Scholarly Publications: Proposing and Revising Book Proposals

Introduction

To many faculty members, publishing a book seems an intimidating prospect. A book? Isn’t that for truly original thinkers with weighty and profound contributions to make to my field? As a graduate student, I often thought that books were produced by people with intellectual weight who had something meaningful to disclose while my opinions seemed puny by comparison. I did not think I deserved to write a book since I surely had nothing important to contribute although I felt that I had plenty to say about our field.

Few who publish books can be considered to be paradigm shifters. One’s intimidation is all too often caused by uninformed expectations. To overcome this, it is necessary to demystify the air of portentousness surrounding the idea of scholarly book publications. We need to scale back the expectations we place on ourselves to write books that will move the tectonic plates of our discipline. Instead, we need to acknowledge that most of us are committed to our academic field Our work can extend knowledge or contribute to critical discourse when we need consider the variety of purposes of writing a book. These might include:

• 1.

  Updating and reorganizing knowledge and materials already in the public domain.

• 2.

  Synthesizing and connecting elements of disciplinary knowledge that have not been connected this way before.

• 3.

  Exploring more deeply, in a new manner, or through different or emerging vantage points an enduring contradiction, question or problem in the field.

• 4.

  Proposing an interesting and exciting future direction for the field of study.

• 5.

  Investigating one small and relatively neglected corner or niche in a field of study that has not been documented well up to that point.

• 6.

  Validating practices from a diversity of grass-roots practitioners or traditionally marginalized populations.

In this chapter, I describe chief elements that should be present in a book proposal submitted to a scholarly press. Throughout the chapter, I delineate my experiences of publishing seventeen books for five different publishers, and of what happens when the ownership of a publishing group changes hands. I use some excerpts from book proposals to illustrate some of the principles that resulted in acceptance.

Getting Over Impostorship

Impostorship is the sense that you are faking a role and that sooner or later people will realize this and discover you to be the impostor you know you are (Cuddy, 2015). This phenomenon is widespread in academe. It exists particularly in first generation college students (Davis, 2010; Ward, Siegel, & Davenport, 2012) and in academics from working class backgrounds (Samarco and Muzzatti, 2005). First time authors often feel that their views are uninteresting to anyone but themselves, and that they possess neither the talent nor the right to go into print. As a beginning author who had never done well as a student, (I failed my college entrance exams, eventually graduated in the 35^th percentile of my undergraduate class, and failed my master’s exam) I was paralyzed with this sense that I had nothing significant to say and that my poor student record confirmed that fact. And the hierarchies and competitiveness in the academy present barriers adding to the hesitation of graduate students or assistant professors to add their voices to the scholarly publication chorus.

Five decades later, I look back at that time and identify five strategies that proved particularly useful in convincing myself that authoring a book was not such an outrageous and inappropriate idea: