Crafting a Winning First Book Proposal

00:00:05:13 - 00:00:29:02

Cathy Hannabach

Hello everybody, and welcome to Crafting a Winning First Book Proposal. My name is Cathy Hannabach. I am the founder and CEO of Ideas on Fire, the academic editing and indexing agency that helps interdisciplinary scholars in particular turn brilliant ideas into publishable, often field-shaping books. And I'm thrilled to welcome you to the second session of our First Book Publishing Series.

 

00:00:29:04 - 00:00:52:10

Cathy Hannabach

The series walks you through every stage of the first book journey, from proposal to publication and beyond. Across these sections, I'm joined by acquisitions editors, editorial directors, production editors, and marketing directors from more than a dozen leading university presses, including the three lovely speakers we have here today. We are here to demystify the first book publishing process.

 

00:00:52:12 - 00:01:19:22

Cathy Hannabach

At Ideas on Fire, we've helped hundreds of scholars refine their book proposals and book manuscripts, strengthen their arguments, and bring those books into the world. We know how much thought and care goes into first books in particular, and we really love helping folks navigate this process. If any of you have questions for our speakers during this webinar, you can click the Q&A button at the bottom of your screen to submit them, and there'll be time at the end of our session today for us to turn to some of those questions.

 

00:01:19:24 - 00:01:42:15

Cathy Hannabach

So without further ado, I'm really excited to welcome our speakers. Today we have Sara Cohen, who's the editorial director of the University of Michigan Press. We have Alyssa Napier, who's an acquisitions editor at Columbia University Press. We have Noah Springer, who's an acquisitions editor at MIT Press, and tech support is provided by Ideas on Fires editorial director Rachel Fudge,

 

00:01:42:16 - 00:02:04:08

Cathy Hannabach

who I think some of you already know, who's also going to be in the chat. So to get started, I want to review some of the basic elements of a book proposal and then turn to how proposals are handled at the presses that our different speakers represent. Each press has their own requirements, but they tend to share some basic sections.

 

00:02:04:10 - 00:02:26:24

Cathy Hannabach

In general, a book proposal includes a brief overview of the book, which includes the main argument, the methodology that you use, and the stakes of the project. It also includes a description of the audience and the market for the book, and we'll be talking a little bit more specifically about that in a minute. A comparative titles section, sometimes called comps.

 

00:02:27:01 - 00:03:01:13

Cathy Hannabach

That section identifies similar books that are already in the market and explains how your book provides something unique that audiences will buy alongside or perhaps instead of some of those other titles. It also includes chapter summaries, which are usually about a paragraph each. And then finally it has a logistics section that lists the total manuscript word count, the date the full manuscript would be ready for submission, the number and the type of figures or images that you want to include, along with any necessary copyright permissions that you need to print those,

 

00:03:01:15 - 00:03:28:06

Cathy Hannabach

and any other relevant structural elements often goes in that section. So with those major book proposal elements in mind, our focus today is really on the real world process—what acquisitions editors look for in proposals, what makes a proposal stand out to them, and how authors can position their projects for success. So I'd like to start with what catches your attention as acquisitions editors.

 

00:03:28:08 - 00:03:35:02

Cathy Hannabach

You all read, obviously, a lot of book proposals. What makes a project description for a first book stand out to you?

 

00:03:35:04 - 00:04:05:14

Sara Cohen

For me, it's really, what you just basically described the brief overview section as having to include the argument, methods, and stakes. And for me, what I really want to see is I want to see that within the first two paragraphs of the proposal, I want to see a clear, concise description that includes those details because we are all super busy. I don't know about Noah and Alyssa, but I can usually tell within, I can usually tell within the first sentence if I'm going to keep going.

 

00:04:05:16 - 00:04:19:19

Sara Cohen

Within those first two paragraphs, if I'm not engaged, I'm not going to keep going. Some people like to open with an anecdote, and I get that. But if you're going to open with an anecdote, keep it short and then get to the meat of the proposal.

 

00:04:19:21 - 00:04:46:20

Noah Springer

Yeah, I'll follow on that. And I’ll go to later in the process when we're writing book copy, there's always a one-liner that's at the top of the copy, that's a sentence, maybe two. And if I can envision the one-liner pretty clearly from that opening paragraph of your proposal, that immediately draws me in more than something that becomes long-winded because we're going to need that one-liner down the line.

 

00:04:46:20 - 00:05:04:13

Noah Springer

So I want to know that that's already in your head as what's happening. that's something that always catches my eye. I think that's right, really early, really quick. I can also sometimes tell, even from the pitch that you send in the email, rather than the proposal itself, if that is starting to feel too much. You want that initial pitch to be really tight as well.

 

00:05:04:13 - 00:05:15:01

Noah Springer

It makes sure that it's just boom: punchy, unique selling proposition, to use business terminology, things like that.

 

00:05:15:03 - 00:05:33:08

Alyssa Napier

Yeah. And just following up on what folks have said, generally the advice that I give to people about book proposals is that the book proposal should help me, should make it as easy as possible for me as an editor to talk your book up to the people that I need to convince in my job.

 

00:05:33:10 - 00:05:49:07

Alyssa Napier

I think we'll talk about this later, the whole process of the gatekeepers. But I need to have an internal pitch to get the product approved for peer review. Then I need to convince the peer reviewers to take their time with the poor compensation that we give them to read the book.

 

00:05:49:09 - 00:06:10:21

Alyssa Napier

And then I also need to convince the faculty committee. So if you can make, I'll follow what Sara and Noah has said, make it as obvious as possible why your book is a good fit for our press. A contribution to the field. Something that's exciting for people in the field to want to read and know more about.

 

00:06:10:23 - 00:06:35:00

Alyssa Napier

And also have all of the relevant information so that when I'm making the pitch, I can explain what your book is to people. That's just gives me a sense of relief. Like, yes, I know what this project is really immediately. Helping me be an advocate for your book—that's how I encourage people to think about their book proposal.

 

00:06:35:02 - 00:06:48:01

Cathy Hannabach

And that's a great way to explain it. Help me help you, essentially. Pointing out that you have to pitch the book to other people. It's not just the author pitching it to you.

 

00:06:48:03 - 00:07:07:09

Cathy Hannabach

Do you find, do any of you find, that authors struggle with that short and sweet elevator pitch moments, that line at the top, or even the spoken version of it? You know, describe your project in a sentence or two sentences. Do you find that that's sometimes more challenging than the longer description portions?

 

00:07:07:11 - 00:07:27:18

Noah Springer

Yeah, I definitely think so. I think it comes from academic writing, how you're trained to write as an academic. I got a PhD years ago, and now I write for a little magazine. The transition from writing for a PhD to writing for a general audience is just a completely different process

 

00:07:27:18 - 00:07:53:16

Noah Springer

and a different way of thinking about things. One of the things we'll talk about this as well is argument, which becomes super, super important when you're talking about a book. Especially when you're translating a dissertation to a book, I’m often finding that the argument I get a lot of times, which is something that turns me off pretty heavily, is the idea that there's a space in the research, there's a gap in the research.

 

00:07:53:18 - 00:08:16:15

Noah Springer

Now that's an argument for a research agenda. That's not inherently an argument for a book. That's the argument that this research needs to be done. But the argument for the book has to be what you've discovered from doing that research. And that becomes a really tricky balance to make where you're talking to people outside of the field or a little wider audience. Your advisors are like, yes, research that gap.

 

00:08:16:17 - 00:08:31:15

Noah Springer

But the person who's buying the book is maybe like, but I don't care if there's a gap in the research. What's interesting about the book itself? That argument, again, can become the one-liner and really focusing in on that becomes super, super important.

 

00:08:31:17 - 00:08:44:09

Sara Cohen

Just a really succinct way that we sometimes talk about that is the “So what?” I don't think I heard you say the word so what Noah, but a lot of the time I say that to people. It's like you just said, it's not enough that there's a gap. Why does it matter?

 

00:08:44:13 - 00:09:03:10

Sara Cohen

I read something recently, I don't remember where, there was an interview with an acquisitions editor who said you need to tell me why the world needs this book. And it's not enough to say, because nobody's written it before. It's because it's making this bigger argument that's going to help us understand other phenomena.

 

00:09:03:12 - 00:09:26:09

Alyssa Napier

To add to that, because this is something that I've been reflecting on as well, I'm the sociology editor and Black studies editor. Those two fields are finally speaking or sociology is finally catching on to things that Black studies has been exploring for a while now. So it's interesting inhabiting that intersection.

 

00:09:26:11 - 00:09:58:16

Alyssa Napier

But the question of why do people care is really dependent on audience. I know we'll talk a lot about audience, but the reason why some people might care about your book as a sociology book might be different from the reason why Black studies folks would care. And then also if you're thinking about a scholarly book versus a trade book, describing what the stakes are for your book and describing that so what might shift.

 

00:09:58:18 - 00:10:05:02

Alyssa Napier

That's something I think we can talk more about when we talk about marketing and audience as well.

 

00:10:05:04 - 00:10:30:06

Cathy Hannabach

This is, I think, really helpful in giving authors a sense of what to aim for and to inform them as to why presses are asking for these kinds of, of pitches. It's not it's not a rote exercise. It actually has a purpose on the press's side of things. So if this gives authors a sense of what to aim for, let's look at what to avoid.

 

00:10:30:06 - 00:10:48:13

Cathy Hannabach

Some of you have mentioned various things to avoid already. But I often find that early career authors are usually writing that first book proposal while they're still trying to figure out how to convert a dissertation to a book, or how to find a publisher that would be a good fit, or doing these other things simultaneously.

 

00:10:48:15 - 00:11:00:10

Cathy Hannabach

I'm curious what are some of the pitfalls or weak spots that you find most commonly that tend to show up in the first book proposals that you're looking at. Let's help our authors out to avoid those.

 

00:11:00:12 - 00:11:34:18

Alyssa Napier

Following up on the previous conversation about audience, one of the things that I notice often, especially with folks who were writing a dissertation very recently, is they are targeting a very niche audience. I will use the example of back when I was a researcher, my research was on the history of Black educational organizing in Boston in the 1960s and 1970s, which I know the people in the world who are obsessed with that particular topic.

 

00:11:34:20 - 00:11:56:14

Alyssa Napier

But that is not enough of an audience for a book that will sell, what, 15 copies? I'm not going to be able to persuade anybody that that niche audience is enough. And so then you have to think about, okay, what does that particular case say about maybe Black educational organizing in general?

 

00:11:56:19 - 00:12:23:09

Alyssa Napier

What does it say about Black organizing in general? What does it say about organizing in general, or does it say something about segregated education in the Northeast as opposed to the South? Thinking about how your case can be applicable to, more than just the kinds of people that you're talking to all the time about this particular narrow research, I think is useful.

 

00:12:23:09 - 00:12:33:24

Alyssa Napier

Avoiding the niche audience and expanding to how more people might buy your book.

 

00:12:34:01 - 00:12:47:22

Sara Cohen

I think the flip side of that is you don't want to make your audience too big. I had a colleague who would say that, and I this is getting into the audience question, so I'll pivot in a minute and say something that's not audience. But I had a colleague used to say, a book that's for everyone is a book that's for no one.

 

00:12:47:22 - 00:13:07:18

Sara Cohen

You need to actually know who you're writing to. In Alyssa’s case, with her example, she can't say this book is for anyone who has ever been to school, because that's not who it's for. It's for Black studies scholars. To pivot to something that's not audience related, one of the big problems I see with first books is that they have too many arguments.

 

00:13:07:20 - 00:13:24:11

Sara Cohen

One of the red flags that I think we see a lot, and I see head nods from Noah and Alyssa, is I will see the word, the sentence “I argue, blah blah, blah” come up 6 or 7 times in a proposal, and each time it's saying something different. You can't possibly do all of those things in one book.

 

00:13:24:11 - 00:13:42:11

Sara Cohen

So making sure, I guess riffing on Alyssa who is saying you need to broaden the scope a little bit, but the scope also has to be a scope that you can accomplish in a single book of max 100,000 words. And if you're saying that you argue half a dozen different things, that's not going to work.

 

00:13:42:11 - 00:13:48:04

Sara Cohen

You need to pick one thing and stick to that.

 

00:13:48:06 - 00:14:18:03

Noah Springer

Let me bridge the two very specifically, I think the benefit of drafting a proposal and following guidelines before you even start thinking broader, is you can see how the two combine—how the audience can inform the argument and the argument can inform the audience. Make sure that those overlap and you are really clear about the relationship between those two. Just to give an example of how I think about audience at MIT, we have two different, well we have a bunch of different kind of books we publish, but we have broken it out

 

00:14:18:03 - 00:14:41:24

Noah Springer

to two specific books. One is scholarly monographs and one is professional monographs. These used to be combined, but in 2020 or so, at some point, we decided to break these out because they're very different audiences actually. So for me, publishing in design, scholars of design is one audience but professionals of design are very much also an audience. And so when you're thinking about how you want to proceed to write a book about design, are you talking to scholars?

