We have a new book on the 2012 presidential election, The Gamble, that provides one model for public engagement. The book was designed to be an accessible academic account of the election, written in real time and published within a year of the election itself — standard timing for books focused on the general public, but an unusually short time frame for a scholarly book. Together with our publisher, Princeton University Press, we structured the project so that we could enter into the ongoing public discussion about the election alongside pundits and journalists — via continuous analysis and writing, serializing the process of peer review, and accelerating the final mechanics of publication.
Our experience writing this book suggests to us that there are underutilized opportunities for both scholars and their publishers to innovate on traditional modes of academic writing and thereby bring scholarly research to a much larger audience. We joked over the past two years that part of “the gamble” was simply writing the book itself. We believe that this gamble has paid off, and we offer our story in hopes that it might encourage others to roll the dice. We think this sort of project can benefit scholars, publishers, and the broader public alike.