The hair on my neck bristled when I got to the back of this week’s New Yorker Talk of the Town section and found a cute little profile of Rich Tennant, the cartoonist who ruined my book.
Well, he didn’t ruin my book. But I’d been taken aback when I opened the box containing my ten author copies of Sociology for Dummies and found that the sections began with cartoons that no one had discussed with me. They weren’t very funny, they were only vaguely related to the subject matter (an evolution gag illustrates the “Seeing Society Like a Sociologist” section), and the last one, featuring a male building inspector evaluating a woman (“sturdy foundation, minor exterior wear, no visible mold”) was kind of offensive.
But Tennant was working under pressure: he illustrates all the Dummies books. I just wrote one; though my name is on two other books, Sociology for Dummies is the only published book I’ve written from scratch, front to back. Except for the cartoons.
Frequently-asked question: How do you get a gig writing a For Dummies book? In my case, the opportunity came through a friend from grad school, a couple of years after we’d finished school and stepped into the cold whipping winds of the real world. The publisher, Wiley, approached Felix asking if he wanted to write Sociology for Dummies—but he was busy with his actual professor job and I was an underemployed writer, so he sent them my way.
The great thing about writing a For Dummies book is that, as long as you keep to the Dummies style (at least one cute little bullet-point icon on every page) and pass the sniff test of the one peer reviewer who reads your book (in my case, an unnamed sociology professor somewhere in Middle America), you can fill it with pretty much whatever you want. No one’s buying this book because I wrote it—they’re buying it because it’s For Dummies. My title is even wrong on the front cover: a copyeditor assumed that my mention of “teaching sociology” meant I was a “Professor of Sociology” instead of the reality, “Adjunct Instructor of Sociology.”
My goal was to use that freedom to make Sociology for Dummies not so dumb: instead of taking the typical intro-text approach (“Hey, people are different from each other! Wow, isn’t sociology cool? Now memorize this stuff Weber said about the Protestant Reformation and the birth of capitalism, and don’t ask why”), I tried to actually show readers why sociology is interesting. When you don’t assume that people are reading your book because they have to, the pressure is on to make it not only accessible but relevant.
Knowing, however, that I was writing what was guaranteed to be one of the best-sellers in the sociology section (or the “people and places” section, or wherever bookstores shove the social science), I tried to score a few points for the academic theories I’d just spent eight years developing. The first chapter I was assigned to write was the chapter on culture; that was what I wrote my dissertation on, and I had things to say about the culture-structure interaction. The final version of that chapter contains sentences like, “It’s helpful to think about the distinction between ‘culture’ and ‘structure’ as a continuum rather than a split between two fixed categories”—and that’s after my editor brought in a “dummifier” (that’s actually the word they use) to help me dummy it down.
So now I have my very own Dummies book. It makes me feel warm and special—even if it’s not the kind of book that people think of as “a book.” I e-mailed the sociology department at the University of Minnesota asking if they’d be interested in having me talk about the book at a workshop or colloquium; they were definitely not interested. I called a couple of local bookstores and asked whether they’d be interested in hosting a reading. Nope: “We don’t really do readings for books like that.”
I did get one e-mail from a guy in Nevada who liked the book, and one high school sociology teacher in northern Minnesota asked me to Skype with her class. My royalty statements say that thousands of people have bought the book, but other than those two people and my aunts, I have no idea who or where they are.
There are over 1,600 titles in the For Dummies series; that’s larger than the population of a lot of small towns. Maybe we should all move in together and found Dummytown: the town that has exactly one expert on each of the 1,600 things people in the world most want to know about. We’ll spend all day explaining them to each other, with lots of bullet points.
Image created with the Official For Dummies Cover Generator
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