 

00:14:42:00 - 00:15:00:20

Noah Springer

When you talk to people on campus, a lot of people are like, my books for general audiences, people who go to university campuses. And that's not actually a general audience. Or is your book for professional designers, people out there in the field, doing design practice, doing industrial design? Those could be different audiences.

 

00:15:00:20 - 00:15:19:22

Noah Springer

Now, there's overlap there for sure, but once you start to look closer at your argument and really narrow down to a single argument, you're gonna be able to say specifically whether you're talking to scholars and students or talking to that wider design community. And that becomes so important as I'm conceptualizing what the book looks like and how we're going to situate it in the market down the line.

 

00:15:19:24 - 00:15:32:23

Noah Springer

And so I think that the audience and that argument really can help, as you go through that proposal process, can help bolster each other to really have a comprehensive kind of approach to both spaces.

 

00:15:33:00 - 00:15:53:17

Alyssa Napier

I have one other thing that I wanted to add. And I'm also curious, Noah and Sara, if you have anything to say about this. One of the things that I've noticed is book proposals that read like research proposals. A book proposal is a very specific genre of writing that I don't think many people get training in.

 

00:15:53:17 - 00:16:14:11

Alyssa Napier

Especially in academic programs, you have a lot of experience writing research proposals. And so I will see that genre leak into the book proposal genre, and I'll see people who will pose a lot of questions without providing a lot of answers. When I'm reading a book proposal, I want to know what your answer is to these questions.

 

00:16:14:11 - 00:16:37:02

Alyssa Napier

This relates to what Noah was saying about filling a gap like, these are all the things that we don't know. And it's like, okay, great, tell me what it is that you do know or what you have found out based on your research. Because that's actually how I will get somebody to read this book, by telling them this is what we have found out.

 

00:16:37:04 - 00:17:11:03

Alyssa Napier

One of the things that I will often advise people when I'm advising them on revising their proposal is taking a look at any sentence that says I will examine how people do X, Y, and Z, and then just actually writing how people do those things. So if you have how anywhere, or even why, these sort of questions, really dialing in on that and being explicit, writing out what this is, actually how or why, based on what I found.

 

00:17:11:05 - 00:17:26:22

Cathy Hannabach

I think that's great advice and really concrete. I think that's easy for scholars to be able to look at an existing draft and be like, oh, I do in fact have a lot of research questions in here, which were great in the research phase. They're great in the dissertation phase, they’re great in the earlier stages.

 

00:17:26:22 - 00:17:46:18

Cathy Hannabach

But as you're all pointing out in different ways, the book is your answer to those really fantastic research questions, because that's what audiences want to read. Obviously we've been talking a lot about audience. It's kind of impossible not to. The whole premise of a book proposal is to connect with audiences of various sorts.

 

00:17:46:20 - 00:18:05:11

Cathy Hannabach

So let's turn to audience more directly. I find that when I'm working with authors on their book proposals, the audience and market sections are the most anxiety producing sections for most authors. Part of that, I think, has to do with graduate school doesn't train you much to think in terms of audience

 

00:18:05:11 - 00:18:35:00

Cathy Hannabach

because the audience for dissertation is literally your committee. That's it. Those five people, you want them to sign the piece of paper to say, yes, you can have a PhD. And that makes for a successful dissertation. Obviously, the audience for a book is extraordinarily different. So what are some of the recommendations you would have for helping authors write that audience and market sections, particularly for projects that are interdisciplinary or that cross disciplinary backgrounds?

 

00:18:35:02 - 00:18:52:17

Sara Cohen

I can start and say that most of the books that I do are scholarly monographs. I do some trade books. And at Michigan, when we're looking, when we're thinking about audience, one of the things we're thinking about is what conferences will we take this book to? And I think some other presses do that too, in my experience.

 

00:18:52:17 - 00:19:12:06

Sara Cohen

So one of the things that might be helpful, if it's a more scholarly book and you’re trying to figure out who your audience is, even if it's interdisciplinary, like I wrote in my notes, if you're doing a book about musical theater, I'm not going to give you a more focused argument than that, but if you're doing a book on musical theater, it's something that might travel to the musicology meetings and something that could also travel to the theater meetings.

 

00:19:12:12 - 00:19:31:06

Sara Cohen

If it's about American musical theater and it's looking at gender, ethnicity, race, maybe it goes to American Studies. So one of the things that might be helpful, one of the ways to approach it, would be what are the conferences either that I go to or that I think this book would be good for? Or what are the conferences that publishers might go to that this book might be good for?

 

00:19:31:08 - 00:19:49:00

Noah Springer

I think also that when you're thinking about the market, thinking about your comps at the same time becomes helpful because what I'm looking for when I'm looking at comps is I'm looking at what are the other books in the space that you're looking to talk to? And then I'm also looking at how well they've sold.

 

00:19:49:02 - 00:20:11:02

Noah Springer

So I'm looking at Nielsen BookScan, which we have access to, and looking at has a comp you're looking at sold 17,000 copies? That's amazing. That's a big market. Has the comp sold five copies? That's less big. That's not a deal breaker inherently. But it helps me start to think about where this book will end up being situated.

 

00:20:11:04 - 00:20:29:15

Noah Springer

And then also in terms of the market, showing how it fits into the list that I'm working on. So when you're doing your comps, make sure you're giving press-centric comps as well as external comps, because I want to know in terms of the audiences that I'm trying to hit and the market space that exists there.

 

00:20:29:15 - 00:20:44:21

Noah Springer

Where does that work, especially if we're trying to break into a new market, which could be a tricky sort of thing to do when I'm envisioning what that market is that you're trying to break into. How does this book line up to that? How does that audience, where does the audience live?

 

00:20:44:21 - 00:21:05:24

Noah Springer

Where do they buy books? Hopefully. But that ends up being a big question because there's big audience out there who aren't going to buy books. That's just the case. And even with large platforms, you have a certain amount of thousands of followers on social media, that doesn't inherently translate into book sales necessarily either.

 

00:21:05:24 - 00:21:21:15

Noah Springer

So there's all sorts of things that we're looking at when we're looking at what audience looks like. But making sure with comps, especially current contemporary comps, your comp can’t be even if it's from 2020, that's starting to feel a bit old. The book market has changed a lot in the last five years.

 

00:21:21:15 - 00:21:31:21

Noah Springer

Being able to show what the market looks like now with the comps, that really becomes an important related dynamic within the proposal.

 

00:21:31:23 - 00:21:54:22

Alyssa Napier

Yeah, I love “does this audience actually buy books,” it’s so important. Because you can write a great book for an audience that only cares about journal articles or just aren’t book readers. I have another few questions to ask yourself that might be helpful. What journals do you want your books to be reviewed in?

 

00:21:54:24 - 00:22:22:01

Alyssa Napier

Thinking about the journals that you read, thinking about the journals that you think in your field would be good signalers that your book has done a good job. What kinds of courses do you think your book would be a good fit for in terms of the syllabi? That might be helpful for interdisciplinary scholars, if you can imagine different courses in different disciplines and fields picking up your book. You don't want to go too broad with that,

 

00:22:22:03 - 00:22:46:15

Alyssa Napier

but in terms of brainstorming and thinking about, getting more specific about audience. And then, just as a sneak peek, Columbia University Press's marketing questionnaire is on our website and it's available for anybody. It might help for people to take a look at a press’s marketing questionnaire, if that's available, and see what kinds of categories they are asking about.

 

00:22:46:17 - 00:23:08:13

Alyssa Napier

They're gonna be asking about journals and conferences and these kinds of things. And I know for Columbia, in our marketing questionnaire, we say these are the conferences that we exhibit at, highlight the ones that are right for you. So then that can help you even get even more specificity on figuring out if the main conference that you go to is not listed on there,

 

00:23:08:13 - 00:23:26:22

Alyssa Napier

then you might have questions about whether or not we're the right fit for you. This is the way in which this press is having a conversation about marketing and audience. And so you can kind of get ahead a little bit on how you have that conversation, if that's available.

 

00:23:26:24 - 00:23:41:15

Sara Cohen

And if I can just quickly articulate something that I think we're all implying that I don't think any of us have said out loud yet: Your book proposal is a marketing document. That's one of the reasons that it's so different from a research proposal, that it's different from the intro to your book.

 

00:23:41:21 - 00:24:01:02

Sara Cohen

I see a lot of people who cut and paste chunks of their book intro into the proposal. In being a marketing document, it needs to be succinct. It needs to be clearly written, it needs to clearly define its terms, and it needs to lay out that this is a sellable object and it has to sell the project.

 

00:24:01:02 - 00:24:08:22

Sara Cohen

And I think that's why it's so hard for people to write these, because we're not trained to do that as graduate students.

 

00:24:08:24 - 00:24:35:05

Noah Springer

Yeah. Just to follow up on that, one thing I've always hoping that authors are doing, maybe not that first time necessarily, is self-promotion. It becomes really important for making a book work and to be able to sell yourself in your proposal and what you're going to bring to the output and how you're going to go about trying to help also can really help make something pop a little bit

 

00:24:35:07 - 00:24:43:13

Noah Springer

from the hundreds of proposals we receive. Just as this one more kind of portion of that marketing content.

 

00:24:43:15 - 00:25:13:16

Cathy Hannabach

I think this connects really nicely to how presses think about the broader direction of their lists or the books that they publish, because of course you've cultivated this audience as a publisher over many, many decades. And acquisitions editors have in particular as well. Getting authors to tap into that broader audience that the press has cultivated or the acquisitions editor has cultivated with their list, might be one concrete way into this question.

 

00:25:13:18 - 00:25:30:24

Cathy Hannabach

I would love to hear from all of you how your editorial list or your press’s mission shapes the different kinds of projects that you're interested in acquiring, because you all come from very different presses and you've all worked at different presses over the course of your careers. I know I’ve talked to you individually about this question and

 

00:25:30:24 - 00:25:43:24

Cathy Hannabach

you’ve noticed differences between those. So how do you find, either in your current role or in some of your previous roles, how do you find that your acquisitions list focus or your press mission shapes the projects that you're acquiring these days?

 

00:25:44:01 - 00:26:02:24

Noah Springer

So my list is directed sort of by the series we acquire. I publish eight or nine series. When the series editor sends me a proposal, I'm generally inclined, unless I see something huge as a problem, to sort of say we could make that happen.

 

00:26:03:00 - 00:26:27:00

Noah Springer

I like to keep my series editors happy. But then there is the portion that's not series related projects. And that's where I get a little more autonomy in terms of sort of publishing stuff. That's my own sort of peccadilloes, niches, and spaces that I am interested in pursuing. One of the things that's worthwhile doing is if you look at my page on MIT, you'll see notable acquisitions and stuff like that.

 

00:26:27:00 - 00:26:48:22

Noah Springer

So you can see things that I've acquired recently. Going through the space of the press and looking to see what kind of threads that you can see develop across the press becomes really, I think, a beneficial part of making sure that you're approaching the press in the right angle and making sure that your book and your argument is positioned to something that's going to actually speak to me, that will draw my attention off the bat.

 

00:26:48:24 - 00:27:07:14

Noah Springer

And then there's this other side, which I often tell people is that there are factors outside of your control that may also determine whether or not I'm going to pick a book up. I have a certain number of books I can acquire during a year. I don't know about Alyssa or Sara, but I'm between 20 and 25.

 

00:27:07:16 - 00:27:27:12

Noah Springer

I run out of bandwidth after that. My pipeline always feels incredibly full. And so sometimes I just I can't do it. I only publish two edited collections a year. If I already have those two contracted, I can't do any more edited collections. If I already have a book on a similar enough topic to yours, I can't justify having another book.

 

00:27:27:12 - 00:27:44:05

Noah Springer

I need to carve out room for other spaces that are coming. And there's also types of books we publish. I talked about scholarly books. I have a certain amount of scholarly books I'm supposed to publish and a certain amount of trade books I'm supposed to publish and a certain amount of professional books. And so I'm trying to always balance those angles as well.

 

00:27:44:05 - 00:28:03:12

Noah Springer

And so sometimes the fact is, I just don't have space for it. But sometimes you can make a compelling enough argument that I will have to figure out a way to make space for it. That's where it comes back to that main argument and that main drive. But all those other kind of institutional factors start to play into whether or not I can I can publish the book.

 

00:28:03:12 - 00:28:07:18

Noah Springer

Getting past those can sometimes be a bit tricky.

 

00:28:07:20 - 00:28:36:23

Alyssa Napier

I think for me, so I recently became the sociology and Black studies editor at Columbia, as of April. So right now I am doing a lot of thinking about how can we retain the strengths of the list built by my predecessor, while also trying to put my own stamp on the list based on what I'm particularly interested in?

 

00:28:37:00 - 00:29:08:07

Alyssa Napier

I am in a position where I'm trying things, and I think in a later question we’re going to be asked about the process. But part of my process or part of the Columbia University Press process is we have an internal pitch meeting where we get projects approved for peer review, which means that my colleagues in the acquisitions department and representatives from sales and publicity are all going to have to hear my pitch for a book.

 

00:29:08:09 - 00:29:37:09

Alyssa Napier

Part of that pitch is me explaining, how does this project take the list where I want it to go? But also how does this build on the strengths of the past list? And how is this project in alignment with my colleagues’ list? So my colleague Stephen Wesley has a series called Race, Inequality, and Health.

 

00:29:37:11 - 00:30:00:06

Alyssa Napier

So if I get a project that's on the sociology of public health or sociology of medicine or anthropology of medicine, then it's very persuasive for me to be able to say, well, this is synergistically related to the stuff that Stephen has going on. This is a strength of ours. It's something our publicity department knows how to promote those kinds of things.

 

00:30:00:06 - 00:30:15:13

Alyssa Napier

So every project that I get in, I am necessarily thinking about how it fits in with the larger press because that's something that my colleagues are going to want to know when I pitch them in that meeting.

 

00:30:15:15 - 00:30:34:15

Sara Cohen

I don't do as many books as Noah and Alyssa anymore because I'm editorial director, but I still acquire about a dozen books a year. I do theater, performance studies, music, and dance, which is a lot of areas to only get to do twelve books. I'm actually probably going to do more than that. But anyway, my personal acquisitions orbit around a question.

 

00:30:34:20 - 00:30:54:19

Sara Cohen

In the same way that scholars have research questions that they're asking with their work. I think acquisitions editors have questions that they ask with their acquisitions. I was able, because I do performing arts, I was able to come up with one question that I think stretches across all those, and I've been articulating it as: How do the arts respond to and enact politics?

 

00:30:54:19 - 00:31:18:04

Sara Cohen

So my hope is that if you looked at our performing arts catalog and performing arts selection of our catalog, you'll be like, oh yeah, this seems to be what's connecting all these works. That doesn't mean that I don't sometimes go off road and acquire other stuff that's personally interesting to me. I heard Noah talking about the bit that was like, oh yeah, I might go after something that's personally interesting to me that I can kind of shoehorn into this because I'm excited about it.

 

00:31:18:06 - 00:31:40:15

Sara Cohen

But for the most part, that's what's governing my acquisitions. In terms of the larger mission, at Michigan, we're doing 75% of our new scholarly books open access at this point. For us, that means we still want to sell books of course, but access and user metrics are a little bit more important than the sales numbers.

 

00:31:40:17 - 00:32:00:03

Sara Cohen

That means that I might be able to take a risk on a very narrow book about Black activism in schools in Boston in the 1950s and 1960s because I'm excited about it and it is making an important contribution, because I might be less worried about the number of copies that I'm selling than Noah or Alyssa might be.

 

00:32:00:05 - 00:32:20:07

Noah Springer

Yeah. Thanks for flagging open access, Sara. At MIT, almost all of my scholarly books are open access as well, at no cost to authors. That's one way that we are balancing the mission and the financial realities of nonprofit book publishing. We've been partnering with libraries. It's called Direct to Open. It's a program where

 

00:32:20:07 - 00:32:47:14

Noah Springer

we partner with libraries, they give us funding, we give them some treats. And in return, we’re publishing all these scholarly, I think we're doing 80 a year or 80 a season. I think it's 80 a year, 80 a season seems like a bit much. It's been a really successful program. We're limiting the print run in that case, but at but at the same time, we're actually selling through those print runs the same way we would before the open access process started.

 

00:32:47:16 - 00:33:10:15

Noah Springer

So that also does allow me to be like, well, the audience isn't necessarily huge but the impact is what is important for this project. And that's balancing that scholarly mission of publishing important research, even if it's not immediately clear that it's going to sell a bunch of books. And so, yeah, open access, I’m a big proponent of. I know Michigan does a great job of that, too,

 

00:33:10:17 - 00:33:14:11

Sara Cohen

and we borrow a lot from what you all do in terms of our model.

 

00:33:14:13 - 00:33:18:22

Noah Springer

We're leading the pack, I think. But yeah.

 

00:33:18:24 - 00:33:24:04

Sara Cohen

And we're grateful to have you as a model. So thank you.

 

00:33:24:06 - 00:33:51:06

Alyssa Napier

I miss open access at MIT Press. I wanted to say thank you for posing the idea of what are the questions, the broader questions you're asking with your acquisitions list. I have to come up with mine, because I think that's a really good way of pitching myself as an editor. One of the things that I wanted to bring up is, you can ask, folks should ask editors about this in person

 

00:33:51:06 - 00:34:13:23

Alyssa Napier

if you see people or if conferences are virtual. If you get a chance to talk to an editor, definitely ask them what it is that they care about. Because it might not necessarily show up on the books that have been recently published because there's that two or however many year gap between acquisitions and book publishing.

 

00:34:14:00 - 00:34:45:13

Alyssa Napier

So the kinds of books that are out now are not books that I have acquired. But if you ask me the kinds of books that I'm particularly interested in, I would say anything that has to do with social movements, activism, Black resistance, Black joy, archival speculation, those kinds of things, which are not on the tables that I conference at, but I'm happy to explain what it is that I'm working on.

 

00:34:45:15 - 00:35:02:14

Alyssa Napier

So don't be afraid to ask those kinds of questions. Although my advice would be don't cold email an editor and ask them what they're interested in because they're probably just going to ignore that email. But if you get a chance to speak to people in person, then that might work

 

00:35:02:16 - 00:35:16:00

Alyssa Napier

a little bit better. And you can tailor your, your actual pitch email with your book proposal and sample materials and everything the more that you actually know that an editor is interested in something.

 

00:35:16:02 - 00:35:37:03

Sara Cohen

Alyssa, would you be more open to hearing from somebody about what you're interested in if they did their homework? By which I mean they talk to their friends who are in conversation with you and they said, I talked to the scholar who's working with you on this book and I've looked at some of the recent publications from the press, and my sense is that you're interested in these questions of social movements, Black joy, etc.

 

00:35:37:04 - 00:35:48:21

Sara Cohen

I'm wondering if you'd be interested in this project that I'm working on. Is that something that might be a better way to approach you, or do you still want to only be approached in person with those kinds of questions?

