Flight Paths
FLIGHT PATHS:
HOW A PASSIONATE AND QUIRKY GROUP
OF PIONEERING SCIENTISTS
SOLVED THE MYSTERY OF BIRD MIGRATION
Rebecca Heisman
HarperCollins, March 14, 2023, $30
ISBN-13: 9780063161146, ASIN: B0B3XRDLYL
Heisman reports:
The origins of Flight Paths go back to my pre-pandemic job as a one-person communications department for the American Ornithological Society. Reading paper after paper being published in the Society’s peer-reviewed journals and turning these papers into blog posts and press releases, I found myself fascinated by not only the results but also by the methods. Who knew you could study bird migration using weather radar? Or hydrogen isotopes in feathers? Or passive recordings of nocturnal flight calls?
Rebecca Heisman
When COVID-19 hit, I became one of the millions of women who left their jobs to take on more caregiving responsibilities at home. I also decided that the time had come to turn this fascination into a book proposal, eventually getting very lucky with both finding an agent and landing a contract.
I queried the woman who became my agent after seeing her mentioned in the acknowledgments of another popular science book with a similar target audience. She sold the book to an editor at HarperCollins who happened to be a birdwatcher.
My book tells how a century’s worth of technological advances has been harnessed to understand where birds go and why. It’s probably the only bird book you will ever read that delves into subjects like the invention of the transistor, the Human Genome Project, and the advent of machine learning.
The nitty gritty: I kept myself organized by creating a digital folder for each chapter, where I kept the PDFs of every paper I read, the recordings of every interview I conducted, etc. I also organized my citations as I went. I used Zotero software, which made creating the list of references in my finished manuscript MUCH easier than it might have been without it.
If I had it all to do over again, I would have done deeper research and more detailed outlining at the proposal stage instead of leaving myself with so much to figure out after I’d signed a book contract, but it all came together, and I’m very happy with the finished book. My advice to aspiring authors is just go for it! Make sure you have a topic you won’t be bored with after being immersed in it for several years!
Contact info:
- Rebecca Heisman: rebecca.heisman@gmail.com, https://rebeccaheisman.com/, @r_heisman, @r_heisman/
- Book: https://www.harpercollins.com/products/flight-paths-rebecca-heisman, https://rebeccaheisman.com/flight-paths/
- Publicist: Tracy Locke, Tracy.Locke@harpercollins.com
- Agent: Michelle Tessler: michelle@tessleragency.com
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Watch for announcements of NASW Books Committee Advance Copy virtual events on the NASW events calendar. Coming up: The Art of Writing Op-Eds That Boost Publicity, Thursday, March 16, 2023, 12:30 pm-1:30 pm PDT. View recordings of past events in NASW’s Video Archives.
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Banner image adapted from original photo by Rebecca Heisman. NASW members: please share photos of your office bookshelves for use on other pages of the NASW website. Upload photos to bit.ly/naswpicsubmit.
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