This episode is for scholars who are considering publishing their book with a trade press versus an academic press.
Leslie:
Hi, everyone. I am thrilled to welcome Dr. OiYan Poon onto your Words Unleashed podcast! Dr. Poon is an educator, author, speaker, and race and education scholar. She’s a senior research fellow for education equity at the NAACP LDF Thurgood Marshall Institute and co-director of the College Admissions Futures Collaborative.
She’s the author of the new book, Asian American is Not a Color: Conversations on Race, Affirmative Action, and Family, which she wrote to answer her young daughter’s questions about race, what it means to be Asian American, and how Asian Americans are shaping the future of race relations through debates over education policies. Such an important conversation!
OiYan and I know each other through our shared networks in Asian American Studies. And I also want to mention that she has published multiple books with different types of presses. So on top of her newest book, which we’re going to talk a lot about today, she’s also co-edited two scholarly books.
The first is Rethinking College Admissions, Research-Based Practice and Policy, published by Harvard Education Press in 2022, which was co-edited with Dr. Michael Bastido. And the second is Difficult Subjects, Insights and Strategies for Teaching about Race, Sexuality and Gender, published by Taylor Francis in 2023, which was co-edited with Dr. Badia Ahad Legardi.
And these are in addition to numerous highly cited academic journal articles on these topics. So, clearly OiYan is a prolific writer, but I especially wanted to have her on to talk about the experience of publishing her most recent book with Beacon Press, which is a trade/crossover press.
You know, one of the biggest dilemmas academic authors face, particularly when they have a topic with broad appeal, is whether they should pursue a trade press. But it’s really hard to find out answers because the trade publishing world is just a whole different ball game from scholarly publishing.
So my hope is that our conversation today can help demystify the process and give people more of a sense of direction. So, OiYan, welcome to the show!
OiYan:
Thanks for having me, Leslie. It’s really exciting to join you and your audience in conversation.
Leslie:
Yes, awesome. So why don’t we start by learning more about you?
The first thing I really like to ask everyone to kind of get grounded is if you can describe your background and journey through academia.
OiYan:
Yeah. So I am a practitioner first. I consider myself an educator first professionally. And so I actually never thought of myself as entering a faculty career until rather late in my life. I had already started a career in college student affairs, so I was a student affairs administrator for many years.
And somewhere in those years, somebody said to me, and to name them, it was a Stan Sue (who recently passed) the psychologist, who said to me, “You might want to consider getting a PhD because learning how to do research can really help you advance your social justice advocacy goals and leadership for changing the academy, changing higher education for marginalized students and populations.” So I kind of happened into the academy and realized I really do like research and writing.
It’s a struggle. It’s a really honorable struggle, I think, to enjoy writing once I get into it. And I landed in a tenure track position. Got tenure at my second university and then in 2020 decided it was time for me to go because I was tired of moving all over the place, all over the country for my career.
And my family and I decided, you know, we need to live in Chicago. That’s home for us. And I took a job in a foundation that funded research for many years, three and a half years, and then left last fall. And now I’m doing some consulting work through the positions that you mentioned and have a research fellowship with major civil rights organizations.
So it’s been a winding journey and perhaps not the most typical academic journey.
Leslie:
Yeah, but still something that sounds like it’s been very much guided by your principles and your values and your priorities.
OiYan:
Yeah, absolutely. And I think people sometimes ask me, “do you ever see yourself back in a tenure-line position?” and I’m like, “maybe, it depends, but there’s nothing really motivating me there right now.”
I’m enjoying being able to make an impact and I think that connects to why I went with the trade press too, was I really wanted a public impact with my work.
Leslie:
Yeah, I think that’s fantastic. And that’s a great segue to the next question, which is, can you tell listeners a bit about your latest book?
Let me say the title again so people can remember it: Asian American is Not a Color: Conversations on Race, Affirmative Action, and Family.
So I’m sure you get this a lot, but I would love to know what inspired you to write it, and what do you feel like are the main takeaways from your book?
OiYan:
Yeah, so I’ll start with the title because I think I’ve gotten a couple of raised eyebrows on social media and elsewhere.
