subject: 5 Tips for Getting your Scholarly Book Published [print this page] 5 Tips for Getting your Scholarly Book Published
It's no secret that venues for scholarly publication, especially in the humanities, have constricted in the last twenty years. Fiscal pressures have compelled many academic institutions to retrench. The upshot has been a reduction of operating subsidies for journals, a mandated narrowing of monograph publishers' editorial missions, and a concomitant increase of responsibility for prospective authors to document the marketability of their projects.
Many, perhaps most, scholars will find the last development an alien expectation, particularly when the average print run for a book is fewer than 1,000 copies. By dint of their vocational immersion in the world of ideas, academicians are unaccustomed to gauging the extrinsic worth of their work in terms of consumer demand. Now more than ever, however, those seeking publication are being called upon to validate why their manuscripts warrant the investment of institutionally limited capital. A new pragmatism has overtaken an earlier culture of scholarship for its own sake.
Given this shift in today's publishing environment, I offer below some tips to consider when investigating your publication prospects:
Why should the publisher be interested in your submission? Tailor your cover letter tightly to the journal's or press's formal mission statement. Demonstrate, in other words, that it is the right "fit" for your piece.
How will my submission complement or enhance the venue's extant line of releases? This too is part of the marketing game. As in the preceding entry, show that you are thoroughly familiar with the targeted publisher's past coverage.
Given your response to the preceding point, how will your manuscript, if accepted, attract new readers to the venue's backlist while also expanding its current clientele? (I use the last word intentionally.) Avoid generalities and bromides that carry little persuasive weight.
What can you contribute to the successful marketing of your text? If it is appropriate for classroom adoption, say so. Otherwise demarcate, again in concrete terms, the reading demographic for which your work is intended.
How, lastly, can you assist the prospective press in other ways of attracting attention to your monograph? Recommend, for example, review contacts in local/regional newspapers and journals with no-cost reciprocal arrangements for full-page advertisements.
All these considerations are secondary, of course, to your main channels of investigation and scholarly interest, but to one degree or another you will have to address them in today's world of highly competitive publishing. The trick, if you will, is not to believe that your job is done once you have completed the artifact itself. Like it or not, we are all enlisted in promoting our individual efforts within a market-driven economy.
