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Oneworld gave me a target of 90,000 words, which seemed a lot, even with my experience of working on theses and lengthy papers in academia.
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It had required the odd hour here and there, but that didn’t really prepare me for what was next. In their science list, I am in extremely good company both the Nobel prizewinner Barry Marshall and the former president of the Royal Society Venki Ramakrishnan have published books with them.īut a pitch is not the same as a completed book up until May 2020, the process hadn’t been especially demanding of my time. Oneworld is an independent publisher with a focus on non-fiction and has published two Booker prizewinners. The pitch was accepted by Sam Carter, editorial director at Oneworld Publications, in May 2020, and my first draft’s due date was set at December the same year. This part of the process was definitely familiar from trying (and failing) to get manuscripts into journals the best part was that I didn’t have to do it myself. After I completed these steps, Caroline shopped the manuscript around to various publishers. You write an abstract of the whole work and a brief outline of the plan, and include some preliminary data (in the form of previous written work and a sample chapter), a short CV, a comparison with the rest of the field and something resembling an impact statement (a summary of who might actually buy this book and why). Pitching a non-fiction book is not dissimilar to crafting a grant submission. And some serendipity: the pandemic meant that infections, the topic I was best placed to write about, was of wide interest.Īs my agent, Caroline helped me to develop the overall pitch for the book, getting it into a shape that would be looked at by the editors at publishing houses. Networking - I was fortunate that Caroline also represents Dan Davis, an immunologist at the University of Manchester, UK, who has written three books and served as an informal writing mentor to me. Persistence: I had been trying to pitch my careers book for 12 months before I spoke to Caroline. Getting an agent came through a number of factors many are the same as those required for a scientific career. Then, six months later, fate intervened in the form of the COVID-19 pandemic - giving me both time to write by shutting my lab, and thematic motivation on the subject matter.
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Caroline gave me a much better idea: writing a book about the science behind infectious disease. Not entirely surprisingly, she said ‘no’, because a book about my career would be of interest solely to me and maybe some members of my family. In November 2019, I had been in touch with a literary agent, Caroline Hardman at Hardman & Swainson, and pitched her a book about my life in science - after all, I’d written already for online periodicals and started a blog, which seemed to be generally well-received. I’d not intended to write a book on infectious diseases, but my laboratory’s closure in March 2020 left me needing something to do, other than home-schooling my children and worrying about my lack of new experimental data. Little did I know that, at the start of last year, this was going to change: I was about to find myself writing a book about a pandemic, during the pandemic, while working as a medical researcher investigating the pandemic. The cycle of grants and papers didn’t leave much room for anything else. Beyond putting out research papers in my field of immunology, I never had time to think about a larger piece of work. I have always loved the writing part of my scientific career, but had never seen a path to develop it.