This is a guest blog post from Cat Bennett author of The Confident Creative: Drawing to Free the Hand and Mind.

The Road to Yes

I’m a veteran writer of sorts. I’ve been writing all my life—journal entries, essays, stories. But I’ve always made my living as an artist, primarily as an illustrator.  Now I’m a newly published writer, the author of The Confident Creative / Drawing to Free the Hand and Mind.  Findhorn Press is my publisher and the day I received a yes from them was indeed a happy one. I remember reading once that getting a book published doesn’t really change your life, so writers shouldn’t hope for that. Published writers still get out of bed in the morning and do the things they do. Their bank accounts rarely burst at the seams from newly minted millions. It’s true my life is much as it was a year ago before my book was published. But it’s also radically changed—I feel a new freedom. Read more

This week we’re excited to offer a set of ten tips on publishing success from none other than Stan Hayward, who has had over thirty books published ranging from children’s stories to computer systems, as well as numerous projects to his name.

…And if you’re confused by the picture , it’s because Stan Hayward is also the creator of Henry’s Cat!

1. Keep a note book with you at all times and list ideas as they come
2. Have a book template in mind. This is a book that has been published and you would like yours to be similar Read more

Weekly Wisdom #11

Find a good (and preferably free) proof reader and get them to check your pitch and drafts well before your editor sees them!

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

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

Weekly Wisdom #10

Remember that good writing is about what you take out, not what you leave in!

I was really excited to discover this article by Katharine Reeve on Times Higher Education – it’s, of course, excellent!

Reeve picks up on the key point that drives this website, which is that there isn’t much support for academic writers when it comes to learning how to propose and write a book. She states:

“While fiction authors are surrounded by advice books, websites and degree courses designed to help them get published, academic authors are left to their own devices. How are you supposed to know what is and what is not a publishable text? An academic is generally a researcher first and a writer second: you may be an international authority on Viking headwear or poststructuralist theory, but you are unlikely to be as expert at writing full-length publishable books. Unless you have a savvy supervisor or have learned by trial and error, getting into print can be tough.” 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

Weekly Wisdom #9

When it comes to writing, disconnect from the internet for a while (or at the very least from social networking sites and email) and just write!

Oxford University Press is the largest university press in the world and publishes in all academic fields from multiple offices across the globe. Here, they share their 5 publishing Top Tips…….

1. We are always glad to hear from prospective authors.  We offer both general guidance on submission  and a set of relevant contacts as it is sometimes best to send the relevant subject editor a brief email describing the project.

2. The hurdles at which most first-book proposals fall is a) suitability (for the list) and b) likelihood of achieving a sufficient level of sale.  An initial email may help signal a project’s chances of clearing those particular hurdles. If an editor can encourage a submission, he or she will advise what should be sent. 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

Marianne Coleman, author of Educational Leadership and Management, provides her top tips on how to get published:

1. Be absolutely clear about your focus and the main point(s) you are trying to get across.

2. Don’t be too ambitious in what you try and cover. Most people write more than they intend to not less.

3. Do market research on potential publishers. Find out who is likely to publish material in your area and proposed format. 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!