Mary Roach on How Her Ideas Went From Magazine Pages to Bookshelves Across the Country

For someone who says she got into writing for lack of any other discernible job skills, Mary Roach has done pretty well for herself. After whipping out stories for the likes of Wired, Discover, Vogue, and GQ, Roach launched a book-writing career in 2003 with the runaway bestseller Stiff, which looked into the myriad ways cadavers are used in science and medicine after their previous occupants have passed on. Her latest book Bonk, about sex research, made a splash earlier this year, especially after reviewers and talk show hosts discovered that, as part of her research, Roach (and her husband) agreed to be the first-ever subjects for a study using ultrasound to scan genitalia “in the act,” as it were.

An early PR gig for the San Francisco Zoo primed the Bay Area-based Roach to explain obscure phenomena, like elephant wart surgery, to lay audiences. She freelanced on the side, initially with Image, the former San Francisco Chronicle / Examiner Sunday magazine, and eventually with national glossies like Outside, National Geographic, New Scientist, and The New York Times Magazine. Roach, who’s known for her quirky take on subjects at the periphery of polite discourse, gained celebrity for her former health and medicine column at Salon, where editors gave her the latitude to write about whatever caught her fancy. In return, they received pieces on subjects other publications might never have touched: vaginal weight-lifting, amputee bowling, and ultra-helpful Japanese toilets.

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Stiff became a New York Times bestseller and made the 2003 best books lists at Entertainment Weekly, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the Seattle Times, among others. Her second book, Spook, about research into the paranormal, was also a NYT bestseller and notable book of 2005.

Roach is currently at work on a fourth book, the topic of which she is currently keeping to herself. mediabistro.com caught up with her to discover the secret of how to springboard from freelance scribe to bestselling author.

If you had to boil it down, why do you think your books have done so well?
Part of the reason the second two are successful is because the first one was. It establishes you. It makes it a lot easier. The difficult part is the first book, getting people to pay attention and check you out, because no one knows who you are and what you do.

The reason Stiff was successful was a combination of things. It’s a subject that people are inherently fascinated by, because everybody dies. Also, it’s a taboo subject. Especially at that time. Six Feet Under had just debuted. I remember saying the in the proposal, “There’s this new series Six Feet Under that seems to be doing pretty well. The taboo is breaking down. It’s becoming OK for people to indulge their curiosity about being dead.” There was that timing phenomenon. That was serendipity. That wasn’t me figuring out, “Here’s a good time to pitch a book.”

So it’s a topic that’s of interest, a taboo topic, that everybody is curious about. But I don’t think that’s enough, because there was another book that came out around the same time called Corpse which did well, but didn’t do as well. I think the combination of death and humor was so unexpected that it got people talking. And I think for a first book to succeed, word-of-mouth is critical. Norton did a fantastic job with publicity. They gave it a good launch. I did a book tour. But nobody showed up at my readings. Nobody knew who I was. And the book didn’t hit the bestseller list until months later. It was a good launch; they did everything right. But the book began to snowball due to word-of-mouth and the strangeness of freshness of that combination of tone — humorous — and subject matter — dead people — that was unexpected. People talk about books that are surprising and fresh.

When you came up for the idea for Stiff, had you been looking for a book idea?
I’d been looking for a book idea for five years — or more. It was probably in the back of my mind the whole time I was in magazines. But I have a very short attention span, and I don’t do narrative stories. I don’t do the kind of feature that you see in the New York Times Magazine or Vanity Fair, which is an in-depth profile or narrative story. My style is a strange hybrid of science writing, humor, and first-person. I didn’t see it as lending itself to a book. There were no books out there that seemed to be a role model for me. So I would try to come up with something that would seem like what other books out there were like, and I couldn’t picture myself doing them.

[An agent] once contacted me and said, “We want to pair you up with a professor who’s written a book about how the apple in the Garden of Eden is really a pomegranate.” And I’m like, “First of all, who’s going to read this book?” And second, “Why would I do this? How does that overlap with my work or my style or my interests?” I was frustrated by the whole thing.

