessions, but they have to be every day. And so for me, that was, you know, I had a little chart on my wall and I would put an X on the chart every time I hit my 30 to 60 minutes of book work. And there was something really motivating about that, just trusting that, okay, I keep adding those X's. It's going to add up to something eventually. And it did. Yeah. I mean, it added up to a book. It didn't add up to something.

SPEAKER_00 20:15

Like, yes. Exactly. Yeah, no, and I think that that's so important. Like kind of the myth busting, like you were saying, that you learn and elevate and also like setting yourself realistic goals because your circumstances are going to change immensely from being in grad school to having a teaching commitment. I mean, I know a lot of grad students teach, but you know, going to faculty and having like assigned classes that maybe at times you don't want them to be at. You know, so that you don't have blocks of uninterrupted time during the day and, you know, having to move, you know, like having to move is a huge transition. You know, so and getting acclimated takes months, you know, like finding your spots. Where am I gonna go to the doctor? Like, where am I gonna do this? You know, all of that is incredibly time consuming. And as your book beautifully illustrates, like cognitively intense. And then you're doing this other cognitively intense thing of writing a book. So, you know, we can think that even if you did have the two to three hour time slots, it might have been challenging to fill all of that time because your brain was doing so many other things. Absolutely. You know, so in terms of time commitment, but also our capacity, like what do we have the capacity to do? Like some days you might have three hours, but be tired and only want to write for one of those hours. And I think, you know, normalized, making that normal and okay. Sometimes you can take a little break.

SPEAKER_01 21:50

Yeah, and that's a shift that I I am still in the process of learning, right? That a lot of things count as research and writing time. Sometimes it's adding words to my manuscript, sometimes it's reading an article and taking notes on that, right? I had to have this shift in my mind of okay, I'm not going to be in a place where I can literally write every day. So on those days when I have low energy, what are things that are still moving me toward the goal, but that are a little bit less cognitively intensive? And more recently, this happened when the book was in production. I got pregnant and now I have a six month old at home. And so I'm I'm learning new lessons about, you know, how I don't have as much control. Control over my time as I used to. And there are a lot of nights when I do not get the sleep that I would ideally have. And so on those days, and my daughter has been up every couple hours, writing deep thoughts is probably not going to be a productive exercise because my brain is just not firing on all cylinders. So on those days, it's okay. What can I do reading-wise? What can I do editing wise? And sort of knowing kind of the hierarchy of tasks in terms of how much energy and motivation they require of me. What can I switch to when I don't quite have that, you know, A plus level?

SPEAKER_00 23:16

Yeah, yeah, for sure. And I think for long-term projects, especially like books, it's really important to have that. And, you know, all long-time podcast listeners will know this is my, this is my hill. This is my hill that I stand on. That, you know, you have to have that versatility because all of that stuff needs to be done. You know, and being strategic about when to get it done so that you do make progress and use your time well because your time is precious and limited. That's a really important skill to develop. And it's a skill that will go on every transition you go through in life, you'll sharpen that scale because you'll have to use it in a different way. You know, so it's not a skill you learn like, oh, I learned in my first year of grad school, but now like I'm no, it's like every transition will teach you a different lesson about how to adapt that skill to your current circumstance. You know, babies, I've I don't have babies, but I've heard they're terrible writing for partners.

SPEAKER_01 24:18

Yeah, I haven't, I haven't tried uh writing my daughter. I'm pretty sure she would try and eat the pen, eat the notebook, bang on the laptop. So um, yeah, usually I uh, you know, make sure that she's otherwise occupied before I dive in.

SPEAKER_00 24:31

Yes, like you're sorry, you can't participate. All right, so I have a couple of more questions about your book is what we would call like an academic trade book, right? And you were very deliberate about writing it in such a way that a non-expert could read it and really enjoy it. And I think you succeeded at that. And that means a lot. That's high praise. No, I think you did. I think it's it's a book that I want to share with people, you know. And like, this is why you're texting me at three o'clock in the afternoon about like cocoa puffs or whatever they are. You like those puffs that maybe oh yeah. Like this is why. So given that it's an academic trade book, that is also a book that you are going to use, you know, in your tenure packet, and you know, it establishes you as an expert in this literature. Talk to me a little bit. I'm gonna keep this intentionally broad. Like, just talk to me a little bit about some of the decisions you made about what to include in the book in terms of like secondary literature and theorizing. I mean, it's a concept-driven book, so you have a rigorous concept there of cognitive labor. But I'm sure there are also things you decided not to do in the book so that it would be more broadly read by people who maybe aren't as interested in some of the nuances of theory that we can get into, you know, as experts who are really interested in theory. So just tell me a little bit about some of the choices you made.