With like, Asian American’s Not a Color, like, what does that mean? And really, those were my daughter’s words when she was three. And I opened the book with this story where she’s nine now. She was three in 2018. Just to bring us back in time. That was two years into the Trump Administration.
Children are getting separated from families at the southern border and just Black Lives Matter is really on the rise because of all these terrible extrajudicial killings of Black people. It was just a mess of a world, like, just like now, in a different moment.
And one night, this little three-year-old asked me, like, “Mom, are we Black or are we white, essentially?” And I said, “Well, we’re neither. We’re Asian American.” And she looked at me funny, you know, a little toddler, you know, imagine like the little chubby cheeks and chubby fingers and just all the squishy goodness. And she goes, “Mom, Asian America’s not a color. I don’t see it in my crayon box, right?”
I’m three, I’m going to preschool, and we’re learning our colors, and I don’t see that in the crayon box. It shocked me, and Leslie, I know you’re a sociologist, so you can appreciate this. My brain, my race scholar-trained brain, immediately went to, “Wow, yes, well, you’re absolutely correct. It is not a color.”
Omi and Winant in their canonical work, Racial Formation in the United States, or Yen Le Espiritu in her canonical work, Asian American Panethnicity. And I was like, well, this is ridiculous. Why did my brain go there?
And then I was struggling, basically, to be like, how do I explain? Yeah, Asian America is not a color. It’s a political identity. It’s contested. It’s fluid. It’s all these things, but that doesn’t make sense for a three-year-old. And I would argue it doesn’t make sense for most people not in the academy, right? And so that was the inspiration. It was like this challenge from this little child that I love so dearly to try to explain the world to very natural questions.
So that was the inspiration behind the book.
Leslie:
What are some of those questions that you cover in the different chapters?
OiYan:
So every chapter opens and closes with storytelling. It’s letters to my daughter Tete. So that’s the format of the book. So it’s partly epistolary, it’s partly memoir, but all that memoir and letter writing is framing my research.
So for the last 10 years, I’ve been doing research on why do Asian Americans feel different ways about racialized policies, and in this case, affirmative action. So, I’ve been very active as a scholar in college admissions work, and you mentioned one of my other books, Rethinking College Admissions, so Asian American racial politics is one thread of my research. And then the other one is, how do these high-stakes decisions get made by organizations and institutions? And so every chapter goes into some of that research. So it opens up with a little bit of Asian American history. And then the following chapter goes into like, well, what is college admissions and how does it work?
And then I feel like the meat of the book: one chapter goes into why do some Asian Americans, and in the research I did, it was all Chinese Americans and mostly men, mostly immigrants as well, more recent immigrants, and professional class immigrants, I should say, who were really adamantly opposed to race-conscious admissions and equity policies and why, right, really digging into why and who they were and having them tell me their stories. And then the following chapter goes into why do Asian Americans support affirmative action and equity policies.
So to answer my daughter’s questions on what does it mean to be Asian American, I basically shared the stories that all these different Asian Americans shared with me. Because when I interviewed these people and asked them like, “well, why do you feel this way about college admissions and affirmative action?” People were really sharing with me their life stories. And it went way deeper than who should get into, say, Harvard. And so that was really striking to me in the research that I did.
And I really wanted to honor those life stories that people were sharing with me, even the ones who I deeply disagreed with in policy positions. I still saw a familiarity with them as someone who identifies as Asian American too. And so the whole book does indeed try to answer my daughter’s questions about these complicated issues about race and identity but not fully in that academic theoretical way. I have those academic journal articles published if you ever want to go into the deep methodology and the deep theorizing behind it, but I really wanted to just tell stories in this book.
Leslie:
Oh, 100 percent! And I’ve read your book. I actually got it from the local library, which is a rarity. Yeah, I am such a huge proponent of using storytelling. I feel like our human brains are designed to learn through stories. That’s what stays with us is the stories. We learn concepts that way, theoretical and otherwise.
And I’m wondering with all the stories that you tell, particularly in writing these letters to your daughter, did that make it easier for you to write or more challenging coming from an academic background?