The other thing that happened was that I told an agent, “I don’t know how to do a proposal. I need some guidance.” And they sent me the proposal for Malcolm Gladwell’s Tipping Point, which is that thick [her thumb and forefinger are an inch apart]. It put me off books for years. I thought, “My God, you have to spend two years researching and writing this thing. It’s all on spec. What if no one buys it?” Well, as it turns out, you can throw together a 10-page piece of crap, and as long as it’s snappy and interesting…

Is that what you did?
I wrote 10 pages, 15 pages, double-spaced. Most of the stuff in the proposal didn’t end up in the book, because I really hadn’t done much research. But it’s a sales tool, and I threw the most interesting, intriguing, sexy dead-body stuff I could find at them. And they said, “Yeah.” My agent took it around, and people were interested. But for a long time, I was just intimidated by the whole process.

What was the a-ha moment with Stiff?
You want to know why it happened? It’s really pathetic. When I was at the Grotto [a writing community in San Francisco], every New Year‘s, three of us would go to lunch and we would make predictions for other people in the Grotto. So-and-so will have a movie deal. So-and-so will be married. So they made the prediction for me that I would have a book contract.

So time goes by. It’s October, and I realize I don’t have a book contract. In January, we would take out the list and go, “So-and-so didn’t get a book contract. So-and-so did get married.” So it was really shame and fear of failure that prompted me. I said, “Alright. You’re just going to write a frickin’ proposal.” An agent had contacted me, based on the Salon column, and said, “Do you have any book ideas?” We had a bunch of conversations. Stiff grew out of one of those conversations — and a desire not to be humiliated at the January 1 Grotto lunch. You need something, because the thing with a proposal is you don’t have a deadline. A deadline is a great motivator. But there’s no deadline on a book proposal, so you put it off.

The timing with Stiff was perfect, though, because I announced the deal at that lunch.

How did the Salon column come about?
David Talbot, the founder of Salon, used to be an editor at Image. Somebody at the Grotto had just gotten a contract to write a column there. So I sent him an email and said, “I hear you’re handing out column contracts. Let’s have lunch.”

Salon was so great. He was just like, “Yeah, OK, whatever you want to do, however you want to write. Just go ahead and do it.” It was so liberating because I’d been used to writing for more traditional magazines.

Do you have any takeaways based on your magazine experience?
The great thing about writing for magazines is that editors move around a lot. They don’t stick in one job that long. They tend to move up the ladder, and, logically, if they tend to like working with you, if they like your work, they’ll take you with them — which is so much easier than trying to write a query letter to an editor that you don’t know and who doesn’t know you.

I read somewhere that part of the initial idea for Stiff came out of the Salon column.
There were three cadaver-related columns, and the hit rates were really high. So that was a consideration. [It meant that] obviously I wasn’t the only person who found this stuff interesting. And that’s important when you’re thinking about a book — unless you just want to publish a book for your own personal satisfaction. If you’re trying to earn a living as an author, it’s important to consider the subject matter and try to envision who’s going to buy this book.

So Stiff was very successful. How did that play into Spook‘s trajectory? Did the publishers come back and say, “Hey, it’s been a great success. What do you want to do next?” Or were you already thinking about it?
I submitted another proposal. When you’ve done your first book, the proposal for the second book can be very sketchy. You know, they’re eager for you to get another book out there. If the first book is successful, they don’t call you up and harangue you about, “When are you going to get the book out?” or “When are you going to have another idea?” But they definitely like to have the second book. When the second book comes out, it boosts the sale of the first book.

So it’s like pitching. Once you have a relationship with an editor, you don’t have to submit fully fleshed-out queries.
Exactly.

So did you pitch Spook before Stiff came out, or after?
I sent the proposal for Spook just before Stiff launched. There’s a certain amount of strategy that goes into that. Nobody knew how well Stiff was going to do. So you can wait to see if your stock shoots up and then get the proposal out there. But if the book fails miserably, then you’re doomed for the second book. So I was riding a certain amount of anticipatory momentum for Stiff. People were excited about it, so we pitched it then, rather than waiting to see how it did. It was more of a sure thing.

Where did the pre-launch excitement come from?
There was a certain amount of buzz in the industry. They have a pretty good sense of how things are going well before a book comes out. From the sales reps, from the bookstores. All the ordering has been going on for a couple months beforehand, so there’s feedback going on in the industry.

