Essential knowledge about scholarly book publishing that every author should have. Get weekly tips on writing and publishing your scholarly book from developmental editor and publishing consultant Laura Portwood-Stacer, PhD.
How writing fits into an academic career
Published 16 days ago • 9 min read
The Manuscript Works Newsletter
Essential knowledge on scholarly book publishing that every author should have
Dear Reader,
I'm pleased to share another author interview with you this week, as I try to do every month in this newsletter. This time I spoke with Dr. Hannah Zeavin about her new book, Mother Media: Hot and Cool Parenting in the 20th Century, out later this month with MIT Press.
Many of the authors I work with are navigating what it means to be a writer inside, alongside, or outside an academic career. I wanted to speak to Hannah because I thought her experience writing three books (along with other types of publications) for different kinds of audiences would be interesting for readers of this newsletter. I hope you find Hannah's reflections to be thought-provoking and maybe even inspiring as you think about your own career as a writer and scholar.
Mother Media by Hannah Zeavin is out with MIT Press on April 29, 2025
Laura Portwood-Stacer: Tell me about your new book. Why did you write it, and how does it sit in the arc of your scholarly career?
Hannah Zeavin: Mother Media: Hot and Cool Parenting in the 20th Century is my second book, following up my first book, The Distance Cure: A History of Teletherapy, which was my dissertation book. I see this second book as a hinge between my dissertation book and my next book, All Freud’s Children: A Story of Inheritance, which is under contract with Penguin and is aimed at a much wider audience. My first book was a traditional academic first book, not meant for a broad public readership. But, as a history of teletherapy, it became suddenly relevant during the pandemic. People started to actually know what teletherapy was, which they largely hadn’t before. My dissertation advisors had thought my topic was too oblique and wouldn’t translate on the job market, which turned out to be true, until it wasn’t. When The Distance Cure came out in 2021, I was asked by Slate to write a piece on teletherapy in the pandemic. That was my first time writing for “the public.” Of course, all readerships are publics.
I conceived of Mother Media as a sibling book for The Distance Cure, not about the triad of therapy, media, and patient, but of mother, child, and media. MIT Press acquired it as a trade book, meaning they would be positioning it as speaking to a wider audience than my first book. It’s still extensively peer reviewed and heavily footnoted and similar in length to The Distance Cure (much to my chagrin), but it’s on a topic that is perennially relevant to a large public: mothering and mediation in the family home and in the media.
The book offers readers, including parents, a history of how psychologists began to categorize mothers as a bad input, as a bad medium. It’s a history of mother as medium. It’s also conversely about how the bad maternal pathologies began to attach to media themselves, like the phone or the screen. It walks the reader through many, many cases, from the prison to the American suburban home, to the clinic, to the commune, to show how ideas that we take for granted, such as “giving your kid an iPad is bad and means you're a bad mom,” actually have a very long and pernicious history to them.
I wanted to write the book at a level and pitch where it would be taken up by people outside academia, much like Ruth Schwarz Cowan’s More Work for Mother was, but still make its contribution to my scholarly fields. But while I wanted to reach a broad audience, I didn’t want to write a memoir or an advice book, which is what trade presses seemed to be looking for when my agent and I were pitching this book. I sort of fundamentally don’t believe in advice, and far be it from me to teach other mothers. I also didn’t want this book to be seen as only speaking to mothers, because it’s human history, a broad history of “bad media.” The trade list at a university press ended up being the right home for it.
When I decided I was going to write All Freud’s Children, on the children of psychoanalysts, I really wanted it to be a trade book and not because it's filled with memoir or advice, but because Freud's having a moment, and because I wanted to try. My agent and I went on submission in a very kind of literary trade, Big 5 way. I can't write it in the same way as my other books, and I don't want to, because the stories are really different. It's based on oral history and on family archives and of course on traditional archives. But it's a story that allows me to really be a different kind of writer. It's been a lot of fun and also painful.
LPS: What has the promotion process been like for Mother Media? I think many readers of this newsletter are familiar with what promotion for a traditional research monograph might look like, but would be curious to hear what’s involved in promoting a trade or crossover book such as yours.
