Thoughts on Academic Publishing

In light of having Katie Helke from MIT press come to speak, I've thought a good deal more about academic publishing and of specifically science related non-fiction. I've read quite a few non-fiction science related books and many more academic journal articles. A lot of the non-fiction I've read has been for classes, often in high school for extra credit, but also quite a bit on my own.

One of the big takeaways I got from our guest speaker was finding the balance in accessibility. On the one hand, if the subject is inherently technical and complicated, you simply can't expect a book on the topic to be a cozy afternoon read. However, you also don't want the demographic of people who can understand the book to be isolated to the academics with years of background. Considering some of the non-fiction I've read, a lot of it has been on topics that I've already known a bit about (e.g, reading a biology related book for a biology class), and from that standpoint, I found the books to be incredibly enlightening and interesting. While a few of the books presupposed a pretty high degree of knowledge, sometimes having looking up concepts every few pages, I still found the end result very compelling. One book that exemplifies this was The Epigenetics Revolution by Nessa Carey. The book started off rather calm in terms of technicality, but increased quickly. However, each chapter remained incredibly enlightening and always produced a result that I could appreciate how it translated to the world at large. Furthermore, the author made it very clear what was intended for what audience, going so far as to include sections in each chapter that were marked as more technical than the earlier section. Additionally, at the end of the chapter, she made a point of summarizing everything talked about and showing the macroscopic effect and how the microscopic explained it. I found this super helpful. When you're trudging through pages about microscopic interactions between the even more microscopic, returning to the macroscopic view helped connect everything. To me, this is where non-fiction really shines. While the technicality of a book can bog the content down, in the end, there is some connection to the world that the reader/audience interacts with everyday. Pretty much everything that Katie was talking about in terms of publishing and marketability I thought about whether Epigenetics Revolution fit the description.

I really enjoyed the discussion we had on academic publishing. It's inherently different from publishing works of fiction, and I found the contrast very interesting. Since I intend to go teaching and/or math, I spend a lot of time thinking about the essence of ideas and how to give the best broad strokes description of something. It seems like this is exactly what academic writers do when writing non-fiction. It'd be cool to talk more about academic publishing and specifically academic journal publishing, though it's definitely a niche topic.