Academic Publication: Books

If you’re an early-career scholar in the humanities or other “book for tenure” field, getting your revised dissertation placed with an appropriate press is the meal ticket. Pulling this off depends on 1) the quality of your work and 2) your savvy traversing of the publishing domain. Here we’ll consider the variety of academic publishers, how to determine which ones to approach, what a book proposal looks like and how to make yours stand out, what to expect in the review process, and the respective roles of press and author in bringing a book to print. While the focus will be on monographs (manuscripts originating in a dissertation or other deep dive into a tightly defined topic), most of the discussion will be equally applicable to other projects such as textbooks, contributed volumes, and scholarly editions.