HZ: Being a writer has always been an important part of my life, but part of my writing life is being pretty dissociated from the idea of reception and audience. But when your book comes out, you can’t do that anymore. There’s a publicist at the press assigned to my book, as there was for my first book, but it’s a different person – David Olson – and we email more. There are more hours and resources devoted to publicizing the book from within the press. The number of talks I’m doing is actually equal, and they’re at a lot of the same places, but the press is coordinating the talks this time, whereas I did it myself last time.
I’ve also changed as a writer since my first book. My writing life is really different than it was five years ago. I've been writing for magazines and newspapers. I run a magazine, Parapraxis. I don’t know what kind of coverage the new book will get; it has had one review already, in Harper’s.
LPS: Could you talk about how your academic career has affected the way you’ve written and positioned your books?
HZ: At the time when I first pitched Mother Media, I was adjuncting and I didn’t know if I was going to stay in the academy. I had lost a bunch of my classes because of austerity during the pandemic, which was fine because I wasn't paying for childcare and couldn't teach my full adjunct load while having a 9-month-old. I didn’t have research funds and couldn’t afford to travel to archives. This book is kind of marked by those conditions. But it's also marked by certain kinds of freedom. I wasn't on the tenure track, I wasn't holding book workshops with my department and having them say it has to look like this or that. I could publish it how and where I wanted to.
Ultimately, I did want Mother Media also to be a scholarly book. I did years of archival work and the project won a prize for work in progress from the Society for the History of Technology. I’m now employed at a university on the tenure track, up for tenure, and this book will be part of my next promotion file. That happened to really matter for me. I've tracked in, but I could have tracked out just as easily, more easily. I’ve found that publishing a trade book with a scholarly press is a really happy medium that lets me preserve its rigor and perhaps get the book in front of people who might need it.
I’m really happy with the support it’s received, in terms of publicity, but also with peer review and all the things university presses do best. University presses are essential to publishing great nonfiction, beyond the market constraints of the Big 5 publishers.
LPS: One thing I think scholarly writers are less aware of is the kind of labor it takes to be a “public writer.” It’s different than what they’re trained for—and rewarded for— in the academy. Finding a literary agent and getting them to support your work is just one piece of the puzzle, and even that is a mystery to most scholars. [Though my workshop next month, with literary agent Kate McKean, is going to demystify it!]
HZ: There’s a lot of excitement about writing for “the public.” Again, they’re all publics. I've always been a writer. If you had asked me when I was five years old, “what are you?” I would have said, “I'm a writer, a poet.” And then I may have said, “I also want to grow up to be a scuba diver,” or whatever, but I've always wanted to be a writer and always have been a writer. But I think that when we double-demand or triple-demand that people aren't just amazing scholars and amazing teachers, but also that they know how to do this totally other different kind of writing, it’s a lot to ask. In fact, it is too much – it is another job in another dying industry.
I happen to have developed this craft of “public writing” partly because of being under-resourced in my job as an adjunct. I couldn’t not be a writer, but the additional venues I ended up writing for, major magazines, had something to do with the pay they were offering. It wasn’t that much money, but writing a commissioned article meant that I could teach seven classes as an adjunct instead of eight. That made a real difference to my life, but not because I was working less. I was out of the classroom and doing something I also really enjoyed which was reporting a feature for a magazine.
That kind of writing is still work, and often done in really different ways, with really different expectations. I’ve had to learn and learn and learn, and I'm still learning both how to be a better writer and how to be a better editor, and I hope to do so for my whole life, just like I hope to be a better scholar and better teacher in the classroom. But I really resist this idea that now public writing is part of what all scholars need to do; it’s not like scholars in the academy are being told they can drop one of the other things in exchange. I'm really wary of “more work for scholars” and I don’t want to be part of the crisis of academic writers being asked to do more with less. Let’s do less with less.
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If you’d like to get a copy of Mother Media: Hot and Cool Parenting in the Twentieth Century by Hannah Zeavin, you can order directly from MIT Press.
Keep scrolling this newsletter for more new book announcements and other resources for scholarly writers.
This newsletter is coming to you from Laura Portwood-Stacer, PhD, professional developmental editor and publishing consultant. I help scholarly writers navigate the book publishing process with more ease and agency.
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Essential knowledge about scholarly book publishing that every author should have. Get weekly tips on writing and publishing your scholarly book from developmental editor and publishing consultant Laura Portwood-Stacer, PhD.