How to write a best-seller

Every morning Caroline Davidson goes into her office in west London and rifles through her “slush pile”. Like all literary agents, she hopes that buried deep within the daily deluge of book proposals and manuscripts will be something so fantastic that no potential publisher would dare turn it down. “My dream is to open a parcel and find a beautifully written covering letter, a title that leaps out from the page and an idea that seems so simple and so obvious that I’m straight on the phone to the author.”

One proposal that caught her eye was sent in by Peter Barham, a physicist from Bristol University who wanted to write a book on “science in the kitchen”. He had failed to sell his idea directly to a publisher, and approached Davidson following a tip-off from a friend. “Caroline showed me how to turn my idea into a workable proposal and told me what would work and what would not, ” says Barham. She soon tied up a deal with a major publisher, and his book is set to hit the high-streets next Christmas.

Physicists like Barham are increasingly keen to muscle in on the “popular science” market, and publishers are constantly on the look-out for new talent and ideas. They all want to emulate the runaway success of Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, this cosmological masterpiece has so far sold more than eight million copies world-wide. Other physicists in the big league include Paul Davies, who has sold 235 000 copies of his books with Penguin, and John Gribbin, who has written 80 popular books on physics and astronomy. Rich pickings if you can find the winning formula.

So what are the secrets of a successful science book? “Cosmology, evolution and genetics are always popular with the public as they try to answer ultimate questions like why we’re unique, where we come from and where we’re going, ” says Peter Tallack, publishing director with Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Shoe-horning the word “God” somewhere in the title is not a bad idea either. Paul Davies has done it twice.

It also helps to have a good story. Simon Singh says that was why Fermat’s Last Theorem became the first mathematics book to reach number one in the best-sellers’ list, selling more than 80,000 copies in the UK alone. His book traces the story of Fermat’s mathematical puzzle, explaining how it challenged the finest minds for centuries until it was finally solved by Andrew Wiles in 1993. “It’s a wonderful tale. It has heroes, it has twists and turns, and because it has a long history I could start the mathematical explanations at a fairly elementary level, ” says Singh.

Luckily Singh knows how to tell a good story. After finishing his PhD in particle physics at Cambridge University in 1990, he joined BBC Television, where he directed a documentary about Fermat’s last theorem. “When you write for television, your explanation has to be very clear because the viewer has only one chance to understand what you’re talking about. Writing the book was therefore relatively easy.”

That’s not to say that you have to lead a glamorous media life to write a popular-science book. Many good ideas emerge from those who are involved in the public understanding of science. “I’m not a natural writer, ” admits Martin Rees, an astrophysicist at Cambridge University, who has written two successful books on cosmology and black holes, and is currently putting the finishing touches to a third on the fundamental constants of nature. “But I had done quite a lot of popular lectures and articles on cosmology for the general public. Having put the spadework in for that, I felt that it was worth the extra effort to transform my ideas into a book.” His publishers evidently thought so too; his latest work, Before the Beginning, has been translated into German, with Italian, Spanish and Polish versions due out soon.

Some of the best books come from scientists from one field who examine another subject from an interdisciplinary point of view. The Emperor’s New Mind by the mathematical physicist Roger Penrose is the classic example of the genre. Despite being heavy going in parts, his exploration of the overlap between consciousness and quantum physics proved an enormous success with book buyers.

The other side of the coin is that books that plod along the main path of a discipline are doomed to failure. “I am astonished at the number of proposals I receive where I’m being offered yet another book on cosmology that doesn’t approach the subject from a new perspective, ” says Simon Mitton, science director at Cambridge University Press, which publishes some 350 science books a year.

But no matter how original your idea, how great your title, or how cunning your marketing campaign, it’s the quality of writing that counts. Passion, enthusiasm and flair are what it’s all about. “Unless the writer can write well, the book won’t succeed, ” explains Stefan McGrath, an executive editor at Penguin. “You can’t market a book that isn’t well written.”

Mitton agrees. He urges physicists who want to become the next Paul Davies to dust off their copies of Pride and Prejudice , A Tale of Two Cities and Jude the Obscure . “My advice is to read as many books as possible from the central canon of English literature. Your training as a physicist will simply not have given you any idea how to tell a story. You have to learn that each chapter in a popular-science book has to have a beginning, a middle and an end.”

But budding writers should be careful not to expect too much. Most books sell just a few thousand copies, and the time and effort involved in writing can be substantial. “The only reason to write popular-science books is because you want to. Usually the pay in dollars per hour is small, ” explains Lawrence Krauss, a theoretical physicist from the Case Western Reserve University in the US, who wrote The Physics of Star Trek and Beyond Star Trek. “The key thing in the end is to come up with something new and hope that it interests people. I think we owe it to the public to explain what we do, and those who are sufficiently motivated to spend a great deal of time for potentially little financial return should try.”

But as Caroline Davidson points out, the rewards in other respects for those who take up the challenge can be huge. “Writing a book is satisfying, it’s life-enhancing, it puts you in touch with all sorts of people, and it can boost your credibility. Publishers will, I assure you, fight for anything in their field that they think is worth publishing.”