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Every morning Caroline Davidson goes into her office in
west London and rifles through her "slush pile". Like all
literary agents, she hopes that buried deep within the daily deluge of
book proposals and manuscripts will be something so fantastic that no
potential publisher would dare turn it down. "My dream is to open a
parcel and find a beautifully written covering letter, a title that leaps
out from the page and an idea that seems so simple and so obvious that I'm
straight on the phone to the author."
One proposal that caught her eye was sent in by Peter
Barham, a physicist from Bristol University who wanted to write a book on
"science in the kitchen". He had failed to sell his idea
directly to a publisher, and approached Davidson following a tip-off from
a friend. "Caroline showed me how to turn my idea into a workable
proposal and told me what would work and what would not," says Barham.
She soon tied up a deal with a major publisher, and his book is set to hit
the high-streets next Christmas.
Physicists like Barham are increasingly keen to muscle
in on the "popular science" market, and publishers are
constantly on the look-out for new talent and ideas. They all want to
emulate the runaway success of Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time
this cosmological masterpiece has so far sold more than eight million
copies world-wide. Other physicists in the big league include Paul Davies,
who has sold 235 000 copies of his books with Penguin, and John Gribbin,
who has written 80 popular books on physics and astronomy. Rich pickings
if you can find the winning formula.
So what are the secrets of a successful science book?
"Cosmology, evolution and genetics are always popular with the public
as they try to answer ultimate questions like why we're unique, where we
come from and where we're going," says Peter Tallack, publishing
director with Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Shoe-horning the word
"God" somewhere in the title is not a bad idea either. Paul
Davies has done it twice.
It also helps to have a good story. Simon Singh says
that was why Fermat's Last Theorem became the first mathematics book to
reach number one in the best-sellers' list, selling more than 80 000
copies in the UK alone. His book traces the story of Fermat's mathematical
puzzle, explaining how it challenged the finest minds for centuries until
it was finally solved by Andrew Wiles in 1993. "It's a wonderful
tale. It has heroes, it has twists and turns, and because it has a long
history I could start the mathematical explanations at a fairly elementary
level," says Singh.
Luckily Singh knows how to tell a good story After
finishing his PhD in particle physics at Cambridge University in 1990, he
joined BBC Television, where he directed a documentary about Fermat's last
theorem. "When you write for television, your explanation has to be
very clear because the viewer has only one chance to understand what
you're talking about. Writing the book was therefore relatively
easy."
That's not to say that you have to lead a glamorous
media life to write a popular-science book. Many good ideas emerge from
those who are involved in the public understanding of science. "I'm
not a natural writer," admits Martin Rees, an astrophysicist at
Cambridge University, who has written two successful books on cosmology
and black holes, and is currently putting the finishing touches to a third
on the fundamental constants of nature. "But I had done quite a lot
of popular lectures and articles on cosmology for the general public.
Having put the spadework in for that, I felt that it was worth the extra
effort to transform my ideas into a book." His publishers evidently
thought so too; his latest work, Before the Beginning, has been translated
into German, with Italian, Spanish and Polish versions due out soon.
Some of the best books come from scientists from one
field who examine another subject from an interdisciplinary point of view.
The Emperor's New Mind by the mathematical physicist Roger Penrose is the
classic example of the genre. Despite being heavy going in parts, his
exploration of the overlap between consciousness and quantum physics
proved an enormous success with book buyers.
The other side of the coin is that books that plod
along the main path of a discipline are doomed to failure. "I am
astonished at the number of proposals I receive where I'm being offered
yet another book on cosmology that doesn't approach the subject from a new
perspective," says Simon Mitton, science director at Cambridge
University Press, which publishes some 350 science books a year.
But no matter how original your idea, how great your
title, or how cunning your marketing campaign, it's the quality of writing
that counts. Passion, enthusiasm and flair are what it's all about.
"Unless the writer can write well, the book won't succeed,"
explains Stefan McGrath, an executive editor at Penguin. "You can't
market a book that isn't well written."
Mitton agrees. He urges physicists who want to become
the next Paul Davies to dust off their copies of Pride and Prejudice., A
Tale of Two Cities and Jude the Obscure. "My advice is to read as
many books as possible from the central canon of English literature. Your
training as a physicist will simply not have given you any idea how to
tell a story. You have to learn that each chapter in a popular-science
book has to have a beginning, a middle and an end."
But budding writers should be careful not to expect too
much. Most books sell just a few thousand copies, and the time and effort
involved in writing can be substantial. "The only reason to write
popular-science books is because you want to. Usually the pay in dollars
per hour is small," explains Lawrence Krauss, a theoretical physicist
from the Case Western Reserve University in the US, who wrote The Physics
of Star Trek and Beyond Star Trek. "The key thing in the end is to
come up with something new and hope that it interests people. I think we
owe it to the public to explain what we do, and those who are sufficiently
motivated to spend a great deal of time for potentially little financial
return should try."
But as Caroline Davidson points out, the rewards in
other respects for those who take up the challenge can be huge.
"Writing a book is satisfying, it's life-enhancing, it puts you in
touch with all sorts of people, and it can boost your credibility.
Publishers will, I assure you, fight for anything in their field that they
think is worth publishing."
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