 

00:35:48:23 - 00:36:19:24

Alyssa Napier

So because I'm a baby editor, I say don't necessarily cold email people because I know lots of editors who get hundreds of emails a day and they're probably just not going to read it. But, yes. I was recently at a seminar from Laura Portwood-Stacer, who is my top recommendation she's got a book called The Book Proposal Book and Making your Manuscript Work.

 

00:36:20:01 - 00:36:57:23

Alyssa Napier

Definitely check her out. She talked about how when you're writing cold emails to editors, it's helpful to have some sort of mediator, some indication, some signal that there's some kind of personal relationship to that editor. So, yeah, if you Google me and you're like, this is what Alyssa cares about and you show that this is what I care about, then, yes, I think I think that's a great idea and something that to that maybe for other editors, if you're like, well, my colleague published a book with you and said that they had a really good experience.

 

00:36:58:00 - 00:37:04:00

Alyssa Napier

You know, we're human beings. We like a little bit of flattery as well.

 

00:37:04:02 - 00:37:04:21

Alyssa Napier

But I–

 

00:37:04:23 - 00:37:06:04

Noah Springer

No, go ahead

 

00:37:06:06 - 00:37:07:08

Noah Springer

please.

 

00:37:07:10 - 00:37:19:18

Alyssa Napier

I was gonna say, I think my recommendation for the cold email was don't email just to ask what people are interested in. Because you're probably not going to get a response.

 

00:37:19:20 - 00:37:35:11

Noah Springer

On the flattery side, I had somebody send an email to me and compliment my dissertation, which I'd hoped nobody else would read. And they said it was really good and it connected to their work. That got an answer for me pretty well. I don't know, maybe that's just me, but I was like....

 

00:37:35:11 - 00:37:36:14

Alyssa Napier

It's not just you.

 

00:37:36:19 - 00:37:44:07

Noah Springer

The research was interesting and then we're setting up a conversation to talk. It wasn’t anything too complicated. But I was like, oh, that's definitely a winning strategy.

 

00:37:44:07 - 00:37:53:15

Sara Cohen

I won’t respond to people who say that they read my dissertation. That's always a red flag for me. Like, you know something about me that I don't want you to know. I can't work with you.

 

00:37:53:17 - 00:38:01:00

Noah Springer

That is a good point. She was very complimentary, so it did soothe my ego a little bit.

 

00:38:01:02 - 00:38:20:24

Cathy Hannabach

I think it might be helpful to turn to some of the questions in the Q&A because they're touching on a lot of things that that are showing up in the conversation. One that I think is super great to ask is very straightforward and touches on something that several of you have talked about. This person is asking, can you speak to the typical timeline from proposal submission to publication?

 

00:38:21:01 - 00:38:31:11

Cathy Hannabach

Obviously, this varies dramatically by press, varies by author, varies by particular project. But in general, with the books that you've worked on, what does that timeline look like for you?

 

00:38:31:13 - 00:38:34:18

Noah Springer

Three years,

 

00:38:34:20 - 00:38:35:02

Noah Springer

give or take.

 

00:38:35:04 - 00:38:37:21

Sara Cohen

That’s what I was going to say, I'm glad that was the number you pulled out.

 

00:38:37:23 - 00:38:46:13

Noah Springer

Yeah. It could be faster, it could be slower. But I would say three years is typical. I'm working on books, I'm signing books right now that are starting to come out in 2028, 2029.

 

00:38:46:15 - 00:39:08:20

Alyssa Napier

I mean, I think three years would be great. But Columbia's process is a little bit more convoluted than other presses. It affects, the length of time basically. I think this is one of the questions that you were going to ask, Cathy. We get a proposal and I, as an editor, decide whether or not I want to move forward with the process.

 

00:39:08:20 - 00:39:33:13

Alyssa Napier

And then, like I mentioned, there’s that internal pitch meeting that has to happen to get approval for peer review. Then we go out for peer review, and then we have to go to a faculty committee meeting to get approval for every single contract. The faculty committee meets once a month. So we're always doing adjustments for those gatekeeping steps of how long is it going to take peer reviewers to get back to us,

 

00:39:33:15 - 00:39:55:15

Alyssa Napier

can we make the faculty committee meeting, stuff like that. And then we have to, once the full manuscript is written, we go back for another round of peer review and another round of faculty committee approval. And if at any point during that process, there is a revise and resubmit or something like that, then it can get a little bit lengthier.

 

00:39:55:19 - 00:40:19:17

Alyssa Napier

I know that at other presses, that maybe don't have those approval steps, there's a little bit more flexibility in the timeline where the editor and the author can decide on their deadlines, but that's what it looks like at Columbia. All of those rounds of approval just adds time to our process.

 

00:40:19:19 - 00:40:34:15

Sara Cohen

At Michigan, what we do is we decide independently as editors whether we want to send something out for review. We don't have to go to a pitch meeting like Alyssa does before something goes out for peer review. Then once the peer reviews are in, we look at them together and decide what the next steps are going to be.

 

00:40:34:15 - 00:40:57:24

Sara Cohen

Are we going to offer an advance contract? Are we going to take this to our faculty board? Are we going to reject this? So that's the first approval. That's an internal approval. A project goes to our faculty board after it's been through all the peer review it's going to go through. Most of the stuff I work on goes through two rounds of peer review, one at the proposal stage, one at a manuscript stage.

 

00:40:58:01 - 00:41:16:05

Sara Cohen

Our faculty board sees projects once they don't need any further peer review. They meet every month, and they can vote to approve a project or reject a project or approve a project with conditions. So it’s different from Alyssa’s process, it sounds like her board sees projects twice. Mine only sees them once. So that allows us to move just a little bit quicker.

 

00:41:16:05 - 00:41:26:11

Sara Cohen

But so much depends on the author's timeline and what you have going on, and all of the other things that you're doing besides writing this book.

 

00:41:26:13 - 00:41:53:03

Noah Springer

Here's a fun one. Very few of my books go see the faculty board. Our approval process looks like this: If there's a book that I think is worth pursuing, I may take it to an early decision by the board if I have some questions about it—by the internal board, the publishing committee that's the director of the press, marketing and sales teams, financial people, and production, not faculty of MIT, though.

 

00:41:53:05 - 00:42:10:08

Noah Springer

So I might take it to them just to make sure that we think this is the right project. I send it out for review, get those reviews back. Then I can put in an advance contract just with another meeting of that internal publishing committee. Then you'll write the manuscript, we'll send that out for review again.

