<p>Are most scholarship/non-fiction books (excluding self-help books) written by professors?</p>
<p>From my observation, it seems like professors have authored most of the higher-level articles and non-fiction books that I’ve read. However, it could also be that what I read comes from a very small pool.</p>
<p>If you do think that professors are over-represented as book writers, why would that would be so? </p>
<p>Do you think it has something to do with tenure/academic freedom; in other words, learned people in industry don’t want to alienate their employers and potentially jeopardize their jobs by writing something perceived as controversial or provocative? Hence, society tends to leave the writing to the professors.</p>
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<li><p>Other than professors, very few people have jobs where researching and writing books is a big part of what they are paid to do, and where taking paid leave to finish a book is an accepted norm. Journalists – who produce a heck of a lot of nonfiction books, too – are paid to research and to write, but when they want to turn what they have written into a book they tend to have to take unpaid leave or to stop sleeping for awhile.</p></li>
<li><p>Every college in the country needs people to teach writing (including nonfiction writing), and all of them love to have brand-name authors as their writing teachers. And writing teachers don’t necessarily have to have PhDs. So if you have any success at all as an author, you will probably have a chance to get some kind of academic job if you want it. Even if it’s not full-pay with tenure, every little bit helps, including (especially) things like health insurance. </p></li>
<li><p>Only a tiny percentage of authors can actually survive on their publishing royalties. A non-academic author who publishes a book every 4-5 years that sells 50,000 copies is someone who struggles to maintain a middle-class lifestyle. An academic who publishes a book every 4-5 years that sells 50,000 copies is a superstar.</p></li>
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<p>Look at Robert Caro, who is a very successful historian with (as far as I know) no academic appointment. He has done very well for himself. But he basically went bankrupt while he was writing his breakout biography of Robert Moses. And if that book hadn’t become a huge best-seller, it would have been awfully hard for him to finance the years of research and writing he had to put in before publishing the first volume of his LBJ biography. So if you are someone like Robert Caro, but you don’t get Robert Caro-level sales, either you take an academic job somewhere, or you stop writing densely researched biographies.</p>
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<li><p>Academia is also where politicians and public servants who are out of power go to lick their wounds and write their nonfiction books. It’s basically another version of the same dynamic: They get health insurance and some cash flow while they write. The university gets a brand-name personality on campus, sometimes even talking to students (but at least hanging out with the faculty sometimes, and thus keeping them from bolting).</p></li>
<li><p>That said, I think lots of books come from two other sources: Journalists (who can also wind up taking academic appointments, either as writing teachers or in j-schools), and people who work in publishing (who know what will get published and maybe sell).</p></li>
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