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I have been interested in writing a book for a while and recently got to talk with a book agent to get some understanding of how publishing might work for me in my specific case. This has caused me to rethink some things.
The book I want to write is about what it means to biology if you approach living things as autopoietic chemical systems. As conceived now, it would include many color line diagrams. There are lots of cool implications that have not yet been well explored in a coordinated way. It relates nicely to origin of life issues and has metaphysical implications (natural units and their meaning on an evolutionary context).
The agent had several things to say:
My primary consideration is to get these ideas out in an easily understood manner (thus pictures) that non-specialists or popular readers could understand. This may make it more like a biology textbook (lots of color pictures). Making money would be nice, but it is a kind of niche subject, so that is not really an expectation.
Wide distribution would be helpful in getting eyeballs on the books to better disperse the ideas.
The agent mentioned academic publishers (often no agent needed) as a possible alternative. Apparently some of they have both specialized publications (like monographs on insect development) and publications for wider audiences. I don't know much about these yet.
Self-publishing some kind of E-book might be the best way to go (some self-publishing can also do print books). There are a lot of formats, some don't do color diagrams and I'm not sure small screens would do well with all my diagrams.
Perhaps a pdf, it should do fine on a big screen (and I could include links too
).
Squeezing big pictures onto too small screens seems problematic to me.
The book I want to write is about what it means to biology if you approach living things as autopoietic chemical systems. As conceived now, it would include many color line diagrams. There are lots of cool implications that have not yet been well explored in a coordinated way. It relates nicely to origin of life issues and has metaphysical implications (natural units and their meaning on an evolutionary context).
The agent had several things to say:
- My style is kind of curt, academic, and technical. I'm not too surprised, especially since they wanted big summarizes in few words. Kind of forces curtness. And academic is what I have written before.
- I have a lot of color line diagrams I have made. This would increase cost and limit the places that it could be published.
Unlikely for traditional print (non-academic presses).
Won't work for certain kindle formats.
Won't work for audio books if the pictures are important for comprehension.
These are financial considerations of publishers. They want as much money as they can get. - #1 and #2 would make it not commercially viable for large publication runs of print books.
- Publishers don't like publishing things if you have already put them on a website.
This affects my plan to make a website and post book related stuff as I am writing it to "build a platform" for publicizing the book when it is done. Basically build an e-mail list to for publicizing the book. Publishers do like a big platform.
My primary consideration is to get these ideas out in an easily understood manner (thus pictures) that non-specialists or popular readers could understand. This may make it more like a biology textbook (lots of color pictures). Making money would be nice, but it is a kind of niche subject, so that is not really an expectation.
Wide distribution would be helpful in getting eyeballs on the books to better disperse the ideas.
The agent mentioned academic publishers (often no agent needed) as a possible alternative. Apparently some of they have both specialized publications (like monographs on insect development) and publications for wider audiences. I don't know much about these yet.
Self-publishing some kind of E-book might be the best way to go (some self-publishing can also do print books). There are a lot of formats, some don't do color diagrams and I'm not sure small screens would do well with all my diagrams.
Perhaps a pdf, it should do fine on a big screen (and I could include links too
![Thumbs up :thumbsup: 👍](https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f44d.png)
Squeezing big pictures onto too small screens seems problematic to me.