‘Trade’ books and ‘academic’ books – what’s that about?

I’ve been getting excited recently about the final stage before publication of my next book, Immaculate Forms, a history of women’s bodies told through four parts: breasts, clitoris, hymen, womb. It’s easy to remember the order of the chapters because it’s alphabetical, but that wasn’t why I did it this way: instead, I am going from visible to ever-less visible, from outside to ever-further inside.

It’s off to the printers at the end of the month. The book is coming out from Profile Books on 5 September 2024, and I am thrilled that the US/Canada rights have been bought by Basic Books, who aim to publish early in 2025.

People who know me but aren’t academic types seem to be surprised at how excited I am. ‘Haven’t you written books before?’, they ask. Well yes, of course. Six of them, in fact. But four of those are definitely ‘academic books’ not, like Immaculate Forms, ‘trade books’. A ‘trade book’ is one written for the general reader, and one that will be stocked by ordinary bookshops (although, as a fan of bookshops, I don’t think any of them are really ‘ordinary’!). This means that People Will Read It. With an academic book, if you’re lucky, you get a few reviews in academic journals, you sell a few hundred copies at the sort of price which only libraries find easy to afford, and that’s it. You’ve got your ideas out there, and maybe a couple of people in your field will cite your book in their own work, and a handful of students will write to you to see if you can help them with their projects.

I said ‘four of those’. The two exceptions are Greek and Roman Medicine, a short guide to the main themes of the field, and Hippocrates Now, aimed at anyone with an interest in how orthodox and alternative medicine continue to tell very dodgy stories about what ‘Hippocrates’ is supposed to have done, from saying ‘let food be thy medicine’ to inventing a cure for his own baldness to being imprisoned for years because of his views. The nicest thing anyone said to me about Greek and Roman Medicine was that they read the first half, had their lunch and then read the second half. Exactly. As for Hippocrates Now, published by Bloomsbury, I was delighted when they asked if they could publish it in an open access format through Knowledge Unlatched, as well as being a ‘real book’. So, both of those are accessible, and are read – over 5000 reads so far for Hippocrates Now – but that’s still nothing like the potential reach of a trade book.

I was invited to write my forthcoming book maybe six or seven years ago, when I was still working and didn’t have the head space to commit to a project describing how women’s bodies have been represented and understood (and misrepresented and misunderstood) since the ancient Greeks. I remember a Christmas break when I at last had time to map out the book proposal in great detail, and came up with the idea of using medicine and religion as the two ways into thinking about how women have been defined by how their bodies are imagined to work. At that point, I was aiming to do other body parts as well, but once I began to write I realised that this would make the book either too shallow, or far too long.

I wasn’t one of those authors who found it easy to write during the Covid years. My mother’s health was failing, my time caring for her was growing, and then she died in 2020. It took me a while to get back into gear with the book project. The contrast with the past few months, when barely a day has gone by without one or other of the book’s publishers asking a question, could not be more extreme. When you publish with people like those at Profile or Basic Books, you have the services of an entire team who are doing all they can to make your book as good as it can possibly be, and to publicise it as widely as they can. In contrast to an academic book, where the editorial input may be nothing beyond the odd typo correction or a minor suggestion, every single line of a trade book has been scrutinised by several editors who push and push for clarity. They ask demanding questions. They challenge the way you write. It’s tough, but it’s right. A good editor ‘gets’ what you are trying to do, and makes the book better in every way.

Trade books also allow you to use images more extensively. With an academic book, you often need to beg the publisher to allow you to illustrate it. All this costs money and, even with the high prices of academic books, the small print runs mean that there’s no spare money for pictures. You will need to pay for any rights yourself, and to correspond with libraries and archives in the hope that they will (a) reply and (b) give you a reasonable price. It takes forever. I remember hearing from the Vatican Library about an image I had hoped to use… several months after the book in question had been published. That situation has improved in recent years with more sites like Wellcome Images which have interesting pictures for anyone to use, and with Wikimedia Commons.

And we all know you mustn’t judge a book by its cover… but we do. I couldn’t be happier with Profile’s cover design by Joanna Lisowiec, which picks up delightfully the floral imagery by which so many aspects of women’s bodies have been described.