Ep. 18: How to Go from Academic to Mainstream Writing with Dr. Kelly J. Baker

Welcome to the Pub Date Podcast, the show where two book broads discuss what should happen before, during, and after your book publication date. Brought to you by Broad Book Group with your host Vanessa Campos and Jen Dorsey.

Hello, happy Friday, Vanessa.

How are you today?

Happy Friday. I'm doing pretty good considering I got the booster and the booster kicked my butt.

You know what? I am also on day 2 of my booster, also feeling a little butt kicked, but that's okay because I would not want to miss our conversation today. We're doing some good stuff today. We have Dr. Kelly J. Baker on the show today. I'm so excited to have her here. She is the editor of Women in Higher Ed. It's a feminist newsletter with a goal to enlighten, encourage, empower, and enrage women on campus. She also is the author of several books, all of which are fantastic: The Gospel According to the Klan, Grace Period: A Memoir in Pieces, Sexism Ed: Essays on Gender and Labor in Academia, Final Girl. I mean, I just— there are so many. And The Zombies Are Coming. She writes about everything. She writes about history, religion, zombies, feminism, motherhood. She does all the things, and we're really excited to have her here today because she's going to talk to us a little bit about what it means to kind of walk that line between being an academic and being a public author. Dr. Kelly Baker, welcome to the pod.

Thank you so much for having me. I'm really excited about our conversation.

We are too. You know, I have been a big Twitter fan of yours for a long time and really just What you do speaks to me because I also am one of those people who has one foot in academia and one foot in publishing. And so I've always enjoyed your writing and just am so grateful to you for, for what you do and for all the wonderful things that you say. So welcome to the show. We're just going to dig right in. I would love to hear a little bit about your background. I obviously just hit the highlights here. There's a lot more to say, but I'd love to know a little bit more about how you took academic life and kind of made it more of a public-facing academic life as a writer and a speaker.

Okay, so I have a PhD in religious studies and I'm now a journalist, public scholar, essayist. So that's weird. Let's just go ahead and say that. But what I would say is, and what I often tell people, is the research skills and the writing skills that I developed in my PhD program transitioned really well to freelance writing and freelance editing. Who would guess that editing hundreds and hundreds of student papers every semester would make you really good at doing editing and argument and these sorts of things and make you better at writing by kind of this practice. So I was on the academic job market, which in the humanities, as a lot of your listeners may know, is really bad. And when I decided that I didn't kind of want to go that route, anymore, someone suggested that I should start kind of doing more public writing, which I thought was silly because I didn't necessarily think of myself as a writer. But I was already writing for sites on religion in America. I was already writing on my blog. Right. So clearly I was doing this writing stuff. And what happened is that I kind of fell into a variety of things. One, I fell into writing about higher education. Just from my own experience, but then doing more research analytical pieces. And I started doing more public-facing work on white supremacy and racism, which is where most of my training in academia came from. And so I just started doing this thing called public scholarship before we had like a real name for it. You know, we had some idea that people are doing public-facing work, but now when we talk about public scholarship, it's everywhere, right? Everyone wants to talk about it. There's all this funding. These sorts of things. And so my goal originally was just to take these really complex abstract ideas and expertise and make it where a general audience could read it. Right. Like, so my goal was, can my mom follow through on this right now? My mom doesn't read my stuff, but that was like my motivating factor, right? It's like, I want to be able to write stuff that's for a larger audience. And as you can tell from the kind of work that I do, I pretty much just follow where my curiosity is. So I am not bound by that training on just studying racism. I've been able to do a whole bunch of other things too, partially because I'm like, oh, the sexism in the academy thing has stuff going on. Let's think through some of these things together. And then the next thing I know, I have a book. Right.

Right.

So I tell people all the time, I just kind of fall into this stuff. Like, I wish I could say I'm very, very purposeful. Right. I had a plan. And instead what happens is I start writing about something and then realize, oh my gosh, I've written 30, 40,000 words, right? Like, not too much more before you have a book. Um, and, and so that's kind of where my journey has been, right? From writing these very academic monographs to more and more writing things that are trade books, actually, you know, that still have that analytical bent to them but are very much written for a general reader so that anyone can kind of pick up my book about zombies and, like, work through what I'm saying without having to have, like, a religious studies background, right? And that was my larger goal in doing that.

That makes a lot of sense. And so much of what you're saying feels very familiar because I think anyone who has even set foot in academia knows that it's a very gatekeeping kind of environment, right? So when you mentioned the job market, yes, the job market sucks. It's, it's terrible. At least for those of us on the humanities side. I can't speak for other disciplines. But how did you— did you feel freer when you were finally able to break out and not necessarily have to meet the requirements of a tenure committee or, you know, a monograph-style publisher? I mean, did it change for you, like, the feeling about how you wrote and how you approached those topics?

Oh, I, like, went wild because I could finally, like, write about anything I wanted to. So, you know, in academia, it was very much like Kelly is a scholar of religion and white supremacy, right? Or a scholar of religion and like the end of the world. So people really expected that this is the stuff I would write about. This is my expertise. And this is kind of where my interests lie. Now, that's true. But writing those things for peer-reviewed journals, right, means that there's very much a particular style. There's a certain amount of references. You know, you're going through a peer review process that's sometimes really hostile depending on what you're trying to do. So when I was able to write for myself, it was just super exciting where I was like, oh, like I can research this thing and then write 1,000 words on it. Like I don't have to be an entire expert. I can actually take those tools that I have and do them to narrower topics, but to present these ideas, right, to different kinds of audiences. So I had the best time ever, because I was like, "Oh, I'm really interested in this zombie thing. I'm really interested in thinking through sexism. I'm really interested in writing creative nonfiction." So for me, it was just one of those where it opened everything up to me where I could write the stuff, but I also could write things in a way that was more about my person. So that there was a way to write that's more personal, that I could use "I" in what I was doing. And I think that made my work more engaging too. That it's very different from the academic, like the person is separate from the work that you do, where instead the stuff that I'm writing about, like even in my zombie book, you know, it's one of those things where I wanted to be kind of conversational. So it's like, I'm kind of chit-chatting with you about this and like, so fun to write, except when writing sucks because writing always sucks too. But like, yeah, no, but it was really fun to be able to do that kind of project where I could actually be like funny. You know, about things that are happening. And I could also be serious and I could do this in the same space and still draw on academic research, but I didn't have to impress someone so I could get tenure, right? Like I didn't have a reviewer too that told me my stuff sucked, right? Like, so I didn't have to deal with any of those kinds of things.

It's always reviewer too, every time. That's great. And, and you mentioned too, um, So kind of changing the way that you frame the topics, I mean, you're obviously writing for a broader audience. What moves have you kind of found yourself making rhetorically to kind of take those things and make them so that your mom can read them, or, you know, the person down the street can read them without it feeling like, um, like you're speaking down to people? Because, you know, I think you've got a really great way of kind of bridging that gap between very academic topics and how they apply more broadly, uh, just to the average reader.

Yeah, so one of the things that I try to do in, um, the kind of trade writing or the public scholarship is that I try to imagine that my audience is like my classroom. And so in my classroom, I didn't want to talk down to students. I wanted us to have a conversation about, like, really, like, top-notch, like, theoretical constructs that were so different from what they experienced. But it revolved a lot of like refining it until it can get to a point where it was understandable, right? So the ability to take these super complex ideas and then present them in a story or a narrative in a way that they could engage it, right? Which meant finding practical examples that we could pull from, right? It meant talking together. It meant that they would read something and say like, I'm still not there. And I would say, okay, like, let's try it another way. So I feel like that transitioning, that classroom identity that I had to this more public-facing work was super helpful to me because I was already doing this in the undergraduate classroom. And so I was like, okay, well, we can just assume that my other audiences, like my freshmen, right, who come in and don't know what religious studies is, right? Like they don't know what gender studies, like they don't have any concept of that. So it's me like saying, okay, like let's walk through the building blocks and let's do this kind of thing. And so for my larger work, that's what I try to do too, right? It's like, I don't assume that my audience is not smart. All right, I assume that they can keep up with me. And I assume that the way that they keep up with me is that I take stuff that they don't understand because they haven't encountered it. Or I mean, like, who is thinking about white supremacy in the way that I'm thinking about white supremacy? But take like those things that I do in this really complicated, nuanced way. And then find ways to refine them and make them easier to grasp onto. Now, that is not an easy thing to do, right? Like, that takes a lot of, like, work and revising to get it where it can be. Um, and it means that my poor partner listens to me, like, think through ideas all the time. He has a PhD in computer science, right? Like, he's not a humanities guy. Um, but, you know, I'm like, okay, does this make sense? And he's like, not quite, right? Like, what are we missing? And so Having those kinds of writing audiences works a lot to get it to where it needs to be. So to have people that can read it and say, like, I'm not sure what you're doing here. Right. And I'm like, okay, let me take another stab at it. So I think one of the things about public writing that people don't realize is how much revision it requires to get the kind of language and structure and story that academic work doesn't necessarily have to have. Right. Like there is revision there, but it's not the level of revision. And it's also not thinking about like style and voice, which is so important with public writing. Like, do you come off as someone who has a PhD and who is like authoritarian, right, and has a sense of expertise? Or do you come off as someone that like someone can engage with, right, where it's like, okay, we're on this journey together, like let's figure it out. Um, and that kind of public writing works better than the like, you have to listen to me kind. Like, that even is a turn-off to me reading things, right, where people are like you have to pay attention to me. And I'm like, actually I don't, right? So move on to the next peep, right? Like, I think that's important to pay attention to too.

I love that you just said that, Kelly. I think, you know, realizing that the people you're trying to attract don't necessarily have to listen to you is key because in that way you really think— have to think about, okay, who do I really want to have listen to my story? Who who is the right audience. So what are a few things that you can share about— because you speak about very broad topics that are very dense. How do you envision that particular person? Is it just one person? Is it a group of people? How do you get to that point where you're like, OK, maybe it's not your mom, but who are you talking to?

Yeah, I think this is a great question. And they're like, what readers are we looking for? You know, in some kind of way. And so for me, I, it kind of depends on where I'm writing for, right? So if I'm writing for The Atlantic, there's a certain type of reader there, right? Who is used to these kinds of analytical pieces, maybe are used to more complex analysis, right? Maybe not based on some of the pieces they publish, but you know, like you can kind of assume a level there. It's going to get me in trouble later. But like, you can kind of assume a level there that might be different from the 750-word New York Times op-ed, right? Where it has to be quick, it has to be fast, and you're saying like, it's a paper of record, right? So how do I convey this in a certain way? So I think a lot for me often is what type of writing I'm doing, right? And so for something like an op-ed, I'm thinking about like anybody that picks up the paper, right? So like I'm not going to assume that they know anything about sexism in the academy. Right? Like, why would they? So how can I convey that? Right? In easy to kind of parse terms, you know. Oftentimes I'm writing, if I'm writing for like religion magazines, and I know I'm writing for religion scholars as well as a larger audience, then that's a different kind of tone, right? Where I can like know that they have a certain familiarity with concepts. But often I err in the folks don't necessarily know what I'm talking about. Right. And that's not me being like snotty about this. It's just like me saying the stuff I do is really weird and particular. Right. And most people are not interested in the weird and particular things that I'm doing unless I can make it engaging for them. Right. And so that's often what I'm thinking about there. And so with my books, it's like I want like a general reader who's just curious about zombies. Right. Like I'm not, gonna assume that they've read zombie scholarship or that they even watch the movies. It's like, how do I get someone who's a non-fan, like, invested in this idea? Um, and that's really helpful for me to think of my ideal reader as someone who's curious but maybe just doesn't have the background. And so my job is to do the background but also make it engaging, um, which is a habit that you have to build, right? Like, it's not a skill that a lot of people just naturally have. It takes a lot of work to kind of figure that out and figure out how to do that, which is super hard when you move from like the monograph to like trade, right? Where the monograph, you assume people can follow you, right? And if they can't, then they can't. But like, there's a certain like level of the price of admission, you know, that's different than like a trade book that anyone could pick up at a bookstore, right? And, and read. And, and how cool is that, right? That they would actually do that.

I think you're dropping a lot of truth bombs here because that is one of the things where Jen and I will go ahead and work with somebody who is an expert in a specific topic and they'll say, oh, this book is just for higher, you know, C-suite people. And we're like, no, but you know, don't take years of experience and expect people to say like, oh, I'm not curious about that. So it's just that little bit of curiosity that's going to help explain that and get people further down that rabbit hole that you so love. And I find myself really loving books that just kind of give me a little bit of a reminder at the beginning. Okay, what are we talking about? I've been doing marketing for how long, but I need a reminder. And I think those are the ones that I stick through with the most. Other than somebody talking down to me. So I love that, I love that.

Well, and I think too, to Kelly's point about, um, not being the, the pitcher filling— or the glass filling the pitcher and pouring out your knowledge into other people, a lot of academics unfortunately kind of trend in that direction even when they're teaching. And so just because people know how to teach people or they know how to research doesn't necessarily mean that they're going to be good at translating that for a broader audience. Not every researcher or academic is necessarily great at making those connections, I think, for whatever reason, right? Like, some people are just kind of so in their research zone that it's really hard for them to get out of it, or, you know, it might be that they sort of have an opinion of themselves that they are the great arbiter of that knowledge.

Yeah, and I think that's a hard habit to break, right? So I often work with academics when they're like designing pitches for different publications, or when they're thinking about like how to do public scholarship, right? And often it's this really funny thing where I'm like, the first thing you should do is throw out jargon. And they're like, what, what? You know, like there's just like franticness to it. And I'm like, nope, just like pitch it. Right? Like, it's useful for your peers, but I'm like, it's not useful for someone that's picking up the New York Times. Right? It's not useful for someone that's picking up your local paper.

Right?

They're going to see that and their eyes are going to glaze over. Because I know that, like, I have a PhD, and when people do this, I'm just like, oh, it's too hard to read. Right? Which maybe says something about me, but I think all of us have a compressed amount of time, right, to get through and to understand these things. And so you have to be engaging and you have to kind of abandon those academic things that we're so wed to and we're so comfortable with. And so I think it, it's often really hard for academics to shift in that way. And so what I constantly remind them is I'm like, you just have to like give it a go and give it another and give it, right? So it's really that process of like revision and refine that I think, like, really freaks people out, right? Like, this sort of thing. And that's what I was telling people when I was writing the zombie book, is that I was taking a project that started out as an academic project, and then became a trade project, and trying to combine those voices. And, like, the first little while doing it, I was, like, going out of my head, because I was having to say, "This academic stuff is clunky. It's not working. Take another go at it." And so it's just one of those things where I was like, "Why is this so hard?" As someone that's already done this, right? But I was like, "Why is this so hard?" Because it is like, it's a really hard thing to do, even for those of us that have experience doing it. But that like process continually of having to like work not only on what you're communicating, but also on your prose, right? Like, does your prose sound nice, right? Like, does it want— do people want to like follow along with you, right? I tell people all the time, like, a first paragraph is the most important. And they're like, what? Because academics don't often put their argument in the first paragraph. And I was like, nope. Like that's what they have to do. And they're just like, but, but I need to build my argument. And I'm like, nope, nope, no one's gonna follow you. Like, it has to be in that first paragraph, right, for them to kind of know. And that kind of signposting is different, but again, it's like a skill that you have to kind of build, um, just through practice, right?

I mean, you can take that lit review that you spent months on and throw it in the trash because nobody in the trade is going to read that. I mean, they're great to have, but, uh, yeah, no. Average reader does not care about your lit review at all. Oh my gosh, well, I, I'd love to hear just a little bit about sort of the other side of, of all of this that you do, which is, um, how do you feel about getting out there and marketing your books? Because that's another big leap for people who are used to academic writing and writing for journals. You don't necessarily market yourself, or at least you market yourself in a different way, like through your CV and through your speaking and your journal articles. But how have you found that shift to be for you to move into the trade where you have to actively market yourself and market your books?

It's so weird and I don't like it, but like, but this is part of what you have to do, right? And, and so I had to get really comfortable with just kind of putting myself out there. Um, you know, so you're like, here's my book, right? Here's the things I'm doing. Here's an excerpt. And so It still feels pretty uncomfortable to me. But I have good editors at the presses that I work with that just kind of encouraged me to do this. And one of the things that I try to do is to do this gracefully, right? So it's not like, go out and buy my book. It's like, I'm a goofball on Twitter, right? Who posts about my cats and cusses like a sailor, but also like I do this cool other stuff. And so I think that I've found a space that feels kind of organic to me to to do that. And I think that's what people have to do, right? Like that you can't be hustling all the time with this. You have to find a way to balance that with other things that you're doing and find something that feels authentic, right? Because no one wants to hear me like talk all the time about my writing. Like they would rather see pictures of my insane cats, right? Like that's a lot more fun. And then maybe they'll buy my book, right? So it's just kind of a weird social media space we exist in. To do this kind of stuff.

And I think that's the most important part and something that Paul and I were talking about during the last recording was being authentic and sharing that part of yourself. I've just met you, Dr. Kelly, but I feel like I've known you forever. Like everything that you said just like hit it on the head and you were just dropping truth bombs today. And I'm just like, I love being in the company of really smart women. I'm just so happy today.

Oh, that makes me feel so happy. I'm glad. And like, Jen has followed me for a while on Twitter, so she knows that this is just kind of how I exist in the world. But I love that you said that. It's amazing because I love badass women too.

So, oh well, this is the badass women club today, plus Paul. Paul's an honorary badass today. So, well, we love it. We love following you. We can't wait to see what you do next. And, um, I hope that, um, the skeleton in your front yard that you keep out in the front yard— there's one of the I think she tweets about sometimes, has his little Santa hat on and is ready for the season.

Where can people follow you to get a little bit more about, to know you and learn more about your work?

Yeah, so I have a website which is super easy. It's just kellyjbaker.com and it's about to be refreshed, so maybe wait a little while before you go to that. And then the best place to find me is Twitter and it's @kelly_j_baker and That's pretty much where I live for better or for worse.

Awesome.

The Twitterverse.

The Twitterverse, yeah. Well, we will keep looking for you there and learning about all the great things that you're up to. Thank you so much for joining us today. It's just been an absolute pleasure to have you, and we hope you'll come back really soon and chat some more with us.

I appreciate the opportunity, and I would love to be back anytime.

Oh, thank you. Well, that's it from us today. Thank you so much to our producer Paul Roberts and to our executive producer Emily Carpenter-Polskamp of Little Red Communications. And we will see you next time. Take care.

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