Architecture professor Vikram Bhatt (right) at a recent book-signing event at the McGill Bookstore PHOTO: OWEN EGAN

Marketing your scholarly wares

MARK SHAINBLUM | McGill has a long history of nurturing authors within its academic community. The university's most famous wordsmith was, of course, the brilliant satirist Stephen Leacock, but the story hardly begins or ends with him. Members of the McGill family have written books in almost every discipline and literary genre imaginable -- from architectural history to literary biography to science fiction to gothic literature and everything in between. And beyond the puerile clichés and fears about publishing or perishing, most scholars write and edit books because they want to. Yet academia was once insulated from the harsh commercial realities of book promotion; it was only the rare scholarly book that would make a breakthrough into mass-consciousness. Now, by default or by design, the distinction between academic and mass-market publishing has become blurred. And every once in a while, a professor hits one right out of the ballpark -- witness the smash success of University of Toronto economist David Foot's best-selling Boom, Bust and Echo. University professors often find themselves talking about their scholarly works on the same talk shows and in the same media outlets as authors of mass-market paperbacks. Though grateful for the exposure, some of them are frankly uncomfortable with this aspect of their roles. History professor Gil Troy is a case in point. His work Affairs of State: The Rise and Rejection of the Presidential Couple Since World War II, a scholarly study of the historical role of the First Lady and the Presidential Family, was reasonably well received when it was published in early 1997. Troy's book dealt with, among other things, the way the Clintons worked together to overcome earlier scandals concerning his adulterous adventures. After the Monica Lewinsky scandal broke, Troy suddenly found himself at the centre of a media frenzy. To his own surprise, he became a regular fixture on Canadian and American television. Among others, he appeared on NBC's Today, CBC's The National and on a "wacky" call-in show on the Washington, DC-based Conservative Cable Network. "I answered all sorts of questions from conservative wackos. When you're shilling a book, nothing is too shameless," he laughs. Ironically, because the book had come out a year earlier, Troy's media exposure did little to spur sales. "As a scholarly author I'm privileged," he says, admitting to a degree of discomfort with the whole book promotion process. "We're coddled, and we need to use our privilege as academics to follow the truth. Having said that, I don't encourage the kind of scholarly insularity where you're only writing for an audience of five eggheads. We need insulation from market forces, but if we have something to say to the public, we need to share it with the public." Architecture professor Vikram Bhatt faced no such conflicts following the publication of his most recent book, Resorts of the Raj: Hill Stations of India, a photographic history of plush Victorian resorts built by the British in pre-independence India. Published in a lush, oversize coffee-table book format by India-based Mapin Publishing, Resorts of the Raj openly appeals to a wide, non-scholarly audience in addition to its core architectural constituency. Both Mapin's North American distributors and School of Architecture administrative secretary Helen Dyer helped Bhatt promote the book in various ways, targeting different interest groups. Bhatt did readings at Chapters in Toronto to reach the mass market and, during the University's homecoming week, he was the centre of an Alumni Association-sponsored event at the McGill Bookstore. Bhatt was particularly pleased with an invitation he received to address an audience at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, a fundraiser in support of the ROM's proposed new South Asian Wing. He is now involved in very preliminary discussions about adapting Resorts of the Raj to other media, including television. "The process is tiring," says Bhatt, "but promotion is very much part of doing a book. It's a partnership between author and publisher. A book can move on its own, but prospective buyers really need to know more before they make the decision to buy, especially when we are discussing an expensive coffee-table book like this one." Author of the widely discussed literary memoir Margaret Atwood: A Biography, published last month, English professor Natalie Cooke is pleased about the generally positive reviews her book is getting in the mainstream media. Still, she is somewhat stunned by the widespread interest in the topic and not entirely sanguine about its tone. "I'm surprised by the sheer hoopla of it," she says. "One would think that no one had ever published a biography of a living Canadian writer in living memory!" Part of the attention stems from the fact that Cooke's book comes on the heels of another Atwood biography focusing on her early years by Rosemary Sullivan. And part of it is tied to the fact that Atwood is no mere "living Canadian writer," as Cooke readily admits. "She's really stood out from the crowd. I suppose the interest has been generated partly because of her reputation, and partly because there hasn't been an Atwood biography until now. It's been anticipated for quite a few years." In addition to underestimating the scope of the media interest in her subject and the time she would be devoting to promotion and appearances, Cooke also admits that she doesn't quite know how to deal with the mass media's fixation on the personal life of biographical subjects and so-called "celebrities." "I don't think I had anticipated that my role would continue beyond [correcting] the galleys," she says. "The breakthrough insights of this book are scholarly and therefore I hope it will change the way scholars perceive Atwood and her work. It challenges some of our critical assumptions about her writing, now that we have delved deeper into the background. I was very surprised by the [popular media] desire for pathology from biographies. For digging the dirt. That's not something I set out to do." Carol Davison is a part-time lecturer of Gothic literature at McGill and the recent recipient of a PhD from the Department of English. Davison's assessment of her publishing experience is decidedly mixed. Davison decided to edit a book of essays about 19th century Gothic writer Bram Stoker in time for the 1997 centenary of his most famous creation, Dracula. Entitled Bram Stoker's Dracula: Sucking Through the Century 1897-1997, the book was published by Toronto's Dundurn Press. A collection of essays from over a dozen writers, the book straddled the academic/mass market divide in a particularly complex fashion, one Davison feels her publisher was not quite able to tackle. "My publisher did a pretty good job in terms of publicity, but they are frankly not very good at figuring out where their target audiences are," Davison says. "I managed to convince them that my book sat on the fence between academic and more layperson-friendly pop culture, but in the end, most of the reviews and events that this book generated came as a result of my own legwork." Formerly in the publishing business herself, Davison wasn't much bothered by many of the promotional aspects of launching her book. She does, however, say that she was not comfortable with another role she feels was thrust upon her. "I don't mind talking about the book," she says, "but I think the publisher felt I was supposed to directly promote sales. I'm of two minds about that. It seems on one hand to obviously be part of the job, but the pitching and sales part can't be at the forefront of every interview and discussion about the book. That bothered me. As an academic particularly, you feel that's a little like prostitution. I felt it compromised me a little."