SPEAKER_01 26:04

Sure. So this was a challenging line to walk. I knew going into this that this was going to be my first book. As you say, it was gonna be a major part of my tenure case. So it needed to be something that, you know, my senior colleagues and others in the field would look at and say, this is good scholarship. This is advancing our knowledge of gender and family. And because I had seen that there was so much popular interest in related topics, I feel like everyone's, you know, Instagram feeds these days are full of the mental load and things like that. It felt like something that would be a shame to not share with a broader audience because I had gotten feedback on some of my earlier articles that the language and the and the terminology that I was using were quite helpful for regular everyday folks in understanding their relationships and the dynamics that they had gotten into with their partner. So I really, you know, I wrote my book proposal with those twin goals in mind, and it was sort of forefront throughout the writing process. Now, in terms of how I actually, you know, acted on those twin goals, the the there are extensive endnotes in this book. There are a lot of scholarly sources that I just decided to put in the footnotes, right? I wanted to have a nod to the fact that, hey, I know these literatures, right? And many of the endnotes are, you know, I would, I would write several sentences to sort of talk about the context and not just include the citation, but really contextualize the concepts. And so that was something that made me feel like, okay, I have the receipts, right? I'm in conversation with the many thinkers who have written on adjacent topics. Another decision I made was the sort of central framing of my dissertation was kind of a play on a core idea in the sociology of gender, right? This famous piece on doing gender. So my dissertation was called Thinking Gender. And I was trying to make this argument about, you know, the role that thought plays in the performance and enacting of gender. And I felt like that was just a little bit too abstract and theoretical for a broader audience. And so that kind of ended up, it's it's there in pieces. I talk a little bit about in the conclusion, but it really became de-emphasized in favor of concepts related to gender inequality, the nature of work and labor and time that were important theoretically, but would also have this sort of intuitive relevance for readers whose interest in the subject was more personal than academic. And then the final thing that you know really stood out to me was I tried very much to keep this not quite conversational, but I wanted it to be, I didn't want the reader to have to struggle through dense passages. So I include things like, you know, the doing gender concept that's still in the book, but I try to explain it as I would to my friends, right? My friends are, you know, they're wonderful and they ask me great questions about my research. And so what would I tell them, right? If I were to explain the doing gender theory, not to a 10-year-old, right? A 10-year-old probably would not be interested in that topic or or grasp it, but to, you know, a friend from college who has some background in the social sciences, but has not read the things I've read, right? That was sort of the reader that I kept in mind. And as part of that, I really wanted to bring them into this field that I find endlessly fascinating because it just explains so much of what I see in my own life, what I saw in my parents' relationships, what I see in my friends' relationships. So trying to keep the tone inviting and not intimidating through the language I used and the assumptions I made about what prior knowledge the reader was coming with, those were three things that really stuck out to me as okay, how how do you write to these twin audiences?

SPEAKER_00 30:14

It's a big shift from the way you would write, say, an article or even a dissertation, right? So how did you manage? And sometimes it's hard to answer just questions because you're like, I just I just did it. You know, like we just figure things out and do them. So how did you figure out that those would be the three things that you wanted to do? Like the end notes, de-emphasizing, like this, you know, concept of doing gender and then focusing on language and like the length of passages or like the density of passages? Like, how did you decide that those three factors were the ones that would make this book available to a broader audience? Oh, okay, were the decisions you made at the beginning? So were the decisions you made at the beginning, were the things that you realized you should do like as you were working on it, or were they things you were in conversation, say with your acquisitions editor about, you know, how did you pick those three?