OiYan:
I would say it made it more fun and challenging, right? It made it more super deeply meaningful because there was just a lot of emotion and tears in the writing process and just unpacking things and just realizing, wow, becoming a mom has really just transformed my–I know you’re a parent too, so like, it’s just transformed my entire outlook on the world and the work that we do.
And so it was really meaningful, emotional, and in that way it made it harder. And I think in talking to some friends who are not academics recently, who had also read it, they said, “Oh, I could kind of feel like this tension,” like I was trying not to slip into academic-ease. So that was really hard because after 20 years of writing in that way and feeling like there’s a particular way we have to demonstrate and illustrate and substantiate our arguments, that was a struggle.
Leslie:
Yeah, no, I can believe it. So congratulations on being able to get through that struggle and come out with a fully published, very successful book. Thank you.
So, like I mentioned, you’ve published books with both academic presses and now with a trade press that publishes crossover books. I’m just very curious how you decided to publish with Beacon instead of an academic press and how that whole experience was different for you?
OiYan:
Yeah, this is a great question. I have always admired Beacon’s catalog. I mean, like James Baldwin, Robin D. G. Kelly, Octavia Butler, you know, I mean, it’s like some big names in their catalog, really impressive works. And I felt like there was a little more storytelling and leeway. And initially, I was thinking, “well, let me just stick to what I know, let me stick to academic presses.” And I thought about it, and I was hearing stories from friends about their experiences with different presses, because that’s what you do, you ask people, “well, what was your experience here and there?”
And some people were saying, “Oh, you know, due to budget cuts, some of them are no longer going to conferences and selling books. There is no marketing. There’s very little publicity outside of academic circles.” And that was also my experience with the academic presses. It was like, yeah, it hit up the academic audiences very well.
But that’s, not necessarily the only audience I was interested in anymore, and I think that’s what was the most striking thing with my exchange with my daughter when she was three, just realizing that I don’t know how to talk to regular people about these things I’ve studied for so long. So it goes back to that, like, let me challenge myself to go outside of these academic audiences.
Not to say academic presses don’t get to more general audiences. Like, I feel like Princeton Press, Oxford, they do a really good job, and other presses of course too, but it’s not their priority necessarily to really publicize outside of academic circles. That’s their niche. That’s their marketing niche.
So I think just knowing who the audience is, I wanted to hit up. And I also when I was on vacation, I hit up every local independent bookstore and I can spend hours and days in these bookstores and I just love it and I was like, there’s just this little bucket list thing I want to get off, which is I want to be able to walk into an independent bookstore and see one of my books there.
It would just be a dream come true and there, dream has come true and it does feel as delicious as I thought it would be.
Leslie:
Amazing. That’s so awesome. So I imagine you talked to different presses in order to land with Beacon. So what was that whole thing like?
OiYan:
That whole process? Yeah, I probably should have done a little more research, but I did literally, I was at a conference, AERA, a couple of years ago, and Beacon was exhibiting and I walked up and I said, “What does it take to publish with Beacon?” And I was talking to Rachel, the executive editor, and she goes, “well, you would email me!” And so we started a conversation on the spot and it was a lovely conversation. And I really enjoyed our conversation that day and onward. She really understood, I think, and was really enthusiastic about what I was trying to do and they saw this book ideas being very much aligned with their mission of a public good, public mission.
And honestly, I didn’t go past that. I mean, other presses that were on my mind were like New Press or Basic Books or Haymarket. These other kind of little bit crossover public audience kind of presses. But I just had such a good feel with Rachel from right off the bat that and that’s how it happened.
Leslie:
Yeah, totally. I mean, it’s so important that relationship with the editor and just feeling like on a gut level that they really get your project and are really supportive and they’re going to push it through. The vibe check was there.
So how did that compare then with, I don’t know, how much you want to talk about the process of working with the trade press? But maybe you could point out some of the differences now that you’ve worked with academic ones too.
OiYan:
Yeah. Well, right off the bat, the biggest difference was money. They paid me, they made me an offer and it just floored me. I also have to say I did not have an agent and in retrospect, I feel like there’s a lot of lessons that I have learned that if I ever publish a book again in the future, I definitely want to get an agent.