 

00:42:10:10 - 00:42:29:10

Noah Springer

Then we don't really need, assuming the reviews are solid, we don't need another round of approval. I will take it back to the committee to just talk about the production process and make sure everybody’s on the same page, but it's been two years since they saw the proposal. They don't remember. And so the major difference is I only take something to the faculty committee, if it's a problem, a

 

00:42:29:12 - 00:42:48:24

Noah Springer

project that I have serious questions about. The reviews came in mixed. I need a third a third set of eyes on this. You know, there's a specific, is this the right approach to this? These kind of things. So they see the sort of problem children rather than just the typical book. If everything's going smoothly, our faculty doesn't see it until it's the book itself.

 

00:42:49:01 - 00:43:03:08

Noah Springer

So that's a that's is a major difference between MIT and other boards. It also makes things a little quicker, I think. But I don't think that it means that we're publishing books quickly. I want good books, not fast books, because there are no fast books.

 

00:43:03:10 - 00:43:07:15

Sara Cohen

Noah, what percentage of the press’s books do you think go through that committee?

 

00:43:07:17 - 00:43:26:09

Noah Springer

Not that many. We meet quarterly with them. And I would say there's three to four books a quarter. Oftentimes we are struggling to find books to bring to them. We get an email saying we need books to discuss. It's not like they're making up problems, but they'll say, oh, well, I guess we could have a good conversation about this question.

 

00:43:26:09 - 00:43:32:17

Noah Springer

You know, something like that. But yeah, it's not a lot of them.

 

00:43:32:19 - 00:43:57:06

Alyssa Napier

The other thing that I wanted to add is that that we’ve focused a lot on the, approval process and the writing of the manuscript, but a good chunk of the time it takes to make a book is the production process. And I feel sorry for an author a little bit when they've written the thing and they want to feel relief of getting it off of their plate.

 

00:43:57:08 - 00:44:29:11

Alyssa Napier

And I'm like, oh, I'm so sorry, there's so much more work that you have to do. There is copyediting, there's indexing, if you're doing your own indexing, proofreading. But there's also cover design, getting the publicity plan together. So, yes, I think it is important, and this is a good conversation to have with an editor during that initial author editor meeting is asking them about that timeline and seeing if it'll work for you.

 

00:44:29:13 - 00:44:39:07

Alyssa Napier

And if you have specific external deadlines, like I need the book to be in production at a certain point in time, making sure that you're really transparent about what that looks like.

 

00:44:39:09 - 00:44:55:09

Cathy Hannabach

I'd be curious to know your best advice for proposals that are not quite there yet but you see promise in. You want it to get better, but it's not quite ready yet. What are some things that you'd advise authors to take a look at?

 

00:44:55:11 - 00:45:15:24

Sara Cohen

I usually end up marking them up and sending comments. That’s something that maybe I shouldn't do. But in terms of outside resources, I think asking your colleagues for model proposals that have been accepted by presses that you can do a genre analysis on and figure out what they're doing. Like Alyssa,

 

00:45:15:24 - 00:45:36:07

Sara Cohen

I'm a big fan of The Book Proposal Book, I think it's super useful. I also love Cathy’s newsletter, the Ideas on Fire newsletter, and Laura Portwood-Stacer’s Manuscript Works newsletter. I learn stuff when I read their advice. A lot of the time I learn more succinct ways from them to give advice that I've been giving for a long time.

 

00:45:36:09 - 00:45:54:22

Sara Cohen

So I think it's trying to eat up as much advice and look at as many models as you can get and think about some of the things that we are talking about today, like how can you make sure you're asking one question? How can you make sure you're making it clear that your book is in conversation with what's going on at the press that you're interested in?

 

00:45:54:24 - 00:46:03:09

Sara Cohen

How can you write your book in a way that sells the project rather than just describes it to other people?

 

00:46:03:11 - 00:46:28:12

Alyssa Napier

To follow up with what Sara said, I like the idea of model proposals, but I would just add try to get a proposal from a person who's at the same stage in their career as you are because this is the way the world works. Very fancy-pants elite people in the academy can get away with terrible proposals that a junior scholar cannot get away with.

 

00:46:28:14 - 00:47:00:01

Alyssa Napier

Maybe your advisor is at the top of your field. You don't want to go with their proposal, but someone who's also turning a dissertation into a book but has a very successful proposal would be useful. I would also add, I think it can be useful to just spend a little bit of time thinking about your table of contents and those chapter descriptions, making sure that each chapter is doing something that relates to your longer argument.

 

00:47:00:03 - 00:47:25:14

Alyssa Napier

Especially for books that come from dissertations or books that come from multiple journal articles, sometimes I look at the table of contents and I'm like, this reads like a series of various things that aren't really coming together. And it's really hard for me to understand this as a cohesive book. Doing a little bit of work and asking yourself, okay, why does chapter two follow chapter one?

 

00:47:25:16 - 00:47:38:18

Alyssa Napier

What does chapter five have to do with chapter three? These kind of basic questions can often help you reflect on the larger argument that you're making and strengthen that proposal.

 

00:47:38:20 - 00:48:00:02

Noah Springer

Let me plug two more books. One is the Dissertation to Book Workbook, from the University of Chicago Press. Exactly what Alyssa is talking about of ways of making sure that argument works together. That is a very helpful guide to threading an argument through chapters. Especially when coming from a dissertation, it can often feel a bit disconnected in terms of argument.

 

00:48:00:04 - 00:48:22:12

Noah Springer

And then there's a slightly older book called From Dissertation to Book by William Germano that's also from Chicago. Both of those offer some really productive ways to think about the things that we've been discussing here and how to make that dissertation into something that actually has the audience and the potential to become a book.

 

00:48:22:14 - 00:48:27:13

Noah Springer

Also, the Laura Portwood-Stacer is great and so is Cathy Hannabach at Ideas on Fire.

 

00:48:27:15 - 00:48:49:05

Cathy Hannabach

Thank you very much. We have a little bit of time for some more questions. Several of you talked about sample chapters, and this connects really nicely to several of the questions that folks are asking. What for your press makes for the most effective sample chapter or chapters that authors are including with their book proposal?

 

00:48:49:11 - 00:49:01:02

Cathy Hannabach

How do you think authors should decide between, say, the introduction, a body chapter, a method chapter, or the strongest standalone section?

 

00:49:01:04 - 00:49:18:08

Sara Cohen

I always tell people to pick their two strongest chapters. I mean, Noah and Alyssa, I don't know if you guys send out partial manuscripts, but I find that whenever I send out a partial manuscript with the introduction, the readers say, why did you send me the introduction? All this is in the book proposal. And if I don't send the introduction, they say, why didn't you send me the introduction?

 

00:49:18:08 - 00:49:37:21

Sara Cohen

I can't evaluate this book without the introduction. So I think you're damned if you do and damned if you don't. The best course of action is pick your most polished, strongest, best two chapters, regardless of whether it's an intro and body chapter or two body chapters. But I’m interested to hear what my colleagues think.

 

00:49:37:23 - 00:49:56:19

Noah Springer

Yeah. Similarly, I use the old dissertation thing, which is the best sample chapters are the finished sample chapters. And I also find that people do like the introduction. But not everybody writes the introduction first. So I would never insist that it has to be an introduction. A lot of people I know write the introduction as the very final thing.

 

00:49:56:19 - 00:50:07:21

Noah Springer

They've got everything else, and then they finish introduction. And I agree, it can be repetitive. So yeah, I generally say the strongest finished chapters, those are the best ones.

 

00:50:07:23 - 00:50:10:23

Alyssa Napier

Yep. Nothing to add.

 

00:50:11:00 - 00:50:31:21

Cathy Hannabach

Okay. Somebody aske: Do you have any different or specific advice for scholars whose first book is a scholarly monograph but it's not from their dissertation. So it's a brand new project. Does any of this advice change, or is it pretty much the same thing regardless?

 

00:50:31:23 - 00:50:59:18

Noah Springer

That's a good question. I'm inclined to say the advice pretty much stands. I think you're probably less inclined to fall into some of the pitfalls that we've been discussing if you're really bringing it from something brand new. As you're doing the research, you could start thinking about argument more primarily, so you could start thinking about these questions we've talked about earlier on in the process.

 

00:50:59:18 - 00:51:15:16

Noah Springer

In your first year of PhD school, nobody there is thinking about a book. They're like, do the research. This is the method, X, Y, and Z. But if you’ve already passed that stage or you're starting a new thing, you can start with that argument-driven question first and fill in some of those holes.

 

00:51:15:16 - 00:51:26:21

Noah Springer

In general the advice is the same, I would think.

 

00:51:26:23 - 00:51:49:14

Cathy Hannabach

How about the timeliness of the topic? This is something that we talked a little bit about in the first webinar of the series. But in terms of the proposals that you're looking at, what are some considerations around the timeliness of a book's topic? I know a lot of authors are like, we're having a moment where X topic is on everybody's lips, it's in all the media.

 

00:51:49:14 - 00:52:01:09

Cathy Hannabach

Should I send out my proposal with the angle that it's really about hot topic X? Is that something that you encourage? If not, why?

 

00:52:01:11 - 00:52:17:23

Sara Cohen

I discourage it because I think that things change too quickly, especially now. I mean, even in between when you send it to me and the week it takes me to get to it, your thing could not be a hot topic anymore. So I think that for my purposes, keep in mind what Noah was saying:

 

00:52:17:23 - 00:52:45:20

Sara Cohen

it takes about three years to make a book, and in three years nobody's going to care about this. Maybe in your cover letter to me you can say this thing has been in the news and so this book feels timely right now, but it's also making this much larger contribution that is going to be of perennial interest. That cover note might be the place to say it's related to this hot thing that's going on right now.

 

00:52:45:22 - 00:53:15:18

Noah Springer

Yeah, I think that makes sense. And some publishers maybe are in the tech space more than the other people here. My authors are always asking about how to write timelessly, especially about contemporary tech issues. Because AI today is that same as AI tomorrow. What does that mean? How do we address that? It's a tricky question to do that, but I would say don't lean on specifics of what's happening this week, this month.

 

00:53:15:18 - 00:53:34:23

Noah Springer

You can lean on larger trends. But even that can be tricky sometimes. I'm encouraging people not to write me books about AI. The market is flooded in that space. The book can talk about AI, but if your primary focus is AI, I would probably say thanks, but we have to many books in that space right now.

 

00:53:35:00 - 00:54:00:01

Noah Springer

It is a tricky question, though. It really it comes down to making sure that as you're writing the book itself, there is a feeling of that larger impact that Sara was mentioning, that it's not just the hot topic today. It is a hot topic today, but the principles that somebody would take away from the book would apply regardless of when it's written, because it's the book’s going to be on the shelves forever,

 

00:54:00:03 - 00:54:04:18

Noah Springer

theoretically, so you’ve got to always keep that in mind.

 

00:54:04:20 - 00:54:36:07

Alyssa Napier

One thing that I want to add is, especially for a dissertation to book, is your dissertation research, if you're doing empirical data collection, your data was probably collected a while ago. One thing that I've noticed is some scholars will try to hide when their data was collected, to pretend, maybe because they're worried that it's old data.

 

00:54:36:09 - 00:55:21:08

Alyssa Napier

I would discourage that. There was a book proposal that they were collecting data for. It was a survey that they took of people's political views. It was in 2020, and I was thinking, what month, what day of 2020? Because so much happened that will change. And I encouraged them to not run from the specificity of the time in which they took data, because you can still have something that is tied to a specific time that that speaks to larger questions that the field has been asking perennially, because academia has been around for so long, and we still don't have the answers to most of

 

00:55:21:08 - 00:55:47:16

Alyssa Napier

the questions we've been asking. So it's okay. Not only is it okay, but I would say really think about the time of your data collection and how that has influenced your analysis, because it should. And that's probably going to be a question that I get from my colleagues. Like, immigration policy has changed so much,

 

00:55:47:16 - 00:56:08:14

Alyssa Napier

how and why would we feel comfortable publishing a book, on this topic, given that we have no idea what the landscape is going to look like in three years. And I will have to have an answer for them. So if you have an answer for me, that helps me be a good advocate for your book.

 

00:56:08:16 - 00:56:27:16

Cathy Hannabach

Awesome. So we're at time now. I do want to thank all of you for joining us today, including our amazing speakers. I hope everyone's coming away with some good ideas on how to craft a successful first book proposal. You all are going to be receiving the recording of this session shortly, so keep an eye on your inbox.

 

00:56:27:18 - 00:56:49:14

Cathy Hannabach

And please don't hesitate to reach out to me for editorial support on any of these book proposals that you're putting together. And finally, don't forget to join us for the next webinar in this series, which is coming up on January 20th after the winter break. We're going to be talking about working productively with an editorial team, focusing specifically on the production process that we've touched on a little bit here today.

 

00:56:49:16 - 00:57:01:06

Cathy Hannabach

You can register for that on our website at Iideasonfire.net. I also think Rachel threw a link in the chat if I'm seeing that correctly. Thank you all for being here and I hope to see you all next time.