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Hi there, writers!

You know, when I originally started this podcast about two years ago, I thought I would be incorporating lots of interviews with other writing coaches, editors, and published scholarly authors.

Then I started my business and left the academy, and all of those plans got shelved while I figured out how to run my business full time.

It was just easier for me to do solo podcasts. while I created a new rhythm and structure for my life.

But in 2024, I am committed to growing and expanding in brand new areas. I want to actually talk to people and learn from them. So I went and learned how to record podcast interviews, which is a whole other can of worms.

And I’ve invited on a stellar group of writing coaches, editors, and published authors!

Don’t worry if you’re used to my old podcast model. I’ll still be doing solo podcasts about half the time.

But I’m ridiculously excited because today’s episode is my very first interview for this podcast.

It’s with Laura Portwood Stacer, who I’ve talked about many different times.

She offers some of the best and most practical advice when it comes to putting together a competitive book proposal and choosing a press that will meet your unique needs as a scholarly professional.

I hope you enjoy this episode!

Leslie: I am so excited to have my very first guest interview on Your Words Unleashed podcast. I want to welcome developmental editor and publishing consultant, Laura Portwood Stacer.

Welcome, Laura!

Laura: Thank you, Leslie. And it is an honor to be your first guest, for sure. Thanks for the opportunity.

Leslie: Before we get into our conversation, I want to read your short bio so listeners can get a sense of who you are and what you do.

Laura Portwood Stacer, PhD, is a publishing consultant and developmental editor who helps academic authors at all career stages navigate the book publishing process. Her company, Manuscript Works, offers regular workshops and online programs to assist writers around the world in drafting book proposals and connecting with scholarly publishers.

She’s the author of The Book Proposal Book: A Guide for Scholarly Authors, published by Princeton University Press in 2021. Yay!

And Laura’s weekly newsletter, providing academic writing and book publishing advice can be found at newsletter.manuscriptworks.com. All right, so thanks so much for being here.

We met because we were both writing coaches with the Princeton University Press, Supporting Diverse Authors Book Proposal Development Grants.

This is an equity initiative where we help nonfiction writers from historically marginalized groups in the early stages of book writing develop a proposal for consideration at the press.

So Laura, I have a lot of questions for you. So how about we just dive in?

Laura: Sounds good.

Leslie:

Laura: Sure. And, it’s nice to be asked about this because I feel like it was so long ago that I sometimes even sort of forget about it.

But I do have a PhD in communication from the University of Southern California, which I received in 2010. Okay. And so I taught and published in media studies and cultural studies. I published a book based on my dissertation in 2013. But around then is sort of when the trajectory changes a bit.

Because I was a visiting assistant professor in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University. And I was invited by the editors of the journal Feminist Media Studies. to serve as an associate editor for that journal for the section where short essays and book reviews were published.

So that became sort of, you know, as much work in academia is sort of a side gig that didn’t compensate very much for the labor, but I found that I really enjoyed the labor that went into that.

And that sort of involved soliciting themed essays several times a year. Then I and my co editor would help the most promising submissions get to a publishable place.

And we had a very quick turnaround. It was about six to eight weeks for each round of submissions. So we ended up being really hands on with our authors to help them develop their arguments, get their pieces structured in an engaging way. And, you know, at the time, some of the authors we were working with expressed that it was the most attention and support their writing had ever received.

So I realized that I was good at that work and I found it more gratifying than the other parts of my academic job at the time.

And you know, with being on the job market, I wasn’t really willing to move to any location where I might land a tenure track job if I were able to land one magically. So I figured I had nothing to lose by trying freelance editing and seeing how far I could take that.

You know, it was definitely slow at first, but ultimately I would say that the experiment worked and I really think this is the work I was meant to be doing all along. So I do feel fortunate that I somehow landed here through that academic journey.

Leslie:

Laura: So yeah, the work I was doing, you know, with that journal, I would consider that to be developmental editing.

You know, I wasn’t the copy editor. I wasn’t taking the final, final draft and making sure it sort of fit the journal style guide. You know, my job was to look at the big picture elements of the submissions. Like, the argument the author was making, how the piece was structured, to make sure the ideas were coming through clearly, to connect with our readers.

So that’s what I also do as a developmental editor. It’s really about focusing on the substantive parts of what the author is trying to communicate.

And then the more cosmetic parts of it have to happen, but they happen later on in the process.

Leslie: And so you wrote The Book Proposal Book, which has been so immensely useful to me and so many other folks.

Laura: Yeah, so I launched this developmental editing business in 2015 and I was working with authors on their books. And, you know, as I was working with more and more authors, especially early career scholars who are writing their first books, Many of them not only needed help revising their manuscripts, but also navigating the book publishing process.

