Weekly Wisdom #17

Be realistic about manuscript delivery deadlines and don’t sign a contract based on a schedule you know you can’t keep!

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 week we have some really useful tips on how to publish your thesis from Palgrave Macmillan Publishing.

Palgrave Macmillan is a global academic publisher, part of the Macmillan Group, with strengths in the social sciences, humanities, and business. We publish textbooks, monographs, and trade books on an international scale.

Here are some insider publishing tips for prospective authors looking to publish their PhD thesis with us:

1.) Attend major conferences in your field and meet editors in person to discuss your ideas for publishing a book and receive some first feedback. Make sure your topic fits in with current events and debates and is of interest to a broad readership. Read more

Weekly Wisdom #16

Keep redrafting your pitch documents after each rejection or new piece of advice!

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

This week, Bruce Wands, author of Art of the Digital Age (Thames & Hudson) and Digital Creativity (John Wiley & Sons, Inc.), offers us some of his advice on getting published for the first time.

1. Do some research on publishers that release books like the one you are planning. They generally have a section of their website for prospective authors and how to submit a proposal. Follow their directions exactly. You’ll generally need to submit some sample chapters, a bio or CV, who the target audience is and who your competition will be. You may need to rewrite the proposal a few times before the publisher accepts your project, too.

2. Position your book for the widest possible audience. Publishers want sales and having a topic that speaks to a small audience won’t go over well when you propose it. 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

Weekly Wisdom #13

Speak at as many conferences as you can and make sure you mention your planned book!

Weekly Wisdom #12

Break book-pitching into short-term, medium-term and long-term tasks; don’t get overwhelmed!

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

Gylphi is an academic arts and humanities publisher focused on the twentieth century and beyond. It is home to the Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry, the forthcoming Transgressive Culture journal and book series, and the SF Storyworlds book series.

Here, they offer their top 5 tips for getting published……

1. What’s in a title?

A title (not the subtitle) should describe the book as precisely as possible in as few a words as possible. If you are going to use a pun make sure it describes your text, it is no good being undecipherable and profound. You don’t want to be writing for a readership so narrow that only those who already know the subject inside out will understand the title and buy your book.

Think also about librarians and booksellers looking for books to purchase. Will they, without specialist knowledge, know what your book is about? Bear in mind that they draw their information from databases that can cut short long titles. If your title is long and ends with the title of the subject or an author name, then the short version of your title may give no real indication about what the book is actually about.

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

This week, Jeff Johnson, author of American Advertising in Poland , offers us some of his own insight on getting published for the first time.

1. Talk to former professors, your friends, colleagues and any other people you have known in academia about your project. Ask them to share their publishing contacts and any information they may have. The people we know best can often help us a lot, we don’t often ask though.

2. A few weeks before a conference, make appointments with any relevant attending book editors to talk about your upcoming book projects. Have a prospectus for any book projects you are working on and a copy of your CV. Even if an editor isn’t interested in your current project, he/she may want to publish one of your future books. Keep in contact with the editors you meet and always make a point to say hi whenever both of you attend the same conference.  Read more