Writing a Popular Science Book: How-To Next Week

Starting next week, I will be teaming up with my fellow bloggers and book authors, Brian Switek (Written in Stone, to be published in November 2010) and Michael Welland (Sand: The Never Ending Story) to discuss the process of writing our books. Each of us will write about our work and Brian will then collect the links. Our goal is to generate a conversation about science books and science writing. This seems quite apropros considering that a science book, The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science by Richard Holmes, just won the National Book Critics award.


Our initial discussion will focus on the process of taking an idea and making it appeal to a publisher without sacrificing the science and accuracy. We will also consider what goes into a book proposal. Please feel free to send in questions.

One thought on “Writing a Popular Science Book: How-To Next Week”

  1. Here's a bit of advice to take to the publisher/editor of what ever science book you plan to write:

    make sure the text size and font color are chosen to enhance readability!! I tried to hard to read Sand – and had to give up because the text size was so small. It gave me a headache!!!! This was not the first time I had to put down a recommended science book – seems that publishers forget that "Pretty" and/or attempts to seem "Green" should come after legibility. In one such book, about trees, the print was green, on "earth tone" paper – what were they thinking?

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