SPEAKER_01 31:24

Yeah, it was a bit of a mix. So I remember talking with the acquisitions editor at the time, and she and I really shared a vision for the book as this, you know, more broad academic trade title. And that was something that she coached me on throughout, right? Thinking about, okay, this is important, but it can go in the footnotes, right? What is really essential? She would give me line edits on, okay, this is where you're gonna lose the non-academic readers, right? How can you reframe it or give an analogy? So some of that was really coaching and guidance from her. I think in terms of like the bigger picture framing on, you know, this doing versus thinking gender concept, that was something that I felt like was interesting in the dissertation, but I was kind of ready to jettison it by the time I got to the book writing. It had sort of, you know, I got some feedback from my committee and they were like, well, this is interesting, but it's maybe not the core of what you're doing. So that was something that I kind of, although the thinking gender title remained for a very long time, that concept had fallen away. And then in terms of the writing, I mean, really, I love to read, I love to read, you know, popular nonfiction, I love to read, you know, long-form journalism. And so it was thinking about, well, what, you know, when I'm reading outside of sociology, what kind of language resonates with me, right? It's it's stories, it's in-depth profiles of people, you know, I'd collected this rich set of interview data. And so one of the things I really wanted to do was bring some of those couples to life in the pages of the book. And so each chapter starts with this vignette that kind of illustrates the core concept of the chapter in one couple's life. And that was really just, I don't know if I consciously thought about it this way when I was writing, but it was more like, what do I want to read? And it was fun to write here because in articles, you don't have the word count to do that. You don't have the word count to really tell these stories. And so it felt like such a pleasure to really stay with a couple and think about, you know, how I saw these broader patterns reflected in their single story. So that was something that just really kind of came from like, this is the way I want to be writing. And articles sometimes feel more constraining because, you know, they they are much more rigid in the way that you have to structure them, in the space you have to tell these stories and make these claims. So it kind of felt like this opening up. And then the last thing I'll say on this point is just that I definitely found my voice over time. And so it was interesting. By the time I was, you know, writing chapter six, my editor was like, okay, this is the tone. This, this is the sort of, you know, rigorous but accessible that we're going for. And so a lot of what I had to do in subsequent rounds of editing was sort of take what I landed at and bring it into the beginning. I was still trying to figure out what it meant to write in this new genre.

SPEAKER_00 34:31

I love that. I love that. I love that. Number one, you just gave yourself the time to kind of figure it out. And also that you realize, like, I want to write this way. You know, that I want, but you wanted to do, which is a very you often don't hear academic writers say that. I don't either. So I think that that's really that's really important because it comes through that it is conversational in its tone and it is sociologically interesting. You know, like the phenomena you're describing. So I think that that's like you said, it's a hard tide rope, but I think you do it well. Thank you. Thank you. I appreciate that.

SPEAKER_01 35:13

Yeah, and it's it's really trusting your voice and trusting your instincts and writing a book that you would be excited to read, like that just makes the whole process more fun and meaningful. And of course, you know, there's constraints in academic convention and what your editor and publisher want. But I think to the extent folks can find opportunities to like bring their own unique writing personality onto the page, that for me made the whole experience much more fun.

SPEAKER_00 35:44

Yeah. And it sounds like you did a decent number of revisions. And I'm only asking that because I think people have a misperception that when I submit it the first time to the publisher, it should be ready to go. Like it should be ready to publish. And it sounds like that was not what you did.

SPEAKER_01 36:01

No. So, and this was something that I talked about with my editor early on, right? When we were just, you know, forming our working relationship. I know folks, you know, have they're at different stages when they get to the contract stage. But for me, because most of the book was not drafted, I had a conversation with her where I said, Hey, do you want me to just go away for six months, write a draft, and send it to you? Or do you want me to give you pieces? And she said, I would much rather get this chapter by chapter. And so I would send her, you know, okay, here's chapter one. Now I'm working on chapter two, and she would give me feedback and having a sort of quicker feedback cycle, I think was helpful for trying on new ways of writing and new ideas and really recalibrating in real time. But even still, I had to do a lot of revision where, you know, some of it, some of it was coming from my editor, some of it was coming from me. One of the things that I did once I had a full draft of the manuscript was each chapter I sent to at least one friend in academia and one friend not in academia. And so I wanted those two sets of feedback because, you know, I want, okay, what are the sociologists going to say? And what are the folks who don't care at all about sociology going to say? How can I make sure this is appealing to them? And it's hard because a book is too big to keep it all in mind at once, you know, and making sure that there's consistency. Okay, I decided to replace this concept with this concept. Now I need to go back to chapters one, two, and three and integrate this new language, right? And so that consistency and the way that you know your thinking evolves means that edits are inevitable and they take a long time because you know, more text, more opportunities to for things to drift, right? And so I did a lot of kind of zooming in and zooming out. Okay, how is this working at the level of you know, the paragraph, the sentence? But then if I just look at the chapter introductions, does this tell a coherent story? So I think trying to build in different levels of revision and review was was helpful for me to make this feel like a coherent narrative.

unknown 38:10

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 38:11

I love that. I love that you actively sought out feedback from different audiences along the way, that you didn't, you know, just hope that, you know, non-experts would like it. You know, that you actively sought their collaboration, you know, throughout the process. So to close, Allison, so if someone came to you now and was like, I want to write an academic trade book, you know, I have this topic and I think that it's promising and I think people, it's really important that a broader audience read it. What would you, what would you tell them to do to like prepare for that process? So they're someone hypothetically, like they're done with their dissertation, they're ready to write a book. Where would you tell them to start?

