(I'm just a terrible blogger this week. Kids, a side venture that needs attention, lack of sleep because I was up until 2am reading commentary about RNC. Things should normalize very, very soon.)
I am such a bad blogger than I am only catching up on the Niall Ferguson debate. Best posts come from Henry Farrell and Dan Drezner. If you have even a passing interest in commercial non-fiction, then you should read these posts.
The quick takeaway — If you are able to successfully brand yourself as a "smart person," then your real money is in speaking fees, not book royalties or Ivy League salaries.
Apt. 11d 
I believe that some of the problems these ‘public intellectual superstars’ encounter comes from their likely out-sourcing of a lot of the tedious work of writing non-fiction – research, fact-checking, actually crafting the prose.
I know enough of middling academic superstars who’ve relied on armies of grad students and assistants (paid or unpaid) who actually did the lion’s share of research and writing on projects only to get nothing more than a brief mention in the acknowledgements. How can I not believe, especially with the lazy errors that creep in, that these so-called superstars aren’t just riding along on the “find me five examples to prove my point and draft up some talking points for when I appear on CNN”.
LikeLike
“I believe that some of the problems these ‘public intellectual superstars’ encounter comes from their likely out-sourcing of a lot of the tedious work of writing non-fiction – research, fact-checking, actually crafting the prose.”
Very true. This comes up all the time in those popular historian plagiarism cases, where it turns out that the secret to churning out fat book after fat book year after year is to have other people doing your work for you. (In these cases, the defense against plagiarism is always that some unnamed “research assistant” was rushed and forgot to quote and cite or paraphrased too faithfully.)
And in the case of “public intellectual” types with heavy speaking engagements, how could you be writing researched books while constantly travelling and speaking to groups?
It’s kind of like the old masters, who ran workshops with lots of employees and had apprentices doing the grunt work on their chubby-nudes-by-the-yard.
LikeLike
their chubby-nudes-by-the-yard.
That’s an actual naturalist camp in Wisconsin.
LikeLike