Of Zombies and Book Marketing

I'm 61,000 words into a book about zombies. It's sort of a history book, but I'm a historian so I shouldn't be expected to write novels. I'm not honestly sure I'd be able to write a novel anyway, since it seems like you need to be really good at understanding human relationships to do so and I've spent most of the last eight years in the company of historians who died before the birth of Christ. Anyway, I've spent the last months finalizing the thing, and I'm nearly at the publishing phase.

The problem is, I'm not sure If writing the thing was anything more than a mental exercise at this point...academia doesn't train you to understand things like marketing, and it doesn't give you a very good grasp of much outside the realm of the academy. The "normal" people we encounter are all students who enter our domain and are forced to bend themselves to the rules they find there. We connect with them for the most part on our own terms. Footnote this way. Margins should be one inch. You didn't grasp the author's full argument. You didn't read about who Diodorus Siculus was, so you can't understand his history.

Academics don't have to market their books. If three people read it, fine. My dissertation is "Slave and Peasant Rebellions in the Roman Republic." I can count on two hands the number of people in the world who've done work on the subject besides myself. And some of them are now deceased, if I remember correctly. We're not used to writing things that people might want to read...rather, we produce volumes that fill gaps in the scholarship, even if that gap is a very narrow one and has been sort of wedged open on purpose in an attempt to find something to write about. We even learn our own dialect of the English language, which we use when we speak to one another away from the undergraduates...if you're going to graduate school and you read this, then get ready to use "discourse" and "historical actor" and other such terms that nobody else normally uses. A lot.

I'm afraid as I get ready to publish my book (which I refer to as my "zombie book," as opposed to my "cat book") that I've been absorbed by graduate school so long that the experience has warped me...that I might be getting excited about things that everybody else could care less about. Even with a book about zombies. Historians are trained to be professional nitpickers, and I'm trying to re-learn how other people in the "real world" live and interact. Take me to your leader(s), I suppose...