Welcome to penultimate post in the series that is: The BubbleCow Guide to Academic Book Pitching. Let’s review where we’re at.

In Part I we looked at what a book pitch needs to do and why, and did a bit of homework. Then, in Part II we learnt how to write the query or covering letter as preview of what we’ve got to offer. In Part III we focused on how to write a synopsis of the book, and in Part IV we tackled the marketing section by identifying our book’s buyers and the books that have established its market.

A guide like this can never be comprehensive, but if you’ve worked through all the tasks, you should be well on your way to writing your proposal and query letter and getting it right. Again, I can’t emphasise enough how important it is to be clear, spell everything correctly and READ THE SUBMISSION GUIDELINES CAREFULLY FOR EVERY PITCH YOU MAKE AND STICK TO THEM LIKE GLUE!  Read more

Well, there are just a few instalments left of BubbleCow’s nifty guide to pitching your academic book, but there’s still work to be done. We have already looked at your query letter and synopsis, so now we turn our attention to your book’s intended market.

I hope you did your homework again?!

The section of your proposal that explains the market for your book is arguably the most important. This is because it will show the publishing house straight away whether your book is viable and the degree to which you, as prospective author, recognise that publishing is about selling books.   Read more

This is the third instalment of BubbleCow advice on crafting academic book proposals. So far we have looked at your query letter as a sales document and examined its structure. Now we turn our attention to the tricky subject of the pitch itself and in this post, the synopsis.

Although submission guidelines will vary from publisher to publisher, with some asking you to fill out an ‘author questionnaire’ and others asking for your CV, an indication of the intended market for the book, comparable texts and proposed peer reviewers, a tricky section of the pitch they will all want to see is the synopsis of the book.

The synopsis is perhaps one of the most commonly misunderstood sections of the book proposal. Writers who can produce pages of elegant prose often go weak at the knees at the simple mention of a synopsis.  Read more

Weekly Wisdom #15

Collect course reading lists and decide whether your book would make a useful addition or even a replacement for the core texts!

Right, here we go, the next part of our BubbleCow guide to academic book pitching! I hope you managed to complete your homework regarding the subject area(s) of your book, as it will come in very handy now.

In the last post we talked about how you need to see your query letter and synopsis as sales documents. And now we are going to look at the structure of a successful query letter.

A query letter needs to be concise and focussed. That said, it should be much more than a simple ‘please read my extract’. Last time, we highlighted the four aims of a query letter, these were to show:

1. You understand the marketplace, Your book will fit into their current list,
2. Your book will sell enough copies to make it worthwhile printing it in the first place, You, as an author, can support and promote your book. Read more

This is the first in a guest series by Gary Smailes of BubbleCow.

At BubbleCow we work with writers on a daily basis to help prepare their books for submission to publishers and agents. As part of this process we have taken the time to talk and listen to publishers and agents to discover exactly what they are looking for in a successful book proposal. In this series of 6 blog posts guest written by myself, Gary Smailes (with Charlotte Frost), I will share what we at BubbleCow have learned and give you, the writer, all the skills and tips needed to write a great query letter and book proposal.  Read more

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. Read more

little known fact is that the working title for this website was Platforming for Academic Publishing. I was very familiar with the idea that an author needs to be ‘visible’, preferably before they pitch, and I wanted to look at this specifically in relation to academia. I ditched the title because this isn’t all I wanted to do with this site and because it seemed a bit jargony in the end – and besides PhD2Published is way cuter!

I also didn’t start the site with looking at platform building, but instead I set about installing lots of ways to flood it with content on how to make your book pitch, as this seemed the best way to establish it. But I do want to visit this idea of the platform now and, as luck would have it, a good post just came out on Writer’s Relief to remind me. Although this article, ‘Author Platforms: What They Are, Why Agents And Editors Look For Them, And Whether You Need One To Get Your Book Published’ doesn’t tackle the idea of being an academic and having a demonstrable following for your work, it does look at the idea of the platform for the non-fiction author. Read more

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. Read more

Weekly Wisdom #8

Ask someone (who knows nothing about your field) to read your book summary and put it into their own words. They’ll likely do a better job of capturing its essence than you!

or the last post we looked very generally at the main areas of publishing. So now we can move onto analysing the specific focus of different academic publishers and the easiest way to do that is by looking more closely at who they are selling to.

For the academic publisher, there are three main ways of breaking down their target markets.

Firstly this can be very easily done by country or language. The big presses will have offices in different parts of the world and, in theory, can target a range of global markets. Smaller presses will likely target buyers in their country of origin and may extend to overseas buyers, but perhaps only those that speak the same language.

Secondly this is done by selling primarily to libraries or libraries and individuals. Some publishers, like Ashgate, for example, focus very much on the library market. A publisher like this might be working with a print run of as little as 250 books. Others consider their market to be the university educated public more widely, like Cambridge University Press. A publisher like this might well produce a print run in excess of 3000 book. Read more

Weekly Wisdom #7

Consider that university libraries may well buy your book based on a very short, text-only description so try and nail the writing of this right from the start!

ight, it’s going to be beneficial, before you go too far down the line of pitching to publishers, to learn a bit more of the basics about types of publishers, their imprints or departments, markets and lists or series. This is an area which you’d be forgiven for thinking you know all about; you read books all the time! Right? But don’t be fooled into thinking this gives you a knowledge of the publishing industry, it doesn’t! There are lots of publishing territories you won’t yet have mentally charted, and you need to have at least looked at a map before you set out.

So, over the next two blog posts, we’re going to take general look across the realm of publishing, eventually focusing in on the territory you need to claim: the beautiful land of academic publishing!

There are roughly five main types of publisher, these are:

Read more

Weekly Wisdom #5

Don’t be coy, pitch to the major publishers if you can see the gap in their list your book would fill!

Weekly Wisdom #3

Look at your own book shelves as an indication of who you should be pitching to!