Black Gate

Greetings academic editors, writers and publishers! I am an educated lay reader of academic history books.

I hear academic publishing is… differently profitable at the moment, so perhaps you want to have a think about how to engage more people like me.

Really there must be a lot of us — people who want to get at the detail, the evidence, the debate, and so find ourselves buying weighty academic tomes.

We’re military history buffs who want to get into not just of equipment and tactics, but logistics and administration and sooner or later get dragged into context.  You can’t, for example, be fascinated by Count Belisarius without wanting to know more about Byzantine History. Take a look at Osprey, an entire publisher devoted to satisfying that need !

We’re architectural history hobbyists — people who tick off castles and great houses the way twitchers do rare birds — who want to put flesh on the crumbling bones of some corners of history not covered by reliable mass market books. And we’re local historians trying to make sense of musty documents, mounds in fields, and half forgotten traditions.

We’re also Historical Reenactors looking for very specific information on how things were or might have been. We’re Historical European Martial Artists (yes, HEMA is a thing! Modern people do study Medieval Martial Arts!),  looking to contextualise the original martial arts manuals around which our lives revolve.

And we’re writers, looking for inspiration, or just building a storyworld for our characters to inhabit.

Many Black Gate readers must fall into at least one of these categories, and we sometimes get a million hits a month…

I am, of course, all of the above with the exception of “local historian” (since all of western history is my backyard). I’m also a former technical author — conveying technical information to novices used to be my trade — and an author who thinks about writing. So it might be worth your while — O mighty academic editor, writer or publisher! — to hear what I have to say.

Upfront, you don’t need to dumb down or jazz up. The whole point of academic books is that they are academic! Rather you need to stop shooting yourself in the collective feet. Working from the outside in, here’s how…

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When you’re writing that first draft, standard advice is: Don’t go back to edit!

Make like Omar Khayyám:

The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.

Or if you prefer, Guderian:

Ticket to the last station.

Yes, the ideal first draft is a blitzkrieg: rampage onward with the story, ignore pockets of resistance, you can catch them on the second draft.

However, you are neither a medieval Persian ruminating on life, nor a Panzer general.  For all we like to skin it with the aesthetic or the macho, writing is its own activity. The truth, so I’ve learned, is more complex.

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