And we can talk about what that entails to at least what I’ve learned. I still don’t have an agent. I would love to have an agent. Please contact me! But I think money off the bat, the negotiation of it. I do wish I’d had an agent to help me negotiate. Not just the money, but other things, right? Like parts of the contract, like around publicity and marketing.
And there’s little things that I didn’t realize that you could do, like ask for a certain number of advanced copies. And they gave me automatically the first prints so I could give away and whatnot. But there’s just a lot of things I feel like I don’t know because I didn’t know without an agent that could have been part of the contract.
I generally accepted the contract that was offered.
Leslie:
And I think because people never think about academic books in terms of money, right? Like you get maybe a hundred dollars a year of royalties. Like that’s actually the money is your salary goes up.
And so when we’re talking about money with trade books, is it an advance and then royalties?
OiYan:
That was the word I was looking for. Yeah, it was advance. Right. And so in talking with some of my friends who now have trade press contracts, their advances were significantly more than my advance was. And it was really helpful to have these advances because I used some of that money to rent out a hotel room and give myself a little solo writing retreat.
I was able to not just ask friends for, “Hey, can you read this section for me? But can I also take you out to a dinner?” Or “can I, like, send you a little bit of money just as a little thank you? Or use some of that money to do a launch party?” Yeah, I had cookies with the cover of the book on the cookies, which were a huge hit. So, you know, little things like this that in the academic world, you don’t think about. Or you pay out of pocket. Or you ask for free labor. Yes. Yeah, and I didn’t. I was like, “wow, I don’t need to ask for free labor this time around!” That’s pretty nice.
Leslie:
That’s great. Was it also a review process? Was it similar or different to academic reviewers?
OiYan:
Yeah, there was no mass peer review, whereas in my academic books there were peer reviews and feedback that came back. It was everyone on the Beacon team from marketing to sales to publicity to finance to just everyone in their office.
They have regular meetings of their cross-departmental teams. And it got pitched by the editors and everyone talked about it and that kind of thing. So it was, I think it was more like a marketability. Is it clear? Is the writing good? kind of question, which is very different than an academic book, but I still feel solid on the research despite, you know, cause it is based on– I do have peer-reviewed research that is forming the foundation of the book.
Leslie:
Yeah, that’s still so interesting though, and I wonder if it’s a little bit freeing in some ways to not having to meet rigorous standards in terms of an argument and evidence. How did you feel about that?
OiYan:
I loved it. It was freeing like you’re saying. It opened up possibilities for storytelling.
I mean, one of the first presses that I did pitch and send a proposal for this book prior to Beacon was an academic university press. There was no interest in it because they were like, I wasn’t interested in writing like an in-depth methodological piece and pull the threads of the theory through it all. It was just more an argumentation. And so there was no interest in the academic press. And I think that rejection was a gift.
Leslie:
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it opened your ideas up to a much bigger audience, I presume.
OiYan:
Yeah. Well, I’m hoping so. It’s only been a couple months, but I am hoping so. Yeah.
Leslie:
Yeah. So if you weren’t getting as much feedback from reviewers, how do you ensure that the writing is as good as it can be?
OiYan:
So for the last two or three years, maybe four years now, oh my gosh, I have had a beautiful little cross-disciplinary writing group that meets once a month. We always joke about how this sounds like the opening to a joke.
Um, there’s a historian, there’s a sociologist, there’s a political scientist, and me as an ed scholar, the four of us meet once a month and we take turns. Somebody each month is up with their work and we read each other’s snippets of work and we discuss it. And so that group, which included Anthony Ocampo, Janelle Wong, and Ellen Wu, They really gave me just phenomenal feedback throughout in terms of my voice and in terms of like the evidence. Ellen, especially as the consummate historian, you know, with the history chapter, I was really nervous about having her read it. Yeah. So there’s little sentences in there, little points that I make in that history chapter that are really for her.
