PhD2Published

art I of the Book Shelf Test looked at how your own book shelves can provide you with instant market research, showing you who is publishing what, and through which publishing houses.

If you already have your book planned in your mind (or indeed written) there’s another way of turning your book shelves into instant market research. Now you want to collect together all the books that most closely relate to the one you’re planning to pitch and write. Firstly, pile them up by publisher. This test is slightly less revelatory as you can probably predict the tallest pile before you start and you have probably also already made a mental note to pitch to this publisher. But is there a pile – even of only one book – that represents a publisher you hadn’t noticed before? If so, leap over to your computer and look them up and find out how they’ve categorised this book. The answer might be clear cut; that they publish books very relevant to your field but you hadn’t realised. Continue Reading »

ere we go, this is what I’m calling the Book Shelf Test (which it comes in two parts) and it’s going to save you a lot of time and answer a lot of questions so far as finding the right publisher is concerned.

In the last 2 part blog on Publishing Markets, I talked about publishing houses and their imprints. And I used the example that Indiana University Press has form in gender issues, and proved this for myself by looking at my own books. Well, rather than surfing for hours trying to connect some of these specialisms with publishing houses and imprints, you can do it just by looking at your own books.

So the first part of the Book Shelf Test is to test your own shelves for how they reflect the specific interests of different houses or imprints. And really, this is child’s play, because as most of them have logos, all you need to do is grab all the books from your shelves that have the same logo and then group them together into subject areas. Continue Reading »