You doing the academic book thing? Dope! A thread.
1. Do your homework. Sometimes the most prestigious academic press that (more) established scholars fawn over ain't meant for your research. Peep their acquisition editors, their titles, etc. Is it a fit?

2. Don't cold-submit a manuscript. Reach out to an editor. Talk about your work. Tell them where you are in the project. If y'all vibe, they'll ask to see what you got. Have it ready. Which leads to my next suggestions:
3. Don't waste your time or the editor/press' time. Bring your A game. If you are revising your diss, you need to scrap it to its bare bones starring YOU. You the authority. All that citing needs to fall back to the footnotes LOL. How are you changing/adding to the convo?
4. If you are starting from scratch - I did with Chronicling Stankonia - take some to figure out your burning question and its potential answer and learn to elevator pitch it. What you talking about? Why is it relevant? What new ground you breaking or revisiting?
5. Aight so boom you get invited to submit a proposal for peer review. Aaaaye! Your proposal is the blueprint: What's your project about? Why should it be published? Who would you be next to on the shelf? What makes you shine? Why xyz press? What is your timeline?
6. Your proposal also includes sample chapters. These are the appetizer and should give a vibe of your larger project. I suggest your intro and a "new money" chapter. The "new money" chapter shows you owning your shit and shining bright with originality and intention.
7. Show the editor and reviewers that you know what you talking about, are familiar with the field but not parroting that knowledge, and that your project is grappling with some necessary questions and you got necessary answers.
8. The proposal review takes time. Presses gotta find somebody who will do you right and have time to read. This is crucial. You don't want this rushed. If you have senior scholars in the field that can read your work, suggest them as reviewers to your editor.
9. Your editor finds readers! Woo! They send back reviews that suggest whether or not you are ready to go with a contract. We claiming all good energy, so yeah, you got two positive reports! You turn up.
10. After the turn up, you write a memo acknowledging your readers suggestions for improving the manuscript and how you will incorporate the ones that make sense into your project. You submit to your editor. They discuss with the press and possibly their board for approval.
11. Aaaaye issa contract! There's usually two types: a "contract contract" and an "advanced contract." A "contract contract" is for a complete manuscript. Advanced contracts are for those projects not quite finished but strong enough that a published manuscript will happen.
12. Celebrate. You are under contract! Make time to celebrate every victory in the book publishing process. It's a daunting and heavy-labor process. Good luck!

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Writing effectively.

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1. Start with building your writing habit by leveraging @jamesclear's Four Laws of Behavior


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I can second this observation through personal experience. I was only able to start writing because "it's just dumb weeb fanfiction quests, who cares." 100,000 pages of dumb weeb fanfic later, and I actually got better... but only because I was trying my best with every page.


"It's dumb weeb fanfiction" gave me permission to be bad, to vomit things onto the page that I knew fell far short of what I wanted it to be. To just write and write instead of laboring over six paragraphs for weeks like I'd always done before.

But I still *wanted* to be good.

Writing is HARD. And unfortunately, most people don't appreciate just how hard writing (or communication in general) is, and that cultural attitude infects writers, too.

You must give yourself permission to be bad. And realize that all writing is practice.

IT. COUNTS.

And as the folks in my mentions are pointing


... it's an excellent way to find out what actually resonates with other people - putting work out there. Even your early bad stuff you'll cringe at later.

What resonates is NOT easy to tell, because we all, inherently cringe at ourselves, a lot.
Things we don’t learn in this article: that the author wrote David Cameron’s speeches during the period when they were intentionally underfunding the NHS and other services, directly creating the problem the author is concerned about now.


We also don’t learn that the paper it’s written in stridently supported those measures and attacked junior doctors threatening strike action over NHS cuts and long working hours, accusing them of holding the country to ransom.

We aren’t reminded that NHS funding and the future of health provision was a central part of previous election campaigns, and that attempts to highlight these problems were swiftly stomped on or diverted and then ignored by most of the press, including the Times.

I’d underline here that “corruption” doesn’t just mean money in brown envelopes: it describes a situation where much of an organisation is personally motivated to ignore, downplay or divert from malfeasance for personal reasons - because highlighting them would be bad for careers

Foges was Cameron’s speechwriter at the height of austerity; Forsyth is married to the PM’s spokesman; Danny F is a Tory peer; Parris is a former MP; Gove used to write for them regularly, and that’s before we get to professional mates-with-ministers like Shipman or Montgomerie.

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