About this project

You don't have to be smart to be a smart aleck. But it helps.

Hi. We're the Smart Aleck Staff. We write text books - in a way. We're serious about the subjects we cover, but we're not above taking shots at Ambrose Burnside's facial hair, going off on tangents about the Muppets, or making jokes about silly how other text books look when they try to bring the material "down to the students' level" (is any kid REALLY going to get into Shakespeare after seeing it re-written into slang that resembles the instructions to a skateboard-themed video game from 1990?) We like to think of ourselves as "study guides for the smart kids." The books are hilarious, but also ridiculously informative, with valuable lessons about info-literacy thrown in along with the book-specific material.

Our first book, THE SMART ALECK'S GUIDE TO AMERICAN HISTORY, was published by Random House in 2009 to fantastic reviews - and sales were good (for a young adult nonfiction title that isn't about "your changing body"). 

Here's what people said about it:

"Speeding along on humor, Daily Show-style,…the irreverent, often laugh-out-louad approach should win over reluctant readers." - Publisher's Weekly

"In the style of acclaimed writers Jon Stewart (The Daily Show) and Stephen Colbert (The Colbert Report), this witty, comedic and appealing volume….is sure to appeal to even the most reluctant of readers" - School Library Journal

"Pretty darn entertaining…valuable lessons about info-literacy…will enlighten, entertain, and might well motivate students to go on to check out in-depth books" - Richie's Picks

"This title makes history come alive by adding a little silliness and a lot of sarcasm and humor. Often witty and clever, the brief chapter and many jokes that cover early exploration to the Obama administration touch on the many important points of American history as well as the many plainly ridiculous and enjoyably obscure." - American Library Association

Naturally, we want to take our approach to American history and apply it to other subjects, as well. Rather than doing one book every few years for traditional publishers, we decided to do MANY guides on our own, ranging from guides to Shakespeare and Baseball to random things like Grave Robbing. E-publishing will let us cover topics for which there may not be a big market, since our overhead is low (nearly every student has to read Julius Caesar, so that's a no-brainer, but the fact that few teachers assign Timon of Athens won't stop us from doing a guide to that one, too!).  We trademarked the brand, formed an LLC, brought a few more experts onboard, and got to work! Most will be published as ebooks (priced from 2.99-4.99), though a few will probably still come out through traditional publishers. With low prices like these, we believe people will be willing to take a chance and learn about something they've never heard of or thought about, just because they know that all Smart Alecks Guides are fun -and fascinating- to read.

THis fall, we plan to launch with half a dozen new titles, including The Smart Aleck's Guide to:

Hamlet

Romeo and Juliet

Julius Caesar

Macbeth

Grave Robbing (history, theory and practice)

The Constitution and Our Founding Fathers (just in time for the Iowa caucus!)

Over the next few months after that, we'll be rolling out guides to Dickens, Jane Austen, Baseball History and Appreciation, 80s Horror, Great Films, Huckleberry Finn, and a whole lot more. Eventually, we want to cover everything Cliff's Notes does (plus a lot that they don't, like The Shakespeare Authorship Debate, and Thomas Middleton (a contemporary of Shakespeare whose time has come!), but our goal has always been to be twice as informative as other study guides and ten times as much fun to read. We don't want to get you kids THROUGH a subject, we want to get them INTO it. 

We may tell kids the things their teacher doesn't want them to know (or simply doesn't know), but the dirty little secret is that teachers tend to love us. Once we popped into a middle school in Ohio to thank a librarian for a fantastic review, and when she took us to meet the history teacher, he was actually reading to the class from our history book just as we came in!

But even though e-publishing many of the projects allows us to keep our overhead low, we still have fees for forming the LLC, trademarking, commissioning artwork, securing photo rights, copyediting, and, of course, ADVERTISING.