SPEAKER_01 39:00

So I think one of the most important things is that your editor and press share your vision for the book, right? Because if you are you're you have this plan to write an academic trade book, they expect a more traditional academic monograph, right? That is going to be a friction point that will continue throughout the entire writing and production process. So I think to the extent you can share those goals with editors and then find someone who believes in that vision and will support you, that would be one of the most important things. The second thing to think about is really like what about your topic is going to be appealing to that broader audience, you know, and what is necessary for the scholarship. So being really clear about how you're going to contribute on both of those levels. What do you think is going to resonate with each audience? And then how do you weave that throughout, keeping that sort of top of mind throughout the planning and then writing process. And let's see, I think the other piece of this too is, you know, when you're writing an academic trade book, it's probably going to be very different from your dissertation. And so being prepared for the fact that you might need to start not quite from scratch, but the prose may need to be completely rewritten because these are just two totally different genres. You know, a regular academic book and a dissertation are two different genres, and then add the trade component, and it's it's going to be sort of night and day. So I think having the realistic expectation that you could write a wonderful, amazing, you know, field-changing dissertation, and still need to really significantly rework the text to meet the expectations of this entirely different set of readers and collection of audiences. So having a little bit of that in mind from the start, I think can save some heartache and demoralization down the line when you're like, oh my goodness, I thought I had it all, right? Just keep in mind that this is a new genre. And so you are going to have to try on a new voice and experiment with expressing really abstract and theoretical concepts in new ways. Awesome.

SPEAKER_00 41:17

Awesome. I think that's great advice. So everyone listening, if you're thinking of writing a trade book, like go back, rewind, and listen to that again, write it down because it's really important. Thank you so much, Allison. Is there anything that you think I have missed that you want to share?

SPEAKER_01 41:34

You know, if you're like, don't forget this or Yeah, I mean, one thing that we've you know touched on a little bit, but that I found really helpful in Elevate and then have sought to continue for myself afterward is just the camaraderie of being with others who are in the trenches of writing a first book. I found it so reassuring, you know, of course, to get your wisdom and advice, but also to hear from you know my fellow writers who were who were struggling with some of the same things. That was just reassuring in a way that I think you know can't be overstated. And once I graduated from Elevate, I've joined writing groups at my institution. And, you know, folks are working on all kinds of different projects. But I think seeing yourself as part of a community of writers, a community of people who are engaged in this thing that is, you know, public scholarship or or whatever you want to call it is really valuable. So try and find that community in whatever form is going to be best for you for accountability, but also just for solidarity. I think that's really important, especially in these times.

SPEAKER_00 42:41

Yes. Yes. The the importance of community cannot, you know, we can't overstate that. Yeah. All right. Well, thank you so much, Allison. I'm so happy that you came to the podcast today. And for everyone listening, you know, Alison, you can find your book everywhere, and I'll put it in the show notes, but it's called again, What's on Her Mind, The Mento Workload of Family Life. It is published by Princeton Press. And I'll put some links for people to be able to get it, especially if you're interested in writing, you know, trade or what they call crossover books. This is a very good model. So, and it's very recent. So it shows a lot of like what is expected now in an academic trade book. So definitely get it from your library or your bookstore and take a read.

SPEAKER_01 43:29

Thank you so much, Jane. I appreciate your support back in 2022. And it's been so fun to reconnect and to reflect on this process. I think so much of the interviews I've done have been about the content of the book. And so I've really appreciated this opportunity to talk about the process of writing it.

SPEAKER_00 43:46

Yeah, no, for sure. And thank you for being here. All right, and for everyone else, thank you for listening and take care. Thank you so much for listening to today's episode. Remember, writing an academic book is challenging, but that doesn't mean you have to overcomplicate it. If you liked what you heard in today's episode, please leave a review. This helps get the word out about the podcast so more people will listen and we can continue the conversation. Take care and tune in for our next episode.