However, like, based on the secondary stuff, and so, they were really rigorous with their review, but they were also pushing against the jargon. Like, in education, and I think, like, policy and social science, applied social sciences, we use the term “theory of change” a lot. And, I still kept theory of change or approaches to change in one of the chapters but, I had to explain it, right? So the three of them, for instance, were like, “this sounds jargony.” So they were putting on their different hats and pushing me not only on the rigor and evidence, but also on the voice and audience, which I really appreciated. So they were the ones who really made me rewrite things and that kind of thing.
Beacon was just very supportive and maybe my writing is that great, I don’t know, but they were like, “this is great, this is fantastic. Maybe cut out some block quotes, right? Or like condense them or paraphrase them.” Probably that paraphrasing point was the most in-depth writing feedback they gave me, so I’m glad I had this other space where I was really revising.
Leslie:
Yeah, I think it’s so important to have multiple eyes on your work. Not too many. I mean, once in a while people can get way too much feedback and then it’s really hard to incorporate and really find your own voice. But it’s great that you have this multidisciplinary group of experts who can also see that they’re actually not your primary audience.
You know, so that it’s still readable for regular folks who are just, they’re really curious. They want to know how to talk about these issues with their own kids, and they want to know from an expert some of the real history and the facts and the evidence, but in a way that’s very appropriate, right? It’s still something you want to read as a regular person.
OiYan:
Yes. And, you know, I just listened to one of your previous episodes on developmental editing, and I was like, “Oh, that’s great. Maybe I should have thought about having a developmental editor.”
Leslie:
I think there’s like so many resources out there that you just don’t know until you know. And I think I’ve mentioned a number of times that it wasn’t until I was in my second tenure track position that I had even heard the term developmental editor. And I was like, “wait a second, is that like a shortcut? Are people cheating? You know, hiring folks to write for them?” No, it’s not. It’s really just someone who’s there to make the story cohesive and not really be an expert on your work, but be that external voice that you may not get that kind of feedback from an editor at your press. Ideally, you would, but they don’t have that kind of time.
OiYan:
Exactly. So I think that developmental editor, if I write my next book, I will definitely be hiring one.
Leslie:
Yeah. It also just makes it like, what do you need? You need accountability, right? You need someone to help you weave threads all the way through.
Maybe it’s not an argument, but it’s just thematically. So the thing doesn’t read like six different separate pieces. And so yeah, lots of things that can be done to really strengthen your voice. I’m curious too about the marketing.
So we all know that in scholarly publishing, there’s almost no money in marketing, and so it’s really on the shoulders of authors to take responsibility for that. So what has your experience been like with this book?
OiYan:
Yeah, I mean, again, another difference between academic and trade press, at least in my experience, there was a scheduled meeting with the marketing and sales team. where we talked through ideas that they had.
I know that the book cover was market tested or whatever, like Penguin Random House is the distributor for Beacon. And so they had a big hand in designing the cover. And so just having experts in those fields working with me on this project was really different, a big first. They have their own contacts and press contacts. But also a lot of author friends who have published in trade presses have told me you should also hire your own publicity, hire your own team.
Or like my friend Curtis Chin, who wrote the memoir, Everything I Ever Learned, I Learned in a Chinese Restaurant, he was wonderful in talking to me about, well, he’s been on like this whirlwind national, and I would say global tour which he has really organized himself, and I think he may have hired somebody as well. But my goal was not to, like, travel all that much, you know, having a small child at home and a partner in a busy life at home. Don’t have that time, and so sure, hitting up bookstores and whatever is nice, but then also doing podcasts like this is just really important, building the relationships, but also writing op-eds is really important.
But having that publicity team got me onto a national NPR podcast and show when the book came out. So there’s things like that that were really nice. But thinking about just relationship building, I’ve learned about what’s called Bookstagram or BookTok. On TikTok, there are all these folks who just read for fun and post about books that they’ve read and share with each other. And those are extensive networks. So just building relationships, I think, is really central to getting the word out.
Leslie:
Yeah, yeah, and I know you didn’t want to travel much, but you’ve still done a number of different speaking engagements and bookstore appearances and things like that. So, have those events felt any different since the general audience is actually, general public is reading your book?