And that, as I’m sure you know, Leslie, and many people listening, that process can be really opaque. Even if you’re going through it, even if you have been through it before, once or even twice, you don’t always, as the author, understand what is going on, on the publisher side, and what publishers are motivated by, and what they’re actually looking for, and what could actually make your work more successful when you’re trying to connect with a publisher.

As somebody who had published my own book, who had in retrospect, seeing all the mistakes I made along the way, I wanted to help the authors I was working with sort of avoid some of those missteps.

I would say about four years into working with authors on books and book proposals, I realized that I was giving a lot of the same advice over and over again to each sort of individual author. So around this point, it was like 2019, I literally opened up a document on my computer. That I called Book Proposal Advice Compiled.

And I was like, “I’m just gonna copy everything I’m telling these authors into this file.” And then when I, you know, work with a new author, I can draw on this file with things I’ve already said. And then I realized, okay, it’s a pretty long file here. Maybe I could find a way to share this information with people who aren’t necessarily able to work with me one on one as a developmental editor. Or who don’t maybe need an editor for their manuscript, but do need help navigating this publishing process.

That’s when I started my newsletter as a way to share some of this information, and I launched my Book Proposal Accelerator, which is a group program to help people write proposals and navigate the book publishing process.

Once I had that newsletter going, more people started to notice that I was doing this work. And at that point I was approached by an editor from a university press who suggested that I write a book to teach what I was sharing in my newsletter and in my course. And when he said that, you know, of course that was flattering, but I sort of felt like, well, there’s so many other books out there about writing.

There’s already books about publishing. Is mine really needed? Do we need another one? Couldn’t people just go you know, read those books. But he was really helpful, this editor, in saying that I had a strong voice. It was my own voice. It wasn’t the same voice these other books were written in.

And as many books as are out there about writing and publishing, the appetite for books like that is even bigger than the supply.

So, I took that to heart, and that sort of encouragement was what I needed to write up a proposal for a book about book proposals and then start pitching it to presses. So I pitched it to a few places and ultimately Princeton University Press’s vision for the book and their enthusiasm for the idea really lined up with mine and my feelings about it. So that is where I ended up publishing it.

Leslie: Awesome.

Laura: Yeah. So I am a very practically minded person. Like, I just want to know what to do. You know, like I don’t want to like sit and philosophize about it.

I want to just sort of, what are the steps I need to take to get through this project I’m trying to complete? So that is how the book is structured. It’s really step-by-step. You know, here’s like some of the background context you need to know before you enter into submitting a book proposal to a press.

And then here’s all the pieces you’re going to need to assemble for this submission package.

And I put them in a particular order that I think sort of helps ease into the process, like not necessarily starting with like the heaviest lift of like Writing your project summary of your whole book that you’re like life’s work up until this point, like that’s tough.

So that’s like in the middle of the Book Proposal Book. We start by thinking about, you know, where might I send this proposal? What readers do I want to be reading my book when it’s out? What are the other books I’m in conversation with? And then it sort of proceeds through other pieces of the proposal.

By the time you finish reading the book and working through all the steps it lays out, you will have a complete proposal that you could take to a publisher, a scholarly publisher.

And then the final chapters of the book sort of deal with the next steps after that, that every author has to go through.

So dealing with peer review, promoting their books, you know, all the things that happen sort of throughout the publication and post publication process. So it’s sort of meant to be a companion through that whole thing.

Leslie: So, so useful! I’m so glad that you wrote this. Thanks.

Laura: Yes. Great question. I would say sort of the biggest general mistake that people make is, and I can’t blame people for this because the book proposal is a very specific genre and it’s not like other genres of academic writing.

I think the biggest mistake people make is they sort of confuse the way a book proposal is evaluated by a publisher for the way other academic writing is evaluated in the rest of their professional life.

So a book proposal, as opposed to other kinds of writing, is not about proving how much you know, how much you’ve read, how sophisticated your thoughts are, how rigorous your research was, how deserving you are of having your ideas, you know, distributed. Just none of that is the purpose of a book proposal.

A book proposal is, in essence, about demonstrating to a press that you have an idea that other people will want to engage with.

And not just any other people, but a specific well defined group of people that that publisher that you’re sending your proposal to is also interested in and capable of reaching.

When people don’t understand that, that can lead to certain mistakes in the writing of the proposal.

I see sometimes people really dwelling on trying to prove the quality of their scholarship, the rigor of the scholarship, the originality of the scholarship. But that is not necessarily what a publisher needs to be convinced of when they see your book proposal.

Most scholarly publishers are going to take quality scholarship as a baseline assumption. What they are truly looking for is a writer who really knows who their readers are and can explain convincingly why their book will matter to those readers. So everything in the proposal has to back that up because that’s what you want the publisher to be taking away from this piece of writing.