Let’s get down to brass tacks. Many writers toiling in the trenches assume that, if they can get a bestselling book, they’ll be set financially. But money is sometimes a funny thing in this racket, especially when advances don’t always cover the several years it takes to crank out a book. Do you make a living at this?
I make a very good living. The books have done well. But when all I was doing was freelance magazine writing, I always managed to make a living at it, sometimes even a good living. I would do a mix of things that I really loved doing and that didn’t pay all that well, like Salon, and then I would work for the women’s magazines, which paid very well, but were annoying, for various reasons.

What you’ve accomplished is what a lot of writers would like to accomplish. There’s always the fantasy that, “If I could just do what she did, then my life would be perfect.” And yet, there are downsides to any job. So fill in the blank: Don’t do this job unless you like or can deal with X.
Don’t do this job unless you like or can deal with chronic self-doubt, anxiety, self-loathing. (Laughs) It’s like what I’m going through right now with this new book: This nagging sense that nobody’s going to be interested in it, so it constantly needs to be better — that I need to get out there and find better stuff.

So it never goes away?
No. What happens is, with your second book, you’re flying high. You’re thinking, “I can write about anything. People love me. They’ll buy my book.” Well, no, people have to be interested in the subject matter, and it’s got to really work. It’s not enough that your first book did well. With your second book, you are somewhat immune. And when it doesn’t do as well as the first book, then you’re completely horrified and brought down to earth. And then you go back into the cycle of self-doubt and self-loathing.

I’ve got volumes of stuff for the first half of this next book. I know what I want to include, but I can’t figure out how to order it, what’s going to work as the narrative structure for this chapter, following on that chapter, while enabling me to pull this stuff in. I know I’ll figure it out, but it’s just driving me crazy.

Do you have a methodology for working through that?
No, it’s just time. I write outlines, and I abandon them. I write another outline, and I abandon it. And I keep thinking along the way, “Now I’ve got it.” But I get more information, and I’m like, “No, I don’t have it.” It’s getting there. I’m much closer than I was before, but it’s really agony. The end result, though, if you beat yourself long enough and stick with it, is that it will work, and it will be good. And people think, “Hey, this reads like you just sat down, and it all came out.”

So what you’re saying is, it’s not really as easy as it looks.
Yeah, it’s not as easy as it looks.

Bonk just launched. What’s the most unexpected thing that’s happened since it came out?
A number of sex researchers have written to me to say how much they loved it. I didn’t expect it. I thought the reading public would enjoy it. But I thought that sex researchers, because they are MDs or psychologists, and the books and papers that they write, there’s no humor in them obviously — everything I’ve read is quite soberly presented — I thought they would not appreciate the tone that I took and feel it was somehow belittling. Anyway, it’s been really nicely received by that community. And people have even written to say, “Thank you for writing a book that’s funny.” That’s been really gratifying, because those are your harshest critics, people who already know all this stuff. They know the material.

Any insights into why they had that response?
I just think they enjoyed it. It was funny, but it was also accurate.

You’ve talked about how, with Stiff, you were trepidatious about approaching researchers who work with cadavers because they don’t necessarily want publicity.
Yes, same with Bonk.

You’ve also said you’re so grateful when people actually do agree to be interviewed. When they have all the reasons in the world to say no, why do you think they say yes?
I think they say yes because, by and large, people are decent and giving. I can’t come up with any other reason. To a certain extent, people are flattered that you are interested in their work. Or they feel that their work should be given more notice. They would like to have more recognition. These people work really hard, and I think sometimes they feel under-recognized. So if somebody’s going to take their work and expose it to a broader audience, they’re grateful for that. But I always figured that would be tempered by the fear that you would present it in a way that doesn’t take it seriously or isn’t accurate. I’m always amazed that people tend to, ultimately, say yes. And that they’re optimistic about the end product.

Now, though, a lot of them have read Stiff. I expect them to go, “I’ve read Stiff, and I don’t want anything to do with you because what I do is sensitive, and you’re not very sensitive.” But, in fact, people are wonderfully receptive to being in another book. Of course, there are a tremendous amount of people who never return my emails. But I don’t know if the emails have gone into a Spam box, or somebody just looked at my bio and said, “Yeah, I don’t think so.” But it is extraordinary to me the number of people who say yes when there’s every good reason to say no.