OiYan:
I love bookstore events! They’re so fun because typically, so this is very different than an academic conference. The discussant or interlocutor, I’m usually like with somebody in conversation like we are right now. Those people have been a lot of public radio people and that really indicates who I am. I love public radio. And so a lot of local public radio folks have been my interlocutors. But also friends like Anthony Ocampo or Taz Ahmed.
And then the audiences, like the one that I just did in Somerville outside of Boston at Porter Square Books, my whole family was there. And it was the greatest compliment when my dad didn’t fall asleep. Literally, he didn’t fall asleep. My cousins were there, my nephews, and friends. I’ve reconnected with friends at bookstores I haven’t seen in 20 years. They’re not going to go to academic conferences, right? But these people are going to come to a local bookstore or library.
Yeah, I did the Chatham Square Library in New York City. That was really fun. Just having conversation and connecting and just people bringing up questions that I don’t think we get at academic conferences.
Leslie:
Like what?
OiYan:
Oh, just really applied things, right? Some people who read it, they were like, Oh my gosh, how did you handle this person who– there’s a story I tell in one of the chapters where one of the people I interviewed who was opposed to affirmative action really like trash talked my family without even knowing my family. Right. Like I tell this story where I asked, you know, before you say, “okay, I’m going to start the recorder during an interview. Right. I was like, do you have any other questions?” And this guy goes, like, “yeah, I do, actually. Are you Chinatown Chinese?” And I was like, “excuse me?”
Leslie:
Oh my goodness.
OiYan:
And he was like, “you know, your parents probably came here and were like restaurant workers and garment factory workers.” And, you know, he was basically class-shaming my family. And I was like, “yeah, they were restaurant workers and garment factory workers. You also forgot the casino workers, right?” And so people have had questions about those stories or with the election coming up, people have been asking a lot about like, “what’s the implications for our national politics right now?”
I don’t think those are necessarily the conversations or questions that are coming up for me at my academic conferences about when I did present on this work. It was more like methodological questions, theoretical, why did I choose this theory and not that theory, you know what I mean? Like, it’s just, yeah, important but not the same.
Leslie:
Yeah, more applied because that’s how people are thinking about the work is how do they apply it to their lives. Right. And so just in like hearing you talk about this whole process, I really like that the word fun has come up so much because that’s so not the experience of most of my clients and myself when I was writing academic books.
And so maybe just like a final question, how do you make writing more fun?
OiYan:
Being in community. I am a big believer in these kinds of monthly check-ins with friends. I mean, half of our, yeah, I don’t know if I’m spilling too much tea, but like I want to say like the first 15 minutes of these monthly meetings that we have for my book writing group or my writing group is a little bit of, you know, gossip that we’re like sharing or about. What’s happening in each other’s lives and just checking in with each other.
Once a year I really do like doing an in-person writing retreat that isn’t all writing, it’s wellness too and it’s walking and just cooking together and being with each other. And so there’s that, and then just, I’m a big believer in just writing a little bit a day regularly and not making it too anxiety triggering, I guess, but being in conversation, that’s been what’s made it really fun.
Leslie:
And your book is all conversation, so that makes a lot of sense. So what is the best way for listeners to connect with you?
OiYan:
There’s not a lot of OiYan Poons out there in the world, so if you just google me, you’ll find my website, which is oiyanpoon.com or also publicpedagogy.info. On Instagram, I’m oiyanpoon, on Twitter/ X, I’m still SpamFriedRice because it’s delicious and it’s a nod to, I feel like, Asian American heritage. Yeah. There’s a lot of different ways you can find me.
Leslie:
Awesome. So thank you so much for sharing your experiences and your strategies and your ideas with my listeners! So, please, everyone, go out and buy the book, Asian American is Not a Color, Conversations on Race, Affirmative Action, and Family, which is available at all book retailers.
And maybe you should go to your independent bookstore and pick it up there. Yes. So, again, thanks so much again.
If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to listen to:
Ep. 70 – Becoming a Public Scholar: Making an Impact Beyond Academia (with Dr. Kevin R. McClure)
Ep. 67: Three Reasons Why You Need to Write More Simply (with Dr. Oiyan Poon)
