I'm playing with the idea of just allowing myself to really have fun with this project. I've actually tried to be slightly stodgy in my writing for this monster project, which is probably silly of me -- especially since I write ever so much better when I'm having fun. Someone in publishing told me the story of how a friend who wrote novels when they just had fun with it wrote ever so much better too. These things do come through....But I do also plan to investigate the market for this sort of approach quite soon.
The very next day I posted,
Looks to me like the books that are published on lifestyles are almost all written well or illustrated well. Of course the most wonderful ones are both, but a publisher can't always afford a heavily illustrated book for most audiences. There's a great-looking one on Paris, eg, but that would have a much huger audience than, oh, mine! They can also demand a price about 5x more than the barely illustrated books I saw. But I see that both academic and popular presses publish books with a lighter though very reliable approach. It's just I've seen so few in my subject area that I wondered, but I'm seeing a lot to do with Europe including ancient Greece etc. It's about time to have a good synthesis like I'm dreaming of and spending an inordinate number of years working on!
