December 8, 2024

Barber-surgeons and the anatomy of authoring

Or how being a twenty-first century author is weirdly like being a seventeenth-century barber-surgeon.

The mustachioed man draped from neck to waist in a white sheet relaxed in a chair, reading. An elegantly dressed (that collar! those cuffs!), equally mustachioed dude stood facing him, brandishing an enormous pair of scissors. Haircut day!

Meanwhile, on the other side of a partition, are scenes of teeth-pulling, blood-letting, and the treatment of an unfortunate soul with blood running from the top of his head to his right eye:

These scenes all appear on a painted wooden partition, dated 1648, which once separated the two workspaces of a barber-surgeon. One arena seems to have been for the work of being a barber, responsible for fashioning moustaches and hairdos. The other was for grislier acts of surgery. Here’s one side in its entirety, six feet (180cm) high and some 4 ½ feet (135cm) wide:

In Europe between the Middle Ages and the seventeenth century, being a surgeon - attempting to heal people by cutting or sawing their bodies rather than prescribing them things - was bundled together with being a barber. Barber-surgeons Cut All The Things.

Barber-surgeons and authors both perform two kinds of activities on “bodies” on which they work.  Author rework and operate on the bodies of ideas in their brain rather than on the physical bodies of clients or patients (or victims).

Most people assume that authors just need to put their butts in the chair, think hard, and write words, perhaps also doing research if they write nonfiction. But that’s only half of the craft we perform on the ideas and stories in our books. Let’s call this the “barber” part of the job.

The other part is getting the word out to potential readers that they’ve written a book. To make a living as an author you have to become an authorpreneur  - an author-entrepreneur. (See what just happened? Author-entrepreneur // barber-surgeon!)

It’s not enough to write a book. You have to do a different kind of work to get the word out to promote it. No one can buy a book they’ve never heard of, or that never appears on their screens or when they browse in a bookstore.

Authors must dissect, reassemble, and regurgitate the body of their book as feature essays, op-eds, talking-points, social media posts, interviews… long and short blurpings that capture, distil, and build on the body.

This analogy isn’t perfect. The book-writing part is ALSO fraught with blood, tears, and fear: it isn’t just sitting in a chair enjoying a book. The shape of the outcome - what the final book will be like - is unclear at the start.

And there’s SO MUCH CUTTING of the Frankensteinian monster from first scribblings to publication: book body parts are all over the cutting-room floor. But for me, both jobs - barber-surgeon and authorpreneur - have a Jekyll-and-Hyde thing going. They both require that the artisan re-set the pinball machine of the brain, back and forth, between settings that involve different relationships to the “stuff” we craft.

I’m in full barber-surgeon mode right now! I’m spending some of my brain-time thinking up the next book, so that I (or rather, my literary agent) can sell it for actual money with which I’ll get to keep eating while researching and writing the book.

But more than half of my brain time is still all about HUMANS: A MONSTROUS HISTORY, even though books are in the warehouse and I’m awaiting delivery of my author copies.

Over the past six months (since before I began copy edits), I’ve been writing emails to set up a spring US book tour. This is shaping up nicely! There will be public lectures, events in conversation with other authors, bookstore talks and signings, informal sessions on the art and craft of creative and narrative nonfiction writing, and Zoom talks. I’ve also begun pitching essays to newspapers and magazines, and pitching myself as a podcast guest.

And I’m talking about my book on social media - especially on BlueSky but, as and when bandwidth permits, also on Instagram, Threads, and Mastodon. (Please find me there and re-share news about HUMANS! Links are at the bottom).

How you can help

Did you know that preorders improve the discoverability of a book online, and shape how many bricks-and-mortar bookstores stock the book? Or that an author’s sales figures also shape their next book advance, which in turn affects that book’s publicity and marketing budget?

This is why it’s crucial to get the word out to folks who might want to buy a forthcoming book. If you’ve already preordered or told folks about this book, thank you! Your support has already had an effect.

I’ve LOVE for you to buy HUMANS (of course!), but there are free ways to support the book, too:

• Tell folks about the book: friends, colleagues, students, neighbours, or family.

• Ask your library to preorder the book: your public, school, college or university library or book club/society.

• Forward this newsletter to someone you know: perhaps someone interested in history, medicine, science, or tech, a fan of sci-fi or fantasy, or someone entranced by all things peculiar, wondrous, and unexpected.

• Share, like, or comment on my social media posts: on BlueSky, Threads, Instagram, or Mastodon (links at the bottom).

• Read, rate, and review the book once you’ve read it: on Amazon, Goodreads, the StoryGraph, or LibraryThing, for example. Reviews can be as short as a sentence - or even a single word! - but they can be longer if that’s easier for you. What matters is getting reviews out asap to encourage other potential readers. Done is better than perfect. If you were to make February your month for monster reading, that would be fantastic.

I’m fortunate that the publicity and marketing team for HUMANS has been super-active. There are tasks that are traditionally done by the press team and not by the author, like inviting newspapers and magazines to assign the book for review or landing bookstore events (VERY hard for a debut commercial author like me), and I’m grateful to the press for their support.

But what helps keep selling a book once the marketing and PR folks have moved on to work on other books is the enthusiasm of readers who continue to buy, read, gift, recommend, talk about, post about, and assign the book.

If you’re half as excited about HUMANS as I am, I hope you’ll consider telling other folks about it, stocking up your 2025 present drawer with it, and reading and reviewing it when it comes out.

And for more on the barber-surgeon partition, check out the Rijksmuseum Boerhaave webpage here.

You can also find me on www.surekhadavies.org,

BlueSky (@drsurekhadavies.bsky.social),

and Instagram/Threads (@surekhadavies).