You Deserve Better
If you’re a scholar trained in the humanities or social sciences, chances are you’ve spent years mastering a language most people don’t speak.
You’ve built arguments for specialists, footnoted every claim, and learned to anticipate the objections of peer reviewers. It’s been rigorous, and often rewarding.
But here’s a truth the academy doesn’t always say out loud….
Your ideas deserve more than a niche audience.
They deserve to be heard—by people outside your field, outside the university, outside the echo chamber.
Monographs Are Important. But They’re Not Enough
Academic books are typically written for promotion and tenure committees, disciplinary insiders or tightly defined scholarly debates. They move conversations forward, yes—but usually within a closed circuit.
Trade books, by contrast, are designed to start conversations—or expand them. They ask questions that resonate beyond a subfield, questions that matter in a more immediate sense.
For example:
Why do we remember some histories and erase others?
How did inequality become so entrenched in this particular system?
What does it mean to belong—to a nation, a language, a culture?
If your research touches on any of those questions—and I’d wager it does—then you already have something the public needs.
Your Work Is Already More Public Than You Think
Academics often assume that “writing for the public” means straying far from their core interests. But chances are, the themes at the heart of your work—power, identity, memory, language, belief—are already deeply public. They’re shaping school curricula, influencing elections, fueling movements.
What’s needed isn’t a change in subject, but a change in form.
When you trade the monograph’s defensive posture for the trade book’s invitational tone, you’re not compromising your ideas—you’re releasing them into the world.
Writing for the Public Is an Act of Intellectual Generosity
Academic culture sometimes treats public writing with suspicion. “Popular” can feel like a dirty word. But what if we flipped the framing?
What if writing for a wider audience is one of the most generous, courageous things you can do as a scholar?
To write accessibly is to believe that your reader is capable of understanding complex things.
To tell stories is to trust that meaning doesn’t require jargon.
To go public is to let your work matter—to someone who doesn’t already know what a “discourse community” is.
You’re Not Selling Out—You’re Showing Up
Let’s be honest: the jump from monograph to mass market is intimidating. It requires a certain kind of vulnerability. You lose the comfort of footnotes. You risk being misunderstood. You open yourself to new forms of critique.
But you also open yourself to impact.
To being read, not just cited. To reaching the people your work was always ultimately about.
That’s not selling out. That’s showing up.