Tell me about a killer element in Stiff, Spook, or Bonk where you’re like, “Thank God I got that, because the book would have been so much less without it.”
For Stiff, I really, really, really needed to have the severed head lab [where Roach observes plastic surgeons practicing surgical techniques on human heads that have been separated from their bodies]. That’s the scene that everybody remembers. A roomful of people working on severed heads. It’s an inconceivably surreal, bizarre, fascinating scene, and I needed to get it. It was really hard. I initially contacted the organizer of the seminar who said, “You need to talk to the surgeon.” The surgeon never wrote back; surgeons are busy people. Finally, I found another surgeon who was going to be there, and I tried flirting with him. I ended up having to cash in a favor. I had done a story that had to do with a plastic surgeon, and I emailed him and said, “Do you know anybody on this list and can you help me?” And he did, and he got me in there.

For Bonk, the [sex] scene with Ed and me, which just fell into my lap. I’d read this one line in a Lancet article, saying, “In the future, I’m going to do a scan of human genital organs in coitus.” I wrote them and asked, “Can I be there for this historic event?” And [the researcher] said, “Well, we don’t have any volunteers.” And I knew that that’s the scene that people will talk about and would absolutely drive the publicity. So, even though it was incredibly awkward, and I feel so guilty putting my husband through it, it had to happen.

I noticed that you do a lot of interviews with random bloggers. That’s very generous. It takes time. Why do you it?
Blogs are equivalent to word-of-mouth, and word-of-mouth is how books catch on and do well. I also do it because, for the most part, if somebody approaches me and says, “I’d like to interview you,” who am I to say no, when I spend all my days going, “Hello, you don’t know me. I’d like to ask you some questions. Do you have a little time?” I think it’s this golden rule of being a writer/journalist, so I say yes.

Do a search for “Mary Roach” on Google, and the results are 50 percent you and 50 percent the semi-notorious American Idol competitor from Season Four. Has that ever caused any complications in real life?
Only in that, around the time I wanted to do a Web site, American Idol had bought one of the main Mary Roach URLs. It pissed me off. I had to wait until it expired.

What has happened more is that there’s another Mary Roach in Oakland [who has a very similar email address to Roach’s]. She’s kind enough to steer people in my direction. And she’s listed in the phone book, and I’m not, so she gets calls from people asking her to come to their benefits.

How to leap from magazine writing to books:
1. Entertain yourself. Find a subject you’re excited about, not just something that you know would make a good book. “You’re going to be with it for at least two years,” Roach says. “Hold back until you find something that is really compelling to you.”
2. Entertain others. Choose a subject that’s going to be interesting to others as well. If your topic doesn’t have an audience, the book is not going to sell. Try looking at past articles you’ve written. Which ones got really good responses? If possible, check Web logs and find the pieces that got lots of hits. Roach knew she was on to something when the dead-body-related columns she wrote for Salon generated spikes in traffic.
3. Do your thing. Trust your own voice and own way of writing. Roach put off writing a book for years because the kinds of nonfiction on the market weren’t the kind of writing she did, and she doubted she’d be successful trying to shoe-horn herself into a style that didn’t come naturally to her. Instead, she waited until she and an agent came up with an idea that was a good fit.
4. Just do it. Force yourself to sit down and pound out your proposal. It’s easy to procrastinate when no one’s actually waiting for your document. If necessary, do what Roach did and create an artificial reason for urgency. If the prospect of humiliating yourself in front of friends isn’t enough of an incentive, try the wallet. Promise five people you’ll pay them $100 each if you haven’t completed your proposal by a certain date.
5. Think “word-of-mouth.” When no one knows you, your best marketing is going to come in the form of personal recommendations from one reader to another. Include material in your book, like the severed head lab in Stiff or the sex scene in Bonk, that will get people talking. And be generous with bloggers who ask for interviews. You’ll get more bang for the buck doing an interview with a blogger — even if they only have 50 readers — than you will flying across the country for a bookstore reading where only two people show up.

E.B. Boyd is a freelance writer based in San Francisco.