And then I said, there’s like another mistake that I think people make that is maybe less about writing the proposal itself, but more about like what you do with the proposal. And that is that a lot of times people don’t really know which presses are the best equipped to help them reach the readers that they want to reach.

So you can have the best proposal in the world. You could have an outstanding book manuscript. But if you aren’t pitching it to the right presses, you just aren’t going to get anywhere with it.

And that’s going to be really demoralizing, and you’re going to start to second guess yourself. But really, it’s not anything about you, it’s about the fit between your book and the presses that you are trying to show it to.

And a rejection based on fit is the easiest rejection for an acquiring editor to make. I want people to not even have to receive those reductions. We can bypass them if we just sort of do a little homework on the front end to get that fit right.

Leslie: Yeah, and that actually segues right into my next question.

Laura: I guess the first thing you want to do is do your homework, and the way to do that is to understand and have your list of presses that you’re thinking of, and you might assemble that list without much data to underlie it. Maybe it’s who your mentor is published with. Maybe it’s who your friends are publishing with.

You know, which presses seem to have good social media. Like, you just might have an idea of who you might like to publish with. But then you want to do your homework on those presses.

Look at what books they have been publishing in the past three to five years. And then be ready to explain why your book will be interesting to the readers who have been won over by those previous books.

And so when you’re reaching out to a publisher, if you’re sending an email to an editor to just sort of introduce yourself, you want to spell out that resonance between what you’re trying to do and what their publisher has already done.

Say it directly. It might seem sort of awkward or gauche or something to, like, say it, but that’s what they want to hear.

That’s what they need to hear. Like, if they don’t know you or your work at all, like, you need to give them some reference points for something you know that they do know, the books that they’ve already published, to help them situate you and want to know more about your project. You know, editors receive a very high volume of email.

That’s one of the biggest frustrations with academic authors, I think, is that while they’re not receiving responses to their emails. It takes forever to get any kind of feedback from an editor.

So I think the best thing you can do to help your email stand out, to help your book stand out is to show that you know what that editor does.

You know what their press does, and you have a sense already of what will interest them. And your book is sort of fits within that sense.

Leslie: Some folks will have other people send an email introduction to kind of vouch for them first.

Laura: Yeah, I mean, the email introduction doesn’t hurt. I would say if you have those connections, go ahead and leverage them. What the email introduction does, it doesn’t get your book published. Gets eyes on your email, essentially. So it lets you maybe skip that line of the dozens or hundreds of cold emails that are in the editor’s inbox.

If there’s somebody that the editor sort of feels more of a social obligation to vouching for you, or saying they should look at your work, yes, use that connection if you have it. However, you don’t need that kind of connection to get a response from an editor. If you do what I just talked about, sort of do your own work of sort of vouching for yourself by showing your work fits with that press, you are aware of what that press does.

You have reached out to this editor, not because you are throwing things at the wall and trying to see what sticks, but because you sincerely believe that editor might be the right person to help your book achieve your vision. If you communicate that clearly in your outreach to editors, that’s going to help a lot.

I think the other thing I want to say about the idea of, you know, having someone introduce you or connect you with a publisher, that’s really good. But I will caution that the right press for somebody else might not be the right press for you as an author. What I’m really saying there is that that idea of fit, it goes both ways.

It’s not just, well, “am I good enough for this press?” But it’s also, “is this press equipped to do what I need my book to do?” To help me do with my book what I need it to do.

You know, whether that’s advancing academic career goals, trying to reach certain communities of readers, you might have certain personal goals for your book that could be as simple as, I just always wanted a really beautiful cover on my book.

You know, all of that is important and not every press is equipped to do everything that you might want. So the right press for your advisor or your friend or your colleague is not always necessarily the right press for you. The right press for your first book might not be the right press for your second book.

So, you know, even before you ask for those introductions and all of that, you’ve got to, again, do the homework. Make sure you understand which presses you really want to publish with and that are going to be the most promising fits.

I mean, the problem, of course, is that unless you spent a lot of time observing different publishers and understanding how they work and what their reputations are, and you’ve talked to a lot of people who have published books already, it’s not always easy to assess which presses might be the right fit. That’s where I come in and try to help people a little bit.

Leslie:

Laura: Yeah. So, that’s where doing that homework ahead of time is good, because I always encourage people to rank their presses. Not necessarily according to sort of like external measures of prestige, but more like rank them based on how well you think they will support you and make your book what you want your book to be. And those rankings can evolve as you’re having conversations with different presses.

So, let’s say two or three presses are interested in your book. Before you get pulled too far down the road with those presses, have a conversation.

Get some more information about how they see your book, how they see positioning the book, who they’re going to try and get in front of, how they’re going to do that, because that can help you sort of figure out which press is really going to help me do what I need this book to do.

Leslie: