Writing (the book) *Visionary*: The Game's Afoot!

On trade books, literary agents and more

We don’t often hear the voices of medieval women. A common belief is that they couldn’t read, couldn’t lead and then—thank goodness—everything progressed to get us where we are today.

But this version of history is a myth.

In fact, medieval women weren’t as silent and subjugated as this modern view would have us believe. They spoke out loud, they wrote, and they left us a dazzling legacy of books we have almost forgotten—almost. Visionary: The Woman Who Changed Medieval England uncovers the little-known story of saint Birgitta of Sweden (1303-1373), whose book of visions, the Revelations, became the largest female contribution to over two hundred years of English literary history. She’s the most famous woman writer no one has heard of.

So begins the proposal freshly sent out to publishers for the trade book I’m writing! Visionary: The Woman Who Changed Medieval England is my first trade book foray, and my literary agent just sent out the proposal, introduction and sample chapter to relevant editors at quite a few publishers. In a few weeks we’ll start hearing from them—hopefully there’ll be a bit of interest—and eventually we’ll get a contract in place. At least that’s the plan. I am excited: the game’s afoot!

A bit more from my proposal… are you intrigued?

Wife and mother, activist and prophet, politician and visionary, Birgitta’s influence initially radiated out of Sweden, where she lived the first half of her life, and then from Rome, where she spent decades lobbying the papacy for reform and visiting the courts of powerful leaders. She founded an innovative monastic order that soon had houses across Europe, including Syon Abbey, just outside London. But England had a rather more conservative religious climate than found on the Continent, and so her often radical visions caused quite a stir. Birgitta’s Revelations became extremely popular despite—or perhaps because—of the fact that they presented a more powerful woman’s authorial voice than had ever been heard before that side of the Channel.

Visionary interweaves two parallel narratives: how Birgitta changed England, and how England changed Birgitta. Paradoxically, part of the saint’s success seems to have been that her words could be twisted or even censored for quite contradictory ends; her legacy was complex, because different people met different ‘Birgittas’ in what they read. The book will focus on a series of specific historical readers and specific texts that bring alive how this woman changed the course of over 150 years of English literary and social history. Together they tell a story of power, politics, gender, control, and desire. It’s a story still familiar today, as the same double standards and impossible balancing acts continue to shape how women are allowed to contribute as cultural agents over seven hundred years later.

Birgitta writing at her desk, getting inspired to write her own book!

More on the content of my book in coming weeks… but first: before I continue, it’s important to acknowledge that maybe publishers in fact are not intrigued. (Sad trombone.) There’s always a possibility that none will bite. The coming months could be quite disappointing. Remember the other connotation of ‘visionary’ from my introductory post? Somebody who has a vision of something that turns out to be unrealisable, and it fails. I definitely have a vision of what I want this book to be, and I truly believe that it has an important message that will strike a chord with a wide variety of readers. But it could be my vision doesn’t align with ‘the market’ or what press editors are interested in right now. I’m not sure what I’ll do then; I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it, and get some good advice on my options.

I’ve certainly had pieces rejected before—but they almost always get placed somewhere eventually, so I just have to have some faith in my track record predicting the way forward (even though this is unknown territory). After all some people didn’t support my monograph idea and then it won two prizes. And I have to have some faith in my instinct, which tells me my new trade book idea is viable and really worth pursuing, and trust my agent, who supports the book. I’m also incredibly grateful that I’m not in a precarious position where there’s a lot at stake so I can afford to follow my dream of this project even if it doesn’t work out at first (or ever).

Wait, back up a minute.

What is a non-fiction trade book? Or a general audience book, or whatever you want to call them?

First of all, they are books for anybody, for your grandma or your teenage niece or your neighbour or your plumber or your colleague in a wildly different field. Trade books are not novels or fiction (one hopes) and generally readers can learn something concrete from them (at least that’s how I think about it). Anybody can write a trade non-fiction book, from plumbers to journalists to novelists to academics, but it demands a whole new skill set than academics have been trained in. We have to break a lot of ingrained habits.

For instance: My field — medieval English literature / medieval studies — can be fiendish about footnotes. We LOVE to go on and on in them, citing everything we’ve read or even not read. We also love what I would call tempests-in-a-teapot: big, overblown controversies about the littlest mark in a manuscript or a single word in a poem. We play like they have huge consequences and get into shouting matches over them — albeit extremely slow-mo matches with rebuttals every 2-4 years because the publishing process is so extremely slow. But…

… these things are not bad, they are just academic! Big footnotes are important for orienting readers to a field of inquiry and acknowledging whose shoulders you stand on, as well as shaping an inclusive discipline. Huge debates over tiny things are often warranted because tiny things add up to influential arguments—and when not much survives, you have to focus on what’s left, no matter how small. And a slow publication process is often a result of how we quality-control research so that more reliable work gets published.

But a few years ago I yearned for a breather from all this. I had just published my monograph, with its fair share of long footnotes and tiny tempests, and which took many years to write (and re-write). I wanted to tell a story in a different way than we’re usually permitted in monographs; I wanted to spend more time crafting the narrative, to have some fun and take some rhetorical risks, to be personally ‘present’ in the book with a new voice. (More on this next week.) I wanted to bring the important intellectual work we are doing in the academy out to a broader audience.

I also saw scholars I respected write very successful books that stepped outside the purely academic: ‘crossover’ books like Marion Turner’s Chaucer: A European Life, which are affordable and achieve a much broader audience, bringing their research to all kinds of people outside the ivory tower. I attended a few webinars on how to write a trade book, like one offered by Kirsty Sedgman, author of On Being Unreasonable. I started to talk to people and get advice. One piece of advice I received: get an agent!

So what’s a literary agent?

This is somebody who knows way, way, way more about the world of trade book publishing than you do.

They know what publishers want, what readers want, and they know how to get your book idea from vague vision to hard-covers flying off the shelf. They can (at least in my case) help you develop what the book will be about, and develop that idea through the drafting of a proposal, which is a specific genre related to but definitely not the same as an academic book proposal. They help you finalise sample materials like an introduction and a chapter. Then, they take responsibility for sending this all out to relevant editors at relevant publishers and imprints. These are people the agent might well know already—so the editors actually open the email. If you as a random person tried the same thing, it would probably be far less successful. Then, the agent helps you figure out the terms of a contract, and helps guide the book through completion. (At least this is my understanding so far!)

Ultimately, literary agents help you write a better book, reach more readers, and make more money from your writing that you otherwise might on your own.

My agent is Clare Grist Taylor at the UK-based Accidental Agency. She was recommended to me by a colleague already working on her own trade book. After an initial online meeting, Agent Clare (as I like to call her) and I decided we would be a good fit. I then took about a year and a half to finalise my actual book idea, while she was patient, encouraging, and incredibly helpful. I’ve also been grateful for her feedback on my draft material.

But how do agents get paid, you might be wondering? Well, you sign a per-book contract, where they get a certain share of your share (at least that seems to be typical, in my short experience). So the more money they finagle for you, the more money they get. It’s a win-win. They are professionals at negotiating contracts with publishers, so they know better how to argue for better terms than most authors, especially authors new to trade. Plus we authors need to protect our time for writing!

What about trade book publishers?

That’s a good question, and one I'll save for later on when I know more about it myself! All I know is that just by reading around in trade books, seeing what you enjoy and don’t, and noticing who publishes what, you can learn a lot about what the non-fiction book industry looks like. More on that soon.

What’s next then?

I wait. Try to be patient until the publishers start writing back. Try not to get my hopes up. And I get on with writing the rest of the book!

Here in this Substack newsletter, I’ll be reflecting on lots of different things related to this book project and the trade book endeavour in general. Next will be thoughts on the new freedom of authorial voice that can be found, then some of my favourite non-fiction books and how they inspired the development of my own book. I’ll also get back to more details about what’s going in Visionary and how the drafting is coming along. I also hope to maybe invite on as guests some academics and others writing trade books with success, like maybe

Jessica Hooten Wilson

,

Addison Hodges Hart

,

Beth Allison Barr

.

Stay tuned, and invite your friends to subscribe!