Prestel Publishing is one of the world’s leading publishers in the fields of art, architecture, photography, design, cultural history and ethnography. Although not specifically an academic publisher, Prestel have offered us their top 5 tips for pitching to publishers……..
Weekly Wisdom #6Summer is a bad time to pitch; people are at conferences or on holiday. Better to take the summer to work on it and get in fresh in September!
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:
As I’d decided this site was long over-due for a post on the actual nuts and bolts process of writing, I was grateful to find a post on Fuel Your Writing on Making Writing Easy: Practical Tools. It’s basically a list of tools to support your writing by helping you manage the process more effectively.
The interesting thing about doing a PhD, but which seldom gets discussed, is the natural way you tend to evolve your own techniques for writing and researching. I still like to hand-write notes when I do an initial trawl through a book, so when I started my PhD, I printed out a batch of note cover-pages. The cover-page allowed me to quickly and clearly record a complete reference for the book and summarise both its content and what areas were of particular relevance to my own research. It was a bit clunky (I didn’t get all the boxes the right size and never got round to changing it) but at times it was such a life saver when I knew I’d read something, somewhere, at some point that was sort of related…
Edward A. Shanken, author of Art and Electronic Media, offers some insight on how he has been successful in getting published. He explains:
The only thing I can figure out about why I got published early in my career and continue to get published is that I wrote (and hopefully continue to write) about things few other people are writing about but that quite a few people are hungry to read about.
1. It helps that the things I write about are super cool!
2. I try to have a catchy title and to start off with something that hooks the reader, whether it be an epigraph or a short anecdote.
3. I clearly establish a position with respect to a polemical issue.
Weekly Wisdom #5Don’t be coy, pitch to the major publishers if you can see the gap in their list your book would fill!
Weekly Wisdom #3Look at your own book shelves as an indication of who you should be pitching to!
Weekly Wisdom #2Don’t exaggerate the size of your prospective market in your pitch. It’s far better to indicate the niche to which it belongs than make naive claims for its general appeal!
Welcome to the first post in a regular series of weekly installments of academic publishing wisdom.
This is (smash the Tuesday morning Champagne on the, er, keyboard):
Be savvy and get paid gigs reviewing books that directly relate to the one you want to write!
Ashgate is a leading indepdendent press dedicated to publishing the finest academic research. What are Ashgate’s tips for first time authors? We offer four short tips, and one long document to read…
1. Do follow the publisher’s submission guidelines (these are usually available online).
2. Do focus on why your book should be read, not only on what it is about.
3. Don’t send the entire typescript if you’ve completed it. A single sample chapter will suffice in the first instance.
Read more
f you’re still with me, and have decided to go ahead and at least think about publishing your thesis, the second thing to do involves looking at it in a completely different way. I have no advice on how to get the perspective you need for this next part except to suggest that leaving the thesis alone for a while (months if you can) would help, as would performing some sort of ritual purging of the ‘thesis-thinking’ (I destroyed my desk, but this was rash, you will still need a desk to work at!).
But the point is, you need to look at your thesis with fresh eyes and as much as possible, without seeing it as a thesis!
K, the second post for this new blog (on how to get a book published, and advance your career and understanding of academic publishing after completing your PhD) comes in two parts and is about considering the publishing potential of your thesis.
So, you’re still on board? You still think that publishing a book is your (academic) destiny? Well, now you need to decide what your book is going to be about. This may sound like a very simple task, no doubt you’ve spent X amount of years fashioning your cosy niche and now you’re ready to tell everybody about it; not to mention have them remark (in their droves) upon what a clever, cosy little niche it is. But its actually not that simple. Read more
In the first of what will be a regular series of tips from academic publishers, Intellect give us their top five pieces of advice on getting published.
Intellect is an independent academic publisher in the fields of creative practice and popular culture, publishing scholarly books and journals that exemplify our mission as publishers of original thinking.
As a first step towards considering a new book project, we ask all authors to complete our author questionnaire (if a single authored monograph) or editor questionnaire (if an edited collection). Both can be found on our website under the Publish With Us section.
Intellect is also not keen on previously published material, textbooks, readers, companions and overviews that are aimed at the general reader. Make sure you aim your work at the academic market.
1. We are to provide a vital space for widening critical debate in new and emerging subjects, so think original and multidisciplinary and present scholarly work at the cross section of arts, media and creative practice.
In the first of what will be a regular series of tips from published authors, Catherine Mason provides her top five pieces of advice on getting published.
Mason’s first book was: A Computer In The Art Room: The Origins of British Computer Arts 1950-1980, and she was also one of the editors of: White Heat Cold Logic: British Computer Art 1960-1980.
1. Do your research. Locate the main players in your field who already publish similar books, and approach them first. Find out their preferred proposal formats (the publisher’s website will tell you this information often in great detail – follow it).
