Starting next week: What it takes to write a pop-sci book

Long-time readers of this blog know that "Laelaps" is not so much a stand-alone repository of my thoughts and opinions as an active writing lab; from the very beginning I have had bigger things in mind. One of those projects, my book Written in Stone, will be published later this year, and every now and then I have thrown together a few thoughts on what it is like to write a pop-sci book. I am hardly the only science blogger to have gone through this process, though, and starting next week I will be teaming up with two other geoscience writers in an effort to help potential book authors understand what goes into writing a pop-sci book.

Starting on Monday, March 15 David Williams (author of Stories in Stone; blog) and Michael Welland (author of Sand; blog) will be joining me in a discussion about how a pop-sci book goes from an idea to a real dead-tree product on a bookseller's shelf. (We will each post on our own blogs and I will collect the links here.) To kick things off we will discuss on how to identify a "book-worthy" story and what it takes to find a publisher for it, but we also want to hear about what you would like to know. This is meant to be a conversation, not a lecture series, and to make that possible we will need input from others (no matter what stage of the writing process they might be in).Tell us what you would like to know about and we will be sure to cover it.