I am starting this blog in the hopes that it will keep me motivated to work on my book proposal and book project during the summer. I am currently an Assistant Professor of English at a Liberal Arts college, the summer after my second year on the tenure-track. I have been working on turning my dissertation into a book when I have had time to do so over the past two years and have so far had two portions of the book published in pretty good peer-reviewed journals. Right now, I’m not going to tell anyone about this blog, but just use it as personal motivation. I hope, if I keep up with it, that it might provide help for those who are pursuing this same endeavor or are about to pursue this same endeavor. Like so many things in academia, there seems an expectation that one just knows how to get a publisher to accept and publish one’s book, and though I have researched and asked some questions, I am still quite bewildered. Maybe by documenting this process, I–and perhaps any readers who show up–will become less so. I think that’s enough for introductions.
Today, I worked through my book proposal again. Right now, the proposal is 4,079 words long, which is way too long. (Exactly how long I need to cut it is somewhat of a mystery to me. But I know that 4000+ words is longer than I want it to be. I am going to shoot to at least get it to more like 3500.) It consists of the following sections: Overview, Audience, Rationale for the Press (why this press should be interested in this book), Abstract, Relationship to Other Work, and Scope (a table of contents and timeline, really).
I really like the Overview now. It got cobbled together from about 12 different sources, including job letters, project abstracts from job materials, old parts of the diss, and on and on. I think the Audience part is still a little weak. I spent some time today looking up courses in my project’s sub-field. I’ve read on some web sites that this is helpful to do in academic book proposals, though the enterprise seems somewhat bogus to me. There’s of course no guarantee that any of the professors of these courses would even consider using my book. But since it’s a (sort of) interdisciplinary project, I wanted to show that people outside of my narrow field might have interest in this monograph, and counting up courses in this interdisciplinary sub-field was one way to show it. I haven’t yet put in any language that uses this number into the proposal, though I think the final sentence will probably end up looking like, “[Programs in this sub-field] are increasingly incorporating the humanities into their curricula, with over 25 of the top [program name] now offering courses specifically devoted to [sub-field].” It’s very hard to balance the marketing tone and the academic tone, I’m finding. It’s somewhat like job materials, but not quite.
I’m still working on the Abstract. It is, of course, entirely too long, comprising 2400 of the total 4,079 words of the whole proposal. I am working on trimming it, slowly but surely.
Time spent on project today: approximately 1.5 hours.
Goals for today: Make more comprehensible and fluid the Rationale and Audience sections. Continue to tighten Abstract.
Goals met? Yes.
Word count at end of day: 3,926 (with more changes to be input tomorrow)
Goals for tomorrow: Read through of whole document. Complete one hour of work on proposal. (It’s Sunday after all. Plus I’m trying not to